October 4, 2006
Milan Kundera on fame
In "The Hugoliad," a 1935 pamphlet against Victor Hugo, the playright Eugène Ionesco, who was twenty-six and still living in Romania, wrote, "The characteristic of the biography of famous men is that they wanted to be famous. The characteristic of the biography of all men is that they did not want to be, or they never thought of being, famous men. . . . A famous man is disgusting."
Let us try to sharpen the terminology: a man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athletes, artists.
Artists' fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one's death is inseparably bound to the artist's probity. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania.
Let us try to sharpen the terminology: a man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athletes, artists.
Artists' fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one's death is inseparably bound to the artist's probity. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania.
That excerpt comes from Kundera's essay in this week's New Yorker, "What Is a Novelist?" It is not online, but worth reading in its entirety. As you may have noticed, I have not written much during the past few days, but simply pointed to articles of note. There is a reason for this, and, due to other obligations, this may be the last post of the week. Bear with me.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
October 3, 2006
Two from Texte zur Kunst
The German art magazine Texte zur Kunst has recently increased its English-language content and its web presence. Here are excerpts from two pieces in the September issue.
First, Sam Lewitt reviews "Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne" at the ICA Philadelphia:
[Curator Bennett] Simpson endeavors to locate the spirit of resistance to market forces in Cologne's hey day, but like the ideological ambiguity of Kippenberger's imperative, there is a haziness as to the modality of his search: is the exhibition thematic or about social milieu? If either or some combination of both, then what is the specificity of "Cologne" in relation to the present, and further, what is the specificity of the present to the mythical after-image of Cologne in the 80s and 90s?This ambiguity is codified rather than resolved by the inclusion of works by several artists and artist groups that had no direct contact with Cologne; The "Out" of the exhibition title extends to a space-time precariously constellated between direct influence and a posited spirit of practice. Simpson's sensitivity to the pitfalls of his endeavor is clear in his catalogue essay where he states that "MYOL" was: "predicated on a belief that historical reception is both ongoing and contradictory, a product of desires that are political and intellectual as well as libidinal and economic." As viewers navigate "MYOL"'s four successive rooms, this complex characterization of historical reception at times loses distinctiveness as a specifically historical phenomenon as it is put to the curatorial test.
Second, Rosalind E. Krauss reviews "Los Angeles 1955–1985" at the Centre Pompidou:
What is also invisible is the rivalry between Los Angeles and New York resulting not only in a group of very ambitious galleries such as Ferus, Ace and Dwan, but also of the rival art magazine Artforum, determined to wrest the grip of the historical account of the avant-garde from the East Coast critical establishment. The brilliant editorship of Philip Leider propelled Artforum to the front of critical discourse and reinforced the prescience of the L.A. dealers such as Irving Blum for their choices, which included the exhibition of Warhol's "Campbell Soup Cans" at Ferus in 1962, or of Yves Klein's blue monochromes at Dwan in 1961. The wealth of Los Angeles could also support ambitious museums of advanced art, whose talented curators supported the art scene as well. These were Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum and Maurice Tuchman at the L.A. County Museum of Contemporary Art (the site of the important "Art and Technology" exhibition).New York could boast of none of this. Its art magazines, such as Art News, dealt in belle-lettristic gush, rather than close analysis. Its schools were still in thrall to the effects of Abstract Expressionism. Its only advantages came in the form of the artists' housing and studios available in the spacious downtown lofts of SoHo, and the galleries these spawned. The other was the presence of Clement Greenberg, whose precise, spare prose focused the formal features of the works he discussed and produced the historical groupings that gave those features meaning.
