April 27, 2006
Around the web #12
A brief roundup of stories, reviews, and blog entries that have caught my eye since the last "Around the web" post:
- Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains as important to me now as it was when I first read it, ten or so years ago, died this week, aged 89. The New York Times published a very thorough appreciation/obituary in yesterday's paper; the New Yorker has made available online a "Talk of the Town" piece about her from 2004; the Virginia Quarterly Review has made available an essay she contributed to their Spring 2004 issue; and Gothamist rounds up a few more notices.
- An interview with Rem Koolhaas in the German paper Der Spiegel, titled "Evil Can also Be Beautiful," in which the architect discusses his plan to enter politics as a socialist and a 1974 film script he wrote for Russ Meyer.
- On the occasion of the publication of Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, by Allie Angell, Anthony Haden-Guest writes about the "original King of Pop" (to use a colleague's phrase) for The Guardian.
- A gallery of poster designs by Josef Müller-Brockmann.
- More from The Guardian: Robert Hughes on Goya's last works, happily crotchety Jonathan Jones on Marc Quinn's portrait of Kate Moss, and Adrian Searle on the 4th Berlin Biennale and on Yang Fudong.
- The newly expanded Poetry Foundation website has a feature article on Polish poet and critic Adam Zagajewski, whose book of essays titled A Defense of Ardor possesses one of my favorite recent book jacket designs.
- NEWSgrist features an interview with artist and activist Paul Chan about "My own private Alexandria (v.1)," a collection of audio recordings of influential texts, available for free download at his website, www.nationalphilistine.com.
- This year's Reading the World website is now online, featuring books in translation from ten different publishers. Look for a special display at independent bookstores next month.
- Lastly, Dan Green has posted an appreciation of the fiction reviews published in the Financial Times by Jonathan Derbyshire, who just announced on his own blog that they are no longer behind a pay-for-access wall at the paper's site. I've only read two so far, but I also like what I see.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
April 26, 2006
Jenny Price, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA"
A photograph taken last week in Los Angeles
I began reading the first article in The Believer's April issue, titled "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA," as my plane took off from LAX. The article, to be published in two parts, is taken from Land of Sunshine, an essay collection edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise, and postulates that Los Angeles "is the ideal place to tackle the problem of how to write about nature." That's a counterintuitive proposition, to say the least. Despite some rhetorical excesses—such as listing eighteen topics the Los Angeles Times has reported on before identifying them all as "nature topics"—her broadening of the definition of "nature writing," in part through tracing "stories that follow nature through our material lives" and understanding the ways in which class affects one's perception of (and access to) nature, is pretty convincing. A quote, from right after the eighteen-strong list of Times topics:
These are nature topics all, about how we live in and fight about nature, and about how we use it more and less fairly and sustainably, and about the enormous consequences for our lives in L.A., as well as for places and people and wildlife everywhere. And such topics beg for a literature—for a poetry, for an aesthetics—because to clearly ponder our lives in and out of cities, we have to be able to imagine and reimagine these connections to nature.
(A side note: Price ends by discussing the Los Angeles River, which I pass over on foot on nearly every trip to LA, since at one point it cuts between several art galleries on La Cienega Blvd. I'm fascinated by it, and by how the creation of its concrete straitjacket remains the largest public-works project ever undertaken west of the Mississippi. Doug Aitken once tried to take a boat up the river, as discussed with Ed Ruscha in this Frieze interview, a quixotic project if ever there was one . . . )
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 25, 2006
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
At the train station in Malmö, Sweden, I picked up the Virago paperback edition of Gilead, Marilyn Robinson's "demanding, grave, and lucid" 2004 novel. (It was published by FSG in the US.) There was a twenty-three-year gap between this book and Housekeeping, her 1981 debut, and, as many commentators have noted, it was worth the wait. The novel won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was reviewed favorably at the New York Times (where it was one of the paper's ten best books of the year), the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, New York, Slate, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere. This is one case where I think you can believe the hype.
Neither book's narrative recommends itself to me, yet the deliberative tone Robinson strikes perfectly counters her more lyrical passages, and I found myself connecting emotionally to the main characters of each. To use a phrase borrowed from Ann Patchett, a former student at Iowa who reviewed the newer novel for the New York Observer, Robinson's characters "luxuriate in time," living the reflective lives we wish we could enjoy. Thankfully, an added benefit of Gilead, little remarked upon by the book's many reviewers, is that its form—a letter written by the dying, seventy-six-year-old Reverend John Ames to his young son—invites repeated readings; once you've finished the book and know the relationships between its eight or ten main characters, the one-to-three-page, diarylike entries are perfect for savoring individually.
