September 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Hélio Oiticica in New York By Elisa Wouk Almino Miguel Rio Branco, Babylonests, 1971, digital projection, dimensions variable. Courtesy of César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. The late fifties and early sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams. The arts were flourishing under the newly elected president, Juscelino Kubitschek, who had promised to achieve “fifty years of progress in five.” Musicians were mixing samba with jazz and developing bossa nova, while visual artists experimented with abstraction and participatory sculpture. Modern architecture would revolutionize the face of the country in 1960 with the inauguration of the newly constructed capital, Brasília. Designed by the country’s greatest modern architect, Oscar Niemeyer, the capitol was a symbol of hope and transformation in a poor country that had been politically unstable for decades. But all that was swiftly overshadowed by the reactionary military regime, which overthrew the government in 1964. In response to the new government’s violent, nationalistic rhetoric, artists began drawing even more heavily from cultural trends abroad to create a new, anarchist cultural movement, Tropicália. Like the indigenous cannibals who ate their colonialist enemies to become stronger, these artists wanted to consume foreign culture and to outdo it. For musicians, such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, this often meant fusing psychedelic rock with Brazilian beats; visual artists such as Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape melded the handcraftsmanship of indigenous communities with modernist aesthetics. Hélio Oiticica, whose work is currently being celebrated in a massive retrospective, “To Organize Delirium,” at the Whitney Museum, was another actor at the center of this movement. Born into Brazil’s upper-middle class, he studied painting at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and became a vital part of the city’s art scene. Following the military coup, he began working with the marginal classes in the city’s favelas, where he developed many of his ideas of making art in public spaces and designed his famous “penetrables,” freestanding, colorful labyrinths that mimic the makeshift architecture of the favelas. In the best known of these, “Tropicália” (1967), two multicolor structures sit on an island of sand, a clichéd Brazilian setting; Oiticica wanted it to be “the cry of Brazil for the world.” Read More
September 6, 2017 Bulletin Announcing Our New Web Editor By The Paris Review Photo: Kate Kornberg After a month and a half of wandering, rudderless, in the deserts of mixed metaphor, The Paris Review Daily is delighted to welcome its new editor: Nadja Spiegelman. Nadja’s memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, was published last year. More recently, she coedited Resist!, a free feminist publication of comics and graphics. A former editor at Toon Books, Nadja has written for New York Magazine, the newyorker.com, Fantastic Man, McSweeney’s, and many others. She also introduced Daily readers to verse in emoji—the first in what we feel sure will be a series of exciting innovations here at your favorite gazette of culture and the arts. Nadja has spent the past five years living in Paris; she will be returning home this week to join us in our Chelsea offices. (Her personal Paris review? Five stars.)
September 5, 2017 In Memoriam “America the Lovely” By John Ashbery John Ashbery. Photo: Lynn Davis This week, in memory of our longtime contributor John Ashbery, we bring you a selection of his poems from our archive. Read More
September 5, 2017 Arts & Culture A Visit to the Musée d’Edith Piaf By Nadja Spiegelman Musée Edith Piaf. When Edith Piaf died in 1963, at the age of forty-seven, she was the most famous singer in France. But Bernard Marchois, founder and docent of the Musée d’Edith Piaf, was afraid the petite songstress, whose extraordinary voice elevated her from the street corners of working-class Belleville to the stages of the world’s largest music halls, would fall into oblivion after her death. “Her public will never forget her, but the media can. Piaf must not die a second death,” he told me, in French, sitting on an ornate Victorian couch once owned by Piaf herself. Paris is filled with strange museums—from the museum of absinthe to the museum of carnival equipment—but the Musée d’Edith Piaf is among the strangest. Marchois has kept the same hours since its founding fifty years ago, in 1967: Monday through Wednesday, one P.M. to six P.M., strictly by appointment only. He pointedly speaks no English (“Juste une,” he corrected a prospective American visitor, “Une, pas un, parce que vous êtes une jeune femme.”) To those who call, he dictates the address and door codes to a residential building in Belleville. The museum occupies two small rooms of a fourth-floor apartment that adjoins Marchois’s own. Read More
September 5, 2017 Bulletin Announcing Our Fall Issue By The Paris Review In our Fall issue, Malcolm Gladwell discusses his years as an illegal immigrant (and failed right-wing provocateur); Michael Lewis explains how he writes by his family motto (“Do as little as possible”); and David Sedaris weighs the pros and cons of communication with the dead. Also: our longtime Paris editor Maxine Groffsky—who brought John Ashbery and so many others into the pages of the Review–remembers the sixties, with cameos by John Ashbery, Brigitte Bardot, Harry Mathews, George Plimpton, Niki de Saint Phalle, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. (“If we’d been getting money [from the CIA], I would have splurged on typewriter ribbons.”) Plus: fiction by Ann Beattie, Antonio Di Benedetto, Isabella Hammad, and Sigrid Nunez; poems by Peter Gizzi, Patrick Mackie, Ange Mlinko, D. Nurkse, Ezra Pound, Jana Prikryl, Philip Schultz, Frederick Seidel, and Donna Stonecipher; an Art of Fiction interview with Dany Laferrière; and the teenage diaries of Duncan Hannah, high school Casanova. Subscribe now.