Our Faculty, Elsewhere on the Web #1

Our faculty are hard at work not only for the Brooklyn Institute but also in other venues. Please check out some of their recent work around the web:

Abby Kluchin, “Only Connect…:” Super Sad True Love Story and the Semiotics of Palo Alto” at Rethinking Religion

“…In person, Shteyngart didn’t seem ready just yet to mourn the death of the possibility of this encounter, although Super Sad is certainly, among other things, an elegy for its vanishing. The question that Shteyngart, deliberately fiddling with what he called his ‘iTelephone,’ asked is, should he, as a writer (and, I sensed, equally as a reader), stick to his guns about the importance of this encounter with this singular rudimentary technology, or should he adapt? Super Sad suggests in its very form and its engagement with social media, albeit primarily in the mode of blistering critique, that Shteyngart will adapt, though, certainly, he will not go gentle into that buzzing digital night. But the conversation, as well as the audience, was filled with nostalgia. Shteyngart didn’t bring up E.M. Forster, but I thought repeatedly, as he spoke, of Forster’s famous, poignant plea from Howard’s End: “Only connect . . .” And then I went to Palo Alto…”

Christine Smallwood, Monkey Eat Monkey at Triple Canopy:

“A year and a half ago, Triple Canopy published a work by artist Karthik Pandian called “Sacrifice of the Banana.” The project consists of a six-minute film shot in Thanjavur, India, two quotes, and a few highly saturated photographs: a pair of stiff and hairy monkey sculptures facing off against a wall drenched in aqua; a cluster of spotted bananas against speckled stone; a billboard featuring a woman with two mouths and four eyes. It’s about color as much as anything else. The first quote, which precedes the film, is a George Bataille line swimming in a bright yellow and orange bath: “Every animal is in the world like water in water.” The sentence is sort of an epigraph to what follows, and sort of continuous with it. It’s from an essay in which Bataille claims that what defines the animal is immanence—the animal does not experience itself as a subject separate from a world of objects…”