October 29, 2010 Arts & Culture Carving for Blaze By Dawn Chan Traditional jack-o'-lantern carving is an art form governed by extreme constraints. Photograph by Matt Gillis. By day, Van Cortlandt Manor is a historical estate where interpreters in colonial attire give tours, comb wool, and bake kickshaws (from the French quelque chose) at the hearth. The Hudson River borders the property. There’s a gift shop that’s quiet and renovated, and sells old-fashioned candy sticks. But in the weekend evenings leading up to Halloween each year, the manor becomes the site of the “Great Jack O’ Lantern Blaze.” Visitors follow a path that winds through thousands of illuminated pumpkins arranged thematically—dinosaurs, Celtic knots, sea creatures, ghouls. From August through October, for several summers, I worked as as jack-o’-lantern carver for the “Blaze.” The workers were a mix of site staff and local artists. One day, we would be assigned to work on the undersea kingdom, which meant carving kelp-shaped gashes on twenty or thirty jack-o’-lanterns. Another day, it would be crunch time on the pirate faces. Whether we were stationed in the boathouse next to the geese, or outside on benches under a tent, we worked among garbage bags full of pumpkin guts, arrays of handsaws, X-Acto blades, and wood- and clay-carving tools, as well as dremels, paper stencils, and drawings for inspiration. A first-aid kit was always on hand. Many of the pumpkins were polyurethane, which allowed them to be stored in cardboard boxes for future “Blazes” to come. Read More
October 26, 2010 Arts & Culture 2001: Art History with Metaphor By Bruce High Quality Foundation 2001: Art History with Metaphor is part of a series of pedagogical videos by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. It debuted this month at “Retrospective: 2001–2010” at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, Switzerland.
October 13, 2010 Arts & Culture The Woodcuts of Lynd Ward By Art Spiegelman It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America’s most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists. He is, in fact, one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a “graphic novel” until the day before yesterday. The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive Spirit comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of a 1978 collection of his seriously intended comics stories for adults, A Contract With God. It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium, and he often cited Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels as an inspiration for his work and for the euphemism. But Ward’s roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree, belonging somewhere among the less worm-ridden branches of printmaking and illustration. Read More
October 8, 2010 Arts & Culture Sarah Peters: Appeal to Heaven By Sarah Peters Sept 6, 1520, 2010, ink and pen on paper. While drawing, I imagined myself on the Mayflower, looking out into darkness and seeing only water and sky. I thought about waves and drowning and being surrounded by everything unknown. I thought about how it feels to walk on an unstable surface. When I looked out into the ocean and the harbor in Provincetown, I understood, like the Pilgrims, what it meant to feel alone. Read More
October 7, 2010 Arts & Culture Mario Vargas Llosa Wins the Nobel By Nicole Rudick Photograph by Sophie Bassouls. The Nobel Prize committee announced this morning that Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 award for literature, praising him “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” In the fall of 1990, The Paris Review published an astonishing interview with Vargas Llosa. Then a friend to both Neruda and García Márquez, he expressed an abiding belief in the need for a literature that dissolves politics into its narrative fabric and offers imaginative solutions to economic and social problems. Writers, Vargas Llosa felt, should not seek to distance themselves from the political sphere: I think it’s crucial that writers show—because like all artists, they sense this more strongly than anyone—the importance of freedom for the society as well as for the individual. Justice, which we all wish to rule, should never become disassociated from freedom; and we must never accept the notion that freedom should at certain times be sacrificed in the name of social justice or national security, as totalitarians from the extreme left and reactionaries from the extreme right would have us do. Writers know this because every day they sense the degree to which freedom is necessary for creation, for life itself. Hardly imagining, as an adolescent, that he would be able to devote himself to writing full time—“too much of a luxury for a Latin American,” he explained, “especially a Peruvian”—Vargas Llosa planned to pursue a career in law or journalism. We’re grateful that he reconsidered.
October 4, 2010 Arts & Culture William E. Jones: Punctured By Eric Banks There might never be a more bountiful kingdom of photography than that established under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and ruled by the former economist Roy Stryker, some 171,000 negatives made to document Depression America between 1935 and 1942. Though he was no photographer (Gordon Parks joked that he couldn’t even load a camera), Stryker pulled no punches during his reign. “I never took a picture,” he once wrote, “and yet I felt a part of every picture taken. I sat in my office in Washington and yet I went into every home in America. I was both the Stabilizer and the Exciter.” He might have added the Excisor. Scattered among the Library of Congress’s FSA archive are curious reminders of Stryker’s autocratic touch: For the first three years of the project, he registered his disapproval of an image—whether to make an example out of those he thought had wasted valuable film or out of some darker fit of spite—by taking a hole puncher to the negative, ensuring that it wouldn’t be subsequently printed. It didn’t seem to matter who took the picture. Walker Evans got holes punched in a handful of negatives; so did John Vachon, a lowly FSA clerk at the time who was learning the trade on weekends. If Stryker’s one-man photographic death panel was democratic in judgment, it was sporadic in execution. In some negatives the holes are perfunctorily, even apologetically clipped along the borders of the negative; in others, Stryker seemed almost wrathful, going straight for the jugular by obliterating offending faces, necks, or buttocks. In his video “Punctured,” a reformatted version of his 2009 film “Killed,” the LA-based artist William E. Jones has performed a sort of perverse resurrection of Stryker’s perforated negatives, a Lazurus act that’s doubly miraculous because it uses the powers of video animation to raise up the quite-dead world of documentary photography. (The video is currently featured in an exhibition at Andrew Roth gallery in Manhattan.) From 100 perforated images he located in the Library of Congress archives, Jones has produced 4,500 digital files at different scales of enhancement and organized these into a hypnotically syncopated, nearly five-minute-long looped movie. The structural logic is provided by Stryker’s hole itself: each of the hundred images appears for a total of around three seconds, beginning with an enlarged, screen-filling close-up of the negative space of Stryker’s hole, a giant black spot that then smoothly and very rapidly appears to recede in size as the surrounding photograph comes into view. Then, bang, another Stryker reject appears, with the same fast zoom-out, from hole to whole. Read More