You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2009.
Here is a description of techniques of image making in the eighteenth century, which seems to contain a description of someone working very like Jackson Pollock, as well as some early graffiti-artists:
I cannot help thinking, that the admirers of strong rough pictures are, in general, men of enlarged ideas, and frequently possessed of the wonderful talent of making portraits in the fire, or forming fanciful landscapes upon old broken walls, or any other place where there happens to be an assemblage of spots and blotches. – I am informed that a person of Birmingham acquired a considerable fortune by indulging a similar turn of mind. – He was so well convinced of the prevalence of this taste, that he established an academy for the purpose of promoting this style of colouring, and of producing pictures for the exercise of Fancy. These pictures were dispatched by placing five different colours at hand, dipping the ends of the fingers and thumb in these colours, transmitting them to the lid of a snuff-box, and then splashing the colours into confusion by striking them with the palm of his hand.”
Joseph Booth, A Treatise Explanatory of the Nature and Properties of Pollaplasiasmos, London:1784.
The eighteenth-century fetish of correctness in language was not restricted to diction and usage but extended to pronunciation … Needless to say, linguistic discrimination is a staple of human interaction – it was once quite deadly to mispronounce shibboleth.
Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Boston: Bedford Books, 1990. p.649.
Vectors, the Journal of Technology and Culture in a Dynamic Vernacular, has posted the Stolen Time Archive by Alice Gambrell. (An example of the digital humanities at work.)
Thursday 7 May 2009, Study Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, 7:00pm.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, responds to the theme of hope in the first of four seasonal Salons to feature world-leading intellectuals debating the political, ethical and emotional question of hope, and the implications it has for our past, present, and future as citizens of the world.
The Whitechapel Gallery in association with the University of Westminster, London.
Future Salons will feature:
HOPE 2: Richard Sennett, Thursday July 2nd 2009
HOPE 3: Chantal Mouffe, Thursday 8th October 2009
HOPE 4: Peter Osborne, Thursday 14th January 2010
Organised by Marquard Smith, Principal Lecturer in Visual Culture Studies, and David Cunningham, Principal Lecturer in Literary Studies, University of Westminster.
Price: £7/£5. Available here.
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