December 19, 2017 At Work An Interview with Kerri Pierce By Joel Pinckney The Faroe Islands. Jóanes Nielsen’s novel, The Brahmadells, is one of the first books to be translated into English from Faroese, the native language of the Faroe Islands, an archipelago of eighteen islands situated in the North Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway. Its capital, Tórshavn, which figures prominently in the novel, has around twenty thousand inhabitants, making it one of the smallest capitals in the world—and the Islands’ native language, Faroese, only has around sixty thousand native speakers. Nielsen’s novel was translated by Kerri Pierce and published last month by Open Letter. This roving tale of the history of those small and remote islands tells a story both intimate, tracing the complex familial legacy of the Brahmadells and other families over several generations, and general, weaving historical documents and characters into its narrative thread. It is a captivating and enlightening immersion into a place most readers will find unfamiliar. Kerri Pierce and I spoke by phone earlier this month. Pierce’s translation marks the eighth language from which she has translated, though talking with her, one would never know. She was humble and unassuming, and she spoke of her voracious appetite for translating new languages as one might speak of learning to cook a new dish, or adding half a mile to one’s jogging routine. We discussed how she stumbled into translating, and the value of translated literature. Read More
December 11, 2017 At Work States of Desire: An Interview with Anne Garréta By Sarah Gerard Anne Garréta was the first person born after the founding of Oulipo to be admitted to the experimental literary group. The conceit of her memoir, Not One Day (2002), is consistent with that association: At the book’s opening, she vows to write five hours a day, every day for a month, each time recollecting one woman whom she’s desired or who has desired her. She will place the entries in alphabetical order. The result, she says, will be a “stammering alphabet of desire,” one that will locate, spell out, and delineate desire in her life. But in the end, the book doesn’t follow its own rules; it is as elusive as desire itself, unable to be pinned down, slippery as the object of its second-person point of view. Rather than comprising, impossibly, an elucidation of the nature of desire, the memoir instead enacts it, becoming an experience of seduction and pursuit. Garréta has published six books in France, and two—Sphinx (1986) and Not One Day—have been translated into English (in 2015 and 2017, respectively, both by Emma Ramadan). Both upend expectations for love and literature, insofar as we can expect to be anything but transported. In Sphinx, Garréta offers a love story without revealing either of the lovers’ genders. The book is a dark, pulsing romance, tortured and thrilling. I spoke with Garréta recently about Sphinx and Not One Day. I was, at the time, falling in love and in the grip of desire. “Everything becomes salient,” Garréta told me, when I shared this with her. We talked about the relationship of desire to writing, the various states and attitudes of the physical body, and the reawakening of curiosity. INTERVIEWER How do you view the relationship between desire and writing? In your life, are those two things intertwined? GARRÉTA I’d say yes because they’re both quite complicated to figure out and they are both liable to fall into cliché, into patterns that are customary and basically uninteresting. So the difficulty, both in desire and in writing, is to create forms that are not necessarily given or granted. It takes effort. I would say that it’s not a writing of desire, or that there’s a direct connection—there’s an analogy. Read More
November 17, 2017 At Work Narcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer By Robert Storr Yvonne Rainer, still from Privilege, 1990, 16mm, 103 minutes. © Yvonne Rainer. Courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of Chicago. The following is excerpted from Interviews on Art, a collection of more than sixty interviews by Robert Storr with contemporary artists. Yvonne Rainer is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker who has been recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of the past fifty years. She emerged in the 1960s as a pioneer of the Judson Dance Theater movement, an avant-garde performance style that blended elements of dance and visual art, and later turned to experimental film. This previously unpublished conversation was conducted on April 9, 2009, at the College of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, at Boston University. INTERVIEWER Let me begin by saying that it is a special pleasure to enter into this conversation. Yvonne and I have known each other over quite a long time. We first met in the early 1980s—in effect, part of the protracted aftermath of the 1970s—which was a very different