March 30, 2022 Arts & Culture David Wojnarowicz’s Home in the City By Hannah Gold David Wojnarowicz, Oct. 22nd postcard, from the Jean Pierre Delage Archive of Letters, Postcards and Ephemera, 1979–1991. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York. David Wojnarowicz’s final home was on the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street on the Lower East Side. He moved in after the prior tenant, his mentor and former lover Peter Hujar, died of AIDS. A few months later, in 1988, David was diagnosed with AIDS himself; he’d die in the Second Avenue apartment four years later at the age of thirty-seven. Read More
March 25, 2022 Fashion & Style The Dress By Cynthia Zarin Illustration by Na Kim. I bought the dress known in inner circles—that is, in the echo chamber of my closet—as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I’ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney’s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like a long, black cigarette holder. It was February, and outside on the street, the wind was coming up Seventh Avenue. I had been married for exactly one month. That year, all my college friends were getting married. We barged from one wedding to another, carrying shoes that hurt our feet. In some cases, we knew each other all too well; sometimes the marriage was the direct result of another marriage, on the rebound: someone’s beloved had married someone else, chips were cashed. In this instance, I had hung around with the groom on and off through college, and the bride had once been the girlfriend of the man I left when I met my husband. The Dress was a sleeveless crepe de chine sheath, with a vaguely Grecian scooped neckline composed of interlocking openwork squares, which sounds dreadful but was not. It was sublime. Cut on the bias, it skimmed the body—and, it turns out, it skims everyone’s body: the Dress has been worn to the Oscars three times—in 2001, 2009, and 2018—though not by me. Read More
March 23, 2022 Fashion & Style How to Choose Your Perfume: A Conversation with Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh By Jude Stewart Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh, and Jude Stewart try perfumes. Photograph by Seth Brodsky. Even after writing a whole book about smell, I still resisted finding “my” perfume. Perfume has always seemed gimmicky, too expensive, anti-feminist. But researching my book got me rethinking these objections. I wanted to get to yes with perfume but do so honestly. I mentioned this to my friends Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh, who both really like perfumes. Sianne is a professor of English at the University of Chicago and specializes in aesthetics and affect theory in a Marxist context. She has written books about the “ugly feelings” of envy and irritation; contemporary aesthetic categories like “cute,” “zany,” and “interesting”; and, most recently, a theory of the gimmick. Anna is a professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and specializes in formalism, Marxism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. Sianne, Anna, and I are middle-aged women who admire each other, loudly and often. Our sensibilities overlap but also diverge in intriguing ways. We met for this conversation in September at Sianne’s high-rise apartment in Chicago’s South Loop. It’s an airy, glassed-in space with views of Lake Michigan and the South Side in many directions. The day was unseasonably warm, so we’d brought our bathing suits to swim in her building’s rooftop pool. But first we spread out tiny bottles of perfume on her kitchen table, and sprayed and sniffed for a good long while. NGAI Let me start by asking, Why a perfume? Why not several? A lot of people have perfume wardrobes. You can have a depersonalized relationship to perfume and just ask, How do I want to smell, in a performative way? I like perfume. I got really sucked into it and then I had to pull away because I had a dog whose nose was very sensitive. The irony is I ended up with a boyfriend who’s so romantic that he gets upset when I wear anything other than the scent I wore when we met. When I first got into perfumes I thought about it all wrong. It was very conceptual, like, I bet I’ll be someone who likes citrus. I was reifying my identity, thinking of myself as a certain kind of person. It turns out I don’t like citrus at all in perfume. I don’t like florals either, especially jasmine or rose. I do like earthy, woody smells. When I leaned into what felt good at the level of sense, it became easier. Read More
February 17, 2022 Studio Visit Don’t Delete: A Visit with Billy Sullivan By Lauren Kane Billy Sullivan’s studio. Photograph by Lauren Kane. Billy Sullivan’s studio, a fifth-floor walk-up on the Bowery, has a comfortable, elegant dishevelment. Hanging all around the space are some of the brightly colored figurative drawings and paintings he has been making since the seventies: portraits of his friends, lovers, and other long-term muses, rendered in loose, dynamic brushstrokes and from close, pointedly subjective angles. A still life of a bouquet and two coffee cups is an outlier among the faces. Near a work in progress on the wall is a table with a color-coded array of pastels, each wrapped in its paper label (mostly the artisan Diane Townsend, with a few older sticks from the French brand Sennelier); a metal cart bears tubes of oil paint, and carousels of slides are tucked away on low shelves. Tacked up on a set of folding screens is a display of Sullivan’s photographs and sketches, and next to that is a burgundy chaise longue adorned with a faux animal pelt. When I visited on an overcast afternoon in December, Sullivan had set out a bowl with grapes and a fig on the kitchen island, where he pulled an espresso for himself and poured a glass of water for me. Read More
January 13, 2022 Arts & Culture Rhetoric and Rhyme: On Rap By Daniel Levin Becker I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love So come give me a hug if you’re into getting rubbed. 50 Cent, “In Da Club” (2003) Is there any couplet in the English language that so concisely spans the dizzying sweep of poetic possibility, the subtle gradations of sense illuminated in a few short words and the abyss of nonsense toward which we are ever drawn by carelessness and entropy? You don’t have to answer that. The answer is “yes, many.” I was making a point. You’ve probably heard the stately bounce of “In Da Club,” at least ambiently. It was 50 Cent’s mainstream breakout single, and he mostly spends it surveying the fixtures of his nightlife: drinks and drugs, cars and jewelry, prospective lovers and pissy haters. If we’re meant to take anything away from the song, though, it’s that 50 is twenty-five percent hedonist and seventy-five percent hustler. So he puts the song to work for him, makes it tell us what he’s about, what he’s been through, who his friends are, how he moves through the world. After fifteen years of career ups and downs, flops and feuds, fluctuating wealth and implausibly diverse investments, it remains an indelible sketch of 50 at his fiftiest. Read More
December 7, 2021 Studio Visit Reading Upside Down: A Conversation with Rose Wylie By Emily Stokes Rose Wylie, Hold the Right Rail, 2021, oil on canvas in two parts, 184 x 311 cm. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner. Rose Wylie, whose watercolor Two Red Cherries appears on the cover of the Review’s Winter issue, lives in a cottage in Kent, England, that smells of firewood. A treacherous, narrow staircase leads up to a small studio. (“Hold the rail!” Wylie warned me.) Her large, funny, vibrant figurative paintings—made on unprimed, unstretched canvas—cover the walls and floor. When I visited on a recent Saturday afternoon, as Storm Arwen brewed outside, she told me she had spent the first years of her life in India, where her father worked as an engineer. The family moved back to England during the Second World War. Wylie studied at an art school in Kent and then a teacher-training program at Goldsmiths where, at nineteen, she met her husband, the painter Roy Oxlade. She put her own professional ambitions aside to raise their children, channeling her artistic energies, she said, into “soups, jam, clothes, curtains, and Christmas cards.” In her forties, she completed a degree at the Royal College of Art, and worked in relative obscurity until eventually, in her late seventies, her career started to take off, with solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and elsewhere. We talked at her kitchen table, drinking Lapsang tea. The mince pies I’d brought from London had crumbled on the journey, which seemed to delight her. Read More