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Portrait of T.J. Clark. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Art November 2nd, 2006 T. J. Clark with Kathryn Tuma T. J. Clark is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. Since the appearance in 1973 of his first two books, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 18481851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Clark has been one of the most influential and challenging voices in the field of art history. The books that followed—The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985) and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999)—both stand as landmark studies in Modern Art. On the occasion of the release of his most recent book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (Yale University Press, 2006), T. J. Clark speaks with Kathryn Tuma, Assistant Professor of Modern Art at Johns Hopkins University, to discuss art, politics and teaching in 21st century America. Clark’s new book presents an extended examination—“a record of looking taking place and changing through time”—of two of Nicolas Poussin’s greatest achievements, Landscape with a Calm (1650-51) and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648). The two paintings were installed together at the Getty Museum in 2000, while Clark was in residence for six months at the Getty Research Institute. What began as an almost daily series of journal entries of his impressions and thoughts about the pictures evolved into one of the most original art history books to have been published in recent memory. The Sight of Death is many things: a study of two paintings; a reflection on the place of writing in art history; a meditation on death; a heated response to contemporary “image-culture”; a critique of current trends in academic art history; and an impassioned argument for the value of time spent looking at works of art, making more than good on its claim that “astonishing things can happen if one gives oneself
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  • 4/23/2015 T. J. Clark with Kathryn Tuma | The Brooklyn Rail

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    PortraitofT.J.Clark.PencilonpaperbyPhongBui.

    Art November2nd,2006

    T. J. Clark with Kathryn TumaT. J. Clark is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor ofModern Art at the University of California at Berkeley.Since the appearance in 1973 of his first two books, TheAbsoluteBourgeois:ArtistsandPoliticsinFrance,18481851 and ImageofthePeople:GustaveCourbetandthe1848Revolution, Clark has been one of the mostinfluential and challenging voices in the field of arthistory. The books that followedThePaintingofModernLife:ParisintheArtofManetandhisFollowers (1985) and FarewelltoanIdea:EpisodesfromaHistoryofModernism (1999)both stand aslandmark studies in Modern Art. On the occasion of therelease of his most recent book, TheSightofDeath:AnExperimentinArtWriting (Yale University Press,2006), T. J. Clark speaks with Kathryn Tuma, AssistantProfessor of Modern Art at Johns Hopkins University, todiscuss art, politics and teaching in 21st centuryAmerica. Clarks new book presents an extendedexaminationa record of looking taking place and changing through timeof two of NicolasPoussins greatest achievements, LandscapewithaCalm (1650-51) and LandscapewithaManKilledbyaSnake (1648). The two paintings were installed together at the Getty Museum in 2000,while Clark was in residence for six months at the Getty Research Institute. What began as an almostdaily series of journal entries of his impressions and thoughts about the pictures evolved into one ofthe most original art history books to have been published in recent memory. TheSightofDeath ismany things: a study of two paintings; a reflection on the place of writing in art history; a meditationon death; a heated response to contemporary image-culture; a critique of current trends inacademic art history; and an impassioned argument for the value of time spent looking at works ofart, making more than good on its claim that astonishing things can happen if one gives oneself

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    over to the process of seeing again and again

    KathrynTuma(Rail): Tim, the question of political responsibility comes up a number of timesin TheSightofDeath. It wends its way all through your reading of LandscapewithaManKilledbyaSnake, but also through specific incidents you recount from your own personal history and yourthoughts about art history as a discipline. The book, as you say, is a response, or a reaction, to thecurrent ideological momentthe world we live in, inundated by the internet, political soundbites,televised eight-minute therapy sessions. A world where the average time spent by a museum visitoris best measured in seconds. You openly describe feelings of bitterness. But, as you note, Snake isnot a picture where darkness is winning. Yours is also, I feel, not a book in which darkness iswinning. How does that faintest glimmer of optimism manage to hold in the current state of globalaffairs? Can it hold at all? Of course I ask this question against the backdrop of SightofDeathsrelationship to another recent publication of yours, your collaborative work with the group Retort,AfflictedPowers:CapitalandSpectacleinaNewAgeofWar, that describes a bleak picture at best.

