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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Remembering Jacques Ellul

We do live in history, and this age is hard to bear. Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment
To be of one’s time means to attend to the nature of the times. It means resisting the siren call of the day’s enthusiasms—zeal for environmentalism, sustainability, multiculturalism, global fixes, et alia—in order to stay mindful of the root character of those enthusiasms and their ultimate ends. In short, it means becoming a critic of one’s time. Jacques Ellul, devoted to the life of the spirit no less than the life of the mind, was a critic of the highest order. Continue Reading

Keeping It Lite

It was a gift from the Sixties, our user-friendly funeral Mass. Every time I attend one, I come away convinced that resurrection is in the bag. In keeping with the confident, self-affirming modern cosmology that animates our memorials, it is as if the dead were already risen. So why not just strike a commemorative medallion and be done with it? I remember the service arranged for . . . call him Stan. Friends and family stepped to the lectern with smiling eulogies. Continue Reading

Pilgrim Art

Mortals that would follow me, Love Virtue, she alone is free; She can teach ye how to clime Higher than the Spheary chime. John Milton, “Lydidas” What do you mean, “Pilgrim art”? There wasn’t any. Precisely. There was none as we moderns understand it: a product of leisure and affluence enjoyed largely by spectators. The concept had no hold on their attention. They did not conceive of culture as we do, as a kind of sauce spread like Bechamel over the nexus of values that animate a civilization. Continue Reading

Art in the Mantle of Science

The trouble is that modern art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products’ still being truth. This is where science certain aspects of science are seized upon, assimilated, or sometimes simply plagiarized in decorative words, so as to bolster up art’s claim to cognitive value. One such use, and it is a curious reversal of Aristotle, is the boast of factuality: the work of the artist is said to be research; his creations are findings.
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All Hallow’s Eve

It cannot be said that a man endures death easily or uneasily when he does not think about it at all. He who feels nothing, endures nothing. —Voltaire
When did I stop liking Halloween? Was it when parents horned in and started dressing up along with their kids? When the previous director of my town library celebrated Hallowmas by showing up in drag? [Honest. He did.] When all the local merchants turned shop windows over to middle schoolers to paint—in washable gouache—ghosts, witches and tombstones that go BOO? Continue Reading
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