Customer Reviews

The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing

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Reviewed as a radical departure in art writing, it is a departure only from the postmodern mordancy. Although a good book, with some insights about the Poussin's Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, I became bored with Clark's diary of his somewhat predictable relationships with the paintings. His views are motivated by seeing "A socialism, if that's what we shall persist in calling it, that starts from misfortune, pain, and death." p 240

His response to these paintings and his own emotions dwells on "Affliction, misfortune, distress-of course Landscape with a Snake matters preeminently, and has held my attention so long, because it is my example of a coming to terms with the horror of nature that posits a "Huerte, huerte" ["Today, today" referring to Bach's Actus Tragicus] here in the horror, now in the moment of revulsion."

The horrors, to me, are smallish in the whole of Poussin's landscapes, somewhat like Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

I am not moved by Clark's socio-philosophy, but his writing is fluid and personal to some extent.

Art historian T.J.Clark studies two of Poussin's landscape works, noting his thoughts as he sits before them together at a California museum in this experiment in stream of consciousness writing, recording his moment to moment reactions. Though an interesting and microscopic analysis detailing the painter's craft, written with artistic and scholarly style, the author meanders through the landscape of his thoughts in tangents lacking focus and goal, providing little innovation to the discipline of aesthetics. An impressive display of his formidable intellect, but not his most productive work.

A marvelous book -- evocative, erudite, beautifully written. For me, the stamp of distinction in writing appears when I find myself engaged in a conversation with the author, when the written word becomes a voice inviting some kind of verbal response, when the voice appears with a gentle tap on the shoulder at breakfast or during a boring meeting and says "Hey, have you given any thought to what I was trying to pull off about the use of space in Poussin's paintings?" and I say "Why yes I have ...." Just about every page of this book achieves that distinction, UNTIL I CAME TO THE PHANTOM PAGE 103.

Oh, yes, page 103. Nothing Professor Clark did. The publisher, on the other hand, needs to be made aware that pages 103-118 are missing and pages 119-134 were inserted twice. This means that anyone who buys this book online runs the risk of receiving a poor copy. Of course, the missing pages most likely can be had from the publisher, but even so the interruption is pretty annoying. I wouldn't mind so much if the writing was bad or banal (or both), but Professor Clark's book has legs and is deserving of better care from the publisher.

On the other hand, one can have a surrealistic good time trying to make sense out of the sentence created by the missing pages: "Various corrections, then, as I check my intuitions against the facts; but the point about the screen of trees in Snake can just about stand -- at worms always lurking in buds) into something else."

I haven't read this book as well as I would have liked (I tried, but what on earth is it about, anyway? It's just a long description of some paintings, and anyway, with my poor U.C. Berkeley "education," I doubt that I would be able to fully understand it). But I think Clark's premise about "the man who was killed by a snake" may lie in a remark that one of his students made about him, which may or may not be known to Clark and to others. In 1999, while I was standing outside Clark's lecture hall with a peer, we were comparing Clark to Judith Butler, of U.C. Berkeley's rhetoric department. The peer remarked, "He's a God!" To which I just stood there, perplexed, and said nothing. Incidentally, said peer claimed to prefer Judith Butler's work more than Clark's. So that was quite crafty of the peer (whether he was representing what may have happened or if he thought of it on the spot). Um, yes, crafty, like the snake in Genesis. All of this seems to fit with Clark's brand of art history where the self's experience is placed at the center of thinking. Except the question is: did Clark do this through some sort of Leftist zombie-ing around, or can we suppose that Clark was actually aware of his supposed "godliness" at the time of writing? And if so, shouldn't we be angry at Clark? We are human beings. Indeed, in Genesis 6:3, God's response to the breaching of boundaries between divinity and the human is to limit the span of human life to 120 years. Therefore, we are all dying at or before 120 because of people like Clark who write books such as "The Sight of Death" about "the man who was killed by the snake," presumably, not so human beings can regress to an animalism but so that human beings can evolve into a deity. Yet, this is impossible and cannot align with history as presented by our Holy Bible. Because of the crafty snake, who historically got Adam and Eve to take a bite of the forbidden fruit (but why do I feel like I could be the guilty party here, because I didn't respond to my peer's comment?), we can no longer have immortality and access to divine knowledge, so we cannot become the deities that we could have become had we not made a human transgression in the Garden of Eden. So Professor Clark, if you're wondering why I was having a tirade at you and your wife, Professor Anne Wagner, about how much "I hate U.C. Berkeley," here's part of my answer: nearly everything that is produced at U.C. Berkeley might as well be for the trash can! (No offense to whatever it is that you do, though. I'm just not into it. So I'm glad that you literally kicked me out of your graduate seminar by telling me to "Get out now!") Oh, I should note that in a cartoon/poster/map that I picked up on campus in 1994-95, you are depicted as having an argument with the campus personality who wandered around preaching. You reduce his remarks to gibberish. Did this happen because you were or are in conflict with religion? Or was it because you think that at U.C. Berkeley, his remarks are in effect gibberish? I don't want to sound like a conservative, but why would anyone listen to a guy who is supposedly preaching about God but who looks like an unkempt hippy?