August 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Seeing Reynolds Price Through His Art Collection By Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor All photographs by Alex Harris. Reynolds Price’s enthusiasms could not be contained to one form: he wrote novels and stories, poems and plays, memoirs, essays, and songs; made translations; and taught creative writing and literature at Duke University for fifty-two years. If that weren’t enough, Price also collected art. Confined to a wheelchair for the last twenty-seven years of his life, he created a salon-like refuge in his Durham, North Carolina, house in which every wall, bookshelf, and piece of furniture reflected his eclectic passions and preoccupations, paid homage to his influences, and illuminated his interior life. After Price’s death in 2011, his family asked the photographer Alex Harris to document the art and objects as a living collection before it was disassembled. During the winter and early spring of that year, Harris took more than seven hundred photographs of every corner, wall, and nook. A selection of the images are on view through November 5 at the Rubenstein Photography Gallery at Duke University and have just been published in Dream of House: The Passions and Preoccupations of Reynolds Price, edited by Harris and the writer and photographer Margaret Sartor. Below, Harris and Sartor, both longtime friend of Price’s, present photographs and excerpts from Price’s writings to evoke the experience of the writer himself taking us on a guided tour of his home. Read More
August 29, 2017 Arts & Culture Collection By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. The other day I stopped to see a friend, the journalist Misha Kovrov. He was sitting on his couch, cleaning his fingernails and drinking tea. He offered me a glass. “I don’t drink without bread,” I said. “Let’s get some bread!” “Under no conditions! I’d offer an enemy bread, certainly, but never a friend.” “That’s peculiar. Why not?” “This is why. Come here!” Misha walked me to the table and pulled out a drawer: “Look!” I looked into the drawer and saw distinctly nothing. Read More
August 29, 2017 Arts & Culture I ♥ John Giorno and So Should You By Chantal McStay Ugo Rondinone, THANX 4 NOTHING, 2015, multichannel film installation. In any given decade of his life in New York, John Giorno could be found right in the middle of whatever the new scene might be, hanging out with the era’s defining figures and embodying the moment: in the fifties, meeting Jack Kerouac at Columbia’s West End; in the sixties, making a movie with Andy Warhol; in the seventies, studying Buddhism in India; in the eighties, playing in a band at CBGB. He has always been a poet who operates primarily in the art world. His practice is multimodal and collaborative: he’s experimented with sound recording, painting, video, and has been muse and lover to a number of artists, including Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. This last detail, which is so often salaciously foregrounded in the literature and mythos surrounding Giorno, would appear to put him in a passive or sidelined role, but his work gleefully subverts this, showing just how potent and active these roles can be. It reveals, too, the advantages of having passed the time with great artists and what he has learned from being the subject of their gaze. “I ♥ John Giorno,” Ugo Rondinone’s exhibition-as-artwork love letter to his husband and collaborator, which appeared at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015, has come home to New York this summer. This iteration requires a peripatetic tour of thirteen independent and nonprofit venues throughout the city. Rondinone, Giorno’s partner of eighteen years, explores nine distinct chapters in Giorno’s diverse body of work and interweaves portraits of and responses to the poet by filmmakers, painters, videographers, and musicians of many generations. I spent five days taking in the show and feel as if I’ve only begun to traverse Giorno’s staggering creative output, as intricate as it is wide-ranging. Read More
August 28, 2017 Arts & Culture A Case of Mania Grandiosa By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. That civilization, in addition to its benefits, has also brought humanity terrible harm, no one now doubts. Doctors especially insist on it, not unreasonably locating in progress the source of those nervous disorders which have been observed with such frequency throughout the past decades. In America and Europe, one encounters everywhere all sorts of nervous illness, starting with common neuralgia and ending in serious psychosis. I myself have observed cases of serious psychosis, the causes of which should be sought only in civilization. Read More
August 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Degas’s Model Tells All By Jeff Nagy Edgar Degas, Sulking, ca. 1870, oil on canvas. Chrissakes, Pauline! No one would have been more horrified than Edgar Degas at the thought of a model taking up the pen. Not a fan of working-class literacy in general, he might well have died of apoplexy at the very idea that a model might dare not only to write about art but about his art. And from the very first words, we know that Alice Michel’s memoir is not going to be a typical hagiography of a great dead artist. This Degas is not the elegant gentleman, proud member of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie and scion of a well-to-do and diasporic family, with branches running banks in Naples and plantations in New Orleans. Nor is he the grand habitué of ballets, café concerts, and the opera, haunting the loges alongside his one-time friend librettist Ludovic Halévy. Not the cultivated disciple of Mallarmé who tried his hand at the occasional sonnet, not the obsessive aesthete who co-organized the exhibitions that made Impressionism an art-world phenomenon, and certainly not the purveyor of cutting, perfectly formed witticisms at exhibitions and dinner parties. Read More
August 17, 2017 Arts & Culture The Model-Village Preservation Society By Matthew Sherrill Bourton-on-the-Water advertises its charming English quaintness in a perfect, one-to-nine town replica, complete with signage and living greenery. Photos via wolfcreekrcpark.wordpress.com. In the insistently charming Cotswold village of Bourton-on-the-Water, there is one World War I memorial, one bird sanctuary, but four Kingsbridge Inns. That’s quite a few Kingsbridges, even in England, where pubs’ names often sound like they were dreamed up by an uninspired Mad Libs player with limited combinations of King’s-, Queen’s-, Lion’s-, and -Arms, -Head, et cetera. With so many Kingsbridges, one might suspect fierce loyalties among the townspeople, or age-old rivalries between the proprietors, but the odds are diminished by the fact that only one Kingsbridge is large enough to stand in. The other three don’t even serve drinks. The smallest is about the size of a Monopoly house. The lone, ordinarily proportioned Kingsbridge Inn overlooks the River Windrush, a foot-deep dribble wending through the town, which looks as if it could be the main attraction in an Anglophilic water park, with a drove of bored kids on inner tubes soon to round the bend after the next flock of mallards. The inn is owned and operated by Marston’s, a brewing and pub-operating behemoth that commandeers more than seventeen hundred pubs in the UK. The local residents, at least according to a tipsy and garrulous patron I meet named Gavin, prefer the Kingsbridge to Bourton’s other pubs, which lends it a strange sense of authenticity despite its corporate ownership—rendered authentic precisely because Bourton’s tourists are attracted to its more outwardly authentic competitors. From the adult-size Kingsbridge, where Gavin bids me a boozy farewell, the Windrush (which lends Bourton its bathetic nickname, the “Venice of the Cotswolds”) trickles alongside more restaurants, pubs, knickknack shops, and tearooms, before flowing past the perplexingly named Old New Inn. It’s here that, if you’re willing to fork over a reasonable £3.60, you will find the other three Kingsbridge Inns: in Bourton-on-the-Water’s model village. Read More