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11:30 A.M.<\/strong> One of my favorite things about going to Philadelphia is that when you\u2019re disgorged from the train you step into 30th Street Station. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m alone in that sentiment\u2014how many films<\/span> have been made about the City of Brotherly Love that find some way or another to use the old Beaux-Arts structure as a set? I\u2019m not sure what it says about a city that every filmmaker wants to signify Philadelphianess with the very place you\u2019d pass through if you were either coming or going\u2014or for that matter, why so many Philly films choose to stage their most extravagant moments of murder and witnessed mayhem in this relatively quiet corner of the city\u2014but at any rate I get a little thrill<\/span> of walking through the station, so much more humanly scaled (if still monumental in its own way) than Grand Central or Union Station but losing nothing of the rustle of urbanity in the process. <\/p>\n 2:20 P.M.<\/strong> Before we have to catch the train back to New York we head to the National Gallery hoping to see the show of Allen Ginsberg\u2019s photographs in the West Building. I give up\u2014like every gallery here, it\u2019s simply too crowded with people to see much more than other people. I\u2019d read recently that scientists in Italy were formally investigating whether the Stendhal Syndrome<\/span> exists. Could such a thing exist today or would it be dismissed as a run-of-the-mill bout of agorophobia? And wouldn\u2019t the sufferer of the Stendhal Syndrome, having a swooning fit in the middle of these crowds, simply die of embarrassment?<\/p>\n Check back tomorrow for the second installment of Banks’ culture diary. Banks is a freelance critic and writer based in New York. He’s formerly the editor of <\/em>Bookforum and senior editor of<\/em> Artforum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DAY ONE 11:30 A.M. One of my favorite things about going to Philadelphia is that when you\u2019re disgorged from the train you step into 30th Street Station. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m alone in that sentiment\u2014how many films have been made about the City of Brotherly Love that find some way or another to use the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[699,35,698,700,696,125,694,695,697],"class_list":["post-4040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-allen-ginsberg","tag-art","tag-horse-racing","tag-joe-petrosino","tag-marcel-duchamp","tag-new-york-city","tag-philadelphia","tag-the-gross-clinic","tag-yves-klein"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/artmuseum8-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
11:50 A.M.<\/strong> It\u2019s a quick hop by cab to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the first leg of our seaboard-descending art trip. It\u2019s not so much a staycation\u2014with the price of an Amtrak ticket down and back, plus a night among all the foreign tourists at a Dupont Circle hotel chain, we could as well have flown somewhere. We were lured by the recently restored Gross Clinic, on view for the first time since it\u2019s been spiffied up by its new owners, who rallied to keep the canvas in Thomas Eakins\u2019s hometown when the Walmart heirs were trying to buy it and exile it to an Arkansas museum, and the promise of an Arte Povera installation. The latter turns out to be a bit overblown\u2014really just a couple of ho-hum works thrown in to a room alongside great but familiar pieces by Bruce Nauman and Robert Morris. Povera, indeed.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/200px-Etant_donnes-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
12:30 P.M.<\/strong> The Duchamp gallery is, happily, nearly empty of other visitors. Our companion, a Yale art historian who did his dissertation on Duchamp, seems almost deliriously placid sitting in front of “The Large Glass<\/a>.” You don\u2019t associate that sort of copacetic plenitude with looking at Duchamp, and it\u2019s sort of marvelous to behold. \u201cIt never disappoints me,\u201d he says in a church voice. I\u2019ve never had that experience with “The Large Glass,” though “\u00c9tant donn\u00e9s,” no matter how many times you\u2019ve peeped through the hole in the doorway, never loses its filthy staying power and fresh smell of mystery. What other creaky and canonical artworks of the last one hundred years can you say that about? I still feel like a perv squatting so slightly to look through the peephole at the splayed, spread-eagle figure and the twinkling faux waterfall. It\u2019s almost obligatory afterward to cut back through the Brancusi gallery and have a look at the plain, unmarked door allowing maintenance access to the piece. The sight is a purgative for the eyes.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/300px-Gross_Clinic_on_display_at_the_1876_Centennial-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
