On Poliquin's 'Breathless Zoo'
One example is a recent exhibition of taxidermied polar bears culled from homes, museums, and collections around the U.K. Long a powerful symbol of strength and solitude, now a mnemonic for the losses wrought by climate change, the polar bears in the exhibition, “briefly together but solitary,” illustrate for Poliquin the emotional potency of preserved dead animals and the inexorable intellectual and cultural ideologies that determine how and why they are killed, prepared, and displayed. In this exhibition, she sees our attention drawn critically to both an outdated British cultural imaginary of conquest and mastery as well as to the uncanny displacement of the natural world, which serves as a reflection of the “wistfulness,” “waiting,” “loneliness,” and “absence” that filters our relationship to the environment in crisis. These two moments of history called up by the doubly displaced polar bears crystallize some basic questions of taxidermy as practice and artifact: is it symbolic or individual? Victimized or saved? Animal or object? Poliquin suggests that it is the polar bears’ “ambiguity that makes them such potent objects.”
Remembering Eric Hobsbawm, Historian for Social Justice
...Hobsbawm is best known for his magisterial four-volume series The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987) and The Age of Extremes (1994), which together chronicles world history from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the Soviet Union. Long before the current vogue for “internationalizing” the study of history, Hobsbawm insisted that capitalism is a global system, which must be studied in a global context. The books drew on events in every region of the world, and on sources and scholarship in multiple languages. Hobsbawm was comfortable discussing subjects as far afield from Great Britain as the Latin American wars of independence, the Meiji Restoration in Japan and the rise to global power of the United States, yet he was able to merge local details into a coherent account of global political, economic and social change. The account also delves into art, culture, science, technology and other realms of human creativity and experience. These books remain the starting point for anyone who seeks a comprehensive history of the modern world...
Album reviews | The Go-Betweens – Quiet Heart (EMI Australia)
There’s a recurring idea in David Nichols’ excellent Go-Betweens book, the belief that The Smiths were unfairly taken to heart by the world’s introverted bookworms when The Go-Betweens were obviously so much better, so much more literary etc, but there’s a teenage desperation at the heart of The Smiths’ music that The Go-Betweens never touched. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As someone who loved the Smiths as a teenager — and still in some respects admire them — I’m not a teenager anymore. In my 20s, I liked the Go-Betweens. In my 30s I loved them. As I prepare to enter my 40s, I am in awe of them. By the time I reach my 60s, they might be all I listen to...
