April 28, 2017 From the Archive Straight from the Horse’s Mouth By Dan Piepenbring Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, wood, ramp, and speaker, 2.5′ x 22′ x 30′. Photo: Ealan Wingate and Bernadette Mayer The artist and poet Vito Acconci has died at seventy-seven. Acconci is best known for his performance pieces, which shocked audiences in the early seventies—especially Seedbed, which a New York Times profile last summer described with admirable concision: “he constructed an angled false floor at the Sonnebend Gallery in SoHo and hid himself beneath it with a microphone, speaking luridly to the people who walked above him, masturbating as he spoke.” Before he became an artist, Acconci was a writer, and in this line, too, he excelled at provocation. The Paris Review published a pair of eyebrow-raising poems by him in our Summer 1968 issue. At that time, Acconci would’ve been fresh out of his M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa, where, as the Times tells it, one of his short stories “provoked a minor riot.” It featured a dismembered man who became a living sculpture, and it started like this: Read More
April 28, 2017 On the Shelf Same Ol’ Shit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A sample of Basquiat’s work with the tag SAMO©. I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo, but all the good ones are taken. Part of the genome sequence of a polar bear? Taken. Abraham Lincoln holding a boom box over his head like John Cusack in Say Anything? Taken. Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the Chevy logo? Taken. And now the poet Morgan Parker, whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, has just claimed the mother of all tats. Amanda Petrusich went with her to get it: “Parker had saved a photo on her phone of the tattoo she wanted to get, a graffiti tag that read ‘samo.’ In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the tag was ubiquitous on the walls and in the stairwells of downtown New York City, often painted by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his collaborator, Al Diaz. The word is a phonetic shortening of the phrase ‘same ol’ shit’ and thus implies a certain kind of psychic exhaustion … It took about fifteen minutes before the tattoo artist wiped the last streaks of blood from Parker’s skin. She admired his work. ‘It’s me reminding myself that I’ve always been this person,’ she said later, looking at it. ‘It becomes this kind of affirmation, and I like the idea of taking something that’s in the vernacular, and yet it’s hard to define. It’s a word that’s written on the soul. It’s a thing that we know deeply.’ ” Yo Zushi on Leonora Carrington, the artist and novelist who left behind a privileged life in England to pursue the creative life—and, oh, while she was at it, she eluded the grasp of the Nazis, too: “Her life was an extended refutation of convention … In this centenary year of her birth, Carrington, who died in 2011, is at last receiving the attention she deserves. Her shorter fiction, compiled in The Debutante and Other Stories, reveals an imagination that could transfigure horror into enchantment, and the human into the bestial. Yet her most significant achievement is her paintings. In Self-Portrait (1937–38), a wild-haired Carrington sits on a chair in front of a rocking horse, communing with a hyena. We see in the window behind her a real white horse, running free; our eyes are drawn to it by the room’s outlines. Surrealism prided itself in defying logic, but there is a logic here—one of emotional sense, if not literal meaning. Her life was made of multiple escapes. With that galloping horse, how vividly she evokes a longing for freedom.” Read More
April 27, 2017 First Person Permanent Resident By Alexia Arthurs The lingering anxieties of growing up undocumented. Alexia Arthurs. Photo by Kaylia Duncan. I’m trying to remember when I first knew I was undocumented. We all were—my mother, my brother and sister, too. It showed itself in our lives. In Jamaica, my siblings and I had idyllic childhoods, with backyards to run and play in, and mango trees for climbing, and there was a time, for a little while at least, when my father would take us to the beach on Sunday mornings. He was a pastor, and his job required frequent relocation; my childhood is mapped by the houses we lived in and the church congregations we visited. On Ward Avenue, in Mandeville, my sister and I watched our cat give birth in a closet, and when we lived in Clarendon, I remember how the spikes in a church-graveyard fence went through a little boy’s leg and he was taken to the hospital. One August, we moved again—my mother took us to New York, leaving behind my father, who had been abusive to her and was less than interested in me and my siblings. My mother taught high school in Jamaica, a respected position in our community—I remember going to the market with her and the market men and women would call out “Teacher!” to draw her attention to their stalls. Now, she taught in day cares in Brooklyn where she was paid three hundred dollars a week. We lived in tiny quarters, for a time the four of us in the same bed; my clothes were purchased from thrift stores; and when the time came, my maxi-pads came cheaply made in large boxes from the dollar store. My mother taught me to stack one on top of the other, so I wouldn’t leak. It would take twelve years before we finally got our papers, when I was twenty-four. I’m twenty-eight now. Read More
