December 3, 2018 Look Coveting Cartier Necklaces and Celtic Torques at the Met By Julia Berick View of “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. When I walk through museum galleries, stocked with the bravest of human efforts suspended luminescent on canvas or rising in harmonious stone, I feel covetous. And though I am awed by the aesthetic achievements before me, I also diminish them to what I would collect. I would hang that Veronese. I would like to wake to that celadon moon jar from the Joseon dynasty. “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” a new show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (on view through February 24), indulges this covetousness. After all, every piece of art here is wearable. The exhibition displays more than two hundred pieces of jewelry from the Met’s own collection. The thoughtful curation and liner notes make a point I mused on while uptown: jewelry is as ancient an art form as we have. The metals and stones valued by humans often endure. Diamonds, as we know, are among the hardest substances in nature, and any silver seam is as old as the earth. Their endurance is part of their value, and because they are valued, they have been sacked and stolen again and again but less often destroyed. The serpentine logic spirals like a pair of Hellenistic armbands. I stood beside gold Egyptian sandals meant to be worn to the afterlife, and I admired their “toe stalls,” intricate gold caps intended to preserve digits for use in the next life. Each nail is represented down to cuticles of gold, the simplicity of which is as stunning as the complexity of royal earrings from first-century Andhra Pradesh. Though aesthetics have changed since the first century, I was surprised by how little. Only the fussy parure sets left me cold, while every fiber of my avarice called out for an 1860 Italian diadem from the firm of Castellani, and combs with inlaid flowers from the so-called cemetery at Ur (in modern-day Iraq), circa 2600–2500 B.C. Read More
December 3, 2018 The Big Picture Rethinking Schiele By Cody Delistraty The passage of time tends to either confirm the supposed transgressions of historical figures, or absolve them thereof. But Egon Schiele, whose centenary is being celebrated at museums across the world, presents a particular lens through which to think about the line between art and exploitation. Egon Schiele. Standing Female Nude with Blue Cloth, 1914. [Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Picture: © Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg] Egon Schiele first began hosting teenage girls at his studio in Neulengbach, Austria, around 1910. About thirty miles from Vienna, he had a small painting studio with a garden out back. Boys and girls, often from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, would come spend time there with him and his model-slash-lover Walburga Neuzil, whom he called Wally. Schiele was only twenty at the time. Wally was seventeen. The age of consent in Austria was fourteen (as it is today), and their relationship wasn’t much of a scandal. What was a scandal was Schiele’s painting the children and teenagers who came by his studio and, as would be written in his arrest warrant two years later, his “failing to keep erotic nudes in a sufficiently safe place”—that is, exposing these young people to his supposedly pornographic paintings and drawings. In April 1912, Schiele was arrested and accused of “seducing” Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig. Mossig, a thirteen-year-old girl from Neulengbach whose father was an esteemed naval officer, had asked Schiele and Neuzil to take her to Vienna to live with her grandmother. Like many young people, she wanted to escape her provincial town. The artist and his lover agreed to take her, but once they got to Vienna, Mossig had a change of heart and wanted to return home. The next day, Schiele and Neuzil dutifully returned her. In the meantime, however, her father had gone to the police and filed charges of kidnapping and statutory rape against Schiele. That the young man was an artist—and one who depicted younger women—helped fuel the father’s suspicions. A third charge was leveled, too: public immorality for exposing young people to his art. Read More
December 3, 2018 At Work A True Utopia: An Interview With N. K. Jemisin By Abigail Bereola Author N. K. Jemisin N. K. Jemisin is the author of nine books—a duology, two trilogies, and a short story collection. The last of those, How Long ‘til Black Future Month?, is her most recent. Not only is she the only writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, one of the highest awards in science fiction and fantasy, three years in a row (for all three groundbreaking books of the Broken Earth series), but she is also the first black person to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel ever. Speculative fiction is about imagining futures, but those futures are only as revolutionary as the minds of those who create them. We are lucky to have Jemisin’s revolutionary imagination to expand our own. How Long ‘til Black Future Month? is a collection of twenty-two stories written over the course of fifteen years. Each story contains a world that you never want to leave, whether it’s to stay close to Franca while she cooks meals in the kitchen of an inn or to walk alongside Jessaline while she undertakes a covert mission to save her people. Jemisin’s characters usually don’t live in a utopia, but they are fighters—for better futures, for better lives, for their fellow kind. In 2016, the New York Times referred to Ursula K. Le Guin as America’s greatest living science-fiction writer. Though Jemisin’s books have only been in circulation for eight years, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that she could one day be the greatest living science-fiction writer for a new generation. She may already be. A few days before Thanksgiving, Jemisin and I spoke by phone about utopia, justice, sitting with damage, and more. Read More