Because the Texte zur Kunst website uses frames, both of the review links take you to pages that only contain the text of the review; to access the magazine's homepage, click the link at the top of the entry.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Sam Lipsyte hits the road with Michel Houellebecq
Any minute now Michel Houellebecq, the bad boy of French literature, is going to do something very, very bad. It’s true I’ve been on the road with him all week and his behavior has been impeccable, but something’s got to give. There’s too much history. What about his purported obsession with sex clubs and prostitutes? What about his penchant for hitting on female journalists, explaining that only one night with him will guarantee the real story? What about the time he called Islam “the stupidest religion”? Surely, the man’s going to bust out with something reprehensible, and now, in his smoke-filled semi-suite at the Bel Age in L.A., is as good a time as any. He flies back to Europe tomorrow.
More from the October issue of The Believer here.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Adrian Searle's Turner pick: Tomma Abts
There may well be those who feel their lives have been ruined by their participation in the Turner prize, which itself includes a modicum of television exposure. Will the Turner contenders be queuing, in the full gaze of visitors to the show, to tell the stories of their ruin for [Phil] Collins's project, after the winner is announced? Who should win anyway? Who is making the best art, and what does that mean nowadays? [Tomma] Abts and Collins are the most developed in my view. I think Collins has made more concise and telling works elsewhere. Abts's quiet and disturbing paintings seem utterly right and unexpected. They ought to win.
Read the full story here.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Terry Eagleton on "political Beckett"
A friend suggested I read Terry Eagleton's article in the current New Left Review, "Political Beckett?" I'm glad that I did. The article is available online only to subscribers, so here's a brief excerpt:
Beckett, then, was one of the few modernist artists to become a militant of the left rather than the right. And James Knowlson [Beckett's official biographer] is surely right to maintain that 'many of the features of his later prose and plays arise directly from his experience of radical uncertainty, disorientation, exile, hunger and need'. What we see in his work is not some timeless condition humaine, but war-torn twentieth-century Europe. It is, as Adorno recognized, an art after Auschwitz, one which keeps faith in its austere minimalism and unremitted bleakness with silence, terror and non-being. His writing is as thin as is compatible with being barely perceptible. There is not even enough meaning to be able to give a name to what is awry with us. [ . . . ] He shares with his compatriot Swift a savage delight in diminishment.Beckett's art maintains a compact with failure in the teeth of Nazi triumphalism, undoing its lethal absolutism with the weapons of ambiguity and indeterminacy. His favourite word, he commented, was 'perhaps'. Against fascism's megalomaniac totalities, he pits the fragmentary and unfinished. In his Socratic way, Beckett preferred ignorance to knowledge, presumably because it resulted in fewer corpses. If his works are morosely, hilariously conscious of the fact that they might just as well never have existed—that their presence is as farcically gratuitous as the cosmos itself—it is just this sense of contingency, one quite as much comic as tragic, that can be turned against the murderous mythologies of necessity.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
October 2, 2006
Jerry Saltz on "the art world jungle"
Staggering numbers of people now complain about how "big" and "out of control" the art world, especially Chelsea, is. True, 300 galleries in one neighborhood is daunting. Still, it's absurd to claim, as many do, that a gallery is bad because it's in Chelsea or better because it's not. There's a depressing never mentioned reason for the bigness of Chelsea. Shockingly, among Manhattan's big-four museums, only the Met has galleries devoted to the permanent display of the art of the last 20 years. Visitors to MOMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim will only see whatever rotating contemporary shows happen to be up. Works of contemporary art cannot be studied over time.
In other words, the very art these museums make such a fuss about being committed to is given almost no shrift at all. It's great that these museums are buying contemporary art; it's pathetic that they're putting almost all of it into storage. Adding to the problem, Dia, one of New York's most important institutions dedicated to rotating exhibitions of cutting-edge art, has moved out of the city altogether. Leaving Manhattan high and dry is unforgivable. Those who bemoan Chelsea's bigness forget that whatever else it is, Chelsea is ipso facto the largest museum of contemporary art that we have.