After completing Gilead, I sought further commentary from Robinson, and found a lot on the internet. Beyond her brief faculty profile at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, there are a number of interviews, including one at The Atlantic, one at the LA Weekly, and one at Powells.com. There are also audio interviews from two NPR programs (one, two).
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
April 19, 2006
Cady Noland, "approximately"
This seems like a very bad idea, and one that will be very short-lived if Cady Noland responds to this exhibition the way she has to exhibitions that include artworks she actually made.
Cady Noland Approximately Sculptures and Editions, 1984-1999Conceived by Triple Candie, made in collaboration with Taylor Davis, Rudy Shepherd, and two other artists
This exhibition is the first survey ever devoted to Cady Noland's oeuvre. It consists of objects made by Triple Candie and four artists that are based on sculpture and editions by Cady Noland that date from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s. The works were recreated from images found on the Internet and in exhibition catalogues. Though an attempt was made to replicate the original artworks as faithfully as possible, they are not reproductions. They are approximations that have been handicapped by practical limitations (e.g. lack of money and technical expertise; insufficient information about scale, materials, or color; the obsolescence of certain ready-made components; and a limited time-frame). By deliberately falling short of its target, the exhibition is meant to incite the public's desire and curiosity to experience the real thing, which remains frustratingly elusive.
[. . .]
"Cady Noland Approximately" was conceived of conjointly with—and is meant to serve as a complement to—the exhibition "David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective" that was presented at Triple Candie in February/March 2006. There are a number of important similarities between the two artists. Both are evasive figures whose art has been highly influential on younger artists. Both artists tightly control access to their work. Both have expressed dissatisfaction with the art world and have operated outside of it, on their own terms, albeit in different ways. The Hammons exhibition consisted of photocopies and computer printouts from existing reproductions; this exhibition consists of three-dimensional objects that are made from information gleaned from existing reproductions but which are not exact replicas. In comparing the two exhibitions, one question that arises is: "Which of the two compromised forms of replication is closer to the real thing?"
"Cady Noland Approximately" was made in collaboration with four artists: Taylor Davis, Rudy Shepherd, and two others who asked to not be named. None of the objects in the exhibition are individually authored. Cady Noland was not consulted, or notified, about this exhibition. She lives and works in New York City.
(It should be noted that I wrote and distributed an essay titled "Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland," also without consulting her prior to its publication.)
Far be it from me to police what a gallery chooses to exhibit, but it seems to me that making an exhibition-of-photocopied-reproductions-as-homage in the spirit of one artist—an exhibition that leads even the Times to wonder if the artist is involved—is one thing. It is far different, and less malicious, than re-creating the artworks of an elusive artist, no matter how poorly and with how much transparency. As someone said last night at dinner, "This show cannot even begin to look like a Cady Noland show. Cady has very specific reasons for installing her objects the way she does; the relationships between them are of equal importance to the sculptures themselves. This cannot be re-created by others' hands." Hammons is enigmatic, and his relationship to exhibitions and the market can be seen, in some way, as part of his oeuvre; Noland's relationship with the art world is much closer to a categorical "no." In my mind, the differences between those stances outweigh the similarities described above.
It's telling that two of the four artists enlisted to re-create these works insist on their own anonymity. If these aren't Cady Noland sculptures, and those responsible for creating them aren't willing to claim them as something else (à la Sturtevant, or some such), then what are they? As much as I would love to see a Cady Noland exhibition, this is the wrong way to go about it, and the wrong way to "incite the public's desire and curiosity to experience the real thing." That desire is already present, at least among cognoscenti. We need instead to stoke Noland's desire to collaborate with a gallery or institution on an exhibition of her own work. This gesture harms that effort.
UPDATE (5/17): A few weeks ago, Edward Winkleman posted an entry on his blog about this topic, and several commenters took me to task for the remarks above; last Friday, Ken Johnson weighed in on the show in the New York Times ("The show might be seen as a chance to think about an oeuvre that . . . remains pertinent to what young artists . . . . Unfortunately, it is easier to see it as an attention-seeking stunt. No one who values Ms. Noland's work is going to care about seeing inexact substitutes, and no serious critical judgments about her art should be based on such ersatz objects."); and now Jerry Saltz has his say in the Village Voice ("The ideas are interesting and the organizers' hearts are in the right place, yet the show falls flat.").
