Richard Tuttle | Jacket2

The swerve of verse: Lucretius' 'Of Things' Nature' and the necessity of poetic form

The de-versification of Lucretius -- treating it as prose -- is an unintended theme of the most famous contemporary account of Of Things' Nature, Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011). Greenblatt begins The Swerve with an account of his youthful discovery of Lucretius through Martin Ferguson Smith's excellent prose translation. Greenblatt pretty much sticks to citing this prose version throughout his book, despite his nod to Dryden as the best for conveying Lucretius's "ardor" and also noting that he consulted all the translations.

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December 18, 2017

Richard Tuttle on Sanskrit and Islam — at Naropa University, Summer 2016

New at PennSound

“What Sanskrit Means to Me”

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December 12, 2016

Questioning the gender of textiles

At the On Kawara show at the Guggenheim New York, at the New Museum downtown, in the MoMA’s contemporary galleries, and its “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” exhibit, I notice many instances of a poetics of making situated in textiles. This is exciting to notice, and it may have been there all along. It is my awareness that has changed. Pictured above, for example, is an obvious seam: a crucial sewn element in the work of contemporary painter Oscar Murillo, whose installation I will write more about in this commentary.