Light in Buffalo:  When Foucault Kept Manet in Mind Michel Foucault’s view of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère provided the conceptual center for his lecture at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo in the spring of 1970, the first year he taught at SUNY Buffalo.  His thinking did not stop at the picture frame that year, or any other year, and the ways in which the work of art occupied his mind bears re-examination.  Foucault did not flatten his thinking when…

Statues of Limitations In art as in government, representation and abstraction serve as two modes of the same linguistic operation, rather than two sides of a radical break. This sense of continuity offers up abstraction as a premise for rethinking the notion of U.S. representative democracy, directing attention to its separating, reducing, isolating, and extracting projects. This talk-in-progress takes up this continuity in considering contentious monuments in public spaces, future ruins that provocatively suspend the regulation of subject and object.…

Back of the Painted Beyond Some thoughts on connections between current art historical theory and mid-twentieth-century phenomenological thinking, illustrated by way of a few examples of early modern Northern works of art, mostly gleaned from wandering through the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.  How might we talk about the correspondences, even conversations, among paintings that elude art historical labeling and contextualizing? Paintings are materially limited but metaphysically limitless.  How do backgrounds, for example, intimate all that lies beyond that which is…