November 8, 2016 At Work Before Pictures: An Interview with Douglas Crimp By Sarah Cowan Douglas Crimp at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, c. 1970. Photographer unknown. In September, the art historian Douglas Crimp was speaking about his new book, Before Pictures, at the Whitney Museum when the slide projection was turned off and the screen rose, revealing the sunlight bobbing on the Hudson River and a view of Pier 52. It was there that, forty years prior, Gordon Matta-Clark had carved his monumental and illicit work Day’s End in an abandoned warehouse and Crimp had gone cruising for sex. The piers were known to be dangerous, Crimp writes, but at the time he had no fear of them, except the anxiety that their lure was distracting him from his work. Now the seventy-two-year-old was backlit against a thoroughfare of joggers and Citi Bike riders along Eleventh Avenue. The “vast and hauntingly beautiful” structures he describes had long ago been flattened into a parking lot for the Department of Sanitation. Read More
November 8, 2016 On the Shelf Teens Are Forever, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Samara Scott, Lonely Planet II, Frieze London, 2015, stainless steel, water, mixed media. Image via Sunday Painter/Frieze This year’s Nobel and Booker winners have destabilized the literary prize scene—it was only a matter of time until the aftershocks spread to other awards. Op-Ed writers have helped it along: there’s never been a better time to stroke your chin and ruminate pseudo-controversially about the purpose of prizes. How should a literary award be? What is “prestige”? Shouldn’t I be voting right now instead of asking rhetorical questions? Anyway, now Tom LeClair has the National Book Award in his crosshairs: “Some months ago … I identified a trend I called ‘commercialit,’ craft fiction, like craft beer, for popular consumption produced by young M.F.A.-holding novelists whom one might expect to be artists rather than artisans. In attempting to reach what the National Book Foundation calls ‘new communities’ of book buyers and to please its corporate sponsors, the National Book Award for Fiction—once more prestigious than the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award—has turned toward commercialit and artisanal creations. In my judgment, this year only two books of ten have any reasonable claim on the award.” Today in good reasons not to do things: Tim Parks thought he might set out to retranslate The Decameron. Then he read the original English translation and thought, why bother? “Are new translations always better, or always feasible, even? … I suspect what it suggests is the importance of finding the right translator for the first translation of a literary work, one who has a genuine affinity with the style of the original, and, above all, can root it into our own literature in a moment when it makes sense, when the culture can really receive it in its own idiom. In Italy, with the lapse of copyright on Faulkner’s writing, there have been a number of new Faulkner translations that are doubtless more semantically accurate than those made back in the Forties and Fifties. And yet those old translations—made when a modernist work was still a matter of excitement, rather than an aesthetic museum piece—seem more aware of the energy and spirit of the original and certainly a better read than more recent, academic efforts.” Read More
November 7, 2016 Look It Was Just This Moment By Dan Piepenbring Katharina Wulff’s exhibition “It Was Just This Moment” is at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York through December 23. Her latest large-scale paintings depict her community in Marrakech, portraying crowded gyms and a hotel lobby. “The free and somewhat anarchistic way people interact here is one of the many things I find really interesting about Morocco,” she said in 2012. “In Europe there’s practically no real communication anymore.” Katharina Wulff, Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 46 3/4″ x 37 5/8″ Read More
November 7, 2016 Arts & Culture Have You Read Schlump Yet? By Volker Weidermann Fritz Fuhrken, Granate trifft englischen Panzer, Somme Schlacht, 1918. In 1928, Hans Herbert Grimm published his first and only novel, Schlump. It is the latest offering from the NYRB Classics Book Club. Schlump describes the violence, chaos, and absurdity of World War I, experienced firsthand by its author. The book was critical of the German government and military and presents graphic depictions of the high cost of human sacrifice in war; Grimm published it anonymously. The novel’s witness is Emil Schultz, nicknamed Schlump, a wandering tailor who, despite experiencing the horrors of battle up close, remains an optimist, eager to get back to the job of living: “he was determined to make something of his life, because surely there would be peace again now, soon, peace! Peace and decency—how lovely life would be! What a golden era was beginning now!” Schlump’s hopefulness would have been short-lived: Five years after the book’s publication, the Nazi party came to power in Germany. A decade after its publication, Germany was again at war, and Grimm was sent to the Western Front. A pale wall in the living room of a gray house with a pointed roof in the thousand-year-old Thuringian town of Altenburg. The sun is shining through the large windows. Against one wall is a blue sofa, at the other end of the room a grand piano, while a colourful Bauhaus carpet adorns the floor. Cups and small porcelain plates sit on a round coffee table. A closer look at the pale wall reveals a fine crack in the plaster. Here, on this wall, in this house, a strange German fairy tale began. Or is this where it ended? The house, with its large fir trees in the garden and white bench beside the front door, was built at the beginning of the 1930s by doctor of philosophy and schoolmaster Hans Herbert Grimm. Some of the money to finance the house came from a book he’d written, although nobody here in Altenburg nor anyone anywhere else was to know he was its author. Schlump—Tales and adventures from the life of the anonymous soldier Emil Schulz, known as ‘Schlump’. Narrated by himself: the book of his life. Grimm was worried that he wouldn’t be able to go on living normally if it became known that he’d written the novel. It would spell the end of his career as a teacher, and of his peaceful existence in his beloved Altenburg, if word got out that he was the author of a book that described the German soldiers of the Great War as less than heroic, German military strategy as misguided, senseless and foolish, the Kaiser as a coward, and the entire war as a cruel, bad joke. Read More
November 7, 2016 On Film How to Swim By Adam Shatz The Birth of a Nation, Moonlight, and the black protest tradition. A still from Moonlight Last week, I took a train to Harlem to see The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s retelling of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Released in October, the film had already disappeared from most theatres, including my local cinema in Brooklyn. At the matinee at the Magic Johnson 9 cinema on Frederick Douglas Boulevard, there were a total of three people, and I was there with a friend. The Birth of a Nation was supposed to be the film of the year. Fox Searchlight acquired the world rights for the film for $17.5 million dollars, a record-breaking deal for the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January. Nate Parker, who produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film, instantly became a media darling, and the Academy nomination for best picture seemed all but assured. After the #OscarsSoWhite boycott of the Academy Awards, here was a FilmSoBlack, made by a black director, in which heroic slave rebels slaughter their white masters. The film seemed to speak to the insurrectionary spirit of contemporary black America while also offering a belated corrective to D. W. Griffith’s eponymous ode to the Confederacy, released almost exactly a century earlier. Read More
November 7, 2016 On the Shelf When Bulletin Boards Were Cool, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A golden-age BBS. Instagrammers: think before you geotag. Are you really just “announcing your location” to your “e-pals” for “fun”? No. You’re bragging. Worse, you’re setting into motion a creaky, elaborate machine that despoils everything in its path, loosing hordes of tourists into the wild. It’s probably, if we’re being honest, just another form of colonialism. Molly McHugh writes, “Social media and Instagram did not invent discovery of beautiful outdoor spaces — but they have become a curator-friendly guide to collecting them … Manifest Destiny is defined by the nation’s westward territorial expansion, but it’s also a philosophy about the need to conquer, to discover. What happens when social media increases the rate of outdoor discovery? How long until every corner of the planet has been Instagrammed and geotagged?” Time was, you could stay home and explore the world from your living room—no geotagging required. Before the Internet came around and made modems boring, there were Bulletin Board Systems, an early form of PC-to-PC communication with all the thrill and adventure of ham radio. Benj Edwards writes, “BBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ’90s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code … To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. BBS hosts had converted a PC—often their only PC—into a digital playground for strangers’ amusement.” Read More