"This is a song called "Go for a Ride on a Motorcycle'"

Have you ever stood in front of blank canvas, a wetted brush poised in your hand, and wondered how or where to make the first mark? Perhaps you take a few steps forward to size up the situation; while there, you dip your brush again in the stand oil and deftly temper it with the whip-like flick you have practiced before your bedroom mirror for weeks. Yet, as these techniques seem not to have produced any new insights into how to begin, your procrastination moves into its deep-freeze stage as you go for a coffee or, even better, curl up for a little cat-nap on that filthy studio couch.

Well, what Old Ken is trying to get at is that he has felt a little indecisive about how to begin to tell you about the wonderful nautical adventure that set out into the wilds of greater Rugby over the recent Easter weekend. Now, this was not only a super time, but an auspicious "stag and hen do" (i.e. a combined bachelor/bachelorette party, for those of you on the western side of the Atlantic) in honor of those great folks Tim and Bev, who we see seated above on Box Tree Hill, on a blustery day earlier this year. Having hemmed and hawed a bit; having suffered through "paralysis by analysis," Old Ken took to heart the wisdom of America's favorite rock band, Moon Dog Maine. As a means of introducing a selection from their impressive—no, visionary—musical catalogue, the Dogs were often known to bait the audience with the following kind of banter: "Have you ever had a bad day, and you just wanted to go for a ride on a motorcycle? Well, this is a song called 'Go for a Ride on a Motorcycle.'" Amen! And so, enough of my yappin'; let's boogie!



Trips always seem to effectively begin in different places. Trivially, we might say that they begin at the point of departure. But, there are certain early locales on an itinerary that offers a flavor which then inflects and may subsequently be said to have given spirit to the trip as a whole. Without question, this noble function was performed by an early stop to Toddington Services on our way out of London. Services is the term used by the Brits for what we of North American extraction call a "rest area." Now, contrary to conventional wisdom, Brits seem to be much more frank in naming those places where Nature's calls are heeded. We in the States have developed some of the most absurd euphemisms to that end; for example, should one find oneself in a state of desperation in (say) Duluth, one would stride into an office building and ask for the "bathroom," not the "toilet" (as would be the correct appellation in Steeple Bumpstead, Essex). Yet, surely one does not intend to take a bubble bath, so why confuse the issue?



In any event, after Bev had introduced me to the niceties of Little Chef (apparently a mainstay of the British roadway services circuit), we made our way inside. Now, as you will see from the photograph above, the joint was certainly jumpin'. If I may impose on you, gentle reader, I'd like you to look carefully at the photograph above. No, no; not at those gents gettin' they old-school smoov on, nor at the smiling woman suggestively extending a plastic bucket (well, cast a glance upon her if you must). But, look especially acutely toward the apparatus just behind her. That's right, friend: a DJ! Had I struck the motherload or what?



Do you want more? Well, Toddington Services was ready to accomodate. Not only had that sweet Lethe of the weary traveler, the games room, been provided for, but a veritable El Dorado of delicate sweets had been arrayed for our refreshment. Such caramel corn and candy floss (i.e. cotton candy) one could scarcely rival in this—nay, any—freeway system.



Back in our automotive chariot, Derek, we arrived in varying stages of candy-induced coma to greater Rubgy by early afternoon where we were to rendezvous with our posse and the twin canal boats that were to be our homes for the next three nights. As you may remember from an earlier post, Old Ken has quite an affection for boats, having been born on (okay, technically, near) one. Bonds of this kind run deep and so, like many, I longed for the exhilirating blast of marine air that can only be found when travelling three miles an hour through the canal network of greater metropolitan Rugby.