time from now. What we’ve gone through lately, and are about to go through with the onset of recession resembles the 1970s more so than the boom times of the 1980s and nineties: an art world where the terms of making art takes place against a very unsettled and uncertain background. Considering that we are about to speak in front of a predominantly student audience, I would like to begin by saying that I’ve been struck by the way that for the past twenty years or so, people have talked a great deal about careers as if there was some kind of scripted narrative or a scripted scenario for how one begins in one place and ends up in another ideal place. But it seems to me that art has always been much more about working, than about careers and about the specific work that one chooses. Since then you have done many things. Perhaps our conversation might start with the fact of just this variety of paths forward: how you have chosen to work in this way and chosen to work in that way and how have patterns developed rather than how those were patterns foretold or planned. Read More
November 10, 2017 At Work Daring as a Woman: An Interview with Lorna Simpson By Heidi Zuckerman The following is excerpted from Conversations with Artists, a collection of conversations by Heidi Zuckerman with thirty-four contemporary artists. INTERVIEWER Your work is extensive and takes many different forms. How do you respond when people ask you what you do? SIMPSON It gives me pause when people ask me what I do, because there are so many different avenues that my work has gone down. Photography being one avenue, film and video another, more recently—over the past five years—drawing, using inks, and collage. Although I’m trained in different areas, I gravitate more toward the photographic arts. I’ve always left it open as to how I work in different mediums and try not to put too many boundaries on what I do. It’s more about experimenting or the process of making that matters. INTERVIEWER Do you consider your works to be narrative based? SIMPSON Many, yes. My earlier works from the eighties and midnineties are very narrative based. But even more recently, the work has an undercurrent of the narrative of the archive, of found photographs, implied narratives, and fictions. Read More
November 8, 2017 At Work Our Town: An Interview with Adam Gopnik By Lesley M.M. Blume Adam Gopnik and Martha Parker, 1985. Earlier this fall, I got an amusing call from the writer Adam Gopnik. He’d come to Los Angeles as part of the tour for his new book, At the Strangers’ Gate, and was making his way down the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. I was stunned: first of all, it was high noon on a hundred-degree day—the town was absolutely baking—and second of all, he was walking, a rare activity among Angelenos. Luckily, he happened across Greenblatt’s, an old-fashioned deli on Sunset, and sought solace in some chicken soup and a corned-beef sandwich. All of these activities seemed to me evidence that Gopnik was a quintessential, incurable Manhattanite, far away from his natural habitat and relying on his New Yorker instincts for survival. Gopnik is a virtuosic writer; since joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1986, he has written nine books and covered a myriad of topics for the magazine, from the emigration of the European Roma to the complicated legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald to gun control in America. For many readers, he is synonymous with the pleasures of Paris: he was the magazine’s correspondent there between 1995 and 2000 and wrote the best seller Paris to the Moon, about his young family’s triumphs and travails as modern American expats. (The French Republic even bestowed upon him the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.) Yet New York City—where he lives with his filmmaker wife, Martha, and their two children—has been an endless source of fascination and material for him. When he first started at The New Yorker, he dispatched himself all over the city, covering table-hockey tournaments in Flatbush, slack-rope walkers who dwelled in boats on the Hudson River, and a community of rivalrous fresco painters. In Strangers’ Gate, a blend of memoir and social observation in which Gopnik specializes, he revisits his arrival in New York from Canada in the early 1980s. The book is a love letter to that vanished town, then an eccentric metropolis of all-powerful magazine editors, landlines, Kodak film, artists’ lofts in SoHo, and bookstores on every block. At the Strangers’ Gate also seems, at first glance, a whimsical counterpoint to Gopnik’s recent writings about America’s fraught political landscape. Although he once told me that he had never wanted to be any sort of pundit, he was an early whistleblower in the pages of The New Yorker about the threat to democracy posited by Trump, and has been unrelenting in his criticism since. “I feel a sense of emergency every morning,” he says. “We have