by Jeanne Willette | Aug 16, 2014 | Reviews
PICTURING THE BOMB PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE SECRET WORLD OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT Pasadena City College Art Galllery October 5-Novemeber 12, 2011 One of the strangest confluences in art history was the painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the father of the atomic bomb, Robert...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 15, 2014 | Postmodern
FREDERIC JAMESON (1934-) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984) Part One In 1992, Charles Jencks summed up his definition of the Postmodern in ”The Post-Modern Agenda” by saying the over the past ten years the debate had centered on whether the...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 8, 2014 | Theory
Deconstruction The Truth in Painting (1987) In 1905 Paul Cézanne wrote to the younger artist, Emile Bernard, “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you.” One can immediately imagine how Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) would have seized upon such a...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 2, 2014 | Reviews
REBELS IN PARADISE. THE LOS ANGELES ART SCENE IN THE 1960s by Hunter Drohojowska-Philip Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene in the 1960s is a lovely and delicious book. Delightfully and briskly written, it is far and away the best book Hunter...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 1, 2014 | Theory
“Force and Signification” (1967) De-centering the Center It should never be presumed that Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) attempted to solve problems or to promote new solutions. His mission as a philosopher was quite different: Derrida was a Deconstructor or...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 25, 2014 | Theory
Différance (1968) Différance and Deferral Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a prolific writer who had the disconcerting ability to use a thousand words when one or two would do. Différance is typical of his poetic excess and opens with I will speak, therefore, of a...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 18, 2014 | Theory
NATURE AS CULTURE: DERRIDA’S TRACE The Problem with Origins Following his tour de force presentation of “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in 1967, Jacques Derrida astonishingly published three books: De la...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 11, 2014 | Theory
DERRIDA AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE STRUCTURE Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourses of Human Sciences (1966) Jacques Derrida’s (1921-2004) full frontal attack on the movement that had just ended the reign of Existentialism, was not only on the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 4, 2014 | Theory
JACQUES DERRIDA (1921 – 2004) The Path to Post-Structualism Jacques Derrida was a notoriously difficult philosopher to comprehend, especially for Americans, who are baffled by his writing style and his purpose. Americans, being pragmatic, prefer ideas that can...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 27, 2014 | Philosophy
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS (1908-2009) Structuralism and Anthropology Although it has long roots, stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century, Structuralism found a home in philosophy and reigned as the leading movement from the beginning of the 1950s to the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 20, 2014 | Philosophy
THE STRUCTURE OF STRUCTURALISM Structuralism Every society has its songs, its dances, the stories it tells, the myths it makes, the histories it writes. Every culture has ways of loving and mating, way of forming families and raising children. Each tribe has its...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 13, 2014 | Theory
Discours/Figure (1971) Part Two: Veduta In 1971, in the wake of Jacques Derrida’s 1966 presentation Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, the Deconstruction of Structuralism was well under way....
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 6, 2014 | Theory
Discours/Figure (1971) Part One Perhaps because Jean-François Lyotard was a prolific and sometimes too hasty writer (as he termed himself), the reader is a witness to the development of the philosopher over time. Discours, figure was translated into English decades...
by Jeanne Willette | May 30, 2014 | Theory
Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime Part Three In Ticket to a New Decor, Jean-François Lyotard wrote of “anamesis,” a key concept in his account of the sublime. In the Platonic sense, anamesis is a form of pre-conscious collective memory that must be...
by Jeanne Willette | May 23, 2014 | Theory
Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991) Part Two The definition of aesthetics has always been difficult to grasp and perhaps what is more interesting in attempts to define aesthetics is the fact that in the middle of the eighteenth century, philosophers deemed...
by Jeanne Willette | May 16, 2014 | Theory
Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991) Part One The way in which the mind of Jean-François Lyotard worked was slow and systematic and thorough. The notion of the potential injustice in language games appeared in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on...
by Jeanne Willette | May 9, 2014 | Theory
The Différend: Phrases in Dispute, Part Three Defining the “Event” Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the author of The Assassins of Memory, complained about the international spectacle of the 1978 American mini-series Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss and wrote...
by Jeanne Willette | May 2, 2014 | Theory
The Différend (1983) as “The Postmodern Condition, Part Two” Defining the Différend Although Le Différend was the natural outcome of The Postmodern Condition, this book is also an overt return to politics and a reassertion of a life-long concern with...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 25, 2014 | Theory
The Différend (1983) as “The Postmodern Condition, Part One” Part One: The Historical Context The life path and careers of Jean-François Lyotard suggest that this philosopher needs to be understood as a bricoleur. A scholar who stood in a liminal position...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 18, 2014 | Theory
JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD and PARALOGY The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Part Three In writing of Lyotard in relation to history, F. R. Ankersmi in his chapter “Historicism and Postmodernism: A Phenomenology of Human Experience,” referred to the...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 11, 2014 | Theory
JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD: KNOWLEDGE and EDUCATION The Postmodern Condition: Part Two “In contemporary society and culture–postindustrial society, postmodern culture–the question of legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms. The grand...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 4, 2014 | Theory
JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD (1927 – 1998) THE METANARRATIVE The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) A brief book, a small study, “an occasional one” that Lyotard himself did not consider either important or a work of philosophy, The...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 28, 2014 | Philosophy
ART AND MATERIAL CULTURE CLIFFORD GEERTZ and ART HISTORY Gathered together at the Warburg Library and impacted by the neo-Kantian revival in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer created diachronic analyses of cultural symbols from the...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 21, 2014 | Philosophy
ART AND MATERIAL CULTURE CLIFFORD GEERTZ and PHILOSOPHY “Art, Clifford Geertz once remarked, “is notoriously hard to talk about.” However, Clifford Geertz provided art history with a way to talk about art through material culture. A term familiar to anthropology,...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 14, 2014 | Postmodern
RE-DEFINING ART AS TEXT in the POSTMODERN ERA Postmodernism promises endless creative play in contrast to Modernism, which, according to Roland Barthes (1916-1980), was a fraudulent attempt to find the universal in every solution. For Barthes, Structuralism, or the...
