IN “STAGES OF LAUGHTER,” Art in America’s 2015 roundup of artists’ insights into humor, painter Amy Sillman recounts studying improv comedy as a means to get a firmer analytical grip on the role of spontaneity in her work. “I’ve always painted without a plan,” she admits. “It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing, or that I don’t stop and make decisions. I just work by the seat of my pants.”
Vladimir Nabokov saw the beginnings of literature in a familiar idiom. He imagined a boy “running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels.” The child was shouting, reasonably and referentially enough, “Wolf, wolf.” But this alone was not literature. “Literature was born,” Nabokov says, “on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.”
Garry Winogrand died on March 19, 1984, at the age of fifty-six—too quickly and too soon. Just six weeks earlier he had been diagnosed with gallbladder cancer and gone to Tijuana seeking an alternative cure. Anyone would have left behind unfinished work, but this was Winogrand, who, with his Leica M4, made pictures as prolifically as a digital photographer, so we’re talking mountains. In the end, he left behind 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film and 6,500 rolls of developed negatives that were never printed. Today, the Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography includes more than 20,000 fine
In the autumn of 2007, I moderated a panel at the New York Public Library called “Julia Child in America.” Its subject was Child’s ongoing and outsize effect on American cooking and food culture. It had been convened on the occasion of a new biography of Child written by one of the panelists, the estimable food historian Laura Shapiro. The other participants were no less expert and engaging: chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, food writer David Kamp, and cookbook author, editor, and FOJ (friend of Julia) Molly O’Neill. Over the course of the
“Old Nat.” You hear people calling Nat Turner that to this day, even though he was barely past thirty when he was executed for leading the single most effective slave uprising of antebellum America. Black people over the decades since that summer-of-1831 rebellion in Virginia have claimed a kind of exclusive intimacy with “Old Nat” in song and folklore. More than a martyr for generations of African Americans before and after Emancipation, he has been an heirloom, a talisman, a cautionary tale, a heroic paradigm. Because so little has been known of the real Nat Turner beyond the “Confessions” transcribed
If an unstoppable stream of verbal and vocal pyrotechnics is your definition of comedy genius, Robin Williams had no peers. Nonetheless, he was hardly the most original or emblematic comedian of his generation. Andy Kaufman was, although any votes for Steve Martin—the first real post-counterculture comic, anticipating Kaufman more than is commonly recognized—will be counted.
The artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was an outsider, autodidact, and key figure in the East Village art scene in the 1980s. He died of aids in 1992, after a life of creating explicit, beautiful artwork in opposition to the savage, censorious Right. He saw America as the site of a mass slaughter, a land of violent xenophobes trying to create “a one tribe nation.” His work, often called transgressive, is in fact transcendent, full of love and grace and rage, and anarchist at its core. David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art/Yale University
Louis XIV would seem to offer a natural opening for an exegesis of seventeenth-century French culture—during the longest reign in European history, the Sun King presided over both the political ascendance and the artistic efflorescence of his nation. For all the regent’s preeminence, however, the royal rectum seems a less obvious point of entry. Yet that is exactly where Edward Eigen locates his readers when he affirms, with a precision as striking historically as it is startling anatomically, that on “January 15, 1686, Louis complained of a small tumor toward the perineum, at the apex of the raphe, two finger
IN THE LATE 1980S, at the outset of her celebrated career, Zoe Leonard had a crisis of conscience. aids was massacring entire communities with alarming speed, and as a vital member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (act up), she found herself distrusting the value of art in an era when activism felt far more urgent. She showed her friend David Wojnarowicz some pictures of clouds she’d taken that she worried were slight, their politics too nuanced, but he reminded her that beauty was in part what they were fighting for. “You want to help create a world where
The tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, produced many iconic New York City images, but one in particular, taken in December 1940 in the East Village, captures the quintessence of his life and career. The photo presents a slain gangster, one Lewis Sandano, facedown on the pavement, partially covered by what appears to be a crumpled and bloodied sheet of butcher paper; a policeman stands beside the corpse and takes notes with businesslike aplomb. But this otherwise ordinary crime-scene image offers a wry comedic twist—dominating the foreground of the frame, hovering over the body, is a lamppost mailbox
MERVE EMRE STRIKES a rare off-note in her crackling new book, The Personality Brokers, when she briefly purports not to understand the appeal of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). A questionnaire that sorts humanity into sixteen personality types, the MBTI is a means of “annihilating individuality,” Emre points out. “What remains unexplained,” she writes, is why so many individuals embrace it.
