Maitresse

Locked Room Scenario

When I was in London in October I went to see a curious art installation in a warehouse in Hoxton... and I wrote this piece about it for Her Royal Majesty, about getting lost and finding art.

In the very best of circumstances, I have an atrociously bad sense of direction. Send me to a notoriously difficult-to-find temporary exhibit in a somewhat gritty neighborhood I don’t know at all, and depending on my mood I’ll either cry or give up. And yet here I am, on an unseasonably warm October day, wandering through Hoxton. I’ve come to see Locked Room Scenario, an art installation in a warehouse, sponsored by Artangel, a London-based art group with a penchant for outside-of-the-cube installations in unexpected locations. A friend of a friend works there. This show is meant to be really interesting, but no one will tell me anything specific about it – not my friend, and not the friend of my friend. Deciphering the website takes too much concentration. “Please tell me what is the point of the show,” I asked my friend in advance. “Just give me some idea of what I’m in for.” “Just go,” my friend said, so I’m going, despite the fact that I’ve been getting lost in London all week – taking the wrong trains, making the wrong turns, ending up quite far from where I meant to go. But as I’m contemplating moving to London, I’ve resolved to Keep Calm and Carry On. One day I will navigate the Big Smoke with ease. Or at least with less difficulty.

I start off with a half-pint at a pub called The Eagle. Thus fortified, I begin the task of looking for the Londonewcastle Depot, 1-3 Wenlock Rd. I wander up the street and pass building after building but see no numbers on either side until number 7. Maybe the numbers go the other way? I keep walking and soon I’m at number 19. Then I call my friend.

“You know I am easily lost. Why have you sent me here?”

She describes the entrance, and I seem to remember having passed something that matched her description. “Enjoy the show,” she says. “If you get yourself out of there without having your head collapse it will be amazing.”

Read the rest.

Wake in Progress

At the reading last week to celebrate Shakespeare & Company's inaugural Paris Literary Prize I found my attention wandering repeatedly to a pair of prints hanging over the till. Riverrun, I read, past Eve and Adam's, why does this sound so famil--

Although any self-respecting modernist would have made the connection as soon as they read the word "Riverrun," I blame my delayed reaction on the fact that I was simultaneously listening to one of the three short-listed authors reading from their work.  I was, of course, looking at the first sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is also a continuation of the last sentence of Finnegans Wake ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the").  

As it turns out, the prints I was looking at were part of Stephen Crowe's project "Wake in Progress," in which the artist is illustrating every page of Joyce's late masterpiece. In honor of Bloomsday, they were on display the previous night at the party where the winners were announced, but I had apparently had too much champagne to notice what was on the walls of the Société des gens de lettres.

According to Crowe, "Joyce’s final work is a giddy, disorienting dream that dramatises the internal conflicts of a sleeper's unconscious through a wild, satirical mash-up of history, myth and tall tale-telling." Crowe honors "the book's playful miscellany by plundering the history of the visual arts, from Medieval illuminations to cartoon strips."

The prints will be up at Shakespeare and Co until June 30th. For more information on the project, visit Crowe's website. And don't miss this short reflection on "Why Finnegans Wake is Better than Ulysses."

 

poetry + the visual arts

[cross-posting from the NYU blog. this stuff is just so awesome I had to share it here, too.]

In one of the classes I'm teaching this semester, we're reading the Scottish writer Hope Mirrlees's poem "Paris" (1919), a little-known masterpiece of Modernist poetry that was first published in a small print run by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, and which Mirrlees later tried to prevent being reprinted because she had by then converted to Catholicism and found her earlier work blasphemous. No doubt Mirrlees's poem had a big impact on TS Eliot's 1922 work "The Wasteland" (although Mirrlees does seem to have been inspired by Eliot's 1917 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").

Part of what I'll concentrate on with my students is the influence of French Symbolist and Cubist art and poetry on Mirrlees's poem, most particularly the way Mirrlees draws on the way Mallarmé and Apollinaire use the space on the page to produce meaning in their poems as well as language itself. In the visual arts, Severini and Delaunay achieve a similarly dynamic effect of images on their canvases.

The idea for these writers and artists was to "transcend the limitations, the stasis of plastic form or writen language, by reaching out to embrace the whole of experience, sights and sounds, thought and language, song and dance" (Briggs, 263). Mirrlees absorbs all of this and integrates it into her work, which you can download a "dodgy scan" of here.

Gino Severini, Le Nord-Sud (1912)

Robert Delaunay, 1911 (backdated by the artist to 1910)

Guillaume Apollinaire « Salut monde dont je suis la langue éloquente que sa bouche Ô Paris tire et tirera toujours aux allemands » (Calligrammes, 1918)

Mallarmé, "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard," (1897)

Drawing on the Walls at Shakespeare & Company

Badaude is the bomb.  But you knew that; she's the one who designed the wonderful new banner for my blog this summer.  And apparently that task was quite inspiring to her, for when she met Sylvia Whitman in September at the Five Dials party (recounted here and here and here and documented here-- this one caught me and Badaude sitting on a bench, front and center!) she suggested doing the same thing to Sylvia's wall that she did to my blog! And the result is so fantastic I can't even tell you! Look:

But I'm not the only one who thinks Badaude's the bomb. BOMB thinks she is too! So Paul Morris interviewed her and you can read it here. An excerpt:

Paul Morris: Your illustrations are an interesting fusion of image and text. How does your experience as an artist inform your appreciation for literature in general—and for literary figures in particular?

