| Green Lantern |

There has always been a question about whether or not art can be isolated from its historical context. Is it possible to separate a work from its creator and the linear progression of art that led to one single work? Certainly there are different schools of thought that address the problem, some erecting a scaffold of aesthetic principles that strain to achieve absolute heights, while others focus on the dialectic between the two aspects. It is difficult to marinating a purely aesthetic position. Work is not typically created out of a vacuum, and typically the artist has some awareness of how his contribution relates to his predecessors. Nevertheless there are moments when that relationship becomes ambiguous...

Download Ms. Picard's complete essay on Darger (PDF). You too can read this on the beach, but instead of bringing on the compulsion to laugh, ask yourself this question: Can we think about Darger as a pure artist, and not some goddamn janitor who shut himself from the rest of the world. And if he's so "outsider," or any artist for that matter, than what's it doing under the roof of art anyways. An exam will be issued in the upcoming weeks. For real.



		This essay will not be funny. Comedy is primarily a spatial function. It is spatial in that there must be a mediating, precise, distance between the subject, or comic, and the object. Somewhere between too close and too far, there is the comical. The comic—both in the active and passive sense—is endowed with the ability to see the world as a moment between these two extremes and focus in on the humorous mean. But the comic has little room in this mean. S/he takes great care to maintain a precise distance. If he moves too close to his object, there is no humor. If s/he moves too far from her object, there is no humor. Only if the comic keeps his object at an exact distance can the object reveal itself as being funny... Download Moshe's full essay (PDF), all done with a lovely layout. Print it out, read it on the beach below an umbrella and laugh at the sea. Or if in Chicago, lauch at Lake Michigan. This essay will help you with such.

		There has always been a question about whether or not art can be isolated from its historical context. Is it possible to separate a work from its creator and the linear progression of art that led to one single work? Certainly there are different schools of thought that address the problem, some erecting a scaffold of aesthetic principles that strain to achieve absolute heights, while others focus on the dialectic between the two aspects. It is difficult to marinating a purely aesthetic position. Work is not typically created out of a vacuum, and typically the artist has some awareness of how his contribution relates to his predecessors. Nevertheless there are moments when that relationship becomes ambiguous... Download Ms. Picard's complete essay on Darger (PDF). You too can read this on the beach, but instead of bringing on the compulsion to laugh, ask yourself this question: Can we think about Darger as a pure artist, and not some goddamn janitor who shut himself from the rest of the world. And if he's so "outsider," or any artist for that matter, than what's it doing under the roof of art anyways. An exam will be issued in the upcoming weeks. For real.