Kenneth Noland famously declared that his breakthrough as a painter occurred when he “discovered the center of the canvas”[i] in the late 1950s. Noland’s “discovery” produced a series of well-known paintings executed between 1958 and 1962 based on the placement of concentric circles of various colors in varying widths radiating out from the exact center toward but never reaching the four edges of the picture, usually comprising a six-foot square. This essay addresses the question of what exactly Noland can be said to have “discovered” and why the concept of “discovery” is crucial in understanding the nature of modernist painting and sculpture . . .

Published on ABCRIT: https://abcrit.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/25-carl-kandutsch-writes-on-kenneth-nolands-discovery/

The concept of Inside Wiring is important for MDU owners because when dealing with cable television and broadband service providers because control over Inside Wiring often determines whether or not two or more service providers can co-exist and compete for subscribers in an MDU building.

For the third consecutive year, Broadband Communities magazine has selected the Kandutsch Law Office as . . .

“MDU” stands for “multi-dwelling unit”; an “MDU property” is a real estate development or complex that includes multi-dwelling units, such as apartments or condominium units.

The definition of “MDU” is important to service providers and to property owners because the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has promulgated rules governing certain aspects of the cable and broadband business for MDUs. The FCC rules focus on two areas . . .

Michael Fried is today one of the most interesting and perceptive art historians in the world. In the 1960s however, Fried was, along with his mentor Clement Greenberg, perhaps the most insightful critic of contemporary art in the United States, and certainly the strongest advocate for what was then known as “modernist” painting and sculpture, as epitomized in the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella and English sculptor Anthony Caro among others.

Published on ABCRIT: https://abcrit.wordpress.com/2015/09/26/17-carl-kandutsch-writes-on-caro-fried-and-deep-body-blue/#more-270

. . . we human beings tend to orient ourselves around a vertical (as opposed to horizontal) axis, literally (as in the fact that we stand) and figuratively (we aspire, reach for the stars, and when we fail, we fall down, are leveled, degraded, and so on). One manifestation of our vertical orientation is the traditional placement of sculptures on pedestals – as if placing them above rather than on the ground helps to secure the meta-physically elevated status of artworks as distinguished from ordinary objects in the world . . . Anthony Caro was not the first sculptor to eliminate the pedestal; however, as Michael Fried observes, he was the first sculptor to not just place his works at ground level but also to ground them in such a way that the ground is itself made abstract and in this way incorporated into the sculpture’s illusiveness . . .

Published on ABCRIT: https://abcrit.wordpress.com/2015/09/19/16-carl-kandutsch-writes-on-caro-fried-and-prairie/

To my knowledge, no American fiction writer has more carefully explored the moral instability of ordinariness than Patricia Highsmith (1921 – 1995). Highsmith’s novels and stories pose the question: How are we to reach a viewpoint from which we might scrutinize and assess the moral significance of our own lives in their very ordinariness? The absence of such a transcendental perspective is shown in the ease and unobtrusiveness – call it casualness – with which Highsmith’s characters slip from the human to the monstrous and back again, all but seamlessly.

Published in The Chiseler at http://chiseler.org/post/122941734621/patricia-highsmith-ordinary-morality

The association of poetry with magic goes back a long way in our culture, at least since Plato expelled poets from his Republic if not earlier. Less dramatically, let us say that the writing and reading of literature has always implied a transformative power – the power to transform the self and redeem the fallen world. But at the same time, at the end of the day, the poet needs to earn a living just like the plumber, and the weight of words neither adds to nor subtracts from the weight of the world on one’s shoulders. An entire language – the glue that constitutes a social structure over thousands of years – disappears when the body of its last native speaker withers and dies.

Published in The Chiseler @ http://chiseler.org/post/122168813796/the-snows-of-kilimanjaro

"I’m having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be…"

Published in The Chiseler @ http://chiseler.org/post/121428926486/rachels-choice

. . . photographic images can be and almost inevitably are aestheticized, either by design (when the photographer's intention is to make art) or by the way they are displayed (for example, when documentary photographs are displayed on gallery walls). As a general matter, the aestheticization of images seems to be a fate almost inevitable in our mass-consumption society, which compulsively commodifies every conceivable sensuous object and experience for commercial use. But in any particular case, is it true that the aesthetic qualities of an image must be at odds with the image's political or moral significance? Is it not possible for the political significance of a photograph to be fully articulated in and by its artistic qualities, so that the image's moral claim on its audience only makes sense insofar as it is expressed in the language of visual art?

With these questions in mind, I would like to look at a recent photograph that has remained with me since I first encountered it on Phil Weiss's website Mondoweiss on February 20, 2015.