A Haphazard Aspirant's Reading List

Johan is the special guest at our June 2025 International Books Club. We will discuss TheSafekeep by Yael van der Wouden, and you want to be sure to join us because Johan is the right person in this city to give us a good perspective on this book and explain why it is so Dutch.

I remember when I had a subscription to Artforum - that essential document of the American artworld in its most international iteration - and there was the monthly 'books on my nightstand' rubric. Depending on who was being asked, the list was so haphazard as to cause suspicion that friends were canvassed for random titles or the response was so curated that we laughed at the anguished insecurity that must have accompanied the long hours spent producing a shortlist signaling all the virtues of the aspirant intellectual.

Well, here I am: a haphazard aspirant with a list. 

I'm prone to telling people what to read and Otto Kirchheimer's Political Justice remains a book I have foisted upon lawyers and thug-life friends alike; it's about the state and how the state retains power, but it also provides a roadmap for challengers to that power. Fast forward fifty-five years and Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy speaks truth to Kirchheimer's analysis. Thompson's meticulous documentation of the events surrounding a well-televised prison riot, its upwelling of revolutionary hope in a time of political instability and its violent repression by the state is a powerful lesson in human behavior.

How did those prisoners feel as they found an opportunity to rise up? How nervous and trigger-happy were the National Guard and State Police forces as they confronted the chaos of a filthy, overcrowded prison on a dreary day in September? Julia Kristeva's 1982 essay, Powers of Horror, both feminist and psychoanalytic when these ideas were undergoing radical change offers tools for comprehension. Add to the mix that the essay delved into sexuality, desire, fetish, and shame, and you can imagine what a classic of the American intellectual scene it became.  We posture and jockey for the ever-present-phone-camera these days; in 1971, as the tension built and the news cameras rolled up County Road 31, the same thing happened and men reverted to something primal; Kristeva's essay clarifies that picture.

An orgy happens and in the dull aftermath we are fuzzy, groping for our clothes and a story that explains this whole mess; and so it is with genocide and the putting down of rebellion. Institutional rape, the defilement of the body, the dehumanization of your neighbor; these are crimes we commit. Maurice Blanchot wrote The Writing of Disaster in 1980 and captured the sense of emptiness - the inability to describe the state of ourselves - in the aftermath of the horror.

Of course the Europeans - Kirchheimer, Kristeva and Blanchot - had all experienced the Second World War in a way that Americans never could. Harry Caudill's 1963 classic Night Comes to the Cumberlands is unburdened of Freud and Marx and the intellectual stew of pre-war France, it is a story of American self-discovery. Who pays for American prosperity?

How do those people live? Are their sequestered lives whole? Caudill answers these questions with love, respect, and dignity. American prosperity: what a wonder of the world. Can we imagine a world where the bright-eyed American consumer has not been admired, envied or vilified? Even in the early years of the twentieth century Walter Benjamin wandered the streets of Paris and mused on the plentiful objects produced only for our pleasure and the architectural wonders summoned to woo us. Benjamin was always best described as a flaneur and his Arcades reads like a pleasurable walk without destination; beautiful language binds philosophy to art to design to politics.

Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman was translated by Bernard Leach and published in 1971. The glass and steel arcades of Paris like the anonymous potters of Leach's obsession can be better understood with Yanagi's meditation on craft and its makers. Craft is not about the celebrity show; pop painters and personalities inseparable from their often modest productions. Yanagi understands craft to be beautiful because of the anonymous maker: there is no personal reward. The implications of Yanagi's thinking undermine our celebrity culture.

We are incessantly falling forward to death; the arc of our thinking might go from the deeply

self-obsessed to the greater human experiment and then slack off to understanding our scratchings as merely little objects shaped for millennia. Derek Jarman wrote Chroma as AIDS busily dismantled his body; sight deteriorated and memory forced its way forward yielding a meditation on art and beauty and its importance at the end of life.

And so my list is almost done. A Mathematician's Apology was written in 1940 by G.H. Hardy. A dubious inheritance of modern thinking is that art and beauty are a category apart from empiricism and

quantifiability; children of the past three or four generations in the West have been steered to one discipline and away from another to no good. Hardy provides a restorative: "A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. [...] The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."