Description
Thinking in Place is a meditation on place as a physical as well as a conceptual construct that encompasses both history and memory.
The book begins with “Defining Place,” a piece about the memory of childhood as located in two unique locations—Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, New York, and Hastings, a coal-mining town in Western Pennsylvania. These were the two locations of Becker’s childhood and of her multiple dual-identities as Russian Jewish/Polish Catholic, urban/rural and working class/peasant. This essay sets up the underlying premise of the book, which is that writing is the ultimate place of safety and sanity in the midst of the complexity of identity. The second essay is about growing up near the Brooklyn Museum in New York, a place that established for Becker the value of public institutions and thus made possible a long career of working in an art school connected to a great historical museum. This is one of three pieces that takes its location from the pedagogical site of educating artists.
The last four essays in the book are specific to site and history. One is located at the site of the My Lai massacre. Another is focused on the production of an archive by indigenous women who survived apartheid South Africa. Another essay begins at Birla House, the place where Gandhi was shot, and focuses on the public image of “Gandhi’s Body,” exploring the idea that the more naked he becomes in appearance, the more powerful he becomes in the world. The final essay is a meditation on the high waters of Venice, a city that is losing ground, literally, each year, but that houses some of the greatest paintings ever painted—a site of dreams, memories, obsessions about the past, filled with premonitions of the future.
There are ten essays, and each is unique in style and approach. Each is also passionate in its attempt to translate the experiential into the analytic, and to use each experience to contemplate the evolution of the thought as a potential agent for social change.
Read about Carol's thoughts on life, art, and her new book in this interview in The Brooklyn Rail here: Brooklyn Rail Interview
Author Info
Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She is the author of several books and numerous articles on art, artists, pedagogy, and critical theory.
Reviews
"Thinking in Place takes us on an extraordinary pilgrimage through the world of neighborhoods, communities, and art in all its forms and transfigurations, guided by a widely traveled, deeply thoughtful, cosmopolitan scholar. Carol Becker's ability to see significance and value in the large and the small, the permanent and fleeting, the far and the near somehow makes me think of William Blake's paean to the human imagination as that which can see "the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a flower.'"
—Yi-Fu Tuan, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, author of Human Goodness
“Art educator and social critic Carol Becker challenges us with her reflections on the constitutive importance of place in art and in life. Part memoir, part meditation on political violence and art making in recent times, these essays transcend the narrow boundaries of Western ‘global art’ think, showing how writing about the arts is more than ever deeply implicated in multiple histories and social struggles.”
—Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University, author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
“Carol Becker is a gifted story teller with a rare ability to reanimate decisive, yet for Americans largely forgotten, histories after pilgrimages to the sites in which the shattering events occurred. Through her learned and fluid tellings, she argues repeatedly, and eloquently, for the connection between place and memory. Without an embodied relationship to place, and a personal and collective commitment to creative witnessing of the stories that make places repositories of trauma and energy, Becker cannot imagine community and progress. By linking such witnessing to the processes of artists, many of whom, she points out, persistently and fearlessly reinvent the personal and collective past through image and myth, Becker underlines the need for artistic creativity in post-9/11 America. The questions her book raises about the body and memory, and creativity and history, could not be more timely.”
—Michael Brenson
“For Carol Becker, traveler, there are no roads; she makes her path as she walks and takes the only road that can be taken, the ethical one. And along her extraordinary path, she creates spaces of hope and resistance. Her long journey takes us to centers of western culture and helps us separate the culture from the spectacle—and identifies the difficulties ahead. She also takes us to places with no names, inhabited by people without names. She names them, and the naming is a revelation that illuminates these dark times and questions all of our assumptions about our own cultural values. This is an extraordinarily generous and deeply challenging book, that gives as much as it demands.”
—Alfredo Jaar, artist, architect, filmmaker, MacArthur Fellow
Contents
“Art educator and social critic Carol Becker challenges us with her reflections on the constitutive importance of place in art and in life. Part memoir, part meditation on political violence and art making in recent times, this book transcends the narrow boundaries of Western ‘global art’ think, showing how writing about the arts is more than ever deeply implicated in multiple histories and social struggles.”
—Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University, author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
“For Carol Becker, traveler, there are no roads; she makes her path as she walks and takes the only road that can be taken, the ethical one. And along her extraordinary path, she creates spaces of hope and resistance. Her long journey takes us to centers of Western culture and helps us separate the culture from the spectacle—and identifies the difficulties ahead. She also takes us to places with no names, inhabited by people without names.
She names them, and the naming is a revelation that illuminates these dark times and questions all of our assumptions about our own cultural values. This is an extraordinarily generous and deeply challenging book that gives as much as it demands.”
—Alfredo Jaar, artist, architect, filmmaker, MacArthur Fellow
“Carol Becker is a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to reanimate decisive yet for Americans largely forgotten histories after pilgrimages to the sites in which the shattering events occurred. Through her learned and fluid tellings, she argues repeatedly, and eloquently, for the connection between place and memory. Without an embodied relationship to place, and a personal and collective commitment to creative witnessing of the stories that make places repositories of trauma and energy, Becker cannot imagine community and progress. By linking such witnessing to the processes of artists, many of whom, she points out, persistently and fearlessly reinvent the personal and collective past through image and myth, Becker underlines the need for artistic creativity in post-9/11 America. The questions her book raises about the body and memory, and creativity and history, could not be more timely.”
—Michael Brenson
“An extraordinary pilgrimage through the world of neighborhoods, communities, and art in all its forms and transfigurations by a widelytraveled, deeply thoughtful, cosmopolitan scholar whose ability to see significance and value in the large and the small, the permanent and the fleeting, the far and the near, somehow makes me think of William Blake’s paean to the human imagination as that which can see ‘the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a flower.’”
—Yi-Fu Tuan, University of Wisconsin, author of Human Goodness