October 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Kara Walker’s Nightmares Are Our Own By Selin Thomas Kara Walker, Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something), 2017. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Last night, they scaled my walls as I slept. The silhouettes moved closer—paralyzing me—with each flash of yellow light from the street. Some of them danced forward on toe, some ran, others fiddled in place with their shovels, their ropes and lanterns, their dangling snakes, torches, sickles. I didn’t know if they were after me, or if they wanted me to join their brigade. I thought then that I might and suddenly I too was wielding an axe, I too was sneaking along the edges of my room. Not me exactly, but my shadow, elongated with sinister intent. My teeth were long; I could feel them reaching my chin. There was a mirror and in it I saw a drooling beast, me. I woke up. I doubt this dark dream was caused solely by Kara Walker’s show, but it was certainly related. “SIKKEMA JENKINS AND CO. IS COMPELLED TO PRESENT THE MOST ASTOUNDING AND IMPORTANT PAINTING SHOW OF THE FALL ART SHOW VIEWING SEASON!” is on until October 14, at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery, on Twenty-Second and Tenth Avenue. I moved to New York three years ago, at the very minute the Domino sugar plant was to be demolished, just missing Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby. People seemed to almost enjoy saying it was gone, as if they’d taken a brick of it themselves, then licked all the molasses off. I’d waited a long time for Walker’s next work. I rushed through two grisly, oil-slicked linens wanting to first orient myself by Christ’s Entry into Journalism, which I’d read a lot about. It’s a sixteen-foot-by-eleven-foot sumi ink and collage on paper. It immediately recalls Rodin’s Gates of Hell. It can be looked at from any place, but center is best. I took my chance in the crowd. My eyes flitted from the plated head of Trayvon Martin to a woman being raped, from a lynching to Frederick Douglass. There was an American flag in the corner of my vision. I examined a mummified body being carried by Batman. It was that of Emmett Till, dressed for his coffin. There was a man praying and a Confederate soldier pointing his gun, or was he a Union soldier? His arm was broken. There was Donald Trump between the legs of a klansman. There was a lady, a dancer, a drunkard; violence, sex, rage. Was this the ghoulish cast of American history? Yes. No, it was the chorus. It was already enough to think about. But Walker was telling a story I wanted to hear. Read More
October 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Foul Matter By John Kaag Edwaert Collier, Vanitas, 1663. I nearly deleted it. The email’s subject line was “FoulMatter”—an obvious Internet phishing scheme, I thought. A Russian heiress was embroiled in some “foul matter” and needed my Social Security number so she could deposit money into my account for safekeeping? A Nigerian prince requesting initial investment in “a guinea foul farm”? No. That wasn’t it. The email was from my publisher, from the heart of my publisher—the editorial department. Now I really didn’t want to open it. Maybe I’d missed a deadline. Maybe they’d changed their mind about my contract. Or found an error so grievous they were recalling my books. Or found a new and more appropriate term for my writing. “Dear John,” the editorial assistant had written, “would you like to keep your foul matter from American Philosophy: A Love Story?” My foul matter? As if I had a choice. American Philosophy, published last year with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a memoir about facing a father’s death, a divorce and a remarriage, and how American philosophy (the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James) helped me survive. I am now in the weeds of writing my second book, another hybrid of memoir and intellectual history, this time about parenthood and Friedrich Nietzsche. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that you are largely stuck with yourself, most especially with your foulest parts. Foul matter, it turns out, as I learned by reading the rest of the note, is the inevitable literary flotsam that is generated in writing a book—the notes, page proofs, drafts, and rejected covers and art. Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as the art of removing stone until a beautiful form emerges from a block of granite. If writing is at all like this, foul matter is the stuff strewn across the studio floor. The question remained: Did I want it? Read More
