When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa, the Miftāḥ is the only known illustrated Persian dictionary (farhang) in the Islamicate manuscr...
Posted 3 years ago
As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featured in tents, wall paintings, and architectural decorations; new and “neo” architectural styles ...
Posted 3 years ago
Summary
"Black Affective Forms: A Conversation with Garrett Bradley" likely explores the filmmaker's approach to portraying Black experiences, particularly in relation to her documentary "Time" and other works. While I don't have direct access to the full conversation, based on Bradley's other interviews and discussions about her work, we ca...
Posted 3 years ago
In a recent paper, James Edwin Mahon (2019) argues that literary artworks—novels in particular—never lie because they do not assert. In this discussion note, I reject Mahon’s conclusion that novels never lie. I argue that a central premiss in his argument—that novels do not contain assertions—is false. Mahon’s account underdetermines the content of literary works; novels have rich
la...
Posted 3 years ago
Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which ...
Posted 3 years ago
The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset letters on superimposed plexiglass sheets that provide a third dimension of depth. One day, looking...
Posted 3 years ago
Summary
Colonial Documentation through Photography
Møller's work played a crucial role in documenting the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. His photographs served as a visual record of the interactions between Greenlandic Inuit and Danish administrators, providing a unique perspective on this historical period.
Significanc...
Posted 3 years ago
In both European and non-European cities, public spaces are formed by racist and segregative politics that influence everyday life. Planetary migration flows and recently implemented border politics tend to leave the most vulnerable in precarious conditions, not only in the case of migrants/refugees but also in the case of citizens. This article focuses on how artistic methodologies in the contex...
Posted 3 years ago
The first public radio station in the United States, KPFA in Berkeley, California, began broadcasting in April 1949. A legendary counter-cultural enterprise, its initial program months aired a daily fifteen-minute performance of one of the most consequential literary works of late Modernist world literature, Jaime de Angulo’s ethnopoetic masterpiece Old Time Stories (announced as “Indian
Ta...
Posted 3 years ago
In the mind of anyone who knew them and their work, the British art critic and curator Guy Brett and the Filipino mixed-media and performance artist David Medalla formed a pair. Which is why, though it might sound awful, I was not overly surprised by the news that Guy had died (February 2, 2021) just over a month after David (December 28, 2020). It was as if the former had waited for permission to...
Posted 3 years ago