Twombly’s work is a win-win because it does not force us to think or feel at all, except insofar as the work reminds us that most of what we think and feel we are afraid to speak publicly about. (And this, perhaps, for good reason?)
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, art, art museums, Museum of Modern Art
By Oriana Schällibaum and Marcel Grissmer As I went out one morning may strike the casual listener as one of the more insipid songs Bob Dylan ever wrote. Recorded for the 1967 John Wesley Harding album it has never been very important to Dylan; he recorded the song in only five takes and, to date, has performed it in concert only once (in 1974).[1] Yet, “As I went out one morning”—apart from being a joy to listen to—is worth a […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, celebrity, literary theory, popular music, The Bible
Speeches of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, in the Company of Consonant Words from Patrick Henry, Karuna Ezara Parikh’, Martin Luther King, Jr., Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shakespeare 29 September 2017, as revised 4 October 2017 San Juan Mayor Cruz’s speeches to cable-news reporters and the world were heroic and heart-rending, and examples of great leadership in a time of crisis. If and when documentaries come to be made of the Trump years, sadly, these clips […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: CNN, death, disaster, Donald Trump, hunger, Martin Luther King, Paris, Patrick Henry, Puerto Rico, Shakespeare, Shelley, speeches
In the aftermath of Trump’s election, artists and writers have had the feeling that all is changed, and their work, too, has to change somehow; they—we—have to come up with an effective response. One way I have approached this is, in my museum wanderings, to see which works from the past seem most right to me now. My two top choices from the modern-art galleries—Pierre Bonnard’s portrait of himself as a boxer (which he wasn’t) and Joan Miró’s Ceci est […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: African art, Bonnard, collage, David Koch, Donald Trump, James Baldwin, Marcel Duchamp, Mirό, Rosalind Krauss, Vladimir Mayakovsky
At sea in these thunder-clouded days we write out of habit and wishing that we might find some magical, Archimedean fulcrum that would right the ship or allow us to gather the pieces and start building anew. At present we cannot be sure how, or if, these pieces fit together. In any critic’s work, we may find an underlying set of values which inform the critic’s assertions that work ‘a,’ artist ‘b,’ public policy ‘c’ is superior or inferior to […]
Categories: Comment, William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Donald Judd, Gatsby, Thomas Jefferson, United States of America
by John Sumser
The famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson writes that the attraction of a photograph is not that it captures reality but that it just barely glimpses it. His photograph Derrière la Gare Saint-Lazare captures, in mid-air, a man in a suit and hat attempting a hopeless leap over a large puddle of water.[1] If we had been standing behind the Saint-Lazare train station we would not have been able to see what the photograph shows us—we cannot register images in 1/64th of […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Donald Trump, Henri Cartier-Bresson, meaning
You may be an ambassador to England or FranceYou may like to gamble, you might like to danceYou may be the heavyweight champion of the worldYou may be a socialite with a long string of pearls But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeedYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyWell, it may be the devil or it may be the LordBut you’re gonna have to serve somebody — Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” 1979 Bob Dylan, who first achieved […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, Christianity, Jesus, popular music, The Bible
![Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971, Ink on paper, 26.7 x 35.2 cm = 10 1/2 x 13 7/8 in, Private Collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth [GUSTO77446]](https://journal109944135.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/d4973-gusto77446.jpg?w=248&h=330&crop=1)
In a number of Philip Guston’s more than 100 cartoon-style drawings of Richard Nixon, which are currently on view at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City, the former President’s nose and jowls are transformed into a cock and balls (or scrotum).[1] We recognize the long-standing association of the nose and the penis, and can understand that Guston, in his sixties, was making his way back from Abstract Expressionism toward the cartooning of his adolescence. He was exaggerating the […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: anti-Semitism, cartoons, Cyrano de Bergerac, drawing, Jews, John F. Kennedy, Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, noses, Philip Guston, Philip Roth, Presidential campaigns, Richard Nixon, United Nations
Le monde s’étire s’allonge et se retire comme un accordéon qu’une main sadique tourmente The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion tortured by a sadic hand Dans les déchirures du ciel, les locomotives en furie In the rips in the sky insane locomotives S’enfuient Take flight Et dans les trous, In the gaps Les roues vertigineuses les bouches les voix Whirling wheels mouths voices Et les chiens du malheur qui aboient à nos trousses And the dogs […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Blaise Cendrars, Bob Dylan, Clintons, French, John Donne, Paris, poetics, poetry, popular music, songs, translation
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