March 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Paradise, Polysemy, Porridge By The Paris Review Marianna Rothen, Fear of Fear from the series “Shadows in Paradise”, 2016, archival pigment print, diptych, 17″ x 17″ each. If Barbara Loden directed a film using Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, it would begin to approximate the photographs in Marianna Rothen’s recent “Shadows in Paradise” series, on view at Steven Kasher Gallery. The images elicit a sixties noir and depict women in various guises in isolated scenes of distress, eroticism, and introspection. The series’s title takes its name from Remarque’s 1971 novel; the book appears in one of the photographs, laid open across the lap of a distracted reader. Rothen’s use of it may reference the woman’s (or, more generally, women’s) feeling of a simultaneous absence and doubling in her life: that her identity and her body—physically and psychologically—are always circumscribed by social and cultural forces, so that she becomes two people, neither one of whom, perhaps, she recognizes. In one of the works, in which two photographs are set side by side, the image on the left shows a woman gazing out a window at an overturned chair, a dress, shoes, and a wig on the lawn; the image on the right shows the same scene, but the woman at the window now inhabits the dress and wig and lies prone on the ground, as though dead. Rothen has said that her photographs reference Persona, Three Women, and Mulholland Drive, and too often she wears those influences on her sleeve, but, to me, these are images that couldn’t have been made by a man. Rothen shows an appreciation for the subtle variations of women’s predicament that can only come from having known it herself. —Nicole Rudick I don’t know whether it’s my favorite movie, but I do know Mulholland Drive is the only film I’ve ever seen twice in two days—as soon as I left the theater, I wanted to go back in. And I don’t know whether it’s my favorite moment in the movie, but I do know that when the mysterious woman in the Teatro Silencio opens her mouth and begins to sing in Spanish, and the song turns out to be “Crying,” and then she proceeds to sing the song in its entirety, I have never felt more satisfied, or more uncannily understood, by a work of art. And now, thanks to Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch, edited by J. C. Gabel and Jessica Hundley, I know that Lynch has called this his favorite moment in all his films. Others may prefer the Woman in the Radiator from Eraserhead, or Dean Stockwell lip-syncing “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet, or the “Locomotion” scene in Inland Empire—as this lavishly illustrated compendium shows, nearly every film or show Lynch has made uses music to deep and mysterious effect. —Lorin Stein Read More
March 10, 2017 First Person Warp and Woof By David Ramsey Listening to Chances with Wolves’s lonesome, dusty mixtapes during a year of transition, loss, and decline. Christopher Colville, Coyote #6, 2016, from the series “Beyond Reckoning.” Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York. I first listened to my favorite radio program, Chances with Wolves, in the summer of 2015, while cleaning out my parents’ longtime home. The premise, more or less, is that a pair of DJs play strange old records and periodically mix in wolf-howl noises, sound clips, and echo effects. All of their two-hour episodes—now more than 350—are streamable, so I had hundreds of hours of material for the hundreds of hours of labor in the task at hand. Sonic distractions in difficult times always leave an imprint. It was a hard year. My father has Parkinson’s and my mother has multiple sclerosis; my wife, Grace, and I had moved to Nashville to help out. There are good days and bad days, but the prognosis is uncompromising in its bleak narrative: over time, things will get worse. The arc of one’s own mortal universe bends toward decline. If asked how he’s doing, my dad likes to respond, “Better than I’ll be doing the next time you see me.” Read More
March 10, 2017 On the Shelf Ride Your Sky Horse, Peasant, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Fantasy, 1925. Image via New York Review of Books. I’ve written in this space before about my affection for Billy Joel. I think he has catchy tunes. But in the interest of fairness, it must be said: some people think that Billy Joel is an agent of Lucifer, his baritone a cancer metastasizing across radios worldwide to poison all that is gay and true in popular song. Liel Leibovitz is in the latter camp, and that’s her right. Joel, she says, “is so nefarious precisely because [he] was given great gifts—his songs, as Bruce Springsteen correctly noted, are masterworks of musical construction—and yet chose to squander them in the service of nothing but his own lust, vanity, and insecurity. You can tell just by looking at him: While Dylan’s face is still a mask protecting him from having to deal with emotions, and Young’s face is a topographical map of misfortune, Billy Joel, bald and glistening, looks like a big, smooth stone, as if the years and the sorrows, like so much water, simply polished its surface but failed to penetrate its core.” An exhibition at the Royal Academy pays tribute to a famous 1932 Soviet art show, “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic”—the last gasp of the avant-garde before the state tightened its grip and forced its artists to churn out only propaganda. Jenny Uglow writes of the new show, “This is a big, dynamic, disturbing exhibition, a blaze of artistic hope undermined by suffering, death, and despair. It is all about power and its perils … At first painters, composers, and poets thrilled to the Revolution, which seemed to offer untold freedoms, a chance to use bold new forms—Cubism, abstraction, street art, film, jazz, satire, fantasy—and to share in the making of a new nation. The mystical Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, and the Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Lyubov Popova, responded with equal euphoric intensity … Yet there is a sense of terror, as well as hope, in these blazing, color-filled canvases. As cosmic spheres hurtle forward in spear-like shards of light in Konstantin Yuon’s apocalyptic New Planet (1921), the dwarfed crowds seem to cower as much as to rejoice … Even the distinctive figurative paintings of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin … feel full of a yearning nostalgia. In his huge canvas, Fantasy (1925) the peasant riding the leaping red horse of revolution does not look forward, but back, to a vanished world.” Read More
