March 17, 2016 On History The Little Man of Nuremberg By Erik Morse Wonder in the age of Matthias Buchinger. A late sixteenth-century portrait of a disabled man, included in a Wunderkammer at Ambras Castle. Though he had neither arms nor legs and was only twenty-nine inches tall, Matthias Buchinger spent his sixty-five years variously as a magician, a musician, a carver, and an inventor, among other vocations. But his most astounding talents were in micrography—that is, literally, small writing. Since his death in 1740, his renown has been relegated to an obscure niche between print design and outsider art. “Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Inventive Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay,” showing now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rescues him from a seventeenth-century German wunderkammer of conjurers, carneys, witches and “freaks” endemic to early modernity. Accompanying the exhibition is the equally eccentric art-history and antiquarian memoir Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest Living German by Ricky Jay, Whose Peregrinations in Search of the “Little Man of Nuremberg” are herein Revealed, in which Jay, something of a sleight-of-hand artist, reconstructs Buchinger’s exotic life and oeuvre. Read More
March 17, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Security By Sadie Stein Alexey Kuzmich, Old Age, 1986. When I lived in France, I volunteered a couple of times a week at a major expat cultural center. I’d intended just to help out at the soup kitchen and maybe with a little tutoring, but this somehow also turned into working the security desk, too, under the direction of a fiercely proprietary octogenarian Englishwoman, Nancy, who was despised by everyone else, but performed her volunteer tasks with such zeal that removing her seemed out of the question. Read More
March 17, 2016 Look In Bamako By Dan Piepenbring Malick Sidibé, Le Faux Musicien Derriere sa Voiture, 1971/2008, silver gelatin print, 20 7/8″ x 14″. The Malian photographer Malick Sidibé’s latest exhibition opens tonight at Jack Shainman Gallery. Sidibé, who’s seventy-nine or eighty, lives in Bamako, where he’s worked as a photographer since the fifties; he’s known for his vivacious black-and-white studies of the city’s youth culture. “You go to someone’s wedding, someone’s christening,” he told LensCulture in 2008, speaking of the renown he gained as a party photographer: I was lucky enough at that time to be the intellectual young photographer with a small camera who could move around. The early photographers like Seydou Keïta worked with plate cameras and were not able to get out and use a flash. So I was much in demand by the local youth. Everywhere … in town, everywhere! Whenever there was a dance, I was invited … At night, from midnight to four A.M. or six A.M., I went from one party to another. I could go to four different parties. If there were only two, it was like having a rest. But if there were four, you couldn’t miss any. If you were given four invitations, you had to go. You couldn’t miss them. I’d leave one place, I’d take thirty-six shots here, thirty-six shots there, and then thirty-six somewhere else, until the morning. His new show spans the whole of his career; it’s up through April 23. Read More
March 17, 2016 On the Shelf You Think You Know About Puritanism, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from The Witch. Since I began working at the Review, I’ve asked repeatedly for one simple thing that would propel this magazine to new heights: limited-edition designer-made cashmere Paris Review socks. They’re now a reality, and guests at our Spring Revel will walk away with a pair of them. (Maybe they’ll even walk away wearing them.) As Women’s Wear Daily reports, “Editor Lorin Stein has enlisted the talents of Gabriela Hearst and Peter Miles to design signature socks as a parting gift for attendees at the April 5 gala at Cipriani 42nd Street. The fashion designer Hearst and art director Miles, whose portfolio includes work for Céline, took into consideration some of the cover art from the literary journal. The women’s design borrows from Derek Boshier’s art on the spring 1966 issue’s cover, and the men’s version drew from Günter Fruhtrunk’s handiwork on the summer 1969 one. Hearst teamed with the Italian sock specialist Maria La Rosa to produce the women’s socks.” Dan Chiasson looks at Robyn Schiff’s new collection, A Woman of Property, which seems to emerge from the anxious mist of a stress dream: “Schiff’s poems, with their Hitchcock-like distrust of appearances, their alertness to hidden binds and snares, offer something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world. It’s a paranoid vision, often an unsettling one, but a huge variety of phenomena enter the poems. From H1N1 to supermarket carnations and the petrified rictus of a lobster (“like a terrible crack / in a wall something worse is coming through”), these poems are interested in everything, possessing