In other words, the very art these museums make such a fuss about being committed to is given almost no shrift at all. It's great that these museums are buying contemporary art; it's pathetic that they're putting almost all of it into storage. Adding to the problem, Dia, one of New York's most important institutions dedicated to rotating exhibitions of cutting-edge art, has moved out of the city altogether. Leaving Manhattan high and dry is unforgivable. Those who bemoan Chelsea's bigness forget that whatever else it is, Chelsea is ipso facto the largest museum of contemporary art that we have.
More from the Village Voice here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Roger Angell on editing
In the New Yorker's online-only section this week is an interview with Roger Angell, who has just celebrated his fiftieth anniversary on the staff of the magazine and recently published Let Me Finish, a memoir. Here's his response to a question about editing:
Well, I don’t do as much editing as I once did. I used to read a lot of young writers, a lot of new writers, and I don’t do that anymore. We have a young and very talented fiction staff, and most writers are young, and I think that flood of fiction should be read by young people. If we’re close to buying something, sometimes I get asked to read a story, and I can say, “This is great,” if I think so, or “My God, you must be crazy.”I’m getting ready to do a New Yorker Festival appearance on a panel about editing. I’ve never talked about editing before. One of the things I’m going to say is that the first job of a fiction editor is to say no. You turn down a lot of bad stuff and a lot of pretty good stuff, too. This is the way it should be. What I used to love more than anything was to become aware of a young writer who hadn’t quite got it together yet, and to start sending stuff back, if I had to, but also say what I liked in the story. Sometimes you’d see writers beginning to understand what kind of a writer they were and what they could do, and as their capacities grew they might give us a story we could run. Not a New Yorker story—that’s the mistake everybody makes, that there is a New Yorker story—but the best this writer can do. You have to edit within their capabilities, particularly with fiction writers. The only thing Shawn ever told me in the way of advice—I put this into my book—was that it’s no great trick to edit a story and make it the greatest story ever written. He said, “Anybody can do that. It’s much harder to edit a story and help make it the best story this writer can write this week.”
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Adam Kirsch on Hart Crane in the New Yorker
The interpretation of Crane’s life as a dire fable of the age has shaped his reputation ever since. Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, two of his best friends and two of the best critics of modern American poetry, saw his story primarily as a warning. For Winters, he was a noble spirit destroyed by false principles, “a saint of the wrong religion”; for Tate, his poetry had “incalculable moral value,” but mainly because “it reveals our defects in their extremity.” No wonder Crane remains a special case in the canon of American modernism, his reputation never quite as secure as that of Eliot or Stevens. Langdon Hammer, a professor of English at Yale, and one of Crane’s most intelligent advocates, has written that his poetry “must be repeatedly ‘introduced’ again, brought in, reclaimed. . . . Crane still does not have a place.”
At last, however, Crane has been given a place, the most unassailable one in American letters: a volume of his own in the Library of America. “Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters,” edited by Hammer, can be seen as a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature.
[ . . . ]
No poet since Keats had achieved this kind of elated lyricism. In fact, while Crane was a modernist by vocation, he stands more comfortably in the grand tradition of English poetry than most twentieth-century poets do. In an age of free verse, he usually wrote in iambic pentameter and often used rhyme; on the page, his poems look much more conventional than the broken lines of Williams or the somersaults of Cummings. While Crane sometimes sounds like Rimbaud, his work owes less to the French Symbolists—whom he could not read fluently—than to the amplified rhetoric of the Elizabethans, especially Christopher Marlowe. He adored “the glorious cornucopia that Tamburlaine shakes page after page,” and his own verse conveys a similar sense of confused abundance.
At last, however, Crane has been given a place, the most unassailable one in American letters: a volume of his own in the Library of America. “Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters,” edited by Hammer, can be seen as a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature.
