Linguistic vandals: In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson, surveying his “retrospective”-ly minded countrymen, was disappointed in their fascination with the past. “Why,” he asks, “should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Joyce Li and Drew Phaneuf, in this week’s addition to The Harper Review’s spring issue, debate the merits of this question of existential orientation. Should one be strengthened by the familiar or branch off into the unknown? Phaneuf, writing about resistance movements, argues that public and personal conservatism breeds stagnation. While “modern dissent” has enfeebled itself with cautious movements and “sterile doctrine,” “the voices of history should propel us forward” and out of tyranny. Li, focusing on language study, finds that expanding one’s horizon makes one not only “better at a language but at being human,” even if the “quest” seems “illogical” and demanding. In charting leaps of faith into political and linguistic unknowns, Li and Phaneuf offer an alternate path for another retrospective age.
Brady Santoro, managing editor
Digging up dirt: Up a precariously narrow flight of stairs in downtown New York is the fresh smell of dirt. Barred from slipping out into the hallway by a sheet of glass, deep brown dirt is piled and packed mostly evenly in two white-walled rooms. No light illuminates the room with dirt and it feels still. When the world has ended there will only be dirt.
I kneel to the floor next to the dirt. I put my finger past the glass and etched in the grooves of my fingerprint comes out rich, brown dirt. I yearn to climb over and walk through the dirt. Lay in the dirt. Bury myself in the dirt.
Why is the dirt evenly packed? Why doesn’t the dirt spill from the wall like the heap of candy in Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)? Or the dirt gather in mounds across the room like in Samuel Beckett’s “Oh les beaux jours”? 197 cubic meters of 56-centimeter thick dirt has been covering the 335 meters of the room since 1977. The dirt is not from anywhere in particular, which is surprising given the eccentricity of the exhibit. For 49 years the dirt has laid over prime New York real estate. Is the dirt mocking us in its ability to pay rent? Or is it saying that our rent is worth dirt, nothing? The dirt is silent and doesn’t respond.
Even though Walter De Maria, the artist who placed the dirt, is dead, the installation lives on. In busy cities like New York, what does dirt bring to the table, or in this case the floor? Dirt, as conceptual land artist Walter De Maria saw it, is in fact, Earth.
Mimi Mikhailov, contributing editor
Ars nova: Neolithic Anatolian caves; Medieval church-tombs; Roman glass; morality in art criticism; trans anatomy in contemporary art: all were subjects of the Intercollegiate Art History Symposium held last Saturday, April 18. The Cochrane-Woods Art Center hosted thesis-writing students from the University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul, and the University of Illinois Chicago, with projects spanning the entire human timeline. The roundtable proved surprisingly engaging for undergraduates, allowing the speakers to relate their projects on subjects such as ethics, embodiment, and the historical eye. Few students are aware that the University of Chicago’s Art History Department is among the best in the country and the only one to allow undergraduate exhibition design, but never was it so well demonstrated.
Anju Lukose-Scott’s presentation on moving beyond anatomy in the contemporary scene particularly fascinated me because of its theoretical framework. Using José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queerness as a way of life rejecting the “here-and-now” and transness as a continual ideation, they explored pieces such as Cassils’s “Becoming an Image,” in which the artist attacks a one-ton clay block in total darkness illuminated only by the photographer’s flash. Cassils infuses their energy into the material, whose shape warps in the endless formation and becoming of identity. Conversely, the artist becomes image because the process only appears in glimpses. This, at least, models the ideas at play in Lukose-Scott’s presentation. Keep an eye out for more events from the department.
Jacqueline Oury, contributing editor
Zoomers just wanna have fun: I’ve recently started crossing myself again. I haven’t been religious for many years and still don’t believe in a god, but I’ve always had the instinct to make the sign of the cross when ambulances or fire engines pass, a holdover from my Catholic school days. All of us rushing to the window while our teachers told us to pray for whomever that screaming machine was hurtling towards. Even during my radically atheistic years, I could never shake off the impulse to give off some physical token of hope and pity towards the world. Even though I believed religion was a deceptive sham, I also felt ashamed that I would not give my fellow sufferers even this slight act of empathy, uncomfortable with feebly concealing my internal sense of community.
Similar phenomena have been playing out across my generation. Gen Z seeks new meaning in a digital world, as evidenced in the rise of the New Right. Last Friday, the University of Chicago’s Parrhesia Program for Public Thought and Discourse held a pair of panels dedicated to “Covering the New Right.” Parrhesia and its partner, The Point magazine, invited seven scholars and journalists well-versed in the content and history of the New Right, who were asked questions by a moderator as well as by the audience. Continue reading here.
Reilly Pryma, assistant editor
Image: William Wyld, Manchester from Kersal Moor, with rustic figures and goats, watercolor, 1852 (Royal Collection, London).