The back cover of my review copy of Katerina describes it as “James Frey’s highly anticipated new novel, his first in ten years.” This assertion, maybe unsurprisingly for a Frey production, is not exactly true; depending on how you count, Frey has written as many as thirteen novels since 2008. Right there from his Amazon author page I can buy Frey’s The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, a novel in which a contemporary, bisexual, and extremely horny Jesus offers a searing critique of modern society, published in 2011 by the Gagosian Gallery and available in paperback, electronic, and imitation-leather
Except for its action-packed title, Peter Biskind’s The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism doesn’t have much in common with the smack-talking chronicles of Hollywood rebels he’s best known for. A onetime editor at Premiere magazine, he first hit pay dirt twenty years ago with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Only cinephilia’s most stubborn vegans didn’t immediately gobble up that gooey cheeseburger of a book.
“The devil has got hold of the food supply in this country.” This was the conclusion of Nebraska Senator Algernon Paddock, chairman of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, in 1891. That year, he sponsored a bill that would become just one more failed legislative attempt to require food producers to label their products truthfully. Among the transgressions he was trying to stop were common practices like whitening milk with chalk, “embalming” corned beef with formaldehyde, lacing fake whiskey with soap (it made the liquid bead on the glass), and creating ground “pepper” made of “common floor sweepings.” It was
JUSTIN TAYLOR: Let’s start at the beginning. You started working as a journalist and a critic fairly young, fresh out of undergrad, yeah?
In a “Talk of the Town” piece from the September 27, 1976, issue of the New Yorker, Jamaica Kincaid recalls a night spent at the Loft, David Mancuso’s legendary invitation-only disco (which was also his home), then at 99 Prince Street, in SoHo. She describes her get-down docent, a Loft habitué: “A man we know named Vince Aletti spends much of his time ‘partying,’ and, as can be imagined, he has a lot of fun. Vince Aletti loves to dance, knows just about all the good current dance songs, and writes a column on discothèque music for a national music-trade
Thomas Demand, Daily #18, 2012, framed dye-transfer print, 237⁄8 × 337⁄8″. The catalogue raisonné Thomas Demand: The Complete Papers (Mack, $85) follows the German sculptor-turned-photographer’s twenty-five-year paper trail—literally. The artist builds and photographs elaborate and eerily convincing life-size scenes entirely from colored paper and cardboard, often drawing inspiration from mass media images. His photos of […]
On July 6, 1962, a group of young upstarts presented “A Concert of Dance” at the Judson Memorial Church, which stands on the south side of Washington Square Park in downtown New York City. More than three hundred people gathered to watch the show—an impressive number given that every performer on the bill was somewhat new to the scene. Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, and Deborah Hay were but a few of those whose pieces that evening, to quote critic Jill Johnston, felt as though they “could make the present of modern dance more exciting than it’s been for
In December 1971, Adrienne Rich, then forty-two, spoke to a roomful of women about what the women’s liberation movement might do for literary study. Like Rich, the women gathered that day were writers, teachers, and scholars. Like her, they had gone to good colleges, studied with famous male scholars, and read canonical male writers; this is how they had learned what literature was and should be. But as women across the country filed charges of sexual discrimination and marched for equality in the streets, they were starting to revise their ideas about literary significance. Like Rich, they were newly conscious
For all its blind spots and moral squickiness, true crime is a genre in which crimes against women, particularly middle-class white women, have merited sustained attention. The nuclear family is no guarantee of safety in the world of true crime—often quite the opposite, in fact. The home is a site of potential violence, and heterosexual domesticity is frequently laced with manipulation and abuse.
