April 19, 2017 Look Bayou Fever By Caitlin Love “Bayou Fever and Related Works,” an exhibition of twenty-one vibrant collages by the late artist Romare Bearden, is on view at DC Moore Gallery through April 29. Made in 1979, the works were originally conceived of as blueprints for a ballet, the titular Bayou Fever—a performance Bearden hoped would be choreographed by Alvin Ailey but was never produced. The ballet’s storyline involves a confrontation between the “Conjur Woman” and the “Swamp Witch,” who twist in a dramatic struggle for the soul of a sick child deep in the bayou. The collages are exhibited alongside artworks from other years, an effect that accents Bearden’s motifs: powerful women, elders, musicians, rural landscapes, domestic interiors, and religion. Romare Bearden, The Bayou, 1979, collage, ink, pencil, and acrylic on fiberboard, 6″ x 9″. Read More
April 19, 2017 On the Shelf Go on and Drive Your Van Right Off a Cliff, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Dead to me. The Volkswagen Westfalia Camper used to be a mark of distinction: passing one on the road ten years ago, you could be fairly certain its passengers were unwashed eccentrics, conspiracy theorists, petty criminals, or all of the above. But today the van has lost its luster. Like everything decent and weird in this world, it’s been co-opted by rich white people who yearn to cultivate a sense of ersatz rebellion and get more likes on Instagram. They buy these vans by the hundreds, presumably to take boring drug-free road trips and have lots of vanilla sex in the back. This is called #vanlife, and you should denounce it whenever you see it. Rachel Monroe writes of the trend, “Like the best marketing terms, ‘vanlife’ is both highly specific and expansive. It’s a one-word life-style signifier that has come to evoke a number of contemporary trends: a renewed interest in the American road trip, a culture of hippie-inflected outdoorsiness, and a life free from the tyranny of a nine-to-five office job … ‘It’s men in their thirties with huge beards, and they’re pretty much all stay-at-home dads,’ [Harley Sitner] said. ‘Their wives work office jobs and they work on the vans so the family can go out and vanlife on the weekend’ … ‘There are now professional vanlifers,’ [Foster] Huntington told me, sounding slightly scandalized. Vanlifers have a tendency to call their journeys ‘projects,’ and to describe them in the elevator-pitch terms that make sense to potential sponsors.” In an interview by Paul Devlin, David Murray reflects on the legacy of Albert Murray’s jazz writing: “People get tired of reading good stuff when reading about jazz. They don’t want to think too hard. A lot of people got frustrated with Albert Murray on that too—people just want a few sentences—they don’t know about the sustenance of the blues. But he broke it down … The fact that he even thought [the blues] was sophisticated turned some people off. Europeans love Africans when they don’t comb their hair. See, in Europe, they’ll see a light-skinned black, and they’ll say, ‘He’s black, but he’s not really black.’ Here, politically, we’ve defined who we are as African Americans. In Europe, they use their definition of us rather than our definition of us. We have to say these things to continue to define who we are as people. That’s what Albert Murray was saying when he described the afro hairstyle as ‘Afro-Brillo,’ rather than describing ‘the natural.’ He says that because he knows exactly what he means. He’s very specific. There are white people who resent those distinctions because it destroys their idea of the nigger serving coffee. Or those lawn jockeys. Sometimes I would go to a restaurant in Portugal that had one. I’d always throw some shit at it. The owner says, ‘Man, why you always messing with my jockey?’ I say it makes me not want to come in here!” Read More
April 18, 2017 Our Correspondents Sing, Together, as Long as We’re Alive By Alison Kinney and Mechi Annaís Estévez Cruz A conversation about ¡Figaro! 90210 and immigrants’ rights at the opera. Mozart’s 1786 opera Le nozze di Figaro has been set in a Trump Tower penthouse and at a Jewish wedding in contemporary Germany. Now, for a week in New York City, Vid Guerrerio’s adaptation, ¡Figaro! 90210, sets Mozart’s music to an English/Spanish libretto—and puts Conti in a red baseball cap. Of course, the plot still features two spirited, ingenious working people trying to free themselves from the abuses of the powerful, but now Figaro and Susana are undocumented Mexican household workers singing their opening duet in Spanish, on the grounds of the Beverly Hills mansion of their pussy-grabbing employer, Mr. Conti. Susana explains that the boss has given them a pool-house apartment to facilitate his assaults on her: “I see this coming when he tell me he help me get my visa … ‘Good girls, they get green cards. Girls who don’t obey their boss get deported.’ ” Le nozze di Figaro lends itself well to this kind of reworking; rebellion is in its DNA. Its eighteenth-century premiere came only a few years before the French and Haitian Revolutions. The opera derived from a play by Beaumarchais (who was also an arms dealer for the American Revolution) of which Louis XVI said, “For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first”; Napoleon, for his part, called it “the Revolution in action.” The opera’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, lightened the play’s political radicalism to bypass Austrian censors, earning Joseph II’s approval and a special palace performance commission. Yet the plot remains subtly subversive, addressing both the vulnerability and moral superiority of women and workers, and the violence of the ruling classes and their henchmen. After the marvelously entertaining opening night, the two of us compared notes to figure out what kind of audience ¡Figaro! 90210 was for. Not everybody, we observed, was happy with the adaptation. Read More
