Category Archives: modernism

Agamben on Twilight

Posted on November 22, 2022 by Mark Kerstetter

Twilight As the weight of day bears down and night’s promise advances, memory and loss in equal shares emerge in a standoff. Will and fancy, knowledge and flight become unlikely workmates and vision pushes focus against the last flakes of silver backing … Continue reading →

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A Note on Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Mark Kerstetter

When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow—Melville, Pierre First all beauty…. is denied and then all beauty…. is accepted—Stein, Composition as Explanation There is nothing to do except observe the horizon,the only one, that seems to want … Continue reading →

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Robert Rauschenberg and Working in the Gap

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Mark Kerstetter

It’s hard to read about Robert Rauschenberg without encountering a Great American Image: a uniquely American hero in modern visual art. It seems to me rather that he was more like the Slavoj Žižek of the art world of his … Continue reading →

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Rimbaud and de Kooning

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Mark Kerstetter

Arriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere. —Rimbaud We are modern. We are so because Rimbaud commanded us to be. —Ashbery It is one of those curious accidents (but are they really accidents?) that I have resumed my de Kooning … Continue reading →

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Conrad Aiken and the struggle of consciousness

Posted on April 27, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

even one’s newness is old —Conrad Aiken   One of the first things that comes up in a google search of the name “Conrad Aiken” (right next to we found Conrad Aiken) is a review of his Selected Poems in … Continue reading →

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Yahia Lababidi’s Balancing Acts

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

The poems of Yahia Lababidi recall some great names: Borges, Pessoa, and Baudelaire. The spirit of Baudelaire looms large in the poems of Balancing Acts. But I think of visual artists too. Striking, novel images are conjured, mysterious and dreamlike, … Continue reading →

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Beckett’s Labyrinth

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

The Minotaur, not Narcissus, presides over the birth of art —Rosalind Krauss Patrick Bowles records a conversation he had with Samuel Beckett while the two were working on the English translation of Molloy. Bowles had shared a quotation from Blanchot: … Continue reading →

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Out of the Shadows with Maldoror

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

Parle, et, puisque, d’après tes vœux les plus chers, l’on ne souffrirait pas, dis en quoi consisterait alors la vertu, idéal que chacun s’efforce d’atteindre, si ta langue est faite comme celle des autres hommes. —Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror … Continue reading →

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Conversations with a Clown by Michael Welzenbach

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

Conversations with a Clown, published in 1991, is the only novel by art critic Michael Welzanbach who died far too young in 2001. The novel concerns art critic Corry Peters who lives in Washington D.C., has profoundly ambivalent feelings about … Continue reading →

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Confessions of a Roussellâtre

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

or, simply this: I am not fluent in French and therefore have no real right to call myself a Roussellâtre, considering some of his principle works have never been translated into English.

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