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
April 18, 2006
An outsider's view of Los Angeles
I've just arrived in Los Angeles, where I will stay for four days and look at as much art as I can. Coincidentally, Adrian Searle publishes his review of the Centre Pompidou's "Los Angeles 1955-85: The Birth of an Artistic Capital" in today's Guardian:
This rewarding, entertaining, often surprising exhibition is a crash course in 30 years of laconic California conceptualism, laidback LA pop art, occasionally silly and often highly confrontational performance, absurd and eccentric abstractions, funky and fetishistic minimalism, edgy, scatological sculptural tableaux, and dark and dirty underground film. They vie with one another, in room after room.
I don't know how many people would agree with this assertion:
LA's problem has always been what the exhibition's curator, Catherine Grenier, calls its "octopoid geography". Whatever New York thinks of itself (and it thinks about itself a lot), it faces Europe. LA is far away. And although there were always collectors in Los Angeles, during the 60s and 70s they did little to encourage local, much less younger talent. Hence, perhaps, the edginess and aggression, the solipsism and individuality that marks the best Angeleno art.
He goes on to make a pretty weak conclusion, but the gist is that he likes the diversity of LA art, and that the exhibition in Paris is good.
I managed four trips to LA during last year's September-to-May art season. Sadly, this is my first visit during '05-'06. I hope to make the most of it.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
The Life Aquatic with Matthew Barney / MP3 of the moment #3
Still from Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9.
There is little new to be said about Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9, which was released a few weeks ago and is now screening at the IFC Center in the West Village. There were, of course, reviews in all of the major media outlets—the New York Times and the Village Voice, among many others—as well as numerous posts on blogs. (Girish's comments were among the earliest and remain among the most well thought out.) As is to be expected, there is little impartial commentary; like all extremely ambitious artists, Matthew Barney seems only to draw fulsome praise or withering criticism, and the film, loaded with visual cues referencing the Cremaster series with which he made his name, will convert few critics and dissuade few fans. Overwrought pageantry and meticulously observed ritual, a fetishist's appreciation of elaborate costuming, and all manner of viscous semiliquid materials figure prominently.
I enjoyed the film. A few brief comments:
- I agree with those who criticize Barney's editing skills, as the film seems like an endless succession of eight- to ten-second takes; were it not for the Björk's evocative soundtrack, there would be even less narrative thrust than can now be discerned. The film's action hovers somewhere between nonnarrative and narrative states, and it suffers some for it.
- While there are plenty of striking moments, there is no single image in Drawing Restraint 9 as beautiful as individual scenes in his Cremaster films. (I'm thinking specifically of the use of the Chrysler building as a maypole in Cremaster 3 or the scene in which Barney jumps off a bridge into the Danube in Cremaster 5.)
- The ending seems tacked on, as if Barney had extra visual material—the kabuki clown, the woman vomiting pearls into the sea, etc.—that he wanted to include but couldn't otherwise fit.
- Some commentators have glossed the reference to Douglas MacArthur in the beginning of the film, but I'm surprised that none yet have reached back to Matthew C. Perry, the original "Occidental Guest." I know that the coincidence of their first names is just that, but it is a suggestive one nonetheless.
Anyway, posting about the movie grants me the opportunity to update my "MP3 of the Moment," listed at the bottom of the middle column. I have uploaded "Gratitude," composed by Björk and performed by Will Oldham, Zeena Parkins, and a choir of Japanese children. From bjork.com: "In the film's moving opening sequence, we hear Will Oldham sing in English the text of a letter from a Japanese citizen to General MacArthur thanking him for lifting the U.S. moratorium on whaling off the nation's coasts; this text was adapted by Matthew Barney and set to music by Björk for harp, here played by Zeena Parkins. Its delicate delivery acknowledges the folk-culture roots of whaling, while it also subtly flags the barbed history and politics surrounding its source text." The song is not as powerful as "Storm," which, along with Funkstörung's remix of "All is Full of Love," hovers near the top of my all-time-favorite Björk song list, but it has its own charms—namely that adorable choir.
Posted in Art, Film, Music. Found always via this permanent link.
April 17, 2006
Memorable descriptions of heads and necks
John Homans gets in a good jab at Tom Wolfe in his review of Gay Talese's new memoir, A Writer's Life, published in this week's issue of New York:
Talese, in his memoir as in life, is charming, modest, self-effacing, a pleasant companion. Like Tom Wolfe, who gave Talese credit (which Talese politely declined to accept) for inventing the New Journalism, he is always exceedingly well dressed. But while Wolfe’s starched collar is a plinth for exhibiting that brain he’s so proud of, Talese uses his wardrobe in the Italian way, to show respect, to make a good impression. [Emphasis added.]