April 27, 2017 First Person J. Stands Up By Marie Myung-Ok Lee John Singer Sargent, Studies of Clasped Hands, for “Apollo and the Muses,” 1916–21, charcoal on laid paper. My son, J., has many medical issues and severe cognitive disabilities. Yesterday, at one of the endless meetings we have about said disabilities, my husband and I were asked to describe how J. got that scar on his face. We shifted, almost in shame, as if it were someone’s fault. It wasn’t. So one of us explained how one day, J. was in so much pain from his gastroenteritis when he came home from school—this is our guess; he can’t communicate what he’s feeling or what motivates him—and we weren’t able to get him his medical cannabis in time. He often bangs his head on things when he’s hurting. That day, he happened to be standing by a window. He put his head right through it, slashing his face open on a jagged piece of glass. The developmental psychologist then asked us if J.’s ever tried to hurt us “with malice.” My spouse and I considered. We have scars from J.’s bites everywhere—I have one on the web of my hand and another on my left breast, where he bit me in fear after seeing a dog while I was holding him. My spouse has his own scar on his face, for which he, the least vain person I know, is considering plastic surgery to have removed. It looks a bit like a pimple, makes it difficult to shave. And who wants to look at that every day? Read More
April 27, 2017 On the Shelf The Ancient Mariner of the Future, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration by Gustave Doré for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Ask anyone: poets are time travelers. They’ve got that thousand-yard stare; that glimmer of psychosis in the face; those penetrating, gnomic utterances. It’s because they’re literally living in the future. Literally—the future. Don’t believe me? The critic Malcolm Guite has marshaled an impressive array of evidence to claim that Samuel Coleridge wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as an “involucrum”: a howling vision of his future self in all its psychic anguish. Kelly Grovier explains: “Guite contends that the true source for the Mariner’s arduous odyssey—from degradation to redemption after committing the cosmic crime of killing the albatross that had guided his imperiled ship through the Antarctic mist and ice—was, in fact, the physical, spiritual and psychological torments that Coleridge himself would suffer in the years and decades after he wrote the poem when he was just twenty-five years old. It is Guite’s belief, not that the poet lived his poem after composing it between the autumn of 1797 and spring of 1798; rather, that Coleridge’s work is based on mysterious foreknowledge of his future self. Line by line, symbol by symbol, Guite painstakingly traces the ghostly congruities between the Mariner’s ordeals and its author’s own subsequent travails.” At the Japan Society, an exhibition of Edo-era woodblock prints captures the phenomenon of the wakashu, a kind of male adolescent whose extreme youth and beauty constituted a third gender. Claire Voon writes, “Wakashu referred specifically to males who had yet to go through the traditional Japanese coming-of-age ceremony known as genpuku. Although they did not carry the social responsibilities of adults, they were considered sexually mature. Their most discerning feature is their hairstyle: a slightly shaven crown flanked by side locks. (To signify having reached adulthood, a man would shave his entire crown, leaving a bald area with side locks intact.) This is best observed in a print on view by Hosoda Eisui of a wakashu holding an ornate shoulder drum. Hairstyles may seem, today, like a trivial way to understand gender, but they comprised an essential visual code in traditional woodblock prints. Combs and hairpins were shown to identify young women, and females, in general, had very elaborate hairdos … Interior views of brothels and private parlors, as seen in erotic prints known as shunga, illustrate how these relationships adhered to established societal attitudes: While same-sex relations between two adult men or two wakashu were not condoned, adult men and wakashu were allowed to be together due to their age difference, which bred a particular sex and gender regime.” Read More
April 26, 2017 Look Rose Gold By Dan Piepenbring “Rose Gold,” an exhibition of photographs and a film by Sara Cwynar, is at Foxy Production through May 14. Cwynar, who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, took the title of her show from Apple’s most coveted iPhone color, introduced in 2015. In the film at the center of the show, also called Rose Gold, two voices, one male and one female, offer observations about consumer desire, at once pointed and disaffected: “I keep finding watch advertisements where all the clocks are set to 8:20 … what time was it really? I go to check what time the Apple Watch is set to and end up wanting one … Several male artists have told me that I’m having a moment, as if the moment will pass soon. Rose Gold is having a moment, too … What is the right way to talk about something? People understand more if you communicate through things bought and sold.” Cwynar also examines Melamine, a brand of luridly colored plastic kitchenware from the fifties—the plastic was supposed to be unbreakable, but over time it grew brittle and faded. Her photos include studio portraits of her friend Tracy overlaid with found objects and detritus; and a set of shiny Avon “presidential aftershave” bottles from the seventies. Robbed of their caps—i.e., their golden presidents’ heads—they look denuded, as if forcibly neutralized. Sara Cwynar, Tracy (One Hundred Consecutive Years), 2017, dye-sublimation print on aluminum, 30″ x 38″. Read More