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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: TOM LUTZ EXECUTIVE EDITOR: BORIS DRALYUK MANAGING EDITOR: MEDAYA OCHER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: TOM COMITTA, EUGENE KOTLYARENKO, ELIZABETH METZGER, ERIKA RECORDON, JANICE RHOSHALLE LITTLEJOHN, MELISSA SELEY, CALLIE SISKEL, LISA TEASLEY ART DIRECTOR: MEGAN COTTS DESIGN DIRECTOR: LAUREN HEMMING ART CONTRIBUTORS: CARLOS ALMARAZ, MICHAEL CARTER, RACHEL ROSKE PRODUCTION AND COPY DESK CHIEF: CORD BROOKS MANAGING DIRECTOR: JESSICA KUBINEC AD SALES: BILL HARPER BOARD OF DIRECTORS: ALBERT LITEWKA (CHAIR), REZA ASLAN, BILL BENENSON, LEO BRAUDY, BERT DEIXLER, MATT GALSOR, ANNE GERMANACOS, SETH GREENLAND, GERARD GUILLEMOT, DARRYL HOLTER, STEVEN LAVINE, ERIC LAX, TOM LUTZ, SUSAN MORSE, CAROL POLAKOFF, MARY SWEENEY, MATTHEW WEINER, JON WIENER, JAMIE WOLF COVER ART: MICHAEL CARTER front: #24, APRIL 6TH (POLLOCK’S EVIL EYE), 2016, ACRYLIC ON ARCHES COVER, 30 X 44 INCHES back: #20, MARCH 24TH, 2016, ACRYLIC ON ARCHES COVER, 30 X 44 INCHES LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS QUARTERLY JOURNAL / NO. 16 / ART Te Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501(c)(3) nonproft organization. Te LARB Quarterly Journal is published quarterly by the Los Angeles Review of Books, 6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Submissions for the Journal can be emailed to editorial@lareviewofbooks.org.
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CONTENTS QUARTERLY JOURNAL / NO. 16 / ART ESSAYS 17 ODYSSEUS AS ARTIST by Paul Chan 57 THE POVERTY OF OUR ACTUAL CONDITION: NOGUCHI AND POSTON by Matthew Shen Goodman 82 LOUISIANA IN LOS ANGELES: HOW NEW ORLEANS JAZZ TRAVELED TO CALIFORNIA. by Lynell George 104 HERE IS SOMETHING TO SEE: AN INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI by Zandie Brockett | 张桂才 118 SEEING AND BEING SEEN by Barbara Browning 124 COLLABORATION IN THE DARK by Karl Whittington 133 TRANSLATOR, CURATOR, SELFISH LOVER; LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES by Ana Iwataki FICTION 32 COMMENTS ON LINDSAY TUNKL'S VIMEO POSTING... by Yxta Maya Murray 65 THE DAN GRAVES SITUATION by Emma Copley Eisenberg 95 DELPHI by Lucy Ives 110 HELLO EARTH by Jess Arndt POETRY 30 TABLE FOR ONE AT THE SUNSET BISTRO by Noah Warren 78 LA VITA NUOVA by Malachi Black 100 TWO POEMS by Lisa Russ Spaar 114 TWO POEMS by Eleanor Stanford 120 TWO POEMS by Susan Stewart 130 MUSIC, 1980 by Katie Peterson 136 THE BALLAD OF JESUS ORTIZ by Dana Gioia SHORTS 40 ON SABINA OTT'S SOCIAL PRACTICE by Chris Kraus 63 THE ROSES by Dorothea Lasky 80 THE UMBILICAL CORD OF GOLD by Claire Bishop 117 THE PROFESSOR by Chiara Barzini 122 PIQUE by Hal Foster HYBRID 44 DEGREES OF VISIBILITY by Ashley Hunt 72 STILLS FROM LIP GLOSS ALURT by Lex Brown 103 OBFUSCATE by Kay Rosen
Editor,MedayaYours,Quarterly Journal
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, Te worlds of art and writing have always been close — friendly at some moments, suspicious and derisive at others. Tey have met and interacted for many years, mostly through the work of the stricken souls who travel in between, spending time in both places, trying to describe and explain one to the other. Tis is a difcult task, as bridging worlds usually is. Tey’ve been traveling for many years, since Samuel Richardson and Tristram Shandy, Baudelaire and Picasso, and yet, despite the years, the task remains just as difcult as it always was. In this issue we have gathered writers, academics, artists, curators, and poets who continually make that difcult task theirs. You will fnd writers who dedicate their words to art, and artists who dedicate their art to words. Poets who consider the relationship between words and music. You will also fnd many pieces that are bridges in and of themselves. Here is an issue of a literary review dedicated to making art just as important as the literature and words we value. Tis is also a big thank you to LARB’s art director, Megan Cotts, who has served as tireless and deft ambassador. May our roads get shorter and shorter. May other worlds and their strange ways at least be visible from where we stand.
LOVE Thanks to those who donated to our 2016 matching grant fund drive — you've helped keep LARB literary, happening and fearless. A very special thanks to the supporters of the Quarterly Journal: Lelia Scheu Rick LisaDouglasRichmanSillsSee&Richard Kendall Annie Dillard Nion McEvoy Jon Robin Baitz Selma Holo & Fred Croton Cynthia Sweeney
LARB? Los Angeles Review of Books is a yourthisyou,seesandEvery501(c)(3)nonprofit.essay,review,interview,workofartwepublishonlythelightofdaythankstoourloyalreaders.Noneofwouldbepossiblewithoutsupport. Become a member or donate online lareviewofbooks.org/membershipat:orcontactMembership:membership@lareviewofbooks.org
PAUL CHAN, LA BAIGNEUR 2 (DEMOS) , 2017. NYLON, INK, FAN, CARDBOARD. 72 X 40 X 67 INCHES
Tis is the notion I want to develop here; I’d like to see whether it can hold its weight in reality, and whether it can provide a diferent story about what art is to us now. It is the notion that art is the cipher for what it means to cheat fate.
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ODYSSEUS AS ARTIST PAUL CHAN ECHOES “Echo reconciles.” Tis is the shortest sentence Teodor Adorno wrote in his magnum opus, Aesthetic Teory. Perhaps this is why it is so memorable. In two words he illuminates a constellation of ideas and relationships that take dense and unforgiving blocks of texts to describe everywhere else in the book. It shows up on the page like a life raft drifting in a sea of words. What I think Adorno is suggesting in the sentence is the power of the indeterminate nature of concepts within an artwork. A paragraph before, he writes, “no concept that enters into an artwork remains what it is.” A concept is created when ideas and intuitions are brought into a relationship that evokes a particular way of judging or understanding. It is, in short, an intelligible perspective on what is seen and felt. Adorno claims that when a concept fnds expression in material form, the work that results changes it. Te concept can no longer claim to be conceptual in the same way as before, he suggests. It is refracted and is made indeterminate by the very form that enables it to be experienced as something sensuous and real. Tis is because a concept is merely one element among others that make up a work. And it cannot claim to be more salient than what else appears, like the rendering of shapes and colors, or the choreography of movement and light that gives a work duration and dimension. If the intent is for a concept to attain a more experi ential form of meaning by becoming art, what is gained by it entering a composition is paid for by that concept losing a semblance of its own discursive authority. For Adorno, the interior of an artwork is like an echo chamber, where a concept is deprived of its social bearings and becomes unmoored from the historical determinations that ground it in an intelligible reality. Understood in this way, the notion of form turns into something radically dynamic. Form fractures whatever enters into its fold and, in Adorno’s words, “negates its fatefulness.”
If art possesses the capacity to cheat what fate has in store for the elements that enter into it, as Adorno speculated, can it also help cheat what fate has in store for us?
As an artist, it seems to me that echoes also resound in how a work appears to us and how it can alter our perceptions of what seems most natural and fated to be — about a historical situation, or a contemporary moment, or a way of being.
Tis is how echo reconciles. By turning elements into echoes of themselves within the matrix of its composition, a work loosens the grip social reality holds over those elements and frees them from their fate, or their pre-existing uses and meanings. Tey lose, in other words, their place in the order of things, which enables them to relate and belong in ways neither wholly predictable nor predetermined. Tis is what Adorno believes is one of the most emancipatory aspects of art. It is able to create new relationships out of what already exists to remind us what is still possible with what is given.
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“THAT ENDLESSLY CUNNING MAN”
If, as Simone Weil suggests in War and the Iliad, the true hero and subject of the Iliad is force, it is arguable that by the same token the true hero, the true center of gravity in the Odyssey, is cunning. Cunning is the character the gods respect and fear. Cunning is what animates the bold and daring feats that constitute the epic. Cunning is the spirit that endows men and women with the power to cheat fate. In the Odyssey humankind is portrayed as being capable —through cun ning — of altering the course of their own lives, which before had been largely at the mercy of more powerful forces. But this way of being and acting could also bring sufering and misfortune, or worse. Cunning is what emblematizes the growing awareness the Greeks had that particular manifestations of human intelligence had the potential to make men and women as dangerous as nature or the gods. In fact, the Odyssey begins like this: Sing to me, Muse, of that endlessly cunning man who was blown of course to the ends of the earth, in the years after he plundered Troy. He passed through the cities of many people and learned how they thought, and he sufered many bitter hardships upon the high seas as he tried to save his own life and bring his companions back to their home. But however bravely he struggled, he could not rescue them, fools that they were — their own recklessness brought disaster upon them all.
Te Odyssey constantly reminds us of this quality Odysseus embodies. When he washes ashore and is approached by a young woman, Odysseus ponders his situation and “he began to address her in a speech both gracious and cunning.” He even boasts about it, introducing himself to Alcínoüs the king by saying, “I am Odysseus, son of Laértes, renowned among all mankind for my stratagems, and my fame reaches the very heavens.” He is exaggerating only a bit. When the sorceress Circe tries to drug him and turn him into a pig, it doesn’t work. Circe exclaims: How can it be that my drug has no power to change you? You weren’t afected at all. Never before have I known a man who drank it and didn’t succumb. You must have a mind impervious to enchantment. I am sure that you are Odysseus, that endlessly cunning fellow whom Hermes has told me about. He even has the audacity to try to pull one over Athena, who happens to be his divine protector. After he tries to con her, Athena smiles and says, Cunning, subtle, and tricky beyond all bounds would a man have to be who hoped to outwit you; even a god couldn’t do it. Swindler, daredevil, cheat, king of the liars, remorseless in your deceptions — even in your own country you are unwilling to drop the tricks and tales that you love from the bottom of your treacherous heart. But no more of this for now. We are both clever enough — you are the greatest of mortals in judgment and eloquence, and among the gods I am renowned for my subtlety and my wisdom.
Writer Stephen Mitchell, who recently did a new translation of the Odyssey had this to say about how Odysseus is frst described: “Many of the formulaic adjectives that the poet attaches to his name emphasizes these qualities and mean more or less the same thing: polutropos, in the frst line of the poem, literally means ‘many-turning, versatile, wily, inge nious’ (I have translated it as infnitely cunning).” Variations of polutropos denote “many-counseled,” “crafty,” “shrewd,” as well as, “many-deviced,” “resourceful,” “inventive,” and “never at a loss.”
Do you hear the echo? Athena recognizes human cunning as a refection of divine wisdom. She respects it and enjoys its use even when Odysseus tries his tricks on her. But it is equally as crucial to point out that cunning was not always so admired by Greek gods or men. For as you probably know, the Odyssey is the second time Odysseus appears in Greek literature. Te frst was of course in the Iliad, written some 40 to 60 years before the Odyssey. In the Iliad, Odysseus’ cunning is what sets him apart from other characters like Achilles or Hector. Te Trojan horse, as you will recall, was his invention. Nevertheless, the cunning Odysseus exhibits is not viewed as something worthy of the best of men. It is not the quality that suits a hero, at least according to the terms of the Iliad. And what are those terms, exactly?
As one of the Homeric men who matter, Odysseus is no diferent. But he is not quite the same either. He already stands out for his craftiness. Tis, in the Iliad, was portrayed as a negative characteristic, and not ftting for a real hero. After a lengthy speech by Odysseus, Achilles replies, “I’m going to speak plain words and tell you exactly what I am thinking and what I am going to do, so that you won’t sit here cooing and trying to coax me into agreement. I hate like the gates of Hades the man who says one thing and hides another inside him.” But contrary to the Iliad, the cunning Odysseus embodies in the Odyssey is both celebrated and admired, by both men and Whatgods.changed?
19
Tey begin and end with the notion of honor. It was honor that motivated the Homeric hero in the Iliad; to wage war, to kill, to sacrifce, to die. But what is honor? It is, I think, a kind of justice among equals. For Achilles and Hector, qualities that make them heroic like valor and courage express more than who they are, but more importantly, where in the social standing of the ancient world they belonged. Codes of conduct on and of the battlefeld were followed as if they were laws of nature by those recognized as heroes because they represented what the Greeks called themis, which roughly translates as orderly procedure, custom, tradition, of what was ftting and proper. And it is no coincidence that these codes signify the aristocratic military culture of Greece. In a sense, Homer was a poet who told stories about the adventures and exploits of a particular class of people whom Homer understood as embodying what constituted the highest good. Aristoi in Greek literally means “the best people” and designated the hereditary nobles who held the most wealth and power, in peace and in war. Te line separating the haves and have-nots is as bright and clear in Greek society in Ho mer’s time as it was in his stories. Eumaeus, the swineherd, the old nurse Eurycleia, the countless sailors and slaves, are by and large generic stock types in Homer’s world. To get some idea of how peasants and commoners felt or thought, we would have to go to the poems of Hesiod, and his Works and Days. For Homer, these kinds of people were not important enough to render into poetic reality. And the chasm that divided the aristocracy from common people was so wide it was rarely crossed. If there was a semblance of what we would call a public administration of justice in Homer’s world, it was in maintaining this division, so that everyone understood and respected their so-called proper place. Honor, then, is a kind of informal justice among equals, insofar as equals designated those who belonged to the aristoi Te pursuit of honor, which depends on an array of attributes like valor, courage, wealth, and physical prowess, signifes a chain of associations that is ultimately used to justify the glory and rightness of rule by the aristoi. As E.R. Dodds explains in his book, Te Greeks and the Irrational, this is why Homeric men are more or less obsessed with what they called timē, or public esteem, and aidos, which roughly corresponds to the notion of public opinion. It is in the public — like battlefelds or arenas of political struggle, where one’s proper place in society is verifed and maintained. Achil les and Agamemnon seek a public for their heroic deeds to remind the demos, or the people, why the class of nobles they represent deserves to rule. And public respect, once it is gained, serves as a form of acclamation, where the people consent to being ruled. Te Greeks were arguably the frst to understand that fame is the product of an aesthetic that naturalizes and enforces social divisions.
PAUL CHAN
Perhaps a more ftting question is, what keeps changing? Moses Finley and other classical scholars speculated that during the intervening period between the two epics, Greek society fourished beyond their original settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Finley identifed three distinct but overlapping spheres of infuence that had defned the lives of men and women in ancient Greece before and during the expansion: clan, kin, and what they called oikos, which translates as “the administration of the house.” Tese three spheres established a person’s status
ON CALYPSO’S ISLAND
Homer, I want to suggest, understood this. Like any artist worthy of his or her name, he recognized the changing social, cultural, and economic currents that were slowly but surely reconstituting his world. And he made work using what was available at the time, anticipating the contours of what the changes were bringing about. Te Odyssey, in other words, was a harbinger. It foretold in poetic form the emergence of a new spirit of thinking and doing that led to one of the crowning achievements of the ancient world: the development of Greek rationalism, which found its greatest expression in the creation of the Athenian democracy in the early fourth century, some hundred years after the appearance of the Odyssey Tis poet could see that the qualities that made Achilles and Hector heroic in Te Iliad were either not worth aspiring to or were perhaps not suited to the new sensibilities that this coming community would bring to the people of Greece. A new aesthetic had to be forged that could grasp the changing nature of a world that was beginning to feel more fuid and fexible, and not as beholden to the “fatefulness” established by forms of social and political authority.
In Book Five of the Odyssey, fate appears as a goddess on an island living in a luxurious cave. She is Calypso, a nymph and daughter of Atlas. She is described as being more beautiful than any mortal woman. And here is what her cave looks like: In front of the entrance a luxuriant wood grew: alders, poplars, and fragrant cypresses, where many large birds made their nests — horned owls and falcons and loud-screeching cormorants, who fy to the sea for their living; and all around the mouth of the cavern, a vine trailed, heavy with grapes. Four clear springs bubbled up there, near one another, and fowed with clear water, then turned of in four directions, and in meadows on either side of them violets bloomed and wild parsley. Even a god who came to that place would marvel.
Odysseus is stranded on Calypso’s island of luxury. She rescued him after Zeus destroyed his ship, leaving him foating alone on the dark sea. She nursed him back to health and then chose him as her husband. She even ofered to make him immortal, like her. She loves him, the story goes. So it is surprising that when Calypso looks for Odysseus and fnds him on the shore, he is weeping. Being with a nymph goddess no longer pleases him. Or perhaps what pleases him was not enough to make him forget what he felt most em phatically: that he did not belong there. When asked by Calypso how he could turn down being made immortal, and if only he understood how difcult his life would be if he left the island, Odysseus replies, “I can’t help longing for home.”
Tis new aesthetic, I want to suggest, is manifest in Odysseus.
20 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS and function in society. But their power began to wane as new forms of sociality emerged as a result of growing popu lations dealing in more robust forms of trade, which led to more contact with other cultures in the region. Non-kinship institutions — though fundamentally based on the image of the household and the family — nevertheless opened the way toward new kinds of social interchange that were more diverse and not as rigidly defned by which family one was born into and how much land one owned. In short, a concept began to take shape in the emerging social imagination. It was what we now know as community.
PAUL
Calypso says, “Poor fellow, don’t grieve anymore. Don’t weep your heart out; I am ready at last to send you away.” She then tells him to cut down some trees and make a boat with the lumber. What happens next is a frst in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Odysseus responds: Goddess, how can you tell me to cross the vast gulf of waters in a small boat?
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Te sea is fearful and dangerous; even the largest and fastest ships are not always able to cross it. You must have some other purpose here, not my homecoming.
I will not set out on boat unless I am sure of your good intentions — unless you give me your oath that you aren’t plotting some further mischief against me. Besides the fact that this is the frst time Odysseus actually speaks in the story, there is nothing particularly remarkable about what he said. It sounds to me like a reasonable reply, perhaps even a banal one to contemporary ears. Calypso is letting him go after seven years without any further explanation. Only a fool would not be suspicious of the motives behind this sudden change of fortune. And Odysseus is no fool. Why would he — or in truth any rational thinking person — not question what is going on? But this is why the exchange is unique. It marks the frst time a mortal in Greek literature openly and directly argues with a divine being. A human character — no matter how heroic — had never before questioned what a god or goddess was up to, and whether it was right or wrong. Tere are many instances in both the Iliad and the Odyssey where men and women debate about the gods, but they only do so with other mortals. And when people did dispute with a god, it was only because the god was magically disguised as someone else — typically a relative or loved one. What Odysseus did was radical within the cultural ferment of ancient Greece. It was tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of divine authority itself, and one’s fate in the established order of things. But question Odysseus did. And Calypso’s response is just as remarkable. Here it is in its entirety: What a great rascal you are! No one with a mind less cunning than yours would ever have thought such a thing. All right, let Earth be my witness and heaven above and the downward-fowing waters of Styx — the greatest, most terrible oath that we immortals can swear — that I am not plotting the slightest mischief against you. I am only considering what I would do myself if I were in your situation. I really do feel for you; my heart isn’t made of iron. It is a tender scene, and also a revelatory one. For what Calypso suggests is that Odysseus is cunning because he employs the rather commonsensical practice of inferring what is happening by questioning the acts and intentions of others who play a part in that situation. She recognizes that for Odysseus, there exists a profound relationship between exploiting something and understanding it. And in doing so she acknowledges a crucial aspect of cunning in general: that it is dialectically bound to the notion of reason. Tis is also consistent in concept with why Athena is so fond of Odysseus, and protects him at every turn. Athena sees a resemblance between divine wisdom, which she embodies, and human cunning, which Odysseus exemplifes. Tey are also similar insofar as they both represent forms of practical reasoning. Unlike how it is typically practiced today, philosophy was understood during the classical age of Greece as something more concrete and practical. Having wisdom did not mean merely attaining knowledge, but of having a particular CHAN
In a telling scene in Book Five, it reads, “ Ten Odysseus would surely have perished, beyond his fate, if Athena had not given him presence of mind.”
At its essence the Odyssey is a story about someone trying to get home. And it is generally understood that for Odysseus this means Ithaca. But home is as much an idea as it is any particular place. Hegel, for instance, used the metaphor of home to characterize one of his key philosophical concepts: reconciliation. It is almost impossible to explain in detail but fairly easy to describe. Reconciliation is the state where one feels at home in the world.
Odysseus’ homesickness is really then twofold and dialectical. Te dreadful intuition that he is alienated from himself is inextricably bound to his feeling that he doesn’t belong on Calypso’s island. Remember, she’s a goddess. She concocts ambrosia. She makes love passionately. Violets and wild parsley bloom everywhere. She ofered him immortality. It is the image of the good life. Yet he won’t stay. “I can’t help longing for home,” Odysseus says. He goes on: “And if some god does wreck me during the voyage, I will endure it. My heart knows how to endure great hardships. Before now I have sufered many, both on the sea and in war, and if I must sufer another hardship, so be it.” Te question is, why? Why is Odysseus willing to endure new and formidable hardships and leave behind such luxuries and ofers of divinity? Te answer is clear: it is in the book. He is homesick. He wants to see his father, and his wife Penelope, and his son Telemachus, and return to where he belongs more than he wants to sleep with a goddess all day. And frankly, the Odyssey would not have been much of an epic if Odysseus decided to stay. Not only this, but Homer most likely needed to valorize certain moral codes that the Greeks held as sacred and right to ensure that his work found
It begins with the spirit of inquiry. What Calypso sees as Odysseus’ cunning and what we recognize as his use of reason was rarely portrayed at that stage in the history of Greek literature, and certainly not valorized in the manner that it was in the Odyssey. It is nowhere to be found in the Iliad. But in the Odyssey, Odysseus habitually refects on his various troubles. When a goddess advises him that the best way home was by leaving his boat behind, he says, “What should I do? Is this goddess trying to lure me to ruin by saying that I should abandon my boat? I will not obey; [I] think I will do something else; it seems the best of my choices.” He is self-refective, even in the direst situations. He even questions Athena about whether she is lying to him. She answers, “What a shrewd mind you have, always doubting and testing! I couldn’t abandon a man like you.” She never does. And she ofers him something to endure all that fate has in store.
HOMESICKNESS
It is this mindfulness that distinguishes Odysseus. His capacity to refect and be aware of the situation around him is what makes him so prudent and dangerous. He thinks in order to see what he is able to get away with, and to fnd (or create) choices where none are evident or given.
Odysseus certainly does not feel at home on Calypso’s island. As Homer describes it, “his sweet life was ebbing away as he mourned for Ithaca.” But what is not so obvious, but just as plain to see within the framework of the story is another, and perhaps greater burden he is bearing. He does not feel at home with himself. He was losing a sense of his own identity, “his sweet life” ebbing away the longer he stayed on Fantasy Island. Te luxuries that Calypso ofered him has ironically made his life less of what it was. Te terms that he understands himself through have been narrowed, and whatever stakes he uses to claim his full potential as a human being no longer seem to matter.
I think it is reasonable to suggest that Homer was also describing, through characters, plots, and rhymes, the shape of the kind of life worth living most. What can we learn from this shape? Or at the least, what are the discursive contours that defne it?
22 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS know-how about carrying oneself in the world. Wisdom, in other words, was knowledge gained from, and shaped with, experience that engenders a certain and exemplary form of life.
PAUL CHAN, DAEMONIUM , 2012. INK ON PAPER. 36 X 27.5 INCHES
It is arguable that the quality and depth of the engagement here — as elsewhere — are interdependent on the ways this zone fnds enrichment from other artistic socialities; in other words, in terms that come from outside of what is typically used here. When I frst wrote this essay, I was working on my exhibition at the Schaulager, in Basel, Switzerland. And even though the Schaulager is utterly unique as an art institution, it is an institution nevertheless, and it bears a family resemblance to other places that exhibit art without selling it, like museums and kunsthalles. Galleries, art fairs, and auction houses that make up the commercial sector of contemporary art is yet another zone. One of my other lives is that of a publisher. My press, Badlands Unlimited, publishes paper books and ebooks by artists, poets, and thinkers. So for the past several years, I have been privy to the zone of the art publishing industry. I have been exposed to all the peculiar ways and means by which books are published and distributed by universities, museums, galleries, and others.
In one of the stranger convergences of mind, Adorno in Aesthetic Teory comes very close to what Duchamp declared in the late 1960s: that the onlooker has as much say about what a work of art means as the artist who made it. Duchamp believed art’s import is defned socially. And it is society, as represented by the various zones of engagement, that ulti mately determines how art looks to us as it relates to our understanding of who we are, who we can be, and where we come Insofarfrom.asDuchamp’s
What is interesting is that the more this understanding of art propagates in the public sphere, the more natural it feels to imagine art’s import being exclusively about how it largely serves the interests of those who beneft most from reducing
It’s the echo. Te situation Odysseus fnds himself in bears a striking resemblance to contemporary art’s situation in so ciety today. Te echo resounds with the same undertones: the seduction of material luxuries, notions of what constitutes a good life, and how these notions entrap ways of thinking and doing. Above all, there is an indescribable homesickness.
And although there are certainly terms that various zones share, the zones themselves nevertheless tend to remain dis tinct, which refects the diferent competing claims they make about how best to understand and experience art in light of what interests these zones uphold and maintain, socially speaking.
I can go on. Te point is that these diferent zones of engagement connect us — as artists, scholars, students, curators, dealers, auctioneers, collectors, editors, and readers — to a multitude of interdependencies that enable ways of under standing what art is and ought to be today. And the capability to comprehend what it takes for an artwork to matter in these great times is proportional to just how diverse those interdependencies are. Te more diverse and varied the relationships, the more far-reaching the terms of the conversations tend to be. Tese conversations — which can lead to new forms of judgment and understanding — become more nimble and daring. For they are more willing to take into account the myriad contradictions art manifests, which are themselves echoes of antagonisms that both constitute and confound the experience of living today. Te stakes involved in why art matters become enriched as a result.
A multitude of socialities comprise the artistic enterprise today. Te endeavor to comprehend what art is and can be in settings like this one is something I am familiar with, having lectured at my fair share of universities. But this zone of engagement is certainly not the only one, as we all know. Other zones engage and understand art using diferent terms.
24 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS sympathetic ears. E.R. Dodds quotes Aristotle: “Poets tell this kind of story to gratify the desire of the audiences.” So why the why? Why wonder about the motivations of a character in an ancient epic poem?
insight is right, I think it is possible to ask what art in general looks like today, socially speaking. And it seems pretty clear to me: it looks luxurious. When art makes news, it is usually because of the staggering amounts of money it fetches at auctions. When art is an event, it is typically now at fairs like the one in Basel, or the one in New York or London, or Dubai. When art brings people together, it is by way of glamorously choreographed dinners, parties, and galas like the ones you have not been invited to. As an artist, I have been a part of all this. I enjoy it as far as it goes, and understand it as an element within a wider feld of relationships that make contemporary art what it is today. But it also seems to me that this particular impression of art dominates the public consciousness in ways that exclude other interests and stakes, as if what is most important about art today is how it embodies the notion of “the good life” as it is expressed in material wealth and economic power.
25 PAUL CHAN
If reason can be described as the means by which mental representations are used to conceptualize and produce insights that further enhance what one knows, what one does, and what one may hope to gain in the future, then in the Odyssey it is nearly impossible to diferentiate between cunning and reason, and to defne them on their own terms. Homer certainly made this the case, by portraying Odysseus as cunning precisely because he uses reason to his advantage. For Odysseus, cunning is reason as exploit.
REASON AGAINST CUNNING
Tis is perhaps why Greek philosophers, at least since Socrates, never embraced Odysseus as a thinking man’s hero. For how he used reason was precisely what Socrates was philosophizing against. It is worth remembering that in the late ffth century BCE, Socrates was not only a philosopher, but also a trenchant critic of a certain other kind of philosophy with which he was once associated. It was Sophistry. Before Socrates, there were philosophers who acted like merchants of knowledge, or Sophists. For large sums of money, sophists taught methods of rhetoric and a variety of philosophical discourses to help one reach a higher station in Greek society. In other words, philosophy was a tool used largely for social and political advancement. Socrates represented a new paradigm. He gave away his philosophy to anyone willing to listen in the style of informal conversations and understood philosophy not as knowing this or that, but of being this way or that way. Socrates’s famous proposition that “Virtue is knowledge” refects his insistence that what is most worth knowing is a particular know-how or practice about what it means to carry oneself in the world. His thinking was a rebuke to the intellectual formalism in vogue at the time. Rhetorical skill and tricks of persuasion were taught and prized as if they were magical formulas for acquiring — if not wisdom — then at least a better seat at the banquet. In this regard, Socrates is similar to Achilles, who berated Odysseus as someone who speaks one thing and thinks another. In fact, it is arguable that the philosophical lineage that began with Socrates, and continued in the form of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, all essentially echo, in diferent fashion, the Socratic claim that philosophy is a form of thinking about how to live in adherence to reason insofar as a life is the truest manifestation of a real philosophy. And in this storied tradition, there is no place for the kind of thinking embodied by Odysseus. It may be clever, even rational, but it wasn’t reason, for those who seriously considered themselves philosophers. It was Plato who elevated the notion of reason to a level that rivaled the Gods after studying with Pythagorean mystics in what we now know as Sicily and Southern Italy. Plato’s theory of forms is among other things a philosophical and political hypothesis about how reason endows one with the power to comprehend what is most essential and objective about the universe. Using reason enables one to grasp the nature of how things ought to be, without petty and particular human concerns distorting how the world was supposed to really work. Tis is why for Plato reason was the foundation for social progress. Te use of reason serves the good of a general interest, whereas cunning represents a form of thinking that benefted only particular interests; namely those cunning men and women. Cunning was beneath the dignity of real reason. It is the kind of thinking and doing that Nietzsche described, 2,200 years later, as “human, all too human.”
