Check out my new favorite blog by Theresa Duncan. Some will recall her animated pseudo-rockumentary from the late 90s, The History of Glamour,which she wrote and directed in collaboration with artists Jeremy Blake and Karen Kilimnik... we are very happy to finally be able to get our dose of Duncan, regularly and online:
The Wit of the Staircase
From the French phrase 'esprit d'escalier,' literally, it means 'the wit of the staircase', and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. "Esprit d'escalier," she replied. "Esprit d'escalier. The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete till aterwards it suddenly comes to you when it is too late."
Her latest post covers critical remarks on the current Ed Ruscha show at the Whitney:
[...] Rather than asking for whom the bell tolls in this Empire, the critics cast about for an Emperor, and while they come to praise Caesar, they wind up burying him. "We should dip him in bronze before he Tires, before, like every artist before him and all who will come after, he Tools his pictures and then Dies." Or so the thinking seems to go. The artist, who will be one year shy of seventy next year, seems on the other hand not to be in the state of laurel-wreathed inertia the critics describe. He is mercurial, even puckish. The decision to rework the old paintings is a vote in favor of flux. Reviewer after reviewer has tried to outfit these canvases with the cement shoes of reputation, but these boots were made for walking. Change and iteration are the only constant in a California shot through with fault lines and shaky foundations, after all. We are surfers here, used to unstable ground and stepping into liquid.
Some has been written about these paintings as capitalist critique, but this is not only boring, it's bullshit. {read full post: The Emperor's New Course, 12/18/05}
