Log24

Friday, December 17, 2004

Friday December 17, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm
Christmas Dance at Taos

One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.

— Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"

The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin,
who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico:

"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."

"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime…."

"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"

Related material:

Pictures of Nothing,

Balanchine's Birthday.

Friday December 17, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:05 pm

Song in Red and Gray

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From today's New York Times:

Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92

Background: entry of 7 PM Wednesday.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Thursday December 16, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 am

Nothing Nothings
(Again)

Background: recent Log24 entries (beginning with Chorus from the Rock on Dec. 5, 2004) and Is Nothing Sacred? (quotations compiled on March 9, 2000).

From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times:

"Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."

Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9.

Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:

  • " 'Nothingness itself nothings' — with these words, uttered by Martin Heidegger in the early 1930s, the incipient (and now-familiar) split between analytic and continental philosophy began tearing open. For Rudolf Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle [Wiener Kreis] of logical empiricists and a strident advocate of a new, scientific approach to philosophy, this Heideggerian proposition exemplified 'a metaphysical pseudo-sentence,' meaningless and unable to withstand any logical analysis. Heidegger countered that Carnap’s misplaced obsession with logic missed the point entirely."
    Review of A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
  • "Death and Metaphysics," by Peter Kraus, pp. 98-111 in Death and Philosophy, ed. by Jeff Malpas and Robert Solomon.  Heidegger's famous phrase (misquoted by Quine in Gray Particular in Hartford) "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" is discussed on page 102.

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