    T.J.Clark: Yours is not a book in which darkness is winning Well, I guess I agree with thatjudgment, taking TheSightofDeath as a whole. Though obviously the book does look certain kindsof darkness more fully in the face than anything else I have written. Its not called TheSightofDeathfor nothing! I think (or I hope) that you and other readers come away from it without a sense ofterminal glumness because youre carried along by the simple, central pleasure of looking that drivesthings forwardand the astonishment at what one or two pictures have to offer, if you give themhalf a chance. This pleasure and astonishment are unnegotiable. Nothing the world can do to themwill make them go away. And yes, I agree: the world does plenty. Pleasure and astonishment seem tome qualities that the world around us, most of the time, is conspiring to get rid of. Or to travestytoturn into little marketable motifs. It amounts to the same thing.

    I dont know what one person does in such a situationand youre right that for me its experiencedas an extreme situation, far more stifling and catastrophic than almost any current politics wishesto recognizebesides trying to describe the catastrophe, which is what AfflictedPowers is mainlyconcerned with, and trying at the same time to keep the opposite of the present alive. By which Imean the full range of human possibilities that the present is dedicated to destroyingthe kinds ofrecognitions and sympathies that make up the human, as far as Im concerned. Recognitions andsympathies, but also losses and horrors and failures of understanding. Everything the presentecstasy of information wants us to transfer to trash.

    You do this wherever the possibilities put in an appearancefor you. In my case, that means aboveall in certain paintings. In other words, I think that over the years I may have built myself a way totalk about these possibilities astheytakeforminpaintings without the talk immediatelydegenerating into moralizing or wishful thinking. And thats the essential problem in our 21stcentury, isnt it?to talk about alternative worlds without the alternatives coming across as just asflat and formulaic as the world theyre supposed to be against.

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    Rail: Your book seems to me to put tremendous pressure on issues of living and dying, how wemake our choices about how to live, how we conceive ofor representdeath to ourselves and whatdoing so means. As, in part, an extended reflection on deaththe sight of deathyours is all therarer in this culture that we inhabit where imagesor perhaps I should say the spectacleof deathare so pervasive and yet so perverse. You began writing this book closely following Y2K; you finishedrevising it in a post-9/11 world. Is the dizzying array of catastrophes we are now facing related to anentrenched inability in America to grasp the sight of death in a way that is not flat and formulaic?Or perhaps not so much to see death, but to bear the true weight of its thought?

    Clark: Immensely hard to talk about these things, Kathrynbut youre right, theyre ultimatelywhat the book is about. These days I cant get the lines by Emily Dickinson out of my mind: BecauseI could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me. I guess its Dickinsons verb that particularlystrikes home. Death is everywhere, but we cant stop for it. We cant make it part of our livesandtherefore of our politics. The capital D Dickinson was able to give it is way beyond us.

    Yeah, yeah I dont mind you bringing on the word spectacle at this point, just as long as were notusing the word to reduce the issues simply to too many images too fast! Its not the technics andquantity that matter most, its the shattered sociality in which the images circulate. Its thedismantling, over the past half-century, of so many forms of resistance to the imageso many of theforms of life in which the image-life of power could once be derided or spoken back to. Who was itwho called the spectacle the totalitarian dictatorship of the fragment? Its a bit clumsy, thatformula, but it gets a lot right.

    Rail: Id be interested, with your last answer in mind, to hear your thoughts about your life and yourhistory as a teacher. Let me bring up a specific example from TheSightofDeath. You talk thereabout the quality of stillness that a certain kind of experience of works of art can inspire. Thisseems to me to get at something very profound in what time spent with pictures can do. But is thisteachable? In this culture of distraction, I confess to having had my own doubts. What is it that weare trying to teach when we teach art history? What is it you yourself have hoped to do? Have yourthoughts about teaching changed as the culture in which that practice takes place has changed, andso dramatically? As the students themselves are changing?

    Clark: Tough subject You wont be surprised to hear (remember I began as a university teacher in1967!) that teaching for me has always seemed a pretty embattled activity, taking place in a cultureuniversity culture very much includedincreasingly turned against it. Lets call it the culture ofmultiple choice, of lectures as performances, of methodologies chosen from the supermarketshelves of disciplines, of books as disposable databases on the verge of being superseded by othersless quaint and inflexible (less elitist). This culture has always been the dominant one in theuniversities I have worked for. There is almost no difference, ideologically speaking, between theclaptrap of Clark Kerr and Harold Wilson (universities forged in the white heat of the newtechnological revolution) and the current utopia of cyberspace and virtual higher education.