This, of course, reminds me of a great, perfectly apt line written by Tom Morton in a 2004 issue of Frieze, which I commented on at the time here. (Click through . . . it's funny enough to merit it.)
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Arthur C. Danto on the Whitney Biennial
In his review of the Whitney Biennial, published in the May 1 issue of The Nation, Arthur C. Danto draws a connection between "Day For Night" and "Uncertain States of America," a smaller exhibition of American artists. The latter was also organized by European curators, and was recently presented at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. (It opens at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Museum on June 24.) Unfortunately, Danto uses the connection only as a rhetorical device, opting to describe the pieces in the Biennial by a few artists included in both exhibitions. He then goes on to say:
None of these works support the subtext of the show. What they illustrate, rather, is the extreme pluralism of contemporary art—the sense that one can make art out of anything, looking any way one likes. To the degree that artistic pluralism mirrors the contemporary world, ours is an open world full of aesthetic opportunities, a condition that only an aesthetic monist would deplore. A certain price may be paid for this pluralism, in art as in life. In art the price is that often one does not know what one is looking at, or what a work means, or why it is there. The curators have acknowledged this by providing generous amounts of wall text, helping us understand what we are seeing.
There are many people, I think, who would argue that wall-text supplements cannot do the heavy-lifting these artworks seemingly call for, and that there is something lost in the translation.
Later in the piece, he offers a calmer version of a criticism the exhibition has drawn from many in the peanut gallery:
This is the kind of thing most of the works are said to do. They ask us to reflect, explore, question. The Peace Tower installed in the Whitney's courtyard, for example, "provides an opportunity to step back momentarily from the bustle of the rest of the exhibition and to reflect on the wider social issues presented therein." Surely that is not what di Suvero and Tiravanija intended. When Serra's painting says Stop Bush, its aim is to stop Bush, not reflect on the messages of the other works with which it is exhibited. There is something strangely inert about the language of mirroring and reflecting in which "Day for Night" is framed. Somehow, one feels, the experience of a work of art ought to do something more robust than reflect on good causes. It is too much to ask that we feel the way Rilke did when he stood before an archaic torso of Apollo—that he must change his life. But there seems to be little place for passion, or pleasure, in the intellectually earnest work on display here.
There is now a third exhibition entering this European-curators-looking-at-American-artists field: "USA Today," a collaboration between the Royal Academy of Arts and the Saatchi Gallery opening in six months in London. What I hope is that someone who is able to see all three—or even only two—of these exhibitions will compare them at some length, interrogate the reasons for the recent surge of interest in young, American artists in Europe, and try to ascertain just what picture of America, if any, emerges from them.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 16, 2006
Gary Lutz interview
(Until May 1, most of the content posted to this site will comprise links to other essays, stories, blogs, and news items. I am facing down several deadlines that will likely keep me from posting original content.)
The writer Gary Lutz came up in a phone conversation I had with a friend on Friday afternoon. I have never read Gary Lutz's short stories, nor have I read much writing by Ben Marcus, the author to whom I speculatively linked him. When Lutz's collection Stories in the Worst Way was published, I read a sharply critical review of the book, filed his name away, and didn't seek out other commentary. Then, in February, The Believer published an interview with him that reversed my earlier impression. I am now in search of a copy of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, which contains a piece by Lutz and was edited, coincidentally, by Marcus. (Marcus also blurbs Stories in the Worst Way, saying: "Gary Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. He is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspring.")
The Believer interview (not all posted online) offers an endearing portrait of the self-deprecating artist. Here are a few quotes:
BLVR: When you manipulate words like this, is it a technical process? Are you using many reference materials? Or is it mostly intuitive?GL: I think that a lot of what I seem to be doing when I try to get from one end of a sentence to the other—a crossing that can take hours, days, weeks—is introducing words to each other that in ordinary circumstance would never meet . . . because I have some other hunch that they belong together, even though anyone else might write them off as entirely incompatible. I guess I work my way through a sentence by instigating these relationships—a perverse sort of matchmacking, apparently—and then to keep the words from getting too cozy, I might reach for an uncstomary preposition that plunges the sentence into some queasy depths. The whole undertaking seems to be alrgely intuitive and probably unnatural.
[ . . . ]
BLVR: Your acceptance of ambiguity seems more on the experimental side, while your interest in grammar seems more traditional. Would you ever call yourself a traditionalist?
GL: I think it helps somehow if prose that on the surface might seem vivid in its disrupture or overthrowal of the conventional is ultimately discovered to be pure grammatical fussbudgetry underneath. (A friend tells me I'm a Victorian at heart.) I probably would not have had a long-enduring, even morbid fascination with prescriptive grammar and punctuation if I weren't convinced that exactitude in such matters was a lost cause.
