May 26, 2011 Notes from a Biographer Mary Frank By Sam Stephenson Mary Frank in her studio, 2011. Photograph by Kate Joyce. The photographs in Mary Frank’s current solo show at DC Moore Gallery were made over the last three years, yet they evoke decades of history. The items in the photographs form a kind of collage: she composed new paintings directly onto the planks of her studio floor, then arranged sculptures, other works of art (some dating back fifty years), rocks, glass, torn paper, fragments of paintings, and fire around the new painting. It’s like she created abstract, autobiographical stage sets. Then she photographed the results. I first met Mary through her cousin Paul Weinstein. Their grandfather, Gregory Weinstein, had emigrated from Russia in the 1870s and started a multilingual printing company on Varick Street, a business Paul still runs today. I met him in the early days of the Jazz Loft Project through David Levy, the former director of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. David told me that Paul was “a finisher,” someone who could help me organize a complicated New York project from my home base in North Carolina. That proved to be true: among other things, the seed of a four-year collaboration with Sara Fishko and WNYC on the Jazz Loft Radio Project came from a public event Paul threw for me at the Center for Jewish History on Sixteenth Street in 2005. One night around that time, Paul and I were having dinner downtown. I told him I’d spent the afternoon with photographer Robert Frank in his Bleecker Street studio. “My cousin Mary used to be married to him,” Paul said nonchalantly. I startled to attention, the small town of New York City revealing itself to me once again. Until then I only knew Mary Frank as a figure in a photograph. She was the beautiful, exhausted young mother in the car with her two children at the end of Robert Frank’s The Americans—the woman keeping their kids fed, clean, and happy on the road, while her husband completed the work that would make him immortal in the history of photography. Read More
May 25, 2011 Arts & Culture The Punk Ballerina By Miranda Popkey Photograph by Julieta Cervantes. It’s easy to recognize young ballerinas. They own back-seamed pink tights; they keep their hair in buns and fill their backpacks with bobby pins; when they run, their toes are always slightly pointed. After school, they gather in groups to gain mastery of something frightening and foreign: their own bodies. For close to six years I spent hours each week in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors aligning my shoulders with my hips with my ankles, trying to breathe without moving my rib cage. When I see a woman onstage in a leotard, extending her leg horizontally from her body and holding it in place, I recognize, in that long, beautiful, excruciating, terrifying movement, a woman awakening to her own body and its power. Ballet depends on the power of a woman’s body but rarely celebrates it. If anything, ballet encourages women to torture their bodies, rewarding their ability to be strong while appearing physically vulnerable. What choreographer Karole Armitage and her Armitage Gone! Dance company offer is not precisely a refutation of this rule, but its counterpoint. Armitage, who once danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov, is known in the ballet world as the “punk ballerina.” The suite of three dances I saw recently at the Joyce Theater, featured two of her more famous pieces, including the revolutionary Drastic-Classicism, which debuted in 1981 and is set to a live performance of what might plausibly be called punk rock (Ryhs Chatham wrote the score). A drum set and several electric guitars share the stage with the dancers. Before the lights dimmed, audience members in the first row were offered earplugs. Read More
May 25, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Matthew Specktor, Writer and Editor By Matthew Specktor Photography by Lisa Jane Persky. DAY ONE 11:00 A.M. Where better to start a Los Angeles–based culture diary than on the city’s enpretzeled freeways? I leave an editorial meeting and take the 101 to the 5 to the 10 to Boyle Heights, en route to David Kipen’s Libros Schmibros, “a community bookstore and lending library.” It’s pretty much the best bookstore in the world, not so much for its scope (its stock is superb, but it’s an average-size storefront), but for its curation and spirit. Not only is every book in the shop one that any sane reader would covet, but if you happen to empty your pockets while you’re there, you’re free to borrow books you don’t buy. Kipen is clearly some sort of a pinko, but if you can get your head around it—a store that lets you take out works of art on loan—the idea kind of grows on you. (If only someone would make so free and easy with the closely guarded spoils of the music business!) I plan on sending David’s children to college by bankrupting myself in his store. Today’s haul: some replacement Greil Marcuses, swanky hardbacks of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife and Our Gang, Leonard Michaels’s Time Out of Mind, Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air, Daniel Fuchs’s The Golden West: Hollywood Stories. Also, a handsome copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. The rest I left, just because I was too embarrassed to ask for a dolly to carry it all to my car. (Edit—there’s no store here! I’m making this up. Book lovers, stay away! David, I’ll be back next week.) Read More
