Category: writing

From The Richfield Reaper

Greg Knauss’s mention of the ancient web and an obituary spurred me to back up a little piece of my own hard drive that is the web. From Rootsweb/Ancestry.com’s republished obituaries from Piute County, UT, is by great uncle’s obituary, from the Nov. 9, 1944 issue of the Richfield Reaper:

St. Sgt. Lark Allen, 27, son of Mr. and Mrs. Chester Allen of Antimony, was reported killed in action on October 9, somewhere in Germany.
He had been wounded July 16 and released September 5 and sent back into active duty and had been overseas two years.
St. Sgt. Allen had taken part in the African invasion, the campaign in Sicily and in France. He entered the service July 7, 1941.
He has been awarded the bronze star and the purple heart was sent to his parents after he was wounded.
He was born in Circleville and attended the schools there. After graduating from the Circleville high school he attended the B.A.C. at Cedar City.
Surviving besides his parents of Antimony are the following brothers and sisters: Mrs. Dot Hall, Richfield; Miss Joye Allen, Logan; Champ Allen, Marysvale, Wayne Allen, Camp Pendelton, California and Calvert Allen, Richfield.
Memorial services will be held Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. in the Antimony ward chapel.
(Richfield Reaper, 9 November 1944)

My dad was born just a couple of months after his uncle was killed. His parents named him Lark.

Holden Caulfield, Curator

From the Observer profile of Massimiliano Gioni:

Growing up outside Milan in a town he likened to Newark, Mr. Gioni found himself drawn to art precisely because there were no adults talking to him about it. “It didn’t belong to the school or the teachers,” he said. “It was mine.”
When he was 14, he started reading the Futurists and the Dadaists–he can still recite by heart Tristan Tzara’s Manifesto of Mister Antipyrine–and listening to Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and Dinosaur Jr. He also started looking at the pictures in Artforum and Flash Art, and loving what he saw “because it was so strange.”

And from Stranger art critic Jen Graves’ review of “Parenthesis,” a new show at Western Bridge in Seattle:

But when I first read Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada manifesto in college, as a kid still angry over my parents’ messy divorce and the messy new relationships that followed, I was moved by Tzara’s childlike claim that “every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada.” If the family, like art, could not be a strong, safe nest, then it had to be abolished; it’s less painful to do away with families than to watch them fail. (Dada was always from the perspective of a disillusioned child.)

Either we’re in a neo-Dadaist moment right now, or Tzara’s Manifestos are the Catcher in the Rye of the art world. [via jason]

The Sentence As Earthwork

Not that it doesn’t sound fascinating, but a diagram of this sentence would be as big as the Lightning Field itself:

In this lecture Chris Taylor will present Land Arts of the American West as a work that makes other works through a field program that investigates the intersection of geomorphology and human construction beginning with the land and extending through the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes.

From the description of “Measures of Time, Travel, and Space: exploring Land Arts of the American West,” presented last April at Yale. [land arts via tyler]

Much Is Published, But Little Printed

From Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, quoted by Mark Noonan in the Columbia Journal of American Studies

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

rays_stream_through_shutter.jpg
For a long time we had construction on our street. The crew would store their portable signs in such a way that, on many mornings, they would reflect a rainbow in our window and across our living room ceiling. The kid took on the job of spotting them, which led to her taking pictures of them. This is one of the earliest examples. I suspect the memory of the rays will far outlast our shutters which, frankly, are nothing special and which I can’t wait to remove.

On The Public-Sculpture Gravy Train

It’s got shiny spheres, and science re-creations, and DC artists and quotes from curator and museum director friends. But it’s been a few weeks now, and the only thing I can say about Blake Gopnik’s mind-numbing/blowing article on Jim Sanborn is that this passage on public art is pretty damn funny:

The fame of the CIA commission “funded me for all the years since,” Sanborn says. It put him on the public-sculpture gravy train. He stopped living in his scruffy studio building in Northeast Washington (it’s where he met his wife, Jae Ko, a well-known local sculptor), bought a house in Georgetown, designed a home in the Shenandoahs and continued to fund his more “serious” art, such as “Atomic Time.”
But lately, the commissions have dried up. Today’s selection panels, he complains, go for “decorative embellishments.”

