January 9, 2023 Arts & Culture A Room with History By Saidiya Hartman Door in shadow. Licensed under CCO 2.0. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. —Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return What is the matter of history through which Dionne Brand offers a guide? This history that arrives in the room with us is not the captor’s history, even as it is a history of captivity. It is not history as the project and handmaiden of Europe, or the plots and stories that create the fatal divide, the caesura between the West and the rest of us, or the self-aggrandizing romance of a nation, or even a narrative with fixed coordinates and a certain arc, no once-upon-a-time, no myths of origin or claims of autochthony. A Map to the Door of No Return is a philosophical meditation on the world created by the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492 and of the Portuguese on the West African coast in the fifteenth century, inaugurating one of the largest forced migrations in history, described euphemistically as “the trade in slaves.” The book is a hybrid of poetry, memoir, theory, and history, and its recursive and nonlinear structure formally enacts the open question of the door and its duration: “nothing is ever over.” As Brand writes, there is no way in, no return, “no ancestry except the black water and the Door of no Return.” The door is less a place than a threshold of the brutal history of capitalist modernity. The door is the end of traceable beginnings and provides a figure for describing the psychic and affective dimensions of black existence in the diaspora. Read More
December 19, 2022 Studio Visit LSD Snowfall: An Interview with Uman By Camille Jacobson Uman, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, 2016–2020 (detail). The Paris Review‘s Winter issue cover, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, by the artist Uman, looks from different angles like a field of floating Christmas lights, a confetti drop on New Year’s Eve, and a winter storm touched with a kind of bright magic. Uman worked on it over a period of four years, dabbing bright color on the canvas until, as they told me in our conversation, it felt a bit like “the mothership.” Born in Somalia in 1980, they grew up in Kenya and moved to Denmark in their teens. In 2004, they came to New York, where they continued to work in collage, painting, and sculpture before moving upstate. They are largely self-taught, and their signature style is bright, geometric, and vivid. We talked about their economical attitude toward paint, the process of making Snowfall, and their sheep. INTERVIEWER Have you always thought of yourself as an artist? UMAN I certainly drew as a kid. The earliest drawings I remember doing were on my actual schoolbooks. At school I ended up drawing on desks and lots of walls, sort of like tagging things—always female figures. I wanted to study fashion. In Kenya our TV channels were limited, but we had CNN, and on Saturdays I would watch Style with Elsa Klensch. I just remember being fascinated by fashion—drawing things, making things out of my imagination. And it felt really good. At one point, my parents were called to my school to pay for the damages I’d caused. I realized then that drawing wasn’t something I should be doing, so I became more secretive about my creativity. Read More
November 17, 2022 Arts & Culture At the Joan Didion Estate Sale By Sophie Haigney Joan Didion with her stingray corvette, Julian Wasser. Courtesy of Stair Galleries. In November, writers began making little pilgrimages from New York City to Hudson to see Joan Didion’s things. In fact, thousands of people came to Stair Galleries, an auction house on the main drag of a town filled with antiques stores, farm-to-table restaurants, coffee shops, and stores that all seemed to be selling only five items of clothing. I made my own journey by early-morning train. Didion died this past December at eighty-seven, and a selection of her furnishings, art, books, and other things was being auctioned at an estate sale, with proceeds going to Parkinson’s research and the Sacramento Historical Society; prior to the sale, a small exhibition was open to the public, titled “An American Icon: Property from the Collection of Joan Didion.” The word icon is fitting and perhaps inadvertently implies the way some people become like relics in life and especially in death. Didion certainly became one, via the mythology and imagery that became attached to her—who hasn’t seen that photo of her posed on the white Corvette, or in the black turtleneck, and marveled at her ineffable cool? (Both photographs were for sale.) She came, through her work but more so through her persona, to symbolize something, or a whole set of different and sometimes contradictory somethings, about being a writer, a woman, and a person of certain class at a certain time in America. And now here were her actual relics, the things that outlasted her, which might serve as little metonymies for whatever it was we tried to read into her. Read More