November 30, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Good Guys, Goose Fat, and Ghosts of Mars By The Paris Review Kristen Roupenian. Photo: Elisa Roupenian Toha. There was a time when I found online dating apps addictive. It was a guiltless game: arbitrarily judging prospects by a series of photos, a far-fetched emoji or two, and a pickup line purloined from some seedy Internet forum. Does he like cilantro? (He should not.) Does he travel? (He should.) It’s no secret that the methods of modern romance have long been under fire. In retrospect, it’s equally unsurprising just how many people Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”—the New Yorker story that inundated the Internet last December—resonated with. In that story, Roupenian shows she has a disconcertingly accurate eye for the ways we misjudge and miscommunicate our desires in today’s perfunctory dating culture, often to catastrophic ends. Her forthcoming short-story collection, You Know You Want This, is destined to be even more devastating. Roupenian sets the scene in “The Good Guy,” one of her eleven new stories in the collection: “It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.” Her characters verge on being uncomfortably relatable—trying to break up with someone in an Olive Garden, obsessing over whether bug bites are actually bug bites—before they start to spiral out of control in pursuit of humanity’s nastiest and most self-destructive pleasures. Each story is a refrain of the private indignities that keep you lying awake at night, the things that leave you wondering, Am I a good person, despite wanting what I want? With a wry voice and an all-knowing smirk, Roupenian lances through the sexual anxiety that permeates much of contemporary literature and society. Look at who you are, she dares us. “Look at what you’ve done.” —Madeline Day Read More
November 30, 2018 Arts & Culture On Edmond Baudoin, an Ink-Stained Proust By Matt Madden Edmond Baudoin is a force of nature who holds a singular position in the French comics scene. An ink-stained Proust, his drawings and his memory keep bringing him back to the small, Southern French village of his youth as well as the nearby city of Nice, on the Mediterranean coast. In many of his books, you see the same woodland paths, the same barren views of Nice harbor, the same faces: his own adolescent self, his parents, his brother. He came to cartooning relatively late in life—his first album (as the French call their bound comic books) wasn’t published until he was forty years old, in the early eighties. From his earliest works, Baudoin focused on autobiography, making him one of the first French cartoonists to explore this genre, which has gone on to become one of the most prominent features of European literary comics. At the same time, his art—already confident, with an inky expressionist manner reminiscent of his contemporaries Jacques Tardi and José Antonio Muñoz—evolved quickly into a daringly loose, calligraphic brush style that has made him one of the most respected and recognizable cartoonists in Europe. After Baudoin’s first few albums, Étienne Robial—the legendary graphic designer and cofounder, along with Florence Cestac, of Futuropolis, one of France’s most influential independent publishers—prodded Baudoin to break with traditional narrative structure. Shortly thereafter, an epiphanic Miles Davis concert gave the cartoonist the courage to start improvising in his work by introducing digressions, elements of collage, and postmodern authorial interruptions. Books like Un flip Coca! and Un rubis sur les lèvres are full of jarring juxtapositions and shifts in style. A few years later, Couma acò harnesses this jazzy, improvised style to the form of a more classical family memoir, a template Baudoin has returned to numerous times, notably in Piero, published in English this month by New York Review Comics. Couma acò was also his first big critical breakthrough, winning him the prize for best album of the year at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 1992. He would go on to win two scriptwriting awards: for Le voyage in 1997 and for Les quatres fleuves (in collaboration with the mystery writer Fred Vargas) in 2002. Read More
November 30, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Octavia Butler By Valerie Stivers My copy of Lilith’s Brood, with a breadfruit, soon to be made into an edible bowl. I’ve read the book six times, as the damage to my copy shows. The most perfect alien abduction scene in all of literature occurs in Dawn, the first volume of Octavia Butler’s Imago trilogy. Butler (1947–2006) was a rarity, a black woman publishing science fiction in the eighties, and the Imago trilogy is her masterpiece. On the first page, the protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, comes to consciousness with the words “Alive! Still alive. Alive … again.” She finds herself in a familiar room with “light-colored—white or gray, perhaps” walls and anonymous touches like a bed that’s “a solid platform that gave slightly to the touch and that seemed to grow from the floor.” Lilith has been here before, has undergone weeks or maybe years of questioning by disembodied voices that come from the ceiling, has lost her mind and fallen asleep or lost consciousness only to reawaken and be put through it all again. This time, there’s food—“the usual lumpy cereal or stew, of no recognizable flavor, contained in an edible bowl that would disintegrate if she emptied it and did not eat it”—and something new: clothing. She dresses and eats. She is finally ready to cooperate with her unknown captors. Lilith’s last memories from before the locked room are of an all-annihilating nuclear war, of which she recalls, “a handful of people tried to commit humanicide.” Despite the strange circumstances of her captivity, she doesn’t realize she’s on a spaceship in the hands of aliens until the first one comes through her door. She then discovers a race of humanoids called Oankali, who are covered with shaggy, grotesque, tiny “sensory organ” tentacles. The Oankali long ago scooped up all survivors of the war and have been keeping them in suspended animation while restoring the earth to a primordial, habitable state. Now they’re ready to repatriate the survivors—but only under certain conditions. Lilith has been chosen to help the Oankali manage her fellow humans. That Lilith doesn’t want to be a collaborator is the first problem. The second is that the aliens cause a visceral, bone-deep, skin-crawling horror in human beings—a sensation akin to being confronted with giant hairy bugs. And the third is that the Oankali want to have sex. More than that, they are gene traders, and they offer humanity a future only if the survivors are willing to give up human children and breed a new third race, to be left behind on earth when the spaceship moves on. Read More