June 10, 2014 Video & Multimedia Originals and Remnants By Dan Piepenbring The poet Susan Howe is seventy-seven today. A few years ago, she and the musician David Grubbs collaborated on “Frolic Architecture,” a series of multidisciplinary performances that sprang from a book of her collage poems by the same name. Harvard has posted a video of the performance, which is quietly, insistently disruptive. As it progresses, prerecorded shards of Howe’s voice seem to fall into her live voice, and Grubbs fills the space with incidental sounds: insect chirps, gravel and snow and leaves variously underfoot. The performance seems at once to take on weight and ascend into the ether. Howe remarked on the collage, and the process of recording it, in her 2012 Art of Poetry interview: HOWE I am an Americanist. There’s something that we do, a Romantic, utopian ideal of poetry as revelation at the same instant it’s a fall into fracture and trespass. Frolic Architecture cuts itself to bits. It could be that because I am a woman, bullets are more like blanks. What fuels the poems in that collection is the sense of epic breaking into shards. INTERVIEWER I’ve heard the recording of your performance of Frolic, and you actually speak—sound out—its fragments and phonemes, those shards. You treat your work as a score. HOWE Collaborating with the musician-composer David Grubbs has brought vividly home to me how acoustic a seemingly collaged and visual work can be. Several years ago our first collaboration was for a performance at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and was based around an early poem of mine called “Thorow.” We collaborated again to produce Souls of the Labadie Tract. The work I have done with David has influenced the course of my later poetry by showing me a range of contemporary music with which I was unfamiliar. It also restored my earlier interest in Charles Ives. I love the way Ives’s musical use of quotation throws connectives to the winds. His work is Romantic and iconoclastic at once. And in the journal Lana Turner, Ben Lerner wrote with typical acuity about the performance: I assumed Grubbs had digitally manipulated Howe’s voice in order to mimic the fragmentation of the collages. And Grubbs did often and artfully alter her voice, but it turns out that many of the sounds I thought were digital slivers weren’t. It simply did not occur to me that Howe would be capable of reading such diverse phonemes and even smaller linguistic particles in real time with such precision. But she is: I have never heard a person pronounce “nt” or “rl,” for instance, so exactly. Howe can render even the most distressed text acoustic … Howe’s recorded voice—sometimes digitally cut up, sometimes left alone—alternated or overlapped with the live performance, and Grubbs had made sure that there was little or no perceptible sonic difference between what was digital and what was happening before us; when I shut my eyes, I couldn’t tell. This blurring of the boundary between the live and the recorded was a deft way to indicate how Howe’s poems are at once originals and remnants.
June 10, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Sacred Rites By Sadie Stein William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Crown of Flowers (detail), 1884. The food takes awhile which gave us time to watch a waitress deliver a Dutch Baby and envelop us with its fragrant, perhaps sacred, steam. A tray of ruby grapefuit [sic] juice in large glasses made me think of luxurious jewels. Obviously we had traveled back to a past time. —A review of the Original Pancake House When I was about twenty-six, a friend sent me a listing for a job at an online review site, which, at the time, had not yet gone public. It seemed to me a good idea to apply to lots of things, so I sent in a letter. “We’re looking for someone hip and quirky for this job,” said the woman, Tyler, who interviewed me from San Francisco; she’d mentioned an improbably high salary and a host of benefits and perks. “You seem hip and quirky. But we need someone more integrated into the Web site’s community. I notice you have no reviews, no profile, and no ‘friends.’ We’ll need to see more of a commitment.” I attacked my new assignment with determination. I set myself a quota of ten reviews a day and implored everyone I knew to join my network. In my capacity as manager of the lingerie store where I worked weekends, I commandeered the computer, knocking out reviews of the coffee at the bodega on the corner (“too subtle for the common palate”), the new artisanal pizzeria (“a horseman of the gentrification apocalypse”), and the local nail salon (“The nail technician was slovenly and surly; her coat was soiled; she started cutting my cuticles without asking”). While I placed a premium on quantity, I began to take my task seriously: I was appalled by the cavalier manner in which fellow reviewers dismissed small businesses after a single visit or graded spots where they hadn’t bothered to wait for a table. I took special care in rebutting what I felt to be thoughtless and uninformed reviews. My tone became hectoring. Read More
June 10, 2014 Arts & Culture The National Writer By Ted Trautman Chinghiz Aitmatov and the literature of Kyrgyzstan. “Chyngyz Aitmatov and his arts,” a series of Kyrgyz postage stamps. Six years ago today, when pneumonia claimed the life of the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov, I learned about it the old-fashioned way: from a man weeping in the streets. I don’t mean to imply that all of Kyrgyzstan had thrown its hands up in despair at the loss of its best writer and most famous native son, though I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had. I just happened to come across an old man—an ak cakal, or “white beard,” as the elderly there are known—sitting next to a small radio on a park bench, letting tears run down his face as he listened to the news. I’d been living in Kyrgyzstan for a year at that point, halfway through a tour in the Peace Corps; my Kyrgyz was not so sharp that I could clearly understand the radio, but it was more than good enough to ask the man