May 24, 2011 Nostalgia My Manticore By Sadie Stein When I was in my midtwenties, my apartment acquired a stuffed Canada goose, mounted in full flight. Although this was around the time when taxidermy was becoming obligatory for a certain breed of sepia-toned downtown restaurant, there was nothing ironic about ours, which my then boyfriend had shot himself on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The less said about his hunting proclivities the better—and I’m sure you could say all sorts of obvious things that were later borne out—but I liked that the goose had a provenance, which is a true urban rarity. We named him Manticore, after the Robertson Davies novel (he was, after all, Canadian) and generally assumed he would be a whimsical addition to the household. How wrong we were. Manticore, it soon turned out, was a dreary and oppressive presence. Somehow, he became indelibly endowed, in our minds, with a humorless earnestness. It started as a joke but quickly took on a life of its own. We imagined him policing our conversations, interjecting superior opinions, and staring down judgmentally with his glassy eyes. Manticore, we somehow sensed, had strong and implacable opinions on matters like universal healthcare and, possibly, 9/11 conspiracies. He disapproved of levity. He would have been heavily involved in experimental theater, if he hadn’t been a stuffed goose. I grew to hate Manticore. Initially, I’d thought Manticore would be an integral part of decorating schemes, gamely donning scarves and garlands as the season dictated. When I knew him better, this was out of the question—say what one will about the goose, he had a certain dignity. We might strip him of life, we might force him into unwilling cohabitation, but somehow he would maintain the autonomy of the wild. When the relationship ended, Manticore took up residence in my former boyfriend’s new bachelor pad, where—since it was a studio—he loomed large. I took a certain petty pleasure in imagining the chilling effect his self-righteousness would exact on any romantic prospects. Or perhaps he’d find another woman more to his liking. Manticore, I sensed, had disapproved of me. Read More
May 24, 2011 At Work Anthony Caro By Ariel Ramchandani When the museum is crowded, a trip to the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art includes a huddled wait in line for the elevator. You ride up, packed in a sticky car with a school group and some tourists. When the elevator doors open, everyone rushes out, blinking in the sunlight, into what feels like another world. At first, the views of the city and the park dominate, then the five sculptures by Anthony Caro begin to assert themselves. They invite the viewer to come in close; the vista begins to act as a backdrop. The sculptures are substantial but also appear light—one looks as though it could soar right off the roof, whereas another is in danger of caving in on itself. Anthony Caro, knighted in 1987, is one of the most influential British modernists. Our interview felt like a lesson in itself: he answered my flowery prose with simple sentences; when I called him to elaborate, he pushed me toward more crystalline questions. He has an authoritative voice, and he spoke with a purposeful exasperation. One sees this impulse in his work, too: a dogged pursuit of form from a man who helped shaped modernism, whose simple philosophy matches his training as an engineer. The roof is a unique place to show—any installation is buffeted by the gleaming skyline and greenery of Central Park. Did you choose particular pieces that might work in this setting? The pieces were chosen because they were sturdy pieces that were in the New York area and fairly easy to obtain. I think that the New York skyline sets sculptures on the Met roof beautifully. Mind you, all sculpture on the Met roof fits beautifully. It is a wonderful place to show because you have that marvelous background. And I feel it’s quite intimate in a funny way. I think my sculpture is intimate. Mostly it is not public sculpture, though what I’m making for Park Avenue is public. But it is not a monument and has nothing to do with being a monument. After Summer, 1968. Click to enlarge. Read More
May 23, 2011 Arts & Culture Postscript: Celebrating Sybille Bedford By Sylvia Brownrigg Aliette Martin, at left. There are writers who speak several languages proudly, ostentatiously. There are novelists who pen stories in loud, colorful italics about coming from one country and moving to another. There is a fetishizing, even in our globe-trotting culture—web-linked, multiscreened, and simultaneously translated though it is—of nationality, its hold and its reach. Then there is the grace and subtlety of Sybille Bedford. To read Bedford’s work is to bask in the presence of someone at once German, French, and English—at the very least—who knew these countries from deep within herself and was able to enjoy their distinctions without ever belittling or simplifying them. If the word cosmopolitan had been coined with a particular literary figure in mind, it might have been Sybille Bedford. In a piece included in a volume published to honor Sybille after her death, her French friend and literary executor Aliette Martin recalled lines from Sybille’s last book, Quicksands: “To remain monolingual reduces the mind to the confines of a tramline. The civilized mind needs alternatives for its expression.” Though Sybille chose to write in English, she routinely included quotations or phrases from other tongues, along with amiable translations—so that the reader could hear the music or humor of the original, but needn’t feel excluded if his or her mind happened to be more tramlined than the polyglot author’s. Ms. Martin was among those sipping wine or soda water in the elegant offices of The Paris Review not so long ago, at a gathering to celebrate Sybille Bedford’s centenary with readings from various of her books. Read More