April 6, 2017 Look Stung By Dan Piepenbring “A Self-Portrait,” an exhibition of paintings by Lamar Peterson, is at Fredericks & Freiser gallery for just a few more days, through April 8. Peterson intends the works to serve, in aggregate, as a metaphor for contemporary black male identity. He’s credited his predilection for bright landscapes to none other than PBS’s Bob Ross: “When I was a kid, I used to paint along with him, and he always painted a mountain scene. I imagine that as being the perfect scene … that most people can relate to. In a sense, people see that mountain scene as being an ideal kind of thing, so I keep coming up with images like that.” Lamar Peterson, The Conversation, 2016, oil on canvas, 77″ x 72″. Read More
April 6, 2017 On the Shelf Technology Is Telepathy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A man fixes telegraph wires during the U.S. Civil War, ca. 1863. Image via Public Domain Review. In the nineteenth century, as communications technologies proliferated and spiritualism spread across the U.S., people began to wonder, not unreasonably, if telepathy was real, and if our dreams could be used to predict the future. It’s an idea that retains a certain currency even today. For instance, last night I dreamed I lost my thirty-day unlimited MetroCard on an escalator; I spent two hours looking for it, riding the escalator again and again all hunched over. I experienced this search in real time. Now all I have to do is lose my MetroCard in real life and whammo, I can claim to be a telepath. But wait, back to the nineteenth century: Alicia Puglionesi writes, “Despite skepticism from some scientists, people took the idea of spontaneous, unconscious mental transmission quite seriously, as a possibility and as a danger, in an age when powerful ideas crisscrossed the nation through new and mysterious channels. From mass print to the telegraph to the railroad, burgeoning communication systems collapsed time and space through increasingly rapid connections. They brought unprecedented economic growth, creating new forms of investment and trading that depended as much on information flow as they did on the movement of commodities. Such precipitous connectedness also posed a threat to the socioeconomic order: it allowed laborers to organize, abolitionists and suffragists to rally. Dangerous ideas could spread uncontrollably, and many worried that hardware might not limit their range. The line between technology and telepathy blurred, with medical men like William Carpenter explaining the nervous system as a telegraph and extending its reach beyond the individual body; he believed that ‘nerve-force,’ as a form of electricity, could ‘exert itself from a distance, so as to bring the Brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with that of another.’ ” Family vacation idea: take a guided tour of America’s nuclear facilities. Peggy Weil did it, and she discovered vast subterranean networks of apocalyptic weaponry that most Americans never truly contemplate. Also, there were cartoons: “The Minuteman III Launch Control Centers are located deep underground in remote areas of North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Montana; these facilities support the approximately 450 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that now comprise our land-based nuclear arsenal … Operational from 1965 until 1997, Oscar-Zero was one of fifteen Missile Alert Facilities run by the 321st Strategic Missile Wing, its crew responsible for ten of the 150 Minuteman missiles then housed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, about eighty miles to the northeast … But Oscar-Zero is not all gunmetal grim. One corner melts into an azure photomural depicting a lush tropical seascape. In another mural, two missileers stride proudly under the slogan WHO YA GONNA CALL? … The commanding officer is depicted as an American eagle and his deputy commander is the Muppet character Oscar the Grouch, who declares: ‘Hey! This is a job for the BEST of the BEST!’ Both officers are wearing patches that read: KREMLIN KRUSHERS. On one cabinet there’s a picture of Donald Duck lazing against a palm tree.” Read More
April 5, 2017 In Memoriam An Empty Saddle for Yevtushenko By Carson Vaughan The late Yevgeny Yevtushenko had an unlikely affinity for cowboy poetry. Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the 1995 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Photo: Sue Rosoff. Last Saturday, April 1, outside Mandan, North Dakota, the fifty-year-old Shadd Piehl cooked dinner for his family: lasagna, garlic bread, a simple spinach salad. The wind chimes whispered on his porch, the breeze parting the prairie grass and bare elms beyond the barn. With the table set, Piehl called his wife, Marnie, and their three boys to the kitchen. He raised a toast: “To the great Russian poet and witness to our marriage, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.” As unlikely as it seems, Yevtushenko—the internationally renowned poet, the voice of so many young Soviets crawling out from Stalin’s long shadow, the “angry young man” on the cover of Time in April 1962—cinches their memory of an era. Yevtushenko, who died of cancer Saturday, lived in Oklahoma, where he’d been teaching poetry at the University of Tulsa since 1992. His eulogies trumpet his defense of the Jewish people; they quote from “Babi Yar,” his most recognized poem, composed after his first visit to the unmarked mass grave near Kiev, Ukraine; they boast of the thousands who once flocked to hear him read. But few have mentioned his impact in the world of cowboy poetry, a genre in which Yevtushenko—unlike so many snickering journalists and dismissive academics—appears to have found common ground with Americans. Read More
