Essays
Going home singing: The Analects of Simon Leys
Analects are gleanings, crumbs under the table, fragments of old text that, in the case of Confucius, have coalesced into a classic. Simon Leys, his latest translator and annotator, seldom misses an opportunity to remind us just how ragged and loopy this little book is — a mere one hundred pages in this edition (requiring another hundred pages of irresistible notes). The Analects consists of brief passages of partially recorded or remembered conversations between the Master and a set of often unidentified interlocuters.
James Turrell’s Within without: A User’s Guide
I would argue that Within without is the most significant and praiseworthy international art purchase the NGA has made to date. It is exactly the sort of contemporary art the NGA should be collecting: work that smaller institutions with less space and resources could not commission; work that alters our perception; work that can foster a genuine sense of collective ownership; work that challenges viewers to move beyond their habitual ways of looking at art.
Universities and the Block
Pyne is attempting to divert the function and aims of knowledge in our society. His policy clinches and fully institutionalises the worldview that understands education entirely as a private good. The public benefits of major scientific discovery, rigorous social diagnosis, and cultural imagination will henceforth be the generous efflorescence of private ambition.
‘I have had my vision’
The more I go on, the more I am convinced that a great book is one which leads its readers away from the worn path of what they already know, to a wild and unfamiliar place where new logics and understandings can take hold. But of course there is nothing new in this – it is what any gifted editor has always known: that each book is its own wild creature, and that sometimes it is in disorder and inconsistency and ambiguity where the greatest art lies.