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
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
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
Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray I Robert Smithson’s Mirrors and Shelly Sand (images above) is a long, low, floor-lying crest of sand (approximately 30 feet by 5 feet), which is divided in equal parts by 50 double-sided mirrors.[1] Division and reflection—reflection in the sense of light, images, and ideas being thrown back without being absorbed—are central concepts here. As regards division, […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, beauty, capitalism, cultural criticism, intellectuals, Oscar Wilde
Why do we think Guston made paintings like these? This becomes a question, too, about how we are compelled, how we respond. By William Eaton I think every good painter here in New York really paints a self-portrait. I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean himself in this environment, in this total situation. […]
Categories: William Eaton • Tags: Abstract Expressionism, art, CIA, Clement Greenberg, Cold War, Harold Rosenberg, McCarthyism, Meyer Schapiro
Or, Dying, “What does it feel like?” First approach Torvald Helmer: Oh, you think and talk like a heedless child. Nora, his wife: Maybe. But you neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over—and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you—when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Adorno, aporia, art, Belgium, Berlinde De Bruyckere, death, dying, Gatsby, Ibsen, Jean-François Lyotard, juxtaposition, Paul Simon, popular music, reverie, sculpture
The films touched upon here and below are: The Third Man, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Farewell My Concubine [English title], Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, or The Bicycle Thief), L’Amant (The Lover), Touki Bouki, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Anna Karenina (1935 version), Un air de famille (Family Resemblances), Carol, Youth, Orson Welles : Autopsie d’une légende, Strangers on a Train, The American Friend, Eaux Profondes, Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), The Leningrad Cowboys, Festen, Satyajit Ray’s […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Bob Fosse, Dr. Caligari, Farewell My Concubine, Jaoui et Bacri, Lawrence of Arabia, Mao, movies, Paolo Sorrentino, The Third Man, Virginia Woolf, Woody Allen
Living with the objects, they became his family, his neighbors, his friends. — Janet Abramowicz, former assistant to Morandi You don’t have to paint a figure to express human feelings. — Robert Motherwell [1] (1) For what, in the past year, have been revealed to be psychological reasons, I have long been drawn to the still lifes of the twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, one of the great still-life painters, etchers, and watercolorists. There is a dominant interpretation […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: families, fascism, Italy, Morandi, painting, relationships, Still Life
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