number 112 / summer 2010
Conversations between Artists, Writers, Actors, Directors, Musicians—Since 1981 Joan Jonas by Karin Schneider Edward Droste of Grizzly Bear by Rick Moody Elizabeth Streb by A.M. Homes Jennifer Egan by Heidi Julavits Alain Mabanckou by Binyavanga Wainaina Jessica Jackson Hutchins by Stuart Horodner Dan Asher by Ben Berlow Cynthia Hopkins by Annie-B Parson First proof: Bomb’s Literary Supplement
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contents bomb issue 112 / summer 2010 EDITOR’s choice
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bomb specific Fiona Banner
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artists on artists Futurefarmers by David van der Leer Andrew Lampert by Ed Halter Cordy Ryman by Stephen Westfall THE WICK Guy Richards Smit Joan Jonas, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2005, video still from multimedia Performance at Dia:Beacon. Performer: Ragani Haas.
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30 Alain Mabanckou by Binyavanga Wainaina To fellow author Wainaina, Mabanckou is a leading writer amongst those building bridges between a divided, postcolonial Africa. For his newly translated novel Broken Glass, Mabanckou figured out how to write the Congolese oral tradition into French. His Congo is no heart of darkness. Cynthia Hopkins 42 by Annie-B Parson In her most recent theater piece, The Truth: A Tragedy, Hopkins tackled head-on her father’s deterioration. Annie-B Parson rolled the dice to find out how Hopkins converts modern-day disturbances into vigorous onewoman productions blending dance, song, plenty of fact, and even more fiction. Dan Asher 50 by Ben Berlow The final poignant interview with the prolific, irrepressible, and—to anyone who met him—unforgettable New York artist Dan Asher, who passed away of leukemia on April 23, 2010. Joan Jonas 58 by Karin Schneider A pioneer of what has become known as performance art, Jonas’s recomposing of literary texts, disparate images, and haunting sounds in the ephemeral media of chalk drawings, video, and theater has created a new Gestalt. Edward Droste of Grizzly Bear 68 by Rick Moody Beginning with the mostly solo Horn of Plenty, Droste’s ringing vocals catapulted Grizzly Bear to the fore of Brooklyn “freak-folk.” Ironic, then, that here he recalls being initially afraid to sing, even for himself.
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Jessica Jackson Hutchins 74 by Stuart Horodner Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s sculptures reference the human body in all of its dumb charm and joyful habits. With Horodner she reflects on Levinas, contingency, and Chinese scholar’s rocks. JENNIFER EGAN 82 by Heidi Julavits A Visit from the Goon Squad is Egan’s fifth book; its polyphonic structure mirrors the undeniable fact that characters, like people, are central to themselves yet peripheral to others. To fellow writer Julavits, each chapter is an ice-core sample, and Egan an expert paleoclimatologist drilling through the layers. ELIZABETH STREB 88 by A.M. Homes A master manipulator of spatial movement who has redefined the parameters of dance, “Streb” has become a verb for “pop action.” Novelist A.M. Homes and the action heroine discuss overcoming gravity.
Ralph Bakshi by Morgan Miller maya beiser by Bill Morrison SHARON HAYES & LAWRENCE WEINER ARLENE SHECHET by Jane Dickson brian ulrich by Lynn Saville
This issue is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency. BOMB Supporters include the Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative, the Thanksgiving Fund, and BOMB’s Trustees.
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Danielle Dutton Fiction for Driving Across America: from S p r awl
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Mac Wellman From Linda Perdido
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Kim Rosenfield From Lividity
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BOMB 29th Anniversary Gala & Silent Auction April 27, 2010 The National Arts Club New York City Honoring: Cecily Brown & NicolaI Ouroussoff Gabriel Orozco Nancy Spector
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Thank you to all 2010 BOMB Patrons LEADERS $40,000 and over Cary Brown Epstein & Steven Epstein National Endowment for the Arts SPONSORS $20,000 to $39,999 New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts The Thanksgiving Fund Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative DONORS $10,000 to $19,999 Bloomberg Frances R. Dittmer Family Foundation Michele Oka Doner Fundación Cisneros, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gagosian Gallery Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fundación/ Colección JUMEX Heather M. Kirby Bertha & Isaac Liberman Foundation Dorothy Lichtenstein Jerry I. Speyer PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE $5,000 to $9,999 The W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation Helaine & Paul Cantor Barbara Gladstone Marian Goodman Gallery James R. Hedges Lief D. Rosenblatt May & Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc. Jennifer & David Stockman PUBLISHER’S COUNCIL $2,500 to $4,999 Chatham Importers, Inc. Hugh Bush & Douglas S. Cramer Empire Merchants Giuliana Bruno & Andrew Fierberg Steven M. Holl Jill & Peter Kraus Christina Weiss Lurie Amy & John Phelan Marla Prather Mimi Thompson & James Rosenquist Alexander S.C. Rower Ellen Phelan & Joel Shapiro Sue Scott & Mike Stanley Select Equity Group Madeline Weinrib PATRONS $1,000 to $2,499 Anonymous Roland Augustine & Lawrence Luhring Mahnaz Ispahani & Adam Bartos Jill Bernstein Diana Betteridge Karin Waisman & Carlos Brillembourg Priscilla Caldwell Rosemary Carroll Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Janice Gardner Cecil Jane & James Cohan
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varieties of slow, 2008, PERFORMANCE VIEW, whitney museum of american art. photo by howard yang.
