December 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Opera in a Post-Weinstein World By Daniel Foster From the Welsh National Opera’s staging of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. These days, we hear soloists, ensembles, and choruses of women singing out against abusers. But the courage expressed by these female choirs has made me question my enjoyment of another kind of music. I’m talking, of course, about opera. In this modern moment, it’s difficult not to hear opera as the highly aestheticized echo of our deeply sordid reality, a harmonization of voices wrung from women’s suffering. Louder and clearer than ever, I’m hearing opera as critics like Catherine Clément long have: as the undoing of women by men. From an early age, my daughter (let’s call her O. to protect her privacy until she’s ready to tell her own story in the way she wants to) also recognized that there was something seriously wrong going on between men and women in opera. Carmen is her favorite opera. It used to serenade us on our daily commute to her nursery. She especially loved the children’s chorus—“Taratata, taratata!”—as they imitated the marching soldiers bugling and fifing out the old guard for the new. We even watched Francesco Rosi’s cinematic montage of bullfighting and lust in the dust of Seville. Then, one day, she asked me, “If Don Jose loves Carmen so much, why does he kill her?” Read More
December 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Reimagining Female Identity in a Ukrainian Orphanage By Rebecca Bengal From the book Internat, Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos More than a decade ago, on a Fulbright fellowship in Ukraine, the artist Carolyn Drake found herself outside Ternopil, a small city on the banks of the Seret River. Her hosts led her to a forest on the edge of a suburb, where a large, half-century-old building stood bearing a small nondescript sign, which translated to “Petrykhiv Children’s Home,” or Internat, the title of her just-published photo book. Away from society at large, among a staff of women and one male director, the orphaned girls who lived there formed their own community, an all-female family engaged in the routine of daily life and chores, and an instinctive, if naive, curiosity about the outside world. In the intervening decade, Drake traveled to Central Asia for her project Two Rivers, and to the western frontier of China to make the photographs, drawings, and embroidery that comprise Wild Pigeons. When she returned to Ukraine, in 2014, she expected that the girls she had met would have left the orphanage. But they were still there, suddenly grown up. “They were little bouncy energetic girls and then they were private, snarky, opinionated, complicated adults. I started thinking a lot about change,” Drake told me recently. “I was interested in how girls develop in an environment void of men, especially in Ukraine, where women seemed to me a lot of times to be defined either as objects of the male gaze or through their purity.” Over a series of visits from 2014 to 2016, she took photographs with the Internat residents that compose a subversive fairy tale—a story of modern cloistering, of isolation and escapism, and an evocative reimagining of what it means to be female. Read More
November 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Tuli Kupferberg’s Yeah!: The Tiny Magazine That Captured the 1960s By Alex Zafiris Interior spread from issue no. 4 of Yeah! It was 1961. Eisenhower had cut ties with Cuba, JFK was sworn in, the Berlin Wall went up, the Shirelles were in the top ten for “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and America fizzed with the unchartered sexual dynamics created by the newly introduced pill. Meanwhile, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the homegrown poet-anarchist Tuli Kupferberg—already immortalized as the figure who survived after leaping off the Brooklyn Bridge in Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem “Howl”—put out the first issue of Yeah! The opening page presented the zine as “a satyric excursion published at will,” and it begins: I want to put the revolution at the service of poetry. I want Comrade Stalin to say Tuli, tell me how to revive the bodies of my dead Ukrainian peasants with your magic words Recently re-released in facsimile edition by the publishing non-profit Primary Information, the original ten issues of Yeah! were made at Kupferberg’s home on Tenth Street and Avenue B with the help of his wife, Sylvia Topp, and printed on a mimeograph. Kupferberg asked his friends to contribute. Many delivered poetry and art, such as Allan Sillitoe, Judson Crews, Brigid Murnaghan, Peter Schumann, Anita Steckel, William Wantling; others facilitated. Jonas Mekas submitted a poem from Der Spiegel by Yevgeny Yevtushenko; Ken Jacobs provided newspaper clip collages of absurd, tone-deaf reporting. Other sourced items—a misogynist cartoon from the Yale Record, a New York Times correction detailing the war injuries of a Vietnamese child, happy news of an anti-crossdressing electric shock treatment—are laid bare, their absurdity and cruelty thrown into sharp relief. Read More
November 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Painting the American Dream at Guantánamo By Paige Laino Muhammad Ansi, Untitled (Field with Windmill). Thirty-six artworks made by detainees while at Guantánamo Bay are currently on display at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in midtown Manhattan. To view them, however, takes persistence. You must possess both a photo ID and enough patience to explain to the security guard that the college does indeed have an art gallery. You then have to navigate the building: down an escalator, up an elevator, past an indoor rifle range and a rooftop tennis court, until you finally reach the President’s Gallery, outside her offices. It’s hardly the Met. The exhibition opened in early October (my cocurator, Erin Thompson, wrote about it for The Paris Review.) On November 16, the Miami Herald reported that in response to the show, the Pentagon has stopped releasing security-screened prisoner art and has declared that, as the Herald wrote, “the art made by wartime captives is U.S. government property.” One attorney even told the Herald that the U.S. military intends to burn the art. Since then, the exhibition has gotten a new wave of media attention. Because it is so difficult to actually access the artwork, few of the people reporting and commenting on the art have actually seen it. The exhibition has become largely symbolic. Read More
November 29, 2017 Arts & Culture Listen: Hemingway’s Unrequited High School Crush By Robert K. Elder A undated photo of Frances Coates, Ernest Hemingway’s unrequited high school crush. It was as if a lightning bolt struck the teenage Ernest Hemingway, right there in the orchestra pit. Although Frances Coates, seventeen, was only cast as “Third Servant” in the high school performance of Martha, her brief opera solo made an impact on Hemingway, sixteen, who was playing cello and gazing up at her. The biographer Carlos Baker describes how a classmate of Hemingway’s made a caricature of a boy with desperate eyes and labeled it: “Erney sees a girl named Frances.” Baker also notes that Hemingway was too shy to ask Coates to prom. Now, you can hear that voice, in recordings recently found by Coates’s family. Read More
November 29, 2017 Arts & Culture White Man on a Pedestal By Toniann Fernandez Kenya (Robinson), If I Were King, 2017. The fourth statue of J. Marion Sims was erected at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on November 10. The other three monuments to Sims—which live in New York’s Central Park; in Montgomery, Alabama; and in Columbia, South Carolina—celebrate the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” the man who developed the surgical technique for the repair of the vesicovaginal fistula, an injury often encountered during childbirth. This recently erected statue, however, is dedicated to the atrocities Sims committed: to the black women he tortured through bloody, nonconsensual, and nontherapeutic surgeries without anesthetics. His new plinth reads PONEROS, Greek for “Evil One.” To his right, is a gang of ten thousand five-inch-tall, plastic white men (cumulatively, they are eighteen feet tall) referred to by their maker as “Daves.” Both are part of Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson)’s exhibition“White Man on a Pedestal (WMOAP),” which seeks to amend history without erasing it. It’s a clarion call for reorienting our perspective. The exhibition asks viewers to consider white privilege as a plastic toy and to evaluate their own complicity in its proliferation. Read More