Enslaved to everything,

By being too sensitive

I have wasted my life

--Arthur Rimbaud, “Song of the Highest Tower,” 1872

 

Published on the occasion of the group exhibition of the same title, curated by Russell Ferguson at Gladstone Gallery in 2008. Including the work of an eclectic group of fifteen artists of different generations, the exhibition encountered themes of aspiration, sensitivity, and frustration.

 

Rimbaud was only seventeen when he wrote “Song of the Highest Tower,” but already he was half-convinced that it was all too late. He gave up poetry at twenty, became a trader of coffee and guns in Ethiopia, and was dead at thirty-seven. His myth, though, lives on, constantly approaching cliché yet appealing to each new generation eager to follow his path of a “derangement of all the senses.” The work in the exhibition was chosen less in response to the derangement of the senses than to the desire to achieve that transcendence of an often-dismal everyday life. The artists whose work is included are:

 

Roy Arden, Mike Disfarmer, Mari Eastman, Thomas Eggerer, Kirsten Everberg, Paul Graham, Rodney Graham, Jonathan Hernández, Larry Johnson, Nathan Mabry, Catherine Opie, Michael Queenland, George Shaw, Kerry Tribe, and Martin Wong.

 

Russell Ferguson is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, and the editor of  Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture and Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, both published by the MIT Press.