Bill Berkson Dreams

June 2, 2011 Stereotypes, whether true or false, would like to have us believe that poets, perhaps above all others, record their dreams for beauty, self-indulgence, or posterity.  However, the poets interested in the dream and the logic of the subconscious today, are perhaps not the same poets that inherited the logic of the avant-garde.  The surrealists were, certainly, heavily invested in the dream state, but the topic has not stood out as a particular interest since then.&nb.. read more...

On Pharmaceutical Conceptualism

May 30, 2011 To my nearly-non-existent collection of avant-garde and contemporary art has been added a small conceptualist gem: a single translucent red pill inside a plastic bag labeled: Speak, write and read perfect German "inmiatly" (sic). It's by the excellent painter and documentary photo- and video-grapher Adriana Bustos, from Cordoba, Argentina, who happened to be classmate of mine in language study. I can only assume that her lengthy studies in psychopharmacology and neu.. read more...

Does the Avant-Garde Need Marx?

May 30, 2011 It's official: Marx is back. At least that seems to be an increasingly acceptable veiwpoint within mainstream, English-speaking intellectual circles that would've not so long ago viewed the great 19th Century economic and political thinker as no more than a passe obsession of the Cold War era, a fetish of sheltered English departments in the ivoriest of ivory towers (about as relevant to contemporary economics as Freud is to cognitive psychology), or a dubious authority to be.. read more...

Weston’s Aesthetic Vision Poses Alternate Modernist Path

May 29, 2011 "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges," (probably) wrote Beatrice Wood, an American modern artist and lover of Duchamp, defending the signed urinal he had submitted to the Salon des Independants in 1917. The legacy of the urinal is often understood to be Conceptualism on the one hand -- a paradigm where ideas and gestures resonate over and above the technical skill of the artist -- and on the other, Avant-Garde (anti)-.. read more...

The Importance of Drinking and Smashing Innumerable Bottles on a Giant Pile of Beer, until It’s Gone that Is

May 26, 2011 It's not an out and out characteristic, or quite a trend, but in the German capital they do seem to love heaps. Perhaps it's because the 350-mile-city itself is so devlishly flat. One of the tallest mountains around is Teufelberg or "Satan's Hill," the tremendous aggregation of wartime rubble just north of West Berlin's lush Grunewald forest. The word, I believe, is still out on whether one of Hitler's secret bunkers is still buried at the core. Thus far it.. read more...

And the Avant-Garde Gesture of the Micro-Epoch Belongs to: You?

May 16, 2011 When I think back on the past several years, as to whether there was any artist who came forward with a move that resonated in that the-world-before-and-after, you-can-only-do-it-once sort of way (like say, Duchamp's submission of a urinal to the Salon Des Independants): well, the only thing that really jumps to mind is Urs Fischer's excavation of the entire floor of the Gavin Brown Enterprise gallery. The massive crater he produced out of a piece of pricey NY real estate (an.. read more...

Fluxus, the Sprightly Godchild of Duchamp, Retrospectivized at Dartmouth

May 15, 2011 Fluxus, the sprightly Godchild of Duchamp, has endless quantities of material around that will keep scholars and enthusiasts of conceptualism, antics, hijinks, and the general dada spirit busy for many years to come. A new exhibit at Dartmouth's Hood Museum: "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life," presents a fair swath of the witty, irreverent output of this 1960's and '70's neo-Avant-Garde. Fluxus works are like philosophic miniatures: very small pieces of.. read more...

In Defense of the Sharjah Art Biennial

May 13, 2011 The Sharjah Biennial, the oldest and most respected biennial in the Middle East hosted by the eponymous Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, is about to close its doors this Sunday, May 16. It remained opened for two months, and has, in that brief time, also become the focus of a whirlwind scandal concerning the contention between the contrarian secularism of modern art and the devout religiosity of the region's general population. The situation tha.. read more...

How Man Ray Took on Lautreamount

May 3, 2011 In a recent post I compared Duchamp's assemblage of the bicycle wheel atop the stool to the Comte de Lautreamont (aka Isidore Ducasse)'s notorious saying: "as beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a table." The latter, I argued, was radically disjunctive in a way that the bicycle wheel was not and furthermore that Lautreamont's image really only makes sense in language. Recently however, I was proven somewhat (I emphasize somewhat.. read more...