Philosophically speaking, the situation does not seem to have changed much. I think it is still generally the case that people believe it is reason that will unlock the potential for whatever social progress there is left for a sorry species like ours. Cunning, on the other hand, is how those who are not so broad-minded think. It is where knowledge is misused for purposes of deceit, artifce, and other secret or underhanded means.
the whole of the artistic enterprise into an elite service industry. As if this was how things work. As if it was fated to be.
Tis is why the public discourse about art seems to me so impoverished: the terms are narrow and the stakes so very low. Is it possible to broaden the terms for contemporary art by thinking through the notion of cunning as manifest in Odysseus? And can cunning be redescribed as a way or thinking and doing that raises the stakes for why art ought to matter today?
Tey accept the notion that reasoning is what enables the human mind to comprehend what exists beyond mere per ceptions, habits, and instincts. But they do not regard it as a mental capacity so unique to humankind that it is what distinguishes us from mere animals, or the more extreme idea, that reason is a gift from the divine that justifes our special place on Earth and sanctions our dominion over it.
26 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS WHY REASON AT ALL?
In 2011, Dan Sperber, a social and cognitive scientist, and his then PhD student Hugo Mercier published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that put forward a novel theory on reason. And even though Sperber and Mercier come from evolutionary biology and cognitive science, their theory bears more than a passing resemblance to the rela tionship between cunning and reason in Odysseus.
Instead, Sperber and Mercier characterize reason as one among many capacities, or traits, humans have developed over time. In others words, our ability to reason, like how we can walk upright or extract nutrients from digesting certain animal and vegetable matter, is a result of evolution. It is a trait we have acquired and have continued to maintain and develop as members of what Marx called our species being. Tis trait we call reason is capable of handling many diferent tasks, or functions. Sperber and Mercier understand the notion of function in a biological sense. A trait can have a number of diferent functions. For instance, the trait known as our feet allows us to both walk and run. But it is possible to discern — from an evolutionary perspective — which function serves the interest of that trait most, insofar as how that trait contributes to the overall fourishing of whoever or whatever possesses it. And there is strong evidence to suggest that given the nature of human feet, they are primarily shaped for walking. Likewise, Sperber and Mercier contend that despite the myriad ways in which reason is employed in our lives, the main function of reasoning is argumentative. Tat is to say, it has evolved and persisted largely because “it makes human communication more efective and advantageous.”
It is within the framework of communication that Sperber and Mercier stake their claim about why we reason. Insofar as knowledge acquires currency only when it is sent or received, reason works best and is most adapted to ensuring that what is being communicated is stable and reliable, meaning that it is benefcial to both the sender and the receiver. Tis is also why reasoning is predominantly a social act which connect us outwardly, toward others, since the need to under stand what is worth accepting as true and reliable information is what has pushed reason to evolve and persist as part of an array of human mental capacities. For Sperber and Mercier, reasoning can be employed in solitude to enhance under standing for oneself. But it has evolved to work best and most profciently when used in the midst of social interactions. It is not difcult to imagine reasoning at work in fguring out whether what someone says should be accepted as true. To avoid being misled by unreliable information, we exercise what Sperber calls “epistemic vigilance.” Tis is where one evaluates both the sender of the information and the information itself to gauge whether what is heard or seen should be believed. You are, if I were to guess, doing this right now. You are reading this essay, trying to fgure out whether any of this is worth knowing. One way you are doing this is what cognitive scientists call “trust calibration.” Tis is where you gauge the level of trust you are willing to grant me based on what you understand as my competence and intentions as a speaker or writer. If you think I cannot be trusted, maybe because what I am saying sounds dimwitted, or perhaps because you have learned not to trust anyone from New York (which is perfectly understandable), you will have less reason to take in what I am saying for further refection. Even if you are taking in what I am saying, you are, if I were to guess again, not doing so passively. You are instead active ly and perhaps even unconsciously engaging in what is called “coherence checking.” Tis is where you are interpreting what I am saying against a context of your previously held beliefs in order to try to integrate what I am saying with what
Tey call it the argumentative theory of reason, because, according to Sperber and Mercier, we don’t reason to seek and build a better society, as Plato wanted to believe, or to satisfy an insatiable hunger to confrm our own existence through our thinking, as Descartes saw it, or to reconcile with the natural and social world, as Hegel speculated. We reason, they say, simply to argue.
27 PAUL CHAN you already understand as true. If incoherence is uncovered during this process, you face at the least two choices: either reject what I am saying because it does not cohere with what you already know, or go through what is called “believe revision,” a term from the wonky world of social science, otherwise known as learning.
Epistemic vigilance is how the receiver of the information exercises reasoning. But how is reason used for the sender of the information, the one who is making a claim about what is true and reliable? What is remarkable is that the same mechanisms like coherence checking and trust calibration are also being used, but in a contrasting way. Tey become resources that one draws upon to make the most compelling argument possible about why the claim being made ought to be true. In other words, those mechanisms that act as epistemological standards we use during refection to assess the worthiness of the information are also the very same ones we rely on to help us craft arguments that strive to be persuasive and pleasing enough to pass those same epistemological standards we hold as barometers for judging what constitutes real knowledge.
For the past 50 years, the growing literature on the science and psychology of reasoning has suggested that human decision-making seems to be dictated largely by irrational biases. One of the most studied and well-known biases is called confrmation bias. It consists in “the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand.” In other words, we tend, in general, to justify what we believe as reason, or claims of what is reasonable, based on our preestablished intuitions and inferences, even if what we know and believe is dubious or even outright wrong. Confrmation bias is also the intelligible dynamic at work when we devalue or wholly discount evidence that runs contrary to what we claim to be true, even in cases where the evidence holds epistemological value in understanding the truth of what is being argued for.
For standard theories of reasoning, and arguably the entire tradition of philosophical thought that began in earnest with Plato, what confrmation bias represents is a faw of reasoning. It is how not to think. According to this tradition, reasoning should be done without prejudices or irrational infuences in mind so that what is thought is as objective as what we want reality ultimately to be. Tis, in any case, has been the wish.
THE CUNNING OF REASON
For claims that do not push the bounds of typically shared beliefs and intuitions, like the claim that I am known as an artist, not much work is really needed on my part, as the sender of the information, to convince you this is true. And this is because I don’t think it would take much work on your part, as the receiver, to verify the quality of this claim, given the context of this issue, and you knowing who I am from the web, or friends, and so on. But on the other hand, what if a more radical and unorthodox claim is made that tests or goes beyond preexisting beliefs and intuitions? What if, for instance, I want to claim that I am not a human being? To start, it would take more work on my part to convince you. It would take a crafty, perhaps even ingenious argument made up of a series of interlocking premises and ideas that you can plainly follow and understand. I would also need to provide enough empirical and intelligible forms of reference to show how this claim coheres with what is generally recognized as reality in order to try to justify its trustworthiness. Lastly, it would need to be composed in such a way that the quality of the claim implicitly raises doubts about the soundness of your beliefs and intuitions, which grounds your epistemic vigilance. If that ground loosens, there is more of a chance that something new can take root. What is essentially at stake is whether the work done on my part in composing what I want you to believe is persuasive enough to lessen the work you must do in eval uating what I am claiming so that it is more likely that you will agree to it being true. In the end, what is most compelling and radical about understanding reason this way is how it emphasizes the binding ness of the relationships that make reason what it is: between senders and receivers, between producers and evaluators, between what is claimed and what is known. Reason here is no absolute spirit, nor the inevitable calculus that rules the natural world. It is, if Sperber and Mercier are to be believed, more prosaic and unpredictable. Reason is the intellectual arena where what is known and what is expressed are justifed as what is worth valuing in social interaction and devel opment. And reasoning is what we do in this arena.
But, if understood within the framework of the argumentative theory, confrmation bias becomes something else entire ly. Rather than being a defect, it is what motivates reasoning in the frst place, and an essential feature of reason itself, insofar as it is a cognitive activity that has evolved to increase the quantity of communication available for use in social interaction. For what Sperber and Mercier suggest is that the psychological leap of faith it takes for us to make public claims about what we want others to believe as reasonable is grounded in the unsubstantiated conviction that what we already know and believe is trustworthy by the sheer fact that we hold them.
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What the argumentative theory recognizes is the aesthetic imperative within reason itself, insofar as aesthetics can generally be understood as a way of comprehending and making something persuasive and compelling enough that others fnd agreeable. And what I want to suggest is that this aesthetic imperative can be expressed by another word, one that situates aesthetics in a truly expanded feld; as open and wide as social life itself. Tis word is, of course, cunning. Reason is, from this vantage point, the creative act par excellence
Confrmation bias is, in essence, what empowers the will to reason. Sperber and Mercier postulate that as an inherent aspect of reasoning itself, confrmation bias enables us to be more persuasive in arguing for our claims, because we al ready and actually believe them to be true. It also compels us to be more speculative and inventive in how we make those claims, given that as a consequence of believing what we already know is epistemologically superior to what is out there, we will tend to use whatever means are necessary to make our claims stick in social reality.
TAKING A RIDE When I was 13, I used to dumpster dive next to this clothing store to steal credit card numbers. Back then, stores used a machine that looked like a small meat slicer that would copy the card’s information onto a paper receipt with a carbon copy attached. Te store then kept the paper receipts and would throw away the carbons at the end of the day. Carbons from Visa cards were useless because they were designed so that the last two digits of the credit card number didn’t copy over. But carbons from American Express cards did copy all the numbers, along with the expiration date, and the name of the cardholder. Once I found an AMEX carbon, I would skate home and call the mail order catalog to buy what I wanted, explaining that I, “Linda Wallace Stevens,” had a cold and that is why I sound like a nasally 13-year-old, and that if they could ship to another mailing address not associated with the card, because I recently moved, I would appreciate it. It would usually arrive two weeks later. But not to my house: too risky. I would ship the goods to a neighbor on the block. After the delivery truck left, I would ring up my neighbor and explain that my friend Linda meant to send the package to me, but had the address wrong. I got all my skateboard parts this way. And my frst serious tennis racket, the beautiful Yonex R-22 that Martina Navratilova used. A compound bow and arrow kit. Te collected writings of Voltaire. I’m not proud of what I did. But I’m not ashamed either. It was what I thought I had to do to cheat what fate had dealt me at the time, being the son of recent immigrants, living hand to mouth in Omaha, Nebraska.
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Within this context, confrmation bias reveals ultimately not that humans reason poorly, but that the nature of reason is deeply asymmetrical. It works on one side as a producer of arguments, which is shot through with preexisting bias es in favor of what the arguer believes and knows, and on the other side, the evaluator of arguments, which seeks to understand and diferentiate between good arguments from bad ones, and therefore genuine information from misin Iformation.wanttoemphasize here the idea that reason is, in part, a production. Or, for those who are more visually and musically oriented, a composition. Reason is something we make to convince others of the worthiness of what has been made, and serves the interest of the maker as a semblance of what he or she wants others to realize as what is most real about our shared reality. And one of the consequences of understanding confrmation bias this way — along with a host of other intelligible dynamics social scientists have pinpointed — is just how crafty, ingenious, adaptable, deceitful, resourceful, and high-spirited the act of reasoning can be as it tries to justify why it ought to be trusted by others as reasonable.
Until I started writing this, it never occurred to me that what I did then is somehow related to what I do now. Perhaps it’s nothing more than juvenilia: the thrill of doing something and getting away with it. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a long and complex relationship between art and notions of lawlessness. Te myth that, in order to make work, artists must follow their own set of rules entirely, if they follow rules at all, is as old as Homer. Plato, who cham pioned reason over art, takes this myth and twists it to an extreme in his dialogue Ion, where Socrates essentially accuses poets of not following human laws or conventions at all, but only the will of heavenly powers. He explains that poets are good not because they are talented, but because they are literally possessed by spirits. Poets might think that they are following their own inspiration, Socrates speculates, but the law of poetic form is really dictated by divine madness.
Tis othermindedness, or what I have called cunning, is not outside the bounds of reason at all, but is a feature of it. In truth, reason depends on cunning to be reasonable. Or so I have tried to show. Tis idea, which I have traced histor ically and philosophically through the fgure of Odysseus, and in the work of Sperber and Mercier, holds interesting implications for art. One is that it makes available a diferent take on why art matters, socially speaking. Many argu ments abound today about why art is important: it is a form that authenticates what is most human about humanity; it celebrates and afrms the diversity of cultures and identities; it upholds the value of individual freedoms; it is a good pedagogical tool for teaching values; it is a sound economic investment; it gives pleasure. And so on.
Among these competing claims, I want simply to add one more. And a fairly prosaic one at that. It is that the experience of art serves to protect us from being conned. Being exposed to art means among other things seeing all the resourceful and ingenious ways in which someone has tried to make — using what is readily available — something more than what is there. And a work tries to do this through its formal properties. Tese properties, in which a work expresses itself, act like arguments a work makes to try to convince the viewer that it is worthy of being agreeable. Of being valued. Typically by any means necessary. Tis is the cunning of art. In experiencing how a work tries to convince us of its worth, we come to grasp how its aesthetic qualities echo in spirit and in form all the manipulative means by which people use reason to try to convince others of the value of what they are saying, or doing, or selling. In looking at art and trying to comprehend and appreciate what it is, we are at the same time engaging in the practice of recognizing and evaluating all the traits that artwork embodies most persuasively, as a cipher for how aesthetics is deployed socially, and in general. Seen in this light, going to a gallery or a museum is a lot like spending an afternoon in a room full of grifters, all trying to con you into one thing or another. You don’t lose anything, of course, except time. What you potentially gain, however, is insight into what makes something truly, de lightfully, cunning. And in the process, perhaps learn a little about the tradecraft of taking someone for a ride, so that you might realize what is happening the next time someone is taking you for one.
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Even those who believe art is a worthy human endeavor — perhaps even the worthiest —understand that what makes it vulnerable to accusations of being useless, irrational, fraudulent, illusionary, even criminal, is also at heart what makes it meaningful in the broadest social sense. For it is precisely in how a work evokes, in form, the spirit of an “othermind edness” that makes it radiant and enlivening. Adorno captures this idea like a frefy in a mason jar in his famous quip that “every artwork is an uncommitted crime.”
PAUL CHAN
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NOAH
The check curtains, the tiny shakers of olive oil and balsamic shiver in the strong slow draft. A plate of muscle floats to me. If “there will come a time when even heroic actions seem to follow lamely on their consequence” it may be in the stunned aftermath of hunger, the mind piecing itself together. Nothing is more poignant to me than two houses staring at me at evening, and the sound of the wind. The sound darkens with the light and I could assemble arias of detachment, SUNSET BISTRO WARREN
TABLE FOR ONE AT THE
31 I could hang each note like a hook in the whiteness of my mind. There’s a story of the man who wore his face drawn into a mask of calm— he walks a few streets again and again, smiles only when he sees the flock of cherry-headed conures that roosts and chatters in the date palm there. Their thick beaks sprinkle small seeds. Midnight I sit to work, my work evolves like rubble beneath my fingertips, I hear the middles and ends of so many songs. NOAH WARREN
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So, no, it is not strange to want to be bent painfully over a headboard while wailing with happiness. Even famous people like Herman Melville aspired to be slayed like a babbling lamb. Indeed, this ambition proves so common that it often crawls to the depths of banality. Maybe Melville wrote the great Moby-Dick about Nathaniel Hawthorne, but think about the thousands of cliché-famed flms that have been made in passion’s name. Desiring another person to drink from your fagon of life is a well-worn theme in the history of love. What is strange is articulating this longing in language. “Grab my ass! Pull my hair! Harder!” goes the mantra. “Spank me! Say my name!” goes another. Brandon is a 34-year-old civil rights lawyer I met in a Ralph’s. He is imposingly tall and possesses buoyant pectoral muscles. I am a 38-year-old former performance artist, an aspiring writer, and now a platform strategist for Snapchat. Brandon is half Chinese and half Polish, and likes Star Wars prequels. I am a bisexual Chicana with large eyes and sturdy legs. We have been dating for six months. When I visited Brandon’s two-bedroom condominium in Culver City tonight, I arrived at its walnut parquet foyer ready to talk. I had been reading Wittgenstein’s late philosophy on the Metro and wanted to ask Brandon about his thoughts on indeterminacy. But then I saw his blue-veined biceps and bloodshot aura of overwork, and became incredibly excited. “Hi, you look really pretty,” he said, backing into the living room as I threw my recycled canvas Snapchat work bag to the ground and tore at his shirt buttons. “Babe. Baaaaabe. Whoa, this is so exciting. But. Hold on, wait—” Plop we fell on the sofa, which is covered in tweedy wool. “I am holding on, I am waiting a minute,” I gasped back, until I heard myself yelling “TAKE ME NOW YOU MONSTER! LOVE ME LIKE A STEVEDORE! MAKE ME BEG!”
COMMENTS ON LINDSAY TUNKL'S VIMEO POSTING OF IS THIS WHAT FEELING FEELS LIKE? - FIRST ATTEMPT
() Amanda 1 hour ago A person who wants to be destroyed by love is normal. Te human wish to be ravished, despite its bearer’s avowed feminist principles and self-possessed public persona, does not present an anomaly. At rare yet foreseeable intervals, erotic desire will ofer most mortals an expensive, all-inclusive trip to a magical land where they will engage in mutually confusing fagellations with other reasonable people who are similarly, if temporarily, aficted.
“OhEtc. my God,” Brandon said. “Okay, okay. Okay.” I love Brandon a lot.
YXTA MAYA MURRAY
Lindsay Tunkl has made a series of conceptual art perfumes based on the Apocalypse. One of the perfumes is called “Tsunami,” and another is called “Nuclear Blast.” Tey do not appear to be available for purchase on her website and doubtlessly smell bad.
Lindsay Tunkl has the word “HOLOCENE” tattooed on the inside of her lower lip, as a memento mori. She is in mourning for the Holocene, which has been replaced by the apocalyptic era of the Anthropocene, the age of global warming and atomic annihilation. In 2010, Tunkl took a self-portrait. In this photograph, she sticks out her lower lip
33 ¤ “What’s a stevedore again?” Brandon asked afterwards. We cuddled in his queen-sized bed, in his small blue-walled bedroom with its transom window. “It sounds like something out of Moby-Dick.” “It’s a fgure of speech,” I said, stroking his arm hairs. “Not one I ever heard.” Brandon pursed his lips to the far right side, as if his mouth were running away from something.“It’sa compliment.” I laughed.
“Uhhhhhh . . . . ” Brandon lay on his back and looked at the ceiling with eyes that kept widening. “Do I have sex like a postal “Whatworker?”doyoumean, like, homicidal?” I asked. “No, like boring,” he said. I stretched out my legs. “No, you have sex like a lawyer.” Brandon is a lawyer, but I immediately understood my mistake. “A really amazing lawyer. An A.C.L.U. person who fghts for justice and stuf like that.” “Oh, Jesus.” Brandon rolled over and closed his eyes and stopped talking. “Like Turgood Marshall,” I said. “ Tat’s good, right?” Now he is asleep. I am awake, web surfng. When Brandon started snoring around midnight, I padded out to the living room and retrieved my bag, which contained my Wittgenstein and my laptop. I returned to bed and turned on the small white lamp on the stand next to me. I took out my paperback copy of Philosophical Investigations and read until I reached the last page.After that, I leaned over and whispered into Brandon’s ear: “You have sex like a superhero.” He remained unconscious. “I am fanatically in love with you,” I barely breathed. Still no response. “I want you to tie me up like I’m a Victorian femme fatale and you are an evil villain with a mustache and a top hat,” I“What?”said. he said. “You’re dreaming,” I said. Brandon fell back asleep. I turned of the lamp. I tried to sleep, too. When that didn’t work, I dug through my bag again and this time fshed out my laptop. I opened my computer and balanced it on my knees. I started looking at feminist art videos on Vimeo, which is one of my favored distractions during uneasy times. After a while, I found the work of Lindsay Tunkl. It is 3:01 in the morning. You have likely never heard of Lindsay Tunkl. You have probably found this Vimeo page in the same way that I did, which is to say, on accident. According to her website‘s CV/Bio section, Lindsay Tunkl graduated from CalArts with a BFA in 2010 and, as of this writing, is attempting to complete an MFA in Studio Practice and an MA in Visual + Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. From her videos on Vimeo, and her still shots on her website, we can see that Lindsay Tunkl is a White woman in her twenties. She has long dark hair, with streaks of early gray in it. She also has a big silver lip piercing, and bears a metal stud below her left eye, which seems painful. Lindsay Tunkl is pretty and large-framed, with feshy arms and powerful breasts and thighs.
YXTA MAYA MURRAY
Lindsay Tunkl’s loneliness dooms her to speak in what Ludwig Wittgenstein once referred to as a private language.
Tis video lasts for 1 minute and 51 seconds, and has been played 16 times, mostly by me. Except for the com ments that I am now writing, Is Tis What Feeling Feels Like? - First Attempt has elicited 0 comments. It has not been shared with anyone. It has not been Liked by anyone, nor included in any collections. Lindsay Tunkl’s work is a study of human solitude. Tunkl craves a whole and healed earth, but sees only destruc tion and death. She loves, but remains apart. She adores, but is drowning. She cries out for union with her beloved, but feels like she is dying. Lindsay Tunkl is alone. She is abandoned as a human on a dying planet, deserted as a woman in an afectionless world, and she is also forsaken as an unLiked and unCommented-on artist.
Ludwig Wittgenstein studied the problems of private language at the late stage of his career, in his vulnerable old age. Wittgenstein had conceived this idea after an early, more foolish, period: During the Great War, Wittgenstein believed that language mirrored the logic of reality (as he explained in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922), and thought that in so mapping existence and its refectively lucid attendant discourse that he, Wittgenstein, had solved every single philosophical problem that ever existed. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” he wrote.
I love you and I’m not ready for this to be over, she wrote.
34 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS so that you can read HOLOCENE on her mouth’s shiny underside. She made this image into a 36 x 48 print, which also does not seem purchasable from her website.
After that, Wittgenstein went back to Vienna and repudiated all of his work. He spent the last years of his life trashing his earlier philosophy by writing Philosophical Investigations, which was posthumously published in 1953. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein now said that words don’t have any inherent logic, but only derive their coher ence from their ordinary vernacular usages. People agree to use words for certain purposes, and in that way create their meaning. Perhaps Wittgenstein was thinking of the ambiguity of Ja, ja when he wrote this. No linguistic signifcance exists outside of these agreements, which are formed out of elongated human exchanges, Wittgenstein explained. Tese personal connections, however, are difcult to attain. Tey require more than refraining from homicide. Relationships also require a feat of the imagination.
“If one has to imagine someone else’s pain on the model of one’s own, this is none too easy a thing to do,” Witt genstein wrote. “I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am. — Yes: one can make the decision to say ‘I believe he is in pain’ instead of ‘He is in pain.’”
Wittgenstein was gay, Jewish, and an intellectual during the rise of Hitler, but he would not be persuaded that reality was actually a confusing mess except after he began working as a grammar teacher in Lower Austria in 1922.
Te same year that she made Holocene, Lindsay Tunkl executed a performance called Tis Is How the iPhone Didn’t Save My Love Life Tis is How the iPhone Didn’t Save My Love Life consisted of Tunkl sending plaintive text messages to a lover who never replied to her even once, despite the fact that she sent those texts messages while driving across California to reach her, him, or them in the middle of the night.
Lindsay Tunkl sings I will always love yoooouuuuuuuuu and then jams her head under the water, drowning and hollering.
Wittgenstein did not prove a natural educator. He reviled provincial life and called his pupils “worms.” In 1926, in the municipality of Otterthal, Wittgenstein beat a hemophiliac 11 year old student named Josef Haidbauer, who died shortly thereafter, probably because of his injuries. Wittgenstein’s family was rich and Wittgenstein did not sufer any consequences for killing this child. But maybe Wittgenstein did sufer internally. Ten years later, he no longer believed that he had solved every philosophical problem that ever existed. He had moved away to Vienna but returned to Otterthal in 1936 to apologize for committing murder and other student abuses. Te people of the region remained unreceptive. Tey did not look him in the eye, and just said Ja, ja.
I’m not leaving until you tell me that you’re not coming. Tis is all very good, but Lindsay Tunkl’s best work product may be a short video that she posted on this Vimeo page in 2014. It is titled Is Tis What Feeling Feels Like? - First Attempt. In Is Tis What Feeling Feels Like?, Lindsay Tunkl wears a blue dress and her dark hair loose. In a wide shot, we see her walk into a white room that hosts a white table with a white enamel bowl on it. Te bowl brims with water. Lindsay Tunkl stands before the table and the bowl and stretches out her arms. She begins to yell-sing the Dolly Parton/Whitney Houston hit, I Will Always Love You and periodically dunk her head into the enamel bowl, continuing to screamingly sing while her head remains underwater.
LINDSAY TUNKL, STILLS FROM IS THIS WHAT FEELING FEELS LIKE? - FIRST ATTEMPT , 2013, IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
But what if you have imperfect relationships and no one is trying to imagine your subjectivity? What if you are a loner who is obsessed with the Apocalypse? What if, left to your own devices, you spend your afternoons singing I Will Always Love You while drowning and flming it? What if you only have 16 downloads and no one Likes your videos? Does anyone believe that you are in pain? And is anyone hearing or understanding you? To this last question, Wittgenstein might say Not really or Are you joking? He might also say Ja, ja. “Now, what about the language which describes my inner experiences and which only I myself can understand?” he asked in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein did not answer this question outright, but he suggested that such a language does not bear a “criterion of correctness” and thus would “give no information.” A brief review of his biography also makes us suspect that if we could conjure the spirit of Wittgenstein in a séance, he would additionally warn us that a person with a private language is crazy and likely to beat up a hemophiliac child when in a bad mood.
It is too bad that Wittgenstein did not live in the age of the Anthropocene so that he might watch Lindsay Tunkl videos. Lindsay Tunkl shows us that private languages persist as inescapable parts of life. Indeed, her work reveals that the most compelling of all grammars remains the private language that we are each condemned to speak. Tis private language does not necessarily evidence murderous craziness, even if we use it to talk about the Apocalypse or to express “babbling lamb” desires for erotic possession. However, this language possesses no criterion of correctness except for its verifcation of our solitude. Lindsay Tunkl teaches us that the community of empaths that Wittgenstein alludes to consists of people who speak their own grammars of solitude together. Every once in a while these individuals may understand each other. But a lot of the time, they don’t. “Having a relationship” occurs when a person agrees to continue loving another person despite the fact that their reciprocal comprehension remains sporadic and without guarantee.
Commenting on and liking videos, paintings, stories, and also other comments now form new practices of bridg ing this unbearable silence in the modern era.
Art is like unrequited love. As a former performance artist, I can tell you that there exists a lot of art that very few people look at. A huge number of artists work without any support at all. Artists post their art to the web and wait to see if anyone can hear their private language.
We cannot know for certain the precise right that Hawthorne claimed when drinking from Melville’s fagon of life. Tough he wrote many letters to Melville, they do not survive, because Melville burned them. But by studying Hawthorne’s actions and writings, we may discern that Hawthorne and Melville enjoyed some forms of agreement on this aspect of the human condition that Wittgenstein described as the inner experience We begin to suspect that that the two men shared some sort of private revelation when we learn that Hawthorne ran away from Melville. In early 1852, he moved himself and his wife, the dark-eyed Sophia Peabody, to the stevedore less safety of Concord, Massachusetts.
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For a short while, the 19th century novelists Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne provided each other with a life-sustaining community that proved even more powerful than that found in web commentary: Tey both loved and occasionally even apprehended each other. However, though Wittgenstein observed that reciprocal recognition must be manifested by people helpfully imagining each other’s sufering, it should be noted that Melville and Hawthorne’s corporate sympathy did not protect them from pain. Melville lived near Hawthorne in western Massachusetts in 1850-1851, the same years that he wrote Moby-Dick. Melville was 31 and unknown. Hawthorne was 46, and had just published Te Scarlet Letter to much acclaim Both men were married, but this did not matter. Tey met often and walked in silence in the Berkshire woods, enjoying the sunbeams, the trees, and the sounds of the birds. On November 17, 1851, Melville wrote Hawthorne: “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my fagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine.”
I have already mentioned Brandon’s physical attractions. Te chest muscles and the tallness, etc. Tese gorgeous temptations prevented me from caring about Rogue One. All I wanted to do, as Brandon leaned close to pressure me to watch interstellar decapitations, was nuzzle my mouth into his warm, musky neck, and to bite him and maybe lick and also perhaps in my enthusiasm leave a hickey.
narrator, admits that he cannot cope with his loss of Hollingsworth. “ Te heart-pang was not merely fgurative, but an absolute torture of the breast,” he says.
Tat same year, Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance Te novel concerns the relationship between a young poet named Miles Coverdale and one Holllingsworth, an older fellow with a vocation for penal reform. Te men form a passionate attachment in the utopian community of Blithedale, but then have a savage falling-out over a dis agreement about the socialist philosophies of Charles Fourier. Coverdale and Hollingsworth’s spat, however, probably concerns more their romantic frustrations than their commitments to the universal laws of social progress. Tey break up, Hollingsworth taking up with a lady named Priscilla and Coverdale moving to the city, where he begins spying on strange married Coverdale,men.thenovel’s
So, instead of admiring the iPad, I pressed my mouth directly under his jaw. I tried to kiss the tender fesh next to his thorax. Tis stimulus caused Brandon to swiftly jerk his shoulder up so that my face, briefy if brutally, smushed between his head and shoulder. Brandon then snapped his head away, leaving me squish-eyed and politely smiling as I sat stify next to him. “No, come on, watch it,” he said. “Okay,” I Nodding,said.Iobserved the space murder. “See?” Brandon said, raising his eyebrows. “Can’t wait.” My eye hurt. “ Tat’s really neat,” I said.