if everything was all right. In response, he lifted a tattered copy of Aitmatov’s novel Jamila toward me and whispered, “He’s gone.” It’s hard to overstate Aitmatov’s importance to Kyrgyzstan’s national identity. In my time there, new acquaintances regularly quizzed me on the country’s national this and national that. Kyrgyzstan’s national food? A fried rice dish called plov. The national music? Anything played on the ukulele-like komuz. The national writer? Chinghiz Aitmatov, obviously. (My younger English students had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t as quickly recite the United States’ national writer, et al.) December 12, the author’s birthday, is celebrated nationwide as Chinghiz Aitmatov Day. After Kyrgyzstan gained independence, Aitmatov represented the young country as an ambassador to the European Union, NATO, and elsewhere. “One of the great charms of Aitmatov’s life,” Scott Horton wrote for Harper’s shortly after the writer died, “was that he charted first the decline of the Central Asian life and identity, and then participated in its resurrection as the Soviet Union collapsed and as the Central Asian states regained, quite unexpectedly, their autonomy and footing on the world stage.” Read More
June 10, 2014 Studio Visit Signs and Wonders: In the Studio with Hayal Pozanti By Joseph Akel My first encounter with artist Hayal Pozanti was the lucky happenstance of a predetermined seating arrangement: she was placed across the table from me at a dinner celebrating Jessica Silverman Gallery, which represents Pozanti on the West Coast. We spent the evening in deep discussion on the finer points of photographic theory and discovered a shared interest in the writings of Friedrich Kittler. Agreeing to stay in touch, I found myself in New York for Frieze Art Fair and decided to pay a visit to Pozanti’s studio in Queens. She was born in Istanbul in 1983, and moved to New York in 2009. In a small, partitioned space with views looking over the East River toward Midtown Manhattan, we talked about her current body of work, which will be exhibited later this year at the Prospect New Orleans biennial and at the Parisian iteration of the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. With my recent paintings, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ken Price, Philip Guston, and Allan McCollum. And, of course, I always come back to Giorgio Morandi—I think about him regularly. I find that a common ground for all of these artists was the ability to create, through figurative abstraction, a world parallel to the one we live in. As a Turkish immigrant who has moved from place to place, who speaks several languages, I’m intrigued by the possibility of creating a universal language to unite my cross-cultural experiences. When I think back to my childhood in Istanbul—even to my time as a young professional there—I was always concerned with the question of acceptance and with the idea of unifying people. Read More
June 10, 2014 On the Shelf Butlers for Everyone, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Danish cartoon from 1901. Spurred by Downton Abbey, fabulously wealthy people around the world have decided they must have butlers, and they must have them now. Jeeves must be rolling in his grave—even if he was technically a valet, and a fictional one at that. “The 1920s and 1930s in France were a moment when extreme ideological currents swept unstable, marginal, even criminal figures out of their ordinary recesses into positions of remarkable prominence.” Sounds awfully familiar… A helpful (or at least mildly diverting) graph shows us how often a given letter occurs at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Y is nearly always at the end, never the start. Poor Y. In the forties, a woman named Frances Glessner Lee revolutionized crime-scene investigation with one simple innovation: dioramas. “After months of cleaning and painstaking scientific investigation, art specialists in Britain have apparently concluded a decades-long debate over the authenticity of a self-portrait by Rembrandt, saying on Tuesday that it was genuine.” Your next home: a decommissioned Boeing 727.
June 9, 2014 Weird Book Room Relativistic Finesse By Dan Piepenbring Above is an advertisement from our seventieth issue—published in the summer of 1977—for Deep Foot and its sequel, Deeper Foot, two apparently seminal avant-garde novels. Click the photo to see the ad in full; it merits scrutiny. Anyone seriously seeking Truth, Love, and a real and true ALTERNATIVE to the deadness and shallowness of the American Dream, rather than merely seeking people or trips to become dependent upon: THESE BOOKS ARE FOR YOU! “This generation may hide these masterpieces under their beds,” the ad goes on, “but the next generation will more likely use them like a Bible!” I’m of that next generation, and I can tell you: we most certainly would, if we only knew where to find them. Information on the whereabouts of Richard M. Vixen has been hard to come by—we appreciate any tips you can offer. We do know that Avant-Garde Creations, of Eugene, Oregon, was in existence as recently as 1981, when the company took out an ad in Yoga Journal—a questionnaire, in fact, whose first prompt is “Are you conscious of a deep desire to be in an environment in which you could choose to be with any of 20 (or so) people, all of whom you love and who love you?” Evidence indicates that Mr. Vixen wrote, in addition to the series advertised here, The Game of Orgy (with a foreword by Robert Rimmer) and The Magic Carpet and the Cement Wall, for Kids from 8 to 92. A rhapsodic Amazon review of Deep Foot describes it thus: A triumphant, voluptuous novel about a woman’s enlightenment. A mercilessly erotic, tenderly passionate journey into love and awareness. When Lotta escaped from her prison of beliefs (about what she thought her life was supposed to be about) she found a whole new world of love and beauty awaiting her, and she fell in love with … Everyone! A dissenting critic writes, “Reading it felt a bit like watching a non-lethal crash between two clown cars happen in slow motion.”