January 13, 2016 Arts & Culture Rivers, First Draft By Caille Millner Lorraine O’Grady’s living Künstlerroman. “Rivers, First Draft”: the Debauchees intersect the woman in red and the rape begins, 1982 Digital C-print from Kodachrome 35mm slide. Photo via Alexander Gray Associates In 1982, the artist Lorraine O’Grady staged her first major performance piece in Central Park, “Rivers, First Draft.” In the park’s bucolic Loch section, the audience watched a black woman in a red dress walk down the ravine. Red is a sign for wanton women, and this one was in the company of wild-eyed dancers, barely clothed—all of them white. She was shy, lingering behind the dancers as they shimmied and shook down the hill. When she caught up and tried to engage them, they spurned her. So the woman in red wandered over to a door. Several black male artists were gathered behind it. She knocked, and they, too, turned her away. While she hesitated, hoping to change their minds, the dancers returned and attacked her with Dionysian energy. Read More
January 13, 2016 Contests Win a Free Copy of Pal Joey By Dan Piepenbring Sing it, pal. A few months ago, we published Thomas Mallon’s introduction to John O’Hara’s Pal Joey, which turns seventy-five this year. “I sense that O’Hara’s moment for a really breakout revival,” Mallon writes, “may at last be upon us”: Joey’s is an American voice from the second act of the American century, a time when the country’s wisecracks and slang, thanks to movies and even to books, wrapped themselves around the thoughts and vocal cords of half the world. O’Hara had the upwardly mobile luck to be in possession of the best ear anybody had for catching and transmitting the national lingo. The new Penguin Classics edition is out this week, and we’re celebrating by giving three copies away. Anyone who retweets the message below is eligible to win; we’ll select three names at random. Retweet for your chance to win a free copy of John O’Hara’s “Pal Joey.” https://t.co/D8bnqRo9g3 @PenguinClassics pic.twitter.com/ZrRG6xCDxd — The Paris Review (@parisreview) January 13, 2016
January 13, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Ballad of the Gossip Hangover By Sadie Stein Toledo Street Scandal, 1895. A few weeks ago, I woke up one day feeling awful. I inventoried my symptoms. I didn’t seem to be getting sick. I hadn’t had too much to drink. Was it food poisoning? No—the slight ache in my stomach wasn’t, exactly, physical. And then it all came crashing back over me, and I realized the truth: I had a gossip hangover. Read More
January 13, 2016 On the Shelf I Wrassled a Bear, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From White Boy, Garrett Price/Sunday Press, via NYRB. Sometimes I lose sleep worrying about the colors of the world, fearing that some of them will disappear forever as manufacturing processes change and our planet’s pigment chemists quietly swap, say, one shade of aubergine for another, slightly inferior shade. But we needn’t worry. The Forbes Pigment Collection, presently housed at the Harvard Art Museums, is dedicated to preserving historic colors. “Later Forbes hired scientist Rutherford John Gettens, who examined the chemistry of pigments and innovated tools like a microsampler for taking art specimens. Now conservators can examine how a color has changed over time—like pararealgar, that was originally red and reacted with light into yellow—and the original components of art through the pigment library.” So your home was featured in a popular motion picture! That’s swell. That’s just grand. I’d be happy to stop by and have a look, because, you know, I’m in the market for a—oh, oh it was in Silence of the Lambs, you say? I see. And nearby, “there’s a creepy-looking tunnel, which some visitors suspect is haunted. There’s an old, rusty bridge that crosses the Youghiogheny River and serves as the main access route to the nearby town of Perryopolis. The isolated location is perhaps the perfect place for a fictional killer to set up shop”? Well, let me think on it. I’ll get back to you sometime. In the 1930s, a Wyoming newspaperman named Garrett Price started to draw White Boy, a comic about, yes, a young white male who was captured by Indians and adopted into their tribe. (The strip later took the slightly less inadvisable title Skull Valley.) Now, the entire three-year run of White Boy has been reissued and it is … let’s say it’s illuminating as to the predilections and prejudices of its era. “Price’s character Trapper Dan Brown was a familiar frontier type, with a high