November 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Singing, Sequins, and Slaughterhouses By The Paris Review Still from On Body and Soul. “I would like to sleep / with you, to enter / your sleep,” go a few lines from Margaret Atwood’s 1981 poem “Variations on the Word Sleep,” and I recently found myself repeating these to myself as I watched On Body and Soul, the 2017 drama written and directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. The film—which won the Golden Bear at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival and has recently been released on Netflix—centers on the intense, off-kilter romance between two slaughterhouse employees, Endre and Mária, who discover through a series of work-related mishaps that they in fact share the same dream every night, one in which they appear to each other as deer in the woods. What could have been a twee cinematic disaster—Mária, with her nervous tics, is the sort of female character a lesser director would portray as nothing more than quirky—is saved by the brutality with which Enyedi juxtaposes Endre and Mária’s interactions with cuts of animals being killed, dissected, and turned into something far more sterile than their original bodies. To sleep beside someone requires a certain level of trust, of intimacy, and by the film’s shockingly violent ending, Enyedi successfully explores the dissolution of the self essential to both dreaming and desire. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
November 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Big Fish, Bombay, and Busted Pinkie Toes By The Paris Review M. F. Husain, Sprinkling Horses, ca. 1975, oil on canvas, 43 1/4″ x 92 1/2″. While the Guggenheim is rewriting the narrative of twentieth-century art history, with revision inked in pages upon pages of critical revelation, a quieter disruption is occurring down the street at the Asia Society, where an ambitiously comprehensive exhibition populates two floors with paintings by the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. After India’s independence in 1947, the PAG—a collective of headstrong, dynamic men—was formed as a way of shaping Indian culture and society for the new modern world. The social purpose of these paintings looks forward by looking inward, and therein lies their genius. The range and variety are evidence of an energetic originality; every painting is fresh and exciting, a refraction of the artist’s central vision, which is steadfast and zealous in its innovation. I found myself captivated by the characters that emerged from each cluster of work: F. N. Souza, the radical virtuoso whose work is arguably boldest in its imagination, is fearless in his often gruesome depictions and also in his liberal use of bold black lines and shapes (and is also perhaps my favorite). The prolific M. F. Husain marks his canvases with rough strokes of muted earthy browns and reds depicting Cubist renderings of scenes from Hindu tradition. S. H. Raza becomes obsessed with the Bindu, the motif of a black orb, which appears time and again, as a black sun in the sky or as a sparse mandala—a hypnotic, primordial symbol both auspicious and ominous. And the list could go on. As we change how we think about the influence of women in modern European abstractionism, so should we take time to reconsider the evolution of the avant-garde with respect to influence beyond the West. —Lauren Kane Read More
November 2, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Shirkers, Sculptors, and Space Ghosts By The Paris Review Still from Shirkers. Little did Sandi Tan know, her first (and only) feature film, Shirkers, would escape her in the exact way its namesake prophesied. In 1992, Tan wanted to write a movie that preserved her punk adolescence in Singapore. Nineteen-year-old Tan and her friends fancied themselves iconoclasts, abrading against a stiflingly conservative art scene; they led dozens of minor revolutions, from chewing gum (which was against the law) to watching bootleg copies of Blue Velvet via a “clandestine videotaping syndicate.” Inspired by the “unusual” and “unpopular” films of French New Wave and independent American cinema, Tan concocted an idea for her own: a guerrilla-style road movie in a country that takes only forty minutes to drive across. It would be bold and bright and fizzling with youthful energy, exuding all the naive ambition of a sure-to-be cult hit. Only it never was, because Shirkers was never finished. After filming was completed, all seventy reels were stolen by Tan’s mentor and director, Georges Cardona. It took more than twenty years for Tan to be reunited with Shirkers. She sprinkles the surviving footage into a breathtaking Netflix documentary in which she spends remarkably little time pathologizing Cardona, choosing instead to entertain a more nostalgic, meaningful subject: how Shirkers (and its absence) has rippled through the lives of its creators, cast, and crew. Tan in particular feels that she has been permanently fissured by the vacancy that Shirkers left behind, not only in regards to her own childhood but also the place her work should have occupied in Singapore’s film history. Alongside her crew members, Tan wonders if it is possible for the lack of something to be felt, even something that never really existed in the first place. But in the end, Shirkers isn’t just Tan’s wish for what could have been; it’s a beautiful and backward odyssey, chasing down and interrogating her past to find out precisely how her innocence fell by the wayside. —Madeline Day Read More
