Category Archives: visual art essay

MERRA

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Mark Kerstetter

He began speaking. He was right. Who is not right? —Samuel Beckett I am interested in the mechanization of the graphic procedure. —Richard Serra It may be that there has always been a visual art based on a relationship with … Continue reading →

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Details on Page 97

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Mark Kerstetter

On page 97 of Mark Stevens’ and Annalyn Swan’s de Kooning: An American Master (Knopf, 2004), they state that de Kooning and Arshile Gorky met in 1929 at a social gathering at Misha Reznikoff’s studio. The two quarreled and almost … Continue reading →

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“The Red Wheelbarrow” in the Style of ChatGPT

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Mark Kerstetter

Do you pretend to know more than you do to elicit my ignorance? My red wheel barrow is too full of Socratic irony to get yours into it Our cries in the yard just tears in rain the dead fact … Continue reading →

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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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Time as a Theme in de Kooning and Ashbery

Posted on October 13, 2021 by Mark Kerstetter

Time is an emulsion—Ashbery I have to keep the paint wet so that I can change it over and over, I mean, do the same thing over and over+I’m really slipping most of the time into that glimpse—de Kooning The … 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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Dewey Out Loud

Posted on November 11, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

If it weren’t for the memory of the friend who gave me a copy of John Dewey’s Art as Experience I probably would not have worked all the way through it.

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Conrad Aiken and the Anthropological Machine

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

Linnaeus’s genius consists not so much in the resoluteness with which he places man among the primates as in the irony with which he does not record—as he does with the other species—any specific identifying characteristic next to the generic … Continue reading →

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Sometimes You’re the Bug

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Mark Kerstetter

I’ve been singing The Bug while I do my work lately. It started with needing to replace a piece of trim on the carriage house (fancy word for garage). Uncovering one piece of wasted wood revealed another, and then others. … Continue reading →

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