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    But, of course, there is a sense in which the social and educational drift of the last fifteen years hasmade a differenceat least, to the teaching of art history. For somewhere at the center of the currentclaptrap is the idea that we are passing from a word-based culture to an image-based one. And thisidea, lite as it is, does point to a new, or intensifying, social fact. Were back to the question ofspectacle againand this time, lets talk about the technics, the machinery Citizens of advancedindustrial societies, to state the obvious, are accustomed from an early age to living in a constantflow of visual imagery. Flow is important here. The imagery is designed not to be looked at closely,or with sustained attention. It would not do its work (of selling, of confirming and enforcingapproximatemarketablevisualizations of the good life, of achieved satisfaction, of individualfulfillment) if it was looked at closely. (Videogames are the exception that proves the rule. Attentionis allowed here apparently because it can be stripped down to a state of nerve-racking fear andsuspicion, with the world continually scanned for incoming bullets.) Flowmeaning constantreplacement, fading in and out of focus, speed-up and slow-down, instant magnification andminiaturization, a ludicrous and mind-numbing overkill of visual stimulierodes the boundarybetween the imaged (the imaginary) and the real. Everything is representation, they tell us.Everything is manipulable, virtual, scaleless, infinitely translatable.

    I think these are the lineaments of the visual culture in which our students are brought up. And I seeteaching art history as a modest, no doubt quixotic, effort to present to them the fact that othervisual cultures were (and are) very different, and in some ways preferable. Visual images were, for astart, made in the past with limited and intractable physical means. An oil painting or a lost-waxbronze are pathetic, vulnerable, proud things. They bear the mark of individual or collective effort(call it craftsmanship) on their faces. The best oils and bronzes are full of a sense ofa positivereflection ontheir own mere thinglikeness and vulnerability (as well as an exultation in thethinglikeness and vulnerability overcome). In a word, they are human. They spell out the limits ofhuman imagination and practice. They are all about the eternal war between possibility (virtuality)and resistant material fact. The best moments in teaching come when I find a way of conjuring thiskind of consciousness back into beingagainst the worst that the belching slide projector andcrumpled screen can do. I go on wondering if this year, finally, the conjuring trick will fail. There is asocial pessimist in me, who sees less and less reason to doubt that one of these days the symbolmanagers and cybertechnicians will have made the world they dream of, so that I and my sad littletechnologywords from a stage, xeroxed handouts, essay requirements, dim celluloid shadows ofTitian or the DemoisellesdAvignonwill mean nothing. But it interests me that this has nothappened yet. I still get a kick from the fact that simply presenting the opportunity for sustainedattention, and proposing that visual images carry within them the possibility of genuine difficulty,genuine depth and resistancedoing this strikes some students as such a relief! Of course it does.Its a relief because it offers an escape from the flimsy and infantile imagery of human purposes,which is what they are mostly offered by the world we inhabit. Theres nothing invulnerable aboutthat infantilism. Its flimsy, as I say. Its always possible to talk back to itto show alternatives to it.

    Rail: You mention that you started teaching in 1967. The most striking thing about that year is itsobvious proximity to 1968. Can you say something about how you came to art history as a discipline?

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    And why, and how, you found your way to writing ImageofthePeople and TheAbsoluteBourgeois?

    Clark: It was all pretty ordinary. Ive been hooked on paintings ever since my parents took me tothe National Gallery on a trip up to London at the age of twelve. I stood in front of the Constables,and that was it. God knows why! And I was a political animal. The 60s happened. And then Parisas so often, a way of escaping my assigned place in the good ol English class system. And theSituationiststhe picture of a possible politics, more and more on the agenda as the culture wentinto free flow (for a while). The books you mention came out of this history. But of course they werealso, in a sense, a place of shelter from the storm. Doing art historybeing an academicwas acompromise. It was as much as I had the nerve to do. But this is confessional, Kathryn! Ugh!

    Rail: Since you bring up the Situationists, Tim, let me ask you this: AfflictedPowers keeps gettingdescribed as a Situationist account of current politics. It has received more attention in the art pressthan in TheNation or MotherJones. From what I hear, Retort has an installation as part of theSeville Biennial this November. Whats going on here? Are you happy with all this?