YXTA MAYA MURRAY
Two months ago, in his apartment, Brandon helped me cut and shave my hair. I have an idiosyncratic hairstyle, where I buzz the right side of my head in a circular pattern and grow the left side long and braid it with beads.
I felt the feathered wings of my spirit terrifyingly expand like the wings of those emotional angels described by Plato in Te Phaedrus. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him. My heart beat and beat. Eight weeks after that, though, Brandon and I “crossed wires.” We sat in his living room, on the sofa covered with the fuzzy fabric. With the aid of his iPad, Brandon attempted to show me a two-minute clip of young violent people dueling with big glow sticks. He explained that he wished me to watch this atrocious preview because he felt very excited about the release date of a flm in the Star Wars franchise called Rogue One Rogue One, as I quickly learned in enormous detail, is a prequel to the Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and Han Solo tale. It tells the doomed love story of two attractive interstellar Resistance Fighters who waste a lot of time misun derstanding each other’s private languages via interminable debates over a primordial, tech-savvy version of Fourierism that requires the subservience of individualism to the greater good. Te female eventually submits to the ideology of the male, which causes them to deeply and hysterically fall in love. Te female and the male then perish demi-in fagrante while getting planet-bombed by the Empire. “Here, look,” Brandon said, pressing the iPad up to my face.
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Brandon brought a wood stool from his kitchen and put it in front of his bathroom mirror, which hangs above his sink. He took of his white Oxford button-down, and I took of my Quiet Lightning T-Shirt. I never wear a bra. We smiled at each other in the mirror and laughed. I sat on the stool. Brandon had previously removed his electric razor from the cupboard below his sink counter. He now picked it up of the sink’s ledge and ficked it on. He bent over me, buzzing my hair into the circle confgura tion. His fngers touched my scalp and my cheeks very gently.
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I cannot say for certain what exactly Brandon had in mind when he said See? Can’t wait. I suspect that he attempted to communicate to me a hope that we shared similar cultural and aesthetic values that would bode well in our future together as man and wife and the parents of a small, intelligent brood of children. He also, of course, could have simply meant that he felt impatient to see the flm.
I can say for certain, however, what I meant when I said Tat’s really neat. I did not mean that’s really neat in the least. I actually meant: I cannot believe that you are more interested in watching fucking television than you are in me.
None of that happened, though. Ste·ve·dore /ˈstēvəˌdôr/ noun 1. a person who loves you by fucking you so blindingly hard and passionately that he or she destroys the separateness between you. Tere are three types of language. Te frst type of language voices a fellow-feeling. One need not say a word to pronounce this idiom. Wittgenstein says that this expression is none too easy to achieve, but Brandon and I efortlessly spoke it when we looked at each other’s refections as he buzzed my hair. I know that the message that passed between us signaled I love you. When Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne walked together in the Berkshires, they, too, co-wrote the story of their fatal love by marking their footprints into the leaf-mold of the Massachusetts forest. I cannot say if it was none too easy for them to do so, but the violent queerphobia plaguing the United States at the time (and, now) suggests that they had to fght to secure these precious moments of afective telepathy. Lindsay Tunkl and her lover also spoke this language in Tis is How the iPhone Didn’t Save My Love Live, where she clamored at her, him, or them via text to return her devotion but only silence followed. Like Brandon and me in the bathroom, and Melville and Hawthorne in the forest, Lindsay Tunkl eventually understood the magnitude of her beloved’s message. It created an arduous yet necessary mutuality between them. Te second type of language bears words whose meanings arrive corroded and warped, but partially understood. Tis is the language of Ja, ja. Lovers live in terror of this vocabulary. It is the patois that leads to heartbreaking disagreements over Fourierism, singing I Will Always Love You, and drowning. Ja, ja has double, triple meanings, untrue meanings, builds false hopes, and lays secret traps. A person may hear a phrase spoken in Language Number 2 and believe that
For a moment, I also meant: I sort of hate you right now. What had passed between us to explain this deterioration? What sin had we committed to fall from our psychic decla rations of love in the bathroom to the depths of our mutual ignorance in the living room? Earlier in our relationship, when Brandon had cut my hair, our Plato-like passion to fuse into one person had impregnated every moment with agreed-upon meaning. But then, love cooled. And once this horizontality began to dissipate, a creeping hierarchy of afection started to reveal discrepancies, that is, the existence of our separate private languages.Onthe sofa, we had a choice to endure the risks of empathetic imagination, as Wittgenstein teaches us. For example, I could have submitted my ideology to the male’s, like in Rogue One. Or, Brandon could have seen a look of disappointment fash across my features and said, Tis heart-pang is not merely fgurative, but an absolute torture of the breast, like Hawthorne wrote in semi-code about Melville. Or, we could have stared into each other’s eyes and said I will always love you, like Lindsay Tunkl sang as she drowned in a bowl of water in Is Tis What Feeling Feels Like?
39 they discern an existential yes within its syntax, but later realize the damnation of their dreams. A particularly exquisite suferingWhenensues.Melville asked Hawthorne by what right he drank from the fagon of his life, Hawthorne replied with a Yan kee Ja, ja by feeing the soft mossy forests of the Berkshires for the redoubts of Concord and then writing Te Blithedale Romance. In so doing Hawthorne tried to convince Melville that he had no idea what in the hell Melville was talking about but simultaneously also explain that he would love Melville for the rest of his life.
In my case, I fear that when I said Tat’s neat about the Rogue One prequel, and actually meant I sort of hate you right now, I cracked the mechanism that translates Brandon’s and my words when we speak to one another. I worry that the injury I inficted on this love technology continued to lethally spread and widen in the months since our conversation about Star Wars, since I did not immediately superglue the damage with sex or authentic ideological submission. Tus, when I made erotic overtures to Brandon this evening, and he responded by saying Wait and Hold on, I am scared that what he actually tried to tell me was Stop, I do not want you anymore. Te third type of language cannot be understood, either as a single or double entendre. Tis private language is the shibboleth of a diferent type of wasteland. In this dialect, the word Stevedore may be written by an island castaway on a paper scrap that is then stufed into a bottle and thrown into the ocean. When a beachcomber on the mainland sees the bottle bobbing in the water many months or years later, and opens it up, he reads the word and thinks that it refers to a character out of a novel by Herman Melville that treats the themes of masculine madness and whales. Te castaway remains on her faraway sandbar, unable to translate her nouns and verbs into shapes that will attract a rescue party. She sits on the beach and contemplates Tsunamis and Nuclear Blasts — the end of the world. It is 4:16 in the morning. Brandon’s breathing remains deep and steady. In Los Angeles’s pre-dawn, sepia light, I can make out the hedgehog spikes of his hair. I smell his skin, the clove of him under his cologne. He moves lightly. Te cotton sheets make crinkling noises. I want you to love me like a tornado, like a plague, like a fre. I want you to destroy me with your light saber. I want to have your baby. I lean over to him again. “I love you,” I say instead. I say it now so that he can hear it. Brandon’s rhythmic breathing stops. He shifts and turns toward me. He reaches out under the sheets and grasps my thigh.“Yeah, I love you too,” he says after several seconds. Ten he falls silent again. I look out of the transom window, at the blue-opal sky captured in a windowpane. I don’t really know what he means. Lindsay Tunkl, keep working.
YXTA MAYA MURRAY
Ott’s multimedia work was always social and celebratory, but after moving to Chicago from California in 2005, she be gan making public art projects. Her CTA Window, commissioned by the Chicago Transit Authority Commission, is a stained-glass mural in which pufy gray cloudbanks soar above freeways; the mural itself is installed alongside a window that looks out on the changeable sky. In 2011, she founded Terrain — an innovative, ambitious curatorial project in which she and her partner John Paulett transformed their green-shingled house in Oak Park into a gallery. Artists at all stages of their careers have been invited to install original, site-specifc work on their front porch and postage-stamp yard.
Her most recent full-scale installation, who cares for the sky?, featured an 8,000-cubic-foot mountain that could be scaled on a series of stairs or burrowed into via a treasure-flled underground tunnel. Inspired by Gertrude Stein’s children’s book, the project became a lopsided monument to innocence, persistence, and wonder. In the spirit of her work with Terrain, Ott invited 70 artists to contribute a small, personal work to be hung in the tunnel. She received a mixed batch of things from a mixed batch of artists, and it was not always clear which pieces were the work of professionals. As she observed, Tere’s something that happens when you abstract a single piece from a body of work that renders it talismanic. […] I’ve always believed that my artworks ofer a place where trauma can be trans formed into something else by turning things inside out and dislodging them into a space of pure play. When I made paintings, I was experiencing that kind of play by myself and it was very personal. But here, in these spaces, it’s very public. […] Someone who came to the show compared it to writing a poem: You begin, but don’t know how it’s going to end. Te mountain has an illusion of solidity, but it feels very temporary to me, perhaps even still growing, and in a way, that’s a beautiful thing.
By 2014, Ott’s highly painterly work no longer entailed making actual paintings. She began working with Sty rofoam. Her massive installation at the Chicago Cultural Center, here and there pink melon joy, spread over three large, windowed rooms mobilized her occupation with queasy, saccharine colors and synthetic textures into an epic funhouse journey through purgatory, heaven, and hell. Massive blocks of carved icehouse Sty rofoam rest on AstroTurf clouds. Te efect is profound. “ Tis dream is no escape from reality,” Jason Foum berg wrote for Artforum. “Ott builds the type of world she wants us to live in.” Her pastel-drenched kitsch mate rials transcend themselves in sculptures that evoke sufering and pleasure, ecstasy, pleasure, fear, and mortality.
40 ON SABINA OTT'S SOCIAL PRACTICE
Simple, open, and democratic, Terrain projects explore the divide between public and private, decoration and function, fgure and ground. At the same time, they’re a gift to the neighborhood, ofering children and adults a chance to expe rience challenging contemporary art without visiting a museum or gallery. Over the years, Ott’s concept has spread far beyond her front yard, with Terrain Biennials being held this fall in California, Indiana, Arizona, Sweden, and France.
CHRIS KRAUS In the mid-1990s, Sabina Ott experimented with transporting elements of her colorful, bold, and layered non-narrative paintings away from the canvas and into the room. Swaths of color escaped from the paintings to wrap themselves around walls and onto carpeted foors; details of images were incrementally expanded and then rendered as wood-relief architec tural models. Inspired by Gertrude Stein’s deliberately skewed reinvention of syntax, installations like 2001 Everywhere Tere is Somewhere (Suddenly Green Became Blue) and What’s here is everywhere (2003–2004) enacted a controlled and delirious state of confusion whereby color, shape, and emotion become newly clear. As Ott described her process, “ Te syntaxes switch, everything is thrown up in the air and falls down, and then you can experience it again in a fresh way.”
SABINA OTT, THE RELATION OF ASPIRATION AND ACTION , 2011, POLYSTYRENE, SPRAY ENAMEL, FLASHE, WIRE, MIRROR AND CACTUS 20 X 60 X 20 INCHES
SABINA OTT, WHO CARES FOR THE SKY? , 2016.
SABINA OTT, WHO CARES FOR THE SKY? , 2016
This is a body of photographs that study the landscapes in which over 250 prisons, jails, and detention centers sit throughout each of the fifty U.S. states and territories. Each image is photographed from a publicly available point of view. Statistics have been obtained from the facility pictured, or if withheld by the facility, through another publicly avail able source. All information was obtained between 2013 and 2017.
Offering an unprecedented survey of the U.S. prison system, Degrees of Visibility traces the visual politics of what some call a “carceral soci ety,” a society predicated on the mass-scale captivity of people. The project has been exhibited in Atlanta and San Francisco, with addi tional cities being planned. It is also being developed into a book.
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
ASHLEY HUNT
Some images are accompanied by additional material that describes the space pictured, including histories that are typically hidden from the discourse of modern imprisonment, and depictions of the work of grassroots organizations around the U.S.
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DEGREES OF VISBILITY
ISAMU NOGUCHI, MY ARIZONA , 1943, FIBERGLASS, PLEXIGLAS. 18 1/4 X 18 1/4 X 4 5/8 INCHES. ©THE ISAMU NOGUCHI FOUNDATION AND GARDEN MUSEUM, NEW YORK / ARS. PHOTO BY KEVIN NOBLE.
December 7, 1941 — Listening to NBC News on the car radio while driving south from Los Angeles to San Diego in search of onyx for a sculpture, Isamu Noguchi heard Upton Close announce that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Born to a white American mother and a Japanese father who returned to Japan when Noguchi was a toddler, Noguchi was, by his own account, abruptly racialized at age 37. “With a flash I realized I was no longer the sculptor alone,” Noguchi writes in his autobiography. “I was not just American but Nisei. A Japanese-American.”
On March 18, Roosevelt signed the War Relocation Authority into existence with Executive Order 9102. The WRA immediately began to issue civilian exclusion orders. In the coming months some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, including those with as little as 1/16th Japanese heritage, were made to leave their homes and report to assembly centers, to be processed and relocated in what the WRA itself framed as “pioneer” communities. “Within these areas,” a WRA-produced circular stated, “you will have an opportunity to build new communities where you may live, work, worship, and educate your children.”
Worried about being interned, Noguchi flew back to the East Coast that March. He then seemed to change his mind, deciding to go west to join the internees, enlisting John Collier, head of the Office of Indian Affairs, in his efforts. With the help of Collier, Noguchi obtained a letter from the WRA office in Washington, DC, stating that the sculptor was traveling “to aid in the development of a handicraft project among Japanese evacuees.” The letter identified Noguchi as not an evacuee from a military area and therefore not needing any special permit. Noguchi arrived at the Poston War Relocation Center in southwestern Arizona on May 8, shortly before evacuees were relocated. Getting there early allowed Noguchi to make somewhat short-lived friendships with the administrators. These alliances didn’t survive, dissipating with the arrival of the rest of the internees and the start of camp life in Poston.
THE POVERTY OF OUR ACTUAL NOGUCHICONDITION:ANDPOSTON
MATTHEW SHEN GOODMAN
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The shocked sculptor, who had earlier worked with Brâncuși in Paris and was experiencing some success (most notably with the previous year’s News, Noguchi’s Rockefeller Center bas-relief of various heroically posed newsmen), joined the Japanese American Citizens League after the hearing the announcement, in hopes of convincing the country that Japanese Americans were loyal citizens. Finding the JACL too timid, he organized his own group, the Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy. (He later held that organization to also be of little worth: “The Nisei don’t want to have anything to do with liberals. They say, ‘Keep away! Leave us alone!’”) The NWAMD drafted a “Plan for Government Sponsored Farm and Craft Settlement for People of Japanese Parentage.” The group proposed voluntary evacuation for Japanese immigrants and citizens (Issei and Nisei) to small settlements where evacuees would participate in New Deal–style industrial and agricultural work. While the plan did not circulate widely in Washington until March, it preceded in its conception the February 19 Executive Order 9066, which allowed the Secretary of War to create military zones from which any person could be “excluded.” The NWAMD framed the evacuation as fostering “good will” via the production of goods as one’s “patriotic duty”: “as a citizen, it becomes incumbent on the Nisei to consent to evacuation as a measure of his patriotism.” (The plan reads strangely to current sensibilities; it is hard to imagine a contemporary group of ostensibly left-leaning people of color proposing “voluntary evacuation” in order to convince white America of their commitment to democracy.)
documents from the museum’s archives related to Noguchi’s internment are on view: the back and forth over the seized maquette; a memorandum from the San Francisco Museum of Art on the occasion of Nogu chi’s exhibition; a letter from Shoji Fujii, editor and publisher of the progressive Japanese American weekly Doho (“some predicaments you face with no doubt, but whataheckthematter, isamu ol’ boy? Now that you are in, I guess we’d better
58 los angeles review of books Life in the camp was not as Noguchi hoped. Lacking both equipment and skilled personnel, his plan to begin a handi craft program failed, leaving the sculptor feeling superfluous. He gave the WRA office an ultimatum: if they didn’t help him with his projects, he’d ask for his release. In the meantime, Noguchi was prevented from seeing a show of his own work at the San Francisco Museum of Art, which was put together by the museum’s director Grace Morley in part to counter the demonization of Japanese Americans. Reviewing the exhibition in the Pacific Citizen, Larry Tajiri wrote of Noguchi’s embodiment of the ideals of true democracy, “the mixing of cultures and races that was anathema to the Axis powers.” Both Noguchi himself and his art were that “synthesis of culture and race that he believes must eventually come to America.”
The objects produced during the sculptor’s time in Poston testify to the hampered quality of Noguchi’s time there. With little by way of sculptural materials, Noguchi was forced to work primarily with wood. His curved carvings are on view in the exhibition, less works in themselves than precursory elements to the multifaceted, mobile-like pieces he would make later on. In addition, the exhibition presents plans for a recreational park and a cemetery for Poston, both unbuilt during his time in the camp. The works made upon Noguchi’s return to New York bear the marks of his internment. Reminiscent of topographical models, wall-hanging squares bear titles like My Arizona and This Tortured Earth, the latter featuring tears and rips in its undulating surface. Categorized as either “Gateways” or “Deserts,” the rest of the exhibition attempts to find Poston’s traces in Noguchi’s later career. Rough-hewn slabs of rocks evoke the colors of Arizona’s wilds, while portal-like objects are meant, according to Self-Interned, to represent a bridge between an alien landscape and something more closely approximating home. “That was how he turned the potential liability of his bi-culturalism and innately peripatetic existence into an asset: by fashioning himself as a citizen of the world,” the wall text reads, echoing Tajiri’s words some decades Yellowing,later.type-written
In spite of the idealism Tajiri saw, Noguchi was attempting to get out of Poston, applying for leave in August under a new “mixed blood” clause allowing for those in racially mixed marriages and children thereof to ask for release. He remained trapped in Poston until mid-November, needing the intervention of the internment camp’s director Wade Head. “I have every expectation of coming back here in a month,” Noguchi told the camp’s newspaper, “unless some unforeseen development keeps me out.” Though the camps remained open another three years, he never returned.
Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center opened last January at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City in New York. Open until January 2018, the show displays some two dozen works from Noguchi’s time before, during, and after Poston — though all marked in some way by Noguchi’s time in the camp. The Poston-an tecedent works include a bust of theater actress Lily Zeitz (actually finished by Noguchi in the camp, the piece was one of numerous such busts of celebrities Noguchi had undertaken to make money in the decades prior the war), and a 1937 frieze maquette that had been detained in transit from Hawaii to San Francisco, where it was to be shown at the 1942 exhibition. (“Writing to the shipping agent and the War Relocation Authority’s Division of Evacuee Property while interned at Poston, Noguchi learned firsthand about the loss of internees’ rights as citizens,” Self-Interned states. It pales in comparison, of course, the wholesale loss of property by his fellow internees, who, as Hayden Herrera writes in the Noguchi biography Listening to Stone, saw the sculptor “as a famous artist from Manhattan and did not feel at ease with him.”) Absent from the show is any evidence of Noguchi’s socially minded projects from the ’30s that might contextualize his work with the NWAMD and his choice to go to Poston. Much of the work from those years exhibits a combination of New Deal liberalism and Deweyian philosophy; this is especially evident in the 1933 Monument to the Plow, a Jeffersonian proto-earthwork consisting of a pyramidal mound of dirt — one side fallow, another plowed, the third planted — proposed to the Public Works of Art Project. We also don’t see evidence of Noguchi’s labor affiliations, whether with the Artists’ Union or, in another proposed monument, a memorial for hosiery workers to be built in front of Philadelphia’s Carl Mackley Houses, the first federally funded housing project in the United States.
ISAMU NOGUCHI, UNTITLED , 1943, WOOD, STRING. 23 1/4 X 5 3/8 X 3 1/2 INCHES ©THE ISAMU NOGUCHI FOUNDATION AND GARDEN MUSEUM, NEW YORK / ARS. PHOTO BY KEVIN NOBLE.
A corner of Self-Interned has been set up as a reading room, with a number of history books on the internment camps available for perusing. Visitors can take pamphlets of “I Become a Nisei,” Noguchi’s unpublished May 1942 essay. Solic ited by DeWitt Wallace for Reader’s Digest, the article was perhaps an attempted atonement for “Japanese Saboteurs in Our Midst,” a fear-mongering screed published a month after the Pearl Harbor bombings (that article remains unpublished in any of the subsequent printings of the January 1942 issue). Noguchi knew that the Reader’s Digest au dience expected something patriotic and inspirational, and was probably wondering why Noguchi, “a Eurasian sculptor from New York,” would go to Arizona to join the evacuated Japanese. “I reply that because of my peculiar background I felt this war very keenly and wished to serve the cause of democracy in the best way that seemed open to me,” he writes. “Relocation ofered a presage of inevitable social change in which I wished to take part.” He makes clear the misery of Poston, the 120 degree afternoons, and the winds of burning dust; the 37-cents-a-day rations, prepared by inexperienced cooks. “We have moments of elation only to be defeated by the poverty of our actual condition; the lack of water and equipment for farming, of tools and materials, our barrack surroundings. Sixteen dollars a month seems hardly an incentive to some.” Noguchi hardly shakes his unsettlement throughout the essay. Aware of the legal and material stakes of being Japanese (it is difcult to believe he felt Japanese at all for the frst time on that car ride — one wagers he felt threatened in a diferent, near ontological manner), Noguchi describes his arrival as being in part to commune with those he now felt close to, and in part to help the Japanese interned live a sort of model minority life of democratic citizenship. “A haunting sense of unreality, of not quite belonging, which has always bothered me made me seek for an answer among the Nisei.” Tey did not respond in kind, Noguchi feeling alienated as he had two years before, when he claims he frst heard the word Nisei in Hawaii. “I met many of them on the Islands, young architects’ assistants who feted and dined me. Tey looked upon me as one from the outside who had surmounted barriers which they felt closed advancement against them.” It didn’t help that the white faces of the camp also abandoned him, those administrators he’d befriended upon arrival abruptly having become “our keepers whose word was our law […] Along with my freedom I seemed to have lost any possibility of equal friendship. I became embarrassed in their presence.” A state of transitory alienation was pervasive in Poston, Noguchi ascribing a similar ailment to his own to the Nisei at large. “I begin to see the peculiar tragedy of the Nisei as that of a generation of transition accepted neither by the Japanese nor by America.”
Conceivably conceding to the audience of Reader’s Digest, the sculptor remains conficted yet upbeat about the intern ment camps themselves. He describes “a duality of purpose in the relocation program,” seen either as “a land and com munity development which may lay the basis for social engineering in the handling of oriental peoples for reconstruc tion and education to a more democratic way of life,” or “a travesty of democracy which at best leads to paternalism.” Te essay is bookended by two interwoven assertions: that the reintegration of the Nisei, “a middle people with no middle ground,” should come from their acquisition of handicraft skills, which will provide them with the employable traits necessary for their return into public life; and that their hybridity — but maybe more so Noguchi’s — is the teleology of the United States. “To be hybrid anticipates the future. Tis is America, the nation of all nationalities. Te racial and cultural intermixture is the antithesis of all the tenet[s] of the Axis Powers. For us to fall into the Fascist line of race bigotry is to defeat our unique personality and strength.”
60 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS plan accordingly”); and letters from Noguchi himself, including one to Man Ray sent only a few weeks after his arrival. “I’m all right,” Noguchi writes. “ Tis is the wierdest [sic], most unreal situation — like in a dream — I wish I were out. Outside, it seems from the inside, history is taking fight and passes forever. Here time has stopped and nothing is of any consequence, nothing of any value, neither our time or our skill.”
Donald Trump was inaugurated a day after Self-Interned opened. He had said two years prior that he didn’t know whether he would have supported or opposed the internment camps, playing up the contingency of history — “I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer” — and quickly veering into abstracted talk of the difculty of winning. A week after the election the spokesman for a pro-Trump super PAC cited the internment camps as legal precedent for an immigrant registry many obviously feared would target Muslims. A week into his presidency, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which restricted travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim coun tries. (Defending the widely protested ban in the Ninth Circuit Court in this past May, Acting Solicitor General Jefrey
That manner of solace seemed and still seems useful. Certainly harmless: Liberal viewers did not suddenly begin sug gesting that Muslim Americans register themselves in order to demonstrate their patriotism. But what a moment might harbor does not necessarily last. In rereading “I Become a Nisei,” some months after the initial shock of the election has dissipated, I find that a sort of wavering disgust hovers over everything. There is something embarrassing about it, to me, as a mixed-race individual. The specifics-bereft nature of the language we used and still use to praise multiraciality rings hollow, from those vague pronouncements of bland anti-racist goodwill (as if the commonwealth of democratic humanism was foretold in your discernibly hybrid phenotype), to those self-affirming bills of rights for multiracial peo ple that provide celebratory choices — you can determine your identity! — but no demands. I wonder what it means to claim hybridity as the future in a nation culturally and legally structured by hypodescent, and whose anti-miscegenation laws provided the legal model for German fascists. I imagine “hybridity” as an empty category, often meant to imply something very specific and still very white, often vaguely east Asian — Keanus and Isamus abounding. It certainly feels strange to consider a return to the peak Obama-era headrush into a post-racial utopia — venerating “The New Face of America,” Time magazine–style, with appropriated terms like “hapa” — when the political mood of a sizable part of this country now seems to align more closely with that of Santa Barbara mass shooter Elliot Rodger, who was half white, half Malaysian Chinese. Roger’s murderous misogyny seemed inseparable from his unending white supremacist calculus. (Bemoaning his lack of a sex life, Rodger fumed impotently in his manifesto: “I am beautiful, and I am half white myself.”) Noguchi’s message here might fall short because of its resonance with the glistening corporate image of multiracial bliss preferred by the centrists who lost to the man so feted by the white supremacists in Charlottesville. Certainly, Americans could procreate among themselves until their descendants become some universal beige. We could put a person of each and every color at the head of Berkshire Hathaway and Exxon, the NYPD and ICE, and each of the armed services. That could, despite Trump, yet be the American telos, our hybrid future — while still being, as Noguchi described the camps, a travesty of democracy, at best a paternalism, at worst something differently hellish.
On February 19, the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, I attended Bend, a performance by Kimi Maeda about her art professor father who had been interned in Poston with Noguchi. I found myself crying, sitting cross-legged on the floor for lack of room, before the lights had begun to dim.
Wall declared the case “is not Korematsu,” referring to the Supreme Court decision upholding Executive Order 9066, which, despite being almost universally reviled, has yet to be officially overturned.)
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Given the circumstances, the exhibition has been understandably lauded. For those perturbed by the country’s state of affairs, it felt timely, prescient, Noguchi’s declaration of a hybrid America described as a sort of rallying cry by the Times
MATTHEW SHEN GOODMAN ISAMU NOGUCHI, POSTON PARK AND RECREATION AREAS AT POSTON, AZ , 1942, BLUEPRINT, 42 3/8 X 88 INCHES
HILMA AF KLINT, BUDDHA’S STANDPOINT IN THE EARTHLY LIFE, NO. 3A, 1920, COURTESY HAMBURGER BAHNHOF.
Hilma af Klint painted what art historians have called the frst abstract art. Tey say she painted from her gut or her soul — a type of automatic painting, and did not engage in pre- or post- thought. She neither planned out what she was about to do, nor did she necessarily craft or wring her ideas out through hours of meddling. She made forms that spoke to her from spirits that were so presently inside her that they may have as well been elsewhere, and from a voice not her own, the voice that calls to us when we are born.
THE ROSES DOROTHEA LASKY
Klint was a follower of Spiritism, which like so many other religions, asserts that a spirit and a body work in tandem throughout a life. Spiritists also believed in something called a perispirit, a sort of binding principle between the spirit and body — a third thing. Tis thing was thought to be a type of solidity, like smoke, as if the form of the ghost was the holy ectoplasm. As if the thing we see as the mirage were real. Because it is. People I have loved have died. All of us have loved people who have died. We search for their whereabouts after they are gone and when we sense them right beside us, what do we feel? I am still living so I don’t completely know the answer. But I do know that when I look at Hilma af Klint’s paintings I am somehow inside the liminal, where death was always the state of what things were. It isn’t sad like some might understand it to be. It’s efortlessly cerebral, the feeling mind. When I am completely submerged in Klint’s paintings, it is that beach sensation between land and ocean, if land were life and ocean were death. Like when you are on that edge between the two, you ask: Should I jump in, should I go back to my yellow towel, should I try to jump up into the sky and edge out either answer? It’s probably not that easy to make a decision like that. Klint’s paintings are the form of that question — Should I? When the question should be — Can I? Or, must I? When the question is always, do they call for me in the ocean? Oh, but they always do. You don’t need to ask that. We artists call for them, too. Klint’s forms always say, it’s neither beach nor ocean that matters, it’s the solid air that was always holding you steady, a lattice of air to climb when the moment is right, when the moment means for you to. Klint’s forms say that jelly air has colors and shapes and they interact in the eternal moment and her paintings say, look, I took a picture of that moment. And when we look at them ourselves, in the museum or the history book, we say, thank you, dear painter, you showed us, yet again: we are real.
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For so long I have feared that the world of contemporary art is spiritually vapid. Maybe I’ve thought this because of the modes of production, the ways in which art must be customized and commodifed today, makes it packaged in such a way that it cannot hold the spirit. I’m always searching for those pieces of art — past, present, or future –– that can.
RACHEL ROSKE, EYE SHADOW, 2017, SILVERPOINT ON CANVAS,16 X 21 INCHES.
Meredith Lovelace was hoping to resolve the Dan Graves situation before lunch. It was Monday, the day she liked to meet her wife Amy at the cart for soup and sourdough rolls. Te situation concerned two newly admitted graduate students to the Department — both sculptors, both Mer edith’s advisees. Elena claimed Dan Graves had showed up on the steps of her apartment the night before — blotto, talking suicide, and toting a suitcase of letters from his dead dad. “He told me he wanted to get in his car and crash it,” Elena had said earlier that morning while whipping tissues from the dispenser in Meredith’s ofce. “He told me he wanted to die.”