April 5, 2017 Arts & Culture From The Teeth of the Comb By Osama Alomar Hans Thoma, Mond (detail). SWAMP I turned into a swamp of inactivity, and because of this no one was able to see the gems in my depths. Read More
April 5, 2017 On the Shelf Don’t Lick the Wallpaper, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Bitten By Witch Fever, a new book on poisonous wallpaper. Is the present better than the past? No. Progress is a sham. Suffering is endemic, resources are dwindling, exploitation is the norm. Still, we should all pat ourselves on the back, because there’s no more arsenic in our wallpaper. We figured it out. We fixed it. In Victorian England, on the other hand, people had no clue. They were totally surrounded by bright, poisonous wallpaper, letting it eat away at them, staring at death on every wall and not even knowing it. Like common fools! Kat Eschner explains how it all came to light: “The root of the problem was the color green … After a Swedish chemist named Carl Sheele used copper arsenite to create a bright green, ‘Scheele’s Green’ became the in color, particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and with home decorators catering to everyone from the emerging middle class upwards. Copper arsenite, of course, contains the element arsenic. One prominent doctor named Thomas Orton nursed a family through a mysterious sickness that ultimately killed all four of their children. In desperation, one of the things he started to do was make notes about their home and its continents. He found nothing wrong with the water supply or the home’s cleanliness. The one thing he worried about: the Turners’ bedroom had green wallpaper.” The American experiment has culminated in this: we can binge-watch television about superheroes. Sam Kriss tried out Marvel Studios’ latest, Iron Fist, and he is duly afraid: “Netflix creates its plotlines and pacing by observing the aggregated metadata for all the other programs on its site; it knows when people take toilet breaks in the less interesting sequences, it knows when they get bored and decide to go outside. This thing, Iron Fist, a dopey man with a doughball for a head wandering around and punching people, is what viewers want; for all the negative reviews, it’s Netflix’s most binge-watched show to date. In some sense, it’s the deep ideological truth of our society. Stories about superheroes have, in the last decade or so, become inescapable; they’re our primary cultural substratum, our equivalent of Church dogma or mythic cosmogony. In the same way that the Homeric epics encoded the social and psychological structure of antique Greece, telling us through stories about gods and wars and monsters how the ancients imagined their world, Marvel comic-book narratives encode the word of postmodernity. When the Iron Fist punches a ninja for the fiftieth time, he’s not fighting some fictional ancient order but hammering through the contradictions of capitalism.” Read More
April 4, 2017 Revisited Ruins in Advance By Kyle Chayka Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Kyle Chayka revisits Anselm Kiefer’s Velimir Chlebnikov. Anselm Kiefer, Velimir Chlebnikov, 2004 (detail), thirty paintings: oil, emulsion, acrylic, lead, and mixed media on canvas; eighteen paintings: 75″ x 130″ each; twelve paintings: 75″ x 110″ each. Photo: Arthur Evans, courtesy Hall Art Foundation, © Anselm Kiefer The summer before I went to college, in 2006, I worked as a guard at the Aldrich Museum, a contemporary-art museum an hour from where I grew up in the Connecticut woods. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I’m fairly certain it always will be. For ten dollars an hour—a royal sum for a teenager whose only other gig had been making cider donuts at an apple orchard—I and five or six other guards, some retirees and others fellow students, stationed ourselves in the airy galleries to make sure none of the guests touched or collided with the art on display. Mainly, our responsibility was to have conversations with visitors reassuring them of the validity of the curatorial decisions: Yes, this is art. When there was no one around to question contemporary aesthetics, we sat on foldout stools and read, drew, or knitted. (In this way, I made my way through most of Haruki Murakami’s oeuvre.) That summer, one of the galleries on rotation—we switched locations on the hour, so over the course of a day every guard got a full tour—was a two-story-tall corrugated-steel pavilion built on a cement plinth outside on the museum’s grounds. The pavilion was a work by the German artist Anselm Kiefer, a painter and sculptor known for the gnarled surface of his huge canvases as well as for his gothic sensibility: an atmosphere of fallen historical grandeur pervades his work. Inside the rectangular pavilion’s towering metal doors, the two side walls were hung with thirty paintings arranged in grids, covering every inch. Read More