July 25, 2012 Arts & Culture 112 Greene Street By Claire Barliant Exterior of 112 Greene Street. Photo by Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone. I met with Jessamyn Fiore in the air-conditioned back offices of David Zwirner’s Chelsea gallery in late June to discuss her new book, 112 Greene Street, a series of interviews with artists who helped found or were associated with the eponymous location, one of the first alternative art spaces in New York City. Opened in 1970 by artists Jeffrey Lew, Alan Saret, and Gordon Matta-Clark, 112 Greene Street served not as a commercial gallery but as a space in which artists could create and exhibit works collaboratively. Their participation in the burgeoning SoHo art scene also included cofounding FOOD, a pay-what-you-wish restaurant known for its delicious soups. Back then, the neighborhood more closely resembled a small village, rather than the glamorous, high-end shopping district it is now, and all of the artists associated with 112 Greene Street who were interviewed by Fiore remember that communal period fondly. Fiore has a direct lineage to the groundbreaking gallery: her mother, Jane Crawford, was married to Gordon Matta-Clark, who died from pancreatic cancer in 1978 at age thirty-five. Known for his daring “building cuts”—literal dissections of buildings slated for demolition—Matta-Clark was, by all accounts, charismatic and widely admired and loved. Fiore herself ran a nonprofit art gallery in Dublin for several years before relocating to New York, where she curated an exhibition at Zwirner about 112 Greene Street last winter. She is warm, easygoing, and candid; it’s easy to see why the artists, whom she considers her friends, would trust her to preserve their memories in print. Read More
July 25, 2012 On the Shelf Rare Books, Sharks, and Ink By Sadie Stein Terrible beach reads. At UVA, rare-book school is in session. Journalist (and former Paris Review editor) Philip Gourevitch on editing, writing, and his work on genocide. Famous writers and their tattoos. Sergei Dovlatov featured on Russian radio. (In translation!) The sad fate of Dawn Powell’s journals.
July 24, 2012 Arts & Culture Advice to a Young Illustrator By Sadie Stein In 1961, a thirty-three-year-old Maurice Sendak wrote his editor, Harper & Row’s Ursula Nordstrom, about his self-doubts as a writer. Letters of Note presents her response. It is full of great advice, but we especially love this: The great Russians and Melville and Balzac etc. wrote in another time, in leisure, to be read in leisure. I know what you mean about those long detailed rich novels—my god the authors knew all about war, and agriculture, and politics. But that is one type of writing, for a more leisurely time than ours. You have your own note to sound, and you are sounding it with greater power and beauty all the time. Yes, Moby Dick is great, but honestly don’t you see great gobs of it that could come out? Does that offend you, coming from a presumptuous editor? I remember lines of the most piercing beauty (after he made a friend there was something beautiful about “no more would my splintered hand and shattered heart be turned against the wolfish world.”) But there are many passages which could have been cut. Presciently, she added: 33 is still young for an artist with your potentialities. I mean, you may not do your deepest, fullest, richest work until you are in your forties. You are growing and getting better all the time. No kidding: Sendak would write Where the Wild Things Are two years later, and the rest is children’s book history!
July 24, 2012 On Music Tapes on Books: Mrs. Dalloway By Christine Muhlke and Leanne Shapton A literary soundtrack inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
July 24, 2012 Bulletin Dogs, Scientologists, and Ipanema By Sadie Stein Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, Ipanema “The Girl from Ipanema” is fifty! (Not the real one—she’s sixty-seven—but the bossa nova classic.) It is the second-most-covered song, after “Yesterday.” A graduate student at King’s College London has discovered a previously unknown 1909 short story by Katherine Mansfield in the university library. Read an excerpt from “A Little Episode” here. What these writers think about when they think about running. What Maira Kalman thinks about herself. The most beloved dogs in literature? We think Nana Darling was robbed. Portrait of the artist as a young Scientologist: a 1969 BBC interview with a teenage Neil Gaiman, then a believer. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 23, 2012 First Person Letter from India: The Best Restaurant in the World By Amie Barrodale My friend edits a travel magazine. She lets me review hotels. This means that I can stay at nice hotels free in return for a short review. (The magazine doesn’t pay either; it’s done “on trade.”) I can write four or five hotel reviews a year. Whenever I suggest more, my friend (who is a close friend of more than ten years) goes silent. I recently arranged to stay at the Hotel in Delhi for two nights on trade. Rooms there start at six hundred dollars, and (uncharacteristically) they included everything—food, minibar, spa, airport pick-up and drop-off—in the trade. I mean it was all, to use their very polite and reassuring word, complimentary. Alcohol would have cost, they did say, but I am not a person who drinks anymore. I recently lost my privileges. The thing about a free hotel stay is that you pay in time, in tours, and in the unspoken requirement that you ask questions, feign amazement, and jot notes about wall hangings, historic meetings, and persons who have sat in so-and-so chair. (“How do you spell that name? So wonderful. So he really sat here? May I sit?”) Read More