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THE DAN GRAVES SITUATION EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG
Meredith walked up the stone path and stepped onto Dan Graves’s porch. To the right of the front door, a faded American fag hung from two nails. Meredith pushed the button on the storm door with her thumb and pulled the plexiglass toward her. Te button wobbled in its socket and clicked halfway but the door did not release. She tried again, pulling harder, and when it still didn’t open, knocked lightly on the storm door with her knuckles. Te sound rattled the glass, but didn’t penetrate. She waited. Dan Graves did not come. How long was sufcient? A minute? Two? His car was here, after all.
When the door closed behind Elena, the director clapped his hands together and pufed. “ Tose are the magic words,” he said. He handed Dan Graves’s fle across the room to Meredith. “Just knock on his door and see if he’s alive,” he said. “ Tat’s what we did with Ronda last year. Let’s hope this goes the other way.” Dan Graves lived in an un-hip part of the college town, a residential neighborhood near the woods, in a small, stucco house painted mint green. Te driveway was short, and in order to park out of the fow of trafc, it was necessary for Meredith to nudge her Volvo station wagon all the way up nose to ass against the bumper of Dan Graves’s white pickup. Te pickup wore a single bumper sticker — Say Ya to the UP, eh? — and a Michigan license plate, which was clean and perfectly fat. Meredith inspected the truck carefully for signs of an accident, but it was showroom-shiny, possibly brand new, with a clean black bed-liner. Te foot wells had been vacuumed so recently that Meredith could still see the overlapping lines of the nozzle. A CD in a clear plastic sleeve bearing the inscription To Dan, love Kelsey Sue in orange sharpie sat politely in the passenger seat, and a stadium cup holding a mountain of clean quarters was wedged in the middle console. A sensible, admirable thing, that cup. Standing in front of parking meters on campus, Meredith was always rummaging in her pockets, only to turn up dimes, nickels, pennies, and the occasional earring of Amy’s.
Te living room was empty of furniture, just the white carpet and a raised platform of hardwood that supported a freplace. In front of the freplace, a ’50s-era green plaid suitcase with gold clasps lay on its side. On the far side of the room were sliding glass doors that opened out onto a small wooden deck, and beyond that, a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A small square of sun hovered on the near wall.
“I’m not properly dressed,” Dan Graves said, his feet pink and huge. “But will you come in?”
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To cross the threshold, Meredith had to pass very close to Dan Graves. She was tall for a woman, 5'10 on a good day, but she came up only to the top button of Dan Graves’s shirt. He smelled of a sporty masculine deodorant, the one that Meredith also wore. He was an attractive man, Meredith observed. Most women would think so.
Meredith had met Dan Graves only once before, at the director’s annual lawn party to welcome the new class. He had seemed plodding and straight-laced, not a guy given to dramatics. Meredith remembered him as tall and shy; he had eaten a lot of fried chicken, drank only root beer, and left early. She had made sure to meet him. He was her advisee after all, but also she liked the work, plain and simple. Te images he submitted with his application the previous spring had stuck in Meredith’s brain: a deer antler that had grown swollen and infected (in bronze), a large-as-life elk that cowered on its back feet (in bronze) and, Meredith’s favorite, a walleye that lay split open and bleeding against a rock (in bronze). It seemed that at any moment the fsh’s eye might blink, and the fsh’s bronze blood, even in the half-lighting and bad quality of the pictures, seemed to ooze slow and thick. “Yawn,” said one of Meredith’s colleagues, a water colorist. “Isn’t this the kind of macho-nostalgia that belongs in a place called the Soaring Eagle lodge?” But Meredith had spoken up, praising the work’s energy and simplicity, and the director backed her up.
Dan Graves let the storm door slam. Te entryway was carpeted in a thick white shag. Meredith checked her watch. She had 20 minutes if she wanted to catch Amy. “Will you take your shoes of ?” he said. “If you don’t mind. It’s hard work to keep a white carpet clean.”
Meredith bent down and unlaced the men’s blue suede Oxfords that Amy had bought her for their wedding anni versary. Meredith had ogled the shoes from outside the window of the downtown store for a month. On the night Amy gave them to her, Meredith got out of bed to turn on the closet light and hold the shoes in their white tissue paper. Tey were ridiculous shoes, Meredith saw now, looking at them on Dan Graves’s white carpet. Te white carpet continued in every direction. To the right, there was a narrow hallway which led presumably to his bedroom, but Dan Graves led Meredith in the other direction, left into the living room.
It was not exactly that Meredith thought Elena was lying about the Dan Graves situation. As assistant director of the Department’s graduate arts program, it was basically Meredith’s job to answer emails. But in the two months since the new class arrived, Elena had emailed more than her fair share — asking to take a Sociology course instead of the required graduate arts survey or urging Meredith to bring a female tileworker from Nepal as the semester’s visiting artist instead of the male welder that the director had already selected via costly search committee.
Dan Graves stood on the porch, his thin body holding the door open. He was even thinner than Meredith re membered, and stood with his bare feet close together. His eyes were small and set back deeply into his head, which was surprisingly bare for such a young man, the pale skin covered only by a fne translucent fuzz. He wore a red-and-whitechecked dress shirt that bore the faint creases of being professionally pressed and folded, and expensive-looking black corduroy pants. He retreated into the foyer of the house as Meredith advanced, but kept his hand pushing against the storm door so it stayed open.
“When I asked him to leave, he called me a dyke,” Elena had added, near the end of their interview. Dyke, Mere dith typed into the Incident Report Form. Te cursor disappeared then reappeared. “Do you hear what I’m saying?” Elena said. She had a chain that connected a stud in the top cartilage of her left ear to a regular stud in the lobe. It hung long and shimmering as a stalactite, and shook in the air against her shaved head when she spoke. “We absolutely hear you,” the director said. When Meredith and Elena passed each other in the cinderblock stairwells of the Department, Elena would smile warmly, then nudge the tip of her chin quickly upward in a kind of micro-nod. It was the kind of nod that lays a claim. Meredith did not nod back. Meredith was halfway down the stone path when she heard the storm door open. “It sticks sometimes.”
“I think so,” he said. “I got drunk and scared Elena.”
67 EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG
“Damn it.” He said it with a pronounced Midwestern accent so that the words came out through his nose, deeyam it.“Elena said you indicated you might be a danger to yourself,” Meredith said. “She said you told her you wanted to die.”Dan Graves looked down at his thighs. With his eyes looking down, everything about his face changed. Te lids of his eyes looked pale and veined and there were deep purple shadows around his sockets. Te skin of his face was red and raw.“Idon’t deny anything,” said Dan Graves. When he looked back up at Meredith, his face was neutral again. “I’m sorry,” Meredith said. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“What was wrong with the old lampshade?” Meredith asked one night after they’d turned the lights out, her heart beat rising in her ears. “It was faded,” replied Amy. “What does one boy need with seven skateboards?” “Go easy, honey,” Amy said. “Just because your family worshipped at the church of deny thyself everything you want, doesn’t mean we have to.”
Dan Graves rubbed his hands together like he was cold, and looked over at the wooden platform, where there was a bottle of Old Crow and a squat, squarish glass. He strode to the platform, gently nudged the bottle and glass to the side, then sat down on the platform with his back to the freplace.
“We can sit on this,” Dan Graves said. He looked like a grasshopper when he sat down; all knees. Meredith sat too, but left enough space for two of herself to sit between them. “Dan, do you know why I’m here?”
Dan Graves lifted his shoulders to his ears and dropped them. He jiggled his knee, then tapped his bare feet against the carpet. “I said what I said and I probably meant it at the time. But I’m okay now, Ms. Lovelace. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ve slept, I feel a world better.”
Dan Graves seemed pleased. He slid to the carpet and crossed his legs Indian style. With a snap of his big thumb and middle fnger, he released the two gold-plated fasteners so that the two halves of the suitcase jumped away from
Dan Graves reached for the bottle of whiskey that still sat to the side, on the platform. It was a big bottle, glass, but it ft neatly in his hand, which was pale and clean without any dirt under the fngernails. Dan Graves unscrewed the cap, and poured two fngers of whiskey into the glass. He brought the glass to his lips, slurped a few sips, then drained the rest. Te bottle was more than half empty. It occurred to Meredith that Dan Graves was very drunk — still, perhaps, or again.Te director had given the Department’s faculty a presentation about when and how to refer students to the University’s psychological services. He had used a metaphor drawn from his years as a river guide on the Colorado. “You want to throw them a lifejacket,” the director said. “You don’t want to swim out to the drowning point after them.”“How about you don’t drink any more while I’m here?” Meredith said. “Alright,” Dan Graves said. “ Tat’s fair.” He leaned down to the suitcase and touched it. “Would you like to hear a letter from my dad?” Dan Graves said. “My dad is dead now.” When he said dad and dead, they came out sounding the same; dead, dead She could not leave now, something again was required. But also: Meredith recognized what had been bothering her about this room. It was a feeling of anticipation, of story. “I would,” Meredith said. “Please, go ahead.”
“You did,” Meredith said. “And you said some things. Tings the Department is required to take very seriously.”
Te wind blew around a few brown leaves that had landed on Dan Graves’s deck. Te mountains were just starting to turn. It was October. She could go now, Meredith knew. But something in the room tugged at her. Tere was no art of any kind in this room, and no sign that art was being made in it. Te walls were gray and bare. To Amy, flling a house with love was equivalent to flling a house with things. Walking around their house on Saturdays, Meredith would no tice new things that had appeared during the week — a clock in the shape of a cat maybe, or a deep purple lampshade. Amy’s collection of ceramic fsh, gifts from her parents and friends, took up every mantel and surface, and Alex’s closet was crammed with sneakers and skateboards.
Dan Graves read the time stamp, August 17 of the present year. “Dear Pal,” he read. “ Tat’s what he always called me.” Dan Graves looked up at Meredith to see if she was listening. When he saw she was, he reached for the bottle and reflled his glass. He nestled the bottle in the hole his legs made, then set the glass on the platform behind him.
Dear Pal — You caught the walleye with nothing but your hand and then bashed its head against a stone. What a bleeder!
“See?” Dan Graves said. “I didn’t drink it.”
Meredith thought. Ten years ago, Meredith was 28, and in her last semester as a student in the Department. She was still making her art then — collages of human faces from pieces of chalkboard and scotch tape. She made the collages, nearly one a week, in a desperate, hungry fashion that made her forget to eat for hours and then, starving, eat with the fridge door open, sitting on a milk crate. She and Amy lived in a small cottage near the Appalachian trail, where they’d met, and far from campus. She wore brown Carhartt overalls almost every day. Tey carpooled to town and then she told Amy to take the car. Meredith walked everywhere, stopping at cofee shops and parking lots and bars around the town to watch people she might want to make into art. She had a walkman. In the walkman, she listened to the soundtrack of the movie that had not been made yet about the life she had not yet lived. It was a good soundtrack: expansive, unexpected, full of grace and rage and resistance and banjos.
Meredith smiled and said nothing. She was familiar with alcoholics — her father, who else — and wasn’t about to fght with this one. “Dear Pal,” Dan Graves read. “I read that part already.”
“I want to.” Dan Graves made a sound in his mouth like a gun cocking. “Hmm,” he said. He lifted the glass and drank from it.
Dear Pal — At your Aunt’s place you built sculptures out of the driftwood that came down the St. Mary and I sat on the porch and forgot you were there. How could I forget? I don’t know. I think it was because of the light, how it didn’t get dark until very late, 11 maybe, because then the news would come on. Dear Pal — What are the grocery stores like there? Can you get a hunting license? How much does one cost? Tell me how much and I’ll send you the money.
Dan Graves looked down at the letter in his hands. “If I could cry, I would cry and I would not stop crying.”
Tese people, she had begun that year to think, looking around the seminar room at the faces of the other graduate students — all men — in her cohort in the Department. When her work was critiqued, the men said her collages were
68 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS each other. Inside were white envelopes, torn open. He plucked a letter from the suitcase, then held it up for Meredith like a game show host. His name and current address were swept across the front in old-timey script.
Dan Graves set down the last letter. “He wrote to me every day I was away from home until last week when he died. Tat’s 57 letters.” He scrunched his eyes and made breath-sucking noises. He held the bridge of his nose between his index fnger and thumb. “It’s okay,” Meredith said again. Te square of light was weak now, had become distorted. Now that he was crying, Meredith wished he wouldn’t. She felt unfree, put upon. But also, she wanted to give Dan Graves something, something that would say, you still have people here. Tere were a thousand ways to fuck a kid up it seemed, and only time would tell your unique, trademark method. Dan Graves’s dad’s it seemed, was being good and then dying. When Dan Graves was done, he put his open palm to his eyes, gathered the fngers into a duckbill and shook the tears onto the white carpet. “Where were you 10 years ago?” Dan Graves said. Meredith smiled. He was a good kid and she felt sorry for him. “No,” Dan Graves said. “Where were you, actually, 10 years ago? I want to know.”
“Remember Briery Knob? Remember when we camped there and we tried to push the tent poles into the ground and how they wouldn’t go in more than an inch? Te wind farms there are getting bigger. Now when I go on my walks, there’s geese carcasses everywhere. I can’t camp without you. Camping is nothing alone.” “You see?” Dan Graves said. “He loved me.” “Of course,” Meredith said. “Of course he did.”
“Go ahead,” Meredith said. “Go right ahead and cry. It’s okay.”
Dear Pal — Pop quiz: How long does it take to bleed a deer and when should you do it?
Dan Graves read letter after letter aloud to Meredith, pausing sometimes after each letter, sometimes in the mid dle of a long one, to drink from the glass or refll it. Te square of light moved slowly across the wall.
Tese men, her chest moaned as they gestured with their hands, are killing me “I was a student too,” Meredith told to Dan Graves. “It was hard at times, but also good, and I lived with my wife, but we weren’t married yet.”
Amy cleared out a drawer in their bureau for the new, strange items she brought home in plastic bags — bright indigo jeans with black stretchy waistbands that folded over, long yellow cotton tunics with slits up the sides. Amy would take out a pair of leggings and close the drawer quick before shaking them out, like a secret. Amy’s feet spread then swelled. Meredith tended to Amy’s cravings and hurts, attended the necessary doctor’s appointments, but she had done so out of a sense of obligation. She could not get over the feeling that she had been wronged in some way. Mer edith often saw women — at the bar, on the bus, in the cofee shop — who she wanted to have sex with. Tey were all conventionally attractive; thin with big breasts and long hair. Amy was pretty, no doubt about it, but she did not look like these women. Meredith watched the women but did not approach them. Once, after church, Meredith had opened her father’s Bible and seen that in addition to annotating parts of Genesis, he had underlined a short passage: Tere is the thief. Tere is the liar. Tere is the man whose wife is not enough for him, who cannot be happy until he possesses every woman who walks the earth Ten her best collage of all had been critiqued: a 6-inch-by-6-inch portrait of a woman she found sitting crosslegged in the periodicals room. Te woman wore a foppy green hat like one might wear to the beach. But she had this face. And still, the men had critiqued “Woman In Floppy Hat” with the same tone — good, but not excellent. Real, but not true. After that critique, Meredith and Alan stopped at a liquor store on their way to the dive bar. Alan went inside, while Meredith called Amy at her ofce. “Don’t worry,” Amy said. “You’re so talented.”
“Hey there Amy,” Meredith heard the man say, and she could see Amy raise her right shoulder to take the phone so that she could wave hello to the man — Jacob or Andy or Chance — and smile her plump-cheeked smile. Even while Amy was on the phone with her, Amy was watching a man walk away.
“ Te girl you loved then, 10 years ago. You’re married to her now?”
69 EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG too faithful to life, too descriptive, too pastoral. Alan, as she had called him before he became the director, was the only one who spoke up for her work. After critique, Meredith often went to a dive bar with him to complain about their colleagues. So pretentious! So bourgeois! So disafected! In her former life, Meredith had grown up in the city, and it comforted her to sit and drink and play pool among people who cursed and swore and did not wear the polo shirts or cotton jersey dresses that were the university people’s uniform.
Tere was something else. Like her soundtrack that year, Meredith too had been full of rage. She had not broken dishes or yelled in critique, but she had taken to committing tiny acts of cruelty against people she could not see or would never see again, people who did not matter, and who she did not believe in — the telephone operator at her bank, the woman who worked the counter at the cupcake store, a stranger who came to buy an old desk she had in storage.
Alan brought Meredith a book about anger by a Buddhist monk. Say your house is on fre, the book said. Would you run down the street after the arsonist demanding to know why he set the blaze? Meredith thought she might. No! the book said. If you did that, all your stuf would burn. Forget the arsonist, all arsonists have their reasons. Run toward the house to save what you value most. Care for your anger, the book suggested. Treat it like a child. Where does anger live in the body? Te book wanted to know. Meredith was able to locate it somewhere in the region behind her sternum.
But in the background, Meredith heard a male coworker of Amy’s walking by Amy’s desk.
“I am,” Meredith said. “ Tat’s good. You really had it together.” One of Dan Graves’s eyelids drooped, then futtered lightly. “Unless there’s something else.”
Also, that was the year Alex was born. She and Amy had reached the decision mutually that Amy would carry the baby, on a walk through a park near campus where the bodies of thousands of unknown black people — domestic workers for the university — would later be discovered. I can’t be the one who changes, Meredith thought. But she said nothing. Ten Amy spoke. She said, “I can’t be the one who watches.”
Meredith laughed. “What?” Alan said, turning toward her. “Don’t you believe me? You’re such a pretty girl.” He licked his lips, lightly, as if looking for crumbs. “You can’t be gay,” Alan said. Meredith felt light, her mouth dry. “Why not?”
“Because I want you,” Alan said.
Meredith turned to look at Dan Graves. He was triumphant, happy. Tis is what he did, this was his power. Te woods, which belonged to Dan Graves and his dead dad, were dark beyond the deck. “Elena said you called her a dyke. At her house, when she asked you to leave.”
A car was idling, waiting to pull out of the parking lot onto the slick street and the wind was still, as if inhaling, and right then, something in Meredith sort of fowed toward Alan, and when he leaned his face into her neck, she didn't push him away. She hesitated.
Dan Graves blinked his blond eyelashes, which were long but perfectly straight like the bristles of a broom. “I don’t remember,” he said. “But if Elena says I did, then I did. Elena’s not a liar.”
Dan Graves hugged himself with his huge hands. “I don’t know why I am the way I am,” he said. “I haven’t made anything since I’ve been here. I look at every person and I just think, you, and you, and you, none of you matter.”
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Stop, Meredith could have said. Stop now. Stop today. Here’s the thing, she could have said. It really does get better.But she said nothing. Dan Graves would not remember anything tomorrow. Even if he did, who would believe him now, discredited as he was — a drunk, a homophobe?
Dan Graves fnished what was left in his glass. “Brrrrrr,” he said, leaning against the railing of the deck. “I’m so cold.”Meredith
felt younger, lighter. She remembered it all now — the heat rising to her ears, the urge to swallow and swallow, the tingly feeling somewhere around the knees, the way the breath refused to come, and the chest, the chest. She listened to it. It was moaning, again. Tese people, these people, these people.
Tey drank and played three games of pool in the bar and then they left and walked circles around the small down town area. Te night was cool and the streets just above and below the busy retail thoroughfare were dark and empty.
“You know,” Alan said, when they reached the parking lot of the town’s only all-night convenience store. “I don’t get it. You’re so pretty.”
It is this hesitation which Meredith remembers now, with Dan Graves’s small expectant eyes on her. How willing she was to be undermined, to believe, to sell Amy and their not yet born son down the river on the word of a man. Nothing happened — the wind picked up again, the car pulled out of the parking lot onto the street, and Alan only ran his lips along Meredith’s neck, then apologized for being “in his cups” the next day in an email. Amy had picked Meredith up from the convenience store and driven her home and held her and said nothing. Meredith had graduated from the Department and then six months later, their son had been born. Alex was nearly nine now. He liked soccer and drawing animals at the museum. He helped Amy set the table before dinner. His job was the napkins. Te years had rolled by and Meredith had stopped being so angry. “No,” Meredith said. “ Tere’s nothing else.” Dan Graves drank from his glass. Te square of sun was gone. “We could go outside,” Dan Graves said. “It’s a nice evening.” When he got up and opened the glass doors, and went out to stand on the deck, Meredith followed. Te chill came through her cotton sweater. She had the strange feel ing that comes when two people are in a room and something signifcant is happening, but only one mind is recording it. “I’d like to go camping,” Meredith said. “You camp?” Dan Graves said. He laughed. “You don’t, not really.” “Why “You’renot?”acity girl. I can tell. Pop quiz: What’s the best way to build a fre?”
Alan emerged with a blue bottle of gin, and they opened it on the street over a curbside drain. Tey were in a silly mood, amped up. It was spring and the girls looked rumpled and damp. Tey walked the rest of the way to the bar joking and shoving each other and putting their whole mouths on the bottle and spitting the gin onto the street.
Letter by letter, layer by layer, the log cabin began to take shape.
71
“I’m so cold,” Dan Graves said again. “I know it,” Meredith said. “Wait. Soon. I’m building you a fre.”
Meredith turned and went inside the house. She gathered the letters and their empty envelopes back into the green suitcase, then lifted the suitcase up onto the wooden platform. She opened a letter so that it lay fat on the platform, then rolled it the long way into a thin tube. She stood, removed the fre screen, and balanced the rolled letter between the andirons.
EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG
Dan Graves flled the doorway, his body backlit by the sun. “Hey,” Dan Graves said. His eyes were on her, but he had the other look about him.
You can say things to me like "Help" or "I'm lost." You can also say things to me like "I'm lost" or "Slow down, you're going too fast." Go ahead. Say something. What was that? I didn't get that. I'm sorry I didn't get that. Try again. VIDEO PREMIERED ON THE HIGH LINE IN NEW YORK CITY ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2017. RUNTIME 5:12
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72 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS STILLS FROM LIP GLOSS ALURT LEX BROWN
The consciousness you requested is not available at the moment. This is a reproduction of a being who existed in a previous society. I was created in the likeness of those who eventually peaced the fuck out to another spiritial plane.
LA VITA NUOVA MALACHI BLACK We sang along. Our first night almost gone, we broke the rust on your Corolla through the snowfall with one dead headlight and iced wiper blades. Sixteen and too old for home, we held the shoulder on Route 80 West, riding the spasms of the rumble strip to Sparta, Netcong, Newton, Hope— hand-rolling bags of Bali Shag as fading FM stations foamed a static thick and bright and steady as the snow. You drove, guiding the steering wheel with one thigh while I stroked a marijuana finger from the frayed sleeve of my camo coat, and when the gaslight signaled on the dashboard your palm sweated
78 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
79 in my own. Now, snowdrifts shift into the dusk: shadows rise like tusks out of the pines halfburied overnight by plow trucks weary of the interstate. We park, letting the engine run, our tailpipe flicking its exhaust in tongues across the unwatched asphalt of St. Peter’s' lot. Our hands are laced together, and they glow bright as magicians’ gloves, fluttering above the slow heat of our bodies in the backseat’s dome light as we churn, and slur, and hum. The radio is low, but something like a chord takes hold as my salt trembles into yours. Another dense flake melts onto the hood. Too soon, your womb will coil with a vine fed of our blood: a clotted son. These are words we know by heart: Help me, Rhonda. We are young. Your mother was in high school when she named you for a song. MALACHI BLACK
Tese moments of online outrage are lost opportunities to disturb the status quo. Although an artist might face criti cism, he or she is more likely to gain status from such debacles — there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Te real winner is the museum (and Facebook, of course): while everyone bickers over a must-see controversy, the exhibiting institution can forge ahead with its obsequious relationship to the oligarchy.
In the art history department where I work, we tend to celebrate the historic avant-garde for its ferce independence, its utopianism and criticality, and its relentless ambition to shake the public out of its conventional habits of thinking.
Tis is why the level of debate around the Dana Shutz painting at the Whitney Biennial this year was so frustratingly misguided. All the attention was loaded on one mediocre painter, instead of the museum’s own lack of diversity and the egregious backgrounds of its board members. It seems signifcant that the display by Occupy Museums escaped criticism despite its sly self-censorship: rather than addressing the institution in which they were exhibiting, Occupy pointed to the Museum of Modern Art, calling out MoMA trustee Larry Fink, the Blackrock CEO who sits on Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum. Why not take on the Whitney’s own board of trustees, which includes a president of a luxury real-estate company (Neil G. Bluhm), a former CEO of Morgan Stanley (Richard M. DeMartini), a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (Robert J. Hurst), and a real-estate developer (Scott Resnick)? Te Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, was a board member for years, and his partner, Daniel Neidich, was a co-chair of this year’s Whitney Gala (the latter’s wife, Brooke Garber Neidich, is on the board and was formerly co-chair). As a European, I still fnd it staggering that museums like the Whitney and Los Angeles’s own Museum of Contem porary Art — which so proudly display the work of artists who, for the most part, subscribe to a liberal-left position — can stomach the money and opinions of Wall Street predators and foreclosure kings. (Mnuchin resigned his board position at MOCA immediately following his cabinet appointment.) But everyone seems to accept that that’s just how the system works. Nobody wants to rethink the relationship between art and money, because the scale of the task is overwhelming. Micro-quibbles over identity, by contrast, come to seem eminently manageable and clear-cut.
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Art has always depended on patronage: the church, the princely court, the aristocracy, the state, the bourgeoisie, and now the hedge-fund plutocracy. How artists have, at diferent moments, managed to transcend these economic shackles is in part the story of great art. It remains to be seen how this struggle will play out in the 21st century. Tis is, after all, symptomatic of a larger political problem: the left has always been better at fragmenting its own coalition than working in solidarity to confront the custodians of white supremacy.
THE UMBILICAL CORD OF GOLD CLAIRE BISHOP
Tese artists spurned the idea of the museum (too passé and mausoleal!) and instead sought direct interaction with a public who, it turned out, loved to be provoked. Such values are nearly impossible to identify in 2017. Today, art has become a career path with a standardized GPS leading straight to the museum, and when art does prompt a reaction, it’s one not intended by the artist. Indeed, the controversy is usually started by members of the public, and nearly always on the basis of some perceived misstep in relation to identity (this year’s perpetrators: Dana Schutz, Sam Durant, Jimmie Durham). But while conversations around African American and Native American oppression are unquestionably important, in the art world they rarely move beyond an individual artist or work.
CARLOS ALMARAZ, UNTITLED , 1972, INK ON PAPER, 9.25 X 7 INCHES / COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF CARLOS ALMARAZ AND CRAIG KRULL GALLERY, SANTA MONICA, CA
LYNELL GEORGE Gold might be hiding in plain sight; some small stowaway that’s been overlooked, or somehow dislodged, knocked into plain view. I’m always hoping for some sliver of a remnant. I knew better, but I tossed my notebook and camera into the car anyway and threaded out the driveway. A few years back, sparked by a couple of sentences I couldn’t shake, I slipped out just after dawn for a little Sunday morning ghost chasing. I’d gotten midway through Howard Reich and William Gaines’s vivid 2003 biography: Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton, my imagination adrift in the descriptions of Morton’s rollicking Los Angeles years. The broadcasting-24-hour Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe Morton (better known as Ferd or simply “Jelly Roll”) was his own sky-sweeping searchlight and publicity department; Los Angeles was just another stop along the frenzied press tour that was his entire life. As the self-proclaimed “inventor of jazz,” Morton, despite his ornate yet delicate polyphonic piano stylings, was as much a genius as he was bombastic. The reporter in me wanted more. The night before, I’d dashed out a couple of addresses and some approximations based on the narrative’s descriptions, and had them at the ready when I snaked south down the 110 Freeway to Central Ave nue. I wasn’t aiming for the area we Angelenos consider “Jazz Street,” but a corridor further north, closer to downtown’s heart. I was looking for the site of the old Cadillac Café, as well as the Hotel Anita (named for Morton’s paramour, Anita Gonzalez) — where Morton had taken up residence for a time in Los Angeles. I knew to expect little, but what I found was exactly nothing. Numerical gaps, absent street addresses, a parking lot, and a deserted strip mall. Some where in this jumble I realized I’d scared up more questions than answers. It hadn’t been my first try. So many times, I’d hoped to locate some vestige, some sense of former place, a hint of that wild, wide-open California that Morton and his Louisiana cohort had tumbled into. (Phil Pastras’s 2001 book, Dead Man’s Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West, fully embraces this chapter — Morton’s West Coast years — Los Angeles and beyond — “an odyssey within an odyssey.”) But what I wanted to understand most: What did he and so many see when they arrived here, tired but exhilarated, finally unburdened of their pasts? What was their first glimpse? How did California suit them? How did it find its way into their creative imagination, their melodies? For them, California may have just as well been a lyric in a song. Not simply the word — the way the syllables tumbled across the tongue, the stresses, lifts, and pauses — but the very region itself, poetry. The physicality, its varied climates, diverse terrains, and the mysteries that come with vastness could be stanzas or choruses in and of themselves. For Afri can Americans dreaming of opportunity in the early part of 20th century, that lure, the music in California’s new-start promise, was embedded into the consciousness. It burrowed deep. It was the necessary fuel — inspiration — to carry onward beyond known possibilities. Roughly between 1910 and 1970, in two great waves of migration, six million African Americans would journey out of the nightmare of the American South, fleeing post-slavery horrors: Jim Crow segregation, lynching, nonexistent or stunted economic opportunities. The sentence of a still-circumscribed life set families in motion. My family was one of them, tipped toward a musical-sounding myth.
82 los angeles review of books
LOUISIANA IN LOS ANGELES: HOW NEW ORLEANS JAZZ TRAVELED TO CALIFORNIA
83
Migrants carved paths across the country, pointing northeast, midwest, and way west to make a way for themselves: assembly-line jobs, mining, steel mills, skilled labor, railroad work, and later, aerospace. But they weren’t the only laborers looking to fee the constraints and hazards of the South. From early on, artists were leaving too: the chroniclers who would write the poems, who would lay paint on canvas, or who would compose and perform the music that flled in the spaces between work and home chores. So many of these migrant forebears had at least one California chapter. California was a prayer.
