AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts ed. by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty
• Hannah Grannemann (bio)

What are decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in the art world? They are "cosmic computers." They are utopian experiments: "an experimental practice for moving towards a different way of living together." They are cooperatives or collectives that "enlarge the reach of friendship to the point of replacing corporations and governments." Or they're "implicitly antisocial." DAOs will completely reinvent artists' relationships to the art market. Or they're just "shinier versions of the same shit." Or maybe they are starfish.

I came to Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts as a bit of an outsider; I have significant arts management experience, but I don't work in the contemporary art field. At a fundamental level, as I learned in the introduction by editors Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, DAOs are organizations that exist online and are built on the blockchain. DAOs are collectively owned by their members. Decisions about the DAO itself (its governance) and its activities are voted on by the members using "smart contracts," so called because the outcomes of the smart contracts are automatically executed and cannot be changed except through votes by the membership of the DAO. This allows them to be "trustless" organizations, meaning that trust between the members is not required, because of the automaticity of the smart contracts. Beyond that, DAOs can be many different things, including artworks themselves.

The goal of Radical Friends is to bring together writings by the people working with DAOs to show "how traditional organisational patterns and the power structures they serve might be transformed by the emergence of blockchain-enabled Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in artworlds and beyond." The traditional organizational patterns the editors and authors are referring to is how artists intersect with the international art [End Page 21] market, museums, each other, all the related funding sources, and more. Artists and arts workers often view these patterns as extractive and exploitative. The search for more equitable systems is long-standing and ongoing. The purpose of the book is not to persuade the reader that DAOs are the solution to the art world's problems, but instead to "support deep thinking, inspiration, praxis and prototyping."

The problem with DAOs is t

Reviewed by:

• Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich
• Terry Smith (bio)

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest begins with a vivid account of the circumstances that forced Laura Raicovich out of the directorship of the Queens Museum of Art, New York. When she took up the position in 2015 she inherited a not-for-profit art space that, under the previous director, Tom Finkelpearl, had pioneered responsiveness to local communities while remaining relevant to the wider region and to international visitors. This mission was not confined to an exhibition program known for landmarks such as Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1970s (1999). Community organizers were appointed to the museum's staff. They worked directly with groups throughout one of the most diverse boroughs in the city, serving the various needs of those speaking 138 languages and dialects. Finkelpearl went on to pursue similar policies as commissioner of the New York Department of Cultural Affairs from 2014 to 2019.

Seen more broadly, these initiatives were instances within the wave of reforms that had for decades been sweeping through all kinds of museums as they strove to reconcile their traditional top-down educational missions with the diversity of their massively increasing numbers of interested visitors. Progressive reforms met much resistance, most insidiously the defunding of culture by neoliberal governments at all levels. Yet what is now three generations of arts administrators have persisted with these reforms, working in concert with the mainly progressive arts practices that they so passionately support.

In the United States in late 2016 this commitment ran up against what Raicovich rightly calls the "Pandora's box of hate" unleashed by the Trump administration's rhetoric and policies. Its multimedia storm of populist nationalism targeted immigrants, foreigners, and the local elites that welcomed them. For the Queens Museum this meant several staff members, its community program, and eventually its director. Raicovich did not hesitate to [End Page 26] commit the museum to joining the art strike called for January 10, 2017, Inauguration Day, staging a teach-in in the atrium. She posted "a re-statement of values" asserting that the museum had "a deep commitment to freedom of expression, and intentionally supports and celebrates difference and multiplicity as fundamental to our collective liberation." Specifically, the Queens Museum "advocates for art as a tool for positive social change, critical t

Reviewed by:

• The Art of Diremption: On the Powerlessness of Art by Leonhard Emmerling
• Gavin Sourgen (bio)

While the precise object of his discontent is never explicitly stated, Leonhard Emmerling's antipathy toward a pervasive "overburdening of art as the great redeemer"—one that has produced "an almost relentless spate of exposures and revelations, interventions and calls to participation" in the contemporary art world—seems to have in mind a growing belief in the merits of social justice art and, perhaps more damningly, those who naively assume a stable relation between intention and embodiment, conception and reception. Although he never pitches it as a dilemma, The Art of Diremption certainly reads as a response to one. As Emmerling sees it, the "assumption that art has a unique ability to bring truth to light" is born out of, among other things, a fundamental misunderstanding of "the dialectic of appearance and elusion" in art, and a lost sense of how this "reveals [the] truth about its dual composition as reality and appearance." In other words, by forsaking a nuanced understanding of a crucial differentiation between appearance and reality—"the key differentiation in aesthetics," as he sees it—and laboring under a misplaced burden of uncomplicated mimesis, we fail to see that art relinquishes its ontological status as art at the very moment it insists on having a clear intent and impact. When art is "semantically overdetermined," when "the modernist paradigm of the opposition between art and society that is coming apart at the seams is looked upon as no longer appropriate yet indispensable," the "discourse on art has to be pumped full with the force of the radical as a compensatory surrogate." In this way, art is "inflated by … moral fervour," and "the sweeping proclamations about art not only reek of arbitrariness" but ultimately "fail its object." Such beliefs are also, above all else, counterproductive in bolstering arguments for the value of aesthetic judgment as a means [End Page 35] of moral good because any insistence upon the moral worth of a work of art, and any attempt to measure and justify the range of its influence, is bound to produce the wrong kind of diremption: not the generative and unifying force of internal doubt and uncertainty at the heart of aesthetic engagement, but pronounced critical hostility and division.

