Sean Scully, Installation at the monastery of Saint Cecília in Montserrat, Spain
1. I continue to be surprised by the developing canon of contemporary art commissions that reside inside places of worship, across many different faiths. Maybe it is the impulse towards the new in contemporary art and the distaste for long traditions that makes this phenomena surprising, but there is no doubt that the significant projects keep coming. The latest is a very interesting project in Spain by Sean Scully, which should not only grace its surroundings for a long time but also add to the interpretation of Scully's work in general. The 1980s Scully that lived in New York, for instance, gave us tectonic stripes of varying thickness and gravity, often recalling the experience of walking through a city of sky scrapers. There can be no such reading of the work in Spain. If anything, these new Scullys seem to speak to artists like Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, who registered spiritual tensions in formal conditions of painting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/arts/international/sean-scully-painting-from-the-heart-to-the-heart.html?mabReward=CTM&action=click&pgtype=Homepage®ion=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0
2. Simply put, Steve Wasserman has written one of the best essays that I've read on Susan Sontag in a very long time. The essay observers her celebrity, her magnetism, and then properly brackets it in service of actually convincing that Sontag should be read deeply, not as a culture figure, but as an important thinker who should be read for her content and not her personality.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/susan-sontag-critic-and-crusader
3. I enjoy almost everything Janet Malcolm writes, from her reporting of the petty disputes and high theoretical battles that built ArtForum to her wondering out loud about why the work of David Salle never seems to grow on her. In the New York Review of Books, she takes on Anna Karenina, testing the truism that it is the most realist of books, that it is a book built as though from observed by Tolstoy of real lives (such is its three dimensional power). To see the book this way, Malcolm suggests, is to miss its artistry and much of its genius. She makes a fine case:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/25/dreams-and-anna-karenina/
Video of the week:
4. Imi Knoebel's completed a stained glass window project for the Notre Dame Cathedral at Reims in 2014. As the Goethe Institute noted at the time, the choice of a German artist for the project was not only controversial, but also a sign that a great deal of healing has occurred:
"For a long time it would have been inconceivable that a German artist should set his hand to this place. The memory of that September day in 1914 when German soldiers put the coronation church, a French national shrine, under constant bombardment and largely destroyed it was too painful. At the time, “Reims” became the emblem of the deep hatred that existed between the French and the Germans."
I recommend fast forwarding this video to 1:25, but here is a wonderful animation of the windows and a great project by a perpetually underrated artist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kpB8NEIHVg
Poem for the Week:
5. Used bookstores are almost always disappointing in terms of poetry. Actually, it goes for new bookstores as well. New poetry does not have a wide distribution and old poetry only seems to wash on the shore of the secondhand shop when someone is willing to let it go (i.e. when the poetry is unmemorable or bad). Much to my delight, however, someone let Maxine Kumin's collection from 1960-1990 slip through their fingers for me to find it on Friday. What a wonderful poet, a poet I've always admired but never have owned in book form. Her wonderful and haunting, My Father's Neckties, can be found here:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2003/06/18
One Click Deeper:
There is certainly an expanded field of artists doing religious commissions, as I mentioned above. I thought that I would catalog several that I know about, in case you are interested. They range from the likely (James Turrell and Kiki Smith, both artists who are borderline ministers in their work on an ordinary day) to the unlikely (Gerhard Richter and Christopher Wool, both of whom do not seem particularly spiritually motivated). Each and every one of these projects is interesting. I'd love to, one day, visit them in their locations in order to really size them up:
Christopher Wool
http://margaret-cooter.blogspot.com/2013/11/contemporary-stained-glass-christopher.html
James Turrell
http://www.art21.org/texts/james-turrell/interview-james-turrell-live-oak-friends-meeting-house
Richard Serra
http://www.synagoge-stommeln.de/index.php?n1=2&n2=2&n3=0&Direction=113&s=0&lang=engl
Kiki Smith
http://www.wnyc.org/story/97308-lower-east-side-synagogue-unveils-stained-glass-window/
Imi Knoebel
https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/ges/20463725.html
Pierre Soulages
http://www.tourisme-conques.fr/en/histoire-patrimoine/eglise-abbatiale/vitraux-soulages.php
Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/many-colored-glass-2