Damn those panels. If only noted art historian/author Dan Brown would write a book about Washington, he could include another mention of Sanborn’s work.
??!!??: Sparking Interest Within the Sphere of Art | ‘Physics’ May Be Most Substantive D.C. Piece in Half-Century [washingtonpost via man]

And The Company That’ll Bring It To You: AT&T

Maybe it’s just me who figured at the time, everyone was caught up in the giddy, optimistic hype of the World’s Fair. I guess I hadn’t counted on E.B. White. His nonplussed review of the 1939 New York World’s Fair is included in Essays of E.B. White. Here’s the best part [of the fair, that is. The whole essay’s a short, pleasant read]:

Another gay spot, to my surprise, was the American Telephone & Telegraph Exhibit. It took the old Telephone Company to put on the best show of all. To anyone who draws a lucky number, the company grants the privilege of making a long-distance call. This call can be to any point in the United States, and the bystanders have the exquisite privilege of listening in through earphones and of laughing unashamed. To understand the full wonder of this, you must reflect that there are millions of people who have never either made or received a long-distance call, and that when Eddie Pancha, a waiter in a restaurant in El Paso, Texas, hears the magic words “New York is calling…go ahead, please,” he is transfixed in holy dread and excitement. I listened for two hours and ten minutes to this show, and I’d be there this minute if I were capable of standing up. I had the good luck to be listening at the earphone when a little boy named David Wagstaff won the toss and put in a call to his father in Springfield, Mass., what a good time he was having at the World’s Fair. David walked resolutely to the glass booth before the assembled kibitzers and in a tiny, timid voice gave the operator his call, his little new cloth hat set all nicely on his head. But his father wasn’t there, and david was suddenly confronted with the necessity of telling his story to a man named Mr. Henry, who happened to answer the phone and who, pn hearing little David Wagstaff’s voice calling from New York, must surely have thought that David’s mother had been run down in the BMT and that David was doing the manly thing.
“Yes, David,” he said, tensely.
“Tell my father this, began Dvid, slowly, carefully, determined to go through with the halcyon experience of winning a lucky call at the largest fair the world had yet produced.
“Yes, David.”
“We got on the train, and…and…had a nice trip, and at New Haven, when they were taking off the car and putting another car on, it was awfully funny because the car gave a great–big–BUMP!”
Then followed David’s three minute appreciation of the World of Tomorrow and the Citadel of Light, phrased in the crumbling remnants of speech that little boys are left with when a lot of people are watching, and when their thoughts begin to run down, and when Perispheres begin to swim mistily in time. Mr. Henry–the invisible and infinitely surprised Mr. Henry–maintained a respectful and indulgent silence. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I would swap the Helicline for a copy of his attempted transcription of David’s message to his father.

“The World of Tomorrow” was originally published in May 1939 in The New Yorker.

Now I Feel Twice As Useless About My Shirtboards

talese_shirtboard.jpg
Gay Talese writes everything everyday on shirtboards—

INTERVIEWER
Do you use notebooks when you are reporting?
TALESE
I don’t use notebooks. I use shirt boards.
INTERVIEWER
You mean the cardboard from dry-cleaned shirts?
TALESE
Exactly. I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they can fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.
INTERVIEWER
So all day long you’re writing your observations on shirt boards?
TALESE
Yes, and at night I type out my notes. It is a kind of journal. But not only my notes–also my observations.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by observations?

