A small dialogue on John Berger

With the wildest serendipity a few weeks ago, a wonderful woman named Wah-Ming Chang interrupted a jolly conversation I was having on the Brooklyn-bound N train for what turned out to be an interview in a fantastic series about encountering strangers for the Open City online magazine, of the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.

The published interview (conducted mostly virtually) turned into a long correspondence and conversation, rather than a call and response. Wah-Ming’s first question to me didn’t make the final cut of the interview, but had to do with my post on John Berger + Jean Mohr. As gifted wordsmith, Wah-Ming doesn’t write questions so much as unfurls trains of thought and leaves the threads hanging to be picked up. I thought her prompt and my response might be interesting to post here.

Read her fiction and her other written compositions.
Read another snippet of our conversation, of me trying to talk her into reading Haruki Murakami.

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WMC: I always read Berger’s work through a prism of nonlinear narrative—that is how I read everything—and because I find his curatorial sense to be so intuitive and generous, I can’t help but love his words as much as what the words represent or present. How do you as an art critic read Berger the art critic?

SQ: Really, I came to John Berger before I was ready to fathom him and the expanse of his multiple vocabularies. It might have been because his shorter critical essays were my first point of contact, and there was a near-ferocity in his conviction and thinking that humbled me. I can’t speak to his entire body of work by any means, but I think that there is an astounding clarity beneath his playfulness and experimentation. He exercises this awe-inspiringly adaptable visual sensitivity, and offers it as a standing invitation to join him at his vantage point. There is a faith in the interval between the eye and the mind that I think art criticism should always have, and that I certainly hope to endear in my own work.

Two Books on Things that Aren’t There

I’ve been encountering many books on the idea of disappearance and anticipation lately. These were two that I came across during my time at Printed Mater, during two different weeks, but the second brought to mind the first. I present my synopses of them here as perhaps a petit experiment in book-curating, and maybe will become part of a regular book feature on this site. Meriç Algün Ringborg‘s Location: Date: Time: was also the first and only book so far that I immediately purchased after completing my write-up.

Location: Date: Time: Meriç Algün Ringborg

Written and assembled by Meriç Algün Ringborg, this volume is both a two-part reflection and demonstration of disappearance in both personal and cultural terms. The first portion contains an essay that illustrates contemporary and historic assumptions of space and time. Rather than trying to articulate the very meaning of lacking substance, Ringborg writes the idea of disappearance through its converse–documentation, power, place and surveillance. The second portion contains a series of fragments taken from different unnamed sources that both describe and demonstrate erasure in all its moods, ranging from the humorous to the poignant.

A-I-M-E-R: notes for a forthcoming detective novel Sarah Elliott

An unbound collection of gestures, marks, thoughts, images, quotes, snippets printed spaciously and neatly on white cards, for the imagined potential of another narrative. Sarah Elliot presents these as atmospheric ornaments without certain order, and which naturally have no fixed sequence in a story. Presented as fluid parts, these cards invite re-arrangement and generous speculation.

A Linear System of Seeing (Exerpt No. 1)

This is an edited excerpt from a piece written for Valentin Y. Mudimbe on the subject of theories of difference in museums, curation and cultural displays. It was meant to entertain a vein of continental structuralist thinking.

The process of assembling and navigating a book can be experienced as curation, if curation is thought of an act of selecting, ordering, presenting objects from a larger system to demonstrate its functionality as a system of its own.

I recently read Another Way of Telling (Vintage Press: 1995), in which John Berger compiles a series of stories, accounts, photographs by Jean Mohr both captioned and uncaptioned, about a peasant town. The volume typically is read for its contribution to the discourse of photography and memory, it is also useful as an analytic tool to investigate for models in curating. The book serves as both an anthropological account, and a criticism of its own methods: each chapter is an essay that presents the central subject matter in iterative configurations,  remembering while thinking anew through repeated content. [1] Each re-presentation destabilizes the last, and forewarns against the next. The power of the critique is nested in this false linearity, in the arbitrariness of sequence.

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The Beginning of a Thought on Installation Art

In an attempt to re-compress some of the art and literature I’ve gathered in the past few years, I’ve been slowly pinning down corners of a subject I want to pursue in my graduate work. The recurring themes in my undergraduate studies circle around the art institutional space, how it can be transformative and plastic, validating and self-critical. Within the discourses on artistic space, I find myself returning to the idea of Installation Art, which cannot be called a medium by art historical tradition, but has in the past 40 years acquired the valence of a coagulated genre, and thus slipped into art world’s vocabulary. I have noticed a discrepancy in documentation and critical perspectives on installation art relative to its high visibility in contemporary exhibitions. While museum attention implies a certain validation in artistic and cultural currency, installation art has yet to move into the discourse of art history. This might be because the genre is perceived to be relatively young, but I would guess that this is more because installation is part performative, part conceptual, and incredibly fragile.

In the handful of survey books I’ve come in contact with, I frequently return to two prominent volumes: MOCA San Diego’s Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996 (1997), and Phaidon’s Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (2009). They offer competing methodologies by way of introduction to their subject. Continue reading…

The Cloisters, between Pilgrimage and Tourism

This was a miniature conference paper I gave this week. I was trying to locate the Cloisters, as both a museum and a medieval (contemporary) construction, relative to traditions of pilgrimage and tourism.

In the modern age of tourism, museums have achieved landmark status. For one who sees “everything as a sign of itself,” [1] museums are convenient concentrations of cultural artifacts employed to typify the conditions under which they were made. Fortunately for New York tourists and tour organizations, the majority of these museums are concentrated in upper-middle Manhattan. City Sites NY, a popular tour bus franchise, advertises that both their “All Around Town” and “Uptown Tour Bus” tours include visits to the Museum Mile [2], and is therefore a must. The visibility of these museums contributes to their high visitor traffic, and perpetuates their canonization in the New York tourist experience.

Excluded from these franchised museum loops is the Cloisters. This is in part due to its distance from central Manhattan: it is 5.6 miles north of its parent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose inclusion on bus tours is almost guaranteed. The Cloisters’ absence from the museum canon may also have to do with its specialization in medieval art: its narrow focus appeals to a necessarily smaller audience. Thus, obscure enough in location and content to have eluded the double-decker’s radius of interest, the Cloisters occupies a different category of destinations working along and at odds with touristic practice. Continue reading…

Vogue, Vogue, Gender, Repetition, Erasure

I wrote this piece recently on Madonna’s music video “Vogue.” It was fun to write, so I thought I’d edit it and include it here.

Feathers part like curtains to announce the beginning of a performance. Figures impeccably dressed strike poses and are interspersed at intervals between objects of art. In participating in the same space as paintings and sculpture, they acquire the attributes of being visually constructed and topically determined. But, beneath surfaces, there are only more surfaces denying interiority. The figures are thus postured to be apprehended through their presentations. Their personae and their appearances inscribe themselves in each other as they are being simultaneously determined.

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