TO ART-HISTORICAL HELL (AND BACK) WITH HAL FOSTER

“A distinguished bishop, a priest and a peasant are in a great cathedral. In turn the priest and bishop approach the altar rail, beat their chests and declare, ‘I am nothing, I am nothing’. The humble peasant, moved to imitate, shuffles to the altar and says the same thing. The bishop turns furiously and hisses in the priest’s ear, ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’.”(1)

In the somewhat rarified pages of the delightfully left-leaning London Review of Books we currently have the pleasure to read arch critic Hal Foster weighing the ‘new’ MoMA in his golden scales while asking all of the wrong questions.(2) As pulse-taking exercise, we also have the pleasuure of watching Foster twist and turn (rhetorically and otherwise) to make it appear that he has indeed asked the right questions, such as “Who the hell is John Elderfield, and why is he still aligning modern art with the trajectory of twentieth-century ‘positivism’?”, a mostly disingenuous question generally perceived by those in the know, such as Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, as the principal means of bringing down the purveyors of modern art to the level most given to properly discussing art; that is, to the level of discourse regarding the interpenetrating nature of schools -- as schools of fishes inhabit coral and/or man-made reefs (such as sunken ships or jettisoned cargoes) -- thus rendering the entire exercise of placing modern art on display in chronologically convenient and pleasing ‘tableaux mordant’ a terrible and tiring charade executed by curators struggling to make sense out of the inherent mess that the production of works of art entails.

Foster first measures the new galleries designed by Taniguchi to see if they betray anything significant regarding MoMA’s intentions to remain valid into the twenty-first century, as if the gracious spaces spoke a secret language of form that might somehow counter what they contain. Thus he walks into the foyer (‘Agnes Gund Garden Lobby’) and up the stairs to arrive in the premier zone of a museum long renowned for a special form of myopia; a zone given over to what Foster calls P&S (Painting & Sculpture), and something implicitly taken to task for its pre-ordained significance amidst all other disciplines -- architecture and design, of course, falling outside the purview of the arch-druids at MoMA (guardians of the sacred tree of Fine Art), this latter discipline relegated to the care of Terence Riley, who despite problems of myopia of another sort makes mincemeat of the progression of giants gracing the halls of P&S through carefully crafted exhibits that accentuate a possible synthesis (as far as Architecture, the capitalized version, can ever permit such).

By way of Taniguchi’s elemental architecture and John Elderfield’s curatorial vision Foster assembles a critique of the thing otherwise known as Modernism, yet (with Foster and with MoMA) a thing horribly biased by its presentation as Absolute contingent thing … as eyewash, then … And, as if that weren’t quite enough, as edifying (educative) stuff of genius (despite all disclaimers disclaiming that concept, in wall text or actual text … book form) … One almost suspects that what is at stake between Foster and Elderfield instead (plus Rosalind Krauss, by association), as telltale disputed terrain separating two intellects, is the small, ungainly something known as Surrealism (and Dada), a something both have tackled and ended up mangling in the process.(3)

The presentation of art as eyewash leads straight into the mess art historians have made of the single most valuable conceptual field missing to this day in criticality itself -- that is, of course, ‘aesthetics’. Given Foster’s anti-aesthetic bias, this word will never be revived in any positive context, or in its foremost context (as Umberto Eco might place it someday soon), within the field of philosophical aesthetics (as it belongs there … thrives there anyway), which leads one to the conclusion that Foster is out of step now as he was in step then (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) when nihilism was considered au courant.

It is a profoundly unsettling voyage, then, by degrees (and through the bankrupt canon and anti-canon of both MoMA and Foster), this essayistic dissembling before the reconstituted specter of THE Museum of Modern Art … As Foster points out, in the spacious (vacuous?) galleries devoted to P&S and ‘contemporary’ art (whatever that is, and whatever Elderfield or Foster might mean it to be), a something discourteous arrives anyway in the form of caesuras, or holes that cannot be filled. The first hole arrives in the 1940s, to be filled by Abstract Expressionism, while the second arrives in the 1960s, to be filled with Pop and Minimalism. This dismemberment of the teleological-anagogical heart of the art-historical continuum (which is in actuality eschatological) is problematized by Foster as part failure of nerve by MoMA and part proof positive that art proceeds in fits and starts while also undergoing explicit inversions and implosions as it signals its reliance on economic-political capital.

