“For we are afraid, I think. The legacy of postmodernism is this apolitical vacuousness and aesthetic relativism that does not want to call anything absolutely good or bad, that is scared of taking things too seriously.

We are now so impervious to the slings and arrows of the totes amazeballs fun world that only sad sacks complain. For irony is brilliant in short bursts, thus great on Twitter and Facebook. As David Foster Wallace said, though, irony cannot go the distance. He wrote of “trendy sardonic exhaustion”. Yes, I know exactly what that means. Lewis Hyde thought irony should be saved for emergencies and perhaps we are in an emergency now, but again he pointed out the problem with it: “Carried over time, it is the voice of those who come to enjoy their own cage.”

I want this cage to be rattled, at least. So what strikes me increasingly is that the most subversive thing anyone can do in this time of all–encompassing irony, is to care about something and do it well.”

- Suzanne Moore. I Have Had Enough of Irony.  The Guardian Online.  May 30, 2012.

Michael Kimmelman on Medellin’s Architecture

“I arrived in Medellín to see the ambitious and photogenic buildings that have gone up, but also to find what remains undone. The murder rate, while hardly low, is now under 60 per 100,000. Architecture alone obviously doesn’t account for the drop in homicides, but the two aren’t unrelated, either. Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself.”

- Michael Kimmelman. A City Rises, Along with its Hopes. The New York Times Architecture Review. May 18, 2012.

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My favorite writer at the Times expands on the city of Medellin’s architectural interventions.  Make sure to check out the images of many of the newer buildings in Medellin, including one of my favorites, The Parque Espana Biblioteca (The Espana Library), which I visited a few years ago, designed by Giancarlo Mazzanti.  I’m looking forward to getting to see the Orquideorama at the Medellin Botanical Garden someday in the coming years.

Unfortunately, as topical writing often goes, Kimmelman is contracted for a myopic and insular account of art that eschews the difficult social nature of these interventions in the midst of rampant injustice.  The financial decisions which politicize cosmetic and architectural beauty as a form of anesthesia are only hinted at, but not explored.  The form does not allow for it.  The architecture is an ethically questionable and difficult red herring to the political assassinations of community leaders and leaders of the displaced working for justice, and a return of their lands. 

Leaders of victims of forced displacement in Medellin and across the country, are still being threatened, targeted, and murdered by paramilitaries and guerrillas (and probably hired local police) as the promise of President Juan Manuel Santos to return stolen lands to their owners has become a tangible legal process in the country. 

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Linoleum Cuts by Mary Flannery O’Connor. 1940’s. From the Peabody Palladium and the Georgia State Women’s College newspaper, The Colonnade.

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“The visual arts became one of her favorite touchstones for explaining this process. Many disciplines could help your writing, she said, but especially drawing: “Anything that helps you to see. Anything that makes you look.” Why was this emphasis on seeing and vision so important to her in explaining how fiction works? Because she came to writing from a background in the visual arts, where everything the artist communicates is apprehended, first, by the eye.

She had developed the habits of the artist, that way of seeing and observing and representing the world around her, from years of working as a cartoonist. She discovered for herself the nuances of practicing her craft in a medium that involved communicating with images and experimenting with the physical expressions of the body in carefully choreographed arrangements. Her natural proclivity for capturing the humorous character of real people and concrete situations, two rudimentary elements she later asserted form the genesis of any story, found expression in her prolific drawings and cartoons long before she began her career as a fiction writer.”

- Excerpted from Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, edited by Kelly Gerald. The Paris Review Blog: Flannery O’Connor and the Habit of Art. April 30, 2012.