Buildings rise and fall, but vivid stories endure, can resuscitate and reanimate memory. Te great guitarist, banjo player, and expansive raconteur Danny Barker was nothing if not a living, breathing story, absolutely encyclopedic in scope. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1909, Barker led a peripatetic life. Part of the legendary Barbarin family of musicians (among them, his grandfather Isidore, his older uncles Louis and Paul), Barker’s matriculation into music was as expected as learning to walk and talk. “Naturally, I was entangled in this scene” he said. His playing and sense of time was infected with the idiosyncratic syncopation of his native place. From an early age, he knew that that frst line of New Orleans jazz players, those players who laid the groundwork, needed to tell their stories. Te long days and the itinerant nature of the work — a no-curfew town, life on the road — meant you might not necessarily be there to relate the details, not to mention to guard the particulars of history.
“CALIFORNIA … IS A FLIM FLAM TOWN.”
A Life in Jazz, Barker’s expansive autobiography (recently reissued by the Historic New Orleans Collection) showcases his keen ear and eye for story down to the most minute detail. Barker was not only part of an early generation of musi cians who would shape and guide the music that we would come to know as the “New Orleans sound,” but he was also, as the book’s editor Alyn Shipton notes, “a pioneer historian of jazz.” As Gwen Tompkins, host of National Public Radio’s Music Inside Out, also points out in the introduction, the importance of this autobiography isn’t just to provide context and feel for Barker’s world — “the jazz whirl” as Barker would put it — but to emphasize Barker’s preoccupation with documentation. “By the time Danny Barker published A Life in Jazz he was an old man and had already told his story to anyone who would listen,” writes Tompkins. “It was 1986 and he’d been at it since the 1920s.” Believed to have appeared on more than a thousand recordings, Barker had been around long enough to know the New Orleans music scene before it was transformed by Louis Armstrong and the stratospheric range of his trumpet. He also lived long enough to see early jazz bloom, thrive, and transform into America’s popular music and then eventually fade from view, a museum piece that he would protect and tend to. Barker brimmed with what seemed to be a bottomless inventory of anecdotes; yarns peopled with fgures named Rough Dry Sammy or Good Lord the Lifter, and a cast of named and unnamed “Do Wrong People” or “Night People.” Shipton characterizes Barker’s approach as a “complex mixture of researcher and folklorist.” His ornate, at turns eccentric, storytelling wends the reader through decades of shifting musical taste, moving across glittering American cities, in and out of after-hours clubs and backwoods juke joints, speakeasies, bars, and impromptu recording sessions. It’s immediate because you ride shotgun; Barker detailing the sights along the way, danger often shared space with the glamour. Barker left New Orleans looking for work in 1930 with strong opinions about jazz and how it should be expressed. For him, music served to bring people together; it was simply another level of conversation and communication: “Hearts can be beating together […] foots shoving and knees hitting next to one another. Tat’s what music is all about.” Barker eventually came to be known for his “fat chords” and his sense of rhythm. “You play anticipation,” as he put it. He shared sessions and stages with many great fellow jazz musicians — Bunk Johnson, Cab Calloway, Milt Hinton, Dizzy Gilles pie, and even Charlie Parker — but he never felt comfortable making the show about himself. Even though he was a member of Cab Calloway’s orchestra for eight years, “he never took a solo, not once.”
Instead, Barker always kept his focus on the community. Tough he wrote popular novelty songs for his wife Louise (“Blue Lu”), he largely dedicated himself to New Orleans’s rich history, resuscitating and recording Creole folk songs (“Mo Pas Lemme Ca,” “Salee Dame”) sung in that vanishing patois. He also had the incredible prescience to record songs from the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian tradition “[a] genre of music,” Tompkins underscores, “that remains
LYNELL GEORGE
DANNY BARKER AND THE ONWARD BRASS BAND; APRIL BY MICHAEL P. SMITH ©THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION
COURTESY
19, 1974; PHOTOGRAPH
LEE COLLINS, DANNY BARKER, AND ARTHUR DERBIGNY ON THE BEACH IN PENSACOLA, FLORIDA; 1928; OF THE DANNY AND BLUE LU BARKER COLLECTION, HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVE TULANE UNIVERSITY
For years, Barker stayed in New York, working nonstop and sharing tight bandstands and opulent theater stages, but he couldn’t help but feel a dissonance between the connections he was making and the music itself: “Somewhere between those ‘hearts’ and ‘foots’ lies a lingering divide between traditional New Orleans jazz musicians, who believe in the natural marriage between music and dance, and other musicians who don’t. In New York City,” writes Tompkins, “the New Orleans musicians were outnumbered.”
Te book strips these stories of sepia, opening a window onto a vivid landscape detailing the day-to-day particulars of what it meant to be a workaday jazz musician in New Orleans. Barker reanimates the details of the tossed-together life of found work — the “spasm bands” that played “all sorts of gadgets that produced sounds: musical saws, washboards, spoons, bells, […] kazoos” or the “boozans” (parties) that lit up parlors and dance halls. Traveling with itinerant musi cians to backwoods jukes in other Southern states gave Barker’s story fodder, but it also set his wanderlust in motion and gave him a taste of a touring life. Beyond the gulf, what we know about New Orleans music was carried along with those who are part of the New Orleans diaspora. Tat knowledge owes an incalculable debt to Danny Barker and his presence of mind to acknowledge, identify, and elevate a “New Orleans sound.”
As reportage and reviews of jazz and its players traveled to both coasts, Barker was especially concerned about what would translate as the “ofcial story” and what writers from outside of the Crescent City might be thinking and ex trapolating. He was proactive and founded the Jazzland Research Guild, which was, in a sense, his own one-man-band version of a research team. As he traveled the country, he would implore frst-generation jazz musicians to complete questionnaires and mail back their detailed testimonials. Te forms asked that they describe their training, musical heroes, their specialties, solos, broadcast experience — information that Barker knew would help to balance, if not fully correct, the record. Tis was crucial business; he closed his requests, “Be punctual in your reply.”
85 mysterious and deeply infuential to native born musicians. For a New Orleanian living far from home, the words to a song like 'Indian Red' carry a special afrmation. Te call-and-response resonates like a negro spiritual, even if no one else in the whole wide world understands." Barker may not have been a soloist, but he was singular: there’s music in his words, even when they only appear on the page. You can hear his exasperated deadpan loud and clear, and envision the lifted eyebrow. He spins a memory — part history, part exaggeration, with a sharp nudge of innuendo. His autobiography is a trove of elaborately embroidered behind-the-scenes stories about music and the conditions in which musicians in the South made their names. Barker knows just how to charm the listener — when to pull the story’s thread taut and when to ramble a bit. Within each story, he spells out the whys and hows of New Orleans traditions — the brass band, the details of “turning the body loose,” the New Orleans color caste system: “Mulattos, Quadroons, Octaroons, all those diferent people in New Orleans had diferent halls. You went to them because you felt welcome […] If you weren’t in that groove you couldn’t come into the hall. Each one of those caste systems had their own trumpet player.”
He began looking toward new horizons, new terrains, and of course California eventually became a destination for Barker too — as it had for many New Orleanians trying to get a leg up and out of the South. For all of these musicians, it was a roll of the dice, no promises.
“LET’S GET THIS MONEY.”
LYNELL GEORGE
At this time, New Orleans was overfowing with master musicians at the top of their game, many of whom were part of powerful family trusts. “ Tat is the main reason why so many musicians left the city when they became great on their instrument,” Barker explained, “[t]here was no chance for advancement on the local New Orleans scene.” Tat instinct for survival — the inner-impulse and push to “get that money” — propelled Barker himself out into the world, frst to New York, and then later, to many other parts of the country. And yet, Barker always brought New Orleans with him. Even in far-fung cities, he would meet up with players from Louisiana and spark an instantaneous intimacy. When Barker frst met Jelly Roll Morton in New York City at the Rhythm Club, Morton quickly dubbed him “Home Town.”
Before Morton and Barker, a frst-run of New Orleans musicians had cleared a path to California in the early 20th century. Freed from the yoke of Jim Crow, these ensembles began to make their way across country. One of the frst was
bassist and bandleader Bill Johnson, who set down new roots in Los Angeles. Johnson formed the Creole Band (known also as the Original Creole Orchestra) and introduced the West Coast to authentic New Orleans sounds in the early teens. He sent a call back home for other musicians. Tey had “warmed up the room” in some sense; there was an audi ence of re-settled New Orleanians to entertain and a new kingdom to be claimed.
Playing in the New Orleans style was not a task easily mastered; it was a technique not simply “learned,” but lived and felt. Morton sent word home for backup. Tis was a complicated proposition: Anticipating that his New Orleans cohorts would show up in Los Angeles looking as if they never had set foot outside the District, Morton rushed to meet them at the train station. Sure enough they were wearing the ‘antiquated dress habitual to New Orleans musicians, with their instruments all taped up
Tat’s difcult to measure — communities of color in Los Angeles weren’t documented with the same precision and care. And yet, what one may not fnd in mainstream newspaper features or in photographs of the era, we may locate reading between the lines of advertisements. Black newspapers of the time ran promotional ads and announcements for the Creole Band or other Louisiana-themed get-togethers. Tis evidence suggests that a community of musicians and a curious, if not invested, audience had begun to form across the Southland.
Te afterlife of these recordings of “Kid Ory’s Sunshine Band” — as they were credited — was fraught. According to jazz historian Steven Isoradi, co-editor of Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, “Te Spikes Brothers had a confict with Nordskog, who initially put his Nordskog Records label on them. Spikes then pasted their label all over them.” If there was a plus side to this tug-of-war it was a peculiarly Louisiana–Los Angeles history lagniappe. “Paul R. Williams, the great architect,” says Isoardi, “designed the labels for them. He was a big jazz fan.”
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Te possibilities of the West Coast also turned Jelly Roll Morton’s head. Morton, the fashy and showboating “jazz inventor,” blasted onto the California scene in full-on powerhouse fashion. After a few years knocking around in Chi cago, he’d made enough of a name for himself that he was ofered work out west. “[I]n 1917, when impresario Lovey Joe Woodson ofered Morton a job at the Cadillac Café, in Los Angeles, deliverance was at hand,” Gaines and Reich write in Jelly’s Blues: He knew he would not be alone in the faraway city of Los Angeles, for as early as 1908 […] some of the men from the District had tested the waters in Southern California. Tey had taken a train through Houston, Dallas, Waco, and Yuma en route to L.A. and played a month at the Red Feather Tavern […] — the band, in efect, the precursor to the Original Creole band, the soon-to-be-legendary ensemble who would show the rest of America what music and life in New Orleans were all about. It didn’t take long for Morton to land on the notion that he could piggyback on their success and perhaps parlay it into his own. “His timing could not have been better, for crowds line up to hear him at the Cadillac Café at 553 Central Avenue […] At closing time, Morton — energized by the change of scene and his soaring popularity — [he] hopped in his car and headed to George Brown’s Watts nightclub to play until sunup, then he came home and wrote music.”
At this point, a confuence of New Orleans “frsts” were occurring in Southern California: one of the very frst record ings by a black musician with New Orleans roots was made here in the Southland by trombonist Edward “Kid Ory” in May 1922. Te session was organized by the Spikes Brothers (Benjamin a.k.a. “Reb” and Johnny), who owned and ran a record store on Central Avenue. Ory and his band set up at the Nordskog Studios in Santa Monica, but the fruits of the day would go to the Spikes Brothers new label, Sunshine Records. Te ensemble featured Mutt Carey, Dink John son, and Ed Garland. Te players recorded six tunes: four vocals and two instrumentals — among them, “Ory’s Creole Trombone” and “Society Blues.” Tese songs are historic: they are the frst specimens of the black New Orleans sound recorded on the West Coast. Tese recordings are also signifcant in that they endeavor to replicate a music that has deep roots in a specifc place — something that is both authentic and steeped in mood, not sentimentality. Te recordings, while “rather laid back” to historian Lawrence Gushee’s ear, were “distinctly New Orleanian in character.”
Just how infuential was the music? Was it simply part of the atmosphere, like new languages or dialects converging?
87 to keep them airtight and [Wade] Whaley’s clarinet in his back pocket,’ recalled Morton. ‘We spirited them away […]’ It was not a good omen. Tough the newly attired District musicians worked with Morton in Watts, at Baron Long’s joint, they proved incorrigible, bringing buckets of red beans and rice to cook and eat at the show […] Morton and Bill Johnson who rounded out the band razzed the threesome as country bumpkins until the New Orleans men could take it no more. Tey headed back home before the year was out and swore they would murder Morton if he ever bothered them again.
black community, as far as being stars at that time — well, you had to have some pull in the movie industry to let you be nothing but a porter or a menial. Every time you appeared in a movie you had to be in service: a street cleaner, a dish washer, a clothes washer. You could do nothing that would let you be equal with anybody else. And there were black people out there who had done all that business, like they had all them kids. Little black kids — they give them all nicknames: Farina, Pork Chops, Sunshine. Buckwheat — all kinds of things … Quite simply, he had had enough of reading between the lines — better to know what he was dealing with on the marshy shores of the Gulf.
“THAT EASY TO GET CALIFORNIA REAL ESTATE.”
LYNELL GEORGE
Even still, California beckoned — blemishes and all. It ofered a second- or third-start promise. Saxophonist, arrang er, composer, and educator Harold Battiste Jr. came through Los Angeles on the mighty second wave of the Great Migration after World War II, right around the time my mother also traveled west. Tey were loosely from the same neighborhood in New Orleans, with friendships that glanced of one another, sometimes intersecting or overlapping. Same schools. Same hangouts. Same impediments to opportunity. Tey were the generation where a tune like Barker’s Creole-laced “Eh, La Bas” (“Hey, over here!”) could stop a party and unite a room of Louisiana transplants in song. After earning a scholarship, my mother headed west to study piano and voice. By that time, the sounds and styles in music were changing and many musicians were fling out of New Orleans. Te West, albeit imperfect, still seemed a better bet than making the rounds of the old Southern circuit. Wasn’t it better to take a gamble with the “fim-fam” game — as Barker had witnessed — and at least have a horse in the race? Tere would always be tension between what you wished for and what you were dealt. My mother traveled to her new life in Los Angeles by train on the Sunset Limited, the run that snaked “west into the sunset” — tipped toward another horizon. As my relatives used to say, going east to west, you picked up an extra couple
Barker and his wife frst set up housekeeping in the Bay Area and later in Los Angeles. He wrote, “I had been to Califor nia and I liked the weather and I thought it was a whole new fresh area […] so we went […] We stayed eleven months.”
With or without them, Morton was on what he hoped was a yellow brick road toward wild success, playing to packed rooms and acquainting a West Coast clientele to the sounds of Louisiana jazz. “Work was picking up as the population of black California swelled from 21,645 in 1910 to 38,763 in 1920,” note Reich and Gaines, “He was becoming known up and down the avenue for he looked and sounded like no one else Los Angeles had ever encountered.” Tat item, whether covered in the press or not, echoed all the way back home. By the 1950s, when Danny Barker deigned to jour ney west, Morton was long gone (though he would return some years later). “Jelly was forever beefng about ASCAP. He heard many of his songs being played on the radio daily,” Barker recalled in A Life in Jazz “It seems that he signed his songs over to some publishers and they had become wealthy, but Jelly received no royalties as the composer, and there was nothing he could do about the situation.”
It clearly didn’t take long for Barker to sense that something was awry in California. “White Only” signs may not have been posted over lunch counter entryways or restroom doors, but there was something even more pernicious about the quieter but no-less-virulent brand of racism he encountered. “[T]o me California is nothing. A beautiful place, a big fim-fam town.” But the racism that was hot on his neck in the Deep South took on surreal form here, particularly in show business:[T]he
88 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS of hours to “make things right.” On her journey in the Jim Crow car (known formally as a “partitioned coach”), she shared polite conversation with the musician Paul Gayten, who was heading out to “the Coast” for some gigs. After she detrained at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, she was mortifed to learn that her father had buttonholed Gayten — and some of the porters — back in New Orleans, slipping them a few bills, asking to keep an eye out on his “baby” along the way. As Harold Battiste remembers it, he and his friends — Ed Blackwell and Ellis Marsalis — set out to Los Angeles just a couple of years later, in June 1956. Te impetus was Ornette Coleman, who had been rethinking and remaking jazz from the inside out. Tis was a new jazz that Battiste and his cohort had been firting with and steadily writing, playing, and reworking. “Coleman […] had gotten stranded in New Orleans a few years back and stayed with one of the well-known New Orleans families, the Lasties — long enough to meet some of the cats.” Battiste recalled the details in his 2010 memoir, Unfnished Blues: Memories of a New Orleans Music Man. “Coleman sent a bus ticket to [Ed] Boogie Blackwell to come out to Los Angeles. Boogie told Ellis [Marsalis] about the bus ticket and Ellis decided that he wanted to go along.” (Blackwell, however, had already started casting a curious eye westward and making sojourns to Los Angeles as early as 1953, according to historian Isoardi, who recalls Bobby Bradford’s stories of playing with Coleman and Black well in downtown Los Angeles on Fifth Street — “ Te Nickel.”) Battiste, who was a music educator, had been battling to ensure that black students were aforded the same opportuni ties, skills, and scholarship as the white pupils in still-segregated schools. After some years at the job, he had a last-straw moment facing down a school board administrator. He then tendered his resignation with no Plan B. Miraculously, here was a contingency plan. Te young husband and father decided to take a gamble, ofering to drive his friends out in his Chevrolet 210. Tey cashed out their tickets, “got some maps and fgured out a way to get to Los Angeles…” Te freeways were staggering — “I had never seen so many lanes of cars moving so fast in all my life,” but so was the beauty.
Battiste recalled: TAMI LYNN WITH HAROLD BATTISTE JR. PERFORMING AT CLUB LINGERIE ON SUNSET BOULEVARD, HOLLYWOOD; CA. 1984; HAROLD BATTISTE PAPERS, THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION, GIFT OF MR. HAROLD R. BATTISTE JR
We found Ornette’s pad on St. Andrews just north of Santa Barbara Boulevard (now Martin Luther King Boulevard). After only about ffteen minutes of greeting and talking, Boogie unpacked his drums, set up in Ornette’s living room, and we played for about two hours; after all that’s why we came here. Later that day, we rode around looking for a place to live. For the next couple of decades, Battiste ricocheted between the two L.A.s — Louisiana and Los Angeles — trying to fnd his groove. Te story of these two parallel scenes, in conversation musically, is related in great detail — and with great heart — in Unfnished Blues (also published by HNOC, and co-written with Karen Celestan). Battiste initially secured a job working for Specialty Records, later becoming the label’s New Orleans talent scout and opening an ofce back home. Specialty would be the frst real bridge that would connect him to the energy and creativity of both cities, and it was the place where he met a young truck driver and struggling-but-success-hungry songwriter named Salvatore “Sonny” Bono. Tat meeting would be fateful and would set Battiste on a path to a certain kind of success in the music world, but would also distract him from his own dreams. He began taking on arranging and producing gigs, working with Bono and his partner, Cher. He would ultimately serve as their musical director on the road and on television shows. He wrote, “In my soul, I was a jazz musician, or soul, R&B or blues even. But suddenly I was sliding across the line musically and being put up front in the studio [. . . . ] now I was in charge.”
In this time between two cities, Battiste began to amass an impressive roster of musicians he’d signed, produced, ar ranged, or simply rehearsed: Eddie Bo, James Booker, Johnny Adams, Art Neville, Lee Dorsey in New Orleans; Sam Cooke, Billy Preston, Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack in Los Angeles. Imbued with the same collaborative philosophy of his All For One (AFO) projects in New Orleans, Battiste’s frst L.A. laboratory, Soul Station #1, was a small store front on South Vermont Avenue intended to be the frst of a series of intimate rehearsal spaces designed to serve artists who didn’t have connections or access to Hollywood. “I had the idea for a place that would provide a relaxed, at-home environment where talent could be developed for presentation to major companies. It was conceived to be a place where ELLIS MARSALIS JR. AND DAVID PULPHUS PERFORMING WITH HAROLD BATTISTE JR.IN THE ATRIUM OF THE BULTMAN FUNERAL HOME, ST. CHARLES AVENUE, NEW ORLEANS; CA. 1994; HAROLD BATTISTE PAPERS, THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION, GIFT OF MR. HAROLD R. BATTISTE JR. LYNELL GEORGE
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90 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS we could immerse ourselves in music, be ourselves and be part of the neighborhood.” Years later, in another move to both shape a new generation of players and elevate the stature of jazz, Battiste set to the task of designing the jazz curriculum at the Colburn School of Performing Arts here in Los Angeles. Battiste became not just the bridge between the classic sounds and the new, but also the integral link connecting two places as well as the life before and after. Tat note someone scrawls on the matchbook cover and slips you when you arrive in a new city? Battiste was that voice on the other end of the line. “For the homeboys I’d become the person you called when you got to L.A. Often I was able to help cats get some kind of gigs.” When guitarist-pianist Mac Reben nack was in what he called his “L.A. Exile years,” Battiste was among the frst calls. “I had known Mac since 1957 — back in my Specialty Records days. He showed up in the city around 1965. Someone in the music community told me he was in town — or it may have been Mac himself. Whenever he got a chance play (guitar or piano) he would get on someone’s list […] After awhile I introduced him to the Sonny and Cher operation.” Battiste had begun work on Progress Records, a side project that he and Sonny had launched in 1967. He approached Rebennack frst, wanting to know if he had anything in mind. Rebennack told Battiste that he had been reading up on a character called “Dr. John,” a fgure out of New Orleans voodoo tradition. “ Te concept appealed to me immediately [. . .] I envisioned creating a new sound, look and spirit [. . . .]” He and Rebennack began assembling musicians, including the person who was to voice “Dr. John”; that performer, however, declined. “I felt Mac was right for the part, but he was reluctant too. He didn’t see himself as an upfront artist.” Call it studio magic or simply being “in the spirit,” but the sessions they recorded transcended time and place. What would come to be one of Rebennack’s spookiest and most bayou-dank albums was a tour-de-force conceived, produced, and recorded by Battiste amid palm trees and succulents, beneath a sharp Southern Californian sun. History was made in that Hollywood studio. Te album, Gris-Gris, would become a critical success as well as a cultural touchstone. (Te sessions would also serendipitously set Rebennack on a life path — the album was followed by Babylon and Dr. John’s Gumbo. Each recording was awash in that New Orleans sound: the mood, sticky like Louisiana-in-August humidity.) As for Gris-Gris, said Battiste: We collected our cast of New Orleans refugees who understood the spirit of what was going down.
[…] Looking back at this mixed bag of characters, it seems amazing that we got anything done. Te studio was like a Mardi Gras reunion, everybody laughing and talking, telling stories all at the same time. But once we got settled, the vibe was there and the music just fowed. I felt better than I had felt in the studio in a long time. Out of the studio, however, life in Los Angeles was still a conundrum. Much like Barker, Battiste found Los Angeles’s race politics oblique. In the mid-1960s, Battiste was solvent enough to go “buy some of that attractive ‘easy to get’ Cal ifornia Real Estate.” After some false starts and near disasters, he and his family moved into to their West Coast dream home in Baldwin Village, on Bowcroft Street in West Los Angeles near La Cienega Boulevard. Battiste wrote, “I even had my own little ofce — a little shed attached to the garage. I equipped it with a desk and a piano. I wrote music there and would sometimes rehearse with a musician or two.” Tey had a neat front yard with long-necked birds of paradise and other tropical foliage. “For me this was an accomplishment that flled me with joy and pride. Tis was what defned me as a father and husband and as a man.” It was Battiste’s California Dream, even if it only lasted a moment.
Te neighborhood was in transition, with Whites and Jews leaving, African Americans, Asians and Latino Americans coming. Our house was between the two remaining Whites, which was an inter esting frst for us. Te people next door seemed to be cursing and fghting every other night. I learned from that experience. It was obvious to me that these White folks acted like they claimed Black folks acted — in a loud and common way. I had never lived among people that behaved like that.
[…] Tis was not to be a proper production with music arrangements and everything by the number.
“EH, LA BAS!” What distinguishes early New Orleans jazz is its energy. “You play your part and I play mine, so we’ll both express ourselves,” was how Barker phrased it. It was a way of interacting, of addressing a moment that for some of these players translated into the arc of their life paths. Barker toured the world, sharing the New Orleans sound, bur eventually went
“YOU PLAY YOUR PART. I’LL PLAY MINE.”
LYNELL GEORGE
Danny Barker, like Battiste, was also facing down unvarnished truths. California might have ofered a “diferent kind of freedom,” as Southerners used to say, but it certainly wasn’t a cure. He’d come out for his West Coast chapter, seen what he’d seen and acknowledged the limits of this new world. After Los Angeles he circled back to New York, but that choice no longer felt like a glamour move. Instead, New York was like purgatory. He found himself playing in a couple of small joints in Hoboken. To stretch his money, he took a day job working for a company called American Management, a business school located at the Astor Hotel. “ Te job was to put pitchers of iced water on the tables in the classroom, forty or ffty tables, three times a day — morning, noon-time and 2:30. Tat was my job and then I served cocktails.” He was paid fairly and it was “goin’ alright,” but after his wife’s mother became ill, he realized it was time to take himself back home. For a long time, I had been thinking about my status in music. I evaluated myself: I am a musician, but what am I doing? Am I successful at it? Yes and no. I am playing sometimes, but where? At the bottom status, singing and playing in bars […] In New York City I’ve been to the top on other great musicians’ bandwagons so who’s fooling who? Go back home. In the mid-’60s, he moved back to New Orleans — and a world — that he could now see with clear eyes. “I came to New Orleans fully aware of the status quo and resigned to just about any sort of social abuse. I know it’s national, not just the South, because I have been very observant and subjected to too much subtle, clever, hypocritical Jim Crow.”
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He took a job at the New Orleans Jazz Museum, where he was part docent, part security guard, and an artifact in him self. He continued telling his stories, collecting keepsakes and testimonials and working on his manuscripts. He would be in the music business for six decades before his book would fnally be published. Barker had been discouraged, even patently dissuaded, plenty times along the way. Te times he’d share pieces, writers and editors would tell him, “It needs editing.” Te rejection smarted but he noted that once his stories began to appear in books about jazz, not one word was changed. “ Tat all started up North, so I came home to the South where I had not the least idea that the material would get some action—and, fnally, it happens.”
In the years after his museum gig, Barker found himself adrift — home but not feeling at home: “[T]he New Orleans that was an exciting living experience to me has largely evaporated.” He’d lived long enough to see hip-hop, rap, neosoul, and smooth jazz all come on the scene, and remake both the art of creating music and the ritual of experiencing it. He wrote, “ Tere are many of these jazz replacements. Jazz playing, jazz singing, jazz dancing is old folks’ old time music. So you have to face it: time brings on changes.” He recounted how New Orleans folks reacted to his return: “'Why did you come back down here when you had left New Orleans? Why didn’t you just go away and stay away? What’s wrong? You were a failure where you were? Huh, answer me! We don’t need you here.” So I observe all in stride. In my travels about New Orleans I look about at the many places where musicians and sporting people used to gather. Tey ain’t around any more. Te jazz places are churches or open lots. But in those churches and in those vacant spaces, that old spirit sometimes rises; that encyclopedic history was still deep inside him. In his later years, Barker began to work with a group of young musicians and school them in the particulars of New Orleans sound. Te Fairview Baptist Church Band connected a new generation of New Orleanians to brass band tradition, reigniting an interest and energy in the form. Teir ability and enthusiasm was, to him, fesh-and-blood insurance that “jazz will live on, because it digs down inside the body, the brain, the heart the nerves and muscles.”
COLLECTION, 2007 / IMAGE COURTESY OF
COLLECTION.
HISTORIC
DANNY AND “BLUE LU” BARKER, BY MICHAEL P. SMITH, ©THE NEW ORLEANS THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS
1983, PHOTOGRAPH
LYNELL GEORGE home and gave back. Harold Battiste set forth, steeped in the old style, but bending the sound into something new. He too would also return home, using his California connections and know-how to build a jazz studies program at the University of New Orleans. Both men died in New Orleans: Barker would pass on in 1994, Battiste in 2015.
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Te forever-restless Morton kept circling what he felt was his — fame beyond place and category. He stayed in motion, and his health took a toll. Barker ran into Morton for the very last time in New York City, standing on a corner talking to a priest on Seventh Avenue near the Rhythm Club. Barker wrote, Mabel [Jelly’s wife] and Jelly greeted me with smiles and there was a big multi carat diamond in each of their mouths right up in front for the world to see. I’m sure the priest was well aware […] that they were the symbols of notoriety and of tenderloin characters […] We shook hands […] Jelly had noted my surprise at his association with a priest and then said, “Home Town, I have gone back to the Church and it is a great thing.”
Te couple invited Barker back to their apartment, and Barker sat and absorbed Morton’s saga of his misfortune “and how completely disgusted he was with New York City as well as the music business.” All the while, Mabel, Barker recalled, checked on pots and pans in the kitchen “[S]he just looked sadly at Jelly and then looked at me […] When I left the apartment I was real shook up. A few days later I was standing in front of the Rhythm Club with the usual crowd of musicians. I looked down the street towards the church to see Jelly there talking with two priests. Tat was the last time I saw Jelly.”
A formal marble marker is now in place. A simple inscription, white etched on black, reads “Ferdinand Morton” and beneath it, “Jelly Roll.” A delicate rosary encircles the “Rest in Peace.” Tat dash between the dates can only hint at the impossible twists of the journey east to west, west to east, and back again to make things right — but here, the journey is tangible. Evidence. He’s over here, hiding in plain sight.