October 26, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cameras, Colonnades, and Countesses By The Paris Review John Chiara, “Pike Slip to Sugar Hill,” 2018. Installation view. Photography is an exercise in disappointment. How many times has my sight been arrested—by a mountain, a vista, a strange street juxtaposition—only for the resulting photo to be flat, featureless, uncommunicative? I sometimes scroll through old photos I’ve taken and can’t remember what I wanted to capture. Yet it seems the most effortless, natural art. Little manual strength or dexterity is required—you look, you click, and light impresses itself everywhere simultaneously on the film. Camera pressed to face, the lens ceases to be an object, becomes a perceived appendage of the eye. The “eye” of a photographer is often praised in the same manner as a pitcher’s arm, a singer’s voice, a painter’s hand. Yet in those cases the body part celebrated is actually performing the action, while the photographer’s eye does nothing but select—the camera does the work, and the camera is not an eye. An eye is connected to a brain, and vision is inseparable from thinking, from the gestalt of perception, the interplay of the senses. Photographs we take are so often disappointing because they have been denuded of ourselves, floating free from the pressure of our senses and cognition. The great pictures are those that feel made. They induce synesthesia—we can feel them, smell them, hear them. This ethic is embraced by the photographer John Chiara, currently showing his collection of large color-negative New York photos “Pike Slip to Sugar Hill” at the Yossi Milo Gallery. Chiara imposes himself on the processes cloistered in the camera by building his own, so large that he mounted it on the back of a flatbed. As a result, most of the photos are looking up at buildings, gawking. Within the camera he exposes the giant photo paper directly, physically manipulating the exposure in real time. The colors are ghostly and garish, the solid, darker things made bright, giving the photos the spatial clarity of a blueprint. Texture, by virtue of the print size, the volume of the colors, and Chiara’s hand, is palpable. The pictures are quickened by oxymoron. Pointed skyward, they feel subterranean. Defiantly unreal, they are utterly faithful to embodied sight. —Matt Levin Read More
October 19, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Fall By The Paris Review Lucie Brock-Broido and Henri Cole Recently, I visited New York City to attend a tribute for Lucie Brock-Broido, a poet who, like many of the finest, died too young. So I reread Lucie’s last book, Stay, Illusion, which was her best. One of the functions of poetry, and of the poet, is to heal us from the damages of experience; I think Lucie’s poems are often about healing from the damages we inflict upon the earth and its inhabitants. Animal rights was one of Lucie’s passions. As far back as ancient times, animals have been used to represent and critique our human behavior. I think Lucie was part animal. Certainly, she was feral. She believed that in a prior life she had been a lynx, a small lynx. And in this life, she was an ailurophile—or lover of cats. In her poems, there is always the lingering possibility of death. I suspect that Lucie understood from an early age that, as humans, we are finite. In the English language, there is no other poet doing what Lucie did. The Oxford English Dictionary was her Bible, and Lucie refreshed the English language with her radiantly original poems. This summer, I visited her grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts several times, and a thick coat of grass already sparkles over her. I find it almost unbearable to absorb her loss. Sometimes, to keep her alive, I repeat a list of words with her name embedded in them: hallucination, elucidate, Lucifern, pellucid. I loved her poems and cannot believe there will be no more. —Henri Cole Read More
October 12, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Potters, Porridge Bowls, and Pastries as Existential Truths By The Paris Review Kathy Butterly, Yellow Glow, 2018, clay and glaze, 6 1/2″ x 9 7/8″ x 7″. There are several things I miss about living in Louisiana, one of them being its proximity to Mississippi and the strange wonder of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, the Frank Gehry–designed pottery museum across the street from the Gulf in the south of the state. There resides a permanent collection of George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi, an artist who did strange and amazing things with form (some critics say he anticipated abstraction), wonderful and wonky things with color (see the shimmering multicolor glazes), and generally elevated mud into fine art. Lucky for me—lucky for all of us within spitting distance of West Chelsea—Kathy Butterly’s ceramics are on display at James Cohan Gallery through October 20 (with an artist talk this Saturday). Citing Ohr as an influence, Butterly takes familiar forms—she starts by pouring clay into casts made from store-bought vessels—then she smashes and smooshes them, layering on more clay, adding arms and antennae and other bits until she’s crafted a different sort of delight. Note the nooks and crannies of her pieces, the piping and edging and little leaflike appendages that dress her human-scale ceramics. And the colors: I held my nose close to a piece that was bubble gum and seafoam and moss, with these little rivulets of Gatorade orange—a swirl of glazes achieved by firing her creations again and again (sometimes upwards of thirty times). Pro tip: don’t miss the nail polish—it’s another way into the head of a master colorist. —Emily Nemens Read More