2020 #1: Art On My Mind (bell hooks)

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"To transgress, I must move past boundaries..." ('Being the Subject of Art, 133). This is what bell hooks does in this 1995 collection of essays that is part historical survey, part critique, part manifesto. Artists (and artworks by) Alison Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, and others are interviewed and interrogated in the best sense of the word. hooks amplifies intersectionality and lays bare the importance of "constructive critical interrogation" and how essential it is to creating a more authentic understanding. One can, in hooks's mind, celebrate contributions without having to offer wholesale acceptance, especially if there is an absence of understanding of one own's hegemonic role (her basic criticism of Robert Farris Thompson, for example). In essays like 'In our Glory: Photography and Black Life' she digs past both aesthetic and political dichotomies of "good" and "bad". She acknowledges that cultural critique is connected to capitalism and other societal structures:

Certainly a distinction must be made between having access to art and being willing to engage the visual on an experiential level--to be moved and touched be art. Many of us see art every day without allowing it to be anything more than decorative. The way art moves in the marketplace also changes our relationship to it. Often individuals who collect art spend more time engaged with issues of market value rather than experiencing the visual. ('Critical Genealogies: Writing Black Art', 108)

Roughly at the center of the collection is hooks's most personal (in some ways) essay, 'Women Artists: The Creative Process'. It is this short essay where we learn most about hooks as an artist and writer, and where some of her boldest statements appear:

Women have yet to create the context, both politically and socially, where our understanding of the politics of difference not only transforms our individual lives (and we have yet to really speak about those transformations) but also alters how we work with others in public, in institutions, in galleries, etc. For example: When will white female art historians and cultural critics who structure their careers focusing on work by women and men of color share how this cultural practice changes who they are in the world in a way that extends beyond the making of individual professional success? (131).

It is a more than fair question. And when we consider that this collection is from a quarter of a century ago, it is telling that I find these questions still very relevant--at least in my field of music history/musicology. I can't speak to the situation in art history, but I'd venture that not much has changed.

The only drawback of the book is that the reproduction of the artwork is not very good, and in some cases, the lack of color undermines some of hooks's most biting and salient points. The book warrants a new edition with color plates, but in lieu of that, the Internet does come to the rescue in most cases. It is worthwhile to take the time to look up the works featured in the book--some of them can be found on Phillips contemporary art and auction site, others on the artists's personal website (such as Carrie Mae Weems's personal website). Others, like Emma Amos's The Overseer, seem inaccessible. But hooks's prose throws many of these works into high relief through description and critique. But look for them---seek them out. Do the work. The rewards will be there.

This was an important book for me to read, especially because so many of its lessons are directly applicable to music history. It asked me to look at my own "wokeness" and wonder if I have ever been, as Emma Amos put it, "the white critic [who] feels safe focusing on the blackness and otherness of the artist instead of learning to look at the art" ('Straighten up and fly right: Talking Art with Emma Amos,' 188). How much has identity politics shaped by own understanding of music? Am I working against silence and erasure? I'm not sure. But I do know that spending time with these essays has helped me consider the boundaries that I have yet to transgress.

2019 #5: The Shaw Memorial: A Celebration of an American Masterpiece

The Shaw Memorial: A Celebration of an American Masterpiece by Gregory C. Schwarz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I purchased this book in the gift shop of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in New Hampshire, admiring it for aesthetic production and the inclusion of rare photos. Then I read it.

Wow. Each essay provides so much in terms of historical context, and understanding the process that Saint-Gaudens undertook to create his masterpiece(s)--plural, one might argue, because the different versions all seem to express the artist's commitment to perfection (even if he felt he never achieved it). Likewise, one gets a fairly good understanding of conservation efforts as well.

Particularly compelling is Ludwig Lauerhass's essay, "A Commemoration: The Shaw Memorial as American Culture." In reading the first few pages, I rolled my eyes initially at the seemingly hagiographic language, but quickly changed my mind as Lauerhass's well-researched and cited essay delved into an intertextual exploration of poetry and film. Charles Ives "The Saint-Gaudens in Boston Common" is briefly mentioned, as is the score for the movie Glory, by James Horner.

The eternal question of reception and understanding still hangs in the air--and this is perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book. Discussion of Robert Lowell and Paul Laurence Dunbar's less-than-celebratory poems (commentaries on society's failure to act on the lessons of history) helps us understand why we might revisit the monument, and what the role of the viewer is. We can observe the sinewy muscles of the horse, the rich detail in the faces of the soldiers, the posture of Col. Robert Gould Shaw. But what is more important is that we understand the fatigue of that march...that it is ongoing, in our own backyards.

2015 #10: Gardens of Gravel and Sand (L. Koren)

Gardens of Gravel and Sand by Leonard Koren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In half an hour, looking through this book and reading Koren's text will have you rethinking what you think you know about rock gardens. It is a pragmatic look at gravel and sand as "possibly art," and while that may not seem very enticing, it is arguably a more valuable exploration of these gardens than all the new age, Zen, and run-of-the-mill garden books put together. Koren argues that many of the gardens "were not even designed or constructed by Zen practitioners at all by by gardeners/garden designers who were of the lowest social class; there is nothing Zen-like or "spiritual" about them" (32). While his arguments may not impact the integration of said gardens into modern Zen practice, it is refreshing to find new ways of seeing these spaces that are not cliché and rhetorical.