[ . . . ]
No poet since Keats had achieved this kind of elated lyricism. In fact, while Crane was a modernist by vocation, he stands more comfortably in the grand tradition of English poetry than most twentieth-century poets do. In an age of free verse, he usually wrote in iambic pentameter and often used rhyme; on the page, his poems look much more conventional than the broken lines of Williams or the somersaults of Cummings. While Crane sometimes sounds like Rimbaud, his work owes less to the French Symbolists—whom he could not read fluently—than to the amplified rhetoric of the Elizabethans, especially Christopher Marlowe. He adored “the glorious cornucopia that Tamburlaine shakes page after page,” and his own verse conveys a similar sense of confused abundance.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Review-essays on Benjamin and Greenberg in The Nation
The October 16 issue of The Nation contains two review-essays worth reading. The first, by Richard Wolin, reviews Berlin Childhood around 1900 and On Hashish, the two thin Walter Benjamin volumes recently published by Harvard University Press, alongside Michael Löwy's Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" (Verso). An excerpt:
Yet Benjamin knew that by infusing Marxist thought with the redemptive components that had been banished by the nineteenth-century esprit de sérieux, he was playing a dangerous game. For while orthodox Marxists prattled on about the prosaic ends of "scientific socialism," "experience" (or Erlebnis) had become the exclusive province of the reactionary right—Lebensphilosophie, the German Youth Movement and literary Fascists like Ernst Jünger. Benjamin's lifelong theoretical battle was to wrest the concept of experience from the right's monopoly and to turn it to the ends of the revolutionary left.
The other, by Artforum's own Barry Schwabsky, concerns two new books about the critic Clement Greenberg, Alice Goldfarb Marquis's Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (MFA Publications) and Caroline Jones's Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (University of Chicago Press). Jones, whose modern art seminar at Boston University first provoked my interest in art history, receives mostly kind treatment:
Readers who want a better understanding of what Greenberg wrote and why, and above all of why what he wrote was so significant, would in any case be better off if they ignored both biographies and did the harder but more rewarding work of reading Jones's dense, indeed sometimes maddeningly verbose, "critical history." Like Marquis, Jones leans on biographical material culled from Rubenfeld and The Harold Letters along with Greenberg's own writings as well as the reactions to (and against) Greenberg by the art critics and historians who followed in his footsteps; but she brings to all this an analytical intensity, an almost ferocious determination to dig into the text, that makes the biographers' declarative flatness seem dull by comparison. The hundred pages she spends analyzing Greenberg's writings on Pollock—minutely sifting the critic's words through her own searching re-examination of the paintings he had in view—are alone worth the price of the ticket.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Two new MP3s: Christopher Willits and Joseph Suchy
At the bottom of the middle column you will find two new MP3s available for download. The tracks are by two of my favorite experimental-guitar-and-laptop musicians, Joseph Suchy (Germany) and Christopher Willits (USA).
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
October 1, 2006
Momus on John Bock's Medusa im Tam Tam Club
An artist friend who lives in Berlin was in town last week, and over dinner she mentioned her admiration for the fact that German artists like John Bock and Jonathan Meese were expanding their practice and creating pieces for the theater. As she noted, theater is an art form appreciated by a far broader public in Germany than elsewhere (or, for that matter, than contemporary art in galleries and museums). Over the weekend Bock presented the last of five performances of his new work, Medusa im Tam Tam Club, at the Staatsoper in Berlin, and Momus has just posted a report, with pictures, on his site.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Interview with Joseph Leo Koerner
Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook has published an interview with art historian Joseph Leo Koerner that discusses Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, his book The Reformation of the Image (University of Chicago Press), and modern and contemporary artists and art historians. An excerpt:
Still, I was raised in a household that confessed the heretical creed that nothing of enduring value would ever produced under the banner of Modernism. And I became an art historian partly as a response to (or as Freud might say, as repression of) this primal critical scene; I therefore place little weight on my personal judgements on modern art, though that does not keep me from eclectically loving many contemporary painters—Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, and Francesco Clemente are all figures who have meant a lot to me.I feel much freer approaching contemporary photographers. I am a huge admirer of Jeff Wall, and hearing him explain his procedures made me even more fascinated by his example. I enjoy the big photos of Andreas Gursky, partly because I find the modern spaces he photographs naturally beautiful to begin with—similarly the coal mines shot by the Bechers. Having spent much of my life in Vienna, I am fascinated by the nostalgic element of early photographs (Atget) and by the magical photograms made by Adam Fuss. I was bowled over by the first installation I visted by Ilya Kabakov. I am especially intrigued by the installations that feature deliberately obsolete oil paintings; they’re painted by Kabakov, but purport to be by some unknown artist working without a public somewhere in Russia. These, together with the particular apartment house interiors Kabakov creates, transport me back to my childhood in Vienna, where my father was took us every year, and where he painted his peculiar canvases often without any public to see them.
