June 22, 2017 On Games When Lore Bores By Oliver Lee Bateman Video-game developers continue to search for the golden ratio of game play to storytelling. Still from Day of the Tentacle Remastered, an updated version of the 1993 game. My first video-gaming memories are clouded by Amnesia. That game, which comprised nothing more than white text on a black background, haunted me for years. My father bought it for the PC because he saw it on sale at Sears, brought it home, installed it via the command prompt, and then abandoned it. My brother had no use for it, either. They both played Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 3.0, for which we had purchased a joystick, and Tetris, which appeared on the home computer long before its popularity exploded on Nintendo’s handheld Game Boy. Tetris and Flight Simulator were “real” games, you see. Push the buttons in a skillful way and you would win. You could trump your high score or perfect your landing at Meigs Field. But Amnesia was just a story, a playable story, and from a game-play standpoint it wasn’t even a particularly good one. Like most text-based games, it relied on commands like “eat pizza” (always a favorite of mine) to advance the plot, and like most poor text-based games, it didn’t recognize many of the commands that the player typed. Read More
June 22, 2017 Arts & Culture The Bookness of Not-Books By Albert Mobilio Kiki (Kiki O.K.) Kogelnik, Orange Naked Woman, page from the book 1¢ Life by Walasse Ting. (Bern: E.W. Kornfeld, 1964). The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Ryda Hecht Levi Collection of Illustrated Books, Bequest of Ryda H. Levi, Baltimore, BMA 2009.42.21 © Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and © 2017 Estate of Walasse Ting/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. I once owned a hardback edition of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence that had served time at the top of a bedside pile; its cover and spine had acquired several islands of melted wax from the candle it helped support. Running my fingers from the smooth dollops to the grainy fabric—an illegible but sensual braille—always afforded a small pleasure, even if the reading itself offered much less. That long-ago volume came to mind recently while holding a copy of an artist’s book by Deborah Dancy titled Winter Morning in the rare-book room of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Dancy’s slim book is made from wax-impregnated paper into which snippets of found text have been pressed. Light as wafer, the book almost hovered in my hands, and turning its stiff, deeply yellowed pages felt like exploring a precious archaeological artifact. I was fortunate to handle this rare and fragile objet at the invitation of Rena Hoisington, a curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she mounted the current show “Off the Shelf: Modern and Contemporary Artists’ Books.” The extensive range of artists and writers includes, among many others, Grace Hartigan, Picasso, Frank O’Hara, Ed Ruscha, Kandinsky, Susan Howe, Mayakovsky, Barbara Kruger, Robert Creeley, Kiki Smith, and, of course, the master of the artists’ book, the Swiss Conceptualist Dieter Roth. Equally wide is the breadth of approach: from Ruscha, there is an edition of Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, the photos printed on an accordion-folded sheet in the order they appeared on Route 66, going west to east; from Barbara Kruger and Stephen King, a large-format volume with a stainless-steel cover and an embedded digital clock; from three authors—Pasolini, Luisa Famos, Andri Peer—and the artist Not Vital, a series of poems written in Rhaeto-Romansh (the national language of Switzerland) and printed on pages custom made from cedar bark that sport attached objects, such as a saw blade. The rich variety of constructions and materials, as well as the methods of representing text—thickly rendered in paint, printed in chaotic typefaces, scrawled across images—beckons the viewer to reach out and touch. Read More
June 22, 2017 On the Shelf Your Art’s Not Instagrammable Enough, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yayoi Kusama, The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Aspiring artists should judge their work by one criterion and one criterion only: Do people want to take selfies in front of this thing? If the answer is no, then it’s back to the drawing board, friend. You’d do well to make something immersive, something participatory, something that’s such an experience that it acts as a magnet on the surrounding population, much as a Six Flags or a new Shake Shack might. To make anything quieter or less immediately spectacular is to risk irrelevance. When Sarah Boxer went to see Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” exhibition, she realized that she’d found the quintessential art show of our time—one whose value is directly correlated to its Instagramability. Boxer writes, “The fact that some folks have managed to make the scene while others get left out in the cold is integral to the excitement of participatory art. The thrill is akin to exotic travel, or getting to see Hamilton. Because not everyone who wants the experience actually gets the experience, these works, even if their intentions and messages are democratic, tend to become exclusive affairs … Why has the apprehension of art become so like theater? And why is Kusama, who never received as much attention in the 1960s as many of her contemporaries did, finally in the spotlight now? I was given a one-word answer to that question—Instagram!—and surely that is right. The Kusama show has just about everything the Happenings once had—the chance to see something extraordinary, the chance to participate, and the chance to photograph (or be photographed). But the ‘Infinity Mirrors’ exhibition has added one key ingredient to the mix—the chance to capture the lonely existential experience of infinity and send it to others in the form of a selfie.” Speaking of spectacle: in the eighties, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) put a glam, femme spin on WrestleMania, creating a show that fused daredevil feats of strength to campy dance routines. Now Netflix is resurrecting the show—but as a sitcom, and with little input from the original cast. Gendy Alimurung caught up with that cast and found that their lives are equally tragic and exhilarating, shaped in every way by their years as wrestlers: “If the women feel proprietary about GLOW, it’s only because they gave so much of themselves to it. It was brutal work. The pay was measly, the material was campy and racist. For many, however, it was the best job they ever had … Professional wrestling is fake. But the pain was real. Virtually none of them started out as trained wrestlers. They were actors, dancers and models who answered casting calls for ‘a new sports entertainment show.’ Dee Booher, who played German villainess Matilda the Hun, recalls that after a match, ‘these girls sometimes came out with handfuls of hair.’ At her apartment in Seal Beach, Calif., in Orange County, she flips through an old photo album while sitting in a motorized wheelchair—the result of wrestling-related spinal deterioration. ‘I’d beat ’em up. Eat ’em up! It was beautiful!’ she says. ‘Here’s Spanish Red. Look at this girl. Look at how she moves. She was a dancer. Here’s Ashley. Look at those ta-tas on her’ … ‘I hope you’re getting paid enough for this,’ she recalls one of the medics telling her … The women made between $300 and $700 a week. No dental. No medical.” Read More
