May 1, 2018 Look May ’68: Posters of the Revolution By The Paris Review In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, Richard Nixon was elected president, the war in Vietnam intensified, and black Americans and anti-war activists were persecuted by the FBI. Anti-war demonstrators chanted, The whole world is watching, as police beat and teargassed them. On the other side of the Atlantic, a revolution brewed in Paris. “Be realistic! Demand the impossible!” was one of the slogans of the uprising that May. “No replastering, the structure is rotten!” and “Neither god nor master!” In the aftermath of the bloody Algerian war, and following increasingly fervent labor strikes, the students united with the factory workers. They formed barricades in the street, led massive strikes, and occupied the universities. The protests brought the city to a standstill, and for a brief month in spring, it seemed as if a more liberated, equitable reality was possible. But the goals of the revolution were vague: a desire to speak, to be free, to be united, to be young and alive. The new world order the revolutionaries vowed to never stop fighting for failed, and still fails, to materialize. Fifty years later, many French people question what exactly May ’68, for all its earnest hope and idealism, achieved. Some argue it has done little more than infuse politics with empty impractical rhetoric. Others argue it left a permanent positive spirit of freedom. One thing is easily agreed upon: the posters were beautiful. They carry a simple iconography—the raised fist of the revolutionary, the spiked silhouette of the factory, blocky silhouettes that strive to represent a universal figure. Most of these were created by a collective of radical artists based at the occupied art school dubbed the Atelier Populaire. (“Populaire,” used in this sense, translates roughly to “communal” or “classless.”) Whatever the legacy of that fevered month of May, these posters have a lasting power. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
April 30, 2018 Look Flowers Not Grown Anywhere Else By The Paris Review Anna Zemánková, Untitled, second half of the sixties, pastel and ballpoint pen on paper. Like most artists, Anna Zemánková was encouraged, from a very young age, to pursue a more lucrative career. From the age of fifteen to eighteen, she studied dentistry and then worked as a dental technician until her marriage, when she forwent paid labor in order to care for her children. In 1948, she and her family moved to Prague, and when she found herself increasingly depressed, her son, a sculptor, implored her to pursue the creative work she had previously disavowed. Early in the morning, before anyone else arose, she’d sketch pastel and ink onto large swaths of paper, creating botanical dreamscapes all her own. As a self-taught artist, Zemánková tends to be described as art brut, but her art brut is of a mysterious and magical strain. She believed her inspiration was derived from a divine source: “I am growing flowers,” she said, “that are not grown anywhere else.” Following a major retrospective of her work at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Switzerland last summer, Kant Books has released a stunning three-hundred-page monograph. Read More
March 23, 2018 Look So Be It, See to It: From the Archives of Octavia Butler By The Paris Review Octavia E. Butler seated by her bookcase, 1986. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. © Patti Perret Like most ambitious writers, Octavia Butler maintained a routine that became ritual. Each morning she’d rise before dawn, and then write until she had to do the work that brought her money. She labored as a dishwasher, then as a potato-chip inspector, and in her off time she orchestrated her future career. Since 2008, Butler’s annotations, notes, research materials, and drafts of novels have been housed at the Huntington Library in California. A selection is presented below. Read More
March 9, 2018 Look The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga By The Paris Review Jake Verzosa, Abo Nao Sicdawag, b. 1924, Lubo, Tanudan, 2011. When Whang-Od was twenty-five, the man she loved was killed in a logging accident. She had never married, nor did she have children. After the death of her boyfriend, she dedicated herself to her role as mamababatok, or tattoo artist. Whang-Od is now 101, and in the Cordillera mountains of the northern Philippines, where she lives among the Kalinga people, she is a legend. Between 2009 and 2013, the Manila-based photographer Jake Verzosa traveled to the Cordillera mountains and photographed Kalinga women whose bodies bear these tattoos, known as batok. Whang-Od is the last mamabatok, and The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga, a collection of Verzosa’s photographs, documents her work. Alternately described as “dead,” “dying,” “extinct,” or “endangered,” batok is a practice that lives on in Versoza’s images, and also in the Kalinga, who are, Verzosa emphasizes, still here. “When I pass on,” says Whang-Od, “I will bring my tattoos with me in the afterlife. Everything else is left behind.” Read More
February 28, 2018 Look Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Portraits Bring the Dead Back to Life By The Paris Review Hiroshi Sugimoto, Norma Shearer, 1994. All photos courtesy of Damiani. Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent a career photographing fictions. When he moved to New York from Japan in 1974, by way of Los Angeles, he intended to find work as a wedding photographer. Instead, he took his camera to the Museum of Natural History, where he developed a lifelong fascination with dioramas. He photographed the taxidermy there, already frozen in their meticulously staged tableaux, and, as he writes, “I realized that I too could bring time to a stop. My camera could stop time in the dioramas—where time had already been halted once—for a second time.” This doubling of perspective, which has since become a signature of Sugimoto’s work, can produce unexpected and uncanny transformations: a 1976 photo from his “Dioramas” series, for example, shows a stuffed polar bear on a faux icescape, looming over a seal, its teeth bared, as though ready to strike. Twice removed from its natural setting, the scene unfreezes. It could easily be confused for a photo of a real bear, a real icescape. “My life as an artist began,” Sugimoto writes, “when I saw with my own eyes that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film.” Sugimoto achieves similar feats in his latest collection, “Portraits,” which will publish this month. For this series, Sugimoto traveled to the Madame Tussauds wax museums in London and Amsterdam, where he selected subjects that span some two thousand years of history. As in his Diorama series, the imposition of photographic distance has a kind of embalming effect on Sugimoto’s subjects, rendered somehow more lifelike in the act of preservation. “Photographs,” Susan Sontag once wrote, “are a way of imprisoning reality.” But in Portraits, Sugimoto uses his camera to opposite effect, creating counterfeit realities that give history back to the dead: “However fake the subject,” he writes, “once photographed, it’s as good as real.” —Spencer Bokat-Lindell Read More
February 7, 2018 Look Postcards from the Propaganda Front By Spencer Bokat-Lindell Heil Hitler Work Bread, pop-up card, color lithograph on card stock. All images courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston For most of human history, transmitting an image quickly and across long distances was either costly or impossible. Enter, at the turn of the twentieth century, the humble postcard: cheap to produce, widely available, and inexpensive to buy and mail, postcards allowed messages and images to travel farther and faster than they ever had before. Before the advent of World War I, postcards were already flooding the German mail system at the rate of nearly five million per day; after the war began in earnest, that rate almost doubled. In its extraordinary popularity, the postcard also provided political actors with a new and powerful tool of persuasion. During the era of the world wars, propaganda producers—from governments to publishers to resistance movements—took advantage of the ubiquitous form to further their own political and ideological agendas. A selection of those postcards, culled from a collection published by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in December titled The Propaganda Front: Postcards of the Era of World Wars, appears below. According to Lynda Klich, one of the collection’s contributors, “propaganda postcards made complex situations seem straightforward, actions just, and desired outcomes believable and attainable.” Although both the medium and the messages may seem antiquated today, the logic behind them remains unsettlingly familiar. Read More