October 31, 2022 Arts & Culture Dawn Kasper’s Death Scenes By Philippa Snow DAWN KASPER, “MICHELLE FRANCO” (2003), ANNA HELWING GALLERY, CHICAGO ART FAIR. Photo courtesy of David Lewis Gallery. Around the turn of the millennium, when she was twenty-three, the artist Dawn Kasper began picturing herself dead. Then a first-year graduate student at UCLA Arts, she was spending a great deal of time in isolation in her studio, and the rest of her time consuming material that revolved in some way around violence: video nasties, death-scene photographs by Weegee, Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster silk screens, etc. Eventually, a nagging thought set in: However many entries she slotted into her ever-expanding mental Rolodex of female death scenes—Janet Leigh bleeding out in a motel bathtub, or Sherilyn Fenn having her pretty head cracked open in a car crash; Teri McMinn’s slender shoulders being sickeningly thumped onto a meat hook, or the sister in Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl being slashed through with an axe—she would never have the opportunity to see her own death as a cinematic image. “I wanted to see what I looked like dead,” Kasper recalls in an email. “I began to feel afraid—not of my own mortality, but of never knowing how I might die.” It is not unusual for a first-year student, and a first-year art school student in particular, to be morbid. What was unusual about Kasper’s burgeoning obsession with death was her conviction that it might be possible to influence the circumstances of her own demise. She began to believe that if she could fake being killed in every possible scenario, she could cheat fate, as if anticipating all of death’s potential moves might neutralize them. “As a woman, I felt so out of control,” Kasper says of herself at that age. “I began to worry that I was crazy.” Read More
August 30, 2022 Arts & Culture Like Disaster By Rachel Heise Bolten Nature × Humanity: Oxman Architects at SFMOMA. Photograph by Matthew Millman. If you went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco this spring you could see a big small thing, a model that imagines what Manhattan will look like in 400 years. Actually Man-Nahāta is not one model but four, which hang in a square. Starting at the bottom left and walking clockwise you see a version of the city every hundred years, beginning in 2100. Emergence, the first in the series, is a grid of streets and skyscrapers, except for where an organic glassy form appears in Central Park, black and yellow and blue lit from below, awful. In Growth (set in 2200) the form expands in concentric and overlapping spirograph shapes, an almost periwinkle blue at the edges, rippling amber toward the center, where it calcifies into hills. By Decay (2300) it flows back, leaving edges of buildings made soft, eroded into shapes like melted candles. In Rebirth (2400) the built environment is overgrown, peaks and valleys where a city used to be, made of white chalky photopolymers and fiberglass. Man-Nahāta was commissioned by the director Francis Ford Coppola, who hired the architect Neri Oxman and the OXMAN group to create studies for Megalopolis, an epic set in a future New York City that starts production this year. Made for a movie that does not yet exist, the model has its own narrative, based in part on the projected mean global sea level and surface temperature rise in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most people walked around it the wrong way, or maybe not wrong but counterclockwise, changing the story. The glassy form recedes, buildings sharpen, streets reappear. You could circle the model again and again, speeding up or slowing down time, repeating the disaster or undoing it. Susan Stewart writes in On Longing that the miniature, “linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination. It marks the pure body, the organic body of the machine and its repetition of a death that is thereby not a death.” Read More
August 25, 2022 Arts & Culture Watch Loudon Wainwright III Perform Live at the Paris Review Offices By The Paris Review On the evening of August 9, the staff of The Paris Review welcomed a special guest: Loudon Wainwright III, who came with guitar and banjo in hand, ready to perform on a makeshift stage in front of our bookshelves and plants. (We rearranged the furniture a bit before he arrived, and ordered pizza.) Wainwright played both classics and songs from his new album, Lifetime Achievement, accompanied on occasion by his longtime friend and collaborator Joe Henry. His rendition of “New Paint,” first released in 1972, was especially striking. You can watch it in full here, along with a performance of the Lifetime Achievement highlight “How Old Is 75?”