Now, I use the word network advisedly here, as the canals are dotted with a series of locks that boats must navigate. Although Old Ken never really got the hang of the complex lock-navigation system—let alone the rituals of decorum that seemed to indicate which boats had right of way or priority in entering the locks—I was inspired to come up with a little song to commemorate the experience. I'd like to think of this song (which I have foolishly recorded on my camera and even more ridicuously posted below) as a humble contribution to Britain's proud heritage of sea shanties. I take some heart in the fact that this song, which might be called "There's Bilge in Your Lock," seems to be in a fairly obscure file format and therefore may hopefully not be easily accessed by most.



bilgelock.WAV

Please allow Old Ken to divert your attention away from that song with a picture of a majestic swan, an avian species in no short supply on England's canals.



One of the more interesting little side trips (or meta-trips, for those of you who want to go that way) made over the weekend was an excursion taken around the town of Brauston, which you see in the distance below.



While stopping to refill the boats with fresh water, a few of us went for a little mosey in the direction of a medieval church located off in what is now a huge cow pasture. Portions of the church (namely the base of the bell-tower) are said to date from the eleventh century, while the baptismal font inside is supposedly even earlier. Apparently there is notice of the existence of a church in this area in the Domesday Book. If Old Ken sounds a bit skeptical about these dates, one only need evoke that "abandoned" bee-house incident to be reminded that you can't always trust what you read in guide books.



Despite its antiquity, the now-decommissioned church remains in a respectable state of preservation. Old Ken was particularly delighted by the fourteenth century Gothic screen visible inside. Along the walls and floor of the nave were a series of plaques and monuments attesting to the lives of the local Tibbetts family, which of course leads one to think of Wayne and his sympathies for feminine hygiene.



On the way back to the boats, Mark was accosted by a cow. After paying a small fee, we were allowed to pass. I suggested we simply ask the cow to "moo-ve over," but I was threatened with physical harm. What?



Not long thereafter, we entered a kind of vortex. I am not entirely sure what happened, but I believe a ghost ship was involved.



Needless to say, what Old Ken has been able to assemble here is a highly telescoped and entirely unrepresentative account of a truly lovely weekend. That said, what I have wanted to share with you are a few strong flavors that may evoke other more ephemeral savours. And, as if things had not gotten quite savory enough, allow me to share these with you. Officially, they are called "Pork Scratchings." This leads to a few obvious question: with what do pigs scratch? Why would one want to eat sometime a pig had scratched? And is this technically food?



Old Ken did not try these dainties, but Bev's analysis speaks volumes: "Awful."

A Fun Game

How do you get to work? Or, please allow me to rephrase that question; do you go to work? I could mean a couple of things by that. I could be asking whether or not you are one of those new-fangled "e-commuters" who is able to work from home. At the same time, I could be asking whether or not you work at all; perhaps you have inherited a castle with a moat and you spend the day in a smoking jacket.



Well, like most folks, Old Ken goes to work (as what we call in Vera Cruz an "analista de sistemas") using the small object you see above: a London transport "Oyster Card." Why does it have that funny name? On the basis of its seeming ineffectuality as an aphrodisiac (a noted property of that most delicious shellfish), Old Ken is left to infer that the name has something to do with the fact that both objects (cerulean polyurethane card folder and oyster) both open up to reveal their contents. I'm not sure if we can push the analogy much further than that; but that too would be a fun game.



To return to my story, though; when you are on the Tube in London, you will see people reading, listening to music, staring at their hands—seemingly anything other than making eye contact or (heaven forbid!) conversing. Usually Old Ken joins them, reading a book or one of those soul-sucking "newspapers" handed out for free in Tube stations. Yet, recently, having grown weary of the burden of carrying around a novel on top of those other implements necessary to the art—scratch that, science—of the analista de sistemas, Old Ken has sought out a new kind of transport entertainment.



