February 28, 2011 Arts & Culture Frederick Wiseman: The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality By Errol Morris From Sinai Field Mission, © 1978 Zipporah Films, Inc. Fred Wiseman has been my idol for a long time. In the 1970s it wasn’t all that easy to see his films. For a while I had seen only Basic Training (1971) and High School (1968). Nothing else. Titicut Follies (1967) was almost impossible to see because it was under a court injunction. Videocassettes had been introduced, but Wiseman’s films existed only on 16mm—ready to be slapped onto a projector or viewed on a flatbed. Until very recently, he was reluctant to transfer his films to DVD. I believe it was because that would have made them too easy to be seen. When I was editing my first film, I visited Fred Wiseman in Boston. His offices in those days were on Lewis Wharf, and he very kindly allowed me to watch several of his films on a Steenbeck editing machine. At dinner in his home, one of his sons asked him whether he was going to show me “the two-hour, the three-hour, or the four-hour boring film.” Fred didn’t smile. But honestly, I had no problem with the length. For me, they could have been even longer. I saw Fred again at the London Film Festival in 1978. He was showing Sinai Field Mission. My future wife, Julia Sheehan, and I went to the first screening at the National Film Theatre. Julia, also a Wiseman fan, had just gotten off an all-night flight from Boston, and promptly fell asleep next to Fred. She was mortified. I remember being mesmerized by the film and its “language.” The cinder block buildings, the microwave dishes, and the injunction: to stop sunbathing on the modules. If Surrealist painters had to conjure an empty, featureless plain with pieces of driftwood, Wiseman was able to do away with the driftwood, the conjuring, and simply point the camera at reality. The results are disarming and even dismaying. Read More
February 23, 2011 Arts & Culture Eugenio Montale Comes to New York By Jonathan Gharraie A young Eugenio Montale. “So you know Italian?” I suddenly experience an obscure and unwelcome pang of solidarity with Christina Aguilera. “Not very well.” I look down at my shoes. Perhaps they will help. “Or at all.” But, I want to add, I do know Eugenio Montale. Or, at least, I’ve read him in translation. This matters because I’m at the handsomely furnished apartment of Professor Riccardo Viale, the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, where a distinguished crowd of diplomats, writers, and journalists have assembled for a dinner to honor Montale. The occasion is a two-day celebration of the last century’s greatest Italian poet and a Nobel Laureate, which itself forms part of a broader program of events devised by the American Academy in Rome to mark the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy. The above lines of dialogue are repeated a number of times over the course of the evening, but nobody seems to mind my genial ignorance. I may be stoutly and unheroically monoglot, but I don’t share the cultural introversion of my compatriot Kingsley Amis. I’m here to learn, which is fortunate because the room is full of enthusiasts and newcomers alike. Burrowing into a blond hill of steaming polenta, I chat with a business reporter for Corriere della Sera, the newspaper to which Montale contributed reviews of books and opera productions. Meanwhile, over a glass of wine, the playwright John Guare explains to me how he has only recently come to Montale but is determined to explore his work in more depth. Fortunately for us, these events are also about translation and, more particularly, about how one of the principle gifts that Italy has bestowed upon the world came to be unwrapped. We have all just attended a busy recital at the nearby Metropolitan Club, where the actor Fausto Lombardi read from a selection of Montale’s lyrics, while Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi and poet Charles Wright delivered their translations, and poet Rosanna Warren introduced us to those of William Arrowsmith. To emphasize his appeal to American poets and readers, three different versions of Montale’s most famous poem, “The Eel,” were read, but out of a collegial spirit of shared excitement rather than any sense of rivalry. Read More
