July 19, 2013 Arts & Culture What Reader Species Are You? By Sadie Stein I had, I admit, become a jaded infographic skeptic. No more! I said to myself. And then, one day, in the midst of a heat wave, you run across an infographic so intriguing, so well laid-out, so Linnaean, that you think: Yes. I am a human being and man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is, etc. (Click to view at original large size.) Infographic by Laura E. Kelly.
July 18, 2013 Arts & Culture The Golden Age of Soviet Children’s Art By Justin Alvarez Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920–35: Beautiful Books, Terrible Times is a stunning compendium of illustrations from the twenties and thirties. As Philip Pullman writes in his introduction, In the dark and dangerous world of revolutionary Petrograd, a group of Russian poets and artists, among the greatest of the century, came together to create a new kind of book for children about to enter a Brave New World. These artists and writers dreamed of endless possibilities in a new world where children and grown-ups alike would be free from the bitterness of ignorance. For a time, when children’s publications still escaped the scourge of state censorship, their books became a last haven for learning, poetic irony, burlesque and laughter. Pause Play Play Prev | Next
July 18, 2013 Arts & Culture Sexy Librarians, Secret Service, and Tangents: With “The Book Lovers” By Alex Moore Part I: “The Book Lovers” On a Sunday afternoon in March, when the rest of New York’s art world was swarming through the Armory’s annual art fair, I found myself lurking among the stacks at St. Mark’s Bookstore, thumbing through literary reviews and scanning the crowd for a familiar face. I was waiting to meet with David Maroto, a Spanish artist who recently cocurated an exhibition of artist novels—“The Book Lovers”—at the Elizabeth Foundation. Once I found him, nose deep in a book, we meandered to an empty bar and talked about art, novels, experimentation, and engaging the public. David is an artist with strong, creative convictions and a healthy distrust for art institutions. We met five or so years ago at an artist residency, and it is serendipitous that he should be one of the curators of this show. Or perhaps it is just a demonstration of how small our circle is—a tribe within a tribe, the small overlapping area of the Venn diagram where visual art and writing intersect. David thinks this is a growing field, that the novel has run its historical course and is an empty vessel for artists to pick up. I disagree that the novel is defunct, but it does seem that the book form is full of potential for artists and becoming an increasingly popular choice of medium. “Artist novels” is a vague genre, so David and his cocurator, Joanna Zielińska, define it as any work 20,000 words or longer in which the narrative is moved primarily by text rather than images, and written by someone with an active visual art practice. Some of the results could simply be novels with art-world insider lines such as Sexy Librarian’s “he could make her more emotional than a Félix Gonzáles-Torres retrospective,” but David and I are both most intrigued by the books that are a critique of the form or an active expansion of the artist’s studio practice. It can provide a path into the art for the uninitiated and build additional layers of insight and complexity. Read More
July 17, 2013 Arts & Culture The Old Men and the Sea By Sadie Stein Hemingway Days, the annual Key West celebration of all things Papa, takes place from July 16–21 this year. Scheduled events include thematic lectures by Hemingway experts, readings, cocktail parties, a silent auction, a marlin derby, and, of course, the famous Sloppy Joe’s lookalike contest. The following is a video from 2010. Though for the first thirty-six seconds it seems disappointingly lite on Hemingways, just wait.
July 17, 2013 Arts & Culture The Return of the (Feline) Repressed By Rhonda Lieberman and Lauren O'Neill-Butler It is no accident that cats dominate the Internet. Their cute antics erupt on our screens with the persistence of repressed material rising to the surface—because they are repressed material: the feline precursors repressed by Official Art History. Until now, our knee-jerk anthropocentrism has blinded us to something any kitten could see. An entire movement—Minimalism—was in fact actually made for cats.* Minimalist icons are in fact cat toys and litter boxes. In his famous study of copycats, Harold Bloom caterwauled about the “anxiety of influence” that spurs artists to strongly misread (i.e. forget to credit) their influences, while they nevertheless betray them with all kinds of clues, tracking litter all over the place. With the Minimalists, we have discovered a feline influence so pervasive and so obvious; it is unbelievable that the Academy has never figured it out. What follows is a much needed pedagogical intervention to demystify misreadings of Minimalism that have circulated—and even been funded—by respectable institutions. So much discourse has been generated—and how wrong everyone has been. Some of our findings: Donald Judd’s Litter Box, the initial red flag, strangely neglected by piles of scholarship. In Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects” (specific objects for cats!), he meows about an art that is “neither painting nor sculpture.” He howled at “relational composition,” noting, “Objects are depersonalized, art should no longer express human emotion.” His subtext? Art should instead be a potty for pussycats! Read More
July 17, 2013 Arts & Culture Poets in the Workplace By Sadie Stein Remember: today is Take Your Poet to Work Day. Full instructions for toting your preferred wordsmith can be found here; an excerpt is below. (Since a poster-size version of this picture glowers over the Paris Review kitchen, I think we’ve got it covered.)