Perhaps inspired by those VIPS scribbling critical things into PDAs on their way (ASAP) to get a little RNR, Old Ken realized that the Oyster Card portfolio could be put to a more aesthetic use. Removing the enclosed map, which seemed to cover the entirety of southeast England and parts of Holland, I tore and folded a few sheets of drawing paper so that they could fit into the portfolio's external pocket. Holding the portfolio fairly close to one's body (as is requisite on a crowded Tube) and using a heavily ink-saturated drawing tool (such as a Sharpie), it is possible to make quick gestural sketches of folks on the train or waiting at the platform relatively inconspicuously.

Here are a few examples. As you will see, they are pretty crap. But, Old Ken would submit that it is an interesting experiment to try to adapt one's hand-eye coordination to the demands of working rapidly on such a small surface and with one's limbs basically compressed in upon the torso. As Jack White once said of his two person band: "It wouldn't excite me if there weren't those limitations, if we weren't living in that box, if we weren't trapped." Wise words.


Here, you'll see a vignette of some people waiting for the bus in that most attractive of all possible hams—Lewisham; and a creepy-looking man on the Tube, who sufficiently evoked a character in a Francis Bacon painting that I thought I'd share him with you. Whee!

Is it April Fool's Day Already?

Now, as many of you know, Old Ken is not a terribly political guy. Nonetheless, that said, per se ... Paul Wolfowitz. The man famed for spitting on his comb and running it through his disgusting coif at the beginning of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911; the ideological bastard-spawn of Leo Strauss and central mover and shaker in Pentagon neo-con circles; architect of the disastrous Iraq war. This criminal as the head of the World Bank? Are you kidding me?

When I read this news, Old Ken's emotions oscillated at staccato pulse between reeling nausea, blinding rage and just deep, deep sadness at the absurd, ugly horror of the world we live in. These feelings were assuaged a bit by sending some desperate rants to my congress-people, an option I hope you too, friend, may seize as a means of combating this atrocity.

Although Old Ken likes to share the lighter side of things with you, there are some dark, occulted montrosities that cannot go without note. I need you to be aware of this one, friend, so that we can take action together. Dragons everywhere! Time for a bonfire!

Sharing, the Old Ken Way: An Experiment

Do you collect things? Perhaps you have a favorite kind of object—porcelain swans, records, antique cars? I know how various your tastes are! Well, if there is anything Old Ken collects, it would probably be t-shirts. Inexpensive, light weight, and yet surprisingly elusive (at least when you are trying to find something perfectly delightful), the t-shirt has a real charm for an itinerant figure like Old Ken. Displaying one's t-shirt collection is of course a simple matter in real life; one just adorns all of the shirts one owns and then ceremoniously peels off layer after layer as is demanded by conversation or convenience. But how to show and tell on the internet?

Well, what you see above (believe it or not) is a close-up of a Rick Springfield t-shirt yours truly found at a thrift store in Chicago a few years ago. While I won't bore you with an academic discourse on semiotics, this shirt must certainly be considered something closer to a Peircean symbol rather than an icon as it is only by dint of conventional agreement that we could possibly be satisfied that this image represents matinée idol Rick Springfield rather than some ghoulish version of the Incredible Hulk (as our uninstructed senses might tell us). As we are on the topic (well, kind of), I'd just ask you to take a moment to appreciate Sir Rick's chest hair; insignificant as it seems to have been to the t-shirt maker to attend to Mr. Springfield's physiognomy, loving detail has been lavished on his hirsute breast. Rightly so, of course.



As seems to be the fate of the t-shirt collector, Old Ken has never really been able to incorporate this object into his wardrobe. The cotton-blend fabric seems to have shrunk and streched simultaneously such that the shirt is extremely wide and very short. Therefore, it has seemed best to keep this garment as a memento, totem, or life coach—not as a sartorial option.



A similar state of affairs has come to pass with the t-shirt you see excerpted above. Enormously proportioned and composed of a rather repulsive-feeling fabric, this t-shirt nonetheless bears a compelling truth of our times (in glitter no less)! Beyond its sheer resonance with all of my various moods, part of my reason for particularly appreciating this phrase is that it maps nicely onto the penultimate section of a iconic song by one of my favorite bands. For those of you who would like to hear that fine, fine piece of music (and who should have a Quicktime or similar player), the mp3 is posted below. Old Ken is sure that there must be a better way to post such quality, and he'll see if he can figure it out in the future. But, for now, please enjoy in moderation.

