October 4, 2017 On Photography To the Attic: Virginia Woolf and Abelardo Morell By Robert Adams Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: The Sea in Attic, 1994. Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, was the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s niece, and among Cameron’s loveliest subjects. She also served as inspiration for the charismatic figure of Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf ’s novel To the Lighthouse. Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Jackson, 1867. Perhaps Woolf ’s family involvement with photography contributed to her belief in the importance of seeing. To the Lighthouse is a strikingly visual book, not only because of the author’s descriptions in it, which are unforgettable, but also because of the degree to which people in the story change when they truly see. The story is completed, characteristically, when Lily Briscoe, an amateur painter, resolves the composition of a picture with which she has been struggling, and experiences a peace that enables her to accept life’s sorrows, particularly transience. As she thinks—they are the last words of the book—“I have had my vision.” The novel is divided into three parts, the second of which is titled “Time Passes.” In it, we are informed, almost incidentally, of deaths, including that of Mrs. Ramsay, but the focus is on the Ramsay family’s empty summer house on the coast of Scotland, and on the way in which, as the seasons come and go, what is outdoors registers indoors: “Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite … So loveliness reigned and stillness.” And this, among the most beautiful passages in the novel: “Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and folded them round the house in silence.” Read More
October 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Kara Walker’s Nightmares Are Our Own By Selin Thomas Kara Walker, Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something), 2017. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Last night, they scaled my walls as I slept. The silhouettes moved closer—paralyzing me—with each flash of yellow light from the street. Some of them danced forward on toe, some ran, others fiddled in place with their shovels, their ropes and lanterns, their dangling snakes, torches, sickles. I didn’t know if they were after me, or if they wanted me to join their brigade. I thought then that I might and suddenly I too was wielding an axe, I too was sneaking along the edges of my room. Not me exactly, but my shadow, elongated with sinister intent. My teeth were long; I could feel them reaching my chin. There was a mirror and in it I saw a drooling beast, me. I woke up. I doubt this dark dream was caused solely by Kara Walker’s show, but it was certainly related. “SIKKEMA JENKINS AND CO. IS COMPELLED TO PRESENT THE MOST ASTOUNDING AND IMPORTANT PAINTING SHOW OF THE FALL ART SHOW VIEWING SEASON!” is on until October 14, at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery, on Twenty-Second and Tenth Avenue. I moved to New York three years ago, at the very minute the Domino sugar plant was to be demolished, just missing Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby. People seemed to almost enjoy saying it was gone, as if they’d taken a brick of it themselves, then licked all the molasses off. I’d waited a long time for Walker’s next work. I rushed through two grisly, oil-slicked linens wanting to first orient myself by Christ’s Entry into Journalism, which I’d read a lot about. It’s a sixteen-foot-by-eleven-foot sumi ink and collage on paper. It immediately recalls Rodin’s Gates of Hell. It can be looked at from any place, but center is best. I took my chance in the crowd. My eyes flitted from the plated head of Trayvon Martin to a woman being raped, from a lynching to Frederick Douglass. There was an American flag in the corner of my vision. I examined a mummified body being carried by Batman. It was that of Emmett Till, dressed for his coffin. There was a man praying and a Confederate soldier pointing his gun, or was he a Union soldier? His arm was broken. There was Donald Trump between the legs of a klansman. There was a lady, a dancer, a drunkard; violence, sex, rage. Was this the ghoulish cast of American history? Yes. No, it was the chorus. It was already enough to think about. But Walker was telling a story I wanted to hear. Read More
October 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Foul Matter By John Kaag Edwaert Collier, Vanitas, 1663. I nearly deleted it. The email’s subject line was “FoulMatter”—an obvious Internet phishing scheme, I thought. A Russian heiress was embroiled in some “foul matter” and needed my Social Security number so she could deposit money into my account for safekeeping? A Nigerian prince requesting initial investment in “a guinea foul farm”? No. That wasn’t it. The email was from my publisher, from the heart of my publisher—the editorial department. Now I really didn’t want to open it. Maybe I’d missed a deadline. Maybe they’d changed their mind about my contract. Or found an error so grievous they were recalling my books. Or found a new and more appropriate term for my writing. “Dear John,” the editorial assistant had written, “would you like to keep your foul matter from American Philosophy: A Love Story?” My foul matter? As if I had a choice. American Philosophy, published last year with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a memoir about facing a father’s death, a divorce and a remarriage, and how American philosophy (the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James) helped me survive. I am now in the weeds of writing my second book, another hybrid of memoir and intellectual history, this time about parenthood and Friedrich Nietzsche. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that you are largely stuck with yourself, most especially with your foulest parts. Foul matter, it turns out, as I learned by reading the rest of the note, is the inevitable literary flotsam that is generated in writing a book—the notes, page proofs, drafts, and rejected covers and art. Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as the art of removing stone until a beautiful form emerges from a block of granite. If writing is at all like this, foul matter is the stuff strewn across the studio floor. The question remained: Did I want it? Read More
