Thesis Proposal: Annotated Bibliography

Annotated bibliography

1. McEvilley, Thomas. Sculpture in an Age of Doubt. New York, Allworth Press, 1999.

Sculpture in the Age of Doubt is a series of essays on seminal postmodern sculptors set against a really smart analysis of the concurrent decline of the Kantian philosophical tradition. At the moment, the most important insight for me came in McEvilley’s essay of Marcel Broodthaers: “Generally in his work, the alphabet is understood epistemologically and ethically as a grid with which to control perception and reality towards some unacknowledged end.” This remark prompted me to compare and contrast both perception-shaping “technologies” and consider manipulating letters spatially, much the way the grid is explored by visual artists.

2. Shlain, Leonard, The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Roughly: Shlain, a neurologist, argues that the rise of alphabetic literacy fundamentally reconfigured the human brain and consequently brought about profound changes in gender relations. Pre-literate cultures were strongly informed by holistic right-brain thinking and, Shlain argues, consequently revered goddesses and feminine values as much as masculine ones. Writing -- particularly alphabets -- drove cultures toward linear, right-brain thinking. This shift upset the balance between men and women, initiated the decline of feminine values and the reign of patriarchy and misogyny. This brief summary does not do justice to Shlain’s analysis – and no doubt sounds pretty hokey. But, at minimum, the text serves as a marker for the idea that rape and the silences of alphabetic languages are inextricably linked.

For me, then, the idea is to deconstruct the alphabet visually with the aim to evoke the possibility of restoring the balance between right and left brain thinking and consequently male and female values. Bottom line here: Despite the gains in equality, rape exists – whether as a tool of war or “isolated” crime statistics. To create letter-like shapes or constellations of shapes that evoke the look of trying to communicating something important, something unsaid, something, if said, if sayable, might alter the course of that suffering, remove it. A lot to ask. However, the impulse to create a new language is not a new idea for…

3. Albani, P. and Buonarroti B. Dictionnaire des Langues Imaginaires. Paris: Belles Lettres, 2001.

… contains over 1100 recorded examples of imaginary alphabets and/or languages. It is a fodder of visual material.

4. Empedocles, The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation by Brad Inwood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Empedocles was a pre-Socratic philosopher who offered accounts of the nature of change and the origin of the world, which always spark my imagination about the nature of creation.

The trouble with change, for the Pre-Socratics, was that it seemed to require that existence pass into non-existence, and vice versa. This was to their minds impossible. Empedocles proposed that change is really the result of the mixture of inalterable substances and what we call “coming into existence” and “death” are really only the mixture and separation of what was mixed. The four ultimate elements, according to Empedocles, are fire, water, earth, and air. They are simple, eternal, and unalterable. For change, then, to occur, there must – in his account – be moving powers to bring about the mixture and separation of the elements. These are Love and Strife. In the beginning, there was a time when the four elements and two forces co-existed in a state of rest and inertness in the form of a sphere. The elements existed together in their purity, without mixture and separation, and the uniting power of Love predominated in the sphere while the separating power of Strife guarded the extreme edges of the sphere. Since that time, however, strife gained more sway and dissolved the bond that held the substances together in their purity. The elements then became the world of phenomena we see today, full of contrasts and oppositions, operated on by both Love and Strife. At first, though, as the elements entered into combinations strange results appeared – heads without necks, arms without shoulders etc. Then as these fragmentary structures met, there were seen even stranger things, an ox with a human head, a foot with a mouth. But most of these products of natural forces disappeared as soon as they arose due to their lack of viability; only in those rare instances when the parts were found to be adapted to each did the complex forms last and form the world as we know it.

I can almost imagine an extremely precocious child coming up with such a story. And yet there is also something about those strange failed combinations that reminds of the processes of art-making. They also make me think that perhaps alphabets were also such failed combinations or, alternatively, could be improved upon in like manner.

5. Wittig, Monique. Les Guerillieres. Translated by David Le Vay. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007 (1969).

A classic. An imaginary, fragmentary account of a race of women warriors who combat misogyny and -- perhaps -- upend the alphabet. In any event, the writing is extraordinarily beautiful and strange – as if it came from another world.

7. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Scarry not only defends beauty from recent political arguments against it but also argues that beauty continually renews our search for truth and presses us toward a greater concern for justice. She begins by examining the experience of suddenly finding something beautiful – in this case, a palm tree – after a lifetime of never finding palm trees beautiful at all. She found other trees beautiful but not the palm. She really mines that experience, which was mediated by a series of paintings by Matisse. For once one finds something beautiful that one never did before, one realizes the injustice one had done it. At this very moment, however, I am doing her book a grave injustice by making her argument sound trite. It is anything but. It is, for me, the most profound reason to make art, though I had my reasons years before I read it. It is also, I think, a kind of polestar if what you want to accomplish is a change towards truth and justice. And, yes, I believe in those.

6. Kuspit, Donald.“Abstract Painting and the Spiritual Unconscious” in The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Kuspit argues that abstract painting conveys in a seemingly cryptic, subliminal way the process of spiritual conversion for good. It begins with eschewing the mediation of the material world in conventional terms and beginning again with pure sense perceptions and replacing representation with presentational immediacy. I see this as an analogy for creating a new, a better alphabet. Of course, I think the same is true for sculpture.

8. Wechsler, Lawrence. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Robert Irwin is simply inspiring in the way he attacks the questions he poses to himself and does not let go. He is also one of the great artists of “presence,” which is ultimately one of the qualities I am after in my own work.

9. Robert Smithson: The Complete Writings. Ed. Flam, J. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996.

At the moment, I am particularly interested in Smithson’s writings about language: “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read” and “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art.” My favorite remark: “My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas.”

10. Close, Frank. The Void. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

A particle physicist’s explanation of the current understanding of voids, which are not empty but filled with particles popping in and out of existence.