May 14, 2015 Video & Multimedia Work About Work By Dan Piepenbring Mika Rottenberg, Barbara from Mary’s Cherries, 2004, color photograph Mika Rottenberg’s installation NoNoseKnows, showing now at the Venice Biennale, focuses on production, as much of her work does: in the video, we watch an assembly line of women making pearls. They turn hand cranks; they manipulate knitting needles; they partake of the despondent rigmarole that is factory life. Soon enough, though, the images lurch toward phantasm. Some of the women are dozing peacefully at their stations; some have their feet submerged in whole baskets of pearls; and their labor is directed from underground by a kind of Pinocchio-nosed queen bee, an exhausted, frazzled woman with a nasty cold. Then, as Randy Kennedy writes in the New York Times, comes the denouement: the woman sneezes explosively, causing steaming plates of Chinese food and pasta to burst from her inflamed schnozz, which seems to provide the pearl workers’ sole nourishment; the process repeats, maybe endlessly. Yum. Read More
May 14, 2015 On the Shelf The Nineties Are History, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cutcher, Man with a Computer (detail), 1992. Image via Hyperallergic Today is the first-ever Dylan Day: a commemoration of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which he debuted at 92Y (his voice “removed and godlike in tone”) on May 14, 1953. Dylan Day grants you a plausible reason to seize strangers by their lapels and scream about raging against the dying of the light. Do this. The opportunity comes but once a year. What happens when a performance artist abducts a bunch of curators and collectors for an “experimental expedition” in the Swiss Alps? More or less what you’d expect: “Kobilinsky appeared out in the snow. He was completely naked and he was walking toward the structure. It was a wild sight. Not just the naked man staggering through a wide expanse of snowy nothingness, but the group of esteemed collectors crowding the windows like eager schoolchildren. When Kobilinsky reached the crystal igloo and began to crawl inside, agonizing screams started emanating from somewhere outside the train.” “I would sacrifice my own life for a chance to throw a single brick at Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist who eats too much … He coughs up feathers out of his mouth wherever he goes.” New “letters” between “Hemingway” and “Fitzgerald.” As the nineties cedes its contemporariness and becomes “an object of historical inquiry,” it is now time to ask: What the hell happened back there? A new show, “Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s,” begins the critical task of contextualizing the works of the Clinton era. “The show marks our own radical break with a decade at once familiar and unfamiliar … The nineties were marked by various points of turbulence that have now evolved into unremarkable if not unproblematic features of our daily lives: a changing geopolitical order, precipitated by the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union; the “digital revolution,” which linked spatially disparate societies for the first time; the emergence of a global art scene and the series of international festivals and events it spawned; and the advent of so-called ‘identity politics.’ ” Before there was Naples, there was Parthenope, a beautiful city on the bay in roughly the same location; Virgil retired there, and the city traded on this fact for centuries. “Virgil’s place in Parthenope was paraded from the moment of his death, though not perhaps in the way he might most have wished. He became much more than a poet. The author of the Aeneid was variously the city’s owner, its founder, a wizard, a magician tunnel-maker, a worker of miracles and, when Christianity sensed a rival, a worker of Christian miracles.”
May 13, 2015 Events Next Thursday, Meet Four of Norway’s Best Young Writers By Dan Piepenbring Next week, we’re delighted to cohost the latest Norwegian-American Literary Festival, a series of readings, conversations, and musical performances coming to New York for three nights. As the events approach, we’ll be telling you more about what’s in store. On Thursday, May 21, at Chelsea’s 192 Books, James Wood will appear in discussion with four of Norway’s most promising young writers—we’re eager to introduce them to a new audience. Gunnhild Øyehaug has published poetry, essays, and novels, but she’s perhaps best known for her short collection Knots; “Every story [is] a formal surprise, smart and droll,” Lydia Davis wrote of her stories in the Times Literary Supplement. Her novel Wait, Blink was made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts. She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing. Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold, from Oslo, is the author of four novels and a collection of poetry; her work have been published in more than twenty languages. An English translation of her novel Monsterhuman will appear from Dalkey Archive Press. Bold, witty, and deeply existential, Monsterhuman is a bildungsroman that turns the story of a young woman’s chronic fatigue syndrome into an intellectual journey, at once grave and comic. Lars Petter Sveen’s third book, the novel Children of God, made him a household name in Norway. Due in English from Graywolf Press, Children of God is set in the Bethlehem of Biblical times, where multiple narrators who have crossed paths with Jesus tell their stories. Sveen counts Cormac McCarthy among his influences, and his often violent stories present themselves as alternative gospels. Carl Frode Tiller has written three novels and three plays; he lives in Trondheim and plays in the rock band Kong Ler. His three-volume novel Encirclement tells the story of David, who suffers from memory loss—but also of the nine people who write letters to him trying to remind him who he was, simultaneously questioning and celebrating the act of storytelling. Again, these writers will appear in conversation with James Wood at 192 Books next Thursday, May 21. The event begins at seven P.M.; it’s free and open to the public. See you there!