comfortable seats, 2008, performance view, british film institute, london. photo by bryony mcintyre. All images courtesy of the artist.
big mistake, 2009, performance view, center for contemporary art, glasgow. photo by bryony mcintyre.
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artists on artists / andrew lampert
Andrew Lampert by Ed Halter When Andrew Lampert performs his new piece Jacka Spades, he sits somewhere close to the front of a theater, operating a Super-8 projector in plain view of the audience. While the screen remains dark, an audio recording plays in which Lampert and the gravelly-voiced Steve Dalachinsky walk and talk on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Lampert asks him what he should shoot; in their chaotic back-and-forth patter, verging on an impromptu Borscht-Belt act, there’s a bit of confusion as to who’s in charge. Lampert keeps insisting that he’s just the cinematographer and the other guy is the artist, but the would-be director doesn’t seem to know what he wants. “I’m not the guy making the movie,” Lampert protests. “I’m just shooting your movie.” When we hear Lampert’s companion tell him to film, say, for instance, a street sign, Lampert turns on the projector and screens what was shot at that time, and the recorded sound of his camera’s motor overlaps with the live sound of the projector running. Throughout the performance, Lampert starts and stops the reel, correlating the images with the soundtrack in approximate real time. Three minutes of footage spread out over roughly a half-hour of audio, illuminating the theater in brief intervals that momentarily sync the present with the past. In addition to his work as an artist, Lampert is the resident archivist at Anthology Film Archives, but his performances, films, and audio pieces bear none of the librarianlike stuffiness usually associated with the latter profession—in fact, much of his art seems to be about undermining any assumed reverence for the preservation of media artifacts. “The projector and the screen and the projectionist and the audience are together far more integral to cinema than any film running through a projector in a booth behind the audience,” he writes in a short statement on his practice. “Celluloid is not cinema, not even close.” For Lampert, cinema is what happens right now, and he loves to tangle the lines between the documented and the live. As in Jacka Spades, he frequently creates a set of rules allowing for improvisation and chance operations. In the 2009 piece Home, he provides off-the-cuff narration to Super-8 films shot when he was a teenager—re-enacting the way home movies were once shown in living rooms before the advent of video. He performed Jutting (for Will Rose) by proxy in 2009 by instructing the British
curator William Rose to execute his orders through a written letter and an audio CD played in the Riverside Gallery in Leeds. For Varieties of Slow, a multi-projector 16-mm piece staged for the duration of a month during the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Lampert left directions for the museum staff and other participants to change lenses, add gels, play music, and rearrange the set-up according to a detailed calendar of events; sometimes Lampert was there, but mostly not. “Periodic requests and new directions might be sent via email, fax, or telephone,” one version of his instructions reads. “While it isn’t urgent to drop everything, it would be appreciated if the alteration is made as soon as you can get to it.” Perhaps his work as an archivist has made him think about how an artwork functions in the absence of its artist, in the hands of other caretakers. For Double Benetton he printed found footage from a mid-’90s fashion shoot, originally color, in superimposition onto black and white reversal 16-mm film—the last bits of that recently discontinued stock he could find. He imagined, he’s said, that in the future someone might find this film, wonder why it was reprinted that way, “and be confused.” —Ed Halter is writer, curator, and co-founder of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn.
Still from Double Benetton, 2008, 16-mm film. Total running time: 5 minutes.
