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
October 23, 2017 At Work Reappearing Women: A Conversation Between Marie Darrieussecq and Kate Zambreno By The Paris Review Paula Modersohn-Becker, Liegende Mutter mit Kind II (Reclining Mother with Child II), 1906, oil on canvas, 32 1/2 in. × 49 1/10 in. The novelist Marie Darrieussecq’s slim, enigmatic biography of the German Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, opens with the author’s visit to the house in which Paula lived with her husband, Otto. “She was here,” Darrieussecq writes. “On Earth and in her house.” It is a statement of fact that conjures Modersohn-Becker, who died in 1907 at age thirty-one, into being once more. That opening sentence sits in counterpoint to the book’s epigraph, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Being here is wondrous.” Rilke’s claim arrives with easy certitude; Darrieussecq’s with authorial entreaty. In Being Here, Darrieussecq has drawn a complete, if elliptical, portrait of Modersohn-Becker’s short life—her close friendship with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and with Rilke, her marriage to the painter Otto Modersohn, her lifelong insistence on the ability to paint and to have a corner of solitude in which to do it. “I try to see where her strength resides,” Darrieussecq thinks while looking at a photograph of Paula. “She is staring into space. Open and thoughtful. It is the photograph of a woman who paints, alone, whose paintings are not seen.” In reconstituting Modersohn-Becker’s life, Darrieussecq also illuminates a broader problem for women artists. Later in the book, she visits the Museum Folkwang, in Essen, Germany, to see Modersohn-Becker’s self-portrait and is taken to a “temporary display” in the museum’s basement. “Upstairs,” she recalls, “well lit: Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee. Downstairs, in the shadows: a mess of statues from antiquity mixed up with contemporary videos. Goddesses, mother-and-child paintings, queens: the only connecting thread is that these works are by women or represent women.” The neat separation of modernist masters from the full historical sweep of women’s art—a literal high and low—encapsulates centuries of thwarted ambition. Being Here was published in France last year and was released last month in an English translation by Penny Hueston. Darrieussecq spoke with the writer Kate Zambreno over the phone earlier this fall. Zambreno recently published Book of Mutter, a meditation on writing, grief, and motherhood. She also became a mother some nine months ago; her baby’s cries punctuated their conversation about the process of reviving Modersohn-Becker’s reputation, motherhood and art, and women’s friendships. —Nicole Rudick ZAMBRENO What was your first encounter with Paula? DARRIEUSSECQ It was on the Internet, actually. I received a spam email for a colloquium about psychoanalysis and motherhood. There was a stamp-size painting of a woman nursing but lying on her side. That was the best position—for me, at least—to nurse, but I never had seen that position in a painting. I discovered that it was by Paula Modersohn-Becker, and I wondered why she is so unknown. ZAMBRENO I encountered her through Adrienne Rich’s poem about the friendship between Paula and Clara Westhoff, Rich’s answer to Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend.” DARRIEUSSECQ And Rilke dedicated his “Requiem” to Paula. ZAMBRENO But she’s unnamed in it. Read More
October 22, 2017 At Work With a Bang: An Interview with Eleanor Antin By Erik Morse Eleanor Antin as the King, 1972. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. Eleanor Antin began her career as a stage actress and painter-cum-assemblagist in the late 1950s. She was inspired by the techniques of Yiddish theater and Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as those of Marcel Duchamp and Fluxus. Her versatile art practice was conceptual by design, though leavened by black humor and pageantry. Antin’s relocation to the purlieus of San Diego in 1968 contributed to her particularly Californian blend of theater and autofiction, while the native New York she left behind remained dominated by the more politicized tenets of minimalism. Since then, her stylistic DNA has imprinted itself on a cross section of literati and literary artists, from Kathy Acker to Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle, fortifying her status as not only an archetypal feminist artist but an innovative writer as well. This autumn’s Richard Saltoun exhibition “Romans & Kings” together with Frieze Masters’ “Spotlight” presented the first major London showcase of Antin’s oeuvre, including seminal series like “100 Boots” (1971–1973)—often considered the defining entry of the mail-art genre—“The Last Days of Pompeii” (2001), and “Helen’s Odyssey” (2007), part of her larger tableaux vivants collection, “Historical Takes,” as well as a reading from her ten-year cycle of performances, films, photos, and writings as the fictitious Ballets Russes ballerina Eleanora Antinova, which was collected in a book titled An