This long poem written in 2010 is comprised of rediscovered, reconstructed, and re-purposed fragments of western art history excavated from Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods. It pulls phrases from their original context and places them within a larger sequence: a sort of text sampling, a larger context that they in some sense helped shape. In part, it suggests an intellectual history of my own interests as they have been constructed from others' words and ideas.
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Today Years Ago: fragments from western art history: 1906 to 1991
1906> The counter-pole to the need for empathy is the urge to abstraction —
1906> Returning the individual thing to its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness.
1908> The telegraph hammers all over Europe, but tells hardly a word of the glory of Messina —
1910> Movement and light.
1913> The world, a monstrous, fantastic, perpetually moving machine.
1914> Painting sets before us that which a person could and should see —
1915> The movement of red, green and blue,
1915> Constructed on the basis of weight, speed, and the direction of movement.
1912> Not the situation of objects, but the situation of a spectator —
1912> An internal strength whose radiance shines all around.
1913> Superfluous development of sentimental and popular subject matter —
1913> This is that.
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Originally posted 19 December 2010