February 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Like Art, Like Death, Like … By The Paris Review I’ve been losing myself on the train this week in Gabrielle Bell’s new comic, Everything Is Flammable. It doesn’t come out until April, so I’m jumping the gun here, but once I read it I couldn’t not write about it—it’s that good. Bell writes and draws stories with deep humanity, and, impressively, that humanity—painful, awkward, and uncertain—is her own. This new book spans a year and follows Bell as she travels to and from her mother’s home in rural Northern California, navigating the guilt she feels as an absent daughter and the anxiety she feels in trying to care for her independent mother. Bell’s self-awareness and observations never result in tidy epiphanies; the book’s strips open out into one another, accumulating without resolution. She is also always funny, and her distinct blocky hatching style gives warmth to every panel. The ineffable quality is that she makes all this look easy. —Nicole Rudick Having spent hours puzzling over dumb subway ads (worst recent offender: HelloFresh, whose come-hither copy begs, LET’S MAKE SWEET, SWEET POTATOES TOGETHER) I’m having a ball with Glenn O’Brien’s Like Art—a collection of his columns on advertising, which ran in Artforum from 1985 to 1990. As the title suggests, O’Brien treats ads as art objects, which is to say he understands that most of them are meaningless, even if their effects on us aren’t. Though he offers withering pronouncements (“You can’t run a jingle over emaciated faces and bloated bellies,” he says of an AT&T ad about using your long-distance plan to call Ethiopia) and even occasional praise, really his columns amount to a kind of advertisee’s diary, recording the idle chatter that passes through us as we process hundreds, maybe thousands of ads every week. Here he is on cigarettes: “In London recently there were billions of billboards everywhere with the image of scissors cut out of purple fabric. Near one corner was the British version of The Warning: ‘Cigarettes can seriously damage your health.’ But I couldn’t figure out if this was a cigarette ad or an antismoking ad. It was the most abstract ad I’d ever seen. I wanted to stop people on the street and ask them what it meant, but I didn’t. I still don’t know.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
February 10, 2017 Revisited Alexander Is Lowered into the Sea By Kanishk Tharoor Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Kanishk Tharoor remembers an Islamic miniature painting. Attributed to Mukunda, Alexander Is Lowered into the Sea (detail), 1597–98, ink, watercolor, gold on paper, gold on dyed paper. A turbaned king sits in what looks like a large jar as it is dropped into the sea. His attendants crowd about him in boats, straining at the tethers, peering down at the churning water, while an astrologer holds an astrolabe up to the sky. Some of these figures are styled as Europeans with their black hats, ruffed collars, and clean-shaven faces. Others resemble Muslim sages. A world of cities and cowherds recedes in the background. The king wears a stiff expression, at once stoic and wary as he sinks below the waters. This single image contains enormous geographic and cultural scope. Here is a miniature painting composed in the late sixteenth century by a Hindu artist in India for a Turkic Muslim ruler with strong ties to Central Asia. The impassive king going for a deep dive is Alexander the Great, a Macedonian warlord recast through the prism of Persian poetry. He is surrounded by many courtiers dressed in the clothes of Renaissance Europe, set against the writhing, rocky landscape of Chinese art. In our era of globalization, it’s easy to forget that the pluralism we cosmopolitans take for granted isn’t just a modern confection but has been with us for a long time. Read More
February 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Our Gilded Coonskin By Mike Pepi To fight Trump, look to the vulgar style that’s long ruled American art. George Bellows, Men of the Docks, 1912, oil on canvas, 45″ x 63.5″. In 2014, the National Gallery in London acquired their first American picture, George Bellows’s Men of the Docks (1912), in which hulking workers loiter in the dead of winter. White horses join the dockworkers just as the scene cracks with the faintest suggestion of activity. The ship and the city are an imposing frame for an otherwise bleak, bathetic subject. The work, when it comes, will be toil. But it’s better than the idle cold. This little drama never ends, really. Bellows leaves the men trapped somewhere between hope and despondence. It’s a vulgar scene. If the Ohio-born Bellows walked through the National Gallery today, he might recoil at the gauntlet of gentility that lay before him. The Gallery doesn’t have an American wing. Instead, Men of the Docks hangs chronologically alongside the Gallery’s Impressionist and Modern masterpieces, standing out like a sore thumb alongside the l’art pour l’art of Cézanne and Van Gogh. It’s an even ruder departure from the National Gallery’s standard fare, where scarcely a room passes without a meditation on Ovid, a Madonna and Child, or a court-commissioned history painting. To an American of a certain persuasion, this all seems like a powder keg of Whig history. Bellows’s is the first and only painting whose figures appear unfazed by that history’s watchful eye. Read More
