Original illustration by Jenny Kroik

This puzzling quest is almost at its end. —James Rorimer, 1942

Nobody knows who made the Unicorn Tapestries, a set of seven weavings that depict a unicorn hunt that has been described as “the greatest inheritance of the Middle Ages.”

Without evidence, the La Rochefoucauld family in France asserted that the tapestries originate with the marriage of a family ancestor in the fifteenth century. The tapestries did belong to the La Rochefoucauld in 1793, before they were stolen by rioters who set fire to their château at Verteuil. The family regained possession sixty years later, when the tapestries were recovered in a barn. The precious weavings of wool, silk, gold, and silver were in tatters at their edges and punched full of holes. They had been used to wrap barren fruit trees during the winter.

In late 1922, the Unicorn Tapestries disappeared again. They were sent to New York for an exhibition, which never opened. A rich American had bought them and transferred them to his bank vault before anyone else could see them. In February 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. confirmed from his vacation home in Florida that he was the American who had acquired the tapestries for the price of $1.1 million. The tapestries were transferred to Rockefeller’s private residence in Midtown Manhattan.

Fourteen years later, Rockefeller donated the tapestries to the Cloisters, a new medieval art museum he had funded as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mysterious works were to be on regular public display for the first time in their five-hundred-year history. James Rorimer, the first curator of the Cloisters, had the intimidating task of interpreting them.

On July 26, 1942, the New York Times reported that Rorimer had identified symbols that proved the key to the mystery, among them a knotted cord, a pair of striped tights, and a squirrel. He identified these as symbols in a system that pointed to Anne of Brittany as their owner and decided the tapestries had been made to celebrate her marriage to Louis XII in 1499. No one who read the news that Sunday was able to see the Unicorn Tapestries for another two years. The weavings were moved to a secret location following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Read More

André Breton. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What are the politics of walking in the city? What are its poetics?

In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. “Lost steps?” Nadja exclaims on seeing its title. “But there’s no such thing!”

There’s no such thing as lost steps! If one were to search for the principle that epitomizes what, in an echo of the title of a book by the late Marshall Berman, might be called “modernism in the streets,” one could probably find it in this exclamation. It informs the writings of all those authors who consistently sought to make the cities with which they were familiar seem new or strange by traversing them aimlessly, sometimes desperately, on foot, in a state of heightened susceptibility to the relentless stimuli of the streets. But it is also a doctrine that, almost a century later, still resonates in the cities of today. Read More

Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum, 1785 (State Library of New South Wales)

When Raymond Carver died, he left a folded paper in his pocket, a list of what he did not want to forget:

eggs
peanut butter
hot chocolate
Australia?
Antarctica

*

My old friend Robin called last week to tell me that our high school classmate was reminiscing about being on the basketball team with me.

“You have to be kidding,” I laughed. “Can you picture me playing basketball?”

“Well,” my friend said. “You did. I can send you photographs from the yearbook. You were on the team all three years until you got kicked out of school. You weren’t any good at it. Graceful but no killer instinct.”

So, apparently, I was on the high school basketball team for three years until I was expelled from school, a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. How is that something I could forget? The forgetting causes me great unease. I don’t want to see the photographs.

*

We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss.

*

The morning light through the dusty old screens is fractured into tiny squares across the table. My grandmother, Twila, and my brother and I are the only ones awake. My parents and my sister and my brother and my grandmother’s old mother and her sisters and their husbands sleep on sagging beds and sofa beds and cots in all the rooms in the tilted little camp my grandmother rents each summer. The lake is silver. I have yanked my bathing suit from the line and pulled it, cold and still wet from last night, up over my warm skin. I am very young, maybe five, and I love this place and my grandmother and my parents and the sleeping people and the silver lake and the hatched yellow light on the old table.

Twila comes and stands close to me. She peels the skin from a ripe peach with her small knife, then cradles the fruit in her palm and slices glistening sections into my bowl. Thick golden juice drips between her fingers onto the table. She pours milk over the peach and pushes the bowl gently toward me.

I said “parents.” Was my father there? I think so. But there is no way to know. What I remember is the peach.

Read More

“Untitled”, 1988 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, framed photostat, 10 1/4 x 13 inches. Published in Photostats, Siglio, 2020. Copyright Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

Time the substantial we, / epochal and great, as only we can see it, our particular.

—Alice Notley

No one wants to be defined by history’s contingencies, by catastrophe, but attempting to ignore how they shape us would be as ludicrous as trying to stop the clock. What if instead we broke down the chain of events leading to them, undoing their fatal sequence and leaving their parts open for reassembly? Is this what’s at stake in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s photostat works? In the book Photostats, they appear as coded messages awaiting decipherment, but they’re equally apt on gallery walls as reminders that no matter how open or walled-off any space may be, it escapes neither interconnectedness nor time’s inexorable march.

Unlike the stars, we do not write, luminously, on a dark field (Mallarmé). Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s inscriptions do act as constellations, as celestial alphabet. Events worth remembering, the count of years—they are light beams orienting us as we go on forgetting. Each cluster of dates and references displays its own oblique associative logic. The larger narrative it may or may not point to can be searingly legible or obscure to varying degrees. Regardless, those gaps between elements in each of the clusters are openings inviting us to fill in the blanks by bringing in our own associations, personal histories, and biases.

I took apart dates and historical events and remembered or discovered what occurred then that might have had a bearing on him. Let’s not forget he was a transplant, a politically minded one, who identified specifically as American but was born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico: two places with a complex relationship to the U.S. I wonder with whom in the art world he would’ve spoken in Spanish and how his conversations would’ve taken shape according to what he’d say in one language and not the other. Did he think of this? Am I projecting? He carefully avoided labels. Read More