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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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