February 10, 2017 On the Shelf The True Face of Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Look away, look away! Listen, before I break the bad news, I want to say something: we all love hunks. No one is saying that hunks are bad, or that you don’t deserve a hunk in your life, let alone your fantasies. It’s just … are you sitting down? … Mr. Darcy was probably not a hunk, if we’re being honest. I know, I know, you’ve been turning the pages of Pride and Prejudice imagining Colin Firth for years now—we all have—that guy’s cut from fucking marble. But two professors have generated “the first historically accurate portrait” of Mr. Darcy and—think about it—why would he be a hunk? He was a gentleman, not a laborer! Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura writes, “The ‘real’ Mr. Darcy would have been pale and pointy-chinned, and would have had a long nose on an oval, beardless face. His hair, strangely, would have been white. And he would have been slightly undernourished, with sloping shoulders—‘more ballet dancer than beefcake,’ according to one of the authors … A real-life Mr. Darcy in that era would have been a ‘far cry from muscular modern-day television representations’ portrayed by actors such as Mr. Firth, Elliot Cowan and Matthew Macfadyen, the study concluded.” Alexander Nazaryan stopped by our office to talk about literature in the age of Trump, and to go spelunking in our back issues: “Diving into the digital archive, as I did, is a bracing reminder of the artist’s duty in times of national crisis—and there were very few times in the Review’s first two decades when the nation wasn’t in crisis … Thus you have William Styron publishing an excerpt from his hotly debated The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel of racial violence for a nation fighting over race anew; Edward Hoagland’s short story “The Witness” (1967), written from the perspective of a young man in New York ‘full of minority sympathy’; the poet Ted Berrigan, writing in 1968, in the bleakest days of Vietnam: ‘The War goes on & / war is Shit’; David Lehman admitting in 1995 that he’d never liked the towers of the World Trade Center, but after they were bombed in 1993, he suddenly came to appreciate “the way the tops / of the towers dissolve into white skies / in the east when you cross the Hudson”; the violent silhouettes of slavery life by artist Kara Walker, published in the Review in 1999, seven years before her career-making solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.” Read More
February 9, 2017 Look Portraits and Perennials By Dan Piepenbring “Portraits & Perennials,” an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Robert Kushner, opens tonight at DC Moore Gallery, where it’s on display through March 18. In an essay accompanying the exhibition catalog, “Do REAL Men Paint Flowers?”, Kushner writes, “So, are geometry and botany at peace? In dialogue? At each other’s throats? I would like to think that when I am done after working on it for weeks and sometimes months, there is an interesting and intentionally confusing juxtaposition between pure abstraction and linear form—that they each balance one another and create their own tightrope act.” Robert Kushner, Taro Leaves, 2016, acrylic, gold leaf, and collage on paper, 49″ x 33 1/2″. Read More
February 9, 2017 Arts & Culture Parting Shot By Angela Chen “Famous last words” and Japanese death poems offer two strikingly different approaches to mortality. Edvard Munch, By The Deathbed (Fever) I, 1915. I was born in the middle of March in a small town in China. My parents didn’t give me a name; they simply never got around to choosing one. On April 7, I nearly died after choking—and they saddled me with that date as a moniker, a sort of inescapable memento mori. When I came to the United States, at age five, my mother told me I was to be named Angela, after a coworker of hers. Was this coworker particularly kind or smart or pretty? I asked. By all accounts, no. It seemed to be an entirely arbitrary decision. Fittingly, I’ve long been fascinated by the traditions surrounding the words that bookend a life. There’s a split, I’ve found, between the East and the West: the latter favors spontaneous last words that serve as a final confirmation of your personal brand, whereas the East has a custom of premeditated death poems, jisei, that offer a rare chance to break with convention. These differing traditions offer a glimpse into the clash of individualism versus collectivism, spontaneity versus control—forces I’ve tried to balance in my own life, living between Asian and American culture. Read More