These holes cannot be filled without further bankrupting the entire ideological underpinnings of the museum and its critical community. While Foster bashes away at MoMA and Elderfield, he is also resurrecting many of his own tired maneuvers in defense of a different canon (the anti-canon), a system of criticism equally beholden to the unfortunate reduction of artworks to Art. His well-worn slashings at the influence of Clement Greenberg seem out of place these days since no one takes Greenberg too seriously anymore anyway … as many have also decided, perhaps too late, that the school of Rosalind Krauss is effectively a matter of the past and a matter of a collapse of criticality in the face of self-interest.

Thus we stand at a crossroads, awaiting something else, and it is best to read Foster these days as instructive of things now spent and on their way to the back catalogue of art criticism. While loading his rhetorical cannon with grapeshot, Foster takes broad aim at the hegemonic, faux iconicity of present-day versions of late-modernism and neo-modernism as well as its variegated host of apologists. Nonetheless, there is a weird echo in all of his words that seems to presage the opening of a chasm and the subsequent rending of the veil which obscures that which flies below the work of art and which only the most subtle critic may find (and which truly hides out ‘inside’ the canvas, sculpture, assemblage as palpitating ur-form).(4) For such critics as Foster, such a view of art suggests ‘dangerous essentialism’, and it is always automatically dismissed given the misperception (misprision) that it, in turn, signifies the return of transcendence. Such misbegotten bias is also the sign of intellect in service to ideology; and what such a bias neglects is the absolute necessity today to find a way out of the ideological stalemate concerning transcendence and immanence. Elsewhere, should one care to look, already signs of something else may be discerned; yet not at MoMA, and only as discursive gesture (in the negative dialectical sense) in hardcore, dogmatic criticism of the Adorno type (for example, in strenuous commentaries on the painting of Gerhard Richter, the inspired architecture of Zaha Hadid, or the suggestive photography of, say, Thomas Struth). These first signs nonetheless imply that transcendence within immanence represents a possible path through the ideological ruins that yet clutter the representational landscape of late-modernity.

Foster rightly highlights the two huge holes at the new MoMA, finding, in turn, that MoMA continues to serve as the flagship ‘retail’ outlet for received opinions about Modern art. Although these holes are hardly concretized by Taniguchi’s ‘minimalist’ modern architecture, Foster still blames architecture for facilitating the charade. It is MoMA’s well-known penchant for chronological snobbery that rubs Foster the wrong way, given that he also laments the lamentable attempt of the recent past to assemble works in thematic constellations, bringing things separate into closer contact, as one does with words or one does with ideas, and as one does naturally in the very act of living in the world.

Again and again, then, MoMA tries to overcome itself and fails. It is not MoMA’s fault that it has the unnatural responsibility of propping up a twentieth-century version of the Platonic Big Lie. To be modern today has nothing at all to do with Modernism. To be modern today perversely means to say adieu to all of that.

[…]

GK (12/16/04)

