April 30, 2015 Look Prim and Proper, Crude and Vulgar By Dan Piepenbring Mel Bochner, Enough Said, 2012, oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″. © Mel Bochner Our Spring issue, available now, features “Thesaurus Paintings,” a portfolio of text-based paintings and drawings from Mel Bochner. They have a focus on ordinary language, specifically the “emotional trajectory” that emerges when one riffs on words and phrases of a certain theme. The direction, Bochner says, is evident in how one gets from the first word to the last word—from the prim and proper to the crude and vulgar. I concentrate a lot on the sense and sound of the language. The flow of words has to have a certain kind of rhythm—or a certain kind of lack of rhythm. That’s how the narrative of the painting is constructed. You can see what he means by looking at Easy/Difficult, a painting that wends its way from a breezy, “easy” high point, to, well, “some deep shit,” as optimism shades into fatalism: Read More
April 30, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Save the Date By Sadie Stein Photo: Dafne Cholet Let’s say you’re going about your day, footloose and fancy-free. Let’s say a friend e-mails you. “I’m so sorry,” she writes. “I’m really not feeling well. Can we reschedule?” It comes back to you in a rush: the long-ago volley of e-mails; the consensus on a date that, at the time, seemed impossibly far away; the failure to note said date on the calendar. Maybe you have even made other plans for the same time. But you write back with magnanimity: “No problem. Just concentrate on feeling better!” Read More
April 30, 2015 On the Shelf “I Will Not Be Trifled With!” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Adolf Emil Hering, Wilhelm II, Deutscher Kaiser, 1910. Finnegans Wake, in all its difficulty, was only “crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires.” A wealth of new projects online aim to help readers parse, demystify, and/or grapple with the text; “maybe, just maybe, future generations will look back on early discussions of Finnegans Wake’s unreadability and wonder what the hell was the matter with us.” Borges’s “The Library of Babel” has been re-created online, too, in the form of a site that, if it’s ever completed, “would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lowercase letters, space, comma, and period … The library creates a tantalizing promise of reason—somewhere in its pages are all the works lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and every future masterpiece—but drowned out by infinite pages of nonsense.” A lost 1972 interview with Ray Bradbury, animated for Blank on Blank: “People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, ‘Hey, we got a crazy man in the community,’ and they’ll begin talking to you.” A new documentary, Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, follows W. S. Merwin’s attempts to plant a forest of palm trees in Hawaii. “For forty years, [he] planted a tree every day that he could, restoring nineteen acres of land in Haiku, Hawaii, even as it seemed the world might well be ending, first from military conflict and then from ecological crisis. The film is a chronicle of a man struggling to make meaning through tiny, trembling acts.” Kaiser Wilhelm II liked to talk—a lot. “Virtually everything the Kaiser said, no matter how risible, was recorded and preserved for posterity … he cajoles, whines, demands, vociferates and babbles, bombarding his interlocutors with fantastical geopolitical speculations, crackpot plans, sarcastic asides and off-color jokes. Reading Wilhelm II on every conceivable subject … is like listening for days on end to a dog barking inside a locked car.”
April 29, 2015 From the Archive On the Ship By Dan Piepenbring C. P. Cavafy. “On the Ship,” a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy from our Spring 2005 issue. Cavafy was born on April 29, 1863; he died on his seventieth birthday. It certainly resembles him, this smallpencil likeness of him. Quickly done, on the deck of the ship;an enchanting afternoon.The Ionian Sea all around us. It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.To the point of sickness—he was that sensitive,and it illumined his expression.Handsomer, he appears to me,now that my soul recalls him, out of Time. Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—The sleuth, and the ship, and the afternoon Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn.
April 29, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent World Dream in Six Words By Sadie Stein If you look at the trending hashtag #WorldDreamin6Words you’ll see such tweets as: “Less ‘Them’ and ‘They’, more Us.” And “No More Violence in the Streets.” And “Self love and acceptance for all.” And “Ending the Stigma on Mental Health.” And “We all get a hamburger today.” And “A world free of animal abuse.” And “Love each other NOT imaginary dictators.” And (from the same person) “International Casual Friday with Keg Parties.” “Ham, eggs, and corncob pipes for everyone.” (That last one is from “Mark Twainz.”) Read More
April 29, 2015 At Work Good World to Be In: An Interview with Lisa Yuskavage By Thomas Gebremedhin Lisa Yuskavage in her studio, Brooklyn, New York. Photo by EJ Camp, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London Since her arrival on the art scene some twenty-five years ago, Lisa Yuskavage has made a name for herself with paintings that use classical techniques to depict unabashedly taboo subjects. Her creations—awash in radiant, hallucinatory colors and featuring hedonistic heroines unlike anything else in art today—are instantly identifiable. Her latest show, which opened last week at David Zwirner in New York, explores the idea of the incubus and succubus, and includes images of men—Dude Looks Like Jesus, for instance—a first for the artist. “I was thinking a lot about Dürer,” she says. “There’s this obsession with a certain look, which has to do with a revolutionary kind of guy.” I met Yuskavage, who is fifty-two, at her spacious Brooklyn studio earlier this month, where our talk touched on a variety of subjects, including her process, her past, and her experimentation with Grindr, the gay dating app. We’d intended to take a trip to her favorite bookstore, Ursus Books, afterward, but we stayed at her studio instead, conversing as pale yellow light crept along the floor. When critics discuss your work, they talk a lot about gaze—whether the figures depicted are inviting us to look or whether we’re intruding upon something private. It’s interesting because in order to make some of these paintings of men, I did something a few years ago—I didn’t realize why I was doing it at the time. I joined Grindr. I had a Grindr persona. You didn’t think I was going to say that today, did you? Do you remember your username? I don’t remember, but I eventually took it down when I almost hooked up with someone. I met someone by accident. My husband has a very nice body, and I took a picture of his torso. He had pants on. I didn’t want to be that vulgar, because I didn’t want to present myself as being just interested in sex. So I was at Le Pain Quotidien on Bleecker Street having my stupid vegan soup. I was looking at Grindr and imagining the Dionysian possibilities of life. It seemed like the air was full of sex. Not just sex, but hopefulness. Then I see that there’s someone who, whatever you call it, poked me or tapped me. He was ten feet away. I was like looking around and then I saw someone looking around. He was looking for me, and he couldn’t find me because I didn’t exist! Read More