October 25, 2016 On the Shelf Workshopping with Flaubert, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Big data doesn’t care what you learned in college. Big data laughs at you and your myopic conception of “the author.” Big data takes an active pleasure in making you go, like, That’s fucking crazy! So big data has determined that Shakespeare probably collaborated with Christopher Marlowe on the three Henry VI plays, and the New Oxford Shakespeare editions are happy to announce it: “For the New Oxford Shakespeare scholars ran tests to determine whether authors like Marlowe could be reliably identified by the ways they used language—like frequent use of certain articles, and certain words commonly occurring in a row, or being close to each other in the text. Once this was determined, researchers applied these patterns back to texts, to see if they suggested an author other than Shakespeare. If results came out positive, further tests were run … Marlowe appears to have written most of ‘Henry VI, Part 1,’ while Shakespeare wrote the largest share of Part 3. Lead authorship on Part 2 is harder to identify.” Before the culture of the workshop emerged, with its blandishments and its “constructive criticism,” there was Flaubert, who really put himself out there: “Flaubert is often described as a writer’s writer; but students of creative writing should be warned that he is not a would-be writer’s writer. [Michel Winock’s new biography] gives a good sense of the unrelenting misery of composition: ‘grinding away at it, digging into it, turning it over and over, rummaging about in it.’ Flaubert was referring here, not to a whole book, but to a single sentence. Over four afternoons and evenings, his friends listened in silence while he recited his Temptation of Saint Anthony, which had taken three years to write, and then told him that it should either be completely rewritten or thrown on the fire. This is perhaps not what writers’ groups call ‘mutual support’, but it was an impressive act of kindness. The final version, published twenty-five years later, was much improved.” Read More
October 24, 2016 Look Pandemic Pentameter By Dan Piepenbring Trenton Doyle Hancock’s exhibition “Pandemic Pentameter” is at James Cohan Gallery in New York through November 27. Hancock grew up in East Texas, in a deeply Christian family. “I’ve developed a perspective over the way that I grew up, the whole Christian background thing,” he told Artpulse in 2012. “I think about what are the good things that I could take from that rigor or that lifestyle and incorporate it into my studio practice. I think there’s still a little bit of residue left over. I don’t want to say guilt, but maybe the fear that’s a deep Southern Baptist, black Baptist thing. It’s definitely not guilt-based, it’s more fear-based. I think there’s something interesting to be said about making a painting that you can fear for yourself for having made it.” Trenton Doyle Hancock, Becoming the Toymaker, Phase 5 of 41, 2016, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 40″ x 30″ x 3″. Read More
October 24, 2016 At Work Submerged and Interior: An Interview with Gregory Crewdson By Sylvie McNamara Gregory Crewdson, Father and Son, 2013, digital pigment print, 37 1/2″ x 50″. All Photos © Gregory Crewdson. Gregory Crewdson is a photographer, but he calls himself a storyteller. He has spoken of his belief that “every artist has one central story to tell,” and that the artist’s work is “to tell and retell that story over and over again,” to deepen and challenge its themes. True to this, Crewdson’s most recent body of work, Cathedral of the Pines, shares the aesthetic that has defined his career—cinematic scenes of domestic life in the Berkshires—but the images have quieted down. While once Crewdson burned down houses or called the police on himself in order to photograph officers, his concerns have shifted lately from the spectacular to the murky and internal. The hallucinatory images for which Crewdson is best known—sod laid on living room carpets, crop circles and house fires, or tight beams of light emerging from a blank sky—evince the magnetism of catastrophe and the titillation of the strange. Those older works defined Crewdson’s signature style of cinematic production values applied to suburban surrealism and made him one of the most recognizable and influential contemporary photographers. To give a sense of his stature, his gallery is Gagosian, he was the subject of a feature-length documentary, and he directs the graduate photography department at Yale. Read More
