September 3, 2024 Arts & Culture The Black Madonna By Aaron Robertson Glanton Dowdell. Photograph from the Albert B. Cleage Jr. Papers, courtesy of Kristin Cleage. In 1959, at sixteen, Rose Percita Brooks had two choices: the navy or the nunnery. The way her grandmother Rosie beat her for kissing a boy on a couch in her home made the girl want to run into a convent. At least there she would be far from the old woman’s wrath. Whatever inspired Rosie’s cruel beatings may have been a holdover from an ancestor’s pain during slavery times, some ghost haunting the old woman. Rosie was not yet born when slavery existed in Memphis, but she would always moan joyfully in church, as though she had witnessed the first Juneteenth. It was clear when the spirit possessed her. She grunted more loudly than anyone else. Oh, that’s Grandma, Rose thought. She’s happy now. She’s got the Holy Spirit. It was Rose’s grandfather who told his wife that the girl was in the living room with a stranger. They had flirted from opposite ends of the sofa until Rose accepted the boy’s slow departing kiss. That same evening, Rosie surprised the girl when she was changing for bed. As she recoiled from her grandmother’s blows, Rose thought of herself as an abused housewife, so wholly bound to her captor that she started to feel indistinguishable from Rosie. Would she ever escape her grandmother’s orbit? Rose bathed the woman, laid out her church clothes, and had nearly the same damn name. “What are you doing with that man?” Rosie demanded. The worst thing the girl could do was lift her arms to protect her face. Rosie’s force increased each time the girl tried to shield herself from the blows. Read More
July 17, 2024 Arts & Culture Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing By Polly Dickson Some doodles by George Washington. Page from Everybody’s Pixillated: A Book of Doodles by Russell M. Arundel, 1937. Photograph by Polly Dickson. Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of dedicated Doodlers to commemorate significant, and not so significant, days: from the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank’s diary to “Chilaquiles day.” You will also find a long list of apps that take Doodle as their name, including the ubiquitous scheduling tool. This recasting of the word in the age of the internet takes us far from the freewheeling squiggles, squirls, and whirls decorating the margins of telephone books and notepads—which is, perhaps, what doodling once was, in some near-unimaginable bygone era, when we worked with pens and pencils on paper, and when our attention and our hands wandered in different ways. Read More
March 20, 2024 Arts & Culture The Disenchantment of the World By Byung-Chul Han Waste collection trucks and collectors in a landfill in Poland. Cezary p, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The children’s author Paul Maar tells the story of a boy who cannot tell stories. When his little sister, Susanne, is struggling to fall asleep, tossing and turning in her bed, she asks Konrad to tell her a story. He declines in a huff. Konrad’s parents, by contrast, love telling stories. They are almost addicted to it, and they argue over who will go first. They therefore decide to keep a list, so that everyone gets a go. When Roland, the father, has told a story, the mother puts an r on the list. When Olivia, the mother, tells a story, the father enters a large O. Every now and again, a small s finds its way on to the list in between all the r’s and o’s—Susanne, too, is beginning to enjoy telling stories. The family forms a small storytelling community. Konrad is the exception. The family is particularly in the mood for stories during breakfast on the weekend. Narrating requires leisure. Under conditions of accelerated communication, we do not have the time, or even the patience, to tell stories. We merely exchange information. Under more leisurely conditions, anything can trigger a narrative. The father, for instance, asks the mother: “Olivia, could you pass the jam please?” As soon as he grasps the jam jar, he gazes dreamily, and narrates: This reminds me of my grandfather. One day, I might have been eight or nine, grandpa asked for strawberry jam over lunch. Lunch, mind you! At first we thought we had misunderstood him, because we were having a roast with baked potatoes, as we always did on the second of September … “This reminds me of … ” and “one day” are the ways in which the father introduces his narrations. Narration and remembrance cause each other. Someone who lives completely in the moment cannot narrate anything. Read More
March 15, 2024 Arts & Culture The Celebrity as Muse By Philippa Snow Sam McKinniss, Star Spangled Banner (Whitney), 2017. Courtesy of the artist. 1. The Divine Celebrity “There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.” It is interesting that he felt the need to specify that Lohan had not died, although ultimately his assertion of her power is difficult to deny based on the evidence of Lindsay Lohan, which may not exude the surfer-y, gilded vibe he might have hoped for, but which does act as a poignant document of Lohan’s skill, her raw and uncomfortable magnetism. Read More
October 13, 2023 Arts & Culture Ask Me About God: On Ye West By Harmony Holiday Screenshots from “Donda Studio Session for Hurricane (2021).” After a nearly scandal-less summer of 2023, in the caustic August light, Ye West was spotted on a small boat in Venice, Italy, with his ass half out. His new wife had been giving him a blowjob in public. There were other patrons on the boat—it might have been a water taxi helping them from one place to the next. The couple appeared to be performatively oblivious to their surroundings. The boat became their black backstage, a transparent curtain between performance and private life, and it put me in the mind of Ye’s 2021 live performances leading up to the release of his tenth studio album, Donda. For at least one week, he lived beneath the Atlanta stadium where he was hosting the first two public listening parties to debut the album, which was still unfinished. The third performance, in Chicago, Ye’s hometown, also featured the installation of a replica of his childhood home, which he set on fire on stage, leveraging his Promethean dream against the serenity of fantasy. The album itself is not just an elegy for his mother, his martyr; it’s also one for him. He enacts his ego death by it, asks for forgiveness in advance, and retreats, “Off the Grid.” He’s ready to exercise his right to disappear into the next myth even as the old myth is not quite finished with him, not yet obsolete. In the Chicago version of this live listening show, he remarries Kim Kardashian and they walk offstage while the make-believe house keeps burning. Everything, even his family, is a prop on this set. This myth will not stop burning. And while Donda seems to genuflect and repent the loss of the maternal figure, the loss of the womb itself, the lack of access to that primal source of solace, there’s one line on the album that stands out to me as its deeper vendetta: “a single black woman you know that she petty.” Here, he denigrates the same power he uplifts. This is the same mother he laments; he’s hashing out lingering resentments. He’s just unsentimental enough to make a masterpiece that vacillates between grief and backlash. My favorite music begins and ends with this tortured erotic ambivalence; the most effective art is greedy about it, righteous and wicked at the same time, humble and opulent, minimal and spectacular, optimistic and despairing, unrepentant and begging for mercy. Read More
August 8, 2023 Studio Visit The Paris Review Print Series: Shara Hughes By The Paris Review Shara Hughes, The Paris Review, 2023, etching with aquatint, spit bit, soft ground, and drypoint on Hannemühle Copperplate bright white paper, plate size 18 x 14″, paper size 27 x 22″. Made in collaboration with Burnet Editions. Photograph courtesy of Jean Vong, © Shara Hughes and Burnet Editions. Earlier this year, The Paris Review released a new print made by Shara Hughes. Hughes, who was born in Atlanta in 1981 and works in Brooklyn, New York, describes her lush, chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees, and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as invented landscapes. The one she invented for the Review is striking in its rich color and vibrant dreaminess. We spoke to Hughes about her work this summer, touching on poisonous flowers, her unusual color palette, and landscape paintings. Read More