[ . . . ]
GL: . . . A few years ago, trying to recover from a traumatic breakup, I made a study of hyphenation patterns in the New Yorker magazine back when William Shawn was in charge. I made the hyphen my lifeline, and I put my trust in William Shawn and his grammar genius, Eleanor Gould Packard. . . . I eventually fell in love with somebody else and slept deeply for a while.
Two more, unhooked from the questions that prompted them:
As for fiction versus poetry, the border between the two seems less secure than ever. A lot of writing passes back and forth without anyone summoning the authorities. Some people have told me that what I write is poetry, that it could be laid out as such. But I am a sucker for the old notions of poetry and would never think of my paragraphic jitter in that light. Besides, regarding my stuff as prose is a much more cost-efficient use of paper. The reader gets a full page.[ . . . ]
Another way of looking at this, maybe, is that the motions of even the most centrifugally active mind or heart have a circumference, and the writer of a story s hould probably respect or even celebrate the fixity of the circumference. But within those limits, anything should be welcome to clamor on behalf of itself or rise to an occasion or veer off into ultimately pertinent digression.
Elsewhere online, Lutz has reviewed the new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, for Slate; been interviewed by The Stranger; and has been appreciated, by Lawrence La Riviere White, on TheValve.org.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 15, 2006
This seems like a good idea
From Carol Vogel's "Warhols of Tomorrow are Dealers' Quarry Today" in today's Times:
Beginning this year, first-year graduate students were not included in Columbia's open-studios event, held each December, when the school community and the public are invited to see students' work. The intent was to give these students more time to develop without the anxiety of showing what they can do just three months after they've arrived.
On a somewhat related note, see my December 2004 diary entry on Artforum.com:
In an ideal world, all of these students would take what they've learned off to tiny studios in the outer boroughs, where they'd hone their ideas and edit their bodies of work before beginning to look around for a gallery. But we're in the midst of a strong market and live in a terribly expensive city—not at all an ideal world for young artists—and it's becoming more and more common for students to have gallery shows. Kevin Zucker, who had two Chelsea solos before he graduated (Columbia '02) and is now with Mary Boone, is the poster boy of the phenomenon. Obviously this kind of early success can create hype, dauntingly high expectations, and a context in which every failure is a spectacular one—to say nothing of an art world in which youth itself is a selling point. (This may partly explain then-21-year-old Rosson Crow's sold-out SVA BFA thesis show last spring.) Most dangerous, it can lead artists into a catch-22 wherein they find commercial favor before critics and curators even know who they are. As word spreads through the collector grapevine, what the artist hears is: "Collector X wants a painting like the one Y has." Satisfying demand becomes priority number one, and critics and curators write the work off instead of trying to contextualize it. I saw promising artists at all three schools; here's hoping they don't meet such a limited, if profitable, fate.
Rereading the end of the quote above, I can't help but wonder if I wasn't (subconsciously, perversely) making the same kind of speculative grasp as dealers and collectors in an attmept to consolidate some power over the direction of these young artists' careers. I'd like to think that critical interpretation bears some influence on the course of art history in the long run, but of course cannot know so empirically. But the careers of painters like Zucker and Brian Alfred—himself recently picked up by Boone after four fiscally successful, critically ignored exhibitions at Max Protetch—do not evince staying power. I can think of few group shows with notable contributions by either artist (and a host of others, lest you think I'm picking on anyone in particular). I wonder how many museums have acquired—and therefore committed to preserve—works by either artist. Perhaps I shouldn't be so concerned, because maybe they're worrying about the same things . . . all the way to the bank.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 14, 2006
A Venn Diagram
A low-grade digital snap of a page from David Shrigley's forthcoming Who I Am and What I Want.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
April 12, 2006
Anderson on Fukuyama completes a circle (for me)
In this week's Nation, New Left Review editor Perry Anderson reviews Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads, and provides what is perhaps the most careful explication of the genesis of Fukuyama's break with neoconservatives and the most sweeping critique of its limitations yet published. A few excerpts:
In the tripartite structure of America at the Crossroads—capsule history of neoconservatism; critique of the way it went awry in Iraq; proposals for a rectified version—the crux of the argument lies in the middle section. Fukuyama's account of the milieu to which he belonged, and its role in the run-up to the war, is level-headed and informative. But it is a view from within that contains a revealing optical illusion. Everything happens as if neoconservatives were the basic driving force behind the march to Baghdad, and it is their ideas that must be cured if America is to get back on track . . . In reality, the front of opinion that pressed for an assault on Iraq was far broader than a particular Republican faction. It included many a liberal and Democrat.
