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
April 26, 2017 First Person Losing By Brian Cullman They questioned some of the scholarship kids first, boys with cheap-cut shirts and shabby jackets—the ones who tied their neckties as if they meant it, not with the shrug of boys who’d been born with a tailor in the next room. This was at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, high on a hill overlooking a factory town where shoes were sold with metal tips, so if you dropped your hammer you wouldn’t break your toes. Next they questioned the rougher kids, the ones who’d give the gym coach the finger while he was watching, ones who laughed in chapel and smirked during grace. Read More
April 26, 2017 Our Correspondents Survivor By Jane Stern A hypochondriac’s guide to rare diseases. I recently made a wrong turn out of the parking lot of the Danbury Fair Mall, where I’d indulged in a bag of Auntie Anne’s pretzel nuggets and a pair of cheap earrings at Claire’s. Bemoaning my love for this soulless crap—and not paying attention to my route—I found myself at the entrance to NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorders. Read More
April 26, 2017 On the Shelf Washingtonian Wiener, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Canova’s nude Washington. Go on, take a peek at my search history. You’ll see a lot of this: “Nude presidents.” “Nude dead presidents.” “George Washington naked.” “Presidential peen.” “Free naked U.S. American founding fathers pixxx.” “Portrait of signing of Declaration of Independence where all signers are nude.” It has been a long road for me. I am not often delighted by what Google brings to me. But now Antonio Canova’s nineteenth-century sculpture of a totally nude George Washington—presidente numero uno, a hundred percent in the raw, not even any powdered wig—is coming to the Frick. It’s a big deal, a time to rejoice, for, as James Barron writes, we are not accustomed to exposed presidential flesh: “The first president had been dead for seventeen years by the time Canova went to work. Canova had done a nude Napoleon as the god Mars about 10 years earlier. But when it came to Washington, clothes made the man—and the statue—because his appearance mattered. ‘John Marshall, his first serious biographer, even entitled the chapter on Washington’s arrival in the world “The Birth of Mr. Washington,” ’ the historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote, ‘suggesting that he was born fully clothed and ready to assume the presidency.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne seemed to echo Marshall’s notion after posing a provocative question: ‘Did anybody ever see Washington naked?’ ‘It is inconceivable,’ Hawthorne wrote. ‘He had no nakedness, but, I imagine, was born with clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.’ ” When Virginia and Leonard Woolf started the Hogarth Press, it was all fun and games, just like running an indie press should be. But then, as Rafia Zakaria writes, Virginia got bored: “Those first afternoons, when Leonard and Virginia sat covered in ink in the drawing room of Hogarth House, learning by trial and error just how hard it was to set type and center it on the page, were charmed ones. The experience was a simulacrum of the creative process: the beloved final product did not always reflect the pains of its production. But the labors of printing always delivered the satisfaction of a real and tangible object … If Leonard’s involvement was steady, Virginia’s was mercurial, waxing and waning through her depressive and creative spells. As early as March 1924, as they got ready to publish her novel Jacob’s Room, she declared in a letter that ‘publishing one’s own books is very nervous work.’ By October 1933, when Hogarth Press turned sixteen, Virginia declared herself tired of the ‘drudgery and sweating’ and the ‘altered travel plans’ that running the publisher required. She demanded that an ‘intelligent youth’ be found to take over its day-to-day operations.” Read More