Morton traveled back to California to make another try, which would be his undoing. He returned to Los Angeles to take care of business, bringing with him a pile of new music and hoping to form a band and restart his career. Ultimately, it was a plot to claim what he felt was his: full recognition of his contribution. He took ill — a consequence of a chronic respiratory condition — and was hospitalized for 10 days in the summer of 1941, frst placed in a broom closet in the charity ward of Los Angeles County General Hospital because “[i]t was the only room available.” He died 11 days later, July 10, his estate in disarray. News from the West Coast wended back to Barker, the keeper of the lore, and he would later contextualize Morton’s passing thusly: “When Jelly died in Los Angeles there were four famous negro bands touring the West Coast. None of those leaders attended the services of funeral or sent foral oferings,” Barker states in A Life in Jazz Te ofcial Downbeat magazine coverage from August 1941 would fesh out Barker’s “researcher/folklorist” account, reporting that Kid Ory, Mutt Carey, and Fred Washington were among the pallbearers, but that Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford, who happened to be in town for performances, had failed to appear to pay last respects. Morton’s end was indeed grim — his thin estate a tangle of confusion and red tape (Mabel Morton would step in and fle a claim as the pianist-composer’s widow, not Anita who had initially positioned herself as such). It would spin out over time. For years, his grave would remain unmarked. A man and legacy, erased. A poignant irony for a fgure who was so consumed with his billing and marquee power. So much of that history has vanished; it’s been wiped or worn away. But the stories, and their retelling, keep it alive and aloft. Now, if you do wander out to Calvary Cemetery in Montebello, California, looking to chase ghosts, someone in the front ofce will hand you a map, and if they aren’t busy tending to a family, they will help to plot your journey to the spot.
RACHEL ROSKE, BRIDGE OF KAH: THE CANDLE A SAINT, 2016, GRAPHITE ON UNPRIMED CANVAS, 43 X 70 INCHES.
Te air in Athens is soft. Animals twitter below Eleni’s mother’s apartment. Eleni has rented a car. She knows the agen cy in question, rents cars from time to time. Her call to confrm is protracted, laced with gossip. Dana and Meredith sit in the living room amid Dana’s bedding. Tough there are two beds in the second bedroom, the guest room, during the night Dana migrated to the couch. Tey are going to Delphi, because it is autumn and the hillside will be deserted and the site will be visitable, calm. Delphi is a series of terraces. Cut into an exceedingly steep hillside it is proximate to a number of ski resorts. Soon they areOnthere.thelowest terrace, just of the highway, is a guardhouse. Above it stand the remains of an agora, and above the agora, temples. Dana has had no cofee. At one point on the way up, she has a conversation with Eleni and Meredith about television. Tere is a comparison she strives to draw. Te idea is that there could be moving images while spec tators are still. She cannot quite articulate, it has something to do with the idea of living vicariously, not because this is necessary (to live vicariously), but because it is an idea that culture has for our behavior. Eleni and Meredith climb away. Tere is also an international tour on the hill. Tey would like to make use of the view. Te temples are confusing masses of stone melted by military bombardment and the weather. Perhaps because of lack of sleep Dana is having difculty identifying just what it is on this mountain that is sacred and worthy of note. Dana picks her way uphill, using her eyes more than anything else to touch the ancient lumps, littered with ground glass and miniscule tips of rubbish. Te temple of Apollo is a slab. An eroded pillar grouping has been pasted atop it. Dana gets down on her hands and knees. She recalls she has been saying something to Eleni and Meredith about television.Tis location supported the tripod of the Pythia, licked by tendrils of gassy air. Dana hunts around. Dana perceives an opening. It is not large but, judging from the packed earth around it, has been employed by other humans. Dana is looking for guards. Now there is a humming. Dana, who is penetrating an ancient holy site, the locus of mysteries, is nonplussed. She is not eager or terrifed, merely present. It comforts her to think that what is occurring could be representable, could recur as mere images. A brightness increases. She sees what she can only describe as a winged snake bathing its young, because this is what it is: a winged snake bathing its young with its gray tongue. Te wings of the snake seem infnitely soft, even at a distance. Around its neck is a translucent beard. Next Dana remembers, she is seated at an outdoor cafe at Delphi’s base and there is an orange and white cat with a thick neck batting the face of a smaller cat. Eleni and Meredith are eating pastries and Dana is drinking cofee. Now
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DELPHI LUCY IVES
“Have you been working?”
Dana wants to know how it is in Zurich, where Meredith lives. Meredith says Zurich is extremely clean. It’s an orderly place. Meredith does not do much but travel between the apartment she shares with her new husband and her studio, between the studio and the university building where she teaches.Dana expresses surprise that Meredith is teaching.
Dana has slept on the couch and Meredith in the guestroom and Eleni in her own bed in the smaller bedroom. Everyone is awake. Dana says nothing of the snake. Meredith has come to sit with Dana on the couch in the living room among the bedding. Dana is rubbing the back of her head. Tey are both coated in the residue of nearly painful sleep and should probably shower.
Meredith says that anything is possible when you are married to a faculty member. Dana wants to know what the class is. “Studio art,” says Meredith, who is a writer. “Oh,” says Dana. “ Tere was some problem of translation. It’s always dark there.” Dana Meredithnods.is frowning. “I just didn’t know that I would be unhappy.” “Oh,” says Dana. “‘Oh’ is right!” Meredith’s face gets wet. Tears make a light slapping sound as they hit the comforter. Meredith seems to have been, unbeknownst to Dana, flled with water. “Is it J____?” Dana says Meredith’s husband’s name. “No, it has nothing to do with him, which is the worst part. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with me.”
96 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS they are driving away. Tey consume a dinner of rabbit in a hillside town Eleni says was once a ski resort, previous to globalTwarming.enextday
“Drawing, more like. I make stick fgures. I’m trying to appease some imaginary person by acting like an illustrator, which I’m not.” Meredith blows her nose in her sweater. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about work. Tat’s the whole problem.”“Te problem?” “I am stuck. And a year from now I’m going to be stuck. And I’ll be stuck three years from now, a decade from now. I’ll always be stuck because I’ve never managed to actually do anything.” Meredith shuts her eyes. Dana is not a writer or artist. She is unusual among her friends in this sense. Dana is a person who participates in the running of New York galleries. She makes budgets and seating charts and purchases plane tickets for celebrities. She thinks about how she would, for once, like to have a boss who is sane. Dana watches Meredith, who is shivering. Eleni emerges, damp and golden, from the shower. It is difcult to say what makes one person’s life “converge” with another’s. Also, the morning is thickening; it is something that can be paid attention to. Dana is checking her email because an acquaintance, a friend of the gallery where she works, who is Greek and who is the unique daughter of a shipping magnate, has told Dana to write to her while she is in Athens, so that Dana and her friends may have a tour of the shipping magnate’s museum. And Dana has written.Itisasurprise, the graciousness of this heiress’s reply. She is probably in SoHo. Meanwhile, they are all three ignoring the propositions of the morning: breakfast, light. Tey lie around the living room. Dana thinks about how the apartment once belonged to Eleni’s mother, who came to this suburban hillside for some sort of respite. Tere is no rush. Here people don’t go to work; they detach themselves noncommittally from a modest suburban enclosure. Tey appear calm, if unsure. Tere is no talk from Eleni about exploring the surely forested edges of the suburb, whatever unexploited land is there. Te November sky is a white smear. A hidden god seems to desire something on earth, to be about to reach out. Tey are in a taxi, wending their way around the outskirts of Athens, going from one suburb to another. Rebar extends from upper stories.
RACHEL ROSKE, SITTING STILL, 2013, GRAPHITE ON UNPRIMED CANVAS, 37 X 28 INCHES
Daphne replies, in citric British tones. “I’m surprised you want to be here now! But no, you see, this show is curated by,” and here she names a mercenary international curator. “I am really only the director of the museum, functionally speaking.” Tey pass an ofce occupied by three diligently typing, smaller and younger versions of Daphne. Two look up, manifesting white teeth. Tey enter rooms containing artworks, in no particular order, by: Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubufet, Frank Stella, Louise Bourgeois, Jiro Yoshihara, Willem de Kooning, George Condo, Marlene Dumas. Tey go all the way to the top of the building, walk back down again. Later, in the cab, Eleni says, “You guys often do things like that?” She is possibly ofended. Tey draw nearer to the center of Athens, where they will view the Acropolis. Te following day Meredith returns to Zurich. Tere are tearful goodbyes, self-recriminations, vows. Eleni and Dana are alone. It is American Tanksgiving. Tey say nothing to one another of the holiday but take another taxi to the center of Athens, this time to the shopping areas, a plaza near the ofces of state, the true downtown.
Eleni sits in the front seat. Tey come to an area containing big-box stores with perfunctorily landscaped parking lots. Tere are other square buildings behind these, presumably ofce space; international styles, colored metal and glass. Tey drive back into an alley. Eleni and the driver are engaged in rapid conversation. Eleni says, “He says he can just let us of and he’ll wait?” Te driver drifts to a polite distance. Tey walk along the edges of small buildings that bluely line the alley. One building somewhat more closely resembles the building pictured — abstractly — on the private museum’s public web site, and they approach it. It has sleek stairs. Tere is a black glass bulb surely flled with security cameras. Tey see a small number on the black glass door. Te glass of the building has been tinted in such a way that it is impossible to see indoors, and it even appears that no one is there, no light is on. Tey have the sense, all the same, that they are being watched, that they are observed as they fit awkwardly around the front steps, attempting to decide how to proceed. At last Eleni presses a button. Tere is a click. A voice in Greek. Female, very high. Tere is another click and a long buzz that indicates they are aforded access. Eleni goes frst. Tey see legs: legs in clingy white pants, coming down an interior stair. Te legs are attached to a trim torso that supports a nominally pretty, given the carefully applied makeup, face. Te face blinks. She says Dana’s name and intro duces herself as Daphne. Tey are both d’s, Dana and Daphne. Daphne is an administrator. Tey are inside the box. It is clear now how visible their confusion, outside, must have been. No glare of bright sun enters, but there are foor-to-ceiling windows. Daphne is making small talk, but mostly she’s using her taut, manicured form to direct the three young women into an exhibition space at the center of the building. Daphne’s arm is pointing to the right and here is a massive red dripping pirate-shaped item by Paul McCarthy next to a small Basquiat painting. Daphne proclaims that this is a show about modernism. Tat the show is about showing lesser-known modernist styles. “Lesser-known artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat?” Dana blurts. Meredith’s face is a lovely mask. Eleni seems not to know what to do with her hands. Daphne is saying that it is not the artists themselves who are, obviously, lesser known, but rather the particular styles and works on display. Tese works all have a concertedly “modernist” quality, even though they were created during what everyone knows is the post-modern era, or the beginnings of it, et cetera. Eleni is staring at Daphne. Meredith takes a few steps closer to the Basquiat, which is a small painting but not really so small. Daphne makes a noise indicating her concern at Meredith’s proximity. Meredith recalibrates. “So,” Eleni says, “you’re a curator?” “And you’re Greek?” Daphne brightly inquires. Eleni switches into Greek, presumably to say something about how she grew up mostly in an East Coast US suburb.“Oh!”
Even before they come to the location of the marches, the low rumbling sounds of massed bodies are audible. Ele ni points out signs in Greek. “ Tey are against racism, the Golden Dawn,” Eleni says. “ Tey want a safe place. We are all human.” Tey keep walking. Eleni says, pointing, “ Tat building was on fre a few months ago.” Tey turn a corner into an avenue flled with people walking with banners. Tey are state employees, administrators. Tere are many teachers. Eleni walks in silence as chants transpire. Her hair rises in a reddish fn.
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Eleni laughs. “We should go back to Delphi.”
“Your room is the guestroom?”
“I don’t know.” Eleni is staring out over the city. Its many roofs glitter. “All I know is I can’t sell the apartment right now. But I don’t know how any of this can end. Particularly when the private museums of the world could pay for it.” “Could they?”
“You know, now that Meredith’s not here, I can tell you that I’m actually the one staying in the guestroom.”
Eleni begins to say, “I wanted to ask, it bothered you in that room? Tat’s why you were sleeping on the couch?” “I don’t know.”
“Yes. Tat other room, where you were, is my mother’s old room. But you don’t want to sleep in it.” “It must seem really rude.” “It doesn’t. I admit something goes on in there. Tere’s a reason I don’t sleep there, though it’s arguably the nicer space. Like for example the door will shut in a certain way.” “By itself?” “It’s not scary. But I don’t want to, I guess, get in its way.”
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LUCY IVES
“Do you think that it will ever stop?”
Later they ascend to the cafeteria of the city’s largest bookstore. Tey sit on a terrace under heating lamps and con sume hot chocolate. Eleni seems fatigued by the task of being with another American. Dana looks into the square below.
A thug lurking in umbral headzone forgotten between episodes. Null weight of glass afoot in the skull. Nudge to remember the forgotten, the undone, black tree trunks fallen decades ago shifting now behind one eye. Why did they fall unheard, the sky above a contorted, contracting dome? Then the wait, visible, until pain cinches up the brain. Welcome, acrid scalp jewel. Dark familiar with numb knell of bleed-out, of stroke, forecasting the moment a lid lifts at last into absence, music resumes, & dancing. Until it doesn’t.
MADRIGALMIGRAINE LISA RUSS SPAAR
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101 Scuttle moon, I lick thee. How far we’ve come, even when I’ve slept through your scythe, your skull & priestly dome, your going dark, the sky all ark. All the ways you’ve tried to show me how it’s going to go. I project, & yet it’s true, your hold. I look. My eyes burn MADRIGALHEAVENLYgold.LISA RUSS SPAAR LISA RUSS SPAAR
© 2017 KAY ROSEN
Over the past 18 months, artist and Chinese political dissident, Ai Weiwei has traversed the globe — 23 countries to be precise — to give us an inside look at the many narratives of the global refugee crisis. Throughout Human Flow, his first Hollywood-produced feature film, Ai illuminates 60 untold stories of the 65 million families and lone travelers — children and elders alike — crisscrossing the Eurasian continent and the US-Mexico border wall. Humanizing the apparent pain and occasional hidden humor of refugee life, he turns a steadied lens on the determined minds of millions seeking a better future. In addition to exposing the urgency, fear, and occasional boredom of migratory life, he creates a critical record of the humanitarian crisis at hand. The film doesn’t just raise awareness, but inspires an emotional and intellectual call to action. Human Flow is not a surprising work for Ai, who clearly identifies with the people depicted in his film. Ai himself has been on the move most of his life. Born in Beijing, Ai was the refugee child of an exiled literary father. He and his family were forced out of the city during the Cultural Revolution and into manual labor in China’s remote and harsh westerly province of Xinjiang. Ai eventually returned to the capital, where he enrolled in Beijing’s Film Academy, and established himself as the youngest member of the dissident Xing Xing (“Stars”) art group. The rise of “contemporary Chinese art” as a genre however, was slow, and it took nearly two decades before it registered any market demand or institutional support. In 1983, Ai traveled to New York, where he lived as an expatriate, studying briefly at Berkeley, Penn, and Parsons, be fore dropping out. In her book, Notes on a Foreign Country, the journalist Suzy Hansen described living abroad in vivid terms: “My brain experienced the acquisition of such knowledge like a cavity filling: something drilled out, something shoved in, and afterward, a persistent, dull ache and a tooth that would never be the same.” It seems like Ai might have experienced something similar in leaving China. The Chinese narrative to which Ai Weiwei was born — a relatively new nation under the helm of the Chinese Communist Party and at odds with the civilization’s five millennia-old history — was suddenly ripped away. Indeed, it was in New York that he honed his photographic, installation, and quasi-per formative practice, also documented through photos. The influence of his early migratory days and early photographic
ZANDIE BROCKETT | 张桂才 In the Western world today, we are bombarded by harrowing images and stories of wars, poverty, climate change, natural disaster, food insecurity, financial meltdowns, and authoritarian governments — the kinds of crises that force tens of millions of people from their homes in search of sustenance, shelter, and security. These are gruesome and tragic events and yet, they remain neatly contained and removed from our daily lives in the developed world. It's a paradox that underscores the realities of Western life, particularly in the United States, where we often forget that all but one group of our forefathers sought refuge in this country for similar reasons. They sought respite and the freedom to control and express their own narratives, futures, and identities, all of which created an embodied knowledge of the tradition and ritual of immigration. Their memories of hardship, discovery and rebirth give depth and texture to our nation. While these crises have been steadily increasing in the post-Industrial era, they seem more extreme than ever in the globalized, post-internet world in which we now live.
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HERE IS SOMETHING TO SEE: AN INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI
In 2011, nearly 20 years after his ’93 return to China, Ai was famously detained by the Chinese government and spent a number of months in prison, under house arrest and without a passport. He now resides in Berlin, where he joined his family in 2015, after Chinese authorities finally released his passport. His scholarly promise earned him a fellowship studying abroad — a privilege not granted to many refugees or exiles — but the pain of unraveling a national identity from one's own doesn't discriminate according to privilege and opportunity. The process remains fraught with a pro found sense of emotional, intellectual and social displacement. As we see in this film, Ai is carefully attuned to this process as well as its flip side: the myth of nation-building and national identity. At one point in the movie, a Palestinian man acknowledges, “When you grow up not seeing, touching or knowing the other side, but rather only hear about them, you start to develop a stereotype.” Americans should know this well — these false constructs and labels are built out of fear and are often heavily defended, just like a nation’s “protective” walls. Ai Weiwei seems to be paying particular attention to the construction of these walls. His other recent project was a piece commissioned by the Public Art Fund. “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” a title borrowed from a colonial proverb and appropriated by Robert Frost, also opened this past October 2017. It is a series of fences installed throughout New York City, highlighting the preposterousness and conundrum of borders. As we build walls to demarcate our territories and “preserve” our liberties, we also enclose ourselves. The walled city becomes an echo chamber of paranoia and fear. Life outside those walls is of course, much worse. The nationless bodies Ai follows are painfully vulnerable. These ref ugess are hungry; they are subject to the elements, battered by rain, cold, wind, sand. They rarely have walls or roofs to protect them. And while Ai is not as physically vulnerable as they are, they do however, have one thing in common: their identities are at the mercy of external institutional bodies. In both of their cases, the contentious question of national and personal identity not only depends on the governments these people abandoned and the larger systems that run this globe, but also Western news and social media. In Ai Weiwei’s case, his identity as an artist has largely been shaped by the West's need for a tidy narrative: he is a lone soldier fighting China’s injustices. And yet, if you think about it, why is Ai Weiwei still considered a “contemporary Chinese artist”? He has lived abroad for 10 years, and had his passport revoked by his own country; he and his family live in Germany, and he doesn’t currently make art about China. Certainly this isn’t because of his Chinese blood. Ai seems to be actively responding to the narrative built around him. In an interview with the LA Review of Books Radio Hour, Ai said: “My existence really is a product of social media. I’ve been an artist for a quite a long time […] as well as an architect and curator, but none of these things could give me a platform to speak my opinion or to associate with the people whose voices I identified with.” Ai is also not above admitting how this battle has shaped him. In the same interview he said: “Right before the secret police gave me back my passport, they said, ‘Weiwei, we have one question. Someone said you’ve only become so well-known because of us.’ I replied, ‘It takes a powerful nation to make a great artist. Without my struggle [as a result] of you guys, I could never become the Ai Weiwei that you see today.’” This should, in part, explain his fascination with the selfie and the distributive possibilities of social media. They both allow for a measure of narrative control, otherwise unavailable to Ai. He is taking the picture himself, framing himself in it. Likewise, social media allows him to convey an identity that might more accurately depict his own understanding of himself. In these realms, both visually and verbally, Ai is no longer the construct of someone else.
I spoke with Ai Weiwei in Los Angeles, shortly before the release of his film. At the end of our interview, he slumped over as the PR woman whirled her finger, indicating that we wrap it up before his next appointment. He seemed tired and ready to be done with his 10th interview of the day, somewhere halfway through the 165 that had been scheduled for his Toronto – Los Angeles – San Francisco – New York promotional tour.
105 work can still be seen today in his compulsive admiration of the digital photographic medium; Ai is an avid taker of selfies — this is obvious from his many social media platforms, which faithfully archive all of his documented moments.
ZANDIE BROCKETT | 张桂才
Tis grueling schedule certainly could not be fun. Perhaps it is the privileged form of sufering that indicates his active attempt to do his part. It is with his voice that he brings awareness to the millions of lives that are left without one. perhaps this continuous movement is what he too, must do to survive.
Looking back, the whole of society was in that same condition, so you can’t automatically conclude that. Very few people spoke out, you know. While yes, I did sufer through it, [that experience] doesn’t automatically make me an artist. Yes, my father was an intellectual, but that also doesn’t automatically make me an activist. My father could not be an activist himself. He was silenced and before he died, he never had the opportunity to speak the truth, to speak what was in his mind or in his heart. It hurt me a lot because a father is one of the most intimate human beings in your life — you know, he’s a blood relative, but I didn’t even know him.
Yes, I’m an artist, and people have called me an activist. But if I had to guess what caused me to make my art, it’s really a combination of things: my childhood experience, growing up in these conditions and my family. And also the fact that I went to the United States for 10 years, which exposed me to a diferent value system — I now know capitalist and socialist societies, authoritarian and democratic states...but still, those things alone didn’t make me an activist because I simply didn’t have a channel in China or the United States to become an active voice. After leaving the US, I totally felt like I was a failure of all things challenging. I went back to China for over 10 years. From ’93 to 2004 or 2005, I had nothing to do there. Of course, I made underground books and opened the frst art space — China Art Archives & Warehouse — and promoted this kind of subculture but still, that didn’t make enough noise because the scale was very small. What enabled the amplification of your voice? Te internet suddenly gave me a tool or platform to make my arguments. It allowed me to give structure to my knowl edge and experiences and express them and myself through a series of pictures. Ironically, a state-run internet company (民人博客 minren boke, “Sina Blog”) forced me to open my frst social media account. Before that I never touched a computer, I never even knew how to type. So the government said, “Don’t worry, we’ll help you.” I said, “Okay.”
ZANDIE BROCKETT: Can you share your motivations for making this film and the reasons why the refugee crisis has been at the crux of your artwork since your immigration to Europe? AI WEIWEI: Truthfully, in my recollection, I’ve never felt safe or like there was one place I could really call home. I was born to a father who was a serious enemy of the State, and who was exiled the year I was born. For over 10 years, he lived with this humiliation, discrimination, danger, and all kinds of inhumane treatment. I grew up in these conditions. Of course, when looking back, you realize how harsh and bad it was, but when you’re young, you don't know anything else. It's like standing in the rain and everything is wet. Te only diference is that when you look back, you realize that it has been raining constantly for 20 years. I understand the people we documented, who have been pushed away from their homes, and for safety reasons have had to fnd other locations to shelter their children. It’s absolutely natural and it’s the reason why we named the flm Human Flow. Since the beginning of the civilization, this migratory movement has always been part of humanity. We’ve always been on the move to avoid danger and to adjust to a more suitable situation. It doesn’t matter for what reason or at what cost, it’s just human nature. What was it like growing up in exile? Did exposure to your father’s poetry or ways of thinking prime you to express yourself artistically?
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ZANDIE BROCKETT | 张桂才
It’s very hard to evaluate what poetry or art can really do for so-called social change. We only know that it’s profound in dealing with human emotion and humans’ understanding of themselves. But it’s not going to make people politically engaged; it will only make the artist himself politically engaged.
When I started to use social media, I didn’t know where it would lead. I just followed my instincts, out of pleasure and curiosity. As an artist I’m always interested in how to set up these communication systems. Artists have always been so fascinated with exploring themselves — Van Gogh and Rembrandt both made so many self-portraits. Why did they do that? Why do you refect yourself in a mirror in order to create an image that satisfes your own sense of self? Because it allows your inner world to be refected onto another surface, and it introduces you to a recognizable image, to which you say, “Okay, I’m satisfed with that image.” But you see, the struggle is endless. Today we’re in a very diferent society — information and the image is abusively faunted. Everybody posts images of their lunch, their jewelry, their friends and celebrative moment … But for me, it’s more of a diary to record my activities and to observe my life with an indiferent eye. To be able to say, “Oh, this is your behavior.” It’s not a form of celebration, but more like a board for posting notes.
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Do you think art can shift collective behavior?
I fell in love with it. Now, I spend all my time on the internet — 90 percent of my energy is focused online. I started by writing, on average, three articles a day. I wrote all kinds of political, cultural, and judicial posts. I started to investigate, to organize online activities, to do research, to fnd the death toll of the Sichuan earthquake. You know, sensitive matters.
What is your fascination with the selfie and how have you used social media to explore your persona as an artist and activist? How do you feel about the rise of the artist as celebrity?
What is a handshake? What is a hug? What is a selfe? I think people maybe unconsciously want to say, “Okay, at this moment I was here with this guy. Tis is an image you can see, this is proof.” [Simultaneously Ai took a photo of me listen ing to his response; he posted it on Instagram almost immediately after our conversation.] Tat moment in his or her life has been somehow identifed with some value. Tis value could be associated with someone who is an artist or an activist or someone who is recognizable, like a celebrity. You think you’ll never really achieve that moment of success or meet that celebrity, but I think it’s all relative. Tey’re all interesting human value judgments, but they don’t really mean anything — after all, it’s just accumulation of images.
I don’t really know if art can shift that, you know? If you see a child being killed, or a woman being raped, or some houses being burned down … the whole city being burned down … I don’t think we can exaggerate the power of art.
What are your thoughts on “Socially Engaged Art” (SEA), a genre that sits at the confluence of performance and theater, activism and education? Do you think SEA is a form of art that enables gradual social change through civic participation or awareness, or might it be a genre that disillusions us from the practicalities of social change as enacted by NGOs and policy? I think artists make eforts in all directions to illustrate their own relationship with the world. Some artists are more conscious about political and social environments, but some refuse to be engaged, and their work can’t really ofer a language to deal with social struggles. But still, without announcing that work is intended to be politically or socially engaging, the act of making it remains a very political position. But, since art is for us to look at, it always has to ofer us some kind of aesthetic judgment. It’s like a mirror that refects something we would never see otherwise.
I did so much and worked in every direction — I put my flms, my interviews, all kind of research as well as lots of silly and funny happenings onto the internet. Everyday people expected this guy to do something, and I never failed them. I always surprised them. And then the time came when I didn’t even know how to handle the situation. It clearly was not political, but it was so subversive and I didn’t really know how to stop it.
DIRECTOR AI WEIWEI IN GREECE DURING THE FILMING OF HUMAN FLOW , COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS.
For men, women are so mysterious and hard to describe, but women bear, teach, and influence children, so they defi nitely have an effect on our future. The liberation and education of women would absolutely make our world a safer and more reliable place.
Poetically speaking, we all come from women and from their “motherly spirit” that holds so much love and admiration.
How do you maintain hope and positivity to persevere with your work after seeing so much violence, hatred, and injustice? If I accept what I’ve seen, I would be totally disappointed when looking at humanity. Without knowing that I might have a special purpose, my emotions and feelings remain attached to a very essential struggle — one that is connected to freedom of speech, basic human rights, and the recognition of human dignities. I simply see hope because I’m also just one of them. That feeling of trying to be nice toward life can be extended to being nice toward our neighbors and our environment. It’s a very general condition, I think. After watching Human Flow, I was filled with an unbelievable sense of loss but also unease as to how I could actually help. How do you hope your film will motivate the average person? I did my duty to present what I’ve seen, to show some kind of truth about the crisis from both an artistic and journalistic Butperspective.whatwill it achieve? I don’t really know. I try to convince people to watch this film, because film, as a medium, still matters — it’s impactful because you have to spend two hours to sit and watch it. How do you convince people to watch it? I don’t know. I have to do all these interviews, make appearances, and say, “Hey, this is an artist begging you guys to see this film.” At some point, people make a judgment — some will think I’m a failure, but some will think I made something that touches them. Something that’s worthwhile to watch.
What kind of world do you think we would live in if global governance was dominated by women?
I don’t know … women can also lean quite far to the right. It’s very hard to say and too general to talk about, but cer tainly more women in [office to] defend their own rights would make society a better place.
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ZANDIE BROCKETT | 张桂才
Instead of resting, I stayed up all night drinking large cans of Arctic beer extricated from the deserted bar and gulping (this was new to me) glasses of water, trying to fnish a popular TV show a friend of mine had a cameo in, before my access to internet (and all life south) snufed out. Unsleeping, I often visited the giant male ursus maritimus who I’d by then made my familiar, i.e., completely soul-to-soul joined with, returning from my bed cubicle to wave fsts of unlit
In my Los Angeles bedroom my girlfriend who is also my wife is asleep and so is our new son. Late light spouts from the western window across the suddenly too-small bed. He arrived exactly two weeks ago. Osa — “she-bear,” or bear constellation. Adrift in the Glendale hospital that we never meant to go to, our three bodies in some kind of shared existential shock, I carved into my iPhone notepad: “My kid has battle marks on his face, wild fuzzy ears, drag queen length nails, wisps of dried blood in his hair, huge lavender hands.”
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HELLO EARTH
Te far-fungness wasn’t entirely new. Before the High Arctic I’d groped around the Mojave Desert, also trying to be alone. Without severe geographical boundaries in place I stay attached to everyone I’ve ever touched or might, in some future moment, bump up against. Te mushy, undefned feeling keeps me safe. But — I had to erase it. At least I knew one thing: I was fnally going to try testosterone when having fnished “going polar,” I would return home.
Now to keep him asleep, I have the sound machine blasting a 12-hour loop of oceanic swell. Te sea mammal blaaaats make me jump. Our astrologer friend texts us: “this is an extremely happy time wearing a mustache as a disguise. Let yourselves feel the way you foat in water. Your whole family is in amniotic fuid.” Amniotic. Relating to the membrane around a fetus. Or, from the Ancient Greek, amnion: bowl in which the blood of victims was caught. But being born in the sac or caul is lucky. Witchy to be that tucked away in an extra hibernation. How bears — before their last-ditch PR makeover as “charismatic megafauna” — were once seen as totemic line-walkers, spirit transformers going dead every winter only to be reborn. RESIDENCY
JESS ARNDT BIRTH
My frst two days in the territory of Svalbard (an archipelago midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole) I was staying at a mining hotel called Mary-Ann’s Polarrigen by myself. By myself — but only partway, due to the large number of taxidermied animals cohabitating with me. It was an old coal barracks, with emergency lights fashing down the long, otherwise unlit hallway. My sole human co-guest was a Russian man who seemed to have the same habits as I did but opposite. We had wordlessly agreed: we were completely and totally in each other’s psychic way.
