April 26, 2017 On the Shelf Washingtonian Wiener, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Canova’s nude Washington. Go on, take a peek at my search history. You’ll see a lot of this: “Nude presidents.” “Nude dead presidents.” “George Washington naked.” “Presidential peen.” “Free naked U.S. American founding fathers pixxx.” “Portrait of signing of Declaration of Independence where all signers are nude.” It has been a long road for me. I am not often delighted by what Google brings to me. But now Antonio Canova’s nineteenth-century sculpture of a totally nude George Washington—presidente numero uno, a hundred percent in the raw, not even any powdered wig—is coming to the Frick. It’s a big deal, a time to rejoice, for, as James Barron writes, we are not accustomed to exposed presidential flesh: “The first president had been dead for seventeen years by the time Canova went to work. Canova had done a nude Napoleon as the god Mars about 10 years earlier. But when it came to Washington, clothes made the man—and the statue—because his appearance mattered. ‘John Marshall, his first serious biographer, even entitled the chapter on Washington’s arrival in the world “The Birth of Mr. Washington,” ’ the historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote, ‘suggesting that he was born fully clothed and ready to assume the presidency.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne seemed to echo Marshall’s notion after posing a provocative question: ‘Did anybody ever see Washington naked?’ ‘It is inconceivable,’ Hawthorne wrote. ‘He had no nakedness, but, I imagine, was born with clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.’ ” When Virginia and Leonard Woolf started the Hogarth Press, it was all fun and games, just like running an indie press should be. But then, as Rafia Zakaria writes, Virginia got bored: “Those first afternoons, when Leonard and Virginia sat covered in ink in the drawing room of Hogarth House, learning by trial and error just how hard it was to set type and center it on the page, were charmed ones. The experience was a simulacrum of the creative process: the beloved final product did not always reflect the pains of its production. But the labors of printing always delivered the satisfaction of a real and tangible object … If Leonard’s involvement was steady, Virginia’s was mercurial, waxing and waning through her depressive and creative spells. As early as March 1924, as they got ready to publish her novel Jacob’s Room, she declared in a letter that ‘publishing one’s own books is very nervous work.’ By October 1933, when Hogarth Press turned sixteen, Virginia declared herself tired of the ‘drudgery and sweating’ and the ‘altered travel plans’ that running the publisher required. She demanded that an ‘intelligent youth’ be found to take over its day-to-day operations.” Read More
April 25, 2017 On the Shelf Strong Words About Dead Artists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Rauschenberg, Collection, 1954–55. There’s a massive Robert Rauschenberg retrospective coming to the MoMA next month, which means we can expect a host of Serious Opinions on the Significant Artist™ to appear in lofty periodicals everywhere. Look to the horizon and you can see the storm clouds gathering, as the assessors assess and the critics criticize. Jed Perl, whose lacerating take on Jeff Koons can still warm my heart on cold nights, has already rendered his verdict on Rauschenberg, and it goes mainly like this: he sucks. Perl writes, “Rauschenberg became adept at keeping admirers and detractors alike on their toes with his swaggering insouciance and Delphic-Dadaist remarks … It was in 1959, for the catalog of the exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art, that Rauschenberg dreamed up what has become his most famous statement. ‘Painting,’ he announced, ‘relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)’ It’s difficult to conceive of a more gnomic twenty-one-word declaration of principles. What on earth is Rauschenberg talking about? What does it mean to say that art can’t be ‘made’? And what is that ‘gap’ between ‘art and life’ aside from the sweet spot where Rauschenberg established his reputation? … What Rauschenberg provides his interpreters is a nearly endless succession of whims, gambits, riffs, and diversions. Many of his effects amount to little more than lessons everybody ought to have learned in Modern Art 101.” Not dissimilarly, Stephen Akey has lodged his complaints with the Emily Dickinson scholars of the world, who persist, he writes, in a laborious effort to make her poems even harder to read: “The online Emily Dickinson Archive, which reproduces the manuscripts with all their wayward calligraphy and unresolved word choices, is a necessary and laudable enterprise, but the last thing it does is make her poetry more accessible. You thought it was hard reading Emily Dickinson before? It just got harder … Maybe the chief difference between a Dickinson scholar and a Dickinson amateur (like me) is that the scholar is in love with and can justify every last dash, whereas the amateur, desperate for the guidance provided by rational punctuation, mentally supplies the missing commas, colons, semicolons, and periods not to be found in the poems themselves … Can anyone truly read these poems without editing them in her head, supplying the punctuation necessary for many of them to make a modicum of sense?” Read More