And later:
[Fukuyama's] judgment [that Islamic terrorists have little chance of inflicting serious damage on American society] takes us back to the logic of his larger work as a whole. The celebrated argument of The End of History and the Last Man was that with the defeat of Communism, following that of Fascism, no improvement on liberal capitalism as a form of society was any longer imaginable. The world was still full of conflicts, which would continue to generate unexpected events, but they would not alter this verdict. There was no guarantee of a rapid voyage of humanity from every corner of the earth to the destination of a prosperous, peaceful democracy based on private property, free markets and regular elections, but these institutions were the terminus of historical development. The closure of social evolution now in view could not be regarded as altogether a blessing. For with it would inevitably come a lowering of ideal tension, perhaps even a certain tedium vitae. Nostalgia for more hazardous and heroic times could be foreseen.
Then, the damning critique:
Fukuyama remains fully committed to the American mission of spreading democracy round the world, and the use of all effective means at the disposal of Washington to do so. His criticism of the Bush Administration is that its policies in the Middle East have been not only ineffective but counterproductive. The promotion of internal regime change by the right mixture of economic and political pressures is one thing. Military action to enforce it externally is another, conducive to misfortune. In reality, there is no sharp dividing line between the two in the imperial repertory . . . There is not the faintest suggestion in these pages of any basic change in the staggering accumulation of military bases around the world, or the grip of the United States on the Middle East, let alone symbiosis with Israel. Everything that brought the country to 9/11 remains in place.
Anderson goes on to cite "The Israel Lobby," John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, as a more thoroughgoing and useful critique of American foreign policy. While I haven't read the Fukuyama book, the excerpt printed in the February 19 New York Times Magazine leads me to believe that Anderson may very well be right.
Here's where the web of connections fostered by random reading is filled in. Anderson has been a prominent political theorist for forty years, but it was only recently, with the release an essay collection titled Spectrum (which incidentally features a lovely Morris Louis painting on its cover), that I became familiar with him. The book inspired Christopher Hitchens to sober his tone long enough to provide a cogent review in the March Atlantic. Elsewhere in his Nation review, Anderson makes reference to Paul Berman as an example of a pre-Iraq-war hawkish liberal. Berman reviewed Fukuyama's book for the New York Times Book Review and, lo and behold, Berman—for those three of you who read this site regularly, and the two of you who've made it this far into this post—came up in a post here in late December. There's no point to this promiscuous linking beyond pointing you to various reviews, books, and articles that are of interest, and to that end I'll add two more. The first is Julian Stallabrass's "Spectacle and Terror," the second of a two-part reckoning with Retort's Afflicted Powers in Anderson's New Left Review; the second is Michael Hardt's review and (separate) short feature about Afflicted Powers in the October 2005 Artforum. Phew.
Posted in Around the web, Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Penguin covers
The death last weekend of graphic designer Germano Facetti spurs Rick Poynor to fondly remember Facetti's designs for Penguin paperbacks in the '60s:
The remarkable thing about these paperbacks is that they offered a visual education, too. Even then, it was obvious that Facetti had a prodigious knowledge of art history and an infallible instinct for the way a single image might capture the essence of a book . . . Facetti's 1960s covers remain the very embodiment of the Penguin spirit and style. Collectors cherish them and designers admire the rigour and purity of their designs.
The article has an image gallery, and I mention it not only because I also admire the designs, but because the current issue of Bookforum features an article by Matthew Price (not online) discussing the firm's history and its books' design that is well worth reading.
Posted in . Found always via this permanent link.
April 10, 2006
Finally!
After several months of planning, procuring materials, and procrastination, I've finally built two large new bookshelves. Here are the artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and surveys, from The 20th Century Art Book to Thomas Zipp. Another (slightly larger) shelf is in my home office and is filled with books on the history and theory of art, architecture, and design. Thanks are due to Eric for recommending spring-tension pole design and to Apartment Therapy, which featured the design I eventually chose.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Around the web #11
More time than usual has transpired since the last "Around the Web," and consequently there are far more links to articles and blog posts that have caught my eye.
- Terry Eagleton on Beckett in The Guardian
- Charles Simic on Elizabeth Bishop in the current New York Review of Books (link via Maud Newton)
- A profile, now password-protected, of poet and musician David Berman published March 20 in the New York Sun (link via Bookslut)
- A Q&A with Francine du Plessix Gray in the Boston Globe
- Last Monday, 2006 Whitney Biennial curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne spoke at the Walker Art Center, promising to "respond directly to some of the published criticism of the show." Here is a link to a Walker blog post that will point you to the event's details, an archive of the event's webcast, and an interview with Iles and Vergne.
