July 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Are You, Jack Whitten? By Jack Whitten Born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Jack Whitten is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of Abstract Expressionists active in the sixties, his work gradually distanced from the movement’s aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns and focused more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice. For six decades, he kept a log as a private exercise, recording and processing the experiences and experiments of his art making as well as reflecting on the way his studio life intertwined with his daily life. In the extract below, he recollects living and working in sixties New York. Jack Whitten in the early seventies on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street, New York, New York. Courtesy the estate of Jack Whitten. My first studio in New York was a storefront at 369 East 10th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C. Stanley’s Bar was on the corner of Avenue B at 12th Street. The Lower East Side in 1960 was a thriving young art community and Stanley’s Bar was our favorite meeting place. Every night of the week I could speak with Ishmael Reed, Calvin C. Hernton, David Henderson, and other members of the Umbra Group of Poets and Writers. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg often frequented the bar on off hours. Stanley, the Polish owner, knew Charlie Parker who was also a visitor in the early fifties. I loved to hear Stanley’s stories about Charlie Parker spending hours playing the jukebox and playing Polish polkas! Stanley, like Mike Fanelli who I would meet later in the sixties when I moved to the Lower West Side, was a friend of the artist. You could always get a hot meal on credit, cash a check without having a routine identification card; this was important because who had a bank account? The first time I ever showed a painting in public was at Stanley’s…a small group of collage paintings from 1963. The first painting I ever sold was to the superintendent of the building where my studio was: a Spanish fellow who often came in to admire what I was doing and paid $35 for a small 1961 painting as a Christmas present for his wife. Read More
July 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Harvard Color Detectives By Katy Kelleher Photo: Katy Kelleher. Inside the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, below a vast glass roof and above a neoclassical series of gray stone columns, hangs a fake painting. It’s a Mark Rothko—or, rather, a replica of a Rothko. The canvas is covered in moody indigo and vibrant crimson. It shows a square of color, patchy and imperfect. As the eye moves from left to right, there comes a moment when something changes; the colors diverge. On the right side of the piece, the colors are faded, washed pale from exposure to “a very bright light,” explains Narayan Khandekar, director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard. On the left side, the colors are vibrant and angry. “This half,” he says, waving one hand around the square of color, “is an exact copy of the Rothko painting as it would have appeared to the original owners.” This replica is an investigative tool, used by the art explorers at Harvard’s research center to help return the Rothko to its former glory. The original work was composed of a series of large violet and vermilion squares painted on five separate canvases and often referred to as the Rothko Harvard murals. Harvard commissioned the work in the early sixties because some within the institution felt that the university “lacked real modern art.” Rothko was honored and excited by the opportunity, and he accepted the commission with one caveat: he didn’t want to be paid for the paintings. “This is the first time I have been able to deliver commissioned work that I am satisfied with,” he said. It was also the first time his work had been displayed at Harvard, and for the former garment-district laborer, this felt like quite the coup. Read More
July 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Visual Frequency of Black Life By Peter L’Official On Arthur Jafa’s video collage Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Arthur Jafa, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Installation view, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Rome, 2018. One of the most striking moments in Arthur Jafa’s transcendent 2016 video collage, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, is also one of its most recognizable. Barack Obama stands behind the podium at the TD Arena in Charleston, South Carolina, having just delivered a eulogy for the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, the slain pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a week after nine of its African American worshippers were killed in an attack by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. The scene is a tableau of purple paraments and vestments and other decorous trappings of church and state. In the midst of perhaps the most solemn and pregnant silence of his presidency, Obama casts his head downward and, with an almost imperceptible shake of his head, launches softly into the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace.” If you have seen this footage elsewhere, then you know that the crowd, beginning with the AME preachers seated onstage behind the president, stands and joins him in singing the hymn. What you might not have noticed—and what Jafa’s masterfully sequenced seven-minute video symphony illuminates—is the reaction of one of the AME preachers, in sunglasses and seated in the second row behind Obama in the left of the frame. On hearing the first two gently delivered notes, the preacher realizes, in a flash of recognition, that the nation’s first African American president has begun to sing for the congregation and all the watching world. Four fluid gestures occur in an instant: the seated preacher looks to his left, meets the eyes of a fellow clergy member, strips off his sunglasses with awe and pride and exultation, and leaps to his feet. Captured in this seconds-long space is the president’s call to song and the affirmatory response of the oldest AME church in the Southern United States. Very little of this one man’s subtle, then soaring emotional response is perceptible in the available footage of Obama’s eulogy. Seen in real time, it simply happens too fast. Read More