Tat night I shufed around in the region’s footwear of choice, loaner Crocs I found, piled thoughtfully in every size, in Mary-Ann’s ample coat closet. Dined on canned chips — “tomato and shrimp.” Te snow was now raining, a new world fact that once started, wouldn’t let up. It was already the warmest October by any record. I sat in the dark bar texting my Brooklyn brother-in-law. He was always up. Earlier I’d seen a man walking away from me, toward the deep glacier valley, on the settlement’s only road. His baby was papoosed on his back and he had a rife (THE LAW HERE!) slung over his shoulder, I texted. Bears were everywhere, at least the possibility of them. I’d already written this on many postcards. I found it very moving: they (the adult/baby) seemed so contained. I woke in the pitch black with my internal climate raging. In my dream, my unborn kid had emerged, emerald-ine, as a fascinating shape I’d never seen before. I stared at him. Since I wasn’t his biological anything, the doctors pulled him away. I’d known him only briefy, but felt a painful ripping sensation. Rousing, I padded to the toilet, past a display of miner’s pick-axes. We were embarking tomorrow, 30 artists in half as many shrinking cabins. I was one of three writers but it was already clear nothing would come out. Outside the shared bathroom door, something in the tunnelish hall was breathing. Unable to pee: my persistently snick ering bladder infection was back. I pulled up my heavyweight thermal base layer. Te whole region was psychologically infamed. I’d been taking a brew of mouthy, dead-tasting herbs that might slide my system over, away from the estro genic. My suitcase was lined with plastic bottles, a month of doses rolling hopefully inside.
On deck, I plugged in my ear buds. Without internet, Kate Bush, “Hello Earth,” was the only track available, apparently, the only track I’d downloaded? Had anyone ever played this so far north?! All you sailors (Get out of the waves, get out of the water)[…] All you fshermen Head for home
FEELINGS ABOUT WRITING Computer on my L.A.-sweaty knee, sound machine crashing. Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Pub. Date November 8, 2016. I can’t click “yes” on my Amazon shopping cart I swore I’d quit, but what a great title. Yoko Tawada I’m so jealous of you! (What do you do when someone’s just written your book?)
JESS ARNDT
111 sage around him. Press my forehead on his yellow chest. Hold his thick forepaw (that jutted from the claustrophobic wall). He was sleepless too. Polar bears, unlike the rest of their genus, try to live all the time.
By morning we were both red-eyed and exhausted. I walked across the tundra to town. Dangled myself at places I might be seen — various outftters stores and the cafe — as if “cloaked.” Walked back across the scree. Snow salted the hills over the ford and the water and everything beyond it waited gauzily for winter. With fewer people than what Norway calls isbjørne, or ice bears, in the freezing, sprawling, archipelago, Longyearbyen is the northernmost permanent “settlement” in the world. I’d arrived early to secure this feeling of aloneness, to get a jump on things. By the time the other artists swept in, my armor would be in place and I could frmly resist being “known.”
FIRST SIGHTING Going north with Antigua was its own universe. Aboard her, I was stabbingly happy and stabbingly sad. For two weeks a gong punched my ribs fast and close. It felt kind of Duende-like, the way Lorca wrote it. To be: “in hand-to-hand combat,” or “on the rim of a well.” Anyway, I’d chosen to come in late fall, at the start of the accelerating tilt to sunless, 24-hour night. I must have been looking for “black sounds,” as he called them.
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Our pregnancy incubating in California invaded every part of me — yet I was farther from it, geographically, techno logically, even historically, than ever. Te donor had been my brother, but was now our Peruvian friend. Tat was fne, everything was! Except, as I was increasingly more aware, I was no longer genetically latched. At LAX my girlfriend and I had said a measured rather than passionate goodbye. To be north but thinking south, I mumbled frozenly into my memos app. South, but thinking north I undid my glove, warming my iPhone screen. Nothing was more potent, more portent than northness. Te clinking, perfectly frigid water. Te non-human-ness, felt from the deck, of land’s black rock teeth. Escaping myself meant no more “party feature” on high, no more “everybody like me” antics. Suddenly, I missed the miner’s fusty hallway, my balding, very near friend. I scanned the distant snow patches. Ursus maritimus is one of only eight mammals durable enough to survive this annihilative climate, but the landscape, now (+ perhaps forever??), was blank. Te scale of distance matched me gruesomely. A parka shape approached. I’d hidden myself at the bulwark. “Whatever you did to it, the disco ball’s on the fritz,” a sea-frosted arm held out a chunk of colored plastic. I was so in sync my skin crawled. Finally alone enough and everywhere it hurt.
CIRCUMPOLAR Tis present frontier is, as my girlfriend says, a “limit” experience. Te only way I can possibly fnish writing anything is to cram Osa in my arms, up the narrow street toward the end of our block. An ice-eyed husky lunges at us but otherwise it’s pure Los Angeles — jasmine hedges, gnarls of cactus, unkempt palms. He’s a warrior, big headed, a claw-mark on his cheek from the forceps. Even his sobs are rugged. Wrapped in a hospital blanket, a quick exit from an exhausted house — I feel like I’ve stolen him and equally, I’m manically proud, waiting for someone to notice us. A neighbor at the corner in brown Dickies smock and pants, spraying a verdant philodendron, complies. “Oh wow,” she says. It’s a beautiful evening. “He won’t sleep,” I say.
MurderMurdererof calm Why did I go? Why did I go?
It sounded fantastic. Melty bergs slushed past and snow spit against my frozen Gortex hood. I wasn’t sure why my pulse was hammering or why my organs felt like they’d been pasted on my outsides. Maybe it was the dolphins who fanked us, non-Arctic aberrations, sure harbingers of things we weren’t supposed to see. Every day we lost 45 minutes of light. It was a constancy I didn’t trust, I hoped it would get darker. Go to sleep, little earth I was there at the birth Out of the cloudburst Te head of the tempest
JESS ARNDT
Osa’s nodding sideways, his body snufing the length of my arm. “He looks just like you,” the neighbor insists.
Te longer the nights were in the Arctic, the more pitched I was in total blackness, and thereby — impossibly — the closer I was to home, the more awake I became. We’d kicked past the Gulf Stream and were revolving on our own. I stared up at placental aurora, wondering. “Yes,” she says resolutely eyeing us both, “it’s the shape of his nose.”
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My frst book is coming out in a few days. All 144 desperate pages. Somewhere in the middle of it, a narrator very much like me worries about becoming a bear, then about doing something terrible, compelled by their girth — wasting, ruining the bodies they love. I continue: “We think something’s wrong.”
ELEANOR STANFORD
ALL WORLDS AND ALL OF THEIR DENIZENS ARE EQUALLY REAL
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Maria Santana shows me the map she is making of the quilombos: specks of light where the hands of slaves’ descendants catch babies. Her own daugh ter flickers, a small star in a distant interior. How to escape the body? Maria Santana shrugs: a cosmology of cigarette smoke around her shoulders, her field notes annotated with ash. In 1934, Villa-Lobos insisted: I create music out of necessity, biological neces sity. His piano an incandescent extension of his hands, or of his mind. What did Villa-Lobos know of biological necessity? From another hemisphere, my sons exert their gravitational tug. The only way to escape the body is through the body. When I birthed them, I was bigger than that pain, planetary.
Villa-Lobos released his composition to the will of the stars. But Villa-Lobos was also a shill for the military dictatorship.
I like to hear about my husband’s girlfriends: the one who was kidnapped at gunpoint in Niger. The one with a tattoo across her back: of lines, he says, but I hear lions, picture a savannah rippling on skin.
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The one who does energy work on his chakras. The one who comes to our house when I’m away and drinks our whiskey, leaves soggy pad Thai in the Ifridge.want
Marriage, like the music of Villa-Lobos, relies on chance procedures, on inde terminacy--in which performers are given latitude, within certain limits.
A LAPSE COMPOSITIONALOFCONTROL
ELEANOR STANFORD
to say that my sentences emerge from the city’s skyline, or from im perfections in the paper--the generator of randomness still humming after the lights have gone out.
Bishop to Lowell, on his using an ex-wife’s letters in his poems: art just isn’t worth that much. Still, if I could have lain down on marriage’s grassy plain and let myself be torn limb from limb, devoured--I like to think I would have.
ELEANOR STANFORD
MICHAEL CARTER, #9, JANUARY 9TH , 2016, ACRYLIC ON ARCHES COVER, 30 X 44 INCHES
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THE PROFESSOR CHIARA BARZINI
The Professor was so intrigued by Art Nouveau architecture that he put stained windows in the classroom just for the sake of his lectures. For being a teacher he was very hands-on. I got to class late and he asked the students to applaud me. Look at how everything she holds is just spilling out of her, he said. She’s like a Gaudì building, but warm on the inside. The students clapped, even though they resented giving me special attention. I tried to look modest. The Professor said that if we were impressed with the way he redecorated his lecture hall, we should see what he did to the hotel down the street. He remodeled it in his name–– iron and bricks bended to his will. That’s how it was in town. He was a powerful man. The girls knew it. Even the most self-righteous feminist in class, the one who believed men should be derided for making bad pop music, was often silenced by the power of his teachings. He cast spells, some said. He made you do things. For practice that day, he told us to get in touch with the earth. Take some soil and mold yourself according to its rules, he said. That was the first step to become an artist. We had to know our elements so we could dominate them. A pot filled with dirt was passed around class. The Professor ordered us to swallow as much of it as we could fit in our stomach. At first there were giggles, the most advanced students scoffed. What was the point of taking his class if they were just going to giggle, I thought. I didn’t laugh. I looked at the Professor as he demonstrated the exercise. He stuffed himself with earth until he could no longer speak. When he opened his mouth, mud poured. A final gush and it all spilled to the floor. Et voilà, he said coughing up dirt brittles. The rest of the students followed his example. Soon enough everyone was regurgitating mud and feeling cathartic. One girl proclaimed she would confront her selfish mother for never taking her to museums when she was a girl. Another student screamed that her calling was to be a sculptor. An older scholar sobbed because it was her last day of class. The only grump was the feminist. She babbled and complained, walking around class with a big pale belly hanging out, proud for having refused the Professor’s dirt. I didn’t want to listen to her. Shut up, I complained in my mind. I wanted to think the Professor’s experiment was a magical alchemy, that it would cure me. I too wanted to confront my selfish mother. I wanted to know what my calling was. I wanted the Professor to shape the elements of my body like he shaped buildings. I wanted him to remove my lungs and my heart, and place my organs in different positions to make them hurt less. I prayed it would work. I ate the Professor’s dirt and worked my fingertips deep down into his flesh, but there was mud inside and I never found anything else.
I don’t know if the fact that it was “nonfction” made it more of a pleasure. It was very well written.
A few years ago, I received an email from a woman saying she was publishing a memoir in which I appeared and she wanted to run the passages by me to see if I was okay with them. I’d met her nearly 30 years earlier when we were both young American students living in Brazil. After a few months, she went north to another city and we lost touch. When she wrote me after all those years, she said she thought my depiction in her book was fattering, but that she’d be happy to show me the manuscript if I had concerns. I said I empathized because I often wrote about real people and felt com pelled to show them what I’d written, even if it was presented as fction. I said it certainly didn’t sound like anything I’d be discomfted by but that I’d be happy to look at the page(s) in question if it would make her feel more relaxed. It was, indeed, a fattering portrait. I told her I felt I owed her, as the saying goes, a million dollars and a lap dance. She said, among other things, that I was “small, maybe 5’5”” (I’m 5’4”) and that I was exquisitely beautiful. She said I looked like “a young Vivien Leigh.” I told her that either due to fawed memory or poetic license she’d given me an extra inch of height and an incalculable exaggeration in the beauty department. She asked me if I wanted her to correct my height. I said, “Don’t take away my extra inch! I was so enjoying it!”
118 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Shortly after I received this email, I got a note in my departmental mailbox from a wonderful graduate student of mine. I’d given her a copy of the manuscript of the novel I was writing at the time. I told her that there was a character in the novel that was inspired by her. While I’d incorporated several real people into this book in recognizable forms, I felt it was inappropriate for me to do that with a student, even though I considered her in every other way a peer. I wanted her to know, however, that she had inspired me, and also that if there was anything in the character that made her uncom fortable, I’d be glad to change or delete it.
SEEING AND BEING SEEN BARBARA BROWNING
Tere were a couple of other odd details that might be read as less than fattering, depending on your perspective. She frst encountered me wearing a denim mini-skirt and a Che Guevara T-shirt which, as she correctly intuited, was not a particularly well-formulated political statement on my part but a fashion choice. She also seemed to remember that all I ever ate was fried yucca and sausage, gleefully, with the grease coating my fngers and lips. I like the idea of this, but I’m pretty sure she also exaggerated there as well. (Maybe she was confating me with Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind: “Fiddle-dee-dee! Ashley Wilkes told me he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite!”) Either way, the experience of reading this text was certainly uncanny — though almost entirely pleasurable!
119
I’d changed a number of signifcant details about her. For one thing, in “real” life, she was Jewish, while my character was Chinese American. My character, Fang Li, was in my mind and in that of my narrator a charming person of intelligence, integrity, and sly humor, but also of great gentleness. In all of these respects she was inspired by my student, though a couple of her personal accoutrements were lifted from other friends.
In my novel, the narrator’s elderly neighbor comments that Fang is “cute, vewy cute.” Te narrator confrms this, but suspects that the neighbor may not have gotten close enough to notice the more unconventional aspects of Fang’s appearance: she was covered in “scrumbling,” free-form crocheted accessories made of fbrous organic materials like shredded banana peels that would start to smell a little funny after a while; a bracelet made of hardened goose shit; a pierced septum, in which she wears a ring that always recalls, for the narrator, that Edward Lear poem, “ Te Owl and the Pussycat,” in which the unlikely newlyweds have to travel very far in a boat in order to fnd a ring, and they get it from a pig who’s wearing it in his nose. Te scrumbling was, truth be told, a habit of mine, though I had the impression that my student did add decorations of her own devising to her boots. But neither she nor I actually used decaying vegetable matter (that was poetic license). I had an eccentric hippie poet friend years ago who wore a bracelet made of dried goose poop (it had no smell whatso ever). Te bit about Fang’s pierced septum was actually borrowed from another student I adore. When I frst met her, this punk rock detail made her very youthful, pretty, dimpled face seem all the more innocent —but indeed, every time I saw her I remembered that little ditty about the owl and the pussycat, and the wedding ring they took out of a pig’s nose. (She later removed it.) What did my student think about these details of her depiction? She did mention them. She referred to them as the “grotesque” aspects of Fang when you got up close. She said she liked them. She told a beautiful anecdote of her own about a delicate young girl she’d once known who wore some bird bones that gave her a slightly sickly sweet taxidermy scent that she found profoundly melancholy. She professed not to be ofended by my description, but moved. She didn’t say anything about another detail from my manuscript — that Fang eats a lot of hot dogs. Tat was also poetic license. I can only hope it pleased her as I was pleased by my own greasy lips and fngers in that woman’s memoir.
Te elderly neighbor in the novel was also based on a real person. After I included her in my novel, my neighbor and I actually became pretty intimate, until she needed to be placed in assisted living. She was very old and we both thought she would soon die. She told me so before she left. Understandably, she didn’t want to be alone, so she took to knocking a lot on my door. She would also hang out in the lobby of our building for hours at a time. Te one thing my neighbor seemed to fnd very disappointing about me was that I wasn’t Jewish. She kept calling me Judy, as if that might change Wethings.see each other the way we need to see each other. When I told the memoirist not to take away my extra inch, she sweetly responded, “Your stature is undiminished, now and always!” But of course, I’ll probably shrink — I’m probably already shrinking — and I was never really 5’5”. We must know we’re being misperceived, and we may even know we’re misperceiving, but this doesn’t mean we aren’t seeing each other, appreciating our charms.
Sometimes I think that fction is a way of keeping death at bay. Sometimes I think it’s a way of coming to terms with it. It’s also a way of coming to terms with the almost unbearable pleasure of being so alive — Fang’s voracious appetite for hot dogs, or what the memoirist confgured in my greasy lips and fngertips. Tomorrow, for now, is another day.
BARBARA BROWNING
My student’s note was lovely, generous, and lyrical. We’d spoken briefy when I handed her the manuscript about what it means to encounter someone else’s perception of you. Since both she and I are performers (I am a dancer and she a conceptual artist who often uses her own body as her artistic medium), we were certainly aware of, on occasion, being looked at, and we’d both enjoyed and endured critical assessments of our art. But of course, someone’s depiction of you when you’re ostensibly not performing is quite another thing.
120 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS AFTER THOREAU SUSAN STEWART The Weaver Street mutt, locked behind the chain-link, so lonely in the dark and Thenwhimpering.arpeggiosof fury and surprise as the wire cart limps across the pebbledash side-walk, a-thump, a-thump, a-thump, near, nearer, far, far, farther, turning, turnsturns, the corner-- gone: three barks, two barks, a growl two barks, a yawn, a bark, andalone,aheartedhalf-yawn,yawn,whimpering.
121 SUSAN STEWART RAIN ON THE BARN ROOF SUSAN STEWART distant bursts of fivethenbeatssolo gulps, then call response, impossibletotell distant bursts of five beats which side or edge is next—arbitrary rhythm, planned obsolescence,distantbursts the hot dust washed down the cobwebbed windowdistant from the far woods, a woodpecker’secho…
Why should anyone care about this relative cluelessness? Tere are at least a million other things more worthy of our worry right now. Yet these are magazines that circulate in many middle-class homes across this fair land where cultural attitudes are formed and confrmed, where potential practitioners and possible supporters reside. (I was a teenager in one such desert, yet somehow critics like Harold Rosenberg and Susan Sontag came to me in this way.)
Why are otherwise sophisticated reviews so often philistine when it comes to contemporary art? About the best one can expect from publications like Te New York Review of Books and Te New Yorker is a bellelettristic turn by a nov elist, a poet, or a painter, most of whom are indiferent or hostile to recent advances in artistic practice. Te problem is, as they say, overdetermined. Despite decades of interdisciplinary work, it is still assumed that one is either an art type or a literary type, and the clichés of the illiterate artist and the nonvisual writer linger on too. Tis protects an outdated amateurism about art that would never be tolerated in other felds of culture, a fond stupidity that is as strong on the left as it is on the right. Many critics on both sides hold to a prelapsarian notion of art making and viewing as a playground for the expressive self. Tey suck in “the absurdities of individualism in pure form,” as T. J. Clark once put it, like “a last gasp of oxygen as the plane goes down.”
Although liberal commentators often celebrate the politics of the 1960s (at least in the abstract), they resent the transformations that occurred in art at the time, such as the openings to conceptual practice, performance, critical theory, sexual diference, and political engagement. Te turn to concept and critique in particular is routinely dis missed as anti-artistic and academic. (A good example of this fatuous fare is a recent piece in Te New York Review of Books, a Trillingesque denunciation of critical theory as so much “technicality” by the Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia.) Of course, the art world is hardly blameless when it comes to the disdain visited on contemporary art, for it provides a steady stream of lurid stories about auctions, celebrities, and scandals that drown out other accounts in the mainstream media. But why do many otherwise smart publications often follow suit?
Can’t those readers be better done by?
HAL FOSTER
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Certainly there are exceptions to the rule that literary types are indiferent to art. In the oldish range there is Don DeLillo, whose Te Body Artist is brilliant on performance, and Colm Tóibín, Siri Hustvedt, and others write won derfully about art too. More impressive still is the critical intimacy with contemporary practice shown by youngish authors like Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, Rivka Galchen, Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, Katie Kitamura, and Joshua Cohen (to name only several). Tis interest varies in origin, aim, and intensity, of course, but it might have to do with a partial convergence in recent art and fction on questions of world-making, historical reimagining, and aut ofctional performance. And then there are the commitments I mentioned above, ones variously embraced by these authors but usually ignored or bemoaned in publications like Te New York Review of Books and Te New Yorker
PIQUE
CARLOS ALMARAZ, UNTITLED , 1969, INK ON PAPER, 11.5 X 8.5 INCHES COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF CARLOS ALMARAZ AND CRAIG KRULL GALLERY, SANTA MONICA, CA
124 COLLABORATION
IN THE DARK KARL WHITTINGTON
A fre alarm went of in the dark room. I was in a hotel room in San Francisco, and I had just taken of the last of my clothes; Robert was photographing me, shining fashlights across my body, painting on me with light over a long expo sure. Te alarm wasn’t well timed. I was posing for Robert for the frst time, having fnally gotten up my nerve. We had started of with portrait shots to make me comfortable, but the plan for the shoot was clearly to photograph me nude. We waited for a minute for the alarm to stop, and it didn’t; we laughed it of, I got dressed, and we went down to the lobby. When it fnally stopped, we went back upstairs. Somehow the break had actually done me good, and I disrobed again, feeling far less self-conscious, even eager. I was 26, a grad student in art history, and it was my frst time really being part of an artist’s process. I felt totally alive, inhabiting my body in a way I hadn’t before, aware that I was being looked at by an artist whose work fascinated me, as well as by a man that made me nervous and excited. I didn’t know quite what I’d gotten myself into, and was lost in the moment. As an art historian, I’ve encountered plenty of writing on the interpersonal or erotic aspects of collaboration between artists. Whether in the context of married couples (Kahlo/Rivera, Pollock/Krasner, O’Keefe/Stieglitz, Currin/Fein stein) or torrid afairs (Man Ray/Miller, Carrington/Ernst, Michelangelo/Cavalieri) the erotics of collaboration have become an accepted, if still delicate, part of studying the production of meaning in these artists’ works. Sometimes the artists themselves lead the way in the interpretation, talking directly about their personal life, while other times they remain reticent, leaving it to art historians and critics to speculate about how it informs their process. What is missing within all of this, however, is an acknowledgment of the erotic interest of the scholar-critic who writes about it all, or even, dare we suggest it, participates directly in the exchange. In academia, personal identities are recognized grounds, though largely undiscussed, for why one might study particular works (why feminist scholars often study women artists, or gay scholars study homoerotic art), but there is rarely any further discussion of this interest beyond basic identity categories. Would we ask a scholar of medieval or Renaissance art with a research focus on images of violent martyrdom if she is into S&M? Te question seems silly when put so directly. Yet the unexpressed motivations for what people write and study about have always fascinated me. Tis essay is part of my own attempt to come to grips with a very personal collaboration of my own, with the contempo rary artist Robert Flynt, in the matrix of my personal, professional, and intellectual lives. It is part memoir, part refection on making the transition from subject to object, critic to model, and part rumination on why we keep the personal lives of scholars and critics so frmly out of view. Te lives of artists, actors, and musicians — the most visible producers of culture — are mined for personal information, by both the public and by academics, yet the personal identities and interests of cultural critics and scholars are kept hidden, in the interest of maintaining a (perhaps necessary) fction of distance and objectivity (and, of course, because critics and academics are not celebrities — no one particularly cares, perhaps, about our personal lives). It’s not that I think this objectivity isn’t useful, and we obviously can’t completely leave
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
ROBERT FLYNT, UNTITLED (DOUBLE THROATS) , 2009,
125 KARL WHITTINGTON it behind. But it’s become increasingly apparent that in my own scholarly practice, the question of real attraction to cer tain artworks, artists, and subjects constitutes a vital part of my engagement with what I do and how I write and teach. I met Robert in Rome in May 2007. I was 24, a grad student working for a month in Rome on my dissertation research on medieval manuscripts in the Vatican Library; Robert was around 50, a visitor at the American Academy, where he was working on a series of photographs called Memorials, which featured found family photographs (particularly 19th-century ones inserted into gravestones) juxtaposed against or over male fgure studies and faces that he had pho tographed. We met over dinner at the American Academy, where I had come to see another acquaintance. Tere was instant electricity between us; I could tell that he was wryly amused by me — I like to think that something about my naïveté, enthusiasm, and nervousness was charming in a way that he liked. For my part, he was everything that fasci nated me — someone who made art while I only studied it, who was part of a community of gay creative New Yorkers (easy to fetishize from the outside), and who had a cultural capital that I didn’t think I could or would ever possess but aspired to fervently. We also had similar interests — in portraits and memorials, in maps and diagrams, and above all in the depiction of the male body in Western art, in all its strangeness and contradiction. But did these shared interests really even matter? Or were they just a pretext for a chemistry that was obviously present? We spent a long evening talking (firting?) and a few nights later he invited me to his apartment on the Janiculum Hill where the conversation continued. Tat night he asked me if I’d ever be interested in posing nude for his photographs. It’s only now that I can really understand all of the intertwined reasons why I said no — why I wasn’t ready yet for that kind of collaboration. Certainly, I wasn’t ready personally — I was navigating the early years of a relationship with my now-husband, and I assumed that there could be no collaboration of this kind without sex (this was through no demand or insinuation of Robert’s — it was just my own assumption). I didn’t trust myself to behave if I took of my clothes to be photographed. But I also wasn’t ready professionally. As a graduate student, everything I was doing was grounded in
126 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS the idea of becoming a “scholar”; not only did I have no real awareness of what it would entail to be part of his art, but on some level I didn’t think it was appropriate for a scholar to take that role — that even if Robert and I talked about his work, and even if one day I wanted to write about it as an academic, I couldn’t be a part of making it. But even as I said no to being his model, and we just spend a few hours talking, I left his apartment buzzing with energy — intellectual, sexual, who knows — as I walked back down the hill at midnight to my hotel room near the Vatican. Clearly he had touched a nerve, both through who he was, and through the possibility of this intimate collaborative space. I think I was listening to my iPod and singing along out loud as I walked down the empty streets, though I can’t remember anymore what I was listening to. For my younger self, and even in some ways now, the kind of relationship that I fantasized about having with Robert seemed like a relic of a past time. Each individual facet of any potential relationship was recognizable to me — an academic mentorship between an older and younger man, a sexual or romantic relationship of the same nature, or the straightforward use of a younger model by an established artist. It was the possible combination of them that felt an tiquated — it felt like the erotic pedagogy of Classical Greece, where erotic acts or feelings were a legitimate part of a relationship that was also about the transfer of knowledge and experience. At 24, I was still caught somewhere between being a prude and a libertine, and the erotic friendship or mentorship that I thought was on ofer would have collapsed these poles together and, I think, overwhelmed me. It also seemed against my politics — this formation of intimate male space seemed to exclude women, and in the past had always had a tone of uncomfortable class-based exclusiveness. One famous example is the story of a young French nobleman named Jacques d’Aldelswärd Fersen, who in the frst years of the 20th century escaped from the moral censure of Paris to a new villa at Capri, which he flled with erotic classical sculptures and young male friends/lovers, creating an all-male space of erotic and artistic exchange (one of the images here shows Jacques’s boyfriend Nino Cesarini photographed recreating scenes from classical myth). I didn’t want (or did I?) to reinvent myself, even in some small way, as a part of that history. All Robert had asked me to do was pose for a photograph, but in the request I imagined some whole mysterious homosocial world that I wasn’t a part of. Such behavior, I thought, was incompatible with the life of a contemporary gay academic — even just a taste of it. My erotic self had to be kept separate. After Rome, the next time I saw Robert was in 2009, when he came to California for work and visited us. Somehow a lot had changed in those two years, and I was ready to move forward. My partner met Robert and came to adore him; he was fne with my posing for him, and so I did. One night when he was in town from New York, I went from my apartment in Oakland to his tiny hotel room near Union Square in San Francisco. We had dinner at a sushi place around the corner, but I can’t remember a single thing we said at dinner, besides him making me try sea urchin, which I hated. Ten we went back to his hotel room. Robert usually photographs in the dark; he uses long exposures and creates patterns and strings of light with fashlights and laser pointers. Essentially, he paints on your body with light over the long exposure, only occasionally letting the light fall on himself as he moves catlike around your posed body. Te resulting images are eerie, for lack of a better term, and really acquire their meaning for him when juxtaposed or superimposed with other images. Te small room was crowded with furniture, and I had no idea what to do or how to act. I signed model release forms (too eagerly?) and we cleared a space around the foot of the bed, near the door. Robert turned of the lights and we began. Te fre alarm intervened but eventually everything came together. How to describe the thrill of being in front of Robert’s camera? Being an artist’s model was such a simple thing, and something that so many others before me have experienced, but I was unprepared for how changed I felt by it — how validated on so many levels. I imagined that I was fnally someone’s muse, even for a couple of hours — fnally involved in mysteries of creation that I had so long felt excluded from, having little talent as an artist myself despite small eforts in that direction. Not only had I felt excluded from these creation mysteries in a practical sense, but in my academic training in the social history of art, I had almost come not to believe in them at all — for me, art had become the product
It felt so good to be looked at in a way that could feel simultaneously safe and exciting — removed from an expectation of sexual action, but far from neutral or neutered. I had long had little or no sense of my own physical desirability, if indeed I possessed any, but Robert’s interest in my body (as an artist or a man — I didn’t care) felt overwhelming and new. It’s not that my previous sexual experiences hadn’t deeply infuenced my sense of self; what was new was the sense that Robert had also accessed the sexuality of my academic or intellectual self (for lack of a better phrase) in a way that others hadn’t or couldn’t. I’m sure this was largely one-sided; he has photographed hundreds of models, and become friends with many of them. Maybe he was intrigued by photographing someone who thought about art in ways that made sense to him, and with whom he shared so many interests, but it seems unlikely that the experience had meant to him something analogous to what it had meant to me. Perhaps it was the delight that he could see me taking in it that kept him interested; the merest glance at his other photographs reveals the far more perfect bodies and faces that had been available to his camera. He tells me that almost every model he shoots makes that same comment, but that didn’t make it any less true for me — I felt like there was something special about me, some reason he wanted to photograph me, since I didn’t look like I thought a model should. Regardless, my intellectual and personal desires seemed inter twined in a way they never had before. How often has an art historian become part of an artist’s practice? It’s a question that I don’t know how to answer. Te most famous examples that I can think of seem, on the surface, much less interpersonally complicated. Te art historian Meyer Schapiro advised his student Robert Motherwell to ditch art history for painting, and mentored him for years (along with other artists including Willem de Kooning). Benjamin Buchloh has had long-running professional friend ships with the artists Gerhard Richter and Michael Asher (and was married to the artist Louise Lawler); he has written about them, interviewed them for academic and popular articles, and even sat with Richter for a portrait. Art historians and critics have often been connected romantically with artists, such as Clement Greenberg’s fve-year relationship with Helen Frankenthaler. And certainly many art critics, museum curators, and gallery owners have become friends and champions of contemporary artists they admire; yet how often have the interpersonal aspects of these relationships been examined? Do they need to be? Robert and I have long joked about me writing about him; he says confdently that I’ll write his monograph one day, and perhaps I will. I fnd his work endlessly fascinating, though at this point it feels impossible for me to know what I’d think of it if I hadn’t experienced frsthand how it is created.