June 21, 2017 From the Archive Who But the Sun? By Dan Piepenbring Ladies and gentlemen, the sun. You may have heard: today is the summer solstice. That big ole sun out there is going nowhere fast. It’ll be hanging in the sky for hours yet. You want nightfall? Fuck your nightfall! Put a blanket over your head and leave the sun alone! As for the rest of you: if you’re looking for something to kick off your pagan celebrations, I dug through our archives in search of some verse to suit today‘s heliophilia vibes. Here’s what I’ve got: Baudelaire. In our Winter 1981 issue we ran nineteen poems by him—translated by Richard Howard, who won our Hadada Award this year. One of these, “The Sun,” is as moving a tribute to that fiery ball of gas as has ever been written. A quick sample: Who but the sun persuades the lame to dance as if their canes were maypoles, governing the resurrection of the harrowed fields, and for the secret harvest of the heart commands immortal wheat to grow again! When, with a poet’s will, the sun descends into the cities like a king incognito, impartially visiting palace and hospital, the fate of all things vile is glorified. Subscribers can read the full poem here. Nonsubscribers should subscribe now, at which time they, too, can read the whole poem, or recite it to the sun itself, or print it out and use a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays on it until it bursts into flames—a fitting way to celebrate the solstice.
June 21, 2017 Arts & Culture Mother Monster By Philippa Snow Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in a still from Mommie Dearest. “The makeup job, of course, is the real star,” critic Stephen Schiff wrote for the Boston Phoenix about Mommie Dearest, which first screened in 1981, and starred Faye Dunaway in broad Joan Crawford drag: “a Frankenstein’s monster that hovers perilously between faces, between personas … There’s something biologically askew here: a makeup man could create that face, but human genes and chromosomes couldn’t.” I agree—I’d also guess that when he says “the makeup job,” he means the mouth, Joan Crawford’s outsized lips being more or less her genius loci. What Max Factor called “the smear” and the general public called “the hunter’s bow,” a casual observer might call “inhospitable” or “hostile.” The red of Crawford’s lips never seems like the red of a rose or a Valentine, but the red of a wound. Treating the mouth as the sum of the mother is obvious: it’s a mirror for the mother’s other mouth, and a possible site of tenderness. Insensitive to any and all tenderness—and hypersensitive to imperfection—Faye-as-Joan is a perfect bitch and an absolutely flawless lunatic, which makes her as good at being an icon as it makes her awful at being a parent. If the Crawford mouth—a red, Fontana canvas slash of a maw—does not convey the image of a mother or a woman, it may be because Joan Crawford never wanted to be either: only a big, indelible star. To be a star, you also have to be a bit of a monster, which is why “the smear” resembles, variously, the scowl of a clown, the pout of a scheming drag queen, and the bloodied mouth of a bear in a wildlife photograph. Read More
June 21, 2017 On the Shelf Go Stand in the Corner, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A lot to take in here. Prepositions matter. If you’re standing on the corner, you could be having the time of your life; if you’re standing in the corner, you’re probably not having much fun at all. The corner of a room is a site of inwardness and anxiety, a repository for social insecurities. It’s also just not very exciting to look at. For these reasons and more, as Will Wiles writes in a ranging new essay, writers as various as H. P. Lovecraft and J. G. Ballard are united in their fixation on corners, the locus of so many psychic burdens: “Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject … They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares—and in doing so, they reveal its secret history … The Lovecraftian corner could drive men mad, whisk them to terrible other places, and sometimes kill them outright. And the corner of a room is a place of power—uncanny, unwelcome power. ‘That most sordid of all havens, the corner, deserves to be examined,’ writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard saw the corner as a shameful intellectual bolthole, in which we are silent and immobile, negating the universe, constructing imaginary rooms around us … In 1967 Ballard made four conceptual advertisements and placed them in the pages of the literary magazine Ambit. One asked: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’ ” JFK talked a big game about art—“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist,” he said, and he seemed to believe that nurturing U.S. artists was a great way to kick Commie ass. But now that the dust has settled, Philip Kennicott writes, we should be honest—the guy didn’t really like art that much: “Kennedy was never an art lover, and to the extent that he respected art, it was in the same way he respected accomplishment in science and sports. Nor was Kennedy moved by music or opera, or susceptible to the introspection offered by paintings or sculpture. He was, however, passionate about winning the Cold War on all fronts, including culture … Kennedy no doubt believed everything he said about art, at least in an abstract way. But notice the words that got cut … ‘Art reminds us that man’s hunger for beauty, and truth and self-fulfillment, knows no national boundaries.’ That cut, eliminating reference to how individuals actually engage with art—the hunger for deeper things and self-fulfillment—is significant … He was mocked even in his own time for being more an enthusiast than a deep connoisseur. In 1965, the Kenyon Review wrote that one of his most engaging statements on the arts, an article he wrote for Look Magazine, was written ‘in a vein better suited to a high school commencement address.’ ” Read More