On her book Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme
Cover Interview of May 20, 2018
A close-up
I hope that a potential reader would flip through the book
and find unexpected images or startling juxtapositions thereof. He might ask
why a more familiar modernist painting by Kandinsky is in a book together with one
by a virtual unknown, the Dutch Jacoba van Heemskerck, who exhibited actively
with both Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme. (Both organizations promoted more
women than is commonly known.) She might wonder, for example, why an interior
of Bruno Taut’s Glass House is paired with a watercolor by Paul Klee; if
she pursues the heading “Glass,” she would discover that these works in different
media were similarly inspired by the utopian possibilities of translucent
glass. Some unexpected views of potentially already familiar works might also
pique the interest of the casual reader: why, for example, is Duchamp’s Small
Glass shown not against an opaque background for optimal viewing but
instead in a home on top of a piano—and positioned just so that it welcomes a
viewing relationship with a hypothetical pianist? (It turns out that Duchamp,
for all his Dadaist antics, was deeply attuned to the metaphorical and
relational aesthetics of glass, home, and piano.) I value close viewing of art
objects, so I would hope that the browser might skim the text adjacent to any particular
image in the book and discover more than an initial glance at the image could
provide.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
I hope that a potential reader would flip through the book and find unexpected images or startling juxtapositions thereof. He might ask why a more familiar modernist painting by Kandinsky is in a book together with one by a virtual unknown, the Dutch Jacoba van Heemskerck, who exhibited actively with both Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme. (Both organizations promoted more women than is commonly known.) She might wonder, for example, why an interior of Bruno Taut’s Glass House is paired with a watercolor by Paul Klee; if she pursues the heading “Glass,” she would discover that these works in different media were similarly inspired by the utopian possibilities of translucent glass. Some unexpected views of potentially already familiar works might also pique the interest of the casual reader: why, for example, is Duchamp’s Small Glass shown not against an opaque background for optimal viewing but instead in a home on top of a piano—and positioned just so that it welcomes a viewing relationship with a hypothetical pianist? (It turns out that Duchamp, for all his Dadaist antics, was deeply attuned to the metaphorical and relational aesthetics of glass, home, and piano.) I value close viewing of art objects, so I would hope that the browser might skim the text adjacent to any particular image in the book and discover more than an initial glance at the image could provide.