thevillagecharlatan

Yves-Alain Bois: What I’m criticizing in a lot of cultural studies is the lack 

of mediation. It’s a model that says ‘go from here to there’! It doesn’t work like 

that for any of us, why should it be sufficient for an artwork? We don’t start doing 

something bizarre because of what we have just read in the newspaper. No, there 

are mediations. Things are filtered in a very strange way. An artist is never a 

polygraph test. 

I’ll probably be thinking about this quote for a while. It is always difficult for me to decide my tack and framework when making a claim and this made me laugh out loud. It also makes me feel better about disliking Hamilton’s dissertation on postwar assemblage. Sometime I should think about this more, especially in relation to Ed Ruscha’s comments about his own work. “‘Boss’ is just a word that we all used back then. It used to mean ‘cool’.” What to do with that? These things are all clustered in my head right now, even though Ruscha has very little to do with Burri or Arman or Rauschenberg. Never mind, Ruscha has everything to do with Rauschenberg. Fuck. I need a proto-blog where I work some of these things out before they reach the public. Maybe this is it. 

I came across one of Carolyn Steedman’s online sylabi for University of Warwick undergrads today, and it looks terrific. Steedman is a historian of mixed feminist stripe, specializing in domestic relationships; children; the development of the novel since 1700; motherhood; autobiography, and other good things. She instructs her students to start a reading diary here (what’s up with no html abilities?): http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/undergraduate/modules/novel/diary , and I may add this to end-of-semester tasks, possibly to add to the website. I’ve already meditated on (and tried, briefly) the idea of the looking-diary in my old Livejournal, but I was really only concentrating on it while trying to find a Master’s thesis topic. Is there a Wordpress feature that allows for steno-notebook style lists, one of words and one of images? Here are some things I have read: Landscape for a Good Woman (40 pages); a review called “Women of the Weimar Era, in a Social Context” by Charles Hagen in the NYT (April 1995); some descriptions of the Estorick collection of Modern Italian Art; some Pro-Quest dissertation abstrcts; and various boring and short emails. I wonder what all this means.