01%20beer%20bar%20eats.mp3

Art wrestles Life; We All Win

Despite being A Man from A Place, Old Ken often finds his bootheels a-wandering. Of late, Oxford is one place where our elusive peripatetic sometimes lays his head. And it was there on the High Street (not far from the location where seventeenth century experimental philosopher par excellence, Robert Boyle, kept an 'elaboratory') that Old Ken discovered the object you see here. Perched upon a waist-high black metal cabinet, this peculiar rectangular cage keeps its secrets well. Given the finely knit grid of the cage's netting (approximately one inch by one inch), the walls would seem to have been designed to restrain the movements of some relatively small being/s. Now, as this kind of gridding would be perfectly useless containment for mosquitoes or fleas, it would seem safe to infer that the target entity must be somewhat larger than these fine insects. But what might it be?



Observing this curious contraption from various angles, we may note that it seems to have been carfully fitted out to accommodate some highly peculiar needs. In its eastern-most corner, huddled up against the buttery stone face of Queen's College, are three cylindrical projectiles of varying heights. The smallest appears to be little more than a stoppered bottle, like those in which rubber cement or paste are distributed. Clearly, the target species has some interest either in attaching materials together and/or the hallucinogenic properties of industrial inhalants. To its left, our second projectile resembles a small desk lamp, its silvery shaft terminating in an ivory cone. Behind this odd couple towers the most substantial of our inanimante denizens—a titanium-toned flashlight standing upright in all its glory.

But what or whom has this contraption been designed to inhibit? Having contemplated this fascinating spectacle on trips in and out of the nearby Bodleian Library, Old Ken has been unable to shake the sense that this odd conjunction of elements is a crafted environment of some sort. But who might live here? The closest analogue I have been able to produce is to the cage format often used to keep domestic rodents—gerbils, guinea pigs, and the like. Perhaps, this outdoor cage is designed to house a special, highly-durable sort of rodent whose food emanates from the small glass bottle. Further, we might suppose that the white cone really is a lampshade, perhaps to protect the rodent's sensitive eyes as it gnaws on root-vegetables long into the night. Let us ignore the third projectile. As I have never seen any living creatures within this device, the most plausible scenario seems to be that we are witness here to a work of conceptual art—namely, a home for an invisible guinea pig.

What I suppose I'd like to suggest with all of this is that once you begin to look for it, you can find art (conceptual or otherwise) everywhere. Indeed, below you will see an amazing work on paper (formerly in Old Ken's personal collection; current location unknown), which was found on the streets of Oakland, California. Intriguingly, the bold design you see here was actually on the verso; the recto was occupied with administrative communications regarding "a plan" and queries to see if this design was suitable (yes!).



As Old Ken was unable to see this image as anything other than a rather lurid winking face, I was deeply intrigued by the possibility that it might be part of some larger plan. What could this plan possible be? And how could I get involved? Well, sure enough, both paper and electronic addresses were attached on the recto. Dutifully, I communicated both the drawing and the contents of the text to an address in Phoenix, Arizona. When I hear back you, dear friend, will be the first to know.

Why? Or, Ashmolean Musings

Okay, so "Why?" is not the most original title Old Ken has ever come up with for a blog entry. Yet, as Hemingway taught us, sometimes blunt simplicity is necessary. And on occasions such as this, they are. Oh, are they ever! Were this not a blog, I would ask you, friend, to close your eyes and give yourself over to the imaginative play I am going to ask you to stage in upon the proscenium of your mind. Yet, unless you have a speaking feature on your computer that you have trained to read websites to you (or a butler or family pet to perform such functions), I appreciate that you will need to use your eyes to read the words entailing the situation I'd like you to imagine. Well, at least close one of your eyes to get the feel.