July 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Destined for the Dirty-Book Bin By B.J. Novak I’ve been fixated on Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern’s Candy since I first came across it in college. I’ve read it out loud many times to try to capture and understand its rhythm; I’ve given many copies to friends. And yet, what is it? And—even more intriguingly, and more on this in a second—why is it? Candy begins with exhilarating precision; the opening chapters are my favorite pages of any book ever written, with its exquisitely tuned language guiding us through an ecstatic parody of outrageous ego-driven meaninglessness, pulled off with the combination of subtle precision and insane audacity that you might find in a pilot successfully flying a plane under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it continues, the book’s writing gradually collapses, with an entropy that might well be described as obscene, into a tone of sloppy, lascivious wildness that syncs well with its plot. Along the way, it goes on extremely unnecessary tangents to satirize nearly everything imaginable to an audience of its time: psychotherapy, New York City, Hollywood screenwriting, Jewish mothers, quack doctors, New Age healing, progressive causes, pretension, naïveté, innocence, idealism, corruption, generosity, selfishness, spiritual searching, gurus, the male gaze, awareness of the male gaze, “daddy issues,” sexual repression, sexual liberation—as one review suggested, sex itself—and perhaps most of all, the reader who would buy such a book—a person they surely pictured on the banks of the Seine, scratching his head as to what the hell he was reading and whether it was turning him on or not. Read More
July 11, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Dorothy West By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. The career of the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West featured one of the most remarkable second acts in literary history. Almost half a century after her trailblazing debut novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), West published her second novel, The Wedding (1995), at the age of eighty-seven. It received an ecstatic reaction. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at the time an editor for Doubleday and a fellow resident of Martha’s Vineyard, had encouraged West to complete the long-gestated work, which West dedicates to the late Onassis. “Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance,” West writes, “we were perfect partners.” Set on the Vineyard on a single summer weekend, The Wedding is narrated by an irresistibly droll omniscient voice that veers across centuries to trace the knotty, reverberating heritage of an affluent African American family. An instant best seller, it was adapted for television by Oprah Winfrey. The ABC miniseries, starring Halle Berry, aired not long before West’s death at ninety-one. When asked what she wanted her legacy to be, she said: “That I hung in there. That I didn’t say, I can’t.” In the decades between her two novels, West published short stories—she was one of the first black fiction writers to be published in the New York Daily News—and for many years, she wrote columns for the Vineyard Gazette. Yet her enormous early promise seemed destined to go unfulfilled. Her name was but a footnote to the Harlem Renaissance, of whose luminaries she was the longest living but, then and still, the least famous. One reason West gave for her long spell out of the limelight was that she felt alienated by the black militancy of the sixties. When watching television in that era, she said, “almost all of the black people I saw, I didn’t like what they were saying.” Though she was already working on The Wedding, she worried that its backdrop of privilege and its message of communality (“Color was a false distinction; love was not,” one central character muses) would go down poorly in an atmosphere abuzz with Malcolm X’s revolutionary separatist rhetoric. Read More
July 11, 2018 On Photography Ode to the Motel Pool By Hunter Braithwaite 1966 “Teenagers dancing at the pool of the Admiral Motel in Wildwood, New Jersey” “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” John Updike wrote. Forty-six years later, the first half of the sentence holds. The line is from his 1972 story “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time,” which begins with a vacationing family choosing a motel. At the top of the list for the kids is “a pool (essential).” In the new book The Swimming Pool in Photography, published by Hatje Cantz, Francis Hodgson includes iconic and obscure images of sanitarium-style public baths, backyard basins, fascist Olympians, face-lifted starlets, and the odd waterslide. Yet it wasn’t the kidney curves of Beverly Hills that brought back the burn of chlorine to my eyes, nor the steam off an Alpine sauna. It was a handful of photographs showing vacationers at motel pools. Shot on color-drenched Kodachrome and semistaged, these mostly anonymous photographs advertise a seasonal, obtainable version of the good life. The pools, many of which exist within the same space as the parking lot and the row of numbered doors, speak to a moment in America when average people had the resources to travel and relax—and to the temporary communities set up around these roadside oases. Those who know the tedium of the summer road trip—the nausea, the sweat behind the knees—also know the specific joy of a motel marquee, backlit by the evening sun, bearing those four closely kerned letters. Some say the journey is the destination. I’d trade both journey and destination for the motel pool—not too chilly, not too crowded, within walking distance of a Golden Corral. Hodgson’s book is a demonstration of how swimming pools are genetically photogenic. Perhaps it’s that a pool somewhat resembles a photograph: a field of glittering action, bordered by white. Or that before digital cameras, to develop a photograph meant to submerge it in a series of three pools—developer, stop bath, fixer. Or that both center around the joys of seeing—light dancing on water, bodies glowing in the sun. Photography might as well have been invented for swimming pools. Read More