    Clark: Well, youll guess that theres an aspect of this that drives me and the other Retorters mad! Iwrote AfflictedPowers with an economic geographer, Michael Watts, a novelist who was once adefense lawyer fighting it out in the California prison system, Joseph Matthews, and an historian ofpast and present capitalist enclosures, Iain Boal. Not exactly a Situationist (or even palaeo-Situationist) line-up! Obviously our book takes advantage of certain Situationist concepts andhypotheses, and tries to apply them to current politics. And yes, we do think that the power of theimage, and the control of appearances, are more and more part of the very structure of statecraft(and resistance to statecraft). We think the established Left sufferssuffers badlyfrom an inabilityto think about the new conditions of social control, and social struggle Surely the horror of therecent war in Lebanon, and the fact that so much of that horror was played out, often in real time,over a whole battery of image-machinesand that the playing-out as imagery had real politicalconsequencesthat it was part of Israels defeat surely this points to the emergence in the worldout there of a different kind of political process, of political arena.

    Nor did it entirely surprise us that Artforum and October had more to say about the book than TheNation. Were used to the idea that the U.S. Left will maintain a dignified silence if anyone tries tomove political thinking beyond the usual Bush-bashing-plus-policy-studies. (And by the way, therehave been notable exceptions to the decision not to notice, thank you. Counterpunch, and NewLeftReview, and the Rail itself) Politics, in the present desert, has migrated to many strange places.As for Sevillewell, Okwui Enwezor offered us a forum, no strings attached. Our exhibit will centeron the broadsheets we produced for the marches in 2003, and just recently in response to Lebanon.Theres a video, done by Gail Wight. Milton and Yeats are in evidence Lets see what happens.

    All we would say to readers of AfflictedPowers is read the whole of it, not just Chapter One.Certainly the book is concerned with possible destabilizations in the regime of spectacular power.We think that these are happening, and need to be thought aboutwith and without Debords help.

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    But the book never argues that such destabilizations have been the result of a single image-event, oreven of a cluster or sequence of image-events. The sources of instability are complex. Some are long-term and tendential, having to do with the problems of social management in late capitalist society.Some are short term, or mid term, and geo-political: resource crises and the politics of oil, mutationsin the politics of Islam, the way the absolute vacuum of official U.S. politics provided the space forneo-Christian, neo-Hooverite ideologues to seize power. The book is agnostic on the question of thedepth of the new image-instability. But one thing it does not do. It does not say or imply that fromnow on its victory in the realm of appearances that counts. A new thinking of politics, in otherwords, wont fixate on the squalid details of the image war. On the contrary: what really concerns uswhat Retort goes on looking foris the emergence of a possible new ground for war against theimage in its present form. And thats a social questiona question of the emergence of new forms ofsocial identity and non-identity, new kinds of social resistancenot a technical one.

    Rail: Let me press you a little further on the relationship between TheSightofDeath and AfflictedPowers, and the fact that they were written often, you say, in tandem. You talk at various pointsabout the image-politics of our present moment, and SightofDeath as some kind of response tothat politics. Can you say more about that?

    Clark: Some of this has cropped up already, when I was trying to answer your question aboutteaching. But let me go back to it, and take things a bit further. I think that TheSightofDeath standsor falls, ultimately, as an argument with the present regime of the image. In particular it has in itssights the notion that some kind of threshold has been passed in our time between a verbal worldand a visual one. Ill be largely repeating the book at this point.

    No one in their right minds is claiming, I guess, that the realm of language is simply being leftbehind by the new image-technics. But people do really believe (and I see why) that languagesprevious pacing and structuring and sedimentation of experience is now invaded, interfered with,overtaken by the different rhythms and transparencies of the shifting visual array. Weve gotourselves a technology of visualizationheres the claimthat can emulate languages flexibility andpower to make otherwise, but augment that power by its own unique offer of vividness, its promiseof worlds laid out in an instant. Grammar is giving way to perspective.

    Its a good story, but I dont believe its true. On the contrary, I reckon our present means of image-production are still utterly under the spell of the verbalthats part of the trouble with them. Theyare an instrumentation of a certain kind of language use: their notions of image clarity, image flow,image depth, and image density seem to me all determined by the parallel (unimpeded) movementof the logo, the brand name, the product slogan, the compressed pseudo-narrative of the TVcommercial, the soundbite, the T-shirt confession, the chat show Q&A. Billboards, web pages, andvideo games are just projectionsperfections, perfected banalizationsof this world of half-verbalexchange. They are truly (as their intellectual groupies go on claiming) a discourseread, a sealedecho-chamber of lies.

