October 17, 2017 Arts & Culture At the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations By Aysegul Savas While her father lies on an operating table in Ankara, Aysegul Savas unravels eight thousand years of history. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations We arrive at the hospital at seven in the morning. It is still dark, and the air is heavy with exhaust. Patches of muddy snow dot the streets, which branch out without a discernible plan. The taxi ride from the hotel has taken less than five minutes, and yet once we step out of the car, it is impossible to tell which direction we came from in the midst of overpasses and underpasses and the highway warping the hospital. “Shit-town Ankara,” my brother says. We take the elevator to the ninth floor and walk down a hallway, deserted except for an old man in pajamas and a woolen vest, who stands holding onto his serum pole, staring out the window. Up ahead on a hill is Atatürk’s pillared mausoleum, rising high above the city. Our father is still sleeping. We stand uncertainly at the threshold, without turning on the lights. He raises his head sulkily. Read More
October 16, 2017 Fashion & Style The Macaron That Tastes Like Marina Abramovic By Hannah Foster Raphaël Castoriano, Marina Abramovic’s Taste, 2017, from the series “Pastry Portrait.” Stepping into the small office suite in midtown Manhattan, I half expected to find gurgling pots filled with caramelizing crystals, molds crusted with chocolate, and white powder dusting the doorway. Instead, in the headquarters of the sugar/art company Kreëmart, I found a cluster of normal-looking rooms with a small kitchen. The company’s director and founder, Raphael Castoriano, offered me a cup of tea and a variety of sweeteners, saying, “Pick your poison.” The bottle he held must have contained simple syrup, but, feeling suspicious, I opted for unsweetened tea instead. I sat down with Castoriano and his programs manager Simone Sutnick to discuss Kreëmart’s newest edible endeavor. Castoriano explained that sugar is an ideal medium for art because both sugar and art are “not necessities—they are luxuries.” His first foray into the sugar medium was in 2009, at the American Patrons of Tate Modern show. He teamed up with pastry chefs at the Milanese pasticceria and confetteria Sant Ambroeus and the artists Teresita Fernández, Ghada Amer, and Vik Muniz. The artists were no strangers to molding and sculpting, though perhaps not in material as frangible as frangipane. The evening’s most memorable reveal was two cakes crafted into the shapes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Amer decimated the cake politicians’ heads with a hammer, exposing the simulacrums’ respective strawberry and raspberry guts. Read More
October 12, 2017 Arts & Culture Henry Green Is As Good As His Word By Michael Gorra Dean Cornwell, Options, 1917, oil on canvas. Evelyn Waugh could push a joke to the outer edge of our ability to bear it, stopping just when laughter turns to tears, and he’s had his imitators for the better part of a century now. So has Graham Greene, who blanched despair into a weary disillusionment; the contemporary thriller is inconceivable without him. Each of them added to the novelist’s grab bag of tricks. Their contemporary Henry Green didn’t quite manage that. In such early novels as Living (1929) and Party Going (1939) he experimented with dropping out the definite articles in a way that gave his language a tense angularity, the nouns and prepositions grating on each other, uncushioned: “Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water.” Nobody followed him and he left no codifiable body of technique. But Green may have had something better—not followers but admirers, and admirers among all writers. Very little connects such disparate figures as Eudora Welty, John Ashbery, and John Updike, or indeed those who have introduced Green’s other books in this series: little beyond their fondness for this strange elusive figure, not a model but an inspiration. Welty probably put it best. His work was ever changing and yet always the same, his books “to an unusual degree unlike one another … yet there could be no mistaking the hand … [with its] power to feel both what can and what never can be said.” Green’s peers recognized his originality; that’s achievement enough. For a long time, though, it seemed as if only other writers had spotted him. In the early fifties, he was often described as the most innovative novelist in England; by the eighties, he looked always in need of introduction. His American editions went in and out of print, and I had to order his 1940 autobiography, Pack My Bag, from abroad; those of us who read him got a lot of practice in explaining who he was, the Green without an e. Or maybe not Green at all. He was born Henry Yorke, and rich, the younger son of a Gloucestershire landowner turned industrialist; the family’s Birmingham foundry made both plumbing fixtures and equipment for the brewing industry. The boy’s parents sent him to Eton as a matter of course, and then Oxford. He left without a degree but had already finished his first novel, a Künstlerroman called Blindness (1926), and published it under the pen name of Henry Green when he was just twenty-one. Read More