Joanna Walsh: [...] My drawing always relates to writing, whether because I’m responding to a text or mixing my own writing and pictures. Writers are also “commercial” artists—books have to sell to a certain number of people in order to be published. This doesn’t mean that I think “blockbusters” are better than “literary fiction” because they sell more, but I am interested in the knife-edge balancing act whereby writers write what they have to in such a way that enough readers will want to go out and buy a copy.

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers—looking at the way they presented themselves in the reference photos I used-I became interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a published writer in Paris was so central to the myth their lives; a myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter (Quartet, A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer). This is why I chose the quote from Ulysses (full excerpt at bottom), hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural, in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he—and no doubt his hipster-goatee’d creator—furnished his Paris persona.

Here, on her own blog, she explains what it was like to draw on the walls of a 17th century building. (I made myself useful by erasing her pencil marks, handing her pens, and shelving books in the children's section with Sylvia and Gemma. Hey, if I'm only ever a handmaiden to genius, that's enough for me.)

And here is the text of the wonderful quote from Ulysses that snakes its way through the William Morris-inspired "wallpaper":

“My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

around the internet on a tuesday

Ah, it's good to be back compiling lists of links on a Tuesday morning. 

I've written briefly (here) of my feelings for Alberto Manguel, so it was a thrill to find this New York Times piece on his library.  If I could speak with Mr Manguel himself, however, I don't think I would engage him in a conversation about the alchemy of reading, as I might have in the past; no, today I would ask him for advice on how to make a nomadic lifestyle compatible with a serious book habit. I leave for Tokyo on Thursday and I will be there for over three months, so I will need many books in that time; plus, I'll be writing the first chapter of my dissertation and will want the collected works of Elizabeth Bowen with me to do so. My solution the past few trips is to have one suitcase for the clothes and another for the books, but I anticipate extra fees in the near future.  It seems like it would be an expensive proposition to mail them to Tokyo. And figuring out the research library at a Japanese university seems overly daunting. What to do?

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"Why have there been no women artists?" Linda Nochlin's 1971 essay inquires, before embarking on a long career of discovering and recuperating the work of women artists as far back as the Renaissance. Thirty-odd years on, Ingrid D. Rowland writes, reviewing Nochlin's latest book for the NYRB,  Women artists win!

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"London is not one place but plural; 2000 years of history - compressed into a single space - can be found with every step," writes Leo Hollis in The Guardian Blogs. And Francise Prose looks at three interwar London novels by Patrick Hamilton in the NYRB (yes, again, sorry).

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John Litchfield reports for the Independent that the original manuscript of the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) will sell at Southeby's tomorrow for an estimated 1M€, angering art historians and amusing André Breton's ghost.

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Finally: I haven't said much about the anniversary of May 1968, not because I think there's nothing more to say on the subject, but because, well, I've been busy.  So I refer you to that wondrous enigma of a blogger called Spurious, who provides an intriguing rundown of the events in a post organized around the writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.

tuesday links

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The winners include Junot Diaz for  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Fiction), Tracy Letts for "August: Osage County" (Drama) and a special citation for Bob Dylan.

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We're officially in the middle of a Picabia moment: with exhibits at the Tate Modern and the Passage de Retz,  and an MIT Press publication, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, by George Baker, which is the occasion for an article on Bookslut encouraging us to see the Dada artist as a poet as well. Why not.  Read the article and learn why "Dada is an artichoke doorknob."

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More on Virago Press from The Guardian; this time a meditation on Novel on Yellow Paper (which I still recommend you read, it's so kooky and out there) and on the thirtieth anniversary of the press, which is next month.

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The Sydney Morning Herald looks at how weird and out there travel guides are getting in order to capture a share of the market. But there's also a strong desire not to say the same things over and over that I think motivates this kind of narrative... and that's how you end up with women walking from London to Africa.

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My dear Pierre Assouline looks up from his espresso to remark that the commemorations of May 1968 are really starting to bore him, but that in spite of the "avalanche of memoirs, documents, photo collections, novels, and narratives" there are some good books to read on the subject. He recommends  Le jour où mon père s’est tu (Seuil), by Virginie Linhart, the daughter of Robert Linhart (the communist and now sociologist who literally slept through May '68); Tigre en papier (2002), by Olivier Rolin, and Génération (1987), by Patrick Rotman et Hervé Hamon.

And I counted precisely one semi-colon.

Vivenne Westwood: Manifesto!

Wish I could make it to London for Vivienne Westwood's "Art Manifesto: Active Resistance to Propaganda" at the Wallace Collection. A Manifesto at the Wallace Collection? Sounds more like the Tate Modern's thing to me. But read on:

It sounds like a load of bollocks:

Join Vivienne Westwood as she launches her manifesto at the Wallace Collection. Based on the premise that art gives culture and that culture is the antidote to propaganda, Vivienne and 25 other speakers will read aloud her manifesto and answer questions afterwards.

