November 17, 2017 At Work Narcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer By Robert Storr Yvonne Rainer, still from Privilege, 1990, 16mm, 103 minutes. © Yvonne Rainer. Courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of Chicago. The following is excerpted from Interviews on Art, a collection of more than sixty interviews by Robert Storr with contemporary artists. Yvonne Rainer is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker who has been recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of the past fifty years. She emerged in the 1960s as a pioneer of the Judson Dance Theater movement, an avant-garde performance style that blended elements of dance and visual art, and later turned to experimental film. This previously unpublished conversation was conducted on April 9, 2009, at the College of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, at Boston University. INTERVIEWER Let me begin by saying that it is a special pleasure to enter into this conversation. Yvonne and I have known each other over quite a long time. We first met in the early 1980s—in effect, part of the protracted aftermath of the 1970s—which was a very different time from now. What we’ve gone through lately, and are about to go through with the onset of recession resembles the 1970s more so than the boom times of the 1980s and nineties: an art world where the terms of making art takes place against a very unsettled and uncertain background. Considering that we are about to speak in front of a predominantly student audience, I would like to begin by saying that I’ve been struck by the way that for the past twenty years or so, people have talked a great deal about careers as if there was some kind of scripted narrative or a scripted scenario for how one begins in one place and ends up in another ideal place. But it seems to me that art has always been much more about working, than about careers and about the specific work that one chooses. Since then you have done many things. Perhaps our conversation might start with the fact of just this variety of paths forward: how you have chosen to work in this way and chosen to work in that way and how have patterns developed rather than how those were patterns foretold or planned. Read More
November 17, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Five By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this fifth installment, Nabokov wakes from an erotic dream to bloody sheets. Dec. 13, 1964 8.30 am 50. Skipped four nights (Did not take down the banal dreams I had lately). Intensely erotic dream. Blood on sheet. End of dream: my sister O.,[1] strangely young and languorous. Then V. tells me I must not forget to go to the oculist. I find his street but cannot remember the house number. Am agonizingly searching in the telephone book but do not recall his name and, moreover, do not know how to dial the vague number I have in mind—something ending in 492. Then stand near a window, sighing, half-seeing view, brooding over the possible consequence of incest. Read More
November 16, 2017 Events Barney’s Wall: An Evening with Barney Rosset and The Paris Review By The Paris Review On Saturday, November 18, New York University’s Forum on Law, Culture, and Society will host a screening of Barney’s Wall, a seventy-three-minute documentary about Barney Rosset, the provocative and iconoclastic publisher at Grove Press who, in the 1960s, published numerous now-canonical books and helped overturn contemporary censorship laws. Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, will participate in a conversation after the screening with the film’s director, Sandy Gotham Meehan, writer and editor Alan Kaufman, and New Republic editor Win McCormack. Tickets are available here. In celebration of this event and of Rosset’s legacy, we have unlocked our interview with him for a limited time. Read More
November 16, 2017 Look The Rhyming Photographs of Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb By The Paris Review Left: Alex Webb, Havana, Cuba. Right:Rebecca Norris Webb, Havana, Cuba. © Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb In Slant Rhymes, published in August, photographers Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb paired eighty images taken over the course of their nearly thirty-year relationship. The photographs appear side by side—one of Alex’s, one of Rebecca’s—to create “a series of visual rhymes that talk to one another—often at a ‘slant’ and in intriguing and revealing ways.” Below, a selection, with locales ranging from Cuba to India to Indiana, the rhymes bridging the geographic spans. Left: Havana, Cuba A.W. Right: Near Gray Goose, South Dakota, R.N.W. © Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb Read More
November 16, 2017 Life Sentence The Insouciant 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 each week. Artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. © Tom Toro Americans are particularly bad at lying, thought Oscar Wilde. Whatever he would say of us today, his views in 1891, when his essay “The Decay of Lying” was published, were clear enough: The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. Read More
November 16, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Four By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this fourth installment, Nabokov has a confrontation with his father. 38. 22 Nov. 1964 3.15 am In a kind of lecture-hall during an informal performance or rehearsal of lecture. On the platform my father seated at a small table is reading and discussing something. Several people between the stage and me. Am eagerly taking down what he says. My mother is among the four or five people sitting in front of me. My father is now elucidating a point. I see and appreciate it and clear my throat a trifle too loudly while trying to jot down his argument as fully as possible. From the stage he suddenly addresses me—I nod my head supposing he is making the possible objection I have foreseen; but instead, he says to me: “Even if you are <new card> bored you might have the decency to sit quietly.” I feel deeply injured and reply (textual words [transl. from Russian], chosen and uttered with great care and dignity): “I think your observation to me is most unjust. I was listening attentively and with enormous interest.” I get up and start to leave hoping I shall be called back. But I hear behind me my father’s voice resuming his speech with a little less force than before. I visualize in a medallion of light to-morrow morning’s interview with him—imagine him in his beige dressing—<new card> gown. Shall I ignore what happened? Will he refer to it? I decide philosophically—a similar case has come up before within dream experience—that time will decide (curious that I saw myself imagining the future in my dream and vaguely recalling a past and that a sense of future, of time, clearly though somewhat crudely existed in my mind, i.e. I distinctly perceived the degree of difference in comparative reality between the dream vision and the dream prevision). It is odd that my father who was so good-natured, and gay, is always so morose and grim in my dreams. Read More