Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
John Morris, Untitled, 1993−1997, ink on watercolor paper, 10¼ × 7⅛ inches. All images courtesy D’Amelio Terras.
The art historian Carl Schusler’s vast archives document the decoding of patterns originating in the culture of the Paleolithic. Painted, scratched, woven, carved, and tattooed, these patterns represent statements of kinship and illustrations of genealogical history connecting the wearer or maker to ancestors (thus providing identity) and ultimately to the great genetic chain of being.
They survived over thousands of years, across all continents and in many cases outlived the cultures that preserved them, pattern as an unconscious language, whose origins and meanings were long forgotten. It was somehow preserved in custom and tradition.
The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter describes art as a great echo chamber reverberating with ancient images—these are the rooms in Queens, New York where a man is intensely focused in intuitive search, fascinated by patterns and systems. Are these drawings contemporary tartans and heraldic symbols commemorating corporate identities headed by ancestral beings wearing the transparent masks of CEOs? I believe so.
—Adam Fuss
John Morris, Bob Noyce Tribute, (Bob Noyce is an Intel executive), 1998, wax crayon and ink on paper, 10¼ × 7 inches.
John Morris, Untitled, 1997, wax crayon, ink, graphite on paper, 10¼ × 14⅛ inches.
For the past five years, artist Margaret Ross Tolbert has been traveling to southern Turkey to the site of ancient Lycia, an autochthonous culture with roots in the Bronze Age, later Hellenized, and eventually controlled by the Romans.
“I’m fighting between control and letting nature take its course.”
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Janine Antoni, Yayoi Kusama, Jenny Diski, Michael Cunningham, Simon Ortiz, Petuuche Gilbert, Simon Winchester, Gary Sinise, Thomas Vinterberg, and Marc Ribot.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
