John Martin and the Art of Infrastructure

Although he may have held little in common with Marxist ideology, Martin appears to have been more alert than most to the negative disruption of a system of urban-rural exchange, more anxious than most about failing to harness the latent economic value of waste, and more motivated than most to see in infrastructure the potential for compensatory systems.

Style and Subjectivity, a Parable

As the parable migrated from art criticism to the wider world, its purpose changed. Initially, it was used to understand artistic style, especially to shift the register of explanation from manual causes (the way a painter holds his brush, the materials he chooses, etc.) to cognitive ones (the way he sees and understands the world). With repeated retellings, however, cause and effect flipped. Instead of proving that style is subjective, the parable seemed to reveal that subjectivity is stylistic.

Berthe Morisot, Early Impressionist Criticism and the Aesthetics of the Plein-air Interior

What Morisot does in Young Girl in a Ball Gown, as she does in so many of her female portraits, is to confuse interior and exterior. Again, the sofa has been pulled up against a window or balcony, and all blinds and shutters are thrown open, while real and fabricated foliage on fabrics mix in the viewer’s eye. The overall effect is a type of aesthetic confusion.

From Géricault’s Monomanes to Balzac’s La Recherche De L’absolu

Now I want to go a step further and propose that the portraits of monomanes represent not only a climactic stage in Géricault’s development but also a decisive episode in the antitheatrical dialectic generally—as if they mark the limit case of absorption, beyond which for the moment, but perhaps not only for the moment, it was impossible for painting to go.

Issue #46: The Nineteenth Century (Part Four)

In this issue, part of an ongoing series co-edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young, we feature new scholarship on nineteenth-century European art, including Michael Fried on Géricault, Balzac, and “the limit case of absorption”; Laura Kalba on Rossetti, Ruskin, and political economy; Claire Moran on Morisot and the plein-air interior; Stephanie O’Rourke on John Martin and infrastructure; and Harmon Siegel on subjectivity and style. Also featured is the first English-language version of Fritz Novotny’s essay “Das Problem des Menschen Cézanne im Verhältnis zu seiner Kunst” (1932), translated by Carmen Rosenberg-Miller as “The Problem of Cézanne the Person in Relation to His Art.”

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Issue #45: Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”: The Next Fifty Years?

“Signature Event Context” has proved to be Derrida’s most enduring essay. New fields have been founded on its basis, and it is his only work to address at length a text by a philosopher not from the Continental tradition. Occasioned by the passing of “Signature’s” fiftieth anniversary, the present issue, edited by Joshua Kates, includes essays from scholars with a range of sympathies to Derrida’s project. Their articles focus less on purely scholarly concerns and instead on the truth about questions raised by Derrida’s essay: of textual identity, the role of intention and citation, the status of fictional and historical discourses, and the work of interpretation. A series of interchanges between Walter Benn Michaels, Henry Staten, and Joshua Kates, commenting on Michaels’s essay, are also included, which pursue further this attempt to get at the things themselves.