“Truth is about the relationship between language and the world: a correspondence idea of truth.” — Errol Morris
THE ASHTRAY is Morris’ denunciation of physicist-philosopher Thomas Kuhn and the ideas Kuhn propagated in his 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
ERROL MORRIS, THE ASHTRAY (OR THE MAN WHO DENIED REALITY) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Above image credit: University of Chicago Press.
Below: Thomas Kuhn.
A newly edited and updated version of Craig Owens’ 1984 interview with Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield has been published by Badlands Unlimited.
Join Lynne Tillman, Thomas Beard, and Horsfield for CRAIG OWENS—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CRITIC, a book launch and panel discussion with Paul Chan and Johanna Burton at the New Museum.
Owens (1950–1990) was an associate editor at October and a senior editor at Art in America. His essays are collected in Beyond Recognition—Representation, Power, and Culture (1994).
In his memoir Before Pictures, Douglas Crimp describes the quality of Owen’s “unrestrained intellectual enthusiasm.”:
“In many of our late-night phone calls… [Owens] would say something like, ‘I’m writing a brilliant essay on…’—on whatever it was he was working on at the moment. I was at first taken aback by his apparent immodesty, but I grew to understand and appreciate his elation at the process of his own thinking, sparked by his voracious reading.” — Douglas Crimp*
CRAIG OWENS—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CRITIC
Launch and panel
Friday, March 2, at 7 pm.
New Museum
235 Bowery, New York City.
* Douglas Crimp, “Agon,” in Before Pictures (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 213.
From top: Craig Owens, 1982, from the series Art World, photograph © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Craig Owens photographed by Barbara Kruger in her loft, 1988, image credit New Museum.
1971: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF COLOR, by Darby English, “should be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of race and the history of twentieth-century art as it once was.” — Aram Moshayedi, curator, Hammer Museum*
An investigation of two 1971 exhibitions—Contemporary Black Artists in America at the old Whitney, and The DeLuxe Show, an abstract art show in a Houston movie theater—English’s book “looks at many black artists’ desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition…
“Black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture’s preoccupation with color.”**
DARBY ENGLISH—1971: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF COLOR
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
* hammer.ucla.edu/curators-pick-their-favorite-art-books-of-the-year
Darby English. Book cover image credit: University of Chicago Press.
