Fruit and Fish: Alison Goodwin’s Reimaging of the Modernist Motif

Alison Goodwin’s painting Cantaloupe (2008) at first appears, perhaps naively, to depict a still life of fruit and flowers on a table: pomegranate, cantaloupe, sunflowers, and a drink. Beneath two rusty red and murky green lines, a diamond pattern demarcates the floor from the wall above. Next to the mottled green-and-red wall is a view through an open window. Three narrow houses lean precariously to the left; the windows are indicated, almost carelessly, by blocks of watery black paint. Two stylized trees with foliage shaped into bulbous spheres punctuate the row of buildings. Goodwin’s particular style, with its emphasis on a skewed perspective, flattened forms, and broadly applied colors, cannot—and should not—be read as unsophisticated or unknowing. Rather, Goodwin’s paintings reinterpret the work of some of the most important nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painters. She deliberately evokes the style and subjects of European modernists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Each of her paintings recalls the implied formal tension between depicted three-dimensional space and the literal flatness of painted planes of color and stylized forms that her predecessors welcomed. Matisse, Cézanne, and others in the late nineteenth century rejected academic norms of picture making (painting realistically through modeling, shade, and one-point perspective). By revisiting these artists’ aesthetic, Goodwin complicates this historical progression and inserts her own mark onto the modernist (and particularly male-dominated) canon. [excerpt

Bright Lights on Quiet Streets: Tom Keough’s Nocturnes

The well-kept city streets lined with trees and old brownstones may seem familiar in the paintings of Brooklyn-based artist Tom Keough, but the neighborhood is disquietingly empty. Keough situates the sidewalk in the immediate foreground of his paintings and compels the viewer to enter into an eerily vacant scene. With few exceptions, Keough leaves the always still and sometimes snowy New York setting largely unoccupied. Nonetheless, Keough conveys human presence in his paintings with the soft glow of lamplight from windows, footprints in the snow, and cars parked along the side. The theme of urban alienation—a paradoxical sense of loneliness felt in the midst of dense population and bustling activity—has been examined by Keough’s art-historical predecessors, such as Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and perhaps most consistently by Edward Hopper. Whereas these painters frequently employed various urban types (shop girls, entertainers, once clerks) lost in thought to evoke a sense of estrangement and inward reflection, Keough remarkably conveys similarly absorptive emotional states without such figural intervention. [excerpt

Ronald Gonzalez: Private Collection

In Ronald Gonzalez’s latest series of sculptures, old leather satchels, small antiquated appliances, dulled tools, bicycle handles, shoes, a fencing mask, an accordion, a bicycle seat, a toaster and helmets, among other various found parts and outdated detritus are combined to evoke the heads and torsos of human-like forms. The viewer identifies the components at once as what the objects literally are as well as the specific body parts they figuratively describe. As such, his art calls for an exercise in perceptual shifts that allow for more than one visual interpretation. While some objects are manipulated, others are left intact, as Gonzalez creates paradoxically human and strangely inanimate assemblages. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1000/thumbnail.jp

Mark Greenwold’s Excited Self

In a recent exhibition catalog of painter Mark Greenwold at New York’s DC Moore Gallery, the artist, in lieu of a conventional statement about his work, conducted a self-interview. To his question, ‘‘Why?’’ Greenwold responded: I thought that I could possibly get at things that another person might find too daunting or too polite to ask—very obvious questions by the way, that I’d probably be too thin-skinned or reactive to give an honest response to if another person asked the question. [excerpt

Embodiment and Emptiness: Alison Rector’s Interior Spaces

Alison Rector’s painting Green Kitchen (2002) depicts a seemingly ordinary domestic interior: a flight of stairs ascends to the right, and a foyer, furnished simply with a wooden table and chairs, leads to a kitchen and, further still, to a broom closet. The old-fashioned wood-burning stove, muted and patterned wallpaper, antiqued furniture, brass sconce, and wide-planked hardwood floor characterize this home as possibly from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but the lack of figures and personal effects makes the definitive time of occupancy ambiguous. Rector’s unoccupied interiors, however, do not appear abandoned. Even in the quietest of her closed spaces, the viewer perceives a presence, perhaps of the non-depicted occupant. [excerpt

Kara Walker: Harper\u27s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

The preface to the original edition of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866 by Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden asserts, “We proposed at the outset to narrate events just as they occurred; … to praise no man unduly because he strove for the right, to malign no man because he strove for the wrong. The suite of lithographs on display at Schmucker Art Gallery by prominent contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker entitled Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), on loan from the Middlebury College Museum of Art, challenges the truth Guernsey and Alden claimed to recount and inject a discourse about rightness and wrongness the authors professed to omit. Walker’s silhouettes of distorted, fragmented and flailing black bodies are silkscreened over an enlargement, using offset lithography of woodcut plates, of the original Harper’s prints published in Guernsey and Alden’s text to incorporate a new understanding of suffering, loss and horror absent from the nineteenth- century illustrations. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1005/thumbnail.jp

\u27Yet in a Primitive Condition\u27: Edward S. Curtis\u27s The North American Indian

From 1907 to 1930, Edward S. Curtis created The North American Indian, a forty-volume edition of photographs and writings that he hoped would cover “every phase of Indian life of all tribes yet in a primitive condition.” All evidence indicates that he set out to make a singular and unified work of art. However, a comparative analysis of photographs made at different moments in this ambitious project reveals that The North American Indian ultimately is characterized not by stylistic and thematic unity but by significant shifts in aesthetic and political orientation. [excerpt

Content is pragmatic: Comments on Nicholas Shea's Representation in cognitive science

Nicholas Shea offers Varitel Semantics as a naturalistic account of mental content. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea’s own account, content serves only a variety of heuristic functions

A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation

Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, and enactive approaches to cognition. In this talk I sketch an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of mental content. I call the resulting package a deflationary account of mental representation and I argue that it avoids the problems that afflict competing accounts