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Cynthia Hopkins in Must Don’t Whip ‘Um. Photo by Pavel Antonov.
Cynthia Hopkins by Annie-B Parson
I saw Cynthia Hopkins’s work for the first time in 1999; she was performing with her band Gloria Deluxe. As lead singer, she began by telling an obviously apocryphal story about her sister (she doesn’t have one) and how they were in a traveling tent show. She followed this with a few songs and told a bit more of this excessive story. Then she sang a few more of her great songs and continued to unravel this impossible biography. She was wearing a character very lightly, almost as if it would be too exposing to be on stage just singing. Was this the inception of the elaborate fictions that she later made into theater pieces? Part Bob Dylan, part Louise Brooks, Hopkins trained as an actor and a musician, and both disciplines prevail in her work. She is never still on stage except to strap on her accordion or to sit at her piano, but at times even her piano moves around with her. She devises theater as a way to construct an imaginary, complicated, and very musical world that serves to chase away her devils. Video comes and goes, wrapping us around corners and doorways and alleys of images. And she might remind you of another Cindy as she tries on personas as disparate as an old Korean sage and an astronaut. Her narratives seem purposefully hyperfictional, certainly beyond anything we could believe or follow. This elaborateness might serve as a rebuke to the dominance of so-called believable narrative in theater, or maybe she is just trying to hide inside a byzantine maze of fictions. Whatever her mysterious motivations, she holds her audience spellbound, as in the great tradition of the old time raconteurs. With her collaborators Jeff Sugg, DJ Mendel, and Jim Findlay, in 2001 she embarked on Accidental Trilogy, a groundbreaking music/theater trilogy that spans eight years of work and many hours of finely wrought performance. In its three parts—Accidental Nostalgia, Must Don’t Whip ’Um, and The Success of Failure (or, the Failure of Success)—she tells a crazily intricate yarn that wraps her, Cynthia, in a deep fiction and then spins and spits her out in the end to tell the real story of the mother she lost, the addictions she battles, and her roads to psychic survival. Hopkins is often hard to discern up there on stage with her penchant for facing away from the audience, obstructed by objects and masks, scarves, mustaches, hats, noses. Personas and head wraps and wigs and glasses mitigate her face and head; layers and layers of clothes hide her small body. As you watch, it becomes increasingly apparent that she is successfully hiding in the spotlight, a fascinating contradiction. And then, at last, at the very end of an entire trilogy, there she is with her angelic face and clear, childlike voice. She suddenly has stripped off all the masking devices, to just jeans and a T-shirt, and she is playing the acoustic guitar and singing with no mic, and she has unwrapped all the crazy narratives to show us that she is Cynthia, a woman who
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theater / cynthia hopkins
wants to tell her own story straight out, and this story is true and honest and hard to hear, and she is generous, and we are grateful. In early spring we met for breakfast and talked about The Truth: A Tragedy, the new work that she was about to open at Soho Rep. We talk fairly often, usually in the morning, but this was the first time we had a recorder on my kitchen table. —Annie-B Parson Annie-B Parson: I got excited because I’ve never interviewed anybody, really. I created a series of unrelated questions, in the same way we would make a dance with random materials that, at a later date, we’d craft into something woven together. Cynthia Hopkins: It’s already about 10,000 times more interesting than interviews usually are. ABP: I’ll just roll the dice and choose a question from my list to start with. CH: It’s a chance operation. Have you ever seen the dice collection of the Museum of Jurassic Technology? ABP: No; when we, Big Dance Theater, were in LA they wouldn’t let us out of our cage. CH: You have to go when you’re in LA again. It’s based on some of the earliest museums in this country, before there was a clear demarcation between, say, a
Cynthia Hopkins in The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success). Photo by Paula Court.
