December 19, 2017 Arts & Culture Utopia Interrupted: The Uncertain Future of the Mall By Matthew Newton Architectural rendering at Monroeville Mall, 2016. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space An attractive young woman with long dark hair stands in the atrium of a shopping mall. She is alone. There are no other passersby—no shoppers or security guards or senior citizens walking laps. To her left is a seating area with two unoccupied chairs, one gray, the other wrapped in geometric-print fabric. Nearby, an escalator operates without passengers. Its metal steps collapse and build and collapse again. Behind her, the concourse is vacant. Brown, gray, and white floor tiles abut the terrazzo before vanishing in the distance. The outline of her body is silhouetted against a storefront of blue-white glass, giving the scene the impression of a half-rendered hologram. No merchandise or display racks are visible, and it’s unclear if the store is out of business or sells nothing at all. The woman, who is wearing a floral-print dress that’s cut just above the knee and white high heels that strap at the ankle, appears happy despite the loneliness of her surroundings. She is carrying four shopping bags. Two are slung over her right shoulder, while two more hang at her side. No store names appear on the bags, but each one is a different color. There is a sense she has been shopping for hours. With her shoulders turned and her eyes searching, the woman poses like a fashion model stopped at the end of a runway. Yet something is not right. She appears to be waiting for a photograph that will never be taken, and her expression seems to ask: Can you see me? Read More
December 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: There Are Dead in the Fields By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. © Molly Crabapple Maria passed and they said “Puerto Rico, se levanta!” We’re gonna see. We’re gonna see. A cantastoria is a vagabond fusion of art and music, so old it turns up all over the world. In each set, a performer displays an illustrated scroll, then, while pointing to each image with a stick, tells a story in song. The cantastoria first developed in India as a way for itinerant performers to bring the legends of gods from door to door. By the time it hit Central Europe in the sixteenth century, it had mutated away from its sacred roots into a wandering carny show of sex, crime, and political sedition. After the hurricane, the Puerto Rican puppetry collective Papel Machete created a new cantastoria: Solidarity and Survival for our Liberation. Estefanía Rivera painted the scroll; Isamar Abreu and Agustín Muñoz wrote the script. Muñoz, Sugeily Rodriguez Lebron, and Rocio Natasha Cancel piled into the Papel Machete van with their instruments and art and drove to the mutual-aid centers that had sprung up after Maria, and after neighborhoods realized that no help would come from the authorities. In fifteen centros, one each day, they unfurled their scroll in front of the lines of Puerto Ricans waiting for their arroz con pollo, and they began to sing. Read More
December 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Ten Aphorisms from the Russian Revolution By Marina Tsvetaeva Marina Tsvetaeva Marina Tsvetaeva is one of Russia’s most acclaimed twentieth-century poets. She was born in Moscow, in 1892, to a classicist father and a pianist mother. She published her first book of poems at the age of seventeen. She lived through, and wrote about, the Russian Revolution and the Moscow famine that followed. In 1922, Tsvetaeva and her husband, Sergei Efron, along with two of their children, fled Russia. They lived in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin, and Prague. In 1939, they returned to Moscow, and two years later, in 1941, her husband and daughter were arrested on espionage charges. Her husband was executed and her daughter imprisoned. Tsvetaeva does not seem to have known that her husband was a spy: when the police interrogated her, she read them French translations of her poetry and responded to their questions with such confusion that the police concluded that she was deranged. Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga, where, in August of 1941, Tsvetaeva committed suicide. These aphoristic phrases are taken from the diaries and notebooks she kept while living in Moscow between 1917 and 1922: Read More
