JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing

By Erica N. Cardwell

MARCH 2022 | Art Books

A songbook attentive to corporeal language-making processes often dismissed as impediments. The Clearing is not a metaphor—a symbol for clarity or realization—but an activation of ever-present clarity.

Oh, Say Can you Sing?

By Hannah B Higgins

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Critics Page

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about idols as something to sound: We imagine the hollow, golden calf that horrified Moses as full of air, a mere bloviator on behalf of the Canaanite fertility god, Baal. But Nietzsche pushes the reader to go further, to listen to the idol’s “famous hollow sound” as someone with “ears behind his ears,” which invitation theorizes sound about sound. WJT Mitchell theorizes metapictures along similar lines; they consist of “a picture in which the image of another picture appears” and which “may function as a foundational metaphor or analogy for an entire discourse.”

Ruby Sky Stiler: New Patterns

By Jared Quinton

MARCH 2022 | ArtSeen

Whenever I’ve been lucky enough to see Ruby Sky Stiler’s work in person, I’ve come away thinking about the idea of the material metaphor. By this I mean something like the collapse of subject and content into form and expression; a mode in which the meaning of a work inheres in the material itself and how it is used by the artist, as opposed to one in which material is subservient to expression.

Better a Good Ear than a Good Law

By Peter Goodrich

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Critics Page

It is a hoary saw of common law, and forgive the rhyme, that arguments from precedent should sound. Like most oracular juridical pronouncements this invocation of a syntonics of casuistry, a euphony of edicts, is somewhat opaque. Judges will often intone that an argument sounds in law, that it is on all fours with prior decisions, and this appears to mean that it rings, chimes, or tinkles like a clashing of cymbals or roll of drums announcing the onward march of the legion of legists or the achievement of a perfect pitch such that harmonizes with the choir of juristic precedents. The sounding, however, goes unexamined, the word astray as if a mere metaphor or esoteric reference, some croaking divinity or old-fashioned idol lost now in the mists of the immemorial and time, as they say, out of mind.