–including the outline for the Greatest Magazine Article Ever?
rauschenberg_shirtboard1.jpgRobert Rauschenberg developed his abstract/pop collage techniques on shirt boards, while traveling to Italy and Morocco with Cy Twombly in 1951-3. The pair [couple?] of young artists fresh from Black Mountain College were traveling on Twombly’s grant money, which meant Rauschenberg had next to nothing to buy art materials with.
So he collaged cheap prints, newspaper, feathers, drawings, and random stuff onto the shirtboards from their laundry in an irreverent twist of his teacher Josef Albers’ technique.
In 1990, just as Walter Hopps’ incredible show, “Robert Rauschenberg the Early 1950s” was preparing to debut at the Menil, the artist collaborated with Styria Studio to produce meticulous replicas of 28 of the shirtboard works in an edition of 65.
Within the first five minutes of walking into the Menil for the first time, I met Cy Twombly standing in front of his chalkboard painting in the lobby. He had just completed his interview for Hopps’ catalogue. Needless to say, I made it back to Houston for the opening, and then saw the show multiple times at the Guggenheim SoHo.
Beyond instilling a deep appreciation for Rauschenberg’s interest in abstraction and conceptualism both, that show changed the way I look at shirtboards forever. Not that I’ve ever done anything about it, of course, just that it hits a nerve. What’s worse about Gay Talese: he lives in my old neighborhood, so we might even share a shirt laundry.
a nice discussion of the Shirtboard works [icallitoranges]

On Memorial Day, Remembering

David Kurtz, writing on Talking Points Memo about finding the grave of Corporal Pearl B. Wilkerson, who was killed in action in April 1945, just before the European war ended:

But what lingers for me about Wilkerson is how Memorial Day — for all the somber remembrances and displays of military hardware — is a small strike against the inevitable forgetting. Poor Wilkerson got a head start on being forgotten: buried in a now-churchless cemetery with headstones knocked over and steadily sinking into the ground, near a briefly prosperous village of Irish immigrants that was long past its prime when Wilkerson died and will eventually be a nameless crossroads. His is the same fate as that of the overwhelming majority of men who ever fought and died for their clan, tribe or country. Today we acknowledge how much we’ve forgotten by paying homage to what we have managed to remember.

Kurtz is right, of course, but it’s worth remembering [sic] that forgotten and buried–if buried at all–in an unknown, even unmarked grave has been the standard fate throughout history of those killed in war. Remembering and memorializing individual soldiers is a modern, i.e., 20th century, i.e., post-WWI practice.
Lutyens’ triumphal arch tower at Thiepval was one of the first attempts to recognize all the British soldiers who died at the Somme; their names cover every available surface of the arch. From the WWI innovation of dog tags to identify the dead to our current ability to match DNA from the tiniest fragment of a fallen soldier’s body, technology has rendered the idea of an unknown soldier obsolete. Perhaps it is time to switch to the Tomb of The Unremembered Soldier instead.
Gone and Largely Forgotten [tpm]

The Ur-Grey Gardens

I discovered the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens in my first semester of busines school. My marketing professor showed us Salesman, and it floored me, leaving me to track down the rest of the Maysles’ work.
So I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to finally read Gail Sheehy’s 1972 New York article on Grey Gardens and the Edie Beales. I wish I’d found it when I was living in East Hampton; would’ve made those winter nights that much crazier.
scan: The Secret of Grey Gardens, by Gail Sheehy [grey gardens news (!!) via choire]

High Five To The Warhol Foundation Arts Writers

Awesome, I just read through the announcement of the 2008 Arts Writers Grant recipients, and I have to give a huge shoutout to Paddy Johnson whose Art Fag City is one of the first two blogs to be recognized by Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation [the other is Guerrilla Glass, a “post-glass art” blog project by Anjali Srinivasan and Yuka Otani.]
The Arts Writers program has danced around the new media for three grant cycles now, but this is the first time their solicitation explicitly mentioned blogs. Needless to say, it’s about time, and Paddy’s project is highly deserving and should lend the Arts Writers program some nice publicity and online cred.
Which is ironic, since the reason I applied for a grant last cycle was to leverage CC’s and the Warhol Foundation’s credibility for what would otherwise have to be seen as a cockamamie scheme. I had proposed a blog about the art history of satelloons. The idea was to consider NASA’s Project Echo inflatable satellites–instantly obsolete but spectacularly beautiful mylar spheres which were visible to the naked eye–as an exhibition, a propagandistic and aesthetic exercise akin to the US government’s better-known Cold War-era promotion of Abstract Expressionism abroad.
That would give me the impetus to research and document the development and history of the satelloons from primary source material. But it would also be a stepping-off point to explore the history of art and politics in the Space Age, Pop and Minimalist contexts; the history of art and technology collaborations, including the artists who worked with Bell Labs, a key Project Echo participant. [I especially wanted to see if I could trace the use of mylar balloons from Project Echo through Bell Labs’ black box to Andy Warhol.] By looking at scientifically driven production from an art world vantage point, the satelloon blog would question the defining premises of art, especially intentionality and the aesthetic experience of the viewer. It’s all stuff I will probably pursue here with slightly less urgency over the next year or so.
Just as it was reassuring to see Paddy’s excellent writing recognized, it made me feel slightly less marginal that at least two other grant recipients have projects that resonate with my satelloon idea, if not quite overlap. Art historian Douglas Kahn was awarded a grant for Arts of the Spectrum: In the Nature of Electromagnetism, a book about an intriguing vein of art&science interplay. And Annette Leddy, from the Getty Institute, is writing an article on Robert Watts’ “Space Age Home,” an artist in the 1960’s who apparently “extensively re-imagined the home, its furnishings, and its gardens in terms of an ironic Space Age aesthetic.” No idea, but it sounds like the future to me. Or at least the history of the future.
see the full list of Arts Writer grant recipients and their projects [artswriters.org]