ENDNOTES

1 - Christopher Insole, “Kant for Christmas: A Way Out of Some Very Nasty Problems”, The Times Literary Supplement (December 17, 2004), p.4
2 - Hal Foster, “It’s Modern But is it Contemporary?”, The London Review of Books, Vol. 26, No. 24 (16 December 2004), pp. 23-25
3 - Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville, 2002) - Cloth, 243 pages, ISBN 0-896-59576-5 (Paper, 0-896-59579-X) - Re-issued exhibition catalogue, Corcoran Gallery (September-November 1985) - See Rosalind Krauss, “Photography in the Service of Surrealism”, pp. 15-54 / Thus-wise surrealist photography is assimilated to the Marxist dialectical-materialist agenda, the reduction of radical forms of representation to immanence without transcendence, and ‘A’ (‘aesthetics’ as ‘adultery’) becomes the new/old, reified scarlet letter … Similarly, regarding the Merleau-Ponty inspired rhetoric of “the body in space” (implicated mightily in Krauss’ famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”) vis-à-vis Man Ray’s photography (especially “The Return to Reason”, 1923), see Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delecti”, pp. 57-112 …“The nude torso of a woman is shown as if submitting to possession by space […]” … This reading of Man Ray is assembled by way of Caillois (famous dissident surrealist) and/plus Lacan (famous post-neo-Freudian systematist) … It (this rhetoric), of course, more or less ignores the fact that ‘the real’ was for Surrealism a powerful and sinister amalgam of all manner of continuous versus dialectical repressions (as with Lacan) and, hence, no ‘way out’ present itself … The Manichean ‘nature’ of Surrealism is lost (and found), here and there, but rarely assimilated within art-historical narratives … What almost appears, but doesn’t, is the considerable élan (heuristic value) of things phantasmatic, a something else always bracketed in such ideologically reductive readings … As fellow traveller, Yve-Alain Bois has more or less done the same thing with the sculpture of Richard Serra (notably in his majestic essay “A Picturesque Walk Around Clara-Clara”) … See, however, Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism (London: Verso, 1999) for a beginning … Curiously, Bataille’s concept of informe carries considerable ‘economic’ weight in Krauss’ argument with Surrealist photography, as it did in the Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois curated Centre du Pompidou exhibition “L’informe: Mode d’emploi” (1996) … For the latter, see Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997) - In this book, the eternal battle of form and content is synthesized/undermined in the third term "formless" (derived from Georges Bataille's "informe"). "It is neither the 'form' nor the 'content' that interests Bataille, but the operation that displaces both of these terms [...]" (p.15); i.e., "formless" is "neither a theme, nor a substance, nor a concept." (ibid.). In other words, "informe" is a form of "slippage" or perhaps a version of "suture" (as in film studies) and yet another formalist detour "brushing modernism against the grain" (p.16). The origin of Bataille's terminology is Documents 2 (1929), wherein he unleashed a mock formal presentation of the "informe" in action -- albeit in the form of a dictionary with "redundant entries" to underscore the disrespect intended for language a la carte (or language authorized); a disrespect that included, famously, Bataille's definition of architecture as the "expression of the true nature of societies" [sic]. Anyway, Voila!, for here is the very picture of radical contingency hiding out in all formalist and neo-formalist operations. And a word to the wise (from Bataille by way of Krauss): Materialist operations typically "have [re]situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy" (p. 29). And then, there is Yve-Alain Bois' remarks under the rubric "Threshole" - citing Bataille's view of architecture (again): "Architecture is another name for system [referring back to Kant's architectonic metaphors], for the regulation of the plan [which sounds suspiciously like Tafuri's "ideology of the plan"]. Every monument is a monument of social order, a call to order issued to inspire fear [...] Architecture is the human ideal, the superego" (p. 185). Upon reflection, one might come to understand all of this as just another hermeneutic vicious circle, given that formalist and anti-formalist agitation is part of systematic (abstract) knowledge itself. / Operating, of course (always), in the background, in all such scorching discourses is the ghost of Walter Benjamin … It is Benjamin’s prophetic vision, of the Coming Philosophy, that underwrites all analytical forays into the dark heart of modernism as capitalist putsch.
4 - In this regard see the extraordinary work of Antonin Artaud, a figure on the edge (fringe) of Surrealism yet miles ahead, beyond, below, above, outside … Amazingly, MoMA mounted an exhibition of Artaud’s drawings in 1996 … / See Margit Rowell (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper (New York: MoMA/Abrams, 1996) - Cloth, 166 pages, ISBN 0-870-70118-5 (MoMA), 0-810-96168-7 (Abrams) / Yet, far and away, the very best writing on Artaud remains (to this day) Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin’s The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) …

IMMODERNITY A LA CARTE @ MOMA (12/23/04)

“Ces terrains vagues” (André Breton, ‘Poem-Object’, 1941)

‘CONTEMPORARY’ GALLERIES: Cy Twombly, ‘Untitled’ (1970), “Oil-based [grey] house paint and [white] crayon on canvas”; Gerhard Richter, ‘Funeral from October 18, 1977’ (1977), “Oil on canvas” … Last in series of 15-work cycle ‘October 18, 1977’ “depicting scenes from the history of the Red Army Faction”; Andreas Gursky, ‘Rhine II’ (1999), “Chromogenic print” …

P&S 1: Joan Miro, ‘Hirondelle Amour’ (1933-34), “Oil on canvas”; Salvador Dali, ‘Retrospective Bust of a Woman’ (1933), “Painted porcelain, bread [baguette], corn, feathers, paint on paper, beads, ink stand, and two pens”; Joan Miro, ‘Object’ (1936), “Stuffed parrot on wood perch, stuffed silk stocking with velvet garter and doll’s paper shoe suspended in hollow wood frame, derby hat, hanging cork ball, celluloid fish, and engraved map”; Joseph Cornell, ‘Taglioni’s Jewel Casket’ (1940), “Wooden box covered with brown velvet containing three rows of four glass cubes resting in slots on blue glass, glass necklace, jewelry fragments, and red, blue, and clear glass chips”; Joseph Cornell, ‘Untitled (Bébé Marie)’ (early 1940s), “Papered and painted wooden box, with painted corrugated cardboard floor, containing doll in cloth dress and straw hat with cloth flowers, dried flowers, and twigs, flecked with paint”; Joan Miro, ‘The Birth of the World’ (1925), “Oil on canvas”; Vasily Kandinsky, ‘Picture with an Archer’ (1909), “Oil on canvas”; Vasily Kandinsky, ‘Four Panels (for Edwin R. Campbell)’ (1914), “Oil on canvas” …

MIXED BIBLIOGRAPHY (BON APPETIT!)