- Also at the Walker: Sunn0))) and Boris are playing at the museum on May 25. More information here. I'll see Boris in Philadelphia on June 5; Artforum has just published a column by Jan Tumlir on Sunn0))), which is available online here.
- An essay about the nature of creativity by Adam Phillips, who I've mentioned on the site several times, was published on March 12 in the Guardian; Edward Winkleman responded with "Is Inspiration Unexploitable?" on his weblog.
- For those who can't afford the Jeff Koons "Bunny" necklaces produced in collaboration with the designer Stella McCartney (seen in T: The New York Times Style Magazine and elswhere), Grace at design*sponge points out that a $45 laser-cut version is available at the Whitney Museum shop online.
- M.S. Smith at CultureSpace writes about William Gass's new essay collection, A Temple of Texts.
- The Art History Newsletter blog points to a newly published book-length overview of Harald Szeeman's career and a review of it in the Frankfurter Rundschau.
- An interview with Matthew Barney at IndieWire
- Graphic designer William Drenttel visits the Tadao Ando-designed Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis and writes about his "unique, distinctive, personal" experience at DesignObserver.
- The Telegraph publishes "Why architects get it wrong," an excerpt of pop philosopher Alain de Botton's new book, The Architecture of Happiness.
- Olga Grushin, whose novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov has received incredibly wide review attention, is disappointed by Elaine Feinstein's new biography of Anna Akhmatova, and says so in the New York Times Book Review.
- Jill at Inhabitat posts about Elizabeth Demaray's design of a light-weight plastic shell for hermit crabs, which are facing a "massive housing shortage."
- Heart As Arena points to a video of Marillyn Minter's film Food Porn, which aired on Arsenio Hall, Nightline, and other programs in 1989 and 1990.
- At Slate, Ben Yagoda picks apart Michiko Kakutani's reviewing style on the occasion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as critic at the Times. Some present!
"Utterly devoid … wonderfully acute observations … debut novel … savvy social and psychological insights … cringe-making … embarrassing new low": Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless, and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. (She has justly been called out for her near-obsessive use of "lugubrious" and "limn," words that probably have never been said aloud in the history of English.) That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
April 9, 2006
Wanas Foundation, Sweden
I just returned from a three-day trip to southern Sweden. Two days were spent at the Wanas Foundation, a sculpture park on the grounds of a medieval castle; Sweden's largest organic dairy farm is also on the premises. Here are a few pictures:
A few of the farm buildings; the two on the right-hand side have been renovated and are used for temporary exhibitions
Looking across a small lake nestled behind the castle from inside a Dan Graham pavilion
There are a few more pictures here.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
April 8, 2006
"Utopia Station" at Princeton, Pamela M. Lee on the World Social Forum, and Slavoj Zizek in the LRB
On Thursday, March 30, I ventured down to Princeton’s campus for the latter half of “Utopia Station,” a two-day seminar devoted to the concept of free speech. As the press release had it: “We meet to examine this question and to move it.” I was interested in how this program of “talks, screenings, messages and images” would function in two ways. First, as part of a larger, two-year project at Princeton focusing on the study of utopia and dystopia in history, and second, as part of the larger “Utopia Station” project, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and which has manifested itself variously since then.
Molly Nesbit, who is the ostensible ringleader of the project (despite the fact that it was conceived with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and a host of other artists, curators, and critics), emceed the affair. Her first words were aimed at disarming potential critics, specifically the capital-H Historians in the house who have been treated to eighteen months’ worth of serious academic papers on the topics at hand, and emphasized the experimental (if not quite provisional) nature of the mixed-media presentations on that day’s docket. The program itself was impressive, but almost from the start technical difficulties plagued the presenters and unexpected absences shortened the proceedings. Princeton’s computers did not play some of the artists’ DVDs properly: We saw only half of a video by Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno, and what footage we did see was punctuated by glitches and moments without sound. Obrist had left after Wednesday’s presentation, and neither Immanuel Wallerstein nor Martha Rosler could attend; Nesbit read short notes from all three. The dwindling audience murmured.