[ . . . ]
These days the books currently on my shelf that I reach for most often are ones by Bruno Latour, Michael Taussig, Valentin Groebner, and Miguel Tamen. The authors I return to, again and again over the years, and with changing responses, are Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Paul de Man. When I feel I am losing my voice and need to find it again, I read Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka—I listen to their cadences and how they reason about completely unreasonable or unspeakable things. When I feel I am losing my intellectual energy, try to write something about my father. Ambivalence is a great energizer, I think.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Two articles on art in Sunday magazines
In this weekend's Observer, 2006 Turner Prize juror Lynn Barber recounts her yearlong experience with horror:
At first, my friends were keen to accompany me, but they all tried it once and never again. The general reaction was incredulity that we'd driven through traffic jams for two hours in order to see a show consisting of three slabs of concrete and a tyre. 'Is this all?' was the usual plaint. Or we'd be told that the video/DVD/sound installation/whatever was under repair but should be working again next week. Galleries are incredibly resistant to the idea that they might in any sense welcome the public.[ . . . ]
The effect of looking at an awful lot of art in a short space of time, and with an increasingly bad temper, as I did, is that your judgment goes haywire. So much passes in a blur that if you find anything at all different or memorable, you are prepared to hail it as the next Picasso.
[ . . . ]
Art dinners are odd affairs, usually held in private rooms of fashionable restaurants, for 30 or 40 people. It is never clear who is paying (though somebody is) or why you are there. Nobody is ever properly introduced, so you spend half the evening trying to work out who everyone is. I probably insulted people left and right by asking if they ran a gallery when they were, say, head of Italy's national museums, but how are you supposed to know that stuff when nobody tells you?
[ . . . ]
I was also making the big mistake, I now realise, of sticking to the Turner rules. I thought, because I'd been told, that the artists had to be nominated for a particular show, which meant, I would have thought, that one had to have seen the show. Only when we met to draw up the shortlist did I realise that none of the judges had seen all the shows, and that my fears about having to fly to Sao Paolo were groundless. One of the judges said you could often see the shows better online. Why didn't I think of that?
The article is quite long, and alternates philistinism (something she accuses others of) with truth-telling about the absurdities of the art world. It's an entertaining—if not altogether insightful—read.
Elsewhere, Bruce Hainley publishes a paean to the Los Angeles art scene in the New York Times Magazine. It begins:
I am amused by fancy art-world types who breeze into Los Angeles planning to “get” the scene in a few days. They would have better luck reading “In Search of Lost Time” over a long weekend. America’s second-largest city sprawls—physically, aesthetically, socially—over nearly 500 square miles, so any attempt to nutshell the burg and its cultural bazaar takes on comic aspects. Note that the Pompidou Center’s recent survey of Los Angeles art was called “The Birth of an Artistic Capital” and that Michael Govan, the new director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has declared Los Angeles the new New York, forgetting perhaps that Angelenos have never wished to be New Yorkers and that long before the 1955 birth date pronounced by the Pompidou, Hollywood was producing things as provocative, philosophical and influential as anything given the name of, well, art.
Be sure to look at the online slideshow of Ari Marcopolous photographs.