Art & Fear by Bayles & Orland

Whether it’s right or not, this book sounds fantastic:

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product; the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.

Art & Fear, by Peter Bayles and Ted Orland [via kottke and kk]

As Close To Immortal As We’ll Ever Get

“Writing fiction takes me out of time,” he explains. “I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get. I’m scared of sounding pretentious because anyone who writes fiction is saying, ‘Look at this thing I’ve written.'”

from Bill Katovsky’s 1987 profile of University of Arizona Teaching Assistant of the Year, David Foster Wallace, republished by McSweeney’s [via tmn]

Jonathan Lethem On Masterpieces

Before Jonathan Lethem could call 2666, Roberto Bolano’s novel, recently translated into English, a masterpiece, he referenced a Philip K. Dick story titled “The Preserving Machine,” so we knew he wasn’t taking the term lightly:

Dick’s parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes “masterpieces” embody in the human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Con­versely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we’ve plopped onto the planet — all these cities, nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.

Both Lethem’s problematic outcomes presuppose a reflectiveness that may not be as widespread as he’d like. Masterpieces are a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, and most reader/viewer/listeners dutifully feel the ecstasy they’ve been pre-programmed to expect by the canonizing culture at large. When I see mobs standing in awe in front of the Mona Lisa or dutifully thronging the Sistine Chapel, the work itself is almost just a catalyst for the experience of consuming Important Culture. I mean, if people were really paying attention, they’d notice what an unpleasant experience it usually is.
Meanwhile, 2666 sounds absolutely engrossing and fantastic. Now if only I could find a way to read a 912-page novel right now. [nyt book review]

Satyajit Ray In Film India, c.1981

Steve Rosen found a 1981 interview with Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray at the flea market. He transcribed a bit onto Airform Archive, starting with an encounter Ray had with the 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore:

Satyajit Ray: I’ll tell you a story here. In 1928, when I was seven, I went with my mother to Tagore’s university. I had my little autograph book, newly bought, and my mother gave the book to Tagore and said, “My son would like a few lines of verse from you.” And he said, “Leave the book with me.” Next day I went to collect it, and he brought it out and said: “I have written something for you, which you won’t understand now, but when you grow up you will understand it.” It’s one of the best things he ever wrote in a small manner, and what it means is this: “I have travelled all around the world to see the rivers and the mountains, and I’ve spent a lot of money. I have gone to great lengths, I have seen everything, but I have forgotten to see just outside of my house a dewdrop on a little blade of grass, a dewdrop which reflects in its convexity the whole universe around you.”

At first, I thought this sounded incredibly ballsy, but Tagore’s and Ray’s Brahmin families were close.
From the dewdrop, Ray and the interviewer continue in a discussion of the microscopic, but the power of the quote seems to me to be about ignoring the beauty and profundity of the world right in front of us.
Ray would go on to study with Tagore, and in 1961, Nehru commissioned him to direct a documentary of the writer’s life.
…the essence as a dewdrop on a little blade of grass… [airform archives]
Satyajit Ray [wikipedia]