127 of a time and place, of structures of power and gender and politics — not the intimate workings of an artist and model.
I don’t know exactly how, but I am sure that posing for Robert’s photographs has afected both what I write about in my academic work, and the arguments that work puts forth. For one thing, it forces me to see my premodern images
KARL WHITTINGTON
Robert’s techniques produce bodies both familiar and estranged, intimate and distanced. Te introduction of uncertain ty and accident that emerges through his process — through taking photographs in the dark or underwater — reveals something of the fragility of the body, but when seen in multiples, his work reasserts the body’s vital presence and sexual potency within all the networks of meaning and matter that we’ve created around it, and which threaten to fragment it at every turn. Te photographs connect in so many ways with the objects that I study in my own work: medieval images where bodies and worlds are overlapped, or images where the interior medical spaces of the body are abstracted into diagrams. Tey speak to linkages across time between people who were interested in how the viewed and inhabited body becomes part of the mental organization of knowledge — the body as an unstable but constant reference point for everything we think, do and believe.
Robert’s photographs are about the intersection of vision, desire, and knowledge. His images don’t make arguments about the relationship of the body to broader networks and environments — they simply pose questions, invite specula tion, and place things in dialogue. He printed a photograph he took of me and my partner in 2012 on a vintage map of Ohio, and the resulting image was surprisingly uncomfortable for me to see. We had recently moved to Ohio for my frst teaching job, and it was strange to see my body inscribed on this place that didn’t yet feel like home. In the resulting im age Ohio’s counties and highways stretched across my limbs, connecting them with our own bodies’ movement — again, not arguing a connection, but asking if one might exist. Nearly all of his recent works are photographic monoprints like this: photos printed on sheets of paper from old books on medicine, anatomy, history, or design.
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: ROBERT FLYNT, UNTITLED (CIRCLES) , 2016; ROBERT FLYNT, UNTITLED (CRANIAL LABYRINTH), 2016 (ORIGINALS IN COLOR)
128 as part of a larger whole — to remove them from their immediate historical contexts where I can get bogged down in details. But the change in my work as a result of posing for Robert goes beyond just the way I write about images; it’s changed what subjects I choose and especially how I teach students about them. Over time I’ve become less guarded, less cautious in explaining things to my students about my own life and beliefs. Academic objectivity is useful of course, but it can also be something teachers hide behind — a way to avoid sharing ourselves with students in a way that can be vulnerable, but which students seem hungry for. I’m less afraid now to teach the paintings or photographs that turn me on; even if I don’t talk about them in precisely those terms, I’m less afraid that students might make those connections themselves. It’s not that I’m “out” to more of my students now — I’ve always made a conscious choice to be out in the classroom. Rather, it’s that I’m not hiding anymore the fact that being gay isn’t just about one’s identity, but also about desire — something that is impossible to exclude when talking about our responses to visual images. When talking about art and beauty, desire is nearly always in play. Somehow I’ve become more comfortable with this collapse of public and private, with the idea of queer people creating spaces apart, and this feeling only increases with every passing year. In Columbus, Ohio, I’m in the midst of a thriving cultural and academic center, but I have also seen frsthand what happens to a gay community, good and bad, when it takes assimilation rather than diference as its goal. In a place where the pride parade consists of well-meaning church groups and corporate pandering, an ever-greater part of me longs for the spaces apart or outside, in which I can exist diferently, simultaneously inhabiting all parts of myself, even if this space is only (re)created within the context of a sin gle friendship or collaboration. My politics tell me that the conscious integration into the mainstream that is so evident in Columbus is exactly what has lead to such huge leaps forward for gay rights; my gut tells me that something else is being lost, and that my relationship with Robert is part of fnding my way back to it. LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Over time, and especially from talking to Robert about how he envisions the way he works with me and his other sub jects, it feels much less like there are two distinct positions in the relationship and much more like each session, even each photograph, is a kind of performance. For one, Robert is often on both sides of the camera. At times, in the dark, I forget where the camera is, as I watch Robert moving around me or feel him brush against me, following his fashlights to try to see where he is but also trying to stay still. Fantasy enters the picture, but even while he’s photographing, the fantasy is as much about imagining looking at the pictures of myself later, wondering how they will turn out and how he will change them as they become artworks, as it is about my bodily experience in the moment, and where the next click might take us. Whatever the fantasy, it feels fantastic and strange to have this experience where I am fully involved, but can give up control over the fnal work; where I can leave the scholar or writer in me behind and let someone else make the meaning for me. Have any of these photography sessions ever crossed a particular line — have Robert and I actually had sex? I’ve been avoiding the question. It used to infuriate me when scholars very explicitly dodged this question about the premodern artists they studied, reminding us that we don’t know that these clearly queer people actually shared physical intimacy.
I posed for Robert again in 2012, 2015, and 2016, each time with my partner. In 2012, after a long summer dinner in the backyard, we moved aside our dining-room table, pulled the curtains, and photographed in the dark. It was a thrill to watch my partner experience something similar to what I had felt years before, though from talking to him later the experience meant entirely diferent things to him than it had to me. During another visit in 2015 we photographed in the third-foor attic of our new house, posing together after our infant daughter had gone to sleep downstairs, the hum of the baby monitor overlapping with the clicks of Robert’s new camera.
“Of course they did,” I always thought; I didn’t care whether we had historical evidence for it or not — it seemed ob vious. Yet now I don’t want to answer the question myself; it doesn’t seem to matter. I will say, though, that for Robert and many of his models, making this art together acts as a kind of surrogate or substitute for sexual relationships that they might desire. It’s just people, in the dark, in a room; the photographs themselves are the only details that come out of it, and even though part of me wants to tell everything about those experiences, I think it would ruin them to talk about exactly what goes on. Part of the images’ magic as fnal works is their incompleteness as documentation of the Sometimesperformance.in my life now, and especially when I think about this collaboration with Robert, I have the sense that I’ve fgured everything out — that I’ve fnally realized now that I can have all of these things rather than just some of them; that I can play all the roles I’ve been describing — writer, teacher, father, husband, model, friend — without it feeling like I’m an imposter in each as I switch between them. So much about being an academic is about this imposter syn drome; when everything you produce is judged as a measure of your intelligence or creativity, insecurity is always just around the corner. Relinquishing control over the fnal product with Robert lets me out of this cycle. What’s missing, though, is any acknowledgment, outside of our relationship, that it is happening at all — if it’s all a performance, as Robert says, then for whom? When I’ve tried to explain it to a few friends, I usually fail to do so in a way that explains what I’ve written about here — how deep the sense of fulfllment is that I get from this seemingly simple situation, and how many diferent parts of me it touches. I struggle with whether I want to keep it private, just for us, or whether knowing that others have seen the photographs and heard about their creation is precisely the fnal step I need to fully feel and embody the rhyme between what I perceive as these diferent selves. Te question bubbled up again when I tried to choose photographs to include in this essay. Te safe part of me wanted nothing too daring; after all, what if my students see this? Another part wanted to include the most explicit ones. I know I want people to see the photographs, but how much of my body do I want them to fnd? Some amount, I don’t know; here they are.
Being in front of Robert’s camera feels diferent now that I am more invested in the collaboration. When I frst posed for him in 2009, I was caught up in what I thought it meant to “model” for someone, wondering if I was doing it right.
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KATIE PETERSON Turning in the middle seat of the Country wrappedSquire in one blanket and clutching tryinganother,to find some way to lie down and look out the window at the same hometime, sick from school. A year later, I’d see the smoke horizon pushing against the ceiling of my first airplane, my mother’s lips parted in pleasure. In the Advent part of the liturgical calendar, Christ isn’t born yet, and everyone in the roads takes leave to return to the homes of their fathers. In the pageant, I didn’t get the role I wanted, innkeeper, because the month before I’d been the sun. At the center of the solar system, no one spoke up but me, and my mother cut pieces of orange and yellow poster board into rays for a circle the size of the table. I don’t know if I was carried to the car. I thought, the snake might be at school. In the black space I could make by closing my eyes and wanting, I saw him taken out of his cage and placed
MUSIC, 1980
131 on the taped circumference. I knew that would never happen. From the back of the seat I wailed where are we going? You go through the richest places to get to the poorest, she said, her sunglasses on top of her head, a quilted jacket with a print of birds with flowers in their mouths, red and green for the holiday against black piped in pink trim. Sometimes healing is a kind of laundry, a reminder that the earlier state was better but not good. The radio andsomethingIThebutgaveitandforatClassNextYesterdaybecauseI’mbutcalledHeWhoLennonshot,JohnmysignYesterday.playedAtastopIheardmothercrying.Lennonhasbeenshesaid,Johnisdead.washeIasked.madearecordDoubleFantasythat’snotwhycryingI’mcryingoftheBeatles.wasdone.cameWorkingHero.Welookedthestopsignaverylongtimedroveon.Music,wasnotsadnessbirthtoyou,astonishment.personwhosebodylivedinsidelovedbeforemedrovearoundsinging. KATIE PETERSON
RACHEL ROSKE, MAGNETIC ISLAND, 2012, GRAPHITE ON UNPRIMED CANVAS, 16 X 20 INCHES.
ANA IWATAKI
To someone who knows very little of translation, it may seem comparable to the typing done by these nameless wives — fnd the equivalent of the author’s meaning, type it on a page. Te reality of it is messier, less precise. An instance of being able to say this means only this is a rare gift. Instead, as with most relationships between two separate beings, the
— Lauren Elkin on Susan Sontag's As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 I often fnd myself writing in bed. Turns of phrase later adapted for publication or art exhibits were usually frst written there. Tey appear in journal entries, in notes jotted down when trying to record some encounter with a beloved or desired being. Te things that would later come to occupy me intellectually would come in fashes, moments of vulner ability brought on by my attempts at transcendence.
“…she was constantly urging herself from interpretation to erotics, from discourse to intercourse, from thinking to feeling.”
TRANSLATOR, CURATOR, SELFISH LOVER; LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES
— Alain Badiou, introduction to Byung-Chul Han’s Te Agony of Eros
Te minimum condition for true love is possessing sufcient courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.
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“Every beautiful work, or even every impressive work, functions as a desired work, albeit one that’s incomplete and as it were lost because I didn’t write it myself; in order to recover that work, I have to rewrite it; to write is to want to rewrite: I want to actively add myself to something that’s beautiful, but that I lack, that I require.”
Te seductiveness of the other is then tied to what I want for myself, a desire to possess, a search for satisfaction. Tis erotic impulse becomes loving when space is given over to what might become a cure, or at least a salve.
— Roland Barthes, Te Preparation of Te Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980) Barthes writes about the problem of the lampshade — the darkest space is the one right next to the light source. Speaking from the center of something is the most difcult position — there is too much dazzlement. I’m never able to conjure up a clear picture of a new crush’s face. Te lover needs the lover’s discourse. I duck out from under my own lampshade to seek light sources elsewhere — to begin a collection of forms and points of view that, when taken together, might reveal something of myself.
Earlier this year, there was some attention given to wives being thanked by their husband-writers for typing notes or manuscripts, circulating via the hashtag #TanksForTyping. Tey were always referred to simply as “my wife,” in a single line of acknowledgment in their male partners’ oeuvres.
I feel myself fghting against it at times, trying to protect my own ego and my own energies from the demands of others. From care to self-care. I don’t know how to accurately apply notions like “emotional labor” or “working hours” to my own life. Sometimes I ask myself: What parts of these interactions are to be blamed on my “métier” or biology or the
How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces is the collection of Barthes’s lecture notes on the concept of the idiorrhthymic, a productive form of coexistence, in which the individual rhythms of each partner are brought together in harmony. He describes it as solitude with regular interruptions, the utopia of a socialism of distance. It is also described as a fantasy life that knows only positives, in which one can simultaneously want to live alone and Ittogether.oftenfeels though that curating has become an erotic act quite devoid of love. Tere is too little willingness to ne gate oneself, the aggression too exaggerated. Tat harmonious aspect doesn’t seem to be there anymore, and is instead replaced by a cacophony of group exhibitions curated on the internet. Tis fantasy has everyone wanting to appear intimate with everyone else. Tere’s no real afection, only the veneer of amicability to cover up alienation. Everyone is in it for his or her own climax. Te element of care is missing, that ancient notion at the root of “curate.”
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act of translation is a complicated back and forth, with egos and viewpoints bobbing to the surface and retreating back under. Movements of erotic undertone come to mind: advance and recede, submit and dominate. Te translator and the text are past the moment of seduction and in search of the climactic. Passivity and aggression must be accepted on both sides. Te text is ingested to become not just read but understood. Tis interiorization of another may begin with the erotic act but inevitably, surreptitiously, ends as a loving one. Some disappearance, or putting aside, of the ego occurs — at least enough for the translated text to appear written —conceived in the language of its current embodiment. How do you fnd the right word to describe a painting you’ve never seen? Or to speak positively of a thing you hate?
Te writers I translate are almost always strangers with whom I have little to no contact. Any feedback will be com municated through a third party: an editor, a gallery. I’ll have some familiarity with their writing on occasion, but I mostly go in cold, as if on a blind date. Intimacy is achieved purely through the text — style, thesis, and worldview becoming apparent in degrees, line by line. I’ll search for tone and meaning as closely as I might when texting with the aforementioned date. Tis frst moment of becoming acquainted with the text and the author behind it is when I’ll allow myself the most vulnerability. I’ll let the text pass through me in the most direct way possible to reappear in an English that’s not yet mine. Only during the second time around will the text begin to sound like me, words and phrases are nudged into place, leading the conversation to where I want it to go. A third and fnal writing will bring the two together, correcting what might have overshot, letting the text settle into a sweet spot. Tis is coupling — with the one and the other coming together to become a new singular body. Te aspiration for the translated text is for the author and the translator to each feel as if the words on the pages are the ones they meant to say. Te moment of ecstasy, with the translator leaving no more trace than a strand of hair or scent on a pillow. A few months ago, I translated a text by a writer who was completely unknown to me about a small, strange town I was very familiar with. He was taken by many of the small, local peculiarities that had also charmed me. A few weeks later we met by chance and a few beats after hearing his name, I realized who he was. Suddenly, a ritualized, forgetta ble interaction at an art opening became warmed by the intimacy of our shared experience. He brought with him my memories of the desert we had both visited and of trying to fnd the right words to describe its light and buildings and the faces of locals. Te erotic and the loving are maybe easier to identify, at least in obvious ways, in the act of curating. Te curators of this year’s Venice Biennale and Documenta were each criticized for the inclusion of their respective partners in these high-profle exhibitions. It is difcult for me to feel surprised — or really, any strong emotion at all about this. Doesn’t this seem inevitable? At Shanaynay, a project space I co-directed for a time, a funny pattern revealed itself: each member, before they left the space, would organize a show that included his or her partner. Tese exhibitions were not always each person’s last, or planned with that timing, but were the most personal symptoms of a current obsession or preoccupation. Because of this, the inclusion of romantic partners never felt forced and was rarely questioned.
Although there are instances of being struck on frst sight by either love or lust — translation, curating, and intimacy are ultimately matters of choice. A selection is made — the general, the unknown, the foreign, the broad becomes narrowed down to the specifc. Tis text is selected to be made accessible for a new audience. Tese words will communicate this thought. Tis work by this artist deserves to be shown at this time. Tis person is the one I want. I recognize that the sheer volume of things to be seen and read and heard has backed me into a rather sentimental corner. I once cried on the frst viewing of work made by a new lover. It felt like the kind of art I would have made if I were capable. It tricked me into believing something about us, but it was mostly about me. Maybe I’m a selfsh lover in that I can only give to whom I want to give. Faced with the daunting size of the encyclope dic act, I choose the loving one, the desirous one. If it is impossible to write the self, I take the oblique angle in.
ANA IWATAKI
135 patriarchy? I’ve gone through moments of trying to imagine myself simply as a vessel or a caretaker but that doesn’t last long. My fantasy still includes moments of solitude. Te duo, the couple, the pair — two is the smallest unit of collaboration and the frst step outside of solitude. What are the things that allow another’s ideas and working methods to intrude on one’s own, or to go further, become repre sentative of one’s own? What kind of negotiations must be made? What kind of dance allows one to become two? It’s probably a dance that is never mastered; it could be done clumsily but exuberantly in moments of intoxication, or stify in more careful ones. At its best it would feel efortless. I like to think I’ve been given glimpses of this kind of ease. At the moment, there is only one person I refer to as my “partner” in any context and we don’t live in the same country but speak every day. She and I work together, and our conversations move seamlessly from our lives, to gossip, to art, from my native tongue to hers. Tere are moments when I am annoyed that she has an idea that is too close to one of mine. We’ve tied ourselves to each other in a way that even our individual endeavors become refections on each other. I’ve adopted certain nuances of her speech and vice versa; when I read I am sometimes uncertain if ideas or phrases stay with me because they appeal to me or to her.
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THE BALLAD OF JESUS ORTIZ
DANA GIOIA Jake’s family were vaqueros. They worked the cattle drives Down from Montana to market. They did what it took to survive. Jake’s real name was Jesus, Which the Anglos found hard to take, So after a couple of days, The cowboys called him Jake. When Jake was twelve, his father Brought him along to ride. “Don’t waste your youth in the pueblo. Earn by your father’s side.”
Three thousand head of cattle Grazing the prairie grass, Three thousand head of cattle Pushed through each mountain pass.
The days were hot and toilsome, But all of the crew got fed. It wasn’t hard to sleep on the ground When you’ve never had a bed.
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Three thousand head of cattle Fording the muddy streams, And then three thousand phantoms Bellowing in your dreams. At night when the coyotes called, Jake would sometimes weep Recalling how his mother Sang her children to sleep. But when he rose in the morning, The desert air was sweet. No sitting in a mission school With bare and dusty feet. And when the drive was over, He got his pay—and then He came back to the pueblo Where he was one of the men. Ten years on the open range He led the vaquero’s life, Far from his home in Sonora, No children and no wife. Then Jake headed north to Wyoming To find his winter keep Among the Basques and Anglos Who raised and slaughtered sheep. He came to cold Lost Cabin Where the Rattlesnake Mountains rise Over the empty foothills, Under the rainless skies.
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The herders lived in dugouts Or shacks of pine and tar. The town had seven buildings. The biggest was the bar. John Okie owned the town, The Sheep King of Wyoming. He owned the herds. He owned the land And every wild thing roaming. He hired Jake for his tavern. He let him sleep in the kitchen. Mexicans worked hard. And didn’t waste time bitching. Tending bar was easier Than tending cattle drives. Jake poured the drinks while the men Complained about their lives. Jake never asked them questions. He knew what he needed to know-Men working in Lost Cabin, Had nowhere else to go. Jake married a sheepherder’s daughter, Half Indian, half white. They had two sons, and finally Things in his life were right. He told his boys his adventures As a cowboy riding the plain. “Papa,” they cried, “will you take us When you ride out again?” One night he had an argument With a herder named Bill Howard, A deserter from the Border War, A drunkard, and a coward. “Bring over that bottle of whisky! If you don’t grab it, I will.” “Okie said to cut you off Until you paid your bill.”
139 DANA GIOIA Bill Howard slammed his fist down, “Is this some goddamn joke, A piss-poor Mexican peon Telling me I’m broke?” A little after midnight Bill came back through the door. Three times he shot his rifle, And Jake fell to the floor. Then Bill beheld his triumph As the smoke cleared from the air-A mirror blown into splinters, And blood splattered everywhere. A sudden brutal outburst No motive could explain: One poor man killing another Without glory, without gain. The tales of Western heroes Show duels in the noonday sun, But darkness and deception Is how most killing is done. Father Keller came from Lander To lay Jake in the ground. A posse searched the mountains Until Bill Howard was found. There were two more graves in Wyoming When the clover bloomed in spring. Two strangers drifted into town And filled the openings. And two tall boys departed For the cattle drives that May. With hardly a word to their mother Who watched them ride away.
Carlos Almaraz was born in Mexico City, but spent most of his life in Los Angeles. Early in his career, he was part of the Chicano arts collective, “Los Four” which had groundbreaking exhibitions at UCI in 1973 and LACMA in 1974. He worked with Cesar Chavez making murals and banners, but in the later 70s decided to focus on his personal art career, premiering most of his iconic work of the 80s at Jan Turner Gallery. Almaraz’s art contains myth, magic, car crashes, dreams of Echo Park, anthropomorphic rabbits, dogs, and fery, vibrant energy. He died of AIDSrelated causes in 1989. His work is the subject of a major PST:LA/LA exhibition at LACMA curated by Howard Fox entitled, Carlos Almaraz: Playing with Fire Te Estate of Carlos Almaraz is represented by Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica. Jess Arndt received her MFA from Bard College and was a 2013 Graywolf Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at New York Foundation for the Arts. Her action text “Collective Body Possum” performed with Te Knife’s Shaking the Habitual world tour and her writing has recently appeared in Fence, BOMB, Aufgabe, Parkett, and NightPapers
Chiara Barzini is an Italian screen and fction writer. She has lived and studied in the United States where she collaborated with Italian Vanity Fair, GQ, XL Repubblica, Rolling Stone Italy, Flair, and Marie Claire while publishing essays in American magazines such as the Village Voice, Harper’s, Vogue, Interview Magazine, Vice, and Rolling Stone. She is the author of the story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press, 2012) and Tings Tat Happened Before Te Earthquake a novel about Los Angeles in the early 90's, which was published in August 2017 by Doubleday.
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Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center. Malachi Black the author of the poetry collection Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a fnalist for the Poetry Society of America’s (PSA) Norma Farber
CONTRIBUTORS
. Arndt is a co-founder of New Herring Press and her debut collection of short stories, Large Animals, came out from Catapult Press in spring, 2017.
Lex Brown is an artist, writer, and performer. She received her M.F.A. in Sculpture from Yale University School of Art, where she was the recipient of the Susan B. Whedon Award in Sculpture. Her work plays with the scale of personal and emotional experience in relation to large scale systems of social and economic organization. Brown graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2012 with a Bachelor’s degree in Art and Archaeology. She attended Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture that same year. In 2013, she was the Coordinator and Lead Teacher at Tomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, produced by Dia Art Foundation in the Bronx, NY, and was a 2016 fellow at the Sommerakademie in Bern, Switzerland. She has also performed and exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, REDCAT Teater and Te Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the New Museum and International Center of Photography in New York. Her frst work in fction, My Wet Hot Drone Summer, a sci-f erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, is available from Badlands Unlimited.
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Barbara Browning teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She writes cultural criticism in the forms of fction, nonfction, and, most often, something in between. Her most recent novel is Te Gift (or, Techniques of the Body)
First Book Award and selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series. Black’s poems appear widely in journals and anthologies and have been recognized by a number of fellowships and awards. He is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego. Zandie Brockett is a curator, researcher, and writer based between Beijing and Los Angeles. She founded the cultural platform, Bactagon Projects, serves as the editorin-chief of its bilingual, literary journal, BaJia, and was the associate curator of the biennale, the Shanghai Project. Her research seeks to understand the infuence of social practice art on societies that are increasingly transformed by technology and urban life.
141 in the forms of fiction, nonfiction, and, most often, something in between. Her most recent novel is The Gift (or, Techniques of the Body) Michael Carter (b. 1975, Cambridge, Massachusetts) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work is an investigation into universals and the cultural history of science, philosophy, and religion. Recent exhibitions include JOAN (Los Angeles, CA), Nicodim Gallery (LA, CA and Bucharest, Romania), Laband Gallery at the Loyola Marymount University, Machine Project (LA, CA), Steve Turner (LA, CA), and Roberts & Tilton (LA, CA) Paul Chan lives in New York.
Robert Flynt is a visual artist based in New York. His work has appeared in galleries internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and L.A. County Museum. Hal Foster teaches and publishes in the areas of modernist and contemporary art, architecture, and theory. He is a member of the School of Architecture and an associate member of the Department of German; in addition, he co-directs the Program in Media & Modernity and sits on the executive committees of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities and the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foster was a founding editor of Zone Magazine and Books, and he writes regularly for October (which he co-edits), Artforum, and The London Review of Books. He is the recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism in College Art Association (2012) and the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing (2010), and he has been the Siemens Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. Gioia has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently 99 Poems: New & Selected. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. In 2014 he won the Aiken-Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in American poetry. Gioia’s work is included in many literary anthologies, like Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 100 Great Poets of the English Language, The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, and Literature for Life. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written three opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. In 2015, Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California.
Ashley Hunt uses image, object, word, performance and collaborative strategies to engage the sensing of our political environment, our bodies and possibilities within it. This has included a focus on the U.S. prison system, as it expresses the U.S.’ racial and economic histories, beginning with his 2001 feature documentary, Corrections, often engaged and programmed amidst the work of grassroots organizations. Ashley lives in Los Angeles, where he directs the Photography and Media Program at the California Institute of the Arts.
Lucy Ives is the author of the novel Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Lapham's Quarterly, and Vogue, among other publications. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at New York University's Center for Experimental Humanities and is editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins.
Lynell George is an award-winning L.A.-based journalist. She covers arts and culture and social issues with an emphasis on place and identity. Formerly a longtime staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, she is a columnist for KCET’s Artbound. Author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels, her pieces have also appeared both in the Smithsonian magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Black Clock, Vibe, Essence, Ms. She has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University, and was a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow (2013). Her new book After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, a collection of essays and photographs, will be published by Angel City Press, Spring 2018.
Emma Copley Eisenberg is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in West Philadelphia. She is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl, forthcoming from Hachette Books, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like Granta, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, The New Republic, Salon, Slate, ZZVZZYA, and others.
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Eleanor Stanford is the author of two books of poems, Bartram’s Garden and The Book of Sleep. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, and many others. She was a 2014/2016 Fulbright fellow to Brazil, where she researched and wrote about traditional midwifery. She lives in the Philadelphia area.
Karl Whittington teaches art history at The Ohio State University. He writes about European medieval art and architecture, the history of science, and gender and sexuality.
Kay Rosen’s paintings, drawings, editions, collages, installations, and videos have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in galleries, museums and institutions, nationally and internationally, for four decades, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Biennial 2000 and 1991 (as part of Group Material’s “AIDS Timeline”); The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein; Prospect 1, New Orleans; MASS MOCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (L.A. MoCA) and Otis College of Art and Design, which hosted her mid-career survey exhibition in 1998-1999, curated by Connie Butler and Terry R. Myers. Rosen is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, among other honors. Her work resides in collections in Europe and America. It has been featured in numerous books and magazines, including Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. Rosen taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 24 years. She divides her time between Gary, Indiana and New York City.
Matthew Shen Goodman is a writer and a senior editor at Triple Canopy
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Yxta Maya Murray is the author of The Conquest—winner of the Whiting Award—and The King's Gold, the second novel in her acclaimed Red Lion series. She is a professor at Loyola Law School and lives in Los Angeles.
los angeles review of books Ana Iwataki is a curator, writer, translator, and selfish lover living in Los Angeles.
Chris Kraus is the author of four novels and two books of art and cultural criticism. After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography is her most recent book. Katie Peterson is the author of three collections of poetry, This One Tree, Permission, and The Accounts. In 2016 she received a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her edition of the Brief Selected Poems of Robert Lowell, with an introductory essay reconsidering the poet’s work, was published by FS&G earlier this year. She teaches writers and other humans at UC Davis.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of over 10 books of poetry and criticism, most recently Orexia: Poems(Persea, 2017) and Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (UVA Press, 2016). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Spaar’s commentaries, reviews, and columns about poetry have appeared regularly or are forthcoming in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.
Susan Stewart is a poet and writer. Her book Cinder: New and Selected Poems was published by Graywolf Press in February 2017. Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass, 2015 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. His poems appear in the NER, Agni, Yale Review, ZYZZYVA, Narrative, Poetry, and elsewhere. He was born in Nova Scotia and now lives in San Francisco, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Dorothea Lasky is a poet and the author of five fulllength collections of poetry: the forthcoming Milk (Wave Books), as well as ROME (Liveright/W.W. Norton) and Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books. She has also written several chapbooks, including the Snakes (Tungsten Press, 2017) and Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2010). Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Boston Review, among other publications. She is also a co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013).
Rachel Roske holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute in of Chicago (1999) and an MFA from Yale University School of Art (2004). She completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Vermont Studio Center and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited at various venues nationally. She lives in L.A. and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Otis College of Art & Design.
The exhibition runs from September 16, 2017 through February 4, 2018. For more information visit artsblock.ucr.edu. Performance by Carmelita Tropicana Hybrid Alternos Saturday, January 27, 7pm Hybrid Alternos is a new interactive performance-lecture by New York based Carmelita Tropicana (b. 1951 Cuba), a queer feminist artist who uses fantasy and humor to explore issues pertaining to identity politics, gender and nature. The performance touches on issues of immigration, xenophobia, climate change, and endangered species. A panel discussion will follow the performance.
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Mundos Alternos includes work by artists early in their careers like Hector Hernandez, Jillian Mayer, and Clarissa Tossin who provide new ways of thinking about contemporary art in the Americas, and established artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gyula Kosice, and Rubén Ortiz Torres who use various media to imagine new realities and alternate worlds.
Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas is the first transnational project to consider the convergence of visual art, science fiction, and Latin American, Latino/a, and Chicano/a studies. Bringing together large-scale installation, photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, and video, the exhibition presents the work of over 30 contemporary artists who recast the future against a contemporary background of immigration reform, militarized borders, and mass deportations.
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