science, anthropology, or art museum. You see works of theater, science, fiction—elements of truth as well as outrageous fictional invention, all at once. ABP: That makes me wonder if when you make your work you are trying to separate fact from fiction in any way? CH: No, I’m trying to do the opposite. Weave them together and make some new form which is its own beast. ABP: Okay, let’s roll the dice. CH: The last time I was at the museum there was a collection of dice from Ricky Jay, a New York magician, on display. There were all kinds: ancient dice, dice with fur. The museum is like a maze that sucks you in: its walls are dark, its ceilings low, it has all these little rooms and hallways. There’ll be something like a little exhibit of a rain forest inside a glass case, which you’ll be able to see only partially. I discovered the museum through this great book by Lawrence Weschler: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. ABP: This mixing of fact and fiction sounds like your work CH: Yes. My most recent work, The Truth: A Tragedy, which was up this past May at Soho Rep, has a component in the vein of the cabinet of curiosities influenced by the Museum of Jurassic Technology— it is made up of detritus from my father’s life, and it
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first proof
Danielle Dutton Fiction for Driving across America: from SPRAWL Listen to a podcast of Danielle Dutton reading this excerpt at BOMBsite.com
I walk through streets and look in windows to witness cheerfully painted walls and vertical lamps, high technical quality and surround-sound, mystery, beauty, fry baskets, fried chicken legs, joy sticks, shelves, ovens, beans. Over and over I encounter specific signs, such as prepare to merge. I stand in front of one public mural entitled “The Evolution of Dishes.” But a blue heron flies over my car and then just disappears. I carry on for weeks after this. I squeeze oranges into paper cups for vitamins. I cluster near the base of bedside lamps. It’s like I can’t rest confident in the political circumstance of one small space, this one, or right outside the window, or across the street, or over by the train station. As if I’m delicate. As if I’m deserted. As if I’m an endangered ocelot or a farmer on a stamp. As if I identify randomly with people on the street. As if I’m named Yvonne or Yvette. As if I have a bright pink refrigerator. As if I’m exhausted or superstitious or aggressively sexualized and armed with an assortment of lasers or guns. I don’t feel a thing. In the morning, over coffee and eggs, I’m exhorted to be an individual. In the afternoon we wash our cars. At night I’m restricted to a relatively confined social circle. The cat climbs in and out of empty boxes in the hall. I sleep with the window open and imagine. Tonight a celebrity on television mentions his wife and kids. He tells the camera he spent last year riding a motorcycle around the world. His favorite color is purple and his card is American Express. Tonight I deny my ordinary life. I converse with the very words. I impress myself on men’s hands as I make my way toward the restrooms at the back. I drop my dress on the floor. I chop produce. I pick weeds. I pop a plastic bag for no real A heard number of indications intelligently communicated.
reason. I take advantage of particular events, of particular sentiments, to render a particular series of events. I become detached from the routine of lawn, lawn, office building, lawn or “Bring me milk,” “Bring me sugar.” I say, “Milk me sugar” and “Sugar me milk.” I move through the house and let my kimono slip open, a soaring kimono with silvery cranes and blossoms. I get the mail in my open kimono and meet the neighbors’ stares with my own absence. There are bills and catalogs for garden furniture and candles. There is a letter written as a kind of crazy joke, it’s a sort of contest, a contest. It’s easily stirred. I leave the bowl on the counter and the bugs find it. “You’re filthy,” it says. It amounts to nothing. The season, as it progresses, becomes un-collective and un-plural. I acquire a certain understanding with the abandoned swimming pool in the park. It contains a distinctive temperature, a soft molecular surge. In bed I can feel it (strange nighttime rhythms). In the morning a pebble sinks (pebbles and crows). Meanwhile, the evening news is a whole nightmare of the future involving underground laboratories and weather. What is buried in our thoughts is self-evolving. Out there is a continuity of something; it is secretly allowed to cross borders and nations. The book in my hands says, “You wouldn’t like to live on a coral reef but sometimes you would.” I cool my face against the beveled edge of the glass table in the living room. I stand on the table and look out the window. I bruise my leg on the glass edge. So I carry my work into another room where there are decadent lamps and signs of Egyptology as a hobby. Apparently, we are vulgar populizers of the superficial. Sometimes we don’t even know it’s happening. Other times I feel it rise up in my throat like a genteel wrath. Haywood’s flapping smile is wholly innocent. And what’s left? What one might wonder is: is this fast trip through my own little strip of time my own? Am I on it? One day someone will decode intricately wrapped gifts on the far limits of the tabletop: glass grapes, bunches of plastic marigolds, a blue plate, a white plate, a heaping pile of fallen petals. In the movie of my life I’ll play myself, from a distinct past, or a gliding distance, in the garden, under a stone bench, or from the leaves like a watchtower. It’s enjoyable
