James Elkins

James Elkins

After 19 years of work, my experimental novel called Five Strange Languages is being published by Unnamed Press. It’s a very large, complex project in five volumes. The first one, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, is out, and there’s also a vinyl record to go with it. The second, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, is coming out this summer.

I’m posting weekly contests on social media. Anyone who can guess the hidden allusions gets a free copy. Test your literary knowledge! Here is a list of contests that are currently open. If you can identify one, email me for your copy.

Five Strange Languages is a single mega-novel. Lots more information here (scroll down).

I have uploaded 75 short videos on art theory to Youtube. These are for art students. They cover media, politics, gender, the sublime, skill, formal analysis, craft, time, narrative, Eurocentrism, style, research, the body… lots of subjects.

[Updated January 2025. Pages with information about the novel update live.]

Recent uploads: the books Pictures and Tears, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, How to Use Your Eyes, and an essay on the complicity between torture and formal analysis. Another entire book free, on Academia: What is Interesting Writing in Art History? It’s on ways to write experimental art history.

 

This was the keynote talk to the 2002 NCECA (U.S. ceramics convention). It was originally to be published in their journal, but that never happened.

It’s an argument about the marginal place of ceramics in contemporary art history, art criticism, and museum and gallery curation. For several generations ceramists, curators, and critics have been trying to promote ceramics practices so that they can be more central to art historical narratives, art criticism, and museum and gallery display. “Postmodern ceramics,” multimedia installations, and new sculptural practices are among the attempts to move ceramics closer to the center or attention of the art world.

But ceramics is traditionally a secondary, ornamental, or optional medium in modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary art, and interventions in its behalf will not fundamentally alter that fact.

Instead I propose that ceramics emphasizes its materiality: in that way ceramics practices can be central to current discussions of artistic material, hypostasis, and phenomenology.

The paper is intended as a kind of position paper for people interested in the ways ceramic art presents itself in the art world; I also hope it can be of use to art history and art theory instructors, who can have some difficulty finding strategies for including ceramics in their survey classes.

This is a polemic paper, and all comments, suggestions, etc., are welcome.


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