On was an interdisciplinary graduate periodical established by RISD graduate students in 2006. It featured essays and student work that related to a general issue theme. On was intended as a quarterly publication, but it is unclear if further issues beyond the first were ever published.
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Fact and Fiction: Writing the Difference Between Suicide and Death
John Carvalho
Did Michel Foucault die of AIDS or did he kill himself? Did he knowingly infect others in the bath houses in San Francisco or was he unaware that he was ill and of how less-than-safe sex could spread the same virus that infected him? What did he know about AIDS/HIV and what do we know about what he knew? Answers to these questions are ambiguous. This is due, in part, to the culture of homosexuality and the cultural response to AIDS/HIV at the time. It is also due to the conflicting reports about what Foucault knew, and when, in the press, in biographies and in a roman á clef that claims to tell the truth about Foucault in fiction. What are the facts in this case and where do we find them? This essay explores how facts became fiction and fiction became fact in the life and death of Michel Foucault.
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Pry on Murmurs II
Special Collections, Fleet Library, and Evah Fan
Cover for Pry on Murmurs II, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.
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Pry on Murmurs III
Special Collections, Fleet Library, and Evah Fan
Cover for Pry on Murmurs III, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.
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Colonization and Decolonization : A manual for Indigenous Liberation in the 21st Century
Special Collections, Fleet Library, Gord Hill, and Zig-Zag
Cover for Colonization and Decolonization : A manual for Indigenous Liberation in the 21st Century, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.
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Reflections on an Aesthetics of Touch, Smell and Taste
Mădălina Diaconu
Modern aesthetics regards sight and hearing as the only senses which were able to produce art. Touch, smell and taste might offer pleasant stimuli, but can never achieve the status of art objects. What are the arguments for this rejection, and are they still sustainable? This paper focuses on the general and specific difficulties of forming an aesthetics of touch, smell and taste; some can be overcome, while others are still waiting for a proper answer. At the same time, artistic movements, as well as changes in recent discussions of the aesthetics of everyday life prove the necessity of extending aesthetic theory to objects of all senses. Such a re-formulated theory is briefly outlined in the last section of the paper.
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Visionaire 50: Artist Toys
Stephan Gan, Cecilia Dean, James Kaliardos, and Alex Katz
1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations. Ten plastic nesting toys, each designed by a different artist, designer, writer. Each cube consists of six pieces. Artists: Alex Katz, R. Crumb, Chiho Aoshima, Rita Ackerman, Chip Kidd, Rob Pruitt, Kehinde Wiley, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Petro III, Tony Oursler. Toys are housed in a triangular shaped container. Container has a clear plastic lid with the title in silver. Library has no. 1132 of an edition of 4000. "For 50 ARTIST TOYS, Visionaire imagined a set of toys as animal companions to the designer figurines from 44 TOYS and 45 MORE TOYS. It consists of elaborate nesting dolls and acccessories silk-screened in designs by artists like Alex Katz, R. Crumb, and Tim Noble & Sue Webster. “The toy project was sweet on the outside and charming on the inside,” says artist Rob Pruitt. “I simply tacked Winston Churchill’s great quote (‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’) to it, decorated the surface with images of my beloved panda, and crossed my fingers that it would provoke the person playing with it to ponder our collective fascination with this beautiful, threatened creature.” – From visionaireworld.com
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Reunion
Karen Hanmer, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
hand sewn, foldout flaps, leather spine and upholstery fabric cover boards; cover; interior spreads and pages. A tender tribute to the lasting relationship of the artist's parents. Edition of 25 numbered and signed copies. Images of the author's parents, William and Frances Salic Cecil, are printed on rectos with folding overlay showing William Cecil in isolation; text on facing pages. "Vintage photographs [reproduced as pigment inkjet prints] and brief text document a couple's many separations and ultimate reunion. I began Reunion shortly after the death of my father. My mother predeceased him by 34 years. He never remarried. I am intrigued with the idea that they are now reunited, at least figuratively, and perhaps in a more tangible form"--Artist's website, viewed 9/7/2006. Awarded the Purchase Prize for "Maternal Legends," a national juried exhibition of contemporary artists' books held at 23 Sandy Gallery, Portland, Or., Dec. 2008. Library has copy no. 2. Gift in memory of Edythe Woolf Polsby-Salzberger.
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Wittgenstein and Haydn on Understanding Music
Yael Kaduri
Wittgenstein's remarks about music have motivated philosophers to build a comprehensive picture of his philosophy of music, concentrating on the central issues of musical meaning. It is often claimed that, according to Wittgenstein, understanding music consist in grasping the internal relationships between musical events. Musical practice, however, is naturally saturated with what philosophers often call extra-musical meanings. The present study, by considering a musical issue in Haydn's instrumental music, attempts to show that musical language games in the Wittgensteinian sense involve explanations of music that enhance the listener's ability to understand music by broadening his musical competence. Nevertheless, constituting understanding of music, these explanations might use professional musical terms as well as non-musical terms, comparisons, gestures and so on. Thus, though music does not goes beyond itself in the sense of being understood through correlations between purely musical "concepts" and extra-musical contents, it does go beyond itself in musical practice, which involves understanding music through explanations and descriptions of music using various kinds of terms and images.
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State of the Union: live, evil, vile
Scott McCarney, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
stab bound with soft cover and duct tape reinforced spine; cover; interior pages and spreads. President George W. Bush's televised 2003 State of the Union speech is captured in full screen head shots. The overlaying text, similar to close captioning, reveals nonsensical phrases made from the letters in the book's subtitle.
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Commitment and Communication: The Aesthetics of Receptivity and Historicity
Todd Mei
A general tension in contemporary aesthetics can be described as existing between objective truth claims and historical relativity. The former is generally represented by the Enlightenment approaches and its descendants that ground aesthetic judgment in rationality. The latter characterizes the postmodern appeal to historicity and the exposure of historical prejudice. Following mostly the hermeneutical philosophy of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Dupré, this paper argues how aesthetic theory, defined by either pole, inadequately accounts for historicity. In response to this critique, this paper attempts to navigate between these two poles in returning to an analysis of the nature of history and its phenomenological and ontological significance. It is in the very depth of the historical experience that aesthetics gains its greatest fecundity by means of its commitment to meaning and communication within history.
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Acid Candy Flag 13 (description), Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Classic Lights Components Flag 6 (description), Trend Fall / Winter 2006/07
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Classic Lights Components Flag 6, Trend Fall / Winter 2006/07
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Classic Lights Components Flag 7, Trend Fall / Winter 2006/07
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Classic Lights Components Flag 8, Trend Fall / Winter 2006/07
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Direkt Componenets Flag 7 (description), Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Direkt Componenets Flag 7 (detail), Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Direkt Componenets Flag 7, Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Direkt Componenets Flag 8, Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Direkt Componenets Flag 9 (detail), Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Direkt Componenets Flag 9, Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Direkt Componenets, Trend Spring / Summer 2006
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library
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Flat Blacks & Diamond Transfers Flag 3, Trends Fall / Winter 2006/07
Swarovski, Visual + Material Resources, and Fleet Library