March 19, 2006
Paul Pfeiffer and Mary Gaitskill
On Friday, almost five years after I moved to New York, I received what I've been looking for since I set down my belongings in a second-floor Astoria apartment from which one could see a sliver of the Manhattan skyline: lifestyle validation from the New York Times. Apparently, attendance at talks, readings, panel discussions, and the like is on the rise. (The very first post on this site reported a talk given by Benjamin "Heavy Duty" Buchloch at Dia.) To wit:
The current enthusiasm for lectures and spoken-word events calls to mind the 19th century, when crowds flocked to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher lecture, said Donald M. Scott, a historian at Queens College of the City University of New York. At the peak of the country's lecture craze in the 1850's, nearly 400,000 people a week attended lectures in the northern and western parts of the country, he once wrote in an essay on the topic . . . But why the resurgence now? In the 19th century the increase in the number of lectures and debates came at the same time that "there was an explosion in print," Mr. Scott said in an interview. It was "staggering, equal in its scope to the kind of explosion we are seeing in electronic and TV and visual media.""I think it's a symbiotic relationship," Mr. Scott said. "There is something to listening to a figure you may have read or heard about. Even though what they have to say may be something you can get in another form, it's a way to feel you are actually in touch with these ideas and these figures."
Last Monday I was in touch with the artist Paul Pfeiffer, via a Sculpture Center-sponsored talk he delivered at the New School, and on Thursday with the writer Mary Gaitskill, who read from Veronica, her newest novel, at 192 Books in Chelsea.
Pfeiffer, who is cocurating (with Anthony Huberman) Sculpture Center's spring exhibition, "Grey Flags," offered his "subjective history of sculpture," an hour-long talk in which the word sculpture did not figure until the Q & A session after he had finished. He instead opened with a clip from The Exorcist, a film Pfeiffer returned to throughout the talk, and went on to discuss Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man," Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious, Roger Caillois's "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. What united these disparate references, which were accompanied by images of Robert Smithson's "Mirror Displacements" and Dan Graham's pavilions, is still somewhat opaque to me. Perhaps I can best describe the lecture, which Pfeiffer admitted was haphazard, as an attempt to exorcise the "repressed" content within seemingly stable representations of order, from the Vitruvian Man (which, if the circle and square in the famous drawing are de-centered slightly, becomes as unstable as one of Duchamp's Rotoreliefs) to Krauss's infamous "figure-ground-not figure-not ground" grid. Pfeiffer tied this to Fanon's third-person consciousness (living "as an image for others") and, moving through Benjamin, to what he views are shifts in the status of the artist today. (This last idea was mentioned only in passing, and deserves more attention, as does his use of Smithson and Graham, which were given as overly literal representations of this fragmentation of identity.) One can tell by the opacity of this summary that, as Huberman later put it in an e-mail, the talk "asked a lot of his audience." Nonetheless, Pfeiffer's ideas flew like sparks, and he obviously enjoyed presenting them, smiling with the introduction of each unexpected insight. I hope he's offered another opportunity to speak on a similar topic so that he can more clearly thread together these thoughts. I plan to attend one or both of the two remaining lectures in this series: Trisha Donnelly on April 24 and John Armleder on May 1.
Gaitskill, with her cool demeanor and smooth presentation, was Pfeiffer's opposite as a public speaker. She read a long selection from the middle of Veronica set in Paris, where Alison, the narrator, is working as a model. Gaitskill's self-possessed delivery ran counter to the voice I had ascribed to Alison (I'm on page 100), but was nonetheless engaging. The Q & A session, in which Gaitskill answered each question patiently and with both detail and the quiet force that she brought to the reading, led me to believe that she would make a very good teacher. (She's a professor at Syracuse.) Related: an interview with Gaitskill at nerve.com.