October 10, 2017 Arts & Culture The Philosophy of Fly-Fishing By John Knight When I was seventeen, I drove to Missoula, Montana, to learn how to fly-fish. The town is one of the best places to fish in the country. Rivers with names like the Bitterroot and Blackfoot crisscross the valley harboring trout the size of walruses. I spent that summer learning to cast and looking for the eddies and pools where fish might be lurking. I tried a thousand different flies and a hundred different rivers, and though I tensed my entire body to be ready for a strike, though I was living with a friend who made his living as a fishing guide, in three months I didn’t catch a single fish. Not one. Published in 1653, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler might best be described as a curiosity cabinet of a pious Renaissance naturalist. Framed as a dialogue between a veteran angler, Pescator, and his eager student, Venator, the book came recommended by practiced anglers and seemed to promise some bit of knowledge I was lacking. Next to descriptions of fish like pike (“a solitary, melancholy, and a bold Fish”), and bream (“scales set in excellent order”), were poems by George Herbert. Alongside a cheery round of fishing songs, I found instructions for making fishing line from horse hair (“take care that your hair be round and clear, and free from galls or scabs or frets”). I discovered that it was better to be “a civil, well govern’d well grounded, temperate, poor Angler, than a drunken Lord,” and that the clever angler would keep about two thousand black beetles alive through the winter in a firkin. Wasps are good bait if you dip their heads in blood, and if you wish to fish with maggots (and you are likely to wish it), find a “fly-blown” dead cat and you will soon be well prepared. Also “the crumbs of white bread and honey made into paste is good bait for a Carp.” My curiosity was pricked, but I doubted I was becoming a better fisherman. Modern fly-fishing is so different from what Walton practiced in the seventeenth century that the similarities perhaps begin and end with the fish. Whereas we have a cornucopia of expertly tied artificial flies, floating nylon line, and evolved casting techniques, Walton didn’t even have a reel—he just used a stick with hair tied to the end. To entice the trout, he might employ a fragrant oil; to seduce perch, he would select a minnow, a feather, or a cork, though he would not dare to try his luck before the mulberry trees were in bud. It seemed more like witchcraft than fishing. Read More
October 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Documenta’s False Optimism By Sarah Cowan The Google results for “he made the trains run on time” were loading slowly on my phone because the Wi-Fi wasn’t really working at the Frankfurt train station. I could glean from the summary text of the first results that the saying is a verified myth; it turns out there are no benefits to fascism. Information about my delayed train was echoing incoherently from the platform loudspeaker. I hadn’t slept since I woke up in New York twenty-four hours earlier and knew I would have to stay awake for another full day once I got to Kassel for Documenta 14. Documenta itself started as a postmortem on fascism, particularly the Nazi’s erasure of art history in service of a narrative considered more desirable. On my first afternoon there, a tour guide told me that the exhibition’s founder, Arnold Bode, wanted to “use art as a tool to restore the feelings and minds of the people.” He may have wanted to restore more than that, because in 1955, when he inaugurated the exhibition in his hometown of Kassel, the city was still being rebuilt. Kassel had been the site of a Nazi tank plant, and the city and its inhabitants were all but completely eviscerated by strategic Allied bombs between 1942 and 1945. Today, the city center is so bland that the most noticeable features are a Pizza Hut and a TJ Maxx. It doesn’t strike one immediately, nor after three days, as a site for global art-world tourism, but restoration can be another mode of erasure, and the entire event preserves a kind of normalcy through understatedness, with artwork quietly installed in storefronts and local businesses, hidden in public parks, former train stations, and municipal buildings, and snuck into the galleries of local museum collections, all with casual paper labels. The show is mounted every five years under the direction of a single curator. This year, the Polish curator Adam Szymczyk chose to speak to this decade’s political crisis by having the exhibition straddle Europe, with one foot in Kassel, the other in Athens. The show was joined under the title “Learning from Athens,” though I only had time to spend a weekend at the Kassel half. Read More
October 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Drawing Dogs in George Booth’s Living Room By Sophie Brickman Early pages from Here, George! Even with the most contemplative toddler on your lap, a dramatic reading of Sandra Boynton’s Moo, Baa, La La La! will probably top out at two minutes. That’s approximately how long it took Boynton—the beloved children’s author who’s sold more than seventy million books to date—to conceive of her latest board book. It’s called Here, George! and features George, a white dog with a red collar who happens to have a secret: he’s wild about dancing. Boynton’s illustrations are full of round, fluffy, wide-eyed, quizzical and adorable critters. Even her rhinos might be fun on a playdate. But George breaks the mold. He is in need of a wash and fluff. His toenails could use some attention. There doesn’t appear to be a single ounce of squish on his very hard, boney body. And if he ever met a Boynton singing pig, chances are he’d scare the la la la! right out of him. And that’s because George is not a Boynton. He’s a Booth. Read More