December 15, 2017 Arts & Culture Making Art in Communist Romania By Anna Codrea-Rado A design sketch from Codrea’s production of Zamolxe. Forty-four years ago, in dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, my grandfather produced an opera that could have landed him on the wrong side of the Communists. When World War II ended, Romania emerged from the conflict under Soviet occupation. The Russian troops left in 1958, but Communism remained; in 1965, Ceausescu seized power and imposed a brutal totalitarian regime that didn’t end until the bloody revolution of 1989. There was a brief window between 1960 and 1970 when Romania seemed open to the West, but in 1971, Ceausescu delivered his infamous July Theses, denouncing Western culture. The speech ushered in the return to socialist realism, a movement that limited artistic expression to realistic celebrations of the state’s communist values. From then on, dissidents were persecuted and culture once again became little more than a vehicle for propaganda. To be an artist in Communist Romania meant either to conform to the Romanian interpretation of socialist realism or to use subterfuge to subvert it. Performance art had marginally more wriggle room to bypass censorship than less abstract forms of film or literature, but, by Western standards, artistic freedom simply did not exist in any media. It was in this inhospitable context that my grandfather, Gheorghe Codrea, came of age as an artist. He was born in 1928 in Sighet, a town in northern Romania on the Ukrainian border famous for its political prison. He moved to Cluj, Romania’s second city and a long-established cultural hub, in 1949 to study at its prestigious art and design school. Shortly before arriving there, his brother was imprisoned in a hard-labor camp for taking part in an anti-Communist rally, and Codrea lived in fear that the school would discover the relation and kick him out. Around this same time, his girlfriend, who would become his wife and my late grandmother, had been expelled from university because her father was an Orthodox priest. Read More
December 14, 2017 Arts & Culture Stamp This Book By Dan Piepenbring The rubber stamp is the official weapon of officialdom. Anyone who’s used one knows why: it feels great to smash a carved piece of wood and rubber onto a piece of paper, leaving an imperious mark where once there was empty space. Properly applied, a stamp is almost onomatopoeic, and its satisfying thump is the bureaucrat’s easiest pleasure. It’s a tactile expression of power: with a few fluid motions, you make a neat, loud sound, and maybe, depending on what the stamp says, you’ve just ruined the life of a total stranger. Vincent Sardon, a French artist with a small shop in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, sees the rubber stamp as a kind of talisman of the bureaucratic West. A stamp, he argues, is never an impartial object: It packs a symbolic wallop because of the millions of judges, cops, customs officials—agents of public authority—who use them to validate passports, to turn people away at the border, to pass judgment, to pass laws, to sentence, to record proceedings, to excommunicate—all sorts of evil documents that have the power of putting people in impossible situations. His practice is to reclaim the rubber stamp, and the act of stamping, as something playful, banal, even impolitic. In his shop, he designs and sells stamps in a range of sizes and subjects, many of them vulgar, all of them practically useless. There are insults in many languages: “Eat shit and die,” “Go piss glass,” “T’étais moins con quand tu buvais” (“You were less insufferable when you were still drinking”); remonstrations in commanding block capitals: “SORRY, NOT INTERESTED,” “SHUT THE FUCK UP”; and a parade of naked cowboys, porn starlets, and disfigured homunculi, any of which would make a great gift for someone you hate. Read More
December 14, 2017 First Person A Study of Kanai Mieko By Sofia Samatar Photo: Kuwabara Kineo. Kanai Mieko writes in several genres: poetry, fiction, and criticism—most notably on film and photography. We, who know no Japanese, will probably never read her criticism on film and photography, although this is what we most desire. Kanai Mieko is highly acclaimed in Japan. She has also been described as noncommittal, apolitical, and frivolous. One critic laments “that the author, whose talent is comparable to that of Salman Rushdie, would take up such a light, meaningless subject as an ordinary housewife’s uneventful life when she could, and should, be concerned with ideological and political issues of import.” Kanai Mieko ranks Jane Austen higher than Dostoyevsky. She’s not interested in describing objects; she wants to accentuate their amorphous nature. In 1997, Kanai published a novel called Karui memai, or Vague Vertigo. It isn’t available in English. I read about it in Atsuko Sakaki’s book, The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature. Sakaki gave Kanai’s novel the English title Vague Vertigo. In an earlier paper, she called it Light Dizziness. Sakaki changed the title to Vague Vertigo to emphasize Kanai’s references to Hitchcock’s film and to Roland Barthes. Barthes, who wrote: “One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself which I could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the sweater, to discover in what circumstance I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where). This distortion between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a ‘detective’ anguish.” Researching Kanai Mieko gives me a detective anguish. Read More