—the rising and falling of large ideas we play off against our bodies. Like that thing there, can I put it in my up or down? There are breakfast plates, a fork, a knife, a chunk of bread, paper napkins, a banana sliced in half and standing on end. Later, on the same table, there’s a chocolate bar wrapped in blue-and-silver foil, a pear. I stand in my house. I collaborate with the window and fill it optimistically with my figure or silhouette, which is somewhat rewarding. Other days I am ragged and gross. I move into the night and arrive at stones. Then I move southward through an idealized artificial system. I attempt to single-handedly reinvigorate the relationship between people and place. I shake myself on the sidewalk like a dog. I am prominent and astounding, but everyone else is asleep. I stand in the light from lampposts and point at revivals of traditional architecture, landscape scenarios, bifurcations of community, etc. All the houses have at least one door. The initial idea wasn’t ours, but we’ve incorporated it totally. When I get home Haywood is in bed. There is a pain in his chest and he does not choose to perform for me. I eat cake and stand in front of the window in the kitchen. There is something in the backyard, in the dark, so I go outside and squat in the grass, but whatever it is runs away from me. In the morning we go back to the kitchen to eat breakfast. First, one person gets up and goes into the bathroom. Then someone else showers in the bathroom after dinner. In this way, each moment corresponds to a different room. On the evening news they show clips from the nation’s largest machine-gun show. There are vendors selling automatic weapons with mass-market appeal and teenage boys in camouflage spraying bullets at an old Cadillac. Families walk by the camera smiling and waving and eating chunks of meat or corn. There are baseball hats and ski-caps and ponytails that sway and look soft. Then the reporter interviews a man with a metal cashbox and a rif le over his shoulder. Later Haywood and I sit in a swing and look out at all our grass. A bird sings at us from his perch in the tree, but the nests he builds will fall into the pool when it rains. There are all sorts of flowers in the hedges: edible, highly scented and purple, and red clogs for gardening. If stitched
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Danielle Dutton
An owl plunges from the branches toward the asphalt and via a series of similar accidents I lose my head. The following week there is a documented sexual encounter on that very sidewalk. Two people embrace in full daytime view of a wide range of neighbors. These are people we know, but do not know. So I step away from the window and breeze past a lot of furniture.
together, the lawns on this street would be pointless and unrecognizable. Three houses down, one hostess serves champagne and eggs. She carries cupcakes on small trays and the wallpaper in her kitchen is a repetitious pattern of carrots and peas. I keep trying to lie down on all her furniture. Around midnight Haywood and I lock our door with a bolt. We have the right to choose which bodies will enter this special community and which bodies will be denied entrance. For example, there are carefully maintained areas devoted to leisure, areas that measure more than five feet across and that are bounded by special functions. But that’s just it. Sometimes it seems this place is an assortment of ordinary, illiterate people who grew up eating crops. Sometimes we root ourselves in limitations that seem relatively straightforward. The main difference is that if you never leave you are always already here. Sometimes it’s exhausting, or sometimes it’s straightforward in a blank way, like fear. Meanwhile, Haywood is poised between one great idea and one general. I feel his frustration like the brainless grace of a goose capsizing. Then again, it’s as if he admires how I sit in the dark in the midst of my failures. He wants me to. But I sit on the porch under an abstract specimen of sky, stretched out. I continue reading: “‘Good God’ she cried, ‘the violets down below!’” What he finally decides is that what we have is a kind of awkwardness worth saving. His systematic attempts to be a husband are my instructions for the next few hours. We move behind the couch where he presses his fingers against my neck. He puts his toes in my vagina. “Good God,” I cry. I lean against the wall. My face is probably magnificent. My cunt in the moonlight. Afterward, we eat pasta with cream and only use one bowl. Haywood leaves his shoes on the kitchen floor. He showers downstairs. I stand in the living room in front of the open window. The sidewalk grows bigger and bigger. I see it reaching up through the window, growing bigger in the moonlight. “How do I Infants. Pursuing them. Evokes our treatment of intoned structure.
look?” it asks. We could take a train together and disappear in the city outside. It’s impossible; it lies outside the envelope of my own special case. So in a little while I lose my head on the sidewalk, in the lamplight. An owl plunges from the branches toward the asphalt and via a series of similar accidents I lose my head. The following week there is a documented sexual encounter on that very sidewalk. Two people embrace in full daytime view of a wide range of neighbors. These are people we know, but do not know. So I step away from the window and breeze past a lot of furniture. I breeze past a table in the corner covered with knick-knacks. I return Haywood’s shoes to their appropriate spot. I straighten one framed photograph on the wall and place a pitcher of water, several kiwis, and a dozen or so blue petals on the edge of a different table in a completely different room. Then I sit down and push the tablecloth