Short Cuts

John Lanchester: Google Glass, 23 May 2013

“... She can go into internal exile, at will and for ever. What’s that going to be like? T.J. Clark wrote recently in New Left Review that ‘the essence of modernity, from the scripture-reading spice merchant to the Harvard iPod banker sweating in the gym, is a new kind of isolate obedient “individual” with technical support to match.’ Difficult to ...”

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

We are our apps

Hal Foster: Visual Revolutions, 5 October 2023

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle 
by Jonathan Crary.
Zone, 262 pp., £25, October, 978 1 942130 85 7Show More
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“... Emboldened by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well. Yet disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to ...”

Arty Party

Hal Foster: From the ‘society of spectacle’ to the ‘society of extras’, 4 December 2003

Relational Aesthetics 
by Nicolas Bourriaud, translated by Matthew Copeland.
Les Presses du réel, 128 pp., €9, March 2002, 2 84066 060 1Show More
Postproduction 
by Nicolas Bourriaud, translated by Jeanine Herman.
Lukas and Sternberg, 88 pp., $19, October 2001, 0 9711193 0 9Show More
Interviews: Volume I 
by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Charta, 967 pp., $60, June 2003, 9788881584314Show More
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“... of Nouveau Réalisme, the humble materials of Arte Povera, the participatory strategies of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica and the ‘institution-critical’ devices of Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke. But these artists have also transformed the familiar devices of the readymade object, the collaborative project and the installation format. For ...”

Balls and Strikes

Charles Reeve: Clement Greenberg, 5 April 2007

Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg 
by Alice Goldfarb Marquis.
Lund Humphries, 321 pp., £25, April 2006, 0 85331 940 5Show More
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“... taste. The dismantling of Greenberg’s authority reached its height during his debate with T.J. Clark at the ‘Modernism and Modernity’ conference. ‘I really do say this with respect,’ Clark said, summarising his objections. ‘You have become a spokesman for a kind of devastating self-satisfaction and ...”

At Tate Britain

John Barrell: L.S. Lowry, 8 August 2013

“... of Modern Life, curated by the American art historian Anne Wagner and her British husband T.J. Clark, is the most radical and exciting re-evaluation of a British artist I have ever encountered, and a thrilling display of how paint conveys ideas, time, place, building a self-contained world at once absorbing and convincing in its relation to lived ...”

Meltings

Nicholas Penny, 18 February 1988

Painting as an Art 
by Richard Wollheim.
Thames and Hudson, 384 pp., £28, November 1987, 0 500 23495 7Show More
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“... and originality’ the ‘two great proponents of this method in the English-speaking world: T.J. Clark on the theoretical, Francis Haskell on the anecdotal, wing’, but dismisses both as not promising much ‘as far as my interests, or the central problems of the study of art, are concerned’. Both these writers have done much to discourage the sort of ...”

I live in my world

Barry Schwabsky: Willem de Kooning, 22 September 2016

Willem de Kooning Nonstop: Cherchez la femme 
by Rosalind Krauss.
Chicago, 154 pp., £22.50, March 2016, 978 0 226 26744 9Show More
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“... The artist’s viewpoint becomes implicit, and too mobile to be figured directly. Following T.J. Clark, Krauss suggests that the ‘abstract parkway landscapes’ that occupied de Kooning in the late 1950s and early 1960s are built on a similar ‘tripartite template’. As soon as it’s understood that the implicit viewpoint is from inside a moving car, it ...”

You could catch it

Greil Marcus, 25 March 1993

Panegyric. Vol. I 
by Guy Debord, translated by James Brook.
Verso, 79 pp., £29.95, January 1993, 0 86091 347 3Show More
The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Post-Modern Age 
by Sadie Plant.
Routledge, 226 pp., £40, May 1992, 0 415 06222 5Show More
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“... practical impossibility but a moral necessity, an immovable object and an irresistible force. T.J. Clark, in the late Sixties a member of the Situationist International, spoke much later, in 1984, in his book The Painting of Modern Life, of Debord’s ‘chiliastic serenity’; as the Situationists liked to say, ‘the real revolutionary knows how to ...”

Back to Life

Christopher Benfey: Rothko’s Moment, 21 May 2015

Mark Rothko: Towards the Light in the Chapel 
by Annie Cohen-Solal.
Yale, 296 pp., £18.99, February 2015, 978 0 300 18204 0Show More
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“... if there is existential angst lurking in these seemingly serene paintings, the impression, as T.J. Clark put it, is of ‘The Birth of Tragedy redone by Renoir.’ By​ the late 1950s, Rothko found himself a successful artist. Peggy Guggenheim had shown his work and he found a reliable dealer in Sidney Janis. In a division reminiscent of the Jewish ...”

White Hat/Black Hat

Frances Richard: 20th-Century Art, 6 April 2006

Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism 
by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
Thames and Hudson, 704 pp., £45, March 2005, 0 500 23818 9Show More
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“... sphere’ – although frustratingly, for those who have not been reading Jürgen Habermas or T.J. Clark recently, no one unpacks this last, pregnant phrase. As a touchstone text for such arguments, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) emerges, alongside Bürger’s, as another canonical source in 20th-century cultural criticism. It is one of ...”

Words as Amulets

Ange Mlinko: Barbara Guest’s Poems, 3 December 2009

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest 
edited by Hadley Haden Guest.
Wesleyan, 525 pp., £33.95, July 2008, 978 0 8195 6860 1Show More
Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions 
by Maggie Nelson.
Iowa, 288 pp., £38.50, December 2007, 978 1 58729 615 4Show More
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“... If modernism is our antiquity, as T.J. Clark has claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was attached to the lyric modernism of Baudelaire and Mallarmé’s later writing ...”

Hey, that’s me

Hal Foster: Bruce Mau, 5 April 2001

Life Style 
by Bruce Mau.
Phaidon, 626 pp., £39.95, November 2000, 0 7148 3827 6Show More
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“... members were Marxists, had in mind, but such is often ‘the bad dream of Modernism’, as T.J. Clark once termed it. Beware of what you wish, runs one moral of Modernism as seen from the present, because it may come true – in perverse form. And so, to take only the chief example, the old project to reconnect Art and Life, endorsed in different ways by ...”

Look Me in the Eye

Julian Bell: Art and the Brain, 8 October 2009

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness 
by Semir Zeki.
Wiley-Blackwell, 234 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 4051 8557 8Show More
Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki 
by John Onians.
Yale, 225 pp., £18.99, February 2008, 978 0 300 12677 8Show More
Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images 
by Barbara Maria Stafford.
Chicago, 281 pp., £20.50, November 2008, 978 0 226 77052 9Show More
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“... thanks to superior literary artists such as Bryson, Gombrich and Baxandall, not to mention T.J. Clark, the leading proponent of the social-historical approach to art studies that Stafford specifically deplores. Yet in conception, Echo Objects is easily the most exciting demonstration yet of how a neuroaesthetics might shape up. Crucially, this is a ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... of survival was if the Eton-City-News International ‘nation’ ceased to call the shots. T.J. Clark But​ why should the rest of us care? There are some 5.3 million Scots, barely a ripple among the total citizenry of the globe, and less than a tenth even of the population of the UK (which is itself part of the problem). Even so, the referendum possesses ...”
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