February 3, 2007
Remediation
Thursday, a day long workshop at Stanford, on bio-preparedness (or more accurately lack of bio-preparedness) led by Richard Danzig.
Remediation is one of the key technical terms that folks from the national labs use. It seems to mean ‘bring back to acceptable levels.’
Many interesting interventions: one from a vetenary specialist talking about how much anthrax is found in the soil after minor outbreaks with cattle.
concepts floating invisibly across domains. Who will chart this motion?
Contemporary, continued
Walking back to Kroeber Hall, I bump into Tim Clark and tell him how much I liked his recent book, “The Face of Death,” a very intriguing attempt his experiences viewing two paintings by Poussin at the Getty over a period of several months. He records how he sees the pictures day by day as the light changes with cloud cover or bright lights, etc. Quite amazing to read this British, highly erudite, deeply anti-capitalist, thinker address the paintings of this French painter, which are, after all, highly aesthetic. There are a few occasions in the book when Tim let’s loose from the erudition and the description to decry the idea that the current age of images is somehow liberating. I tell him that this sounds like a version of the “contemporary” that we are using, he smiles, thanks me, and says the contemporary is one of his key concepts as well. Off he goes to the museuem and me to write letters of recommendation.