May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Light Effects: On Miyoko Ito’s Abstract Inventions By Dan Nadel Center Stage, 1980, oil on canvas. In the fifties, when she was in her early thirties, Miyoko Ito was “called an old lady painter, passe.” She recalled the slight when she was sixty and nearing the end of her life, yet still decades away from recognition. Now, thirty-five years after her death, her work looks positively avant-garde for any time. Paintings from her most inventive period, the seventies and early eighties, were recently the subject of “Heart of Hearts” at Artists Space in New York, curated by Jordan Stein. (The show originated at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.) Ito’s work is brilliantly sui generis: it touches on the familiar styles of surrealism, minimal abstraction, and synthetic cubism to create meditative color spaces of intermingling forms that allude to landscapes, sexual organs, and urban architecture. For decades, Ito, who spent her adult life in Chicago, has been a kind of cult figure for certain painters and critics (myself included). She was an outlier: Ito made abstract paintings at a time when her adopted city was mostly interested in figuration, and unlike many of her younger peers, she did not exhibit with a consistent group of artists. She also made her finest work at a time when painting as a medium and surrealism as a mode had been critically discredited. Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be “Brooklyn Born”? By Naima Coster I am looking for a place to live. I’ll be moving this summer, and in my wildest fantasies, I’m headed somewhere I can afford both a mortgage and my steep student-loan payments. I know New York City isn’t that place, but I continue kicking around the idea of a return—Brooklyn, in particular, haunts me because it once felt like home and then didn’t anymore. Perhaps I wrote my first novel, Halsey Street, about gentrified Bed-Stuy, because I wanted to have a kind of ownership of Brooklyn on the page, if not in deed. For the last few years, I’ve been in Durham, North Carolina. This city is undergoing its own gentrification. I’ve seen all the telltale signs: new breweries and hotel bars, the influx of money and affluent patrons. One café downtown even sells “Brooklyn drip,” four dollars for a large. In Durham, I’m aware of the renewal and displacement, but I spend far less time thinking of how I fit in. When I run into New Yorkers who fled the city for North Carolina, we wind up talking about Brooklyn or the Bronx, the difficulties of life there. Maybe it’s because for us, Durham is still affordable compared to New York, or else because it’s easiest to mourn the displacement that displaced you. It’s been unsettling to notice in myself the same kind of relative apathy and self-interest that, in my novel, I wrote into the characters who move from the West Village to Bed-Stuy. Read More
May 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Why Are We So Fascinated by Cults? By Kirstin Allio Still from Wild Wild Country. In March, I sent an announcement around to friends and colleagues: watch out for my new novel, Buddhism for Western Children. It’s a spiraling story of a powerful, manipulative guru versus a boy who must escape to recover his will, I wrote, and it profiles Western lust for Eastern spiritual mystique and tradition. I got a lot of wonderful goodwill in response, and also quite a few, Wait—is this like Wild Wild Country? What was Wild Wild Country? I don’t watch TV, a habit left over from my antiworldly, culty childhood, on which my novel is loosely based, but now, obligated, I turned on Netflix. Like so many others, I was hooked, and I began to wonder anew why accounts of cults—novels, movies, docudramas—titillate and resonate time and again. Read More
May 18, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Garbage Gods, Bachelors, and Doinks By The Paris Review “Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder,” 2018. Installation view. Photo: Lance Brewer, courtesy of Red Bull Arts New York. © The Rammellzee Estate 2018. I first learned about the artist Rammellzee from Dave Tompkins’s book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, and I saw his Letter Racer sculptures in an exhibition a few years ago (which Tompkins wrote about for the Daily). Rammellzee is easily one of the most unique and most overlooked artists of the past fifty years, but until seeing the survey “Racing for Thunder” this week at Red Bull Arts New York, I hadn’t realized the extent of his genius. It’s impossible to sum up the breadth and depth of his Ikonoklast Panzerism (in which language is armored for protection) and the prophetic Gothic Futurist project in a few sentences—overlapping modes of music, graffiti, collage, performance, sculpture, writing. He worked according to faith and intellect and intense creativity. Included in this show are his Garbage Gods, intricate costumes constructed from material found on the streets of New York. (His loft-studio, the Battle Station, was on Laight Street in Tribeca.) Each figure is composed of and encrusted with myriad small objects—belt buckles, calculators, radio antennae, jewelry, lots of random plastic stuff—but the individual items disappear into the form of the structure; the whole is the sum of its parts. In these costumes, the fluidity of Rammellzee’s vision is most apparent: in a bit of discarded nothingness, he saw not just a larger creation but a world, a system, and a future. —Nicole Rudick Read More
May 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Arshile Gorky’s Muse Recalls Their First Date By Mougouch Fielding Gorky and Fielding at an early stage of their relationship, taken by her brother on a beach near Norfolk, Virginia, in 1941. Image courtesy the Arshile Gorky Foundation. Like most troubled romances, that between the famed Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky and Agnes Magruder (who later became Agnes Gorky Fielding) began with a misunderstanding. In February 1941, Willem de Kooning and Elaine Fried, themselves soon to be wed, encouraged the pair to attend a party so that they might meet. Gorky was expecting a blond, Agnes an extrovert, and though their expectations were initially disappointed, they quickly fell in love. He called her “Mougouch” (little mighty one), which she took as her name, and she moved into his apartment within the month. She became his muse, and together they had two children. Her life, in the years that followed, became consumed with housework, an occupation she resented with increasing disdain. Soon, things took a dark turn: the barn that housed Gorky’s paintings burned down; he was diagnosed with rectal cancer and underwent a colostomy; she had an affair with a Surrealist; he had a car accident in which he broke his neck and temporarily paralyzed his painting arm; she tried to soothe him; he pushed her down the stairs. When she and their children fled for her mother’s in Virginia, he hanged himself in a shed. She continued to shepherd his legacy, arranging exhibitions and sales of his work. Here and in Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song, edited by Matthew Spender, she recounts her initial meetings with him. Read More
May 18, 2018 On Writing For Sarah By Antoine Wilson I was drinking coffee with a friend in Los Angeles, in an adorable cafe that also happened to sell books. On a whim, I decided to see if they had any of mine. I made my way to the w’s, and there it was—my first novel—on the shelf. I felt happiness followed immediately by anxiety. Why had nobody purchased it? I opened the book and realized it was a used copy. There was the inscription: “For Sarah—I hope you enjoy my twisted little book!” Followed by my signature and the date. I went through a mental Rolodex, trying to figure out who Sarah might have been. I knew many Sarahs—it must have been one of the most popular girl’s names in the early seventies. I pictured first the writer Sarahs, several of whom I respected greatly as my peers or my same-age betters. I tried to remember whose names ended with an h and whose didn’t. I wanted to impress these Sarahs. I wanted them to find my work as valuable as I had found theirs. It pained me to imagine one of them deaccessioning an inscribed copy of my first novel. Read More