May 3, 2017 Look A History of the Evidence By Sandra S. Phillips In 1977, two young artists living in the San Francisco Bay Area, both recently out of art school, published a book of photographs they had found in the files of local corporations, government agencies, and research institutions. Somehow, through a combination of innocence and bravado, the two persuaded the guardians of those files, who were perhaps, in retrospect, even more innocent, to let the visitors in and not only see what was there but take some of it away with them—often for free. In many cases, these keepers of publicity shots and librarians of research files were persuaded not only by the seriousness of the two men, but by a letter on government stationery stating that they had received government funds to pursue a research project and would be granted an exhibition at an honorable museum where the materials they found would be displayed. They called this book and its accompanying show Evidence. Today we are more accustomed to seeing pictures plucked from their original context and put on the wall of a museum or published as objects of artistic value, all without identifying or instructional text. At the time Evidence was published, however, such a decontextualized presentation of photography, especially photographs made for the purpose of record, was a new phenomenon and directed toward a still relatively tiny audience—those interested in photography as a kind of art. Yet the book proved to be a modest bombshell. It was elusive and poetic, it needed the viewer’s active thought and engagement, it was not strictly speaking political, in those most political of times, and it was a challenge to those who thought they knew what art photographs looked like. Thanks to a renewed interest in conceptualism, and now also a regard for photography’s central role in contemporary art, this modest book now seems premonitory rather than dated or quaint. Its republication is a tribute to the continued resonance of these pictures. Read More
May 3, 2017 On the Shelf Could I Please Steal Your Movie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Satyajit Ray. As is by now well known, Hollywood—real, old-timey, cigar-chomping, tush-squeezing, cocktails-in-the-back-of-the-limousine Hollywood—was and is a loathsome place. Imagine an elaborate machine designed to suck the marrow out of an art form and turn it into money—you got it, buddy! And if you were a talented, eagle-eyed filmmaker from the subcontinent, well, forget about it, they’d eat your soul. Or try to, anyway. In 1967, Satyajit Ray, who’d directed the Apu trilogy in India, visited Hollywood in hopes of realizing his latest film, The Alien, which Columbia Pictures had agreed to bankroll. Roy expected a degree of autonomy; instead he confronted “the hum of machinery in my ears” as he was chauffeured around Los Angeles and asked to sign away the rights to his own screenplay. The movie was never made—but later, after Ray’s screenplay had been circulating in California for decades, traces of it showed up in films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty writes, “Where Ray wrote his own screenplays, preferred to operate the camera as often as possible, composed his own music, designed publicity posters and fonts, the studios of the West Coast were known for the scale of their operations and compartmentalized efficiency, so that by the time a film went to the floors its appeal for different audiences would have been sorted out, and everyone in the cast and crew—from the director to the actors to the set workers and sound technicians, all protected by their respective unions—everyone worked in fixed roles to advance that appeal. What has worked once will work again, the Hollywood credo went; prior success was desirable because it could be endlessly replicated. Hollywood, like every longstanding establishment, had a house-style guide.” You’d think the culture wars were over, given that the Christian right united behind a presidential candidate who bragged about sexually assaulting women. You are wrong, though. We live in a time when enterprising Jesus-smooching types are still trying to launch Christian magazines for teen girls. Witness Brio, whose cover lines include “Do You Love Stuff More Than God?” and “Is It OK to Pray for a Boyfriend?” Liam Stack writes: “While Teen Vogue recently published a guide to gifts you can buy a friend after an abortion, Brio has featured reader testimonials on how to avoid the temptations of premarital sex (‘I began struggling to keep my thoughts godly when Satan tried to draw me out of my purity,’ wrote Leah, age sixteen, in 2009.) Sorcha Brophy, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who grew up reading Brio, said the magazine aims to ‘normalize being a Christian teen’ by telling readers it can be cool to go to church and shun drugs and partying. But she said its emphasis on moral uprightness can also create a lot of pressure. As an example, Ms. Brophy pointed to a feature she encountered during her research: a pop culture quiz that deducted points from a reader’s score for correctly answered questions about mainstream music videos and celebrity gossip.” Read More
May 2, 2017 Books Refuge By Elisa Albert Wolf Kahn, Dark on the Right (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 24″ x 26″. From the cover of The Farm in the Green Mountains. When I first read Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer’s The Farm in the Green Mountains, a blustering butthole had just been elected president of the United States of America, and everyone was freaking out. Via any number of platforms on any number of screens, there was a cacophony of anxiety and grandstanding and myopia and rage and despair such as I have never seen, or maybe the sheer number of platforms and screens were the never-before-seen entity. Regardless, things seemed to be turning faster and faster in some widening gyre, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, who didn’t know the half of it. So it came to pass that I found great comfort in the voice of Auntie Al, as I came to think of the indomitable Herdan-Zuckmayer (I can’t imagine she’d mind). It was, in other words, just the right book at just the right time. Read More