April 24, 2017 On the Shelf The Sweet Sounds of Benzodiazepine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sounds good. When Huey Lewis sang, in 1983, that he wanted a new drug, someone should’ve told him to look in the mirror. He was the drug all along! His soft, edgeless sound … his narcotic, synthetic, placid distance … America wanted Huey Lewis in pill form. Thirty years later, pop music’s performers are better looking, its production styles silkier, and its sonics deep enough to swim in, but a kind of Charmin toilet-paper softness is at the center of every song again. Chris Richards argues that the sound of today’s “pill pop” can be traced to the rise of Xanax and Percocet—that we want our music, like our increasingly vast pharmacopeia, to dampen any distress signals: “It’s a smoothness, a softness, a steadiness. An aversion to unanticipated left turns. It isn’t new, but it’s increasingly everywhere. You can hear it in the Weeknd’s demulcent falsetto, in Rihanna’s unruffled cool, in Drake’s creamier verses, even in Justin Bieber’s buffed edges … In that sense, the pill-pop aesthetic and the streaming experience go hand-in-hand. Crafting a hit single with sleek synthesizers, pillowy electronic drums and Auto-Tuned purrs might be enough to get you in the game, but it isn’t enough to win. Dominance belongs to those superstars willing to replicate their softness in abundance, and then roll it out on the streaming platforms … the anxiety-smothering sound of pill-pop is bound to help define this moment in our cultural memory—the same way late-sixties rock-and-roll still pulses like an LSD vision, or the way mid-eighties hair-metal still screams like cocaine.” Martin Herbert’s new essay collection, Tell Them I Said No, looks at artists who’ve shunned the self-promotion and ceaseless glad-handing that have overtaken the profession. Hettie Judah writes in her review, “Herbert examines ten artists who have withdrawn, some in extreme ways, from the self-promotion and courting of celebrity that is bundled up with our understanding of art-world success. Here we find Lutz Bacher, who assumed a near invisible, gender-ambiguous identity; Cady Noland, who ceased making art despite acclaim, and now monitors and bedevils anyone seeking to sell or show her work; and Stanley Brouwn, who shunned photographic documentation and recordings, and once had all the copies of a book featuring images of his performances destroyed … In 1983, David Hammons sold snowballs of various sizes off a pavement pitch in downtown Manhattan, in an event titled the the Bliz-aard Ball Sale. A few years later, in a rare interview, he detailed his objection to the gallery-visiting public. He thought that audience was ‘overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize and not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?’ ” Read More
April 21, 2017 On the Shelf Language Is a Parasite, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Peter Lund, a Danish naturalist, copying rock paintings at Lagoa Santa, Brazil. Every writer needs a hobby. When he isn’t writing bleak, bloody fiction or exploring the primal violence at the heart of the American experience, Cormac McCarthy likes to unwind with a little theoretical scientific research. Who doesn’t? His work at the Santa Fe Institute has led him to write a new treatise on the nature of the unconscious and the emergence of human language: “The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they weren’t there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. I suggested once in conversation at the Santa Fe Institute that language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion … The difference between the history of a virus and that of language is that the virus has arrived by way of Darwinian selection and language has not. The virus comes nicely machined. Offer it up. Turn it slightly. Push it in. Click. Nice fit.” Now that O’Reilly’s out at Fox, perhaps he can really settle into his career as a thriller writer—fiction, with its unfettered escapism, could offer him just the outlet he needs, at a remove from the troubles of the real world. After all, his 1998 novel, Those Who Trespass, was invented from whole cloth—except, of course, for all those parts about sexual harassment and vindictive revenge. Actually, the novel is uncomfortably prescient, as Jia Tolentino writes: “The main character is a violently bitter journalist named Shannon Michaels, who, after being pushed out of two high-profile positions, takes revenge on four of his former colleagues by murdering them one by one … The second sentence of Those Who Trespass describes Ron Costello, a correspondent for Global News Network, on assignment in Martha’s Vineyard and struggling with a ‘basic human need, the need for some kind of physical release.’ Costello spots a pretty camerawoman at a party, happily notes that she’s had too much vodka, and approaches her with ‘intense sexual hunger … tonight he wanted this freelance GNN camerawoman named Suzanne. He wanted her in a big way.’ When Suzanne rejects Costello, he’s furious. (‘Goddamn bitch. She’ll be sorry,’ he thinks.) Then the vengeful Michaels kills Costello by shoving a silver spoon through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.” Read More
