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
October 16, 2017 At Work Suitcase Full of Candy: An Interview with Svetlana Alexievich By Mieke Chew Svetlana Alexievich headlined this year’s Louisiana Literature festival, a gathering of writers, readers, and Scandinavian publishers held twenty-five miles north of Copenhagen, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The event was conducted in Danish and Russian, and the audience peopled a hill overlooking the Baltic Sea, craning their necks to glimpse the 2015 Nobel Prize winner. Alexievich spoke of the “wild, sacred years” of the Soviet Union, the responsibility she felt to free people from time through her books, and the legislation of memory. She was reluctant, when asked, to describe the evolution of her style. (“Must I explain everything?”) And she assured listeners that women are just more interesting than men. I hovered backstage for two days waiting for our interview. Meanwhile, I occasionally saw Alexievich eat, laugh, and chat with a group of friends, all Swedes (she lived in exile in Sweden for years). More recently, and still at risk of persecution, she returned home, to Belarus. “When I walk my dog in Minsk, I go past a church,” she told the festival audience, “I see the youth with their new cars. The priest comes out to see them. They want their cars to be blessed.” This is how she prefers to answer questions—through details. When we spoke, Tine Roesen, Alexievich’s Danish translator, acted as our interpreter. When the interview ended, after forty minutes, I figured Alexievich had had enough. Outside her hotel, she wrapped a scarf around her head and tied it under her chin; it was starting to rain. She stepped toward me and firmly shook my hand. Back in New York, a few weeks later, I read the transcript: The translator, mindful of Alexievich’s schedule, had suggested we end the interview much earlier than we had. Alexievich declined and started to ask me questions. INTERVIEWER In The Unwomanly Face of War, your first book, you say you hear texts everywhere. How did you start interviewing people? ALEXIEVICH I was born in a big city—Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine—but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk. We lived in a Slavic village and in the evening, sitting on benches, people talked, and we, the children, listened, of course—this was after the war, they were all women. This made a big impression on me. A much bigger impression than books, which filled our house. Because in books, the Soviet government made war look like a victory—beautiful, without misery. I don’t think one could even have more than two people killed in a book. What the women said was frightening, different. They would talk of death but also of love. And this, of course, affected a child’s mind. INTERVIEWER And how were you allowed to publish your books, books that changed the past? ALEXIEVICH It was a different time. I would not say it was easy, because no one could understand when I showed up, to a factory, or somewhere else. Why women? Why not men? But it was a different time. I couldn’t get published for three years. Then the times changed, glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn’t allowed to publish The Unwomanly Face of War, but then it changed. The manuscript was getting passed around in Moscow, and someone gave it to Gorbachev’s aide. And in Gorbachev’s report on Victory Day, he said, according to one book, War has an unwomanly face. This was quite a signal. Before that, the censors said: what a frightening book, naturalism, pacifism. Who will go to war after this book? Read More
October 10, 2017 At Work Feeling Foreign: An Interview with Hernan Diaz By Joel Pinckney Photo: Jason Fulford In Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, Håkan Söderström, a Swedish immigrant, traverses the western expanse of nineteenth-century America on his way to New York to find his brother. Along the way, he gains the reputation of a terror and a legend, much to his bewilderment. Håkan is an atypical Western protagonist. He is a foreigner inhabiting a space typically reserved for American desperados, and, though a figure of physical prowess, he is emotionally and psychologically unsuited for life in the American territory—he kills, but he is haunted by it, “overwhelmed by an active, all-consuming hollowness … a stillness that had nothing to do with peace.” I met with Diaz last month at a café in Chelsea. He described the café, with its kitschy diner-like booths and railway-themed decor, as “irresistibly hideous”—a characterization perhaps apt for his protagonist, a figure of endless intrigue whose form provokes others “discovering what a man could be.” Diaz was candid, eager to discuss his work (and share his cheesecake). We talked about the usefulness of considering his book in light of the Western tradition and the American experience for immigrants today. INTERVIEWER Håkan Söderström comes to the American West without any knowledge of the English language. Before he learns English, your narrative is told in such a way that the reader experiences spoken English in the same way Håkan is experiencing it, given no dialogue that Håkan himself wouldn’t be able to understand. How did you decide on that technique? DIAZ It was the result of working within very tight constraints. I was worried about abusing archaisms and relying on a hokey Western vernacular. I didn’t want the book to sound like the transcription of the fake dialect in some bad Western film. How do I make these other characters talk, then? Oh, wait a minute—Håkan doesn’t understand what they’re saying! To me, one of the most fascinating formal problems in literature is point of view, because taken to its ultimate limit, I think it’s also an ethical problem, since it’s related to power. How much about your characters do you know? How far into situations or people can you see? Is it right, just to solve a narrative problem or achieve an effect, to break the laws you had set for yourself? I stuck with Håkan’s point of view in a very drastic way, in that regard. If he doesn’t understand, neither do we. Read More