October 3, 2017 In Memoriam Petty in the Morning By Brian Cullman Back when my son Harry was little, I’d take him out early in the morning, usually with Miss Otis in tow, and walk over to Les Deux Gamins. One of those mornings, I got there around eight. They were still setting up inside, but the morning was mild, must have been early October, and I sat at one of the four or five outside tables. Noel, the Moroccan waitress, brought me coffee in a bowl and brought Miss Otis a similar bowl half filled with water. She looked at it with a mix of droit du seigneur and disdain. As if she were thinking both, Mine! and What the fuck do I care? Pugs have that look down solid. Tom Petty walked by and stopped to take in the café. He was with a pretty blonde woman, not a girl, a woman who looked like she’d done some heavy lifting. She was in a T-shirt and loose cardigan, but he was wrapped up in a navy peacoat, hands in his pockets. Anything below seventy degrees was probably winter to him. Read More
October 3, 2017 Arts & Culture The Art of Memory By Presca Ahn Bernadette Mayer’s Memory at the Canada Gallery Last week, I went to Canada Gallery on the Lower East Side to see the current show, a rare exhibition of the 1971 work Memory by Bernadette Mayer. Mayer is known and respected primarily as a poet, but Memory is an installation of eleven hundred photographic prints and approximately six hours of audio that she created over the course of a month. Those are numbers I learned later, from the gallery’s press release, not ones I processed during my own rather disoriented encounter with the work. I did not count the photographs, which seemed simply numerous to my eye and were arranged in a long rectangular grid spanning the gallery’s back wall. Nor can I recall many details about the half hour of audio I heard, a recording of Mayer reading hypnotically from journal entries corresponding to the dates of the photos. (Later I would read an edited transcript, published as a book by Mayer a few years after the work was first exhibited.) Indeed, as I wandered back and forth in front of the piece, I had to make some effort to focus in on single photographs. The mind, I guess, wants some kind of narrative, and I resisted each image as an isolated moment. Those details of Memory that I do recall vividly are more suited to an archival interest than a critical one: gaps in the wall where certain photos seemed to be missing; the beige mounting corners holding each photo in place, looking almost brown against the white border of the photos; the fact that large plexiglass panels protected most, but not all, sections of the work; a few photos which had slipped free of the mounting and drooped gently away from the wall. Up close, the work looked like it could be some long-untouched photo wall in anybody’s home, depicting friends and places of strictly personal interest. (In fact, after the work was first exhibited at Holly Solomon’s Greene Street space in 1972, Mayer showed the work by appointment in her own apartment.) There is a handmade, unpolished feel to the work that is accentuated by its slightly sunstruck, fading archival state, over forty years after most of the prints on view were made (a few were reprinted for this show). Read More
October 3, 2017 Baseball The Called Shot By Rich Cohen A detail from Robert Thom’s painting depicting Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot.” Courtesy the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Wrigley Field is beloved not just because it’s a beautiful place to see a baseball game, which it is, not because of its harmonious dimensions, which it has, not because of its context, its perfect neighborhood of stoops and taverns where men quote Bartman and Banks, nor because of its ivy, bare in spring, green in summer, but because of all the things that’ve happened there—all of the images and afternoons. Wrigley Field’s pitching ace Grover Cleveland Alexander, ruined by World War I, stashing whiskey bottles in the clubhouse. It’s the catcher Gabby Hartnett, hitting the dinger in near darkness, that basically put the Cubs in the 1938 World Series—“the Homer in the Gloaming.” It’s the slugger Dave Kingman, known as King Kong and as Ding Dong, proposing that Chicago trade the reporter Mike Royko to New York for the reporter Red Smith. It’s the famous rant of manager Lee Elia, in which he described the stadium as a “playground for the cocksuckers.” It’s the play-by-play genius Harry Caray leaning out the broadcast booth to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” It’s me standing with Bill Buckner in the Summer of 1977. It’s the bleacher bums genuflecting before great the right fielder Andre Dawson, the Hawk. It’s Omar Moreno climbing the ivy to get at the hecklers, who drive him off with a delicious shower of frosty malt. But the most iconic event in Wrigley Field did not star the Cubs—it starred the New York Yankees, with the home team serving merely as foil. Backstory: In July 1932, as the Cubs were cruising, their shortstop was shot in a hotel room by a jilted lover. It’s enough to say that the ballplayer was Billy Jurges and the perp was a showgirl who’d later perform under the stage name Violet “What I Did For Love” Valli. Jurges was shot in room 509 of Hotel Carlos, a few blocks from the ballpark. He’d be back on the field before the end of the season. In the meantime, the Cubs needed a solid substitute infielder if they were going to make a pennant run. Read More