A conversation in the Dun Cow, Durham. To continue with the concern that I shared yesterday – the ideology of land, property and labor transformed into aesthetic form – landscape. Images that disguise history? (guilty pleasures of the sublime picturesque) [Link] It is not difficult to identify various components of this aesthetic. (I recall dealing with…
cultural politics
landscape aesthetics and the ideology of pleasure
The Dun Cow, Durham. Early evening. In conversation with Bianca (Carpeneti). My early morning runs are troubling me deeply … these encounters with a sublime picturesque [Link] [Link] [Link] Photo – dawn on Holy Island. Watercolor – J.M.W. Turner (exhibited 1829) (the castle in the background) Turner’s figures in the landscape (they are on the…
writing ancient Egypt
I have just received a copy of Toby Wilkinson’s Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. The cover endorsements are enthusiastic; the blurb is packed with hyperbole and the promise of a roller-coaster soap-opera of pomp and ceremony, corruption and decadence, rulers with all-too-recognizable human emotions, in a book that will, we are told, become the…
Olmec Art
“Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico”, an exhibition of Olmec artifacts, is running at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Extraordinary pieces. Extraordinary presence. It was the first time we had come across them first hand. Here the monumental heads, zoomorphic basalt thrones, engobe ceramics, jadeite celts, are gently spotlit in that subdued ambient lighting…
Archaeology in risk society
Chris Witmore and I have a paper in “Unquiet Pasts” – the new book from Ashgate edited by Stephanie Koerner and Ian Russell – [Link] It is my latest presentation of the argument for a living past, a transitive past, tied now to a call for attention to matters of common and pressing human concern….
Mike Pearson | The Persians
Classics and the contemporary past Mike Pearson and his new production of Aeschylus Persians (National Theatre of Wales) gets a superb review in the Guardian today [Link] This is site-specific theatre with a vengeance. High up in the Brecon Beacons, in a mock-up village used by the military as a training-base, National Theatre Wales is…
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