October 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Documenta’s False Optimism By Sarah Cowan The Google results for “he made the trains run on time” were loading slowly on my phone because the Wi-Fi wasn’t really working at the Frankfurt train station. I could glean from the summary text of the first results that the saying is a verified myth; it turns out there are no benefits to fascism. Information about my delayed train was echoing incoherently from the platform loudspeaker. I hadn’t slept since I woke up in New York twenty-four hours earlier and knew I would have to stay awake for another full day once I got to Kassel for Documenta 14. Documenta itself started as a postmortem on fascism, particularly the Nazi’s erasure of art history in service of a narrative considered more desirable. On my first afternoon there, a tour guide told me that the exhibition’s founder, Arnold Bode, wanted to “use art as a tool to restore the feelings and minds of the people.” He may have wanted to restore more than that, because in 1955, when he inaugurated the exhibition in his hometown of Kassel, the city was still being rebuilt. Kassel had been the site of a Nazi tank plant, and the city and its inhabitants were all but completely eviscerated by strategic Allied bombs between 1942 and 1945. Today, the city center is so bland that the most noticeable features are a Pizza Hut and a TJ Maxx. It doesn’t strike one immediately, nor after three days, as a site for global art-world tourism, but restoration can be another mode of erasure, and the entire event preserves a kind of normalcy through understatedness, with artwork quietly installed in storefronts and local businesses, hidden in public parks, former train stations, and municipal buildings, and snuck into the galleries of local museum collections, all with casual paper labels. The show is mounted every five years under the direction of a single curator. This year, the Polish curator Adam Szymczyk chose to speak to this decade’s political crisis by having the exhibition straddle Europe, with one foot in Kassel, the other in Athens. The show was joined under the title “Learning from Athens,” though I only had time to spend a weekend at the Kassel half. Read More
October 5, 2017 At Work Mistaken Self-Portraits: An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke By Alex Dueben Photo: Sarah Shatz Meghan O’Rourke is a poet, an essayist, the author of the acclaimed memoir The Long Goodbye, a teacher, and an editor; she served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 2005 to 2010. The Summer issue of the Review includes O’Rourke’s “Poem for My Stranger,” and her third collection, Sun in Days, was published last month. Sun in Days differs from her other books: it is less lyric, with longer poems that are almost essayistic, and it includes a series of “Mistaken Self-Portrait” poems, which find the poet taking on the voices of Demeter, Persephone, Meriwether Lewis, and—to borrow a phrase from O’Rourke—a mother of an unmade daughter. It’s a book about illness, moving past grief, wanting a child, and getting older. I spoke with O’Rourke when she had a few spare hours, while someone looked after her son. INTERVIEWER Your poetry collections all seem to be about different stages of your life. Halflife was a young person’s book, Once was in conversation with your memoir and shared its concerns about grief, with the loss of your mother, and this new book of yours, Sun in Days, feels not post-grief, but … I’ve been trying to find the right word. O’ROURKE I know exactly what you mean. When I was working on Sun in Days early on, it was clear to me the poems were constellating around whatever that is—not quite post-grief. It’s actually hard to articulate, which is in some ways what interested me. INTERVIEWER When did you start writing these poems? O’ROURKE I wrote them while I had, as I describe in the book, a mysterious illness that no one could identify. Eventually, they diagnosed it as late-stage Lyme disease that had gotten into my nervous system. I mention this because while I was trying to write this book, I had this sensation that I was no longer myself. I could tell my brain had changed, but it happened so slowly that it took a while to realize. I had a very difficult time recalling and using language, which is a problem if you’re a writer. I also had this bizarre fatigue. We lack the language to describe illness, as Virginia Woolf talks about in her book On Being Ill. When you think of fatigue, you think of times you’ve been tired, but it wasn’t like that. I felt drained. I was trying to write, but I was unable to. The poems I was writing were so bad. They weren’t making sense, and I found it so depressing. “Unnatural Essay” and “A Note on Process” started because I gave myself the assignment of writing a line a day. I felt like I had to put all of my energy into making some kind of sense out of one thing. Sometimes I would write three lines, but there was this impulse toward aphorism or compression in a way that’s not quite how we think of the line in poetry working, in non-prose poems, at least. So those lines ended up more like prose. Read More
October 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Drawing Dogs in George Booth’s Living Room By Sophie Brickman Early pages from Here, George! Even with the most contemplative toddler on your lap, a dramatic reading of Sandra Boynton’s Moo, Baa, La La La! will probably top out at two minutes. That’s approximately how long it took Boynton—the beloved children’s author who’s sold more than seventy million books to date—to conceive of her latest board book. It’s called Here, George! and features George, a white dog with a red collar who happens to have a secret: he’s wild about dancing. Boynton’s illustrations are full of round, fluffy, wide-eyed, quizzical and adorable critters. Even her rhinos might be fun on a playdate. But George breaks the mold. He is in need of a wash and fluff. His toenails could use some attention. There doesn’t appear to be a single ounce of squish on his very hard, boney body. And if he ever met a Boynton singing pig, chances are he’d scare the la la la! right out of him. And that’s because George is not a Boynton. He’s a Booth. Read More
