November 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Irreplaceable Ingrid Sischy By Laurie Anderson Ingrid Sischy. I’m thinking of a summer evening in Venice in 1982. The Biennale was on, and Ingrid and I were standing outside a palazzo where a loud party was in full swing. Ingrid was expected at the party, and so we walked over to the girls with the clipboards standing at the door. Slicked-back ponytails, pale and sleek in identical black dresses, they had perfected the “Do I know you?” look. They were checking off the names on the guest list. Ingrid said: “Hi. I’m Ingrid Sischy, editor of Artforum.” They raised their eyebrows. “Oh? And do you have ID?” She did not, and since she looked approximately nine years old, it was hard to imagine she was an editor of an art magazine or that she even knew what an art magazine was. Ingrid said, “That’s okay.” Her eyes lit up, followed by a quick sideways glance and half smile. Her friends had seen this sequence many times—her eyes darting back and forth as if she were rapidly scanning the pros and cons of something she was about to say or do, running the alternatives and consequences. Laptop fast. We were familiar with this because Ingrid was one of the rare people who allowed you to see her think. “Okay!” she said. “Let’s go around the back and climb in the window.” So we went around the back of the villa, pried open a first-story window, and jumped into the party we didn’t really even want to be at. Once inside, Ingrid did some brisk and intense networking. She stood right in front of the people she was talking to, leaning toward them and giving them her complete attention. We left by the front door, which was pretty much the way she did a whole lot of things—coming in the back way and leaving by the front. Read More
November 13, 2018 Arts & Culture James Baldwin’s Optimism By Gabrielle Bellot From the poster for Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk In November 1970, in the wake of the controversial arrest of the black activist and UCLA professor Angela Yvonne Davis, James Baldwin reflected on the acrid irony of seeing a dark-skinned woman harassed and manacled by white Americans. “One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles,” he wrote in an open letter to Davis. “But no,” he lamented, “they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.” Read More
November 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Big Fish, Bombay, and Busted Pinkie Toes By The Paris Review M. F. Husain, Sprinkling Horses, ca. 1975, oil on canvas, 43 1/4″ x 92 1/2″. While the Guggenheim is rewriting the narrative of twentieth-century art history, with revision inked in pages upon pages of critical revelation, a quieter disruption is occurring down the street at the Asia Society, where an ambitiously comprehensive exhibition populates two floors with paintings by the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. After India’s independence in 1947, the PAG—a collective of headstrong, dynamic men—was formed as a way of shaping Indian culture and society for the new modern world. The social purpose of these paintings looks forward by looking inward, and therein lies their genius. The range and variety are evidence of an energetic originality; every painting is fresh and exciting, a refraction of the artist’s central vision, which is steadfast and zealous in its innovation. I found myself captivated by the characters that emerged from each cluster of work: F. N. Souza, the radical virtuoso whose work is arguably boldest in its imagination, is fearless in his often gruesome depictions and also in his liberal use of bold black lines and shapes (and is also perhaps my favorite). The prolific M. F. Husain marks his canvases with rough strokes of muted earthy browns and reds depicting Cubist renderings of scenes from Hindu tradition. S. H. Raza becomes obsessed with the Bindu, the motif of a black orb, which appears time and again, as a black sun in the sky or as a sparse mandala—a hypnotic, primordial symbol both auspicious and ominous. And the list could go on. As we change how we think about the influence of women in modern European abstractionism, so should we take time to reconsider the evolution of the avant-garde with respect to influence beyond the West. —Lauren Kane Read More
November 9, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Sight of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fifth installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) was published at daybreak. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce My grandmother lived on a cliff on an island and the walls in her front room were the color of bone, the color of the soft underside of certain mushroom caps. They were stark and alive in an earthly way. Two windows faced east and the wide-planked floors were painted a salty blue. At sunrise, light slid over the ocean and into the room, then speared it with a burning rip of peach, the day entering full force. Another window to the right of the bed faced southeast toward town. The curtains were white, thin, and the wind moved all through the room. The room was charged. The curtains were not erotic, though they drifted in the wind like nightgowns. The heavy bureaus were not erotic, and when the drawers were pulled open, always with effort, they smelled of mothballs and dusty linen. The walls were bone. The floors were blue. They were not erotic. Something moved through this room, wind or ghosts or both. The room was charged with a presence I’m not sure I’m meant to name nor could if I wanted to. I have known no room so intimately lit by dawn’s entry. Dawn burned in, and one morning a lover in the bed said, “Look.” Neither of us was all the way awake. And we turned toward each other, this was when we were new, and we pressed against each other. Maybe it was the ghosts that whispered yes, yes, now, right now, while you’re fleshed and ready, while you still cast shadows, now, yes, an urging from another world, touched by dawn’s rose fingers. We heeded it. And we slept again and woke when the morning was real. The house is gone. My grandmother, too. But there are moments, in between sleep and wake, when I am in this room, and I see the windows and those white curtains, the dark weight of the bureaus to the right, a closet space in the left corner of the room doored with an off-white piece of cloth. And then my eyes begin to adjust. The bureaus burn away like fog in sun. The windows seem to be pulled up and away, as though on strings, and my own wide desk comes into view. The closet retreats through the wall, and bookcases appear in its place. Two windows descend to my right, overlooking no ocean. The eyes adjust; the edges get revealed; the blur comes into focus. Read More
November 8, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You Have Become Everything You Needed To Become 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. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I find myself distracted these days—mostly by the violence of the news, which streams in circles. I want to engage thoughtfully, but it’s difficult when everything is “breaking” and urgent. Do you have a poem for this age of terrible information? I want to do what I can in solidarity with those who are putting everything on the line, but I get overwhelmed by the width and scale of injustice. I’d appreciate any help you can offer for narrowing in and focusing my efforts without tuning reality out. At the moment my world is spinning, and I just feel helpless. With Love, Can’t Do It All Read More