opinion of himself and a low opinion of Indians,” Thomas Powers writes of it: “In one strip Trapper Dan challenges Lark Song, a noted orator in his tribe, to best if he can a song Dan has written. One verse goes: Oh, I don’t like books / and I don’t like tea, / I wrassled a bear / when I was three. / Ki-Yi-Yippy-Yippy Yea.” A new collection of Walker Evans’s photography finds him in cinemas and junkyards, subways and ice-cream shops—the book shows “an artist who was constantly evolving; he was sampling new ideas, techniques, and technologies. Anything new or curious was of interest. When he advised the artist to ‘Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop,’ he was speaking from his own experience. It could have been his personal mantra.” Patti Smith has been reading Frida Kahlo’s love letters to Diego Rivera, with attention to one in particular: “They didn’t have a passionate relationship that dissipated and was gone. They had an earthly human love as well as the loftiness of a revolutionary agenda and their work. The fact that this isn’t a profound letter makes it in some ways more special. She addressed it to ‘Diego, my love’—even though this is the most mundane, simplest correspondence, she still noted their love, their intimacy. She held the letter in her hands, she kissed it with her lips, he received it and held it in his hands. This little piece of paper holds their simplicity and their intimacy, the earthiness of their life. It contains the sender and the receiver.”
January 12, 2016 Look Enter the O By Dan Piepenbring Hiroki Tsukuda, 4466 Void, 2015, black ink and charcoal on paper, 79″ x 53″. Hiroki Tsukuda’s “Enter the O,” the artist’s first exhibition in the U.S., opens this Thursday, January 14, at Petzel Gallery, in New York. Tsukuda, who lives in Tokyo, draws his inspiration from science fiction and video games; his works in ink and charcoal feature a welter of futurist architecture and industrial design. His compositions are always dense with infrastructure, looping and jutting out at acute angles. It’s as if some midcentury modernist utopia had been corroded by the needs of a burgeoning population, and eventually abandoned to the forces of nature. Having been colorblind since he was a child, Tsukuda developed a sensitivity to shading and contrast—reflected in the works on display here, which are largely monochromatic. He said in a 2013 interview with Freunde von Freunden that he aims to create the sense of having escaped to an alternate reality: I always had a strong desire to travel to another realm outside of this world, even from a young age. It’s not that I hated reality and wanted to escape; it was more like I wanted to take a peek into the parallel universe that exists on the other side of this world. So when seeing a landscape or buildings, I always imagined that there was a spacecraft launching pad in the mountains or was convinced that the building was actually a secret research lab. A huge bridge 12,300 meters in length called Seto-Ohashi was built when I was a child, and I remember vividly seeing it close up for the first time. I was blown away by the unbelievable size of its concrete mass. For me, it was absolutely an ancient ruin from another universe. So I doodled a bunch of stuff like that as a kid, like a cross-section of a mountain and a facility underneath it … I often choose motifs that are symbolically beautiful: beautiful landscapes, sculptures that are considered historically beautiful or sexy images that I find online. By transforming a part of this, a sense of awkwardness is created, as well as an indication or a sign, that broadly speaking creates a feeling of being abducted. “Enter the O” is at Petzel Gallery through February 20. See more images below. Read More
January 12, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Alias By Sadie Stein Amador Lugo, Perro con Gatos, 1933. Back when our family dog was not dead, he would vacation at the home of a woman named Janet. Hank was a pound mutt with shepherd coloring and terrier brains and a sensitive, Mr. Chips–like face that spoke of past sufferings. He and my dad were inseparable, which made his visits to Janet’s a big deal. Hank adored my father; they frequently duetted on renditions of “Memory,” and the dog spent hours sitting in my dad’s office while he worked. My dad never minded his mange or his foul breath. The only other star in Hank’s universe was a former baby toy of mine, a truly revolting specimen known as Bear, which one tried to avoid touching as much as possible. Read More