May 4, 2018 On Art Seeing Beyond the Tip of Your Nose By Lawrence Weschler David Hockney, Grand Canyon II, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 96″. David Hockney’s latest painterly passion, the results of which are currently on display at the Pace Gallery in New York City, consists of an elaboration of his ongoing fascination with reverse perspective, this time by way of notched hexagonal canvases, such as the one above. As I discussed in my catalogue essay for the show, this current round in his interest was in part spurred by his encounters with the thinking of an early-twentieth-century Russian Orthodox monk, but for my own part, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the work of Trevor and Ryan Oakes, young identical twin artists whose ideas I’ve been following for several years (as has David, after I introduced them to him). Unlike the sorts of identical twins who develop secret languages from infancy, Trevor and Ryan (born in 1982), out of West Virginia and before that Colorado, had been carrying on a conversation, virtually since toddlerhood, on the nature of bifocal vision—what it is like, that is, to see with two eyes. (Around age ten, their parents once told me, they could be found sitting on stumps out in the woods, twenty feet apart, trying to work out what the depth perception might be of a dragon with eyes that far apart.) Notwithstanding their tender years, they’d been thinking about this stuff a long time—almost as far back as David when he started making his Polaroid collages. And as it happens, the ideas that seem most pertinent to Hockney’s current concerns are the twins’ theories on depth perception, which they developed when studying together at Cooper Union as they developed a system for making camera-obscura-exact drawings deploying no other equipment than their own two eyes (a facility that obviously came to fascinate Hockney). Read More
May 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Smoke By John Berger PROLOGUE There’s never smoke without fire. This was first said by someone suggesting a rumor might be well-founded. Words in the media today often function like a smoke screen for hiding flames. The government of North Korea has just announced that they have tested an H-bomb fired from a submarine. Endless discussion about whether this is true or a bluff. No reflections around the fact that in the oceans of the world there are about sixty fully armed nuclear submarines awaiting instructions day and night. Read More
May 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Shirley Hazzard at the 92nd Street Y By Stacy Schiff “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Stacy Schiff reflects on a recording of Shirley Hazzard’s reading from The Transit of Venus in December 1981. It had snowed that morning. It rained hard that evening. Both Shirley Hazzard and F. D. Reeve, who introduced her, thanked the audience for braving the downpour. The weather suited the occasion: no one who has ever picked up The Transit of Venus, for which Hazzard that fall won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is likely to have forgotten the tempest with which the novel opens, one that seems to split earth from sky to deliver a man—amid streaming mud, crackling thunder, wet wool, and a dissolving suitcase—to his destiny. He advances, Hazzard tells us, the weather whipping up her prose, into the frame from the left-hand corner, assuming his place in the landscape “under a branch of lightning.” I am not the only reader who has read those lines under the impression that Hazzard was riffing on another tempest, one painted in the early sixteenth century by Giorgione. She is that kind of writer. Read More
May 3, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Lie to Yourself, What You Will Lose Is Yourself By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, My seventy-two-year-old mother used to wake up early every day and text me the weather so I could dress accordingly before I left for work. I’m twenty-seven years old and—I am proud to admit—fully capable of checking the weather myself. But despite my repeated protests, my mother texted me daily anyway. She passed away suddenly in late February. We shared so many quirky traditions that feel lost to me now. I was wondering: Do you have a poem that might speak to these small gestures of love, either from the perspective of what it’s like to give them or to receive them? Yours, Missing the Weather Dear Missing, Your mother’s texting was an irreplaceable gift, undoubtedly one of many such gifts she gave you. At first, my instinct was to send you Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” (“What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices” being among the language’s great articulations of our inability to appreciate small gestures of love in the moment they’re given). But then I thought it would be better to give you something that spoke specifically to maternal love and its associate—too often thankless—labors. Read More
May 2, 2018 Arts & Culture Black and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds By Ed Park Around the start of the first millennium, a territory on the northern coast of Africa fell under control of the Romans, who dubbed it “Mauretania,” possibly derived from a native word or from the Greek for “dark” (or “obscure”)—the root that eventually informed the term Moor. Centuries later, the Cunard Line affixed the name to a giant ship, built in Newcastle and launched in 1906, which for several years enjoyed distinction as both the world’s fastest and largest ocean liner, beloved by many, though called by Kipling “the monstrous nine-decked city.” It was scrapped between 1935 and 1937, and parts of the interior found a home in a pub in Bristol. Eight decades after the RMS Mauretania’s maiden voyage, Chris Reynolds, a Welsh-born artist in his mid twenties, embarked on what would be his life’s work, a beguiling series of loosely connected stories that he called Mauretania Comics. The work had nothing to do with that remote place or with seafaring vessels of yore, and the name was just one of its many elusive mysteries. The stories were and are easy to consume but tantalizingly difficult to characterize. Droll dialogue gives way to utterly melancholy voiceover; locales like “The Lighted Cities” and “Mouth City” are mapped on the same imaginative terrain as some version of England, one where a blasted figure out of J. G. Ballard might run across Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Monitor, Mauretania’s signature character, always dons a helmet with a striplike visor masking his eyes. (Today he wouldn’t look so out of place: it resembles nothing so much as a virtual-reality headpiece.) The architecture alone is worth the trip: lipstick-shaped temples of music, a house like a geodesic dome crossed with a web made by a spider on acid. Read More
May 2, 2018 Artificial Intelligentsia How to Write Personalities for the AI Around Us By Mariana Lin You just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans. —Dr. Lanning in I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov As a little twenty-first-century cocktail-party experiment, quote that line to someone, and observe whether it elicits hope or fear. Asimov understood the core terror of AI-human relations: replication, confusion, eventual domination, and chaos. What makes his statement discomfiting nowadays is how quickly we are advancing toward a reality in which those relations are increasingly commonplace. Yet it stands to reason that more versions of the “very best of humans”—or, alternatively, more things that bring out the “very best of humans”—would make the world a better place. Today the list of AI who are household names is short: Siri, Watson, Alexa, Sophia, Paro, Cortana, Pepper, Erica … But on a day not far from tomorrow, I’m quite sure this list will be a hundred times as long. The AI arena is expanding rapidly, and virtual and robotic products are being developed as quickly as we are finding needs for them. Within a decade or so, AI will be everywhere, corporeally and incorporeally living among us: driving us, assisting in medicine, teaching our children, guiding us on tours, getting our coffee, or, perhaps more important, spouting original, personally crafted limericks. If we design our AI to simply function well, our society may progress with increased speed in efficiency and convenience. But if we are also designing them to have thoughtful personalities and belief systems, our society may advance in areas where we have ostensibly made less progress—enhancing joy, delight, compassion, and deeper relationships. Read More