Artist’s Life last year. Following her appearance at the Serpentine Pavilion on the eve of Frieze Masters, Antin spoke to me via email about the significance of narrative in her artwork, an ominous adventure to the West Coast, and the literary world’s importunate conservatism. INTERVIEWER I want to begin by asking you about some of the unifying themes behind the autumn exhibitions in London. Part of what becomes clear in looking through all of these very different works in photography, performance, writing and set design is your recurring attention to the highly gestural, the whimsical and the “literary.” Such interests seem to be at odds with the ultra-politicized performance of artists like Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, and Vito Acconci during the height of the post-’68 period. How were these ideas received when you began working in earnest? ANTIN I only worked on what interested me, no matter how alien it may have seemed to everybody else at the time. Vito and Chris were very dramatic artists. Sure, Acconci’s scenarios—at least the earlier ones—sound simple. Like, choose somebody at random and follow him or her until she goes inside. But the possibilities of this life/art piece are various, potentially dangerous, funny, boring, whatever. My Carving: A Traditional Sculpture has what looks like a minimal system, it does. But its potential for complex personal and psychological meanings are there, especially for women. The times weren’t so minimalist, after all. Read More
October 19, 2017 At Work Carrie Mae Weems on Her Favorite Books By Jo Steffens The following is excerpted from Unpacking My Library: Artists and Their Books, a collection of interviews with contemporary artists about their personal libraries, to be published by Yale University Press in November. Carrie Mae Weems in her library. Photo: David Paul Broda INTERVIEWER Your photographic work incorporates family stories, autobiography, documentary, and other narrative forms. What do you consider to be your role as a storyteller? CARRIE MAE WEEMS In the past I’ve employed elements of text in and around my work, but I’m certainly not a storyteller. Storytelling requires skills that I don’t possess. Rather, in my work, text functions as a conceptual frame for creating play, counterpoint, tension and/or positioning meaning. The word is a form and the shape of things. INTERVIEWER Is there one book that stands out as having had a big impact on you when you first read it? WEEMS Books are my playmates, my best friends, my running buddies, my partners in crime, my solace, and my occasional lover. Read More
October 18, 2017 At Work Time Marches On: An Interview with Jon McGregor By George Saunders Left: Jon McGregor. Right: George Saunders. Jon McGregor is a fiercely intelligent, very deep well of an (English) human and writer. I’ve spent some of my most memorable moments in that country on stages with Jon, benefitting from the original and soulful way he thinks and talks about fiction. I’ve recently spent a similarly memorable and transcendent moment with him via his astonishing new novel, Reservoir 13—a strange, daring, and very moving book. For me, fiction is here to create a compressed, distorted scale model that helps us see the real world anew. Reservoir 13 does this, and in a truly original way—its scale and the way time works within it combine to mimic, with rare fidelity, the way things are in reality, and the way real life, lived, actually feels. And it is this fidelity that, paradoxically, allows us to see how very weird and impermanent and unreliable and unreal so-called reality is. The book is a rare and dazzling feat of art that also (in my reading of it) outs us, in a gentle way, for a certain gratuitous drama-seeking tendency we all tend to have as readers—a tendency that makes it harder to see the very real, consequential, beautiful, and human-scaled dramas occurring all around us in real life, in every moment (in nature, in human affairs). I spoke with Jon on a good, old-fashioned landline; I was calling from Corralitos, California, and I imagined him (in spite of the fact that he told me very clearly that he was in his office, in the university where he teaches, in Nottingham) sitting in a pub in an archetypal English village like the one described in the book—a village that is still haunting me, and which, because of the rich detail of the prose, I feel I’ve lived in before, and for which, on closing the book, I found myself homesick. INTERVIEWER Now, let me just say you did something really innovative to my reading in terms of suspense. There’s something that drives us through the book—I think it’s sometimes called a MacGuffin, you know, the thing we’re supposed to be concerned with. But in the meantime, real life is playing out in this village at just the scale and pace that life actually plays out. We fall in love with the town. We fall in love with the people. And although there are incidents, they’re human-scaled. Do you agree with me that this is really a radical subversion of the tyranny of plot? How did that idea work its way into the book? Read More