May 2, 2017 On Music Who the Fuck Knows By Robert Christgau Covering music in Drumpfjahr II. From the cover of YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT.” Whatever else you were doing the last three weeks of November, chances are you weren’t sleeping enough. Chances are you felt trapped in the same nightmare that had been waking most of us up all year. To fend that nightmare off, I’d phonebanked and canvassed for Hillary, although not enough, and published my first Village Voice piece in a decade urging readers to pitch in—or at least see through the sit-this-one-out dodge and the third-party scam. After the nightmare came true, I spent long breakfasts splitting hairs with my obsessed wife, called and emailed many old friends, and tried to figure out how to cover music while devoting my working hours to Twitter and Talking Points Memo. The only thing that cheered me up was my daughter’s new kittens. My gig with Noisey requires me to find three or more albums worth praising each Friday, but I file earlier—which meant I’d written my November 11 post before the election proper, a dilemma I finessed by saving up five artists of seventy-five or older, all explicitly on the left, including the unbowed eighty-eight-year-old communist Barbara Dane. I’d stockpiled Tanya Tagaq and Pussy Riot for a post-election fallback. After that came the Tribe Called Quest comeback keyed to the rallying cry “it’s time to go left and not right,” and after that Southern progressive Mose Allison, dead exactly a week after electoral Kristallnacht, and his anti-imperialist “Western Man,” plus old music master Hoagy Carmichael, who I informed my readers was a liberal Republican back when there still was such a thing. And then I ran out of propaganda and had to ease up. If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that’s obviously not because it’s a fountainhead of protest songs. In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid. Thing is, to quote the recantation of the devout contrarian Simon Reynolds in the politics-themed eleventh and final issue of The Pitchfork Review: “Why was I so down on the idea of preaching to the converted? When history is against them, the converted need to have their morale maintained, their spirits kept stalwart.” Read More
May 2, 2017 On the Shelf I See You in Your Car, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Mike Mandel, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. What’s your most embarrassing hobby? Me, I like to take tens of thousands of dollars of photography equipment to a nice, busy intersection—Times Square at rush hour, say—and take intimate close-ups of people in their cars. I know it sounds creepy now, but it didn’t used to be, I promise. The photographer Mike Mandel, for instance, used to do it all the time. But he was nineteen, and he grew up in simpler times, when not everyone with a camera was presumed to be a pervert. In the Los Angeles of the seventies, as he explained to Hattie Crisell, people were more inclined to mug for the camera, though some of them were spooked by it, too: “He saw the automobile as an American icon and a home in itself, where people would spend hours of their time. Walking to an intersection half a block from his house, he began to take candid photographs of drivers. He used a wide-angle lens, which required him to stand close to the cars. ‘It wasn’t like I was looking at them from a distance—I wanted them to respond to me in some way,’ he explains. And respond they did: the images show couples grinning at him, children scowling, and one lady flipping a manicured finger. ‘I think today there might have been a lot more paranoia about being surveilled or something, but in those days it was maybe a more naïve time. For the most part, people thought it was kind of funny, and responded in a jovial way, and I had a lot of fun doing it.’ ” Quick, name one thing that Louise Erdrich will never, ever write about. I bet you said Long Range Acoustic Devices, as any sane person would. But wouldn’t you know it—sign of the times—that’s exactly the topic she’s chosen for a new essay: “The LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device, was first used in 2009 to control protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Since then, it has been purchased by more than sixty countries to disperse demonstrators. Originally developed to deter pirates at sea, it has been notoriously used by Japanese whaling fleets against Sea Shepherd Conservation boats and helicopters. The military-grade device can project voice messages and eardrum rupturing ‘alarm tones’ over a distance of two miles or more via a thirty- to sixty-degree beam … LRAD’s effect on people is devastating. But in a moving act of cultural transformation, the art collective Postcommodity is using LRAD in a radically different manner. The innocuous-looking gray LRAD speakers are installed in Athens, Greece, and the more softly pitched acoustical beam is directed at the archeological site of Aristotle’s Lyceum. Here, LRAD is used to speak to the origins of Western civilization, not in weaponized tones, but in the language of the human spirit … People who have been subjected to LRAD report its haunting effect. Sounds traveling via the directed beam create phantom speakers. A voice, for instance, seems to emerge from an invisible person right in front of you. The LRAD sound beam ‘gets in your head.’ For one hundred days in Aristotle’s Lyceum, ghosts are speaking to ghosts. Restless contemporary spirits are interrogating the dead. Instead of broadcasting military orders, the art installation’s LRAD broadcasts questions.” Read More
May 1, 2017 In Memoriam Jean Stein, 1934–2017 By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Brigitte LaCombe We were heartbroken to learn that Jean Stein, the writer and editor who chronicled the venal underside of celebrity, has died at eighty-three. Stein led a storied life. When she was still a teenager, she interviewed William Faulkner, an exchange that appeared in this magazine in 1956. By the time she was in her early twenties, she’d earned a spot on The Paris Review’s masthead as an editor; not long after, she worked with Clay Felker, of Esquire. With George Plimpton, she edited Edie: American Girl, an oral history of Edie Sedgwick; an excerpt appeared in the Review’s Summer 1980 issue. The pair also edited American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy. Read More