{"id":65680,"date":"2014-01-27T14:59:04","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T19:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=65680"},"modified":"2014-02-03T14:33:02","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T19:33:02","slug":"lend-me-an-ear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/27\/lend-me-an-ear\/","title":{"rendered":"Lend Me an Ear"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Alvin<\/a>

Alvin Booth, Nombrillisme<\/em>, 2013, silicone and porcelain.<\/p><\/div>\n

It started with an ear. My right ear, to be exact, which the artist Alvin Booth had encased in a pale purple alginate. The material reminded me of blueberry yogurt, and out of the corner of my eye, I watched him scoop the stuff into my ear. We were in Booth\u2019s Manhattan studio, where he lives with his wife, Nike Lanning. I was lying on an antique chaise longue, the type one sees in movies featuring French bordellos. Since my left ear was against the upholstery and my right was swathed in gelatinous goo, Booth\u2019s words were hardly discernible, and at best he sounded like he was speaking from a distant room. I looked up and saw his mouth moving, a wild tousle of hair rising as he spoke.<\/p>\n

For the last twenty years, Booth has been amassing a reservoir of work that revolves, capriciously, around the human body. I say capriciously<\/i> because Booth doesn\u2019t concern himself with the clinical characteristics of form, but rather with the corporeal aspect of the flesh, which is to say, the body erotic. His earlier work in photography has a nostalgic patina; through labor-intensive darkroom techniques, he produced sepia-toned gelatin-silver prints of nudes slathered in oil and gold powder, sometimes bound in latex. The close-ups are at once intimate, almost jarringly so, lending the photos a voyeuristic quality.\u00a0In his digital works, geometric patterns are superimposed on the bodies of men, women, and sometimes children; his models often posed within a kaleidoscopic mirrored enclosure. The results are highly stylized compositions of natural forms, startling and disturbingly beautiful. <\/p>\n

Booth\u2019s newest exhibition, \u201cCome to Your Senses,\u201d is showing this month in Paris\u2019s acte2galerie; it features Booth\u2019s sculptural forms and sound art, most notably the piece Vingt-Quatre Heures<\/em>, which plays snippets of phatic utterances taken from Radio France Culture programs. A black screen shows a green oscilloscope, which alters with every vocalization.\u00a0Booth stitched together the nonsensical sounds that announcers made between words or before sentences\u2014\u201cumm,\u201d \u201cerr,\u201d \u201chmmm.\u201d The result is a catalog of what Peter Hamilton calls, in his introduction to the exhibition, \u201cthe ridiculous nature of the isolated.\u201d<\/p>\n