October 29, 2021 The Review’s Review Organic Video By The Paris Review Shigeko Kubota’s Berlin Diary: Thanks to My Ancestors. 1981. Cathode-ray tube monitor, crystal, ink, and twine. 9 × 8 × 11″ (22.9 × 20.3 × 27.9 cm). “Everything is video,” the Japanese-born, New York–based artist Shigeko Kubota remarked in a 1975 interview. “[We] eat video, shit video, so I make video poems … Part of my day, everyday, the memory—I like to put in video.” Overlooked compared to some of her other Fluxus-associated peers (including her husband, the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik), Kubota’s work is now the subject of a small but brilliant exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Liquid Reality, which spans her artistically fertile period from 1976 to 1985. In Kubota’s hands, video abandons its cold, sleek pretense, instead taking on a wild quality, with inverted color schemes and pulsating time warps akin to an overgrown garden. “Film was chemical, but video was more organic,” she told The Brooklyn Rail in 2007, eight years before her death at the age of seventy-seven. In her work, mountains stand tall, water seeps, and, in 1979’s River, a literal stream babbles over three neon-colored monitors, like some magic rivulet snatched from an old mythology and transported to our technological age. Read More
October 21, 2021 The Review’s Review Eternal Present By The Paris Review Still from Lil Peep’s “Gym Class” music video. Curtis Eggleston’s Hollow Nacelle, out last month from Expat Press, is, like reality, both weird and not at all so. His characters—bandmates—wanna blow up… Or at least have a girlfriend, or at least make art. This is a southern California dreamworld, only so, so gray. In prose that is wonderfully straight even when it muses and metaphorizes, Eggleston conjures up the terrifying banality of fantasy, the dumbness of miracles, and lays them flat on the page. Major miracles, as per usual: love, art, friendship. Plus—and without the corniness that sometimes comes with contemporaneity—there’s the (evil? stupid? neutral?) kinds of spells that, for better or for worse, enchant our late-modern world: an Uber-type driver who appears and disappears at will, the mystery of Instagram virality, a rock of black “goth” molly that turns “purple, lustrous” under the iPhone flashlight. Read More
October 14, 2021 The Review’s Review Nocturne Vibes By The Paris Review Added to “Gen X Soft Club” Are.na channel by Evan Collins. I love this time of year. It takes a little while to adjust to the shorter days, but soon I settle into and relish the long dark hours. Some evenings I turn out the lamps, except for the dim reddish one, lie on the sofa, and listen to terrifying music. I love to feel my heart pound, my stomach drop, my blood move backward. I remember as a child encasing my head in my dad’s enormous leather headphones and listening to his Hawkwind, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, and Captain Beefheart records in the dark. The padded headphones were a helmet and the spooky eccentric sounds they emitted conjured a nocturnal universe that I soared and tumbled through alone, so alone. Over the years my repertoire of spine-chilling night music has grown and includes Scott Walker, Krzysztof Penderecki, Pan Daijing, Pauline Oliveros, Swans, and Aïsha Devi. A few years ago I splashed out on a ticket for Only the Sound Remains at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Inspired by Noh theater and based on translated texts by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, this musical work by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho was unlike any performance I’ve ever seen. So still, so minimal, so slow, and the auditorium was dark, so dark; cell by cell I was slowly blotted out. It was intensely unnerving yet weirdly consoling at the same time. Last night, after gnawing on some leftover sticky chicken and poking at eye-wateringly astringent red cabbage, I lay down and communed with the spectral sounds of Lichtbogen and Petals (performed here by the unsurpassable Imke Frank) and within moments I was overcome with the same feelings of terror, exhilaration, curiosity, and willful independence that swarmed around me as a small child. Bliss. —Claire-Louise Bennett (Read Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with Lauren Elkin here.) Read More
October 8, 2021 The Review’s Review Quiet Magic By The Paris Review We Work Again includes the only known footage of the Negro Theatre Unit’s 1936 production of Macbeth, staged by Orson Welles through the Federal Theatre Project. Above, a photograph of the production: Charles Collins and Maurice Ellis in act III, scene 4 of the play. I am a lover of old things. I could spend hours strolling through vintage furniture stores or flipping through clothing catalogs from the past, but my favorite is undeniably archival video. Recently, I discovered a treasure trove of streaming links: The Black Film Archive. The site, which aggregates lists of comedies, westerns, dramas, and documentaries made between 1915 and 1979, is updated each month, and accepts submissions from the public. It’s free, and equal parts educational and entertaining. This week, I watched We Work Again, a video commissioned by a New Deal–era public works project, in which a narrator describes an idealized version of segregation in the United States over videos of Black life in the thirties. It was moving footage that I likely would have never come across otherwise. This weekend, I think I’ll watch Two-Gun Man from Harlem, a musical western about a deacon who becomes a cowboy. —Lauren Williams Read More
September 30, 2021 The Review’s Review Strangers and the Moon By The Paris Review 17776 (screenshot), by Jon Bois. Four years after its first chapter was published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s serialized multimedia novella 17776: The Future of Football is still my favorite (and some of the only) “new media” lit online. Told through text interspersed with video and graphics that mix satellite imagery, newspaper clippings, and Telestrated sports-field diagrams, the story follows the sentient space probe Pioneer 9 as it flies over the United States of the future: a land in which no one dies any more, but everyone still loves football. With their newfound immortality, Americans have developed more and more baroque constellations of rules for their favorite game, sending their players on elaborate, millennia-long scavenger hunts across the country. An epic reminiscent of Infinite Jest, it’s a dazzlingly idiosyncratic work of art that is equal parts exercise in speculative game design, history of a dying empire, and fable about the meaning of play, humanity, and technology. But 17776 isn’t just an experiment with form; Bois is a startlingly sensitive writer, and scrolling through his simple, color-coded dialogue feels like looking at the 1967 photo of Earth taken by an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission: lonely, but awe-inducing. —Olivia Kan-Sperling Read More
September 23, 2021 The Review’s Review Reproducing Bodies By The Paris Review Linus Borgo, Bed of Stars: Self-Portrait with Elsina and Zip, 2021, oil on canvas, 46 x 68″ (detail). Linus Borgo makes consistently uncanny and gorgeous work, some of which will be featured at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles this January. My favorite of their self-portraits—deadlocked with Fuzzy FTM Transsexual Amputee Plays with Magic Wand and Poppers (Self Portrait)—is Bed of Stars: Self Portrait with Elsina and Zip, in which Linus lies in a pool of deep blue, star-stamped sheets, an oblique banner of sunlight across his torso and thighs, his body filling the frame, toes nearly poking through the border. It’s a work that questions what it is to reproduce an image, a pet, a body part. Of course, this is the terrain of figurative art. But duplicates also appear within the piece: Linus’s left bionic forearm and its phantom mirror not only each other, but his right forearm; the cat dozing by his ankle complements the stuffed one cradling his elbow; the bedspread underneath him simulates the sky above. The effect is overwhelming, and intensified by meticulousness: blades of hair golden in the sun, creases in the pillowcase, a naval piercing, cursive lettering on a nameplate necklace. In this representation of the self, there is an abundance of selves existing side by side simultaneously. What more could you ask for in a self-portrait? —Jay Graham Read More