January 31, 2018 Look Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in Conversation By Katie Hanson Left: detail from Two Studies for a Skeleton by Gustave Klimt; Right: detail from The Pacer by Egon Schiele The year 2018 marks the centenary of the deaths of the Austrian artists Gustav Klimt (born in 1862) and Egon Schiele (born in 1890). Even after a hundred years, their drawings have a compelling immediacy, a sense of energy and presence, of searching and questioning, that still feels fresh. Both artists welcomed deep engagement with their art, a kind of looking that encompassed feeling and seeking. Klimt was nearly thirty years Schiele’s senior, and the younger artist looked up to him, but their admiration and recognition of artistic skill were mutual. When Schiele asked Klimt if he was talented, Klimt replied, “Talented? Much too much.” Schiele proposed an exchange of drawings, offering several of his own sheets for one by Klimt, to which Klimt responded, “Why do you want to exchange with me? You draw better than I do.” Schiele was proud when his work was exhibited opposite Klimt’s in Berlin in 1916. Just a couple years later, upon Klimt’s death, Schiele wrote, “An unbelievably accomplished artist—a man of rare depth—his work a sanctuary.” Read More
January 30, 2018 Look Mirtha Dermisache and the Limits of Language By Will Fenstermaker An excerpt from Mirtha Dermisache’s Libro No. 1 (1972). No importa lo que pasa en la hoja de papel, lo importante es lo que pasa dentro nuestro. (“It’s not important what happens on a sheet of paper, the important thing is what happens within us.”) —Mirtha Dermisache Despots, from those who composed the efficiently murderous junta that ruled Argentina to the petty kakistocracy that runs the United States today, curb the written word because they fear its expressive power. They haven’t learned that what they should fear is not written language but, instead, the very impulse to write. It is more prevailing than literature, capable of surviving where art cannot. The writings and artistic practice of Mirtha Dermisache are a testament to this. Her work, which she created while living under the junta in Argentina, is lasting and subversive even though she barely penned a legible word. One could argue that writing is a state of being in conflict—with oneself, with one’s subject, with one’s government, or with one’s community. But the unconscious impulse to write comes before the word, and it does not always take the form of language. Everything that follows—in how we traditionally conceive of writing—is an attempt to capture that compulsion, to make approximate marks that convey our thoughts to others. This is what John Berger referred to when he wrote, “The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience.” Prose, he came to believe, expressed something that was far from truth because it was too artificial and too trusting; it did not “speak to the immediate wound.” Read More
January 17, 2018 Look Two Thousand Pieces of Subway Ephemera By The Paris Review A bag of bullseye subway tokens. All photographs by Brian Kelley. In 2011, the Brooklyn-based photographer Brian Kelley began collecting old MetroCards, a project that soon transformed into a zealous obsession. After scouring all of the city’s 472 stations, he widened his scope to include maps, pins, tokens, buttons, uniforms, promotional papers, and other historical artifacts. With the help of fellow enthusiasts, MTA workers, and eBay sellers, he has amassed, over the years, some two thousand pieces of ephemera. A selection appears below. In his new book, New York City Transit Authority: Objects, Kelley tells the story of the subway’s evolution. In a moment when the subway’s future has been put into question and dissected by frequent exposés of the system’s degradation, this project offers a uniquely intimate view into its history. The transit passes and MetroCards, in particular, read like familiar texts, each inscribed with traces of their respective time and place. A pink omnibus pass from 1956, for example, contains a name field for the passenger’s husband. A test MetroCard from 1992 heralds the end of tokens. Two years later, in 1994, the MetroCards already resemble those New Yorkers use today. Later specimens from the aughts feature public-safety warnings as well as advertisements, most recently for the fashion brand Supreme. Some things never change: a flyer from 1985, when the 7 line was overhauled for repairs, shows a commuter frustration that wouldn’t be out of place today. Taken together, the objects constitute both a public record and a palimpsest, suggestive of the countless ways the city has grown, faltered, and reinvented itself over the decades, even as the structures undergirding it have remained for the most part unchanged. Read More
December 21, 2017 Look The New Archive of Gabriel García Márquez By The Paris Review When Gabriel García Márquez died, in 2014, he left behind, among other legacies, an astoundingly detailed record of his life—some 27,500 images’ worth of detail, in fact. That collection—culled from his correspondence, his twenty-two personal scrapbooks and notebooks, his photographs, and material from both his published and unpublished works—was acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014, and became digitally available to the public this month. The Ransom archive gives us the author in full and scattered manuscript: yellowed pages of Colombian passports; first and second and third drafts of his Nobel Prize speech, historical dates and ranges penciled in the margin; candid snapshots of him fondling a statue with Pablo Neruda in Normandy or side-hugging a mirthful Fidel Castro in Havana. The images, in their multitudes, compose not so much a story as an entire life, refracted through film and paper. A small selection appears below: Unidentified photographer, Gabriel García Márquez with Emma Castro, 1957. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center. Read More
December 11, 2017 Look Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Anarchist Bikers Who Came to Help By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. Molly Crabapple, Bennie, 2017. On November 4, a little over a month after the hurricane, five bike punks arrived at La Loma, the hilltop community center in Mariana, the barrio where my friend Christine Nieves lives. They hung their hammocks between the beams of the ruined playground, lit some cigarettes, and got to work. Cooze, Greg, Angie, Jerry, and Bennie had come from Charlotte, North Carolina. A decade ago, they founded Ride or Destroy, a bike club known for its tricked out cycles and death-courting stunts—they refer to it as a gang, tongue half in cheek. The anarchism came later. In 2016, members took part in the anti-police-violence protests that broke out in Charlotte after police officers killed Keith L. Scott, a forty-three-year-old black man. After Maria hit, the friends formed DABS, or Direct Action Bike Squad, then crowdfunded money to come to Puerto Rico in order to distribute supplies to mountain barrios. They first spent a week in Luquillo looking for work that needed doing, then, through a facebook page run by a network of Puerto Rican mutual aid centers, they found the mutual aid project started by the community in Mariana. Read More
December 4, 2017 Look Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Artists with the Shovels By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. Molly Crabapple, Bridge, 2017. Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi has lost track of how many times he’s been to Barrio Paloma Abajo since the hurricane hit. As he drove up the vertiginous roads of the Cordillera Central, he ticked off what he and his colleagues at Defend PR have accomplished so far. They were working with an architect to rebuild houses wrecked by Maria. They brought seeds and water filters and set up a solar-powered cinema. Solar lights, mosquito nets, batteries, bug spray, rat traps. They drove kids to a local comedy show. They installed tarps on roofs and brought chain saws to cut down the dangling tree branches and shoveled debris from the broken bridge. They organized themselves into brigades to clean wrecked farms. Jacobs-Fantauzzi rolled up his sleeve and showed me a trail of red welts. Ants, he suspected. Read More