Aquatic Shrouds, Erasures, Bill Viola and Limits in Video.

The traffic moved swiftly on the West Side Highway past the busy shipping lanes of the Hudson River on a bright day in November 2009. The memory of commerce and trade once dependent on the port traffic, hangs on in the refurbished warehouses and lofts, which now house the Chelsea Galleries and remind one of New York’s vital history. The Bill Viola exhibition “Bodies of Light”  on display at the James Cohan Gallery in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district included  a collection of works from different periods during the previous eight years. I went to the exhibition on a recommendation  from a professor friend, charged to evaluate the exhibition in the light of the critical acclaim that Viola enjoys. Much of what is written about his work is positive and Viola is often interviewed with the caveat that his work is assumed to be worthy of his postscriptive comments. The wide range of works presented offered an opportunity to view his recent corpus and perhaps gather insights about the reasons for Viola’s favorable notices from the art world, the public and even religious intuitions. I entered the gallery unfamiliar with his work, but not unfamiliar with the realm of the Chelsea galleries, or so I thought. I offer here my thoughts and experiences as I recorded them subsequent to that first visit when I stepped into the gallery from the cold brightness of a winter day.

Bill Viola, Bodies of Light, installation at James Cohan Gallery.

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Strange Windows: Six Degrees of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound, by Wyndham Lewis

Pound was friends with (former lover of?) HD (he was sort of the Kevin Bacon of modernism)” — Caroline Small

“Wow, I didn’t realize Pound actually knew Beerbohm. It’s that Kevin Bacon thing….” — Noah Berlatsky

What were you thinking, my learnèd colleague and fellow Utilitarian Caro?

What on Earth could connect Ezra Weston Loomis  Pound (1885–1972), the modernist Poetic Master of the Revels, author of the Pisan Cantos…to the respected Hollywood actor Kevin Norwood Bacon (1958–     ), the sensitive megastar of classic films such as  Animal House and My Dog Skip ?

Kevin Bacon wants YOU!

The answer is–

More, much more than you would think!
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Made For You and Me: Localizing Disney’s Imperialism for an Egyptian Audience

 

I would be hard pressed to pick a better mascot for the United States as an imperial hegemon than Mickey Mouse. In Egypt — as with most of the “developing world” — Mr. Mouse is ubiquitous: you can see his big round eyes staring at you on the side of taxi cabs, through the glass windows of clothing stores, and from the cover of popular comic books. In fact, it is in this latter form that many Egyptians have come to know and love Mickey Mouse, or rather have come to know and love “Mîkî.”

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Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (Index)

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary (1751)

In a seven-part series, we  surveyed the contributions of comics and cartoons to  English popular language

Part 1, part 2, part 3 looked at American newspaper comic strips; part 4 and part 5 treated comic books;  part 6 reviewed American panel gags and editorial cartoons; part 7 dealt with Britain.

This post serves as an index to the series; after each entry appears a number referring to the series chapter in which it appears.

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Strange Windows:Keeping Up with the Goonses (part 7)

This is part seven of our look at comics, cartoons and language– today focussing on Britain

Art by Heath Robinson

Britain has a long, rich tradition of cartooning second to no other land’s. And, as we saw for American English, cartoons have contributed to the country’s popular language.

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DWYCK: Jimmy Corrigan’s Spectacular Reality

It has now been over a decade since Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid on Earth was published in collected form, and almost two since he first drew the character in a number of short strips in the Chicago weekly New City. Through the nineties, as it was being republished for the first time in his ongoing serial the ACME Novelty Library, it was for many consistently the most anticipated serialized comic around; an indication that comics were experiencing an artistic renaissance and a harbinger of great things to come for the medium.

Its release in book form in 2000 has now come to be seen as an emblematic event in what certain commentators, such as yours truly, have termed the international “new wave” of comics, which has since only gained in force and momentum. And Chris Ware is still working somewhere at is center, simultaneously expanding and refining his approach to comics, most recently with ACME #20, or “Lint”, which provides as good a touchstone as any to chart his development since Jimmy Corrigan. The following is a re-examination of Ware’s seminal book, made with the benefit of a decade plus of hindsight, with attention paid to how it has contributed to the evolution of the art form of comics and how we think about them. Continue reading