July 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Are You, Jack Whitten? By Jack Whitten Born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Jack Whitten is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of Abstract Expressionists active in the sixties, his work gradually distanced from the movement’s aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns and focused more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice. For six decades, he kept a log as a private exercise, recording and processing the experiences and experiments of his art making as well as reflecting on the way his studio life intertwined with his daily life. In the extract below, he recollects living and working in sixties New York. Jack Whitten in the early seventies on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street, New York, New York. Courtesy the estate of Jack Whitten. My first studio in New York was a storefront at 369 East 10th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C. Stanley’s Bar was on the corner of Avenue B at 12th Street. The Lower East Side in 1960 was a thriving young art community and Stanley’s Bar was our favorite meeting place. Every night of the week I could speak with Ishmael Reed, Calvin C. Hernton, David Henderson, and other members of the Umbra Group of Poets and Writers. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg often frequented the bar on off hours. Stanley, the Polish owner, knew Charlie Parker who was also a visitor in the early fifties. I loved to hear Stanley’s stories about Charlie Parker spending hours playing the jukebox and playing Polish polkas! Stanley, like Mike Fanelli who I would meet later in the sixties when I moved to the Lower West Side, was a friend of the artist. You could always get a hot meal on credit, cash a check without having a routine identification card; this was important because who had a bank account? The first time I ever showed a painting in public was at Stanley’s…a small group of collage paintings from 1963. The first painting I ever sold was to the superintendent of the building where my studio was: a Spanish fellow who often came in to admire what I was doing and paid $35 for a small 1961 painting as a Christmas present for his wife. Read More
July 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Harvard Color Detectives By Katy Kelleher Photo: Katy Kelleher. Inside the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, below a vast glass roof and above a neoclassical series of gray stone columns, hangs a fake painting. It’s a Mark Rothko—or, rather, a replica of a Rothko. The canvas is covered in moody indigo and vibrant crimson. It shows a square of color, patchy and imperfect. As the eye moves from left to right, there comes a moment when something changes; the colors diverge. On the right side of the piece, the colors are faded, washed pale from exposure to “a very bright light,” explains Narayan Khandekar, director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard. On the left side, the colors are vibrant and angry. “This half,” he says, waving one hand around the square of color, “is an exact copy of the Rothko painting as it would have appeared to the original owners.” This replica is an investigative tool, used by the art explorers at Harvard’s research center to help return the Rothko to its former glory. The original work was composed of a series of large violet and vermilion squares painted on five separate canvases and often referred to as the Rothko Harvard murals. Harvard commissioned the work in the early sixties because some within the institution felt that the university “lacked real modern art.” Rothko was honored and excited by the opportunity, and he accepted the commission with one caveat: he didn’t want to be paid for the paintings. “This is the first time I have been able to deliver commissioned work that I am satisfied with,” he said. It was also the first time his work had been displayed at Harvard, and for the former garment-district laborer, this felt like quite the coup. Read More
July 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Visual Frequency of Black Life By Peter L’Official On Arthur Jafa’s video collage Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Arthur Jafa, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Installation view, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Rome, 2018. One of the most striking moments in Arthur Jafa’s transcendent 2016 video collage, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, is also one of its most recognizable. Barack Obama stands behind the podium at the TD Arena in Charleston, South Carolina, having just delivered a eulogy for the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, the slain pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a week after nine of its African American worshippers were killed in an attack by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. The scene is a tableau of purple paraments and vestments and other decorous trappings of church and state. In the midst of perhaps the most solemn and pregnant silence of his presidency, Obama casts his head downward and, with an almost imperceptible shake of his head, launches softly into the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace.” If you have seen this footage elsewhere, then you know that the crowd, beginning with the AME preachers seated onstage behind the president, stands and joins him in singing the hymn. What you might not have noticed—and what Jafa’s masterfully sequenced seven-minute video symphony illuminates—is the reaction of one of the AME preachers, in sunglasses and seated in the second row behind Obama in the left of the frame. On hearing the first two gently delivered notes, the preacher realizes, in a flash of recognition, that the nation’s first African American president has begun to sing for the congregation and all the watching world. Four fluid gestures occur in an instant: the seated preacher looks to his left, meets the eyes of a fellow clergy member, strips off his sunglasses with awe and pride and exultation, and leaps to his feet. Captured in this seconds-long space is the president’s call to song and the affirmatory response of the oldest AME church in the Southern United States. Very little of this one man’s subtle, then soaring emotional response is perceptible in the available footage of Obama’s eulogy. Seen in real time, it simply happens too fast. Read More
