April 21, 2011 Arts & Culture Nan Goldin By Miranda Popkey Nan Goldin is running late. On a Thursday evening in the Theresa Lang Center, in a New School building on West 13th Street, the crowd—close to a hundred people—is growing restless. At the front of the room at a long plastic table, the other panelists have assembled: Benjamin Walker, the moderator and host of WFMU’s “Too Much Information”; author Lynne Tillman, whose petite frame is overwhelmed by an explosion of dark curls; French philosopher Ruwen Ogien, whose wisps of gray hair are messy and front-swept; French professor of aesthetics Carole Talon-Hugon, whose jet-black hair is combed back and secured with a leopard-print scarf; and a neatly dressed woman who is later revealed to be Talon-Hugon’s translator. A laptop on the table is connected to a large projection screen hanging above the stage. A folder is open on the computer, and file names are visible; the JPEGs have titles like “skinheadshavingsex.” Goldin is probably best know for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a collection of her photographs documenting her life and the lives of her friends—homosexuals and junkies, the poor and the marginalized—in the New York of the late seventies and early eighties. In one, titled “Nan one month after being battered,” Goldin faces the camera straight on; she’s wearing bright red lipstick, and her left eye is filled with blood, the area below it bruised a sickening brown. When Goldin arrives around 6:40 P.M., I find myself checking the face of the woman now walking toward the front of the room against my memory of the photograph. Her career is both remarkable and frightening for having provided everyone in the audience with that image as a point of comparison. She sits down and is immediately, endearingly apologetic. Read More
April 4, 2011 Arts & Culture The Gourmand By Mark Gimein Images by Charlotta Westergren. Charlotta Westergren, Victory, 2010, oil on linen, 58 in. x 58 in. The story repeated most often in the gastronomical canon is Plutarch’s anecdote about the Roman patrician Lucullus. Asked if he might want a simple dinner on a night with no guests, the great gastronome orders up a feast, telling his steward that he is entertaining the most important guest of all: “Tonight Lucullus dines with Lucullus.” What always gets left out in the retelling is that Plutarch’s compliment to Lucullus’s table is a backhanded one. “The daily repasts of Lucullus,” writes Plutarch, “were such as the newly rich affect … With his arrays of all sorts of meats and daintily prepared dishes, he made himself the envy of the vulgar.” The misgivings about the gourmet are as old as Roman times: what if the endless expenditure on luxury signals not sophistication, but just plain gluttony? What elevates the gourmand above your everyday glutton? Both rave about the same three-star Michelin experience, the first because it was rapturous and the second because he wants to make sure you know he had it. Maybe for an old-fashioned stoic there’s no difference, but nowadays things are laxer, and we don’t call the honest gourmet a sinner. But can you always tell the one from the other? I’m not sure if it’s polite to ask these days, now that cooking is right up there with art and music and literature, but let’s just put it out there anyway. The questions come to mind now thanks to Modernist Cuisine, the epic six-volume cookbook published by Nathan Myhrvold, a man of grandiose talents (physicist! paleontologist! billionaire!) and appetites. But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, since reading, at my girlfriend Charlotta’s prodding, Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, the great nineteenth-century work of culinary science to which Modernist Cuisine gets compared. Read More
March 31, 2011 Arts & Culture Barry Yourgrau on Super 8 (?) By Lorin Stein As the late Édouard Levé once wrote, “I like watching anything shot on Super 8, even though that is in such predictable good taste.” We feel the same. So imagine our delight to discover this video of the melifluous and virtuosic Barry Yourgrau reading one of his recent Gangster Fables—shot on an iPhone using the “8mm” app. Here endeth the ad.
March 31, 2011 Arts & Culture Mirjam Jacob By Mirjam Jacob Untitled, 2010, crayon on paper and collage. Every time I get to know something new, it becomes a part of me. It also becomes part of my work, although I am not always aware of it. Whenever I see something that appeals to me, something that I like a lot, it instantly becomes familiar, as if it has always had a place deep inside me, and just needed a bit of light to shine on it and make it visible. The topic of my work is often somewhere between isolation and loneliness and vitality. This is how I would describe my pictures retrospectively, because while I am working on them, I do not know what will happen. Read More
March 28, 2011 Arts & Culture Why We Read ‘Don Quixote’ By Jonathan Gharraie What does it mean to be “quixotic” today? Are street-corner preachers quixotic? Is Bono? What about film directors who dementedly pursue the unlikely grail of adapting a difficult book for the screen? The word endures because its source endures. Don Quixote de la Mancha is the first modern novel, and two weeks ago I found myself on the Upper East Side, at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, tracing the word part of the way toward its origin. In the inevitable absence of Miguel de Cervantes, it was left to the book’s most recent English translator, Edith Grossman, the publisher, Andrew Hoyem, and the artist, William T. Wiley to explain the book’s riverine significance. The Quixote Delta has proved fertile ground for world literature, branching off into numerous tributaries, irrigating any number of national traditions and, finally, trickling down into the work of some of the most singular figures in world literature, from Nabokov to Borges, Fielding to Garcia Marquez. But doesn’t quixotic threaten to swamp Quixote? Aren’t these words, which get coined in tribute to an author or a book, almost always treacherous? Can all the possibilities and implications of a character, or even—more ambitiously—a life’s work, be contained within the semantic boundaries of just one word? We think of Orwellian as adjectival shorthand for a state apparatus of terror and surveillance, but what if we also took it to mean window-pane clarity of expression or even a marked aversion to the poetry of Stephen Spender? In the same way, Don Quixote is not only a cautionary tale about the perils of idealism: among other things, it is also the first great book about books, a visionary parable about the responsibilities of reading and writing fiction that arrived early on in the age of printing. The river feeds into an ocean. Illustration by William T. Wiley. Read More
March 25, 2011 Arts & Culture Portfolio: Paul Gabrielli’s Toys By David Wallace-Wells Paul Gabrielli is a young deconstructionist sculptor who often works with false trompe l’oeil. His current show, “Generally,” includes a remarkable series of hung sculptures showcasing found, repurposed, and refined objects behind blister packs and mounted on backboards of edited landscape photography, toys lost in the uncanny valley between desire and critique. Untitled, 2010, cloth, aluminum, C-print, archival board, plastic, staples, oil, acrylic, 13 x 11 x 1/2 in. I call these pieces toys, but they’re more like tchotchkes. That might be a horrible thing to call a piece of art, but there’s something to be admired about the tchotchke: you own it, but it doesn’t function; you just kind of look at it. It’s not a relationship, like with toys, where you can actually play with them. Read More