« Art Critics' Reading List
RENE MORALES
 |
René Morales is Curator at Miami Art Museum, soon to be redubbed Pérez Art Museum Miami. Previously, he worked at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. He is working concurrently on three original exhibitions for the opening of the new Herzog and de Meuron-designed PAMM building: a large-scale, site-specific sculpture by Monika Sosnowska, a survey of the work of Amelia Peláez, and a large show of selections from The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. |
 |
Fernand Braudel. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century [Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life (1969); Vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce (1979); Vol. 3: The Perspective of the World (1979)]. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. The sheer amount of knowledge contained within the three volumes of Braudel’s epic tome is humbling. Select a page at random and you will learn about the significance of the various speeds at which a document traveled from London to Venice in 1500, 1686 and 1765. Choose again and find a crisp summation of the development of paper money. It is easy to get lost in Braudel’s nearly fetishistic explorations of the biographies of material things—chimneys, barrels, candles, etc. Yet the book’s true importance lies in its methodological innovations. Braudel combined an emphasis on the lowly and mundane with deep archival research and a synchronic, non-linear approach to the recounting of history. This potent concoction brings the past into vivid focus. Braudel’s legacy may have suffered with the subsequent rise of skepticism toward the explanatory power of grand narratives, but one need only note the importance of his work to Manuel DeLanda, for example, to see its compatibility with our neo-materialist times.
|
 |
Tony Bennett. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. In Bennett’s hands, the early history of museums proves an ideal subject for Foucauldian analysis, so deeply implicated as this institution was in the transition from monarchic to modern orders of power. Bennett’s account is profoundly illuminating with respect to fundamental issues of curating, such as the complicated dynamics between public and private collections; the impulse to narrativize artworks while maximizing their aesthetic potential; and the deep implications of the museum’s architectural space. There is an alternate art history to be told premised on the ways in which art and museums have impinged on each other’s respective evolutions since the 18th century. While such an analysis falls beyond Bennett’s scope, his work remains an essential point of departure, not only for those interested in the museum-as-object, but for anyone who wishes to gain a long view on modern and contemporary cultural production.
|
 |
Michael Leja. Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. The competition for my third selection was fierce: Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture”; Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another; Saskia Sassen, The Global City; Gerardo Mosquera (ed.), Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America; DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History …But the prize goes to Michael Leja. Along with the book that serves as its methodological uncle—Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art—this profound study had the effect of cementing my belief in the visual/material-culture approach to the interpretation of art. In retrospect it seems obvious that one should look for insights into Pollock’s conception/depiction of the unconscious, for example, not in Freud but in American film noir and in the dime-store, pseudo-psychological pulp literature of the era. As far as “straight” art history goes, this one’s a standard-bearer.
|