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    Heres why it seems to me more and more urgent, politically, to point to the real boundaries betweenseeing and speaking, or sentence and visual configuration. And to try to keep alive the notion of akind of visuality that truly establishes itself attheedgeoftheverbalnever wholly apart from it,needless to say, never out of discourses clutches, but able and willing to exploit the differencebetween a sign and a pose, or a syntactical structure and a physical (visual, material) interval. Sure, Icount myself an enemy of the present regime of the image: not out of some nostalgiclogocentricity, but because I see our image machines as flooding the world with wordswithwords (blurbs, jingles, catchphrases, ten thousand quick tickets to meaning) given just enough visualcladding.

    This is what TheSightofDeath is aimed against. It wants to discover what images are capable ofand what real wordlessness, in the face of the world of words, looks like. The running man in themain painting I look atPoussins LandscapewithaManKilledbyaSnakeis someone genuinelyat the edge of speech, just outside the reach of the verbal. And Poussin wants to show us what isinvolved in being therewhat risks there are in wordlessness, what possible powers

    Rail: Let me pursue this a little further. I certainly understood as I read the book that your accountof Poussin was a way of arguing with the present notion of us entering an image-centered worldleaving logocentrism behind. Your reading of LandscapewithaManKilledbyaSnake comes torevolve around this set of issues asforgive my reducing such a complex argument to a few wordsan allegory of the relationship between word, image and meaning. You write that, as in the case ofPoussin, certain pictures look like language in order to alert us precisely to their unreadability, andthat Snake is a picture of the moment before speech The intersection of those two worldsoursand Snakesmakes for a powerfully charged book. In retrospect, was coming upon that clash ofworlds just serendipitous? Or do you think some other painting or group of paintings might havegiven rise to these issues? I guess Im curious about the fact that it was Poussin, and not a painteryouve written about in the pastand, moreover, not a Modernist painterwho prompted thisexperiment in art writing.

    Clark: I guess I wantedI neededa kind of painting that seemed, on the face of it, to be happywith its own nesting in the world of language; so that it could emerge, gradually, as the book wentforward, that this being at home with the linguisticwith the conventions of narrative, with the ideaof a signing and expressive body, and so onended up making a real argument about the limitsand deficits of language possible. You dont have to be atodds with languagein the way so muchmodernist art has beento be able to picture it as part of a world, not the whole of it. Languagedoesnt have to be posited and hypostatized as the enemyor as some all-invasive, all-determininghuman reality, which only modernism will put to flight. And yes, Poussin has always been my keyexample of just that kind of sanity in face of the word.

    Rail: Right at the start of the book, in the Preface, you say a few words about the difference betweenwhat youre doing in AfflictedPowers and TheSightofDeath and the alternative currently on offerin so much of the Left academy. Its pretty clear that

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    NicolasPoussin,LandscapewithaManKilledbyaSnake(c.164851).Oiloncanvas,4788.25.NationalGallery,London.

    you havent much sympathy for what passes these daysas Left art history. Why not?

    Clark: I think its stuck with an out-of-date sense of theissues. As if it mattered any longeras if it had anypresent political pointto prove for the umpteenth timethat what we poor suckers had imagined was a difficultand double-edged picture of the human condition wasreally, hey presto!, just another instrument of ruling-class oppression Heres Bruegel for youprovider ofsneering moralistic services for a bunch of bourgeoisPuritans. Where does one start with this? Maybe by looking back at the canonical quote from WalterBenjamin, and reminding oneself of what it did and did not say. It did not say that There is nodocument of civilization which is not really, when you look at its origins and function, a document ofbarbarism. It said: There is no document of civilization which is not atthesametime a documentof barbarism. This is a dialectical thought, not an anti-canonical put-down. The work of art is adocument of civilization and of barbarism. The job of the materialist is to think the two identitiesthe two kinds of belonging to historytogether. Not to reduce one to the other. A materialist willpresumably be interested in what it was, in the sets of possibilities offered by a specific medium, aspecific practice, that opened the space in which a jolly denunciation of peasant foolishness becamesomethingelse.