March 9, 2017 Arts & Culture At the New York Antiquarian Book Fair By Sarah Funke Butler A swatch of midcentury wallpaper inspired by Romeo and Juliet, available at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair (Booth E17: Honey and Wax, New York; $250). The Park Avenue Armory is a vast preserve of space and air on a cramped island. I can imagine no better place for the Fifty-Seventh New York Antiquarian Book Fair of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB). Open tonight and through the weekend, it boasts more than two hundred dealers, tens of thousands of items, and combined hundreds of years of experience and scholarship. More important, it offers oxygen to a reading public choking on alternative facts—among the most insidious of which, often repeated in print, is that print is dead. This year’s fair illuminates a shift toward literary properties that live and breathe—manuscripts, letters, and original material, much of it defined by context. This is the stuff through which authors speak to us as they did to their publics and to one another; today their words sting in much the same way and in many of the same places. Imagine rare-book dealers as hunter-gatherers of primary source material, heading out with spears and sacks, returning with troves that speak to our present political moment as much as they do to the past. Book collecting has grown from a traditional quest for bibliographic completeness—such that one collection could be more or less the same as another—into a hybrid of subjective, curated material contributing to larger questions: What was happening in the life Sylvia Plath while she wrote the Ariel poems? Why did Hemingway answer a call to social justice when he had seemingly sold out to Esquire? How real is Moby-Dick? When Duke Ellington wrote Black, Brown, and Beige, was he making a patriotic statement? Below, some highlights from the fair. Read More
March 9, 2017 Our Correspondents Dog’s Dinner By Jane Stern John Charles Dollman, Table d’Hote at a Dogs’ Home, 1879. I eat dinner around six, and so do my dogs. I’d prefer to eat a bit later, but Cecil, my French bulldog, and Ivy, my shelter mutt, have invisible dinner bells installed in their brains, and at six the pacing and meaningful glances start. When I was married, I made multicourse dinners and ate at the table. Alone, I make what’s easy, and I often eat in front of the TV. I’ve noticed that Cecil and Ivy seem much more excited about dinner than I do. I began to see why when, a few weeks ago, I jotted down what they ate and what I ate: Friday Me: frozen Stouffer’s Welsh rarebit on toast Dogs: Cesar Chicken and Cheddar Cheese Soufflé Saturday Me: two slices of leftover pepperoni pizza Dogs: Chef’s Choice Bistro Home-style Meatballs and Pasta with Real Beef in Tomato Sauce Sunday Me: a hamburger and a baked potato Dogs: Blue Wilderness Northwest Skillet with Salmon and Vegetables Monday Me: An apple and some Brie with crackers Dogs: Holistic Brand Grilled New York Strip Steak with Redskin Potatoes and Summer Vegetables in Sauce Read More
March 9, 2017 On the Shelf Pointillism: The Prequel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from a Seurat painting. Has this ever happened to you: you invent a whole new kind of painting, and you’re feeling really proud of yourself and super accomplished, and then you discover that some prehistoric people actually beat you to it by thirty-eight thousand years? Okay, well, Georges Seurat is dead, but he may be exasperated in the afterlife: scientists at Abri Cellier, a cave site in the Vézère Valley of France, have discovered early evidence of Pointillism there, evidence that far predates Seurat, of course. As JoAnna Klein writes, “They found sixteen limestone tablets left behind by a previous excavation. Images of what appear to be animals, including a woolly mammoth, were formed by a series of punctured dots and, in some cases, carved connecting lines. Combined with previous images from nearby caves in France and Spain, the tablets suggest an early form of pointillism, and a very early point on art history’s timeline. ‘Imagine the first time a human convinced someone else that a line, or a group of lines is an animal,’ said Randall White, an anthropologist at New York University who led the excavation … It is impossible to say that this was a magical moment when humans invented art. But in these tablets, he thinks he and his team may have gotten close.” In which Alice Spawls recounts a great anecdote about Cy Twombly and paper: “The photographer Sally Mann tells a story about being at a dinner party with Cy Twombly—the two were friends from their hometown of Lexington, Virginia. ‘He was writing directions for somebody—how to get to the antique mall or something—and he wrote them and the guy said, “Oh yes, I know where that is,” and they left them on the table, and I swear to god—like Wagnerian harpies out of the rafters these people came swooping down on this little scrap of paper!’ The rapacious guests might have done the same for any famous artist (despite early obscurity, by the end of his life Twombly was being called ‘the most important living artist’) but the idea of a Twombly napkin has a sort of genius to it: so many of his surfaces, painted white or bare material, are repositories of scribbles, dribbles and smears, scrawled with lists and doodles and diagrams, written on then crossed out or rubbed out leaving only messy traces. After spending some time in front of Twombly’s work, you begin to look at your own bits and pieces differently. Post-it notes appear enigmatic, rarefied; full of teasing suggestiveness.” Read More