So, here we go: imagine you are in a museum cafe. You have just had a powerful cup of overpriced coffee and choked down a stale brownie. You look around you: the women in scarves are spread across the place as thickly as mayonnaise on a British sandwich. The agitation has begun to set in; perhaps it is nature that now calls you, or maybe the sight of so many scarves makes you newly conscious of the need to wash your hands before you run upstairs and fondle the museum's precious contents. (I like to think I run a pretty clean blog, so let's make like it's the latter case). Well, as you make your way out of the cafe (step carefully around the baby carriage—remember what happened last time?), you pass into the hallway. That's where you see it: a papier maché half-length "portrait" of the seventeenth-century founder of the museum. The question begins to well now in the depths of your diaphragm, resonating off your spleen until bursting forth from the epiglottis over and over again: "Why? Why? Why?"



Now, one can imagine or see such things. One may even be tempted to photograph them, noting that such monstrosities were assembled by some (presumably rabid) band of school children who masticated gobs of construction paper until it was ready to be cobbled together to form this "likeness" of Elias Ashmole (the poor man). Yet, something happens when (say) weeks later, one finds oneself in another museum in provincial Britain. While examining a fine collection of Baroque portraits (note the imperious Oliver Cromwell reflected in the mirror below) and genre paintings, one realizes that the museum staff has provided both the accoutrements worn in a Vermeer-esque interior and a mirror in which visitors observe themselves so decked out. Now, Old Ken regretfully reports that he was not able to really put on one of the lovely satin dresses shown flanking the mirror; however, I did think I cut quite a dashing figure in the feathered hat kindly provided for those of the early modern dandy persuasion (hello?).



I have a friend who managed to integrate discussion of such museum display techniques into one of his comprehensive examinations: silly academics! But, to Old Ken, it seems to underscore a sense of desperation among the curators—as if it requires some extravagant measures of "interactivity" to get people interested in the early modern period. I mean, can you imagine providing costumes so that museum-goers could dress up like Van Gogh (perhaps a bloody scarf to wrap around one's head) or providing a bunch of bathrobes so people could imitate the postures of those wretched paintings by Jim Dine (sweet, sweet Jim Dine)? Can you imagine having school children make a papier maché bust of (say) Peggy Guggenheim and then placing it in the entryway to the museum in Bilbao? Absurd as these travesties would be, such is the reality to which we partisans of the early modern period see great works of art subjected in the paste-covered hands of those who would tart them up like so many Saturday-night strumpets!

Oh well, time to go change my colostomy bag and soak my dentures.

A Tale of Two Possets; Or, My Philosophical Dream, Part II

Do you like wine? Many people do. But what do you think of wine when it is combined with sherry? While contemplating that pleasing mixture, let me push you a little further. That is, eggs: do you like them? And cream? Now, what if you were to have the succulent experience of being able to combine all of these ingredients together? Wouldn't that be delicious? No, friend; that would be what I like to call "posset."

Not so long ago, it was Ken's good fortune to be able to try the following recipe for "An Excellent Posset" from the hands of my seventeenth century namesake:

Take a half pint of sack, and as much Rhenish wine, sweeten them to your taste with sugar. Beat ten yolks of eggs, and eight of whites exceeding well, first taking out the cocks-tread, and if you will the skins of the yolks; sweeten these also, and pour them to the wine, add a stick or two of cinnamon bruised, set this upon a chafing-dish to heat strongly, but not to boil; but it must begin to thicken. In the mean time boil for a quarter of an hour three pints of cream seasoned duly with sugar and some cinnamon in it. Then take it off from boiling, but let it stand near the fire, that it may continue scalding hot whiles the wine is heating. When both are as scalding-hot as they can be without boiling, pour the cream into the wine from as high as you can. When all is in, set it upon the fire to stew for about 1/8 of an hour. Then sprinkle all about the top of it the juice of a 1/4 part of a limon [i.e. a lemon]; and if you will, you may strew powder of cinnamon and sugar, or ambergreece [that is, to quote the OED, “a wax-like substance of marbled ashy color, found floating in tropical seas, and as a morbid secretion in the intestines of the sperm-whale. It is odoriferous and used in perfumery; formerly in cookery"] upon it.

