September 28, 2017 Arts & Culture The Starving Artist’s Cookbook By Nausicaa Renner For some young artists trying to make it, starving is a rite of passage; for others, it is a permanent state of dedication, or a financial necessity. No matter the reasons, the starving artist is a timeless figure, present in every era of every society, socialist or capitalist, boom or bust. But the starving artist of New York in the seventies and eighties holds a special place in the cultural imagination. On Sunday, I cleaved my way through the sweaty, contemporary crowds at the New York Art Book Fair, hosted at MoMA PS1, to see an exhibition of “Food Sex Art: The Starving Artist’s Cookbook Archive 1986–1991.” The cookbook was put together between 1986 and 1991 by EIDIA, an artist duo of Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf. EIDIA, comes from the Greek eidos, for “kind,” and is intended as an acronym for, among other things, “Everything I Do Is Art” and “Every Individual Does Individual Art.” The cookbook—a thick stack of typewritten pages bound with three rings—had an original print run of five hundred. It featured 161 “recipes,” some real and some strange, from artists including Peter Beard, Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, Quentin Crisp, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner. The project was also a video series. EIDIA filmed the artists cooking in their studios, and the original series ran to nine hours. The book is now a collector’s item, and this exhibition, presented by the rare-book purveyor Arthur Fournier, displayed individual pages next to old photos and the videos EIDIA shot. Read More
September 28, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: Fickle Secret Admirers and Knowing the Ending By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, The other afternoon, I received a text message from a number I didn’t recognize. The sender asked to confirm my address, which I did, and then said there would be a “special delivery” for me, “arriving soon.” It was exciting to think I had a secret admirer, but in the end, nothing came. Since, I’ve tried googling the number, but it’s yielded no results; the area code is from Pittsburgh, and I don’t know anyone from there. Now I’m just curious who it is and what they sent. I feel a little tossed around and it’s making me angry to think I’m being taunted. Should I escalate this anonymous relationship and pressure the sender for answers, or just chalk it up to the many displeasures of the Internet age and let it be? Thanks in advance, Bemused in Brooklyn Dear Bemused, I’m at a loss here, so I’ve consulted a creature my friend Danny Ceballos knows, called the “Bad Advice Dolphin.” Danny read the dolphin your letter and here is the dolphin’s advice: Read More
September 27, 2017 Look Picabia’s Covers for André Breton’s Literary Magazine By Stephanie LaCava The cover of Littérature from May 10, 1923. Littérature, founded in 1919 by André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, was couched as an innocent literary journal, but it was known for its avant-garde writings and critiques. In March 1922, André Breton launched Littérature: New Series. He asked his friend, the shape-shifting artist Francis Picabia, to create drawings for the covers. Ultimately, only nine of Picabia’s twenty-six covers were chosen and published. The rest remained in an envelope dated August 8, 1923. They were unseen by the wider public until 2008, when they were presented by Breton’s daughter, Aube Breton-Elléouët, at the Galerie 1900-2000, in Paris. In an essay accompanying exhibition, “In Praise of the ‘Funny Guy,’ Inventor of Pop Art,” Jean-Jacques Lebel argued that these cover illustrations foreshadowed Pop Art. He credited Picabia with “the transformation of a commercial strategy into a subversive artistic practice.” Picabia’s work provided an early, wicked critique of the art and literature industries. In a letter from Marcel Duchamp to Breton in 1922, Duchamp wrote that the scandalous nature of Picabia’s images, many of which associate sex and religion, made it difficult for him to distribute Littérature in New York; vendors were reluctant to display it in public. So Duchamp distributed it among his friends instead. Read More
September 27, 2017 Books Writing a Memoir of Difficult Women By David Plante David Plante and Germaine Greer (center) with friends, in Umbria, 1975. Difficult Women comes, word for word, from my diary. I remember extracting entries about Jean Rhys after she died and pasting them together to form not so much a portrait of Jean but a portrait of my relationship with her. I gave the work to my partner, Nikos Stangos, to whom I gave all my writing for his comments; I recall coming in one evening and finding him in bed, reading, and he immediately said, “This is good!” He did not always say that about my writing. My friendship with Jean had very much to do with writing, about which she had some deeply inspiring insights. Read More
September 27, 2017 Our Correspondents Joyce’s Unpunctuated Rigmarole of Numerical Spangablasm By Anthony Madrid An seventeenth-century shilling. Joyce was good. He was a good writer. He makes me grumpy a lot, especially Ulysses, but he was good. There are at least twenty irresistible qualities to Ulysses. At or near the top of the stack, at least for me, is the way he traffics in what I call “hyperrealistic unnecessaries.” Shakespeare was like that, too. Sprinkled all through his plays are these exchanges that are not at all essential to the plot but that “ring true” in some surprising way, causing one to turn ’em over and over in one’s mind, pleasurably. FIRST PLAYER But who, O who, had seen the mobled queen? HAMLET The “mobled” queen? POLONIUS That’s good. “Mobled queen” is good. The above is especially ticklish because Hamlet, a moment before, had sputtered in indignation at Polonius’s having interrupted the player’s speech. Suddenly, surprisingly, and delightfully, Hamlet himself interrupts—and deflates the very speech he was just defending. And then Polonius reverses himself as well! Moreover, the fact that the whole thing turns on the word “mobled” raises the pitch well into the “exquisite” range. (The best Simpsons episodes are full of this kind of thing, as well.) But to return to Joyce: the unnecessary bits that are just so perfect are everywhere in Ulysses. I want to unpack one of them from my favorite chapter (chapter 1), for the benefit of American readers who have absolutely no idea how traditional British money works. Here is the passage: Read More
September 26, 2017 Look Tina Barney’s Embarrassment of Riches By Joseph Akel Tina Barney, Self-Portrait, 2014. For the photographer Tina Barney, proximity to, and membership in, the upper class has come to define her body of work chronicling the life of the patrician set. Her images, taken over some forty years, are at once a choreographed glimpse into the lives of the leisure class and candid meditations upon universal themes of family. Barney’s recently published an eponymous monograph—with an introduction by Peter Galassi, the former curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art—comes at a time when economic inequality is at the forefront of people’s minds. Here, she reflects on the critical reception of her work, the importance of time in her photographs, and the role of family in creating them. Read More