March 16, 2020 Arts & Culture America Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe By J. Hoberman Still from Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950) Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky… A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. —Albert Camus, La peste (1947) The plague that gave Albert Camus’s novel its title is the plague but it is also, as Stephen Spender put it in his 1948 New York Times review, a “Social Catastrophe.” In that sense, The Plague is a political allegory with a large cast of quasi-allegorical characters—the perfect prototype for a disaster movie. Camus started writing The Plague under German occupation. The novel was published in 1947 when he was thirty-four and already, thanks to The Stranger as well as his writing for the underground resistance newspaper Combat, a cultural icon—the Humphrey Bogart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. French critics mostly read The Plague, which, after many deaths, ends by defining “plague” as “just life, no more than that,” as a metaphor for the human condition. It was also understood as an allegory of the German occupation, with France separated from the West—although the references to crematoria and concentration camps scattered throughout have intimations of something more. Read More
March 16, 2020 Look Eighteen Theses on Rachel Harrison By Maggie Nelson The following essay is the poet and critic Maggie Nelson’s response to “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” the first full-scale survey of Harrison’s work, which appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 25, 2019, to January 12, 2020. Installation view of “Rachel Harrison Life Hack” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020). From left to right: Dinner, 1991; I Like What’s Nice, ca. 1995; Leaktite Luck, 1995. Photo: Ron Amstutz. 1. Look, you’re going to be confronted with the remains of a dinner Rachel Harrison had twenty-eight years ago at Flamingo East in the East Village. (No, the restaurant isn’t there anymore.) First the dinner became leftovers in ziplock baggies and then it became leftovers spawning maggots in ziplock baggies and then, after complaints about flies, the baggies went into Ball jars. And here they are. It’s pretty gross, without a doubt. You might be forgiven for feeling as though the crudeness were at your expense in some way, but I would encourage you to let go of this feeling. (The feeling that some kind of joke is being played, but with no clear object or vector, may recur; my advice is to float in this feeling, allow a degree of surrender to it.) For Dinner surely started, like all of Harrison’s work, as a gesture or experiment of interest to her, one whose reasons may have been inscrutable even to herself. Think about it: she bagged this food one night twenty-eight years ago, with no foreknowledge of this moment we now share together. It was, you might say, an intuition. 2. Harrison’s work doesn’t just rely on intuition. It showcases it, elevates it to a category of ontological fascination. Why, why, why? you might ask, in front of a Harrison sculpture; eventually your own questioning may turn into a kind of music—the music of thinking—playing alongside hers. Your thinking may or may not have content; it is unlikely to land upon answers. Indeed, Harrison’s sculptures are remarkable for their capacity to stir up the primal agitation at the root of cognition and analysis, the whir of thinking. Read More
March 13, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Spines, Spaniels, and Sparsity By The Paris Review Still from Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return, 1979. I first learned of the filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger through her association with Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian writer about whom my colleagues are probably sick of hearing me ramble. Ottinger has directed a few stagings of Jelinek’s plays, and Jelinek herself appears in Ottinger’s 2007 film Prater. But Ottinger is worth seeking out on her own merits. She uses a punk sensibility and a sense of heightened theatrics to create radically feminist films that are wildly stylish—and wildly stylized—in their approach. As luck would have it for those of us in New York, Metrograph is showing a series of her films this weekend. I’ve seen only Ticket of No Return, her 1979 masterpiece depicting one woman’s quest to drink herself to death in West Berlin (it’s much funnier than it sounds), but I’m eager to see more, including 1981’s Freak Orlando, Ottinger’s carnivalesque take on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
March 13, 2020 The Last Year The Return By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November and January. It returns through March, and then will again in June. I’m aiming my camera at a bench on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado. The red-brick path is lined with outdoor shops, galleries, and breweries. Boulder Bookstore. The clouds draw their curtain, a gray weight. The Flatirons are weighted, too, diagonal slabs of sandstone towering like three growing spikes on a graph. Eighteen years ago, I sat on this bench. I wait for strangers to step out of the frame. They pass or linger in lace-up boots and parkas, jeans and huddled laughter—all intruders, because while I stand on this brick street in winter, it’s really a long-ago afternoon in June. In “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf asks, “Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?” Maybe we go back to places not to ask questions, but to realize we don’t have them anymore. Read More
March 12, 2020 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Poems for Social Distancing By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. It’s back after a short hiatus, with Claire Schwartz on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I feel overwhelmed by the ambient anxiety in the air right now. My hands are raw from washing, and I can’t stop refreshing the news. How do we continue to move through our lives when a virus is spreading, events keep getting canceled, and the only way to greet our loved ones is with an elbow bump? Are these the end-times we keep bracing for? I wonder if you might have a poem that reminds us how to stay close to one another while we’re all “practicing social distancing.” Or a poem that will be nice to read when we’re all quarantined? Thanks, Lonely COVID Read More
March 12, 2020 Arts & Culture Artifacts of the Analog Era By Rex Weiner Covers of The East Village Other As I pack the FedEx box addressed to the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, New York—a nonprofit study center for “objects created as part of social movements by the participants themselves: posters, flyers, publications, zines, t-shirts and buttons, audio recordings…”—I am holding a poster that says FUCK COMMUNISM and suddenly find myself in tears. My collection of printed matter from the sixties and seventies has followed me across decades and miles, from East Coast to West. By packing these items off to this worthy repository in my native city, I am letting go of those miles, those years, and these fragile things on yellowing paper. “Imagine no possessions,” says John Lennon. “Does it spark joy?” says Marie Kondo. But this personal downsizing is more elemental than any kind of tidying up. These items are handcrafted artifacts of the late twentieth century’s analog era—a road I followed, and in some small ways contributed to making. Now, in the early twenty-first century, that road tapers off into the digital ether, leading who knows where. So I feel compelled to take one last look at a few of my treasures before sending these things off. Read More