October 24, 2016 First Person Collector’s Item By Chantal McStay What was the Princess Diana Beanie Baby? In the midnineties, my older sisters and I collected Ty Beanie Babies, as most of our peer group did. When I think of Beanie Babies, I think of the piles. Big piles saturated with every color and texture of fuzz, dotted with shiny black eyes and noses. They had a nice weight to them, too, a little heavier than stuffed animals. The pile became a classic image in the Beanie Baby mythos: the collector buried in Beanies. My sisters kept their collections (numbering several dozen) safely stowed in the pockets of over-the-door shoe organizers with plastic tag protectors and careful inventory lists, while I played with mine, ripping their tags off with abandon and allowing them, despite their Ty-brand prestige, to mingle with my other stuffed animals and dolls. Not that I had any objection to them as a commodity: I enjoyed collecting them, too, lining up at Pink’s or Hallmark—the two local authorized Beanie dealers in my New Jersey town—in anticipation of new releases. I read the trade rag, Mary Beth’s Beanie World. I called my local McDonald’s answering machine to hear which Teeny Beanies they were offering with Happy Meals. I searched in vain for rare, highly sought-after defective Beanies: a Spot with no spot, an albino elephant. Today the Internet, with its relentless nostalgia mill, won’t let us forget how worthless our Beanie Babies have become. “Remember When Everyone Was Going to Re-sell Their Beanie Babies and Become Millionaires?” a piece on E! asked. I can’t help but feel vindicated by articles like these. My sisters were convinced that their Ty collections would be worth a lot of money someday; they had to be protected. But: a toy you don’t play with? It sounded dumb. It sounded dumb because it was dumb, and I somehow got that right—this at a time when I was wrong about many, many things. This at a time when I thought that Titanic was the most culturally important, most pornographic, longest movie ever made. (I had not actually seen Titanic, but I knew from my own careful taping that you could fit six hours of video on a VHS tape, and Titanic took up two tapes, so it had to be, like, twelve hours long.) Still, I can’t escape some weird feeling about Beanie Babies: about the bizarre hysteria they generated and the prescience with which they foresaw the Internet as a vast archive for our personal ephemera and its emotional baggage. Read More
October 24, 2016 On the Shelf Digital Obsolescence Is Such a Drag, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Miltos Manetas, Jesus Swimming, 2001. Image via the New York Times. The history of books bound in human skin is tied, as so many terrifying things are, to the history of medicine. As Megan Rosenbloom writes, doctors in eighteenth-century France had a nasty habit of serving as arms of the state: “Doctors sometimes removed the skins of infamous murderers and used them to bind books about their deeds—a fact well known enough to serve as a kind of deterrent … The increase in the number of patients doctors saw regularly gave them a greater body of clinical experience to draw upon, but it also pulled focus away from individual patients, their stories, and how those stories shaped the clinical encounter. Michel Foucault wrote in The Birth of the Clinic that this structure led to the development of the clinical gaze, where diagnostic science and stresses of the job contributed to doctors viewing patients as disembodied symptoms, diseases, and organs instead of as fellow human beings. The book bound in human skin could serve as an example of that tendency. Patients’ skins became raw material for binding a doctor’s prized books instead of the thin membrane between a human’s internal workings and the outside world—an erasure of individuals with families and inalienable rights.” As a fan of early web art, I browse the Internet exclusively on a 1996 Packard Bell PC running Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator 2.0, thus guaranteeing that I see these works as their artists intended them to be seen. But evolving software and infrastructure is making it harder and harder to preserve the web art of the nineties and aughts—so much so that an ambitious archival project is in order. Frank Rose writes, “In the early days of the web, art was frequently a cause and the internet was an alternate universe in which to pursue it. Two decades later, preserving this work has become a mission. As web browsers and computer operating systems stopped supporting the software tools they were built with, many works have fallen victim to digital obsolescence. Later ones have been victims of arbitrary decisions by proprietary internet platforms—as when YouTube deleted Petra Cortright’s video ‘VVEBCAM’ on the grounds that it violated the site’s community guidelines. Even the drip paintings Jackson Pollock made with house paint have fared better than art made by manipulating electrons.” Read More
October 21, 2016 Events This Sunday: Alexander Kluge in Conversation with Ben Lerner By The Paris Review Alexander Kluge. We hope you’ll join us this Sunday, October 23, for a conversation between Alexander Kluge and Ben Lerner at Goethe-Institut New York. Kluge is a German writer, theorist, and filmmaker; W. G. Sebald called him “that most enlightened of writers,” and Susan Sontag wrote that “more than a few of Kluge’s many books are essential, brilliant achievements.” He’ll discuss his latest book, The Great Hour of Kong (Kongs große Stunde, Suhrkamp) and share a selection of new writings prompted by Lerner’s poetry. (We have it on good authority that these pieces will appear in a forthcoming issue of a certain literary quarterly, maybe even the one whose website you’re currently reading.) Kluge will also share a short film program and some live piano music, including Jacques Offenbach’s Bataclan and Giuseppe Verdi’s Attila. The event begins at 5:30 Sunday evening. See you there!