Emmerling sees this current overinvestment in the notion of art as a reconciler of social disparity and a deliverer of moral good to be t

• Point of View and Cognitive MappingThe Case of Mrs. Dalloway
• Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio)

Given its cast of perambulating characters and its distinctive registration of the geography of central London, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) has become something of a canonical text in spatial literary studies, as students and critics have traced out the itineraries of Clarissa, Peter Walsh, or Septimus Smith, either literally—see the "Mrs. Dalloway Mapping Project" (http://mrsdallowaymappingproject.weebly.com/index.html), for example—or more informally in their own minds. The movements of the characters in the city streets, combined with the involuntary memories and subsequent reflections sparked by their peripatetic perspectives, renders a narrative that appears devoted to the experience and conception of time as one that is equally attuned to space, and in particular, the distinctive social space in which such experiences take place. Then there is the prevalence of distinctive toponyms and municipal monuments, such as Bond Street, Regent's Park, Shaftesbury Avenue, and the omnipresent Big Ben, whose tolling of the hours punctuates the novel with a portentous ringing of sonic waves and circles. These, too, give Mrs. Dalloway the appearance of being a sort a spatial narrative, such that we might say that a literary geography of London emerges in its pages.

Of course, this is where I feel the need to add a properly Woolfian caveat: It is true that, when one thinks of space in relation to the novel, the first consideration is usually the depiction of specific spaces or places in the text. This is sometimes thought of as the "storyworld," the area in which the events of the novel take place. A storyworld could be entirely imaginary, such as Terry Pratchett's Discworld in his marvelous series of satirical fantasy novels, or it could closely resemble the geographical spaces of the real world, as with the gritty realism of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles in The Big Sleep (1939) and other works. Or it might combine some aspects of the two, as in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, which undoubtedly resembles the real [End Page 99] Lafayette County, Mississippi, but which has developed its own mythic history over the course of Faulkner's writings once populated with Compsons, Bundrens, and Snopeses. The basic geography and distinctive places in a novel are powerfully effective in orienting the reader and establishing the setting of the fictional world.

But, then, no matter how much a given storyworld makes reference to places in the so-called real world, the spaces of a novel are necessarily imaginary by virtue of being part of that fictional universe. As Woolf herself observed in her 1905 essay, "Lit

Reviewed by:

• Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose by DeWitt Henry
• Michael Joyce (bio)

In Wallace Stevens's long poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," his perhaps comic, vaguely semi-autobiographical character, the poet and "introspective voyager" Crispin, sails from "Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, / And then to," well, (North) Carolina, where, having seen "how much / Of what he saw he never saw at all," Crispin

gripped more closely the essential proseAs being, in a world so falsified,The one integrity for him, the oneDiscovery still possible to make,To which all poems were incident, unlessThat prose should wear a poem's guise at last.

In his extraordinary career, DeWitt Henry has come to see much of what without him—as essayist, fiction writer, professor, founding editor of Ploughshares, and now in this first book of poems, Foundlings—we might not have come upon elsewise. Here, prose indeed morphs to "wear a poem's guise" as Henry crafts discoveries of integrity and grace from well-known (even beloved) prose, found poems that seem not merely (co)incident but immanent. In the process he charts new channels to sail among the straits of what we think we know after a century at least of found poetry from Blaise Cendrars to Annie Dillard to Mary Rueffle.

A found poem must hew, perhaps not obviously, to constraints and procedures [End Page 111] not unlike those of Oulipo. The first being that the would-be poet—the "finder"—must actively find in the often overlooked quotidian of familiar texts a "new" text whose sound and sense (to use traditional, if not outmoded, literary terms) are the overlooked (and/or unsounded) here in there.

Geoff Bouvier's 2016 essay on the prose poem as a "more rigorous text" offers an exercise for teasing out whether "breaking our prose sentences into poetic lines as a temporary editing gesture [might] help to strengthen those sentences … reconstituted as prose." His example takes "a block of simple prose writing," a weather report "lifted purely at random from a national news source," and "look[s] at the same prose in a completely different typographical arrangement … to see what this prose needs to make it more visual and aural, more charged, more intense, more 'poetic.'"

In his "Author's Note," Henry expands upon this basic constraint of both verbal and visual designing as a process of finding "how lines became verses and verses became stanzas; how blank spaces or 'sile

Reviewed by:

• The Place Where Grief Begins by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
• Patricia Laurence (bio)

The Place Where Grief Begins is a collection of poems in memory of Barbara Vann, the founder of the wonderful Medicine Show Theater and other Maine and New York companies. Christopher Brandt worked with Vann for forty-three years, joining the company in 1973 and serving in different capacities from administrator to set designer and builder to writer to actor. After Vann's death in 2015, he managed the company until its closing in 2020.

The heartfelt, poignant poems of friendship and love in this volume—elegies—are tributes to Vann's "genius," her beauty, their love, and her teaching; importantly, they attest to the continued "presence" of Vann's absence. Brandt writes:

I know now how it was with OrpheusThough I lack his lyreI would strip my spirit nakedBefore the god of death to beg her back.

He asserts in the title poem, "The Place Where Grief Begins," that

that placeis no placefor tears

The poems evolve through various stages of love, death, and grief. There is sensual celebration, as the speaker says she is "burned" into his flesh. In "Goddesses" he celebrates "touch":

Hold me holding you, for it is but in touchof flesh on flesh, in smell and taste, [End Page 119] in fleeting things, in all that is put outby death, that we can ride the sky like gods.

He recounts everyday pleasures during her illness in "Putting on Your Socks":

will they fit? They do, a treat. Yourwarm tee shirt

But then, in the grip of death,

My love grows too weak to stand upBy herself …. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Later I hold her under her shouldersAnd lift her up. She is heavy alreadyWith death, though neither of usSpeaks the words.

We read of the denial of death as the speaker cries,

No! I will not let him take you.But suddenly I'm holding only bones.

There is an honesty in these sensuous poems, as Brandt holds onto his love as long as he can but admits to repulsion in "The Smell":