February 22, 2011 Studio Visit Joe Bradley By Stephanie LaCava The artist Joe Bradley has his studio in an old pencil factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There is no buzzer. You must call his cell phone to be let in, and then ride a manual elevator to the white concrete space where he works on the fifth floor. Bradley was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and was recently featured in two solo shows. I visited the thirty-five-year-old artist to talk about his evolving process as a painter. Photograph by Michael Nevin. This building is called the Pencil Factory. When you go outside, there are these giant pencils on the wall. It’s got a lot of light, and it’s quiet and big enough. You can have six or seven paintings up at the same time and don’t have to shift them around. I don’t go into painting with any kind of plan. The ones I am happiest with I have no idea how I arrived at. The best ones are always a real surprise. For most of the paintings I use unprimed canvas and oil paint. I like drawing when the canvas is on the floor, and then I’ll pin it up and see what it looks like on the wall. Sometimes, I turn it over and work on the other side. The nature of the oil paint is that it kind of bleeds through the canvas so you have some sort of residual marks seeping through from the other side and influencing the composition. Photograph by Michael Nevin. Read More
February 18, 2011 Arts & Culture Auguri, Frederick Seidel! By The Paris Review James Brown, Planet (Pink and Grey) VI, 2006, oil and pencil on linen. Frederick Seidel has received some unusual tributes in recent years. Writing in n+1, Philip Connors credited Seidel’s poetry with giving him the courage to quit his job. Wyatt Mason made a passionate case for Seidel’s Poems 1959–2009 in The New York Times Magazine—not a publication known for its attention to verse. There’s been a poem dedicated to Seidel in The New Yorker. The London Review of Books has likened him to a YouTube person in a bunny suit, while fellow Paris Review staffer Dan Chiasson compared Seidel’s effusions to a garden hose. In a nice way. Now the artist James Brown has published a collection of works on paper, canvas, cardboard, and linen inspired by Seidel’s poem “Into the Emptiness.” The volume has come to our attention just in time to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday, tomorrow, of our most youthful editor. § James Brown, Into the emptiness I, 2009, mixed media on cardboard. Read More
February 14, 2011 Studio Visit Lawrence Weiner By Thessaly La Force The artist Lawrence Weiner lives on a quiet street in the West Village, in what was once an old laundromat built in 1910 and is now an unobtrusive five-level town house designed by the firm Lot-Ek. You may recognize some of the architecture: Lot-Ek is often cited for it inventive reuse of prefabricated objects (like shipping containers) and other industrial materials. In fact, the penthouse floor of Weiner’s home is built from discarded truck bodies. The floor below is the bedroom, the floor below that houses Weiner’s archives, and the first floor is the kitchen and dining room. At the basement level, Weiner keeps his studio, where he works. Not long ago, I stopped by to take photographs of his home and talk. I didn’t come from a background that had any idea about what contemporary art was, it was not anti or pro, it had nothing to do with it. I do remember something my mother said when I was sixteen. I was going off to college, and I said, “I think I’m going to be an artist, not a professor of philosophy.” They all assumed I would be a professor because I’m good at logic, and she looked at me and she said, “Lawrence, you’ll break your heart.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Art is for rich people and women.” Read More
February 8, 2011 Arts & Culture An Adult Returns to ‘Sleeping Beauty’ By Rana Dasgupta Sleeping Beauty is often cited these days as the ultimate antifeminist tale. Recently, while visiting my parents, I came across my childhood edition of Sleeping Beauty. As I opened the book again, the decades collapsed: the old illustrations recalled how dire that sleeping palace had appeared to me as a child, how thick its rooms had seemed with dark, ungraspable truths. The story had seemed entirely indecent, and that was precisely why it was so magnetic. Sleeping Beauty is laced throughout with inchoate threat, which is why it feels so bottomless. Most obviously, there is an outrageous fact that the story passes over and that most children do not consciously note: Beauty is a century older than the prince who kisses her and ends her sleep. When he enters her dusty room she is one hundred and fifteen years old. As the reader bends with him over her inert form, adoration is tinged with something else entirely—the apprehension of death. Earlier versions of the story, such as Charles Perrault’s (1697), make this explicit: the prince, seeing the newly awoken princess, “took care not to mention that she was dressed like his grandmother.” Later versions—the Grimm brothers’, for example—got rid of such details so as to make the ending more youthfully nuptial. But the fact of Beauty’s age still lurked in the background as a kind of unfamiliar smell; even a child reader has the sense that this apparently straightforward love affair is stalked by impossibility and decay. Read More