June 2, 2011 Arts & Culture Making Art By Thessaly La Force Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, who founded the Feminist Studio Workshop, with Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven. Here they are in de Bretteville’s house in 1973. Toward the end of !Women Art Revolution, the performance artist Janine Antoni, who was born in 1964, recalls a moment when her professor, Mira Schor, asks if she’s heard of the work of Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneeman. Antoni hadn’t, and she went to the library to learn more. She found nothing, so Schor brought Antoni clippings and catalogues she had saved at home. The moment was profound. “I looked at this work,” Antoni said, “And I thought, ‘I’m making the work of the seventies.’” !Woman Art Revolution, which plays for just this week at IFC, is a documentary by Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film weaves together decades of interviews with female artists, which Hershman Leeson began recording in 1966 in her Berkeley living room, and she continued recording through the next four decades. There are over four hundred hours of tape, and it took Hershman Leeson three and a half months to watch it all—once. It is incredible. Nancy Spero, who died in 2009, shares a humiliating appointment with Leo Castelli: “Ivan Karp saw me. I was wearing high heel boots at the time. I was really kind of tall. Ivan is small. … He had me put [my tablet] on the floor so every time I turned the page, it felt I was genuflecting to him. And then he said, ‘What’d you bring these to me for?’” Here’s the late art historian Arlene Raven: “I stopped doing the dishes, making the three meals a day, the laundry, and the house cleaning and so on. The process of personal liberation for me resulted in the break up of my marriage.” The Guerrilla Girls appear: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Marcia Tucker, the founding director of the New Museum, talks about how she was hired as the first female curator at the Whitney, but at $2,000 less than her colleague James Monte: “So I went into see my director and I said, ‘Listen this is what’s happening and you’ve got to change it.’ And he said, ‘Oh well, the budget, the budget, the budget.’ And I said, ‘The New York Times, The New York Post, The Daily News.’ So it got changed!” Read More
June 2, 2011 At Work Oliver Broudy on ‘The Saint’ By Rosalind Parry Oliver Broudy was a disenchanted freelance journalist living in New York City when he met a philanthropically inclined millionaire whose story struck him as so meaningful that he decided to follow it halfway across the world. The result is The Saint, a short memoir of Broudy’s travels with a man whose spiritual efforts range from the incredible to the horrible, and from the enlightening to the self-destructive. Broudy served as managing editor and then senior editor of The Paris Review, working under George Plimpton and Philip Gourevitch. What made you decide to write this book? Recklessness, I guess. The last resource of the truly stymied. Before The Saint, I only wrote for magazines. But as sweet a gig as magazine writing can sometimes be, there’s a limit to what you can do in that format. Sometimes it can be agonizing, because you get so close to a subject, but the editorial rubric of the magazine prevents you from addressing it the way you’d like to. So you end up sitting there helplessly as this great material sails by. I used to console myself that I could always go back and write my own version of whatever magazine piece was plaguing me at the time, but inevitably by the time you’re done with the magazine version, revisiting the same material becomes unthinkable. Those lost opportunities linger and ache. That had happened to me too many times, and I was determined to try something different. Read More
June 1, 2011 Contests And We Have A Winner! By Sadie Stein We asked, you answered: the thunderous response to our Arcadia ticket giveaway contest made this a tough decision for the panel of judges. The challenge was to write a couplet answering the question “Does Carnal Embrace Addle the Brain?” Entries ranged from the sublime, to the very long, to the ridiculous—with everything (and a lot of adult content) in between. The winners were chosen by an elite panel selected for their expertise—and experience—in brain-addled behavior. Criteria included keeping to couplet form; topical subjects; inventiveness; or anything that made us laugh. Our winner gets a pair of tickets to Broadway’s Arcadia; our three runners-up will receive ever-chic Paris Review tees. The Runners-Up: He made up the apple to hide his depravity. Testicles dangled. “My God!” he said. “Gravity!”—Kay Nine Brains and dicks are of similar stuff. One used unrestrained causes horrors enough.—DJD To all police, when on (or off) duty, Protect, not rape, shirtless, blacked-out booty.—Michael And Our Winner: Carnal Embrace Turns a King Into a Beggar And makes a Single Man out of Arnold Schwarzenegger—Guy Congratulations, Guy and thank you all participants for many entertaining (and occasionally alarming) hours! Stay tuned for more competitions in the future …
June 1, 2011 Arts & Culture The Place of the Flavored Vodkas By Molly Fischer “The Russian Samovar: The Place of the Flavored Vodkas,” read the TV screens above the bar: an apt summary, and a reprimand to anyone ordering beer. Horseradish is the vodka of men; ginger is a crowd-pleaser; pomegranate has a reputation as the girlie vodka. Last Tuesday, in honor of the restaurant’s twenty-fifth anniversary, friends of the proprietor Roman Kaplan gathered to pay tribute and drink from his array of flavored vodkas. Samovar cofounder Mikhail Baryshnikov ordered horseradish vodka. “Horseradish,” said our companion. “That’s what Baryshnikov got? I trust him.” Baryshnikov’s TV alter ego brought Carrie Bradshaw to the Samovar on Sex and the City, but tonight he was in better company. He availed himself of the buffet—dumplings, sliced fish, beet-striped layer cake, a bowl of bright green pickles—and snapped pictures of his dining companions with a digital camera. “Mazel Tov!” said Philip Roth to Roman when he arrived around eight-thirty, in the middle of several Russian speeches. Roman had already spoken and enjoyed a postspeech indoor cigarette. To Alexander Izbitser, the dapper house pianist, Roth apologized for his own khakis and blazer. He promised he’d wear his tux for the fiftieth. Roman, Baryshnikov, and poet Joseph Brodksy opened the Samovar in 1986. Tuesday night was the anniversary of the late Brodsky’s birth. According to Roman, it also marked sixteen years of Samovar poetry readings as well as twenty-five years of the restaurant. Read More
May 28, 2011 Contests Win Two Tickets to Arcadia By Peter Conroy The Paris Review is giving away two tickets to Arcadia—Tom Stoppard’s paean to poetry and bodies in heat—now on Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre. To win, make like Ezra Chater in The Couch of Eros and wax poetic on the immortal question, “Does Carnal Embrace Addle the Brain?” Keep your lines to a couplet, but in true Stoppardian fashion, let your imagination run wild: anything from the impending Kardashian nuptials to Kate Wood’s philosophy to the (alleged) crimes of DSK is fair game. Share yours in comments below. The winning entry will be announced on Wednesday, June 1.
May 27, 2011 Look Big Sky By Danny Singer Foremost, 2011, archival inkjet print, 40” x 60”. Courtesy Gallery Jones.