May 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Like Rain on Your Wedding Day By Sadie Stein An archetypal Kim Anderson greeting card. In middle school, my friend Marissa and I thought it was pretty darn hilarious to give each other the most inappropriate birthday cards possible. I don’t mean those pre-snark Shoebox greetings full of foul-mouthed grandmas; that would have been tantamount to buying into the earnest Hallmark industrial complex. Instead, we’d look for cards for nephews and stepfathers and babies, and then present them with the hand-knitted scarves and mixtapes we’d made each other. It doesn’t sound funny now. But it was a different time—and I don’t just mean junior high. In my day, we made our own irony. Without wishing to invoke the proverbial snow-walking grandparent, it’s still important to remember that greeting-card window between Spy magazine and Gawker, between Andy Warhol and someecards, between SNL and the Internet. The time, in short, when people dealt in the currency of subversion, but it wasn’t our gold standard.There’s a reason that the mom humor of fifties commercial art juxtaposed with louche captions seemed deliciously wicked then, and why it feels tame now—we were used to doing all that in our heads. Read More
May 13, 2015 On History Roger That By James McWilliams The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II. Hans Hysing’s portrait of Byrd, ca. 1724. William Byrd II was a colonial Virginia gentleman who, on occasion, was no gentleman at all. Writing about himself in the third person, in 1723, he bemoaned “the combustible manner in his constitution”; he cursed the innate passions that “broke out upon him before his beard,” making him a “swain” before all women. Byrd’s carnal drive underscored the eyebrow-raising vigor of his lust. On a trip to London in 1719, according to his secret diary, he “rogered”—an easy enough euphemism—no fewer than six women in nine days. Of one woman, he (proudly) recorded having “rogered her three times” in a single evening. That same night, Byrd, aged forty-four, noted with a tinge of sadness that he had “neglected my prayers.” When he wasn’t on a whore-chasing jag in the metropolis, Byrd was back on his Virginia estate, called Westover, with his wife, Lucy. At Westover, his sexual proclivities certainly raged with similar, singleminded intensity—he wrote in his diary about having urgent sex with Lucy on a billiards table—but it was also tempered by a healthy desire to achieve mutual pleasure with her. He was just as inclined to “give my wife a flourish”—bring her to orgasm—as he was to “roger” her, a semantic shift suggesting that Lucy’s response to their sexual union mattered as much to Byrd as his own physical gratification. On April 30, 1711, he noted in his diary that although he discovered his wife in a “melancholy” mood, the “powerful flourish” he delivered filled her with “great ecstasy and refreshment.” He recalled one morning during which “I lay in my wife’s arms” while, during another, his wife “kept me so long in bed” that “I rogered her.” That evening he got around to saying his prayers—before rogering her again. The man could be a virtuous, even tender, Tidewater lover when he wasn’t being a London sleazebag. Read More
May 13, 2015 Big, Bent Ears Big, Bent Ears, Chapter 4: In Search of Lost Time in Knoxville By Dan Piepenbring Michael Gira and his band, Swans, sound check before their Big Ears set. From a video by Mika Chance The fourth chapter of Big, Bent Ears, Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” pulls back the curtain on the art of documentary, and on one facet of that art in particular: chaos. As Weiss tells it, their attempts to capture Knoxville’s Big Ears festival were impeded at nearly every turn: interview subjects went AWOL, keys failed to open doors, and a search for an errant projector cord culminated in a late blitz to Walmart. Fortunately, at the end of the week the Rock Fish Stew team had documented a lot of great musicians; that’s here, too, including footage of Swans, the Kronos Quartet, and Holly Herndon, among others. Read the latest chapter here, and catch up on the rest of the series: Chapter One, There Are No Words Chapter Two, Borderline Religious Chapter Three, Nazoranai, a Documentary Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review