March 7, 2017 Look Cows, Clouds, and Apple Trees By Dan Piepenbring Lois Dodd’s early paintings (1958–66) are showing at Alexandre Gallery through March 18. Dodd, who is eighty-nine, helped to found New York’s artist-run Tanager Gallery in the fifties, when it was one of a series of downtown spaces redefining how work was shown and sold. She said of her paintings in 2012, “They could be much more descriptive, but I don’t want to do that. In that sense, one always puts the blame on the abstract painters. That’s what I looked at and loved. I don’t want to get too descriptive. You can go so far and stop. I can just feel when to stop.” Lois Dodd, Cows and Clouds, 1961, oil on linen, 33 1/2″ x 39 1/2″. Read More
March 7, 2017 Arts & Culture Your Own Private Party By Larissa Pham How reading Eve Babitz got me through the depths of winter. Eve Babitz. The winter after I finished art school and moved to New York, I started telling people I was thinking of having “a California period.” These conversations happened at parties, mostly, in high-ceilinged apartments in Crown Heights stuffy with heat, shoes melting in a salty pile outside the front door; we’d crowd around someone’s open window, smoking and ashing into the succulents, cold air rushing in as quickly as we could exhale. I envisioned a place far away from all this, far from the snowbanks that turned to dirty gray slush and the gloom that pervaded the city at dusk. I wanted Hollywood; I wanted David Hockney. I wanted pools and pool paintings, sparkles and spangled reflections under that hazy golden California light; I wanted to make abstract canvases covered in pink glitter while next to me some turquoise sky stretched off into an Umberto Eco–esque hyperreal. Read More
March 7, 2017 On the Shelf Coercive Silkscreening, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The cover of the Amache Camp brochure, made by the silkscreen shop. Photo: Amache Preservation Society, via Atlas Obscura Colorado’s Camp Amache was one of many hastily constructed internment camps that opened in the early forties, built by American armed forces to house thousands of Japanese Americans. Its detainees were dragooned into all kinds of labor—including, in an unlikely turn, printmaking and silk-screening. As Cara Giaimo writes, those at the camp became de facto artists, producing posters and pamphlets for the U.S. military—the same military that had sent them to the camps in the first place, and that kept snipers posted at all hours of the day: “In the spring of 1943, Maida Campbell, a Red Cross nurse with an artistic background, was sent to Camp Amache to see whether it would be feasible to open a printing operation there. Campbell set up the shop in a recreation hall and began advertising in the Pioneer for employees. A month into their work, the Pioneer reported that the shop’s 25 artists had printed ‘some 185 large posters, 250 stickers, and 100 cards’ … Over the course of 1943, the shop printed at least 120,000 posters in dozens of designs, depicting everything from signal flags to principles of seamanship. Employees took on the entire process, from design and stenciling through color selection and printing … The pay topped out at 19 dollars per month, about half of what one could expect to receive for similar work outside. Despite Campbell’s evident respect for her employees, she, like other administrators, wrote frequently about how the shop provided ‘vocational training’ for them—never mind the fact that their detainment at the camp was preventing them from pursuing their actual vocations, hobbies, and lives.” Fashion, part 1: a few words on hair and baseball. Clint Frazier, a prospective outfielder for the Yankees, has a set of luscious, curly red locks vivid enough to catch eyes in the nosebleedingest reaches of the ballpark. But will the Yankees and their crypto-fascist grooming standards let this man shine? Beneath this cosmetic dispute, writes Billy Witz, lies a matter of philosophy: “In short, the Yankees do not do big hair (or beards), under a policy set years ago by George Steinbrenner and vigorously policed by his daughter Jennifer. Now there is a guessing game over whether the team will send Frazier to the barber before sending him to the plate. ‘I think people are making my hair bigger than my game,’ Frazier said. ‘I’m here to play baseball.’ He said he was getting so irritated by persistent questions about his locks that he might just get them sheared off … ‘It’s a balancing act,’ said Allen Adamson, the founder of Brand Simple consulting. ‘The Yankees have to balance their respect and embrace of tradition with accepting what’s new. What’s new is, the individuality of players is important in making a sports event engaging and interesting.’ ” Read More
March 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Remembering Paula Fox By Caitlin Love Paula Fox at The Paris Review’s 2013 Spring Revel. In memory of Paula Fox, who died last week at age ninety-three, we’re looking back at a series of essays published on the Daily in 2013, when Fox received The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize for lifetime achievement. First, Tom Bissell has the story of how, as a twenty-four-year-old editorial assistant, he brought Fox’s masterpiece, Desperate Characters, back into print: W. W. Norton, the house that employed me, had encouraged me to come up with “ideas” for the paperback committee, which at the time felt like a huge honor. Correction: it was a huge honor. I had a few ideas, most of which, I was gently informed, stank. But one didn’t. Read More
March 6, 2017 Events Tuesday Night: Nazis on Speed By Dan Piepenbring New York: This Tuesday night (March 7) at NeueHouse, I’m talking to Norman Ohler about his new book Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, which reveals how drugs pervaded Nazi society from the front lines of the World War II all the way to the Führerbunker. Kirkus calls the book “a vivid, highly readable account of drug use run amok.” Our talk begins at 7 P.M.; entry is free, but space is limited, so please RSVP by e-mailing [email protected]. See you there. Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review.
March 6, 2017 Revisited Vanishing Point By Cara Hoffman Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Cara Hoffman revisits Giorgio de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914, oil on canvas. I was fourteen when I first saw the evening sun setting an empty piazza aglow. This was in Vicenza, Italy. My older brother, who was stationed there during the Cold War, was getting married to an Italian woman who worked as a nurse, and my family had gone over to attend the wedding. The image is with me still: in a penumbra of orange, the clock tower cast a long shadow in the street as the high, darkened arches of the Basilica Palladiana breathed the cool power of a stone’s history into the fading light of the square. The beauty of it was utterly foreign to me. I had lived, up to that point, in a prison town full of strip malls near a narrow highway in a Sears kit house; the blunt suburban ugliness of the place was further darkened by Appalachian poverty. And the only refreshing things my eyes knew were the river by my backyard and the wooded trails that flanked it. Vicenza was the first landscape I recognized as human. Read More