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Some Sort of Association: Joan Mitchell at David Zwirner

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/sense-layers-vija-celmins-matthew-marks-gallery/"></div><p>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/sam-sackeroff/">Sam Sackeroff</a></p>
<p>What is found in a “found object”? That question, like many questions that have animated postwar American art, was first asked under very different circumstances. A remnant of the prewar European avant-garde, it was most memorably posed by the Surrealist poet and theorist André Breton in his 1937 autobiographical novel, <em>L’Amour fou</em>. Recalling a meandering walk that he had taken with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti through the Marché aux Puces flea market in Paris in the spring of 1934, Breton described how he came upon a large wooden spoon with a distinctive slipper-heel handle. Although otherwise unimpressive, this “found object,” or “<em>objet trouvé</em>,” seized Breton, who purchased it and brought it home, still wondering why it had had such an effect on him. After some time, he realized that his apparent interest in the spoon was only the most recent link in a much longer associative chain that led deep into his unconscious. In a convulsive moment of perception, he recognized that its slipper-heel called to mind a glass sculpture of a slipper that he had asked Giacometti to make for him months earlier but that the sculptor had never delivered. That sculpture was in turn linked to a half-formed phrase, “the Cinderella ashtray,” that had occurred to Breton in a waking dream earlier still. Together, that half-formed phrase and the undelivered sculpture made up yet another composite link that reached even further back, now to Breton’s erotic desire for the “lost object” as such. What had initially been a simple wooden spoon came to symbolize for Breton “a woman <em>unique and unknown</em>.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/sense-layers-vija-celmins-matthew-marks-gallery/#more-3836" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Do You Sense the Layers? – Vija Celmins at The Matthew Marks Gallery

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/another-chance-understand-john-baldessari-marian-goodman-gallery-new-york/"></div><p>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/sam-sackeroff/">Sam Sackeroff</a></p>
<p>How do you solve a problem like the avant-garde? That is a question that John Baldessari has been asking in one form or another for more than five decades. Since July 24th 1970, when, in an inspired moment of getting-over-it, Baldessari and his students at the University of California at San Diego burned the last-gasp gestural paintings that he had made between 1953 and 1966, he has been exploring different ways of pushing the most compelling elements of advanced visual art out of the ever-narrowing confines of academic modernism and into the rich and unpredictable space of actual looking. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/another-chance-understand-john-baldessari-marian-goodman-gallery-new-york/#more-2922" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Another Chance to Understand: John Baldessari at the Marian Goodman Gallery

Writing Politics

<strong>Sam Sackeroff is Leon Levy Assistant Curator at The Jewish Museum in New York. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2019, where he was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow. During 2014–2015 he held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Museum Research Consortium Fellowship at The Museum of Modern Art. His current research focuses on liberalism and aesthetics in postwar America.</strong>

Sam Sackeroff

The Way We Speak Now: On David Bromwich’s “Writing Politics”

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

Sam Sackeroff is Leon Levy Assistant Curator at The Jewish Museum in New York. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2019, where he was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow. During 2014–2015 he held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Museum Research Consortium Fellowship at The Museum of Modern Art. His current research focuses on liberalism and aesthetics in postwar America.