February 2, 2017 On the Shelf Puppets Are Doing Just Fine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Look at ’em go! One fun thing you can do with art is: use it to tell people what assholes they are. This is easy to try, but hard to master. Shahak Shapira, an Israeli-German writer, has the knack for it; his “YOLOCAUST” project publically shames anyone who’s ignorant enough to take a selfie at the Holocaust memorial. Alicia Eler writes, “He simply manipulated the original selfies at the memorial to include actual photos of Nazi crimes, which range from piles of dead bodies to pictures of starving people jailed in concentration camp bunks. The seamless Photoshopping job was what really made this project click. Upon visiting Yolocaust.de, which launched mid-January, you’d find various people’s selfies at the Holocaust memorial. However, if you moved your mouse over them, the once-joyful images transformed into the Photoshopped ones of Nazi death camps. Within one week of launching, the page was visited by 2.5 million people, and all twelve people Shapira featured in the project had taken their photos off of social media and also apologized … The artist invited the people in the pictures to contact him asking that he take their pictures down, simply by e-mailing [email protected].” So many once-thriving art forms are headed for obscurity; so many robust traditions have been lost to the sands of time. But not puppetry. Puppetry is doing great. Laura Collins-Hughes writes, “It’s not so much that puppetry is having an evanescent moment as that it has reached critical mass and settled in, cherished by grown-up audiences raised on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show who have had their hunger stoked by landmark puppet productions on Broadway … Cheryl Henson—a daughter of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson, and the president of the Jim Henson Foundation, a major force in contemporary puppet theater—said that American puppeteers had caught up to the European standard of the craft.” (Or the Russian standard, if we’re talking about Putin the puppeteer—am I right? Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Hold your applause.) Read More
February 1, 2017 In Memoriam One Fundred Dollars By Dan Piepenbring The artist J. S. G. Boggs died last week at sixty-two. As the New York Times’s obit headline put it, HE MADE MONEY. LITERALLY. Boggs, who argued that every banknote was a work of art, drew counterfeit bills with an intricate attention to detail. His craftsmanship was only somewhat undermined by the fact that his fakes were one-sided, and that they contained jokes like ONE FUNDRED DOLLARS or DO YOU HEAR ANYTHING BEING SAID HERE, OR AM I EMPTY NOW? IS ANYBODY HOME? HELLO? For many artists, mere imitation would be enough—as I write this, for instance, Mike Bouchet has an exhibition at Marlborough Gallery that features nothing but the smell of money—but Boggs was determined to turn theory into praxis. He liked to spend his fakes out in the world, to watch people squirm when he pressed them to accept his “Boggs bills” as “real” money. The art wasn’t in the drawing; it was in unlocking the door to a shadow dimension, one where all of us are made to feel the chilly emptiness at the center of the almighty dollar. Read More
February 1, 2017 Our Correspondents Whitman, Stevens, & Co. By Anthony Madrid I haven’t checked, but I’m confident someone before me will have remarked on the similarity between the beginnings of Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.” Exhibit A: Read More
February 1, 2017 Notes from a Biographer The Making of a Comics Biography, Part 3 By Joe Ollmann Read More
February 1, 2017 On the Shelf Is It Luck? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Albert Guillaume, Au Bac, 1898. Americans are a lottery-playing people, a day-trading people, a people who in the summer of 2013 sent a song called “Get Lucky” soaring to the top of the charts. And yet we’re famously predisposed to underestimate the role of luck in our lives—as anyone who recalls Obama’s “you didn’t build that” brouhaha will know. We walk around in a dumb haze of self-determinism. In a new interview, the economist Robert H. Frank offers a useful corrective to those who would argue that success is merely the result of hard work: “I prefer just to look at how people naturally construct their life histories. We assemble narratives about ourselves routinely and the elements that go into those are the things that we can retrieve most comfortably from memory … When you’re riding a bike into a headwind you’re keenly aware of that. Every 100 yards you travel, you wish that wind would go away. You’re battling against it, it’s at the front of your mind. Then the course changes direction; you’ve got the wind at your back. What a great feeling that is for about twenty seconds, and then it’s completely out of your mind. You’re not even aware that the wind is at your back. You’re not having to battle any enemies in that sense and so it’s out of your mind. So when you think back to your career, what do you remember? You remember the headwinds you faced. You don’t remember all the tailwinds that were pushing you along. So there’s just these natural asymmetries that lead people to either ignore the role of luck entirely or overstate it to a considerable degree.” In a new book, the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner argues that Hieronymus Bosch was really painting from life—it’s just that “everyday life was bound inextricably to what seems its polar opposite: an art of the bizarre, the monstrous, the uncanny.” Reviewing Koerner’s argument, Alexandra Harris writes: “To make us feel the overwhelming fertility of the world, holding us on the vertiginous brink of mesmerized attraction and repulsion, Bosch has to paint the ‘enemy territory’ that is everyday life … Koerner leads us carefully towards The Garden of Earthly Delights, intent both on preparing us for the horror and on deepening our experience of it. In their closed state, the grisaille shutters bear the translucent sphere of a half-made universe, quiet and yet brewing, heavy with giant husks and seedpods, ‘at once fecund and already decaying.’ The doors of the world part to reveal what Koerner calls ‘psychology in painted form.’ There in the middle is the eye of the owl, one of Bosch’s figures for himself, an emblem of the devil, yet all-seeing, like the eye of God.” Read More
January 31, 2017 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Ishmael Reed and J. H. Prynne By The Paris Review Ishmael Reed, 2015. The two Writers at Work interviews from our Fall 2016 issue are now online, in full, free to read for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Poetry No. 100, Ishmael Reed is interviewed by Chris Jackson; Reed discusses growing up in Buffalo, the search for “new mythologies” that led him to write Mumbo Jumbo, and his concerns for young writers of color: Combative writing has always been our tradition, even when we try to avoid it. I recently saw an article in the New York Times about Cave Canem, the group of black poets, and one of them described the trend in black literature as a “shift out of the ‘I’m a black man in America and it’s hard’ mode into the idea of ‘you are who you are, so that’s always going to be part of the poem.’ ” As if the tradition of writing about black suffering—I’ve been ’buked and scorned and all that—was dead. But why can’t you write about the hardships that black men and women face in everyday life? It was certainly hard for Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland. Read More