Charles Rosen, Henri Zerner, “Red-Hot MoMA”, The New York Review of Books, Vol. LII, No. 1 (January 13, 2005),  pp. 18-21 - As the critique of the new MoMA picks up steam, here and there, Rosen and Zerner detail important issues resolved and unresolved by the Taniguchi makeover. These include the ‘demands’ made by certain works of Modernist art (and the putative anti-modernist art of the sixties); most notable amongst these being size and scale (which brings to the fore the whole issue of the size and scale of the galleries now and ‘then’, plus arguments regarding how to hang or position these works). These demands include attempts to shatter the museological model of the so-called ‘modern’ museum by the sheer force (and, often, gravitas) of works produced by artists responding to, and reacting to, ‘what came before’. Rosen and Zerner also, rightly, point out that MoMA has already maxed out its new space and much of its principal collection remains in storage (certain artists missing altogether, or represented by a single work) -- a problem that is simply impossible to solve (given the depth and breadth of the collection), plus a problem that perhaps should not be solved (given that certain canonical works need to go ‘off the radar’ from time to time, or to take a break -- literally and figuratively -- to remain ‘canonical’). The authors also take several, sidewise swipes at the Guggenheim and the Whitney, reserving especial animus for the Guggenheim (and its sale of 25 Kandinsky paintings years ago), with  a mostly lovely dig at the ‘director’ (unnamed, though everyone knows his name) and his embrace of ‘entertainment’ versus the (shall we say) mere presentation of art + scholarship (the MoMA model).
Terence Riley (ed.), Yoshio Taniguchi: Nine Museums (New York: MoMA, 2004) - Cloth, 212 pages, ISBN 0-870-70607-1 - MoMA, pp. 162-195 (axonometrics, sections, elevations, plans)
Yoshio Taniguchi, Architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi (New York: Abrams, 1999) - Cloth, 280 pages, ISBN 0-810-91997-4
John Elderfield, Modern: Painting and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: MoMA, 2004) - Cloth, 504 pages, ISBN 0-870-70576-8
__________, Visions of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: MoMA, 2003) - Cloth, 344 pages, 0-870-70700-0
__________ (ed.), Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) - Paper, 352 pages, ISBN 0-520-20440-9
Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) - Paper, 344 pages, ISBN 0-262-56081-X
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) - Paper, 365 pages, ISBN 0-262-61105-8
Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) - Paper, 472 pages, ISBN 0-262-61196-1

MORE BATAILLE - Georges Bataille, Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) - Paper, 296 pages, 0-816-63505-6 / Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall (New York: Zone, 2005) - Cloth, 224 pages, ISBN 1-890-95155-2 / Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, intro. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Paragon House, 1993) - Paper, ISBN 1-557-78644-5 (Cloth, 0-485-30068-0) / George Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 2000) - Cloth, ISBN 0-942-29910-8 / Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991) - Paper, 197 pages, ISBN 0-942-29911-6 / Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Vols. 2 & 3, History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1993) - Paper, 404 pages, ISBN 0-942-29921-3 / Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) - Paper, 271 pages, ISBN 0-816-61283-8 (Cloth, 0-816-61280-3)

HOMMAGE A CARTIER-BRESSON - Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans (Göttingen: Steidl, 2004) - Cloth, 191 pages, ISBN 3-865-21072-4 (French edition, 2-951-98000-0) - Exhibition catalogue, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris (September 8 through December 19, 2004) - Reconstruction of the 1935 exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery, New York - Levy’s photographic collection is now at the Art Institute of Chicago

CORNELL (NOT THE UNIVERSITY) / MIXED AFFECTS - Dore Ashton, Joseph Cornell Album (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002) - Paper, 256 pages, ISBN 0-306-80372-0 / Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (Boston: MFA Publications, 2004) - Paper, 444 pages, ISBN 0–878-46684-3 (originally published c.1997) / Diane Waldman, Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams (New York: Abrams, 2002) - Cloth, 152 pages, ISBN 0-810-91227-9 /  Jodi Hauptman, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) - Cloth, 240 pages, ISBN 0-300-07838-2

