Monthly Archives: March 2014

Hanging Empty

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Jason Farago, “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937 review — What Hitler Dismissed as ‘filth’,” The Guardian 13 March 2014

Dix, who earned the Iron Cross as a soldier during the first world war, was a favourite target of these proto-Degenerate Art shows; his glorious grotesques such as War Cripples (1920), they claimed, were insufficiently patriotic. War Cripples was included in the later Munich exhibition and was subsequently destroyed. The Neue Galerie [in NYC] has a contemporary postcard of the lost work, as well as the painting’s frame, hanging empty.

Before the ‘Beginning Was the Word’

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Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1963

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word’ [via / See Simone Weil.]