June 25, 2012 Arts & Culture Dance to the Music of Time: Tacita Dean at the New Museum By Joanne McNeil Merce Cunningham in "Five Americans." Several times a week, I sneak downstairs to watch dancers rehearse with Merce Cunningham. I work at a nonprofit located in the New Museum and its current Tacita Dean exhibition includes Craneway Event, a 108-minute film of the choreographer at work in an enormous former assembly plant outside San Francisco. A postcard vista of the bay glistens in the background. As the sun creeps in, it warms the reflective surface of the floor to a bluish-gray so that in some shots water seems to ripple beneath the dancers’ feet. Architect Albert Kahn originally designed the plant for maximum natural light. Stripped of furnishing and ornament, it looks porous rather than cavernous. There feels something almost prescriptively calming about looking at a space that size while living in a city as densely populated as New York; as if just by looking at it, I reclaim my proper wingspan after weeks in shoebox-sized studio apartments and subway cars sitting elbow-to-elbow with other passengers. My sense of time is similarly unreined. Nothing rushed, no antics, and absent of narrative; the film offers rather than requests my patience. The term “time-based art” seems especially apt when discussing Tacita Dean’s work. In interviews, she talks of her delight in the period between shooting footage and processing it, as it allows her to revisit a film in progress with a new perspective. Her subjects might be defined broadly as the history slipping through our fingers: fleeting moments, obsolescing technology, the wisdom of an old master (Cunningham died a year after Craneway Event was made,) things just about to disappear. Read More
June 21, 2012 Fashion & Style Subversive Chic: Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada By Katherine Bernard Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada use girlish sensibilities to subvert expectations of age-appropriate dressing. With fashion, true love isn’t about the money. It’s about the conversation. By that I mean decoding the statements on the runway each season and bringing them into culture simply by going about my everyday life. Conversing with someone on the street using the lines and proportions of our clothing: “Nice denim rip. You layered two T-shirts? That collar/hemline/texture is slightly off, and I like it.” I learned how to read these cues and appreciate making odd bits look chic from studying the work of Miuccia Prada. The other day, I tried explaining to a friend whose primary associations with Prada are 1998 Jay Z lyrics (“I like a lot of Prada, Alize and vodka”) why this summer I took pleasure in making a boys lacrosse penny elegant for evening. I picked it up in a Maryland thrift store for two dollars. To most, a practice jersey is as far from a fete like the MoMA’s Party in the Garden as one could get. In that crowd, if you say P.S. you mean Proenza Schouler, and Stella is followed by McCartney more often than Artois. I wore it underneath a silk blazer, with a skirt of tiered fringe. The empowerment I felt was real—there is something about taking a garment of unexpected origin and making it reference something completely new (look at Alexander Wang’s brilliant athletic-inspired collection this season) that excites me. I think of Prada as being synonymous with intelligence and controlled tension; the pith of confidence. Her clothes remind me that I haven’t seen everything, and even on a Hannah Horvath budget, I try to maintain allegiance to her pursuit of self-defined beauty. I feel strong taking a risk, and every morning I try to assemble a look that would make Miuccia say, This is right. Read More
June 12, 2012 Arts & Culture An Arrow in Flight: The Pleasures of Mary Lavin By Belinda McKeon Joyce Carol Oates called her one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century, and there’s much to love about the work of Mary Lavin, whose centenary falls this week; there’s the brilliance with which her fiction gets at the stuff of human interaction, in all its awkwardness, in all the ways in which, muddled and mortified, this interaction will have to do us, because it’s all we’ve got. There’s the immense power with which she depicts the inner lives of women, particularly mothers and widows, women who have no reason to be anything other than honest with themselves about the realities of their situation. Lavin evokes those situations with sympathy and with candor and with, in many cases, a frank and delicious comedy. Lavin was an Irish writer of the mid-twentieth century, so it’s no surprise that Catholic Ireland is present in her work, but there’s nothing predictable about her portraits of the people who lived in its grip, because what her fiction always looks to are the marvels and the strangeness of individual lives, individual territories carved out regardless of the directives handed down from on high. These lives, mostly rural, could be described as small; they could be described as provincial. Mary Lavin would never stoop to either of those descriptions. They were lives rich and secretive and complicated and contradictory, and for her there was no form suited to them more perfectly than that of the short story, the form she described as being like “an arrow in flight, or a flash of forked lightning: you know the way a flash of lightning appears to be there all in the sky at once? Beginning, middle and end, all there at once.” Read More
June 11, 2012 Arts & Culture Taylor Mead’s Lost East Village By Craig Hubert Taylor Mead is dishing gossip. “For our final exam”—in boarding school, where he studied English with the novelist John Horne Burns—“he said, write four hundred to five hundred lines of poetry from memory. It was unbelievable. He killed poetry for me. I haven’t been able to read more than two poems a month since.” Burns would later write a novel loosely based on his time teaching at the school, rife with homosexual undertones. Taylor said he would have enjoyed school if he knew all the great stuff that was happening behind the scenes. “If they want me to make a commencement speech, they better fasten their seat belts,” he joked. Taylor sat across from me at a small table near the front door of Lucien, a French bistro on First Avenue near the corner of First Street. When I walked in the door, the legendary East Village resident and professional bohemian was already sipping from a glass of Dewar’s, waiting patiently. Lucien is Taylor’s favorite restaurant; it’s one of the few places he leaves the apartment for. At eighty-seven, he still resides in the neighborhood he has called home, more or less, for more than four decades. Now, though, he has trouble walking more than a few blocks. Read More
June 11, 2012 Arts & Culture Electrical Banana By Nicole Rudick Mati Klarwein, Annunciation (used for Santana's Abraxas), 1961, oil and tempera on primed canvas. I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer’s ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades … This was the world—a poor thing but my own—which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself. So wrote Aldous Huxley just before an afternoon mescaline trip, his first, in 1954. The psychedelic sixties would take Huxley’s message to heart, opening new doors of perception while under the influence. But for graphic designer Heinz Edelmann, Huxley’s journalistic exploration was mescaline enough. After reading the British novelist’s account, Edelmann thought, “Well, I don’t need mescaline. I can do that stone cold sober.” If you don’t know who Edelmann is, have a look at Yellow Submarine: he created the look of the film and designed all the characters. Read More
June 5, 2012 Arts & Culture Hiding in Plain Sight By Alex Carp Hanna Shell in camo. Why do so many American soldiers look, as one Brooklynite at the office of Cabinet magazine put it on a recent Friday, like they are trying to blend in to computer screens? The question was directed at Hanna Rose Shell, a historian, filmmaker, and professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, who had come to New York to talk about Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. Cabinet had arranged to host a reading and sound performance, which promised “camouflage paraphernalia galore.” We soon found out the answer. It seems the pixelated, “digitized” designs have been standard issue across the branches for a decade, while the iconic, splotchy pattern of green, brown, olive, and black seen in episodes of G.I. Joe and the military-themed action movies of the 1980s is no longer predominant. Officially known as the Woodland pattern of the Army’s M81 battle dress uniform, the older, iconic camo was initially designed, Shell found, to mimic the environment of a region in the Soviet Union where military researchers thought the Cold War would turn hot. Though no longer used to hide soldiers, close approximations of this earlier version can be found today on cargo shorts and Louis Vuitton luggage. It’s been replaced with a series of tiny squares and “micropatterns” that mimic a digital photograph with poor resolution, with the idea that the new uniforms would be more difficult to detect in images produced by contemporary digital surveillance. Also, as a military camouflage expert admitted, “the boys think it looks cool.” Read More