Regarding Richter and Hadid, plus the almost something else prefigured therein, see the critical writings of Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh…

FOR EXAMPLE, BUCHLOH - Regarding “Red, Green, Blue”, Ellsworth Kelly (2002), Oil on canvas, three joined panels, 40” x 181” (102 cm. X 500 cm.) - See Ellsworth Kelly: Matrix (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2003) and the essay by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Kelly’s Matrix” -“I wanted my work to look as if no one had done it …” E. K. (p.5) - Cloth, ISBN 1-880-14640-1 - Exhibition catalogue,‘Kelly’s Matrix’ (May 10 through June 28, 2003)

GERHARD RICHTER - Gerhard Richter, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1960-1993, trans. David Britt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) - Paper, 272 pages, ISBN 0-262-68084-X / Gerhard Richter (photographs), Armin Zweite and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (text), Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas (Barcelona: Actar, 2000) - Paper, 138 pages, ISBN 8-489-77191-X / Gerhard Richter, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Eight Gray (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 2003) - Paper, 128 pages, ISBN 0-892-07263-6

MORE BUCHLOH & OBRIST - Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Bernard Blistene, Premises Invested Spaces in Visual Art and Architecture from France, 1958-1998 (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 1998) - Cloth, 500 pages, ISBN 0-810-96915-7 - Exhibition catalogue / Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) - Cloth, 628 pages, ISBN 0-262-02454-3 / Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster (eds.), October: The Second Decade, 1986-1996 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) - Cloth, 408 pages, ISBN 0-262-11226-4 / Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews (Milan: Charta, 2003) - Paper, 1000 pages, ISBN 8-881-58431-X / Louis Bourgeois, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Marie-Laure Bernadec (eds.), Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) - Paper, 304 pages, ISBN 0-262-52246-2

CLEMENT GREENBERG / ARCHDRUID - Robert C. Morgan (ed.), Clement Greenberg: Late Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) - Cloth, 232 pages, 0-816-63938-8 / John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) - Paper, 296 pages, ISBN 0-226-30621-6 / John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) - Paper, 374 pages, ISBN 0-226-30622-4 / John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) - Paper, 340 pages, ISBN 0-226-30623-2 / John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) - Paper, 358 pages, ISBN 0-226-30624-0 / Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1971) - Paper, 278 pages, ISBN 0-807-06681-8 / Clement Greenberg, Homemade Aesthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) - Cloth, 192 pages, ISBN 0-195-12433-2 (Paper, 0-195-13923-2)

THE GHOST - Marcus Bullock and Michael William Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004) - Paper, 520 pages, ISBN 0-674-01355-7 (Cloth, ISBN 0-674-94585-9) /  Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005) - Paper, 480 pages, ISBN 0-674-01588-6 / Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005) - Paper, 480 pages, ISBN 0-674-01746-3 (Vol 2, Part 1 & 2, Cloth, 0-674-94586-7) / Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002) - Cloth, 480 pages, ISBN 0-674-00896-0 / Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003) - Cloth, 477 pages, ISBN 0-674-01076-0

The Coming-Coming - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/benjamin1.html

ADORNO & ALMOST AESTHETICS - Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) - Paper, 166 pages, ISBN 0-816-61187-4 / Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) - Paper, 760 pages, 0-520-23159-7 / Theodor Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jepicott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) - Paper, 188 pages, ISBN 0-226-00769-3 / Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Robert Hullot-Kentor (ed.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) - Paper, 448 pages, ISBN 0-816-61800-3
 
LAST WORDS - "To the dialectical materialist, any form of idealism is anathema; and 'realism' (in the scholastic sense of the word, which is also the Constructivist sense) is regarded as a form of idealism. An art which deliberately denies the self-sufficiency of the phenomenal world is, for such philosophers, as perverse as a religion which assumes a life beyond the grave. But everything in this argument turns, of course, on our definition of the word 'reality'. The dialectical materialists seem to confine its meaning to the immediate data of sense perception. To the great majority of philosophers that has always seemed a very jejeune attitude. A comparison of these data soon discovers similarities or identities from which emerge, not merely the general laws which constitute the body of science, but universal concepts to which the sense-data always conform, and which therefore may be regarded as the bases of reality. These concepts are not, as the materialist assumes, illusory or idealistic. We cannot have final knowledge about them, but we are aware of their concrete manifestations. They are inseparable from matter: unimagined outside matter. They describe the forms which matter universally assumes - the way matter behaves." Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), p. 231

This essay (online) - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/to_hell.rtf
Richter, etcetera - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/richter.html