Essays on Modern Art: Cy Twombly - Criticisms and Essays on Previously Unseen Art in the Koolhaas Collection
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About this ebook
Justice Koolhaas’s Essays on Modern Art are reproduced alongside at least one of each artist’s works that she owned. Unusually, these works were discards; even more unusually, she obtained them on condition that each artist signed a statement disowning them as artworks.
Her theory work, a refusenikism written in deliberate opacity, is inspired by her collection of art refuse.
Twombly is explored through Walter Benjamin, Deleuze & Guattari and Stéphane Mallarmé. The painter’s interest in the latter’s poetry is obvious from the word-like nature of his mark-making; equally, why Koolhaas was interested in them both is obvious from the way her fanciful and opaque theory evokes sensual understandings rather than anything we could reduce to mere ‘grammar’ or even ‘sense’.
Her circumlocution suggests that artists can emerge from within themselves; the machineries of oppression and standardisation are the selfsame machineries that today’s smartest artists are learning to colonise in a reverse movement that throws power back onto itself. The real terror represented by the Jihadist today is the terror that, as Beuys envisioned, everybody realises their creative potential. Working at the margins as a culture jammer therefore demands sophistry with language. An excellent example can found in one of the Twomblys in both the Koolhaas estate and her essay here.
C. M. Cohen’s comprehensive interpretations mean that the uninitiated Koolhaas student can pick and mix material from this book to suit their purposes without feeling pressured to grasp everything at once.
Justice Koolhaas
Born in Bloemfontein in 1940, Justice Koolhaas was raised in Utrecht and Lausanne. Her twin, Patience, died shortly after birth. Justice always felt that her philosophical interests were a search for presences that haunt everyday life beyond the reach of conventional rationality. Her recently discovered oeuvre extends theory in the humanities and arts beyond its existing frontiers and expectations.She came top her class at the Sorbonne. She studied under Roland Barthes and was privately admired and supported by several European intellectuals. Despite this, she found few doors open to her in the academy. Her sense of foreignness became integral to her work, particularly her adherence to writing in Dutch, which kept her out of print, along with other more personal reasons. Since her death in 2011, her family has committed to ensuring that all her work is published posthumously. Its purview hybridises disciplines ranging from philosophy to sociology to anthropology to cultural studies to media studies to her most beloved subject area of all, art. Her span of theorists, writers and artists includes Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous, Guy Debord, Jacques Derrida, Tracey Emin, Donna Haraway, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Kruger, Jean-François Lyotard, Karl Marx, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hannah Wilke, Frank Zappa, and Slavoj Žižek.C.M. Cohen completed his linguistics PhD in 1980. He worked as an interpreter for the U.N. for 23 years before acting as a consultant translator whose clients have included the South African government, the Commonwealth Games committee, the Antarctic Survey, and several mining corporations. He is now retired. His friendship with Koolhaas, along with his professional experience outside academia, bring a deep empathy in his translations and introductions of her highly stylised literary and philosophical legacy.
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Reviews for Essays on Modern Art
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I though(t) it was really interesting the lengths to which the auteur went to make sure the reader/listener understood/perceived that this has less than nothing to do with academia and more with the act of practicing art itself; if there is an itself;
i do most of the time feel digitized by these ultra-collegiate texts and being handled less bitingly felt refreshing;
people that theorize, I'd also like to mention Grace Lee from WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT THAT Tube You channel, create a sense of community by their very being-performative, humanize this process we're all in the middle of smack dab.
I'd appreciate more voices like this if not so impossible;
Book preview
Essays on Modern Art - Justice Koolhaas
Copyright
Essays on Modern Art: Cy Twombly
Justice Koolhaas
Smashwords Edition.
Copyright 2015 Justice Koolhaas.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.
Acknowledgements
The research and translation for this text was match-funded via the B route: application 1227H/2014.
The translator would like to, as ever, thank Sofietje and Jan.
Cover design: D. Janssen.
‘Crisis in Poetry’ circa 1970. Pencil on mounted linen.
Dimensions approx. 120 x 151 cm
Table of Contents
Translator's Introduction
The Concept of the Problematic
Textual Connexivities
Also by Justice Koolhaas
Translator’s Introduction
Series Introduction
It is difficult for today’s students to find source materials that are original enough to give their assignments an edge. There are so many books and so little time. This is especially so in the labyrinthine world of art and its accompanying theories. What can another book add about the artists that form the backbone of art history? The Essays on Modern Art series offers three things: each book is short, discusses a previously unseen artwork, and carries the prestige in presenting a new and startling theorist – Justice Koolhaas.
Her thought has only recently been made available, and is introduced at length in a previous publication, Creative Theory, Radical Example (Koolhaas 2015). Her art theory has, over five decades, covered mainstream figures and lesser known ones alike. Each of her theoretical essays, introduced by myself, is reproduced alongside at least one of each artist’s works owned by Koolhaas.
The artworks are from a collection of over fourteen hundred that she amassed between the nineteen sixties and early 2000s. These range from paintings and sculptures to videos and installations. Each was obtained in an unorthodox manner. She used her position as an outsider theorist to ingratiate herself with art professionals and hangers-on, the kind of people who typically accrete around artists once their work begins to gather some commercial and critical momentum. Sometimes this resulted in studio visits that sometimes resulted in her asking about any recent work that had been discarded. The discussion about that discarded work occasionally led to her asking to keep it, but with a proviso. She asked