October 3, 2017 Arts & Culture The Art of Memory By Presca Ahn Bernadette Mayer’s Memory at the Canada Gallery Last week, I went to Canada Gallery on the Lower East Side to see the current show, a rare exhibition of the 1971 work Memory by Bernadette Mayer. Mayer is known and respected primarily as a poet, but Memory is an installation of eleven hundred photographic prints and approximately six hours of audio that she created over the course of a month. Those are numbers I learned later, from the gallery’s press release, not ones I processed during my own rather disoriented encounter with the work. I did not count the photographs, which seemed simply numerous to my eye and were arranged in a long rectangular grid spanning the gallery’s back wall. Nor can I recall many details about the half hour of audio I heard, a recording of Mayer reading hypnotically from journal entries corresponding to the dates of the photos. (Later I would read an edited transcript, published as a book by Mayer a few years after the work was first exhibited.) Indeed, as I wandered back and forth in front of the piece, I had to make some effort to focus in on single photographs. The mind, I guess, wants some kind of narrative, and I resisted each image as an isolated moment. Those details of Memory that I do recall vividly are more suited to an archival interest than a critical one: gaps in the wall where certain photos seemed to be missing; the beige mounting corners holding each photo in place, looking almost brown against the white border of the photos; the fact that large plexiglass panels protected most, but not all, sections of the work; a few photos which had slipped free of the mounting and drooped gently away from the wall. Up close, the work looked like it could be some long-untouched photo wall in anybody’s home, depicting friends and places of strictly personal interest. (In fact, after the work was first exhibited at Holly Solomon’s Greene Street space in 1972, Mayer showed the work by appointment in her own apartment.) There is a handmade, unpolished feel to the work that is accentuated by its slightly sunstruck, fading archival state, over forty years after most of the prints on view were made (a few were reprinted for this show). Read More
October 2, 2017 Arts & Culture Art from Guantánamo By Erin Thompson Muhammad Ansi (released from Guantánamo in 2017), Untitled (Alan Kurdi), 2016. I’m looking at an image of a beach. Deserted, framed by distant headlands, with unsullied sands and clear waters. It is rendered in delicate strokes of watercolor. I’m thinking, as I have every time I have looked at the painting, about how much I would like to go there. But I can’t. No one can, not even the artist. This beach exists only in his mind. Although he has lived only yards away from the Caribbean Sea for fifteen years, he has rarely seen the water. He is a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp. Last year, a lawyer, a friend of a friend, asked if I would curate an exhibition of paintings made by her client, a Guantánamo detainee. When I said yes, word spread among the lawyers who volunteer to help detainees, and then among the detainees themselves. Soon, my office in Manhattan filled with the tang of acrylic from hundreds of paintings, and the floor was crowded with model ships, sails made from old T-shirts, and rigging unraveled from the lining of prayer caps. Read More
September 28, 2017 Arts & Culture I Read Playboy for the Comix By Art Spiegelman Art Spiegelman for Playboy, ca. 1981 In the late seventies and early eighties, I was a proud contributor to Playboy Funnies, an ongoing section in Playboy that tried to recuperate underground comix: they sanitized the movement while also acknowledging it. Hefner had once aspired to become a cartoonist and had an eye for the form. Tho as he once said in an interview—I’m paraphrasing—“I see how cartoonists live and how I live and I have no regrets.” I first convinced my clueless refugee parents to subscribe to the magazine when I was fourteen—“so I could study the cartoons.” A couple years later my father and I had a “heart to heart” talk. He told me I’d have to take the centerfolds off my wall since my mother was too embarrassed to come in and clean my room. Read More
September 28, 2017 Arts & Culture The Starving Artist’s Cookbook By Nausicaa Renner For some young artists trying to make it, starving is a rite of passage; for others, it is a permanent state of dedication, or a financial necessity. No matter the reasons, the starving artist is a timeless figure, present in every era of every society, socialist or capitalist, boom or bust. But the starving artist of New York in the seventies and eighties holds a special place in the cultural imagination. On Sunday, I cleaved my way through the sweaty, contemporary crowds at the New York Art Book Fair, hosted at MoMA PS1, to see an exhibition of “Food Sex Art: The Starving Artist’s Cookbook Archive 1986–1991.” The cookbook was put together between 1986 and 1991 by EIDIA, an artist duo of Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf. EIDIA, comes from the Greek eidos, for “kind,” and is intended as an acronym for, among other things, “Everything I Do Is Art” and “Every Individual Does Individual Art.” The cookbook—a thick stack of typewritten pages bound with three rings—had an original print run of five hundred. It featured 161 “recipes,” some real and some strange, from artists including Peter Beard, Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, Quentin Crisp, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner. The project was also a video series. EIDIA filmed the artists cooking in their studios, and the original series ran to nine hours. The book is now a collector’s item, and this exhibition, presented by the rare-book purveyor Arthur Fournier, displayed individual pages next to old photos and the videos EIDIA shot. Read More