April 20, 2017 On the Shelf Smells like Teen Spirit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring That way lies madness—and great innovations in odor-concealing technology. There are great things happening along the I-95 corridor. The rest stops, for one—if you’ve stopped at the Walt Whitman Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, you know what paradise is. But what if I told you that there’s something in the vicinity even better than the rest stops? And what if, to sweeten the deal, I added that it concerns antiperspirant technology? Adam Davidson has the facts: “You smell better now—and will smell even better in the future—because of the advances that are occurring along Interstate 95 between Philadelphia and Newark. You could call that stretch of road ‘the stink highway.’ This revolution began in 1990, when George Preti, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, isolated the specific molecule (3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid) that produces the distinct odor of underarm sweat. Before Preti’s discovery, you had to, in his words, ‘carpet bomb’ smells by applying a perfume strong enough to overwhelm and erase all odors. Once Preti cracked the code, scientists could create scents that adhere only to the nasal sensors that are most sensitive to 3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid. Deodorant designers are now able to create precisely the scent they want, which could be no discernible scent at all.” A literary collector is parting with some of his most impressive acquisitions—pony up and you could take home, say, a letter from Proust bemoaning the sex he’s been forced to overhear. Danuta Kean writes, “The most amusing letter in the collection … was from Proust to the son of his landlord … Proust complains about being able to hear his neighbors’ loud sex. The noise was not the problem, the letter reveals: ‘Beyond the partition, the neighbors make love every two days with a frenzy of which I am jealous.’ ” Read More
April 19, 2017 On the Shelf Go on and Drive Your Van Right Off a Cliff, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Dead to me. The Volkswagen Westfalia Camper used to be a mark of distinction: passing one on the road ten years ago, you could be fairly certain its passengers were unwashed eccentrics, conspiracy theorists, petty criminals, or all of the above. But today the van has lost its luster. Like everything decent and weird in this world, it’s been co-opted by rich white people who yearn to cultivate a sense of ersatz rebellion and get more likes on Instagram. They buy these vans by the hundreds, presumably to take boring drug-free road trips and have lots of vanilla sex in the back. This is called #vanlife, and you should denounce it whenever you see it. Rachel Monroe writes of the trend, “Like the best marketing terms, ‘vanlife’ is both highly specific and expansive. It’s a one-word life-style signifier that has come to evoke a number of contemporary trends: a renewed interest in the American road trip, a culture of hippie-inflected outdoorsiness, and a life free from the tyranny of a nine-to-five office job … ‘It’s men in their thirties with huge beards, and they’re pretty much all stay-at-home dads,’ [Harley Sitner] said. ‘Their wives work office jobs and they work on the vans so the family can go out and vanlife on the weekend’ … ‘There are now professional vanlifers,’ [Foster] Huntington told me, sounding slightly scandalized. Vanlifers have a tendency to call their journeys ‘projects,’ and to describe them in the elevator-pitch terms that make sense to potential sponsors.” In an interview by Paul Devlin, David Murray reflects on the legacy of Albert Murray’s jazz writing: “People get tired of reading good stuff when reading about jazz. They don’t want to think too hard. A lot of people got frustrated with Albert Murray on that too—people just want a few sentences—they don’t know about the sustenance of the blues. But he broke it down … The fact that he even thought [the blues] was sophisticated turned some people off. Europeans love Africans when they don’t comb their hair. See, in Europe, they’ll see a light-skinned black, and they’ll say, ‘He’s black, but he’s not really black.’ Here, politically, we’ve defined who we are as African Americans. In Europe, they use their definition of us rather than our definition of us. We have to say these things to continue to define who we are as people. That’s what Albert Murray was saying when he described the afro hairstyle as ‘Afro-Brillo,’ rather than describing ‘the natural.’ He says that because he knows exactly what he means. He’s very specific. There are white people who resent those distinctions because it destroys their idea of the nigger serving coffee. Or those lawn jockeys. Sometimes I would go to a restaurant in Portugal that had one. I’d always throw some shit at it. The owner says, ‘Man, why you always messing with my jockey?’ I say it makes me not want to come in here!” Read More