to bear witness, even if we can’t change minds.” (He is already working on his next book, a political essay defending liberalism). Yet, he maintains, the seeds of today’s landscape had already been planted by the era he documents in the book; the eighties were “the first domino in a line of dominos that have fallen,” he says, leading to the post-9/11, post–financial collapse, Internet-and-social-media-driven realm in which we dwell today. Gopnik and I spoke about the New York of his salad days, the attributes that make the city uniquely (and peculiarly) alluring, and how New Yorkers seem innately equipped to handle these unstable times. INTERVIEWER Why did you feel that this was the moment you wanted to revisit and document 1980s New York? GOPNIK Two reasons, I think. There’s that beautiful opening line of a novel—what is it? The Go-Between. “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” And for the first time, the eighties seemed like another place—remote enough that you could write and talk about how differently things were done without it seeming too minute to matter. The idea that I could now explain the decade where I came of age to the youngsters who were now coming of age—that was one motive. Also, romantic comedies about young couples in cities are an evergreen form, and I realized that I was remote enough from my own experience to write one about myself, or at least with someone not completely unlike myself, and my wife, at the center. Read More
November 2, 2017 At Work Evil, “Venerable,” and Otherwise: An Interview with Barbet Schroeder By Gary Lippman When you meet the film director Barbet Schroeder, whose distinguished career has spanned more than five decades, and you ask him about his next project, you should not be surprised to hear a response like the one the intrepid auteur gave me two years ago, at a New York City cocktail party: “Next week, I plan to fly somewhere far away and do something dangerous—too dangerous to talk about with anyone until it’s finished.” Born in Tehran, in 1941, to a Swiss father and German mother and raised mostly in Paris, Schroeder has been one of world cinema’s most protean figures, changing forms and themes and settings relentlessly, so who could divine what he’d do next? Given Schoeder’s talk of far-flung travel, this new clandestine project of his didn’t sound to me like a big-budget thriller in the vein of his Single White Female. It surely didn’t sound like his wonderful documentary about Koko the sign-language-using gorilla, either. Could Schroeder’s new work be akin to his French-language Obscured by Clouds, in which he led his cast and crew deep into the jungle of New Guinea? Or would it delve into a new subculture, as he did with the drug-drenched underworld of Ibiza (More), the S and M subculture of Paris (Maitresse), or Charles Bukowski’s down-but-not-entirely-out Los Angeles (Barfly)? Now that the fruit of Schroeder’s sub-rosa labors has screened to acclaim at this year’s New York Film Festival, I have my answer: The Venerable W is the final installment in Schroeder’s Trilogy of Evil. The first film in the trilogy was 1974’s General Idi Amin Dada, a “self-portrait” of Uganda’s colorfully bloodthirsty despot. The second was Terror’s Advocate (2007), which focused on Jacques Vergès, the Parisian attorney who represented international terrorists such as “Carlos the Jackal” and Nazi murderers like Klaus Barbie. The Venerable W completes Schroeder’s rogue’s gallery with a portrait of the title figure, a monk in Myanmar named Ashin Wirathu—or “W,” as Schroeder refers to him. Labeled by Time Magazine as “The Face of Buddhist Terror,” the deceptively sweet-faced and gentle-cadenced Wirathu has, since the start of this century, preached hatred against his nation’s Muslim minority, the Rohingya. The Rohingya, whose ancestral home is Bangladesh, constitute only 4 percent of Myanmar’s population. Economic boycotts, riots, house burnings, mass rapes, internment camps, and murders—there’s little that the Rohingya haven’t suffered. Worse, Myanmar’s military leaders and its Nobel Peace Prize–winning figurehead head of state, Aung San Suu Kyi, have exacerbated rather than eased the widespread oppression. First they overlooked it, then they permitted it, and now they’re actively excusing and encouraging the tragedies. Schroeder was wise to try to keep his work in Myanmar a secret: the military authorities would not be pleased with him if they noticed him and his filming. Unfortunately, they did notice—and weren’t pleased. Schroeder was able to leave Myanmar with life, limb, and footage intact, but he is banned from returning there. Last week, just before Schroeder left New York for the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico, I spoke with him (not at a cocktail party this time, but by phone) about The Venerable W and its place in his filmography. Despite the grim subject matter, or perhaps to counteract it, Schroeder was congenial and charming. Read More