a capaciousness that, paradoxically, requires tight control. If you had a houseful of wild animals, you would need cages. Schiff, like Marianne Moore—a profound and not entirely metabolized antecedent—has, instead, stanzas: rigid, cratelike stanzas, which often employ regular patterns of syllables per line.” If you go to the movies and see The Witch, you may think, Hey, I know a ton about Puritanism now! I’m, like, an expert in Puritanism! Michael Robbins is here to remind you that you’re not: “Twice we see Thomasin’s brother Caleb steal a peek down her shirt and then feel guilty about it, and we’re supposed to infer that religion leads to shame, which leads to repression, which leads to making out with a witch disguised as a grown-up Red Riding Hood … To be blunt, most reviewers appear not to know much about Puritanism … No doubt many Puritans, like many film critics, were self-righteous. But Jonathan Edwards articulated a core theme of Calvinism when he wrote that ‘The deceitfulness of the heart of man appears in no one thing so much, as this of spiritual pride and self righteousness.’ It is one thing to strive to recognize and overcome self-righteousness and fail; it is another to see it only in those to whom you feel superior.” Charlotte Moorman is widely known as “the topless cellist,” because she once played the cello with her top off. But she did other things, too. Two new exhibitions aim to tell us more about her career as an avant-garde performer: “The formidable eleven-person curatorial team at the Block has used the opportunity to refurbish Moorman’s unfortunately limited reputation as Nam June Paik’s topless prop … The exhibition begins by positing Moorman’s version of John Cage’s 26’1.1499″ for a String Player as the centerpiece of her experimental performances … Her elaborately annotated copy of the score is displayed under glass … Explained in handwritten notes, her additions include playing a giant bomb outfitted with strings, smashing lightbulbs with hammers, kicking cowbells, and frying an egg. These actions, combined with the already rigorous timing, ultimately made the piece impossible to complete in the prescribed twenty-six minutes. Cage publically dismissed Moorman’s interpretation as ‘murdering’ his score, but she performed it on the Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas shows anyway.” What if JFK’s most stirring bit of rhetoric—“Ask not what your country” et cetera—was lifted from Kahlil Gibran? The poet, whom the New York Times memorably (and accurately) discussed as a “candy metaphysician,” once wrote a letter to the Lebanese parliament with this little zinger in it: “Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?” Kennedy’s advisor Ted Sorensen is aware of the similarity: “The Khalil Gibran Society telephoned and wrote me asking whether either Kennedy or I had read the piece, even though it had not been translated into English by January 20, 1961. Did either of us read Arabic or any of the Middle Eastern languages in which it had appeared? I was asked. No, we did not.”
March 16, 2016 From the Archive The Unnecessary By Karen Murai Adam Marian Pete, On the Way, 1994. Karen Murai’s poem “The Unnecessary” appeared in our Spring 1990 issue. Read More
March 16, 2016 On History Fashion Regained By Madison Mainwaring Looking for Proust’s muse in Paris. The Comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe. After making a careful study of contemporary fashion plates, Baudelaire came to the conclusion that one couldn’t examine clothes apart from the individual wearing them. “You might as well admire the tattered rags hung up as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomeu,” he wrote in his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics.” In order to “recover the light and movement of life,” clothes needed to be animated by a living body, and it was only on this living body that they were to be understood. One wonders what he would’ve made of the nascent trend of the fashion exhibition, in which the fashions of yesteryear appear on mannequins, those motionless abstractions of the human figure. “La Mode retrouvée,” now at the Musée de la Mode in Paris, and coming in September to New York, uses clothes as a sort of Pompeiian ash in order to sketch the person who once filled them out. In this case, it’s the Comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe (1860–1952), who was by reputation the most fashionable woman of her time. At her salon on the Rue d’Astorg, an integral part of the political and artistic milieux, she arranged for what was thought to be the impossible Russian-Franco alliance, as well as the reception of Fauré, Wagner, Isadora Duncan, and the Ballets Russes in Paris. Historians of the era have argued that no patron did more for music than she. And this at a time when, no matter the fact that she was married into wealth and rank, she had neither rights nor property as her own, as was the case for all women under the civil code of the Third Republic. Read More