2:00 P.M.<\/strong> After a bite in the commissary, we catch the trolley to the museum\u2019s annex, where “The Gross Clinic<\/a>” is the star attraction<\/a>. There\u2019s a dismayingly large crowd on hand to see Eakins\u2019s bloody study from 1875, which until a few years ago was off-the-beaten trail at the Jefferson Memorial Hospital (where Gross, a celebrated military surgeon during the Civil War, held his classes). There\u2019s a lot of documentation on the walls about the painting\u2019s history and how its subject matter\u2014the surgery to remove a diseased bit of femoral bone, which pre-Gross would have entailed amputation of the leg\u2014revolted audiences in 1876, when it was excluded from the city\u2019s Centennial Exhibition. I hoped there\u2019d be a picture of how it was in fact installed at the time, hanging at the end of an art-meets-life prefab model army hospital tent, neatly and almost hilariously in situ, but no such luck.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/Detail_the_gross_clinic_thomas_eakins-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
The canvas now has far more commodious digs\u2014almost its own mini-chapel, where it\u2019s flanked by Eakins\u2019s other surgical masterpiece, “The Agnew Clinic<\/span>.” And after the restoration effort, it\u2019s that much clearer just how strange a picture it is. Before, you saw Gross holding his scarlet-flecked scalpel upright like a paintbrush, you made out the scene of the operation, with its attending surgeons wielding their blood-tipped knives like pencils<\/span>. But so much else was clouded and clotted in a bizarrely blah electrically colored background glare\u2014the tonal registers were just weird, almost fecklessly unresolved. Now you can really pick up the dark clarity of the whole background, including the image of the figure just behind Gross, who\u2019s taking notes and whose grip on his pencil ramifies that of the doctors going after the rotting bone. The sharply foreshortened patient\u2019s fuzzy blue socks jut out at you all that more dramatically and make a clean rhyme against the ether-soaked pillow over his head. And the guy lingering in the hallway\u2014Gross\u2019s son\u2014behind the theater, swallowed in a red haze, is a lot more fiendishly integrated into the scene. I first saw the canvas when it was in the Met\u2019s Eakins retrospective in 2001, and this was like seeing a totally different picture.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/EAKIN-1-articleLarge-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
When we had dinner a couple of nights earlier with an art historian who has a book coming out on the \u201cpleasure dairies\u201d of the anci\u00e9n regime (the best known being Marie-Antoinette\u2019s white marble Hameau at Versailles), she complained about the recent exhibition tendency to make a fetish of the tech-wiz conservationist. Philadelphia\u2019s played up its efforts to clean Eakins\u2014a misnomer, since what they did in essence was to add a level of varnish that the old medical hospital canvas doctors stripped away to try and make the gloomy tones brighter, mucking up the balance in the process. They\u2019ve clarified it strangely enough by making it more oblique. In a lot of the press notices, the conservators make a fascinating observation that their restoration process can easily be undone by future generations if viewing tastes should change\u2014what they\u2019ve got now is a painting that is more attuned to the way nineteenth-century viewers looked at canvases, though most nineteenth-century folks couldn\u2019t stand to look at them. Could you do the same thing with literary translation\u2014build in some sort of tacit statement that the new translations of Proust or Tolstoy or Kafka that you\u2019re reading are only provisional, or for that matter, opt to retranslate them backward, into their earlier and less contemporary idioms? I\u2019ve just read a passage in Tom McCarthy\u2019s new novel C<\/a><\/em> where Egyptologists are discussing a dig and talk about the fact that what they drag up aren\u2019t pure artifacts but the record of earlier plunderers, Romans, Arab, even pharoaic. Where the latter-day architects make their historical mistake is in thinking that their own moment is somehow the definitive one. Instead, it\u2019s just another chapter in a long book. I think McCarthy would approve of “The Gross Clinic\u2019s” restoration relativism. <\/p>\nDAY TWO<\/h3>\n
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10:45<\/strong> The train ride down from Philadelphia to Washington yesterday was uneventful enough, except for the drone of the two Tea Party types seated behind us who mercifully got off at the BMI stop. The pair of old Bags segued from a discussion of the merits of Glenn Beck to talking about going north to New York on September 11 to protest the proposed Muslim community center. I kept trying to read Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man<\/em>, part of a summer of rereading Mann, but it doesn\u2019t jibe with the background noise, and I put it aside for the current London Review of Books<\/em> and a withering review of a biography of Graham Greene\u2019s extended family.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/performance-klein-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