But at least someone is trying to think through the definitions and implications of such a manifesto:

Westwood defines Propaganda using Aldous Huxley’s words as ‘Nationalistic Idolatry, Non-Stop Distraction and Organised Lying.’ She urges us to escape these, particularly Non-Stop Distraction, go in search of art and become artistic freedom fighters. This involves making the choice to become more cultured, thus more human, and to understand the world. Our route should be to actively engage with art and use our ethical imagination to be objective and see things as they really are; in the process acquiring knowledge. This knowledge in turn will make us act differently and become better citizens of the world. In this way the Arts Manifesto is a keystone of Westwood’s wider pre-occupations with politics and justice.

This is already a little dicey (how do we know we are seeing things as they "really are"?), but it gets worse. I'm not sure I put much stock in what Westwood thinks about contemporary art, especially as her own designs are so out there in the ether:

Westwood argues that art must be representative; through representative human nature we gain an imaginative insight into the general nature of things. Westwood believes there is no progress in art and conceptual and abstract art is today’s Emperor’s New Clothes; nothing in it except what you invent; a subjective whim.

It actually sounds pretty reactionary, for a Manifesto.  Don't they generally call for new forms and ideas? But I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt; she is an interesting and creative force herself. I would love to get her in a room and ask her to explain what she means.

"Museums are just a lot of lies,"

or so said Picasso: "...and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters.... We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things." He said that in a 1935 volume of Cahiers d'Art. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. included this quote in his 1946 book on Picasso, published seventeen years after he founded the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

When I was but a wee Barnard lass in my formative years as an academic, one of my favorite places in New York to go and work was the garden at MoMA. As an undergrad at Columbia I was allowed free entry to all of the museums in town, so any given afternoon, when I felt like taking the 1,9 downtown, you might have found me at a table off in the corner, next to a huge coffee, nose buried in a book, pen moving in a notebook, copying out critical estimations and interesting passages out of whatever I was reading. Background noise was faint; there were a few limpid fountains, I seem to recall, and some manicured older women sitting together and discussing the art, their travels, their younger days. There was a healthy amount of outdoor sculpture here and there, and the ground was a series of pathways crisscrossing over a pond. The garden was not very large, but suprisingly was never that crowded, and I sort of wondered if it wasn't one of New York's best-kept secrets. Really, no one must have known about it, or you would think it would have been overrun with museum-goers taking a break in between German and Abstract Expressionism.

I would never leave without running upstairs to wander through the collections, no matter how briefly. Then, as now, I stuck mainly to the pre-1945 art. After WWII my interest in painting and especially in sculpture takes a nosedive... the photography I love, but everything else leaves me cold. Shocker! I actually don't like Andy Warhol! Thanks to a rigorous background in Art History, I have the requisite critical skills to talk about late twentieth-century art and what makes it so. I just can't get into it, is all.

I was crushed, but luckily out of college, when, in 2001, MoMA shut its doors and temporarily relocated to Long Island City, Queens, to renovate the original 1930s structure into something a little more cutting edge. By the time this happened, I was also no longer living in Queens. Schlepping from Manhattan to LIC was not an option. So I bid MoMA goodbye. And now, finally, it's reopening on November 20th! It's been redesigned by Yoshio Taniguchi, and there's a writeup in yesterday's NY Times assessing the new building. Nicolai Ouroussoff writes, "The galleries, stacked one on top of the other like so many epochs, reinforce a hierarchical approach to history that will bolster the Modern's image as a ruthless arbiter of taste...It reinforces the notion - in a way not sensed at the Met today - that museums are as much about the stamp of legitimacy as about aesthetic pleasure."

I don't agree with his observation about the Met, but I see what he means about the layout. It would be interesting to compare MoMA with its British counterpart, the Tate Modern, which is organized by theme rather than by chronological period. There, the works are grouped into the following themes: History/Memory/Society, Landscape/Matter/Environment, Nude/Action/Body, and Still Life/Object/Real Life.

For a public accustomed to having Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, et al grouped within a few meters of each other, to organize the works according to their thematic content interferes with the traditional organization of art history and our traditional methods of appreciating artistic achievement. But really, who says things have to be in chronologial order? who says a linear perspective makes more sense than a nonlinear? Why be traditional when you can be innovative? Isn't that the idea behind modern art anyway?

The new MoMA is not a stranger to the values of mixing it up a bit-- Ouroussoff mentions several "startling" juxtapositions-- but for the most part, apparently, the new design confirms the power of the institution as author and coordinator of art history. Back to the Times: "This may irritate people who believe that a 21st-century museum should take a more populist approach. It runs counter to the idea that art, in a democracy, is a messy, open process. And it exposes the design's overwhelming assertion of control, beautiful yet chilling. But that is what powerful art institutions do: they set standards, they make evaluations. You could argue that Mr. Taniguchi is stripping away the egalitarian pose and exposing the museum for what it is."