December 15, 2017 Arts & Culture Making Art in Communist Romania By Anna Codrea-Rado A design sketch from Codrea’s production of Zamolxe. Forty-four years ago, in dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, my grandfather produced an opera that could have landed him on the wrong side of the Communists. When World War II ended, Romania emerged from the conflict under Soviet occupation. The Russian troops left in 1958, but Communism remained; in 1965, Ceausescu seized power and imposed a brutal totalitarian regime that didn’t end until the bloody revolution of 1989. There was a brief window between 1960 and 1970 when Romania seemed open to the West, but in 1971, Ceausescu delivered his infamous July Theses, denouncing Western culture. The speech ushered in the return to socialist realism, a movement that limited artistic expression to realistic celebrations of the state’s communist values. From then on, dissidents were persecuted and culture once again became little more than a vehicle for propaganda. To be an artist in Communist Romania meant either to conform to the Romanian interpretation of socialist realism or to use subterfuge to subvert it. Performance art had marginally more wriggle room to bypass censorship than less abstract forms of film or literature, but, by Western standards, artistic freedom simply did not exist in any media. It was in this inhospitable context that my grandfather, Gheorghe Codrea, came of age as an artist. He was born in 1928 in Sighet, a town in northern Romania on the Ukrainian border famous for its political prison. He moved to Cluj, Romania’s second city and a long-established cultural hub, in 1949 to study at its prestigious art and design school. Shortly before arriving there, his brother was imprisoned in a hard-labor camp for taking part in an anti-Communist rally, and Codrea lived in fear that the school would discover the relation and kick him out. Around this same time, his girlfriend, who would become his wife and my late grandmother, had been expelled from university because her father was an Orthodox priest. Read More
December 14, 2017 Arts & Culture Stamp This Book By Dan Piepenbring The rubber stamp is the official weapon of officialdom. Anyone who’s used one knows why: it feels great to smash a carved piece of wood and rubber onto a piece of paper, leaving an imperious mark where once there was empty space. Properly applied, a stamp is almost onomatopoeic, and its satisfying thump is the bureaucrat’s easiest pleasure. It’s a tactile expression of power: with a few fluid motions, you make a neat, loud sound, and maybe, depending on what the stamp says, you’ve just ruined the life of a total stranger. Vincent Sardon, a French artist with a small shop in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, sees the rubber stamp as a kind of talisman of the bureaucratic West. A stamp, he argues, is never an impartial object: It packs a symbolic wallop because of the millions of judges, cops, customs officials—agents of public authority—who use them to validate passports, to turn people away at the border, to pass judgment, to pass laws, to sentence, to record proceedings, to excommunicate—all sorts of evil documents that have the power of putting people in impossible situations. His practice is to reclaim the rubber stamp, and the act of stamping, as something playful, banal, even impolitic. In his shop, he designs and sells stamps in a range of sizes and subjects, many of them vulgar, all of them practically useless. There are insults in many languages: “Eat shit and die,” “Go piss glass,” “T’étais moins con quand tu buvais” (“You were less insufferable when you were still drinking”); remonstrations in commanding block capitals: “SORRY, NOT INTERESTED,” “SHUT THE FUCK UP”; and a parade of naked cowboys, porn starlets, and disfigured homunculi, any of which would make a great gift for someone you hate. Read More
December 14, 2017 Arts & Culture The Tenuous Nonfiction of Clarice Lispector’s Crônicas By Gabrielle Bellot Clarice Lispector “I can feel the charlatan in me, haunting me,” Clarice Lispector wrote in one of the crônicas, or newspaper columns, she composed each week from 1967 to 1973 for the Jornal do Brasil. She was writing in Leme, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro named for a vast rock that resembled the rudder of a ship. “I am almost sickened by my basic honesty,” she continued. Later in the column, she suggested that “bad taste” and bad writing were similar, and that bad writing essentially meant telling the simple, unadorned, too-sincere truth. In writing, she declared, “the dividing line between bad taste and truth is almost imperceptible. In writing, moreover, there is an accepted standard of good taste which is actually much worse than bad taste. Just to amuse myself, I sometimes walk that thin line between the two”—between, that is, being a “charlatan,” as that column was titled, and writing the bland truth. A uniquely Brazilian form, crônicas offered readers free-form writing from writers of all kinds, including poets and novelists. Lispector’s adoring editor at the paper, Alberto Dines, simply published almost everything exactly as she submitted it. Although many of her crônicas appeared autobiographical, many also seemed to bend the truth; Lispector, who rarely kept even her birthday consistent, felt most comfortable writing about herself when she was allowed to invent and embellish. Read More