October 4, 2017 On Photography To the Attic: Virginia Woolf and Abelardo Morell By Robert Adams Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: The Sea in Attic, 1994. Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, was the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s niece, and among Cameron’s loveliest subjects. She also served as inspiration for the charismatic figure of Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf ’s novel To the Lighthouse. Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Jackson, 1867. Perhaps Woolf ’s family involvement with photography contributed to her belief in the importance of seeing. To the Lighthouse is a strikingly visual book, not only because of the author’s descriptions in it, which are unforgettable, but also because of the degree to which people in the story change when they truly see. The story is completed, characteristically, when Lily Briscoe, an amateur painter, resolves the composition of a picture with which she has been struggling, and experiences a peace that enables her to accept life’s sorrows, particularly transience. As she thinks—they are the last words of the book—“I have had my vision.” The novel is divided into three parts, the second of which is titled “Time Passes.” In it, we are informed, almost incidentally, of deaths, including that of Mrs. Ramsay, but the focus is on the Ramsay family’s empty summer house on the coast of Scotland, and on the way in which, as the seasons come and go, what is outdoors registers indoors: “Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite … So loveliness reigned and stillness.” And this, among the most beautiful passages in the novel: “Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and folded them round the house in silence.” Read More
October 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Kara Walker’s Nightmares Are Our Own By Selin Thomas Kara Walker, Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something), 2017. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Last night, they scaled my walls as I slept. The silhouettes moved closer—paralyzing me—with each flash of yellow light from the street. Some of them danced forward on toe, some ran, others fiddled in place with their shovels, their ropes and lanterns, their dangling snakes, torches, sickles. I didn’t know if they were after me, or if they wanted me to join their brigade. I thought then that I might and suddenly I too was wielding an axe, I too was sneaking along the edges of my room. Not me exactly, but my shadow, elongated with sinister intent. My teeth were long; I could feel them reaching my chin. There was a mirror and in it I saw a drooling beast, me. I woke up. I doubt this dark dream was caused solely by Kara Walker’s show, but it was certainly related. “SIKKEMA JENKINS AND CO. IS COMPELLED TO PRESENT THE MOST ASTOUNDING AND IMPORTANT PAINTING SHOW OF THE FALL ART SHOW VIEWING SEASON!” is on until October 14, at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery, on Twenty-Second and Tenth Avenue. I moved to New York three years ago, at the very minute the Domino sugar plant was to be demolished, just missing Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby. People seemed to almost enjoy saying it was gone, as if they’d taken a brick of it themselves, then licked all the molasses off. I’d waited a long time for Walker’s next work. I rushed through two grisly, oil-slicked linens wanting to first orient myself by Christ’s Entry into Journalism, which I’d read a lot about. It’s a sixteen-foot-by-eleven-foot sumi ink and collage on paper. It immediately recalls Rodin’s Gates of Hell. It can be looked at from any place, but center is best. I took my chance in the crowd. My eyes flitted from the plated head of Trayvon Martin to a woman being raped, from a lynching to Frederick Douglass. There was an American flag in the corner of my vision. I examined a mummified body being carried by Batman. It was that of Emmett Till, dressed for his coffin. There was a man praying and a Confederate soldier pointing his gun, or was he a Union soldier? His arm was broken. There was Donald Trump between the legs of a klansman. There was a lady, a dancer, a drunkard; violence, sex, rage. Was this the ghoulish cast of American history? Yes. No, it was the chorus. It was already enough to think about. But Walker was telling a story I wanted to hear. Read More
October 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Foul Matter By John Kaag Edwaert Collier, Vanitas, 1663. I nearly deleted it. The email’s subject line was “FoulMatter”—an obvious Internet phishing scheme, I thought. A Russian heiress was embroiled in some “foul matter” and needed my Social Security number so she could deposit money into my account for safekeeping? A Nigerian prince requesting initial investment in “a guinea foul farm”? No. That wasn’t it. The email was from my publisher, from the heart of my publisher—the editorial department. Now I really didn’t want to open it. Maybe I’d missed a deadline. Maybe they’d changed their mind about my contract. Or found an error so grievous they were recalling my books. Or found a new and more appropriate term for my writing. “Dear John,” the editorial assistant had written, “would you like to keep your foul matter from American Philosophy: A Love Story?” My foul matter? As if I had a choice. American Philosophy, published last year with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a memoir about facing a father’s death, a divorce and a remarriage, and how American philosophy (the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James) helped me survive. I am now in the weeds of writing my second book, another hybrid of memoir and intellectual history, this time about parenthood and Friedrich Nietzsche. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that you are largely stuck with yourself, most especially with your foulest parts. Foul matter, it turns out, as I learned by reading the rest of the note, is the inevitable literary flotsam that is generated in writing a book—the notes, page proofs, drafts, and rejected covers and art. Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as the art of removing stone until a beautiful form emerges from a block of granite. If writing is at all like this, foul matter is the stuff strewn across the studio floor. The question remained: Did I want it? Read More