    And always in the back of my mind is the question: Where does the Left actually get its picture of thehumanity that class society stifles and travesties if not, in part, from Bruegel and Poussin? Is it allthere in the pages of Marx and Foucault? I dont think so (neither did Marx). Or is it that Left arthistorians lead such rich and unalienated lives that they simply dont need their picture of humanityenriched by other peoples representations? That must feel goodBut all of this, in any case, is soremote from the questions posed by actual image-war going on around usthats the point. Thecanon question The great art question The sins of museums Wake me when its over.

    Rail: TheSightofDeath publishes for the first time in one of your books of art history several ofyour own poems. What first brought you to writing poetry? The reading of poetry, too, like the timespent with painting, has a special capacity tofor lack of a better way to put italter the thickness ofspace and the rhythms of time. Who do you read, when you are writing your own poems?

    Clark: Well, the poems about the paintings just occurred. I cant do much better than that. Ofcourse I think that poetic languagelanguage at maximum intensity and concentration, taking fulladvantage of the materiality of language itselfis about the best way we have of dealing with theworld. But only if its good. Bad poems are worse than most prose. The poems in the book happenedabruptly: the kernels of all of them, and sometimes a version of the poem as a whole, forcedthemselves on me, usually in the first minutes of the day. Thats to say nothing about poetry ingeneral, just about these poems on this occasion. And

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    DetailofLandscapewithaManKilledbyaSnake.

    naturally I worked like mad to make them better afterthe first shot. Probably too hard.

    I read more poetry than proseat the moment, if youwant heroes, Zbigniew Herbert in Milosz and DaleScotts extraordinary translation, and Brecht,particularly as he comes over in the renderings byHannah Arendt in her great essay in MeninDarkTimes.But of course these are voices far beyond imitation, oreven influence. What is it that Brodsky said aboutPlatonovs novelssomething about Platonov beinguntranslatable, and that we should count ourselvesfortunate that ours is a language that cant say againwhat he had to say? I feel the same way about every lineof Brecht and Herbertas I say, in spite of the miracle ofMiloszs translation.

    Rail: What surprised you the most about the process of writing this book?

    Clark: The whole thing surprised me: the fact that the two paintings were there to be written aboutin the first place, the fact that I couldnt stop once Id started, the poems cropping up, the utterunpredictability of the topics that presented themselves day after dayand the feeling of delight atthe process (idiotic satisfaction at the end of each morning, as if I was doing what I had lived to do)Im not saying I felt the same way all through. There were black passages later. I got into areas Idhave liked to have avoided. From journal to book wasnt easy. But the initial monthsthey weresheer luck!

    Rail: Was it luck, really, or a commitment to the openness of possibility? There is one day Iremember in the book when you describe going to the paintings with an idea of what I should try towrite about. And you say: Not a good sign. It strikes me that this does well to describe the greatproblem with so much art history writing these days. Everyone shows up to the work with anagenda. The best art resists our efforts, of course.

    Clark: I hope But your final of course is optimistic

    Rail: Yes, it is. I can live with that. One last question, Tim: you began writing this book during a stayat the Getty Research Institute, where you intended to complete a new book on Picasso. Do youthink your experience writing TheSightofDeath will change how you approach your next project?

    Clark: Im sure it has. I know I have to return to Picasso, and the book Im beginning to work on hasa working title something like PicassoandNietzsche or PicassoandtheWilltoPower. It comes outof a feeling that what Picasso was up to in the late 1920s still hasnt been confronted adequately.

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    (Carl Einstein began to at the time, but then his suggestions got buried under the mountain ofPicasso schlock) I want to look at certain Picasso paintings with questions from TheGenealogyofMorals and TheWilltoPower in mind. Questions that have to do with truth in paintingor abouthow painting operates in a world after Truth. Big, nasty, portentous Nietzschean questions But Immore and more convinced that they were Picassos too. Nasty and portentous, but alsothis beingPicasso, and this being Nietzschelight-hearted as hell.

    CONTRIBUTOR

    KathrynTumaTumaisaProfessorofArtHistoryattheJohnsHopkinsUniversityinBaltimore,MD.

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    Iwasaskedtowriteaboutthepresentandfutureofartistscinemaandmovingimageart.ThislanguageconflatestwotraditionsthatIstillhaveastakeinseparating:experimentalfilmand(gallery/museum)videoart.

    winter2014