Is your mouth watering yet? Well, scrumptious as it sounds, there was some confusions amongst our philosophical community as to whether the posset should be served warm or chilled. Once we tasted the thick, rich concoction cold, it was readily determined that it needed (desperately) to be heated and to be augmented with strong liquor ("fire-water," if you will). Posset and Jack Daniels was offensive to all that is holy; posset and gin was nauseating. In fact, as friend Damo's cautious expression below will suggest, little could be added to posset (with the possible exception of amaretto) to make it pleasing to consume. Some dishes from the seventeenth century, one must conclude a bit sadly, are simply to rich for the effete modern palate.

Equally rich but utterly dissimilar in its gustatory pleasures (at least from Old Ken's perspective) was the "scholarly posset" I was so lucky as to be able to sample last night. For, no less a figure than Michael Fried was in the fair city of London, in part to deliver a lecture on contemporary photographer Jeff Wall. As I am sure that this topic may be of interest to you, friend—especially as we await the arrival of Mr. Fried's study of contemporary photography, the provocatively-titled "Ontological Pictures"—I want share my account of the talk. If you want to skip the details and get to the basic "punch-lines" of the talk (as far as I understood them), just scroll to the end.

Mr. Fried began the talk with a discussion of Jeff Wall's photograph entitled "Adrian Walker Drawing from an Anatomical Specimen ...," an image that is mounted on a light-box and displayed on the wall in the manner of an oil canvas. In the photograph, we see Walker seated at full length on a rotating chair in an antiseptic, tiled office. Light pours in from the window we infer must be opposite him. Walker gazes in the direction of the light, as he seems to contemplate the partially finished, red-chalk drawing spread out upon the diagonal drawing board before him. A flayed arm—ostensibly the subject of his drawing—lies before him on a green felt cloth, positioned between Walker's body and the window. As a slight digression, I should note that from the very beginning of the talk, the relations between speaker and artist were framed in a very curious way. Fried quoted passages from Wall's writing wherein the artist explained the ambitions of his work through reference to Fried's scholarship (particularly, the seminal "Absorption and Theatricality"). Fried, meanwhile, quoted lengthy passages from personal letters from Wall, and confessed that the two have become friends. So, to work through Wall's self-conceived debt to Fried, we were treated to a whirlwind review of the major arguments from "Absorption ..." (particularly via reflections on Chardin's "House of Cards," wherein Fried ingeniously argues that the two playing cards which press up against the picture plane—one facing out toward the viewer, the other turned away—emblematize or thematize the structure of the picture itself insofar as it is simultaneously facing outward toward the beholder and yet also turned it, absorbed into its own concerns).

In his historical and critical studies alike, Fried has opposed this kind of "absorptive," rapt attention to within artworks to "theatricality" or the kind of mincing play to the beholder's presence that Fried had so abhorred in Minimalist sculpture. (In a great quote along these lines, Fried described Tony Smith's "Die" [a gigantic black cube that looks like one of a pair of dice without the white dots] as "the enemy of mankind"!) Evocative of this absorptive tradition as Wall's "Adrian Walker ..." is, we are wrong to read the photograph as a candid "snapshot" of someone so engrossed in their activities that they don't detect the fact that they are being made an object of representation. Indeed, as Wall explains, the photographs are re-enactments, theatrical restagings of people in their normal activities—a kind of collaboration between artist and sitter. But does interjection of this theatrical set up do anything to compromise their absorptive power? No, claims Fried. Since the work of Caravaggio and the Carracci in the early seventeenth century, he argues, artists have developed a number of absorptive motifs which can be deployed as a "matrix of realism." It is the "magic of absorption," moreover, that these motifs can be reused and theatrically staged (presumably within certain limits) that they nonetheless still work, still convince us that the sitter in the picture (for example) is not paying any attention to us and is completely engrossed in their own world (despite the fact that they are only present to us by virtue of a representation that is made to be seen).