December 14, 2017 Life Sentence The Schizophrenic Sentence By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro The question: Are you ill? The answer: Kings do not collect the money, in this way the letters have been taken away from me, as I that at last of those that particularly believe as I at last chipecially think, and all are burned. A sentence, an ordinary sentence, is an image of sanity. It collects the wits. A sentence that doesn’t work out can usually be written off as merely careless, or rushed, or as the stumbling of a non-native speaker. Sometimes, however, the failure is more ominous. The question above was posed sometime early in the last century by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, and the answer came from one of his patients; it appears in a 1913 study translated into English as Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia. Kraepelin, or whoever took down the words, must have followed the usual cues of spoken cadence in deciding where the sentence started and stopped. In between, the relation of the parts is unsteady. Imagine someone you love calling you up late at night and speaking that sentence; it would be very frightening. Read More
December 14, 2017 Arts & Culture The Tenuous Nonfiction of Clarice Lispector’s Crônicas By Gabrielle Bellot Clarice Lispector “I can feel the charlatan in me, haunting me,” Clarice Lispector wrote in one of the crônicas, or newspaper columns, she composed each week from 1967 to 1973 for the Jornal do Brasil. She was writing in Leme, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro named for a vast rock that resembled the rudder of a ship. “I am almost sickened by my basic honesty,” she continued. Later in the column, she suggested that “bad taste” and bad writing were similar, and that bad writing essentially meant telling the simple, unadorned, too-sincere truth. In writing, she declared, “the dividing line between bad taste and truth is almost imperceptible. In writing, moreover, there is an accepted standard of good taste which is actually much worse than bad taste. Just to amuse myself, I sometimes walk that thin line between the two”—between, that is, being a “charlatan,” as that column was titled, and writing the bland truth. A uniquely Brazilian form, crônicas offered readers free-form writing from writers of all kinds, including poets and novelists. Lispector’s adoring editor at the paper, Alberto Dines, simply published almost everything exactly as she submitted it. Although many of her crônicas appeared autobiographical, many also seemed to bend the truth; Lispector, who rarely kept even her birthday consistent, felt most comfortable writing about herself when she was allowed to invent and embellish. Read More
December 13, 2017 On Technology The Dignified Bot By Jacqueline Feldman Amme Five months after I moved to New York City to pursue a career in writing, I was offered a part-time job composing the dialogue for a chatbot. Called “bots” for short, these are software programs that talk back, answering customer-service questions or performing simple tasks within texting applications or online pop-up windows. In the contract’s phrasing, I would “design” the bot’s “personality.” The office was lit by fluorescent rods, and the windows opened onto walls of brick. As I researched models—Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa—I found myself applying a feminist critique to the personalities I encountered. They were demure, or disturbingly flirty. The design of these helpers implied an odd nostalgia for the all-female secretarial pool. I decided that the bot I wrote would call itself “it,” not “she,” in keeping with its identity as inanimate technology, and that it would convey characteristics beyond a slavish deference to society’s hierarchies. I wanted to equip it with dignity. One obstacle to my bot’s liberation seemed insurmountable. Because it responded automatically, as bots do, it was obligated to answer every question put to it. As a conversationalist, it could not ever remain silent or disengage from the conversation, as humans occasionally choose to do. So I was intrigued when I heard of an unusually mulish system of machinery named Amme, the elusive subject of a beguiling small book, The Amme Talks, published this summer by Triple Canopy. While my bot existed only through speech bubbles, Amme was idiosyncratically corporeal. Created in 1992 by the German artist Peter Dittmer, Amme operated on and off through 2007. Ten years afterward, “the work has been somewhat forgotten,” Dittmer wrote to me recently. “It is also large and expensive to build.” The latest model, Amme 5, comprises six sleek tables shaped like dominos, each equipped with two monitors, a keyboard, and, at the far end, a tall transparent box containing a glass of milk. Between these vitrines drove a robotic arm that terminated in pincers, like a crab’s. At one end of the setup hunkered a console stocked with a tank of milk. While Amme had a chatbot component, replying to humans’ queries in their language, “she” could also effect movements in the physical realm. (Amme’s name is a feminine noun in German, meaning “wet nurse,” and the gender has been carried over.) Using the arm she could spill one of those milk glasses, or not. The unpredictability of this gesture, governed by rules inscrutable to the human spectator, gave the impression that the system possessed the power of choice. At other times, Amme “urinated,” by spilling water rather than milk, or “bathed” the onlooker by causing water to squirt onto the box wall. She occasionally displayed images or played sounds such as this voice-over, in German: “Foxes are like fat.” I found myself enticed by the thought of a talking machine that put into play games of its own. Read More