And yet there were rousing presentations. Liam Gillick, who was on stage with Carolee Schneeman and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the outset of the afternoon, outlined in eleven succinct points many problems with using the words “free” and “speech” in this context. (Unfortunately he read too quickly and there was no opportunity to discuss what he said.) A twenty-minute phone call to Michael Hardt, in Seattle, was illuminating, as the critic and theorist outlined his collaborative working process with Antonio Negri as well as the contours of the project now holding the duo’s attention. (A subsequent, pre-planned call to Negri was met with an answering machine.) Edouard Glissant delivered a rather poetic paper envisioning one particular type of utopia, translated on the fly from the French by a young woman who would have benefited from having more time to prepare her words. At the end of the evening, and with the help of an audience member’s laptop, we were treated to two short videos by Thomas Bayrle and a preview of the third part of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest film cycle.
If judged on the terms it set out for itself, the second day of “Utopia Station” was not a success. Several speakers referred to the marathon discussions sparked by the first day’s presentations; Thursday was marked by its lack of interaction. Although I did not talk to any Princeton historians in attendance, it seemed to me that the attempt to shoehorn this presentation into the wider seminar mostly served to point out the deficiencies in “Utopia Station.” Having not attended the opening of “Utopia Station” in Venice three years ago, I was unable to ascertain fully the relationship of Thursday’s presentation to the original, though being at Princeton was certainly more intriguing—despite the imperfections—than my encounter with the rather inert remnants of the original on site in Venice two months after the Biennale opened.
Three years on from its initial viewing, there’s little more to be milked from the same cast of characters discussing (more or less) the same topics. But the connections that can be fostered by its drawing power are many. Despite my disappointment with the outcome of this “Utopia Station” event, the day trip was salvaged by an encounter with Bayrle and his wife on the train ride back to New York. He offered further thoughts on the films we saw, and on the works now on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and clearly warmed to having four young interlocuters—teaching for twenty-odd years at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt has not dimmed his passion for pedagogical discourse. It was a great conversation . . . one that I wish would have taken place in the auditorium at Princeton.
At one point Molly Nesbit mentioned hearing Michael Hardt speak at Porto Alegre, which was a reference to a presentation he gave at the World Social Forum when it was held in that Brazilian town. Pamela M. Lee has an article on the WSF in the current Artforum. From that article:
Arguably, the relative merit of the WSF's activities is measured less by the concrete implementation of policy than by the kinds of relationships the gatherings produce—a proposition that would seem to raise the question, How might this other world look? What role, in other words, would the visual in general (and art more conditionally) play in the WSF's production and facilitation of a "world process"?
And later:
Indeed, what drew the greatest share of attention at the opening rally and elsewhere were not so much the classic signifiers of revolutionary politics, which fell just this side of perfunctory or routinized, but the circulation of media itself. In countless occasions that mimed something of the feedback-loop logic of the old Sony Porta-Pak, one saw participants videotaping, filming, or photographing other participants who, in turn, were doing exactly the same thing. This was a kind of global mirroring process in which capturing the act of mediation—whether the ad hoc TV stations scattered around the forum's dispersed sites or the live projections in the more heavily subscribed sessions—seemed the most vital form of representation of all. What was at stake seemed not so much a clearly consolidated image of this media (that would be CNN territory, after all), but rather a sense of its potential mobility.
Slavoj Zizek has an article on a related topic, though his is not refracted through the lens of art. "Nobody has to be vile," excoriates the "liberal communists" who have imported values championed at the World Social Forum (held this year in Caracas, Venezuela) to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, specifically Bill Gates and George Soros. To wit:
Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.
And later:
According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today.
Posted in Art, Miscellaneous, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 5, 2006
Of note: Felix Gonzalez-Torres to represent US at 2007 Venice Biennale
Everyone knows my biggest dream is to break news on this would-be "weblog," so here is some, courtesy of the U.S. State Department:
The U.S. Department of State is pleased to announce the results of an open competition to select the U.S. representative to the 2007 Venice Biennale. Pursuant to the recommendation of the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE), the Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) has selected an exhibition of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) to represent the United States. Nancy Spector, Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, will be the U.S. Commissioner and will organize the exhibition.Born in Cuba, Felix Gonzalez-Torres is noted for a body of work that has proven to be profoundly influential for a younger generation of artists. Employing simple, everyday materials, his work investigates methods of distribution, process, and audience participation. For the exhibition, Ms. Spector will include a new work, made from a drawing by Mr. Gonzalez-Torres but unrealized in his lifetime.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
April 4, 2006
Double dose of Sontag
Quick, undigested links: On Sunday, James Tata linked to David Rieff's New York Times Magazine essay about the death of his mother, Susan Sontag, and the health care that she received in the months leading up to it. Then, earlier today, I saw a link to Lisa Levy's "Critical Intimacy," an article in the April issue of The Believer that compares "the paradoxical obituaries" of Sontag.