Now this morning we\u2019re crossing D.C. to see the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirschhorn. It\u2019s always amazing to me to realize how much work you forget when it comes to somebody like Klein, the impresario of fields of monochromatic blue. I\u2019d wondered aloud in the cab whether there would be anything in the show that we hadn\u2019t already seen at some point in recent years on view in the show, and yes, there was a lot\u2014why are so many of the works in private collections rather than museums? But I\u2019d forgotten so much of the melodramatic grandiose gestures of Klein over the years\u2014not the “Anthropometries,” executed by directing nude paint-slathered women to roll themselves on the canvas, which just look campy now; or the “Leap into the Void.” No, I mean more the bouquet of 1,001 blue balloons he had released for his opening at the Iris Clert gallery in May 1957, the over-the-top Order of St. Something-or-Another uniforms and goofy tricornes he sometimes sported (he looks like he\u2019s staring a Parisian version of Paul Revere and the Raiders), the incantatory touting of what he called the \u201cblue revolution.\u201d All completely or at least apparently without any buffer of irony. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/judoklein1.png\" "\\"\\"")
Anybody who knows anything about Klein knows that he was a serious student of judo, but I\u2019d always lazily pictured it along the lines of Andy Kaufman\u2019s enthusiasm\u2014or whatever it was\u2014for wrestling. It\u2019s standard to mention the book he wrote about its techniques, which I always imagined as some sort of self-publication. Wrong: There\u2019s a copy of his Fondements de Judo<\/a><\/em> in a vitrine with its handsome cover, published by Grasset. Archival photos are a dead weight in a lot of exhibitions, but here they\u2019re a nice compliment to the work itself. In one picture, Klein\u2019s sitting on the beach in Malibu, in swim trunks that look like they\u2019re held together with masking tape, beaming as he holds up the monochrome he\u2019s been working on with the blue ocean in the background. It\u2019s still weird to imagine him dying at age thirty-four from a heart attack\u2014the exhibition encourages the myth that Klein was shocked into cardiac arrest from the distress of seeing the film made about him at Cannes, the same death by celluloid that triggered Boris Vian\u2019s heart attack when he saw the movie made out of I Spit On Your Graves<\/em>. My art historian friend mentions the more prosaic speculation that he was juiced on steroids (the judo thing), and later a friend avers that he was a speed freak.<\/p>\nDAY THREE<\/h3>\n
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3:30 P.M.<\/strong> Back in New York and a slow recuperative day\u2014obedience classes for the new dog, and later a glance at the late races on the OTB channel from Saratoga. I miss not making the trip up there this summer and live vicariously through keeping the broadcast on in the background most afternoons while I\u2019m stuck here downstate. Last week I caught one of the best horse names in a long time, a filly who was the daughter of a one-eyed horse named Pollard\u2019s Vision (he was so named for the blind-in-one-eye jockey, Red Pollard, who rode Seabiscuit). Her dam was named Lady Mondegreen (mondegreens are misheard but homonymically related phrases\u2014\u201cexcuse me while I kiss this guy\u201d for \u201cexcuse me while I kiss the sky.\u201d). The filly\u2019s name? Moshe Diane. Get it<\/a>? She won and paid nearly $7.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/JoePetrosino-Commons-150x150.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
8:30 P.M.<\/strong> We\u2019ve been given a DVD set of restored silent films and start to watch the disc billed as The City Reformed<\/em>. It includes a 1909 D.W. Griffith shortie The Voice of the Violin<\/a><\/em> (a violinist is recruited by anarchists and turned into a terrorist after his advances are rebuked by a hoity-toity daughter of an industrialist) and a silent-era safety film made for kids, the 1913 Cost of Carelessness<\/em>, which shows the deleterious effects of playing in traffic. Who knew that driver\u2019s ed splatter staples like Mechanized Death and Signal-40 went back to the \u201910s? What\u2019s remarkable about the disk is how many are ripped from the headlines. We reflexively think of the earliest silent movies as being little more than a camera aimed at a primitive stage set, penny plays mindlessly transferred to film for nickolodean viewers. Here there are message films about the dangers of the payday loan (The Usurer\u2019s Grip<\/em>, 1912), and a dramatization of an Italian-American cop busting up a proto-Mafia extortion ring (The Black Hand<\/em>, 1906). It was rushed out just weeks after the real-life detective-hero, Joe Petrosino<\/a>, became a tabloid star for nabbing the crooks; the scene where the respectable extortion-ready butcher\u2019s daughter is kidnapped was shot in real time on snowy 14th Street while onlookers panicked at what they mistook as a real crime taking place. I\u2019d never heard of Petrosino\u2014he was a legendary cop, who later traveled to Sicily to infiltrate a nascent mob family and got himself whacked in a Palermo square when he was recognized\u2014but thanks to this old forgotten silent film and a bit of Internet searching, I now know that the little triangle of land in Manhattan where Kenmare meets Lafayette was only last year rechristened in his honor. There\u2019s not much of the Little Italy of The Black Hand<\/em> left, but now we\u2019ll always have Petrosino Square<\/a>.<\/p>\n