Strong Words About Dead Artists, and Other News

Robert Rauschenberg, Collection, 1954–55.

 

• There’s a massive Robert Rauschenberg retrospective coming to the MoMA next month, which means we can expect a host of Serious Opinions on the Significant Artist™ to appear in lofty periodicals everywhere. Look to the horizon and you can see the storm clouds gathering, as the assessors assess and the critics criticize. Jed Perl, whose lacerating take on Jeff Koons can still warm my heart on cold nights, has already rendered his verdict on Rauschenberg, and it goes mainly like this: he sucks. Perl writes, “Rauschenberg became adept at keeping admirers and detractors alike on their toes with his swaggering insouciance and Delphic-Dadaist remarks … It was in 1959, for the catalog of the exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art, that Rauschenberg dreamed up what has become his most famous statement. ‘Painting,’ he announced, ‘relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)’ It’s difficult to conceive of a more gnomic twenty-one-word declaration of principles. What on earth is Rauschenberg talking about? What does it mean to say that art can’t be ‘made’? And what is that ‘gap’ between ‘art and life’ aside from the sweet spot where Rauschenberg established his reputation? … What Rauschenberg provides his interpreters is a nearly endless succession of whims, gambits, riffs, and diversions. Many of his effects amount to little more than lessons everybody ought to have learned in Modern Art 101.”

• Not dissimilarly, Stephen Akey has lodged his complaints with the Emily Dickinson scholars of the world, who persist, he writes, in a laborious effort to make her poems even harder to read: “The online Emily Dickinson Archive, which reproduces the manuscripts with all their wayward calligraphy and unresolved word choices, is a necessary and laudable enterprise, but the last thing it does is make her poetry more accessible. You thought it was hard reading Emily Dickinson before? It just got harder … Maybe the chief difference between a Dickinson scholar and a Dickinson amateur (like me) is that the scholar is in love with and can justify every last dash, whereas the amateur, desperate for the guidance provided by rational punctuation, mentally supplies the missing commas, colons, semicolons, and periods not to be found in the poems themselves … Can anyone truly read these poems without editing them in her head, supplying the punctuation necessary for many of them to make a modicum of sense?”

• Now is a great time to worry about the threat of nuclear war with North Korea. But don’t spend all your worries in one place. You’ll want to save a few so you can worry about your dildo getting hacked. Mark Hay looks at the downside of “smart” sex toys: “Teledildonics— the industry term for a wide variety of remote sex technologies— currently encompasses dozens of devices. They range from basic vibrators a partner can activate from afar to the high-end Kiiroo’s Onyx and Pearl, a vibrator and masturbation sleeve combo that connects to allow one to experience a distant partner’s actions in real-time. Theoretically, the toys of the future could even allow users to record every physical aspect of a sexual encounter, remote or proximate, and save it for replay or distribution. As with any smart device, there’s the obvious risk that a company could opaquely collect and sell, or a hacker could illicitly siphon off, metadata on users … The right security flaws may allow hackers to gather identifying details, like an email address, as well as geolocation data and an IP address. Then there’s the issue of long-distance sexual assault … There’s a real risk an outside party could activate individuals’ sex toys.”

• In Berlin, Daniel Trilling visits “German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present,” at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, which reckons with Europe’s many genocides: “The British sociologist Gurminder K. Bhambra gave a lecture in which she pointed out that most of today’s refugees in Europe come from countries that were once colonies, whose poverty or instability are a result of that experience. She argued that the EU was a colonial project in origin: France’s African possessions were offered ‘as a dowry to Europe’ and non-white populations … One exhibit stands out: a set of sound recordings made on shellac discs in 1917. During the war, British and French colonial troops taken prisoner on the Western Front were separated from the rest and sent to live in a camp outside Berlin. They were studied by scientists, some of whom got them to speak or sing. A Tunisian farmer sings a song he wrote about his conscription, war injury and imprisonment. A Gurkha recites the story of the prodigal son in English. A man from what is now South Sudan counts from one to twenty in his mother tongue, then departs from the script and demands to be released. The voices are upsetting, at once distant and shockingly immediate.”

• James Campbell writes on James Baldwin’s cinephilia: “ ‘About my interests,’ Baldwin wrote in the foreword to his first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son (1955), ‘I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental films can be so classified.’ Twenty-one years later, he published The Devil Finds Work, a book-length meditation ostensibly on the roles assigned to black people in the American cinema from The Birth of a Nation to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but diverging at every turn into fierce diagnoses of the society that wished that cinema into being … One of his most cherished hopes was to see a film version of his second novel Giovanni’s Room (1956). Baldwin had a longstanding spoken agreement with Marlon Brando to take the part of Guillaume, the story’s loathsome café owner (there was often a role for Brando in Baldwin’s movie plans), and things progressed far enough for writer, actor and director—Michael Raeburn, who had already transferred Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass Is Singing to the screen—to hold a meeting in Paris and for Baldwin to write a screenplay.”

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2phnPrd