Having situated Wall within this absorptive tradition, Fried then turned his sights on higher stakes—namely, recuperating Wall and other "ambitious photographers" into the High Modernist project Fried himself had touted in the 1960s and which has subsequently been deemed totally irrelevant to contemporary art. As a slight aside, I should note that Fried made this point by saying something like "High Modernism is not dead; while thus deemed by so-called post-modernism, history has been moving on in its own direction" and all the while snapping his fingerings and making this kind of rotating hand gesture (perhaps an invocation of that old friend, dialectics?). I felt like I was at a beat poetry recital! Anyway, our speaker wanted to develop these larger claims by way of Wall's "Morning Cleaning at Mies Van der Rohe's Pavillion, Barcelona," an enormous (11' x 6') back-lit photograph showing a horizontally-aligned view into the reconstructed Pavilion Mies had built for a World's Fair(?) in the process of being cleaned by a single worker, who washes a window with his back to us. Pardon the crappy description here, but I need to catch a bus soon and I am yet to get to Wittgenstein (eek!). So, Fried makes a really beautiful move here from the engrossed action of the window washer to Wall's writing on the nature of photography in a 1989 essay called "Photography and Liquid Intelligence." There, Wall had elaborated what he saw as the atavistic nature of film photography by virtue of its need for water-based processes, which connected it to dyeing, the melting of ores, and other primordial crafts. As Wall acknowledged in this essay, such "liquid intelligence" was being replaced by the "dry intelligence" of digital photography, whose processes the photographer also made use of in the production of his images.

Should we then read "Morning Cleaning ..." as a kind of allegory of photographic "liquid intelligence"? Maybe, but maybe not, Fried claims. Indeed, like his collaborative method of working more broadly, our speaker suggested, we need to see Wall's work as inseparably binding the intentional and the contingent. And in this way, Fried proposes, his work has particular attentiveness to the everyday. Now, as readers of Fried will know, there are many different variants of "the everyday." In his work on Menzel, we are given an account of the Kierkegaardian everyday, which is posed as a "positive," prehistory to the negative valuations of the everyday given by folks like Heidegger. Well, here, we were treated to the Wittgensteinian everyday and Fried's reading of it based upon a 1930 essay published in a collection called "Culture and Value." There, Wittgenstein is musing that there is nothing more impressive or interesting than to see a man who doesn't known he is being observed. Wittgenstein then proposes a thought experiment: he asks us to imagine a theater where we see a man unaware of being seen. This, our philosopher claims, would be a truly great work of art. Indeed, he continues, only art can give us the individuality of the thing in a way that is worth seeing; such are compels us to see the thing in the right way, and pulls it out of mere nature.

So much for Wittgenstein. Fried then went into a lengthy exegesis of this text, which I will spare you. But, the punch-lines as I understood them were these: 1) despite his specific evocation of the theater in this thought experiment, neither theater nor cinema would have been media capable of satisfying the criteria described by Wittgenstein. Instead, Fried argues, it is the new kind of photography done by friends like Wall that is capable of showing us what is worth seeing in the everyday, or of seeing the everyday "the right way." 2) What this new photography has done is to produce a new, "good" kind of objecthood—a category of being that was utterly unbearable for Fried in essays like "Art and Objecthood." Presumably, it is this capacity of new photographs to rip objects out of the everyday (so to speak) that constitutes their status as the aforementioned "Ontological Pictures." Rich, delicious posset-y food for thought, indeed!