July 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Destined for the Dirty-Book Bin By B.J. Novak I’ve been fixated on Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern’s Candy since I first came across it in college. I’ve read it out loud many times to try to capture and understand its rhythm; I’ve given many copies to friends. And yet, what is it? And—even more intriguingly, and more on this in a second—why is it? Candy begins with exhilarating precision; the opening chapters are my favorite pages of any book ever written, with its exquisitely tuned language guiding us through an ecstatic parody of outrageous ego-driven meaninglessness, pulled off with the combination of subtle precision and insane audacity that you might find in a pilot successfully flying a plane under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it continues, the book’s writing gradually collapses, with an entropy that might well be described as obscene, into a tone of sloppy, lascivious wildness that syncs well with its plot. Along the way, it goes on extremely unnecessary tangents to satirize nearly everything imaginable to an audience of its time: psychotherapy, New York City, Hollywood screenwriting, Jewish mothers, quack doctors, New Age healing, progressive causes, pretension, naïveté, innocence, idealism, corruption, generosity, selfishness, spiritual searching, gurus, the male gaze, awareness of the male gaze, “daddy issues,” sexual repression, sexual liberation—as one review suggested, sex itself—and perhaps most of all, the reader who would buy such a book—a person they surely pictured on the banks of the Seine, scratching his head as to what the hell he was reading and whether it was turning him on or not. Read More
July 10, 2018 Arts & Culture When Your Muse Is Also a Demonic Dominatrix By Nina-Sophia Miralles On Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala. When Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala, died in 1982, the first person outside of his household to hear the news was Juan Carlos, the king of Spain. Dalí telephoned the reigning monarch himself, and for once, this was not an act of posturing or presumption on his behalf. By then, the once-destitute artist had become a surrealist superstar, a multimillionaire, a man whose supreme genius landed him the nickname el maestro, the title of marquess, endless fawning fans, and an equally endless litany of clingers-on, copycats, and sycophants. Dalí had met Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, when he was the tender age of twenty-four (and, the story goes, still a virgin). She was ten years his senior, and they lived together for the next fifty-three years, until her death. How would he fare without her? Not well. Following her funeral, Dalí locked himself away in his surrealist tower in Púbol, Spain, drew the curtains, and refused to eat or drink. He denied entry to his friends and aides and forbade anyone to speak Gala’s name. As he writes in The Unspeakable Confessions in 1973, the castle itself was a testament to his love: Everything celebrates the cult of Gala, even the round room, with its perfect echo that crowns the building as a whole and which is like a dome of this Galactic cathedral. When I walk around this house I look at myself and I see my concentricity. I like its moorish rigour. I needed to offer Gala a case more solemnly worthy of our love. That is why I gave her a mansion built on the remains of a 12th century castle: the old castle of Púbol in La Bisbal, where she would reign like an absolute sovereign, right up to the point that I could visit her only by hand-written invitation from her. I limited myself to the pleasure of decorating her ceilings so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find me in her sky. In 1984, two years after her death, a fire broke out in his bedroom under suspicious circumstances, and Dalí was horribly burned. In the hospital, they discovered he was suffering from severe malnutrition, and his staff was accused of negligence. But the truth, as Gala’s biographer Tim McGirk writes in Wicked Lady, is that “after Gala’s death, Dalí lost his will to paint or even live.” Read More
July 9, 2018 Arts & Culture I’m Not Supposed to Talk About Dubus By Nina MacLaughlin On revisiting Dubus’s female characters. The man, who I will not name, had started his fifties but looked older, paunchy, with thinning curls. We overlapped for two weeks at a writing residency in another country. He was the head of the department of creative writing at a large university and was the type of cliché that was amusing at first—the defeated, world-weary writing professor, the sad, self-involved blowhard, mourning his youth and his lost early promise. He was a faded, aging never-quite-was who name-dropped the famous poets at his wedding, and he both did and did not want you to know about his unfolding divorce. (“Let’s just say there’s been a disturbance in the marriage.” “Let’s just say I’m not feeling particularly fond of Geminis these days.” “Let’s just say I don’t have a lot of sympathy for adulterous poets right now.”) The type of cliché who is amusing at first but, in short time, devolves into despicable. He was loathsome. He lectured about writers—not in a formal sense but in the sense that to engage in conversation with him was to feel oneself being lectured—and at one point landed on the work of Andre Dubus, the short-story writer who was born in Louisiana in 1936 and died in 1999, who spent much of his life writing and teaching in Massachusetts, had three wives, and was the father of the writer Andre Dubus III (as well as five other children). “I’m not supposed to talk about Dubus,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “I’ve been told he’s not PC. That’s what my students have said. My female students. That the way he writes women … ” Here, he made a vague gesture with his hand and pursed his lips. “I can’t really comment,” he said. This was two months before the ignition of #MeToo. I wanted to tell him he was wrong or that the “female students” who told him were. I am better able than you to say how well he writes women, I thought. And at that point, I would’ve argued Dubus writes women very well. Read More