April 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Jungle Love By Darrell Hartman Why we keep looking for lost jungle cities. An illustration of Colonel Percy Fawcett doing battle with a giant anaconda, from the cover of Exploration Fawcett. Dry, desolate landscapes tend to preserve any evidence of human passage—they cling to artifacts like precious memories. A Tyrolean glacier hugged the 5,300-year-old iceman to its breast. The desert helped the ancient Egyptians launch their earthly vessels into eternity. More recently, Antarctica has joined in. The frozen continent recently coughed up a 104-year-old biscuit left by an expedition of Ernest Shackleton’s—in pristine, “perfectly nutritious” state. The jungle, though, does not take naturally to cultural preservation. The obscuring overgrowth never stops; the landscape digests all. Excavating a 5-year-old site, let alone a 500-year-old one, can be like sifting through a well-advanced compost pile in search of something edible. And yet, we try—especially when inspired by a figure as captivating as Colonel Percy Fawcett. Fawcett was an intrepid British explorer who disappeared in the Brazilian Amazon in 1925, presumably killed by Indians. He’s the subject of a new biopic, The Lost City of Z, an adaptation of David Grann’s 2009 book of the same name. The Amazon’s greatest cover-up, Fawcett believed, was an utterly forgotten civilization named Z. He aimed, in his quasi-invincible, slightly nutty way, to find it. Read More
April 18, 2017 On the Shelf The Art of the Lobotomy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yikes. Happy National Lobotomy Day! Take a moment to reflect on the pioneers of this innovative, deeply disturbing procedure, which proudly lives on in our nightmares, where it continues to stain the reputation of psychiatry. Clyde Haberman recalls one Dr. Walter J. Freeman, who helped popularize everyone’s favorite brutally efficient surgery in the mid-twentieth century. (He even gave a lobotomy to a Kennedy once.) Haberman writes, “Freeman, who died in 1972, presided over an estimated 3,500 lobotomies from 1936 to 1967. Early on, the actual cutting was done by his neurosurgeon partner, Dr. James W. Watts. He sawed two holes in the skull and, with a device called a leucotome, lopped off cells in the brain’s frontal lobes. The partnership dissolved a decade later when Dr. Freeman embraced a procedure called a transorbital lobotomy. It was not for the squeamish. Dr. Freeman would insert a tool resembling an ice pick beneath each eyelid, hammer it into the patient’s brain through the eye socket, and maneuver it to cut away frontal lobe cells believed to be trouble spots … Dr. Freeman set out on his own, performing hundreds upon hundreds of what, unsurprisingly, came to be known as ice pick lobotomies. He delighted in a craft that critics deemed reckless. Part showman, he even barnstormed the country. In one twelve-day period, he operated on 225 people during a swing through West Virginia.” Doreen St. Félix profiles Kara Walker, whose 2014 work A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, “a chimera of unvarnished American desires,” was the largest piece of public art ever to appear in New York City. Now Walker has her sights on something new, St. Félix writes: “It’s been nearly three years since the Sphinx, and Walker has spent the time interrogating what it means to make monumental and political art—representational or abstract—on the terrain, sites, and buildings in which the lives of black people have been compromised in some way. That is, how to exhume the traumas and delights of an environment rather than fabricating scenes out of black paper—and how to guide the problem of how people look. ‘I am still wrestling with my relationship to what my art might do in the public space,’ she says. ‘How I can control it’ … She sometimes refers to herself as a ‘Negress of noteworthy talent,’ a reference to the slave girl-child character Hilton Als once identified as the ‘saint figure’ of her compositions. She looks to the languid narrators of Southern novels like Gone with the Wind for the flamboyance and piquancy of her drawings. To Walker, art is description, not advertisement.” Read More
April 17, 2017 Correspondence The Quarreling Gondoliers By Dan Piepenbring John Singer Sargent, Gondoliers’ Siesta, ca. 1904. From a 1952 letter by the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, who was born on this day in 1897. “A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it,” Wilder told The Paris Review in his 1956 Art of Fiction interview. “On the stage it is always now: the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity.” Read more of Wilder’s correspondence in The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. Where do I go next? I don’t know … I don’t want to go to Paris. I want to go to a little hotel in St. Moritz (already under snow) and work at what only pleases me. What is there to confer about? Let them come to me. I think that Monday or Tuesday I will entrain for Milan and there at 1:25 take the autobus arriving at 6:10 in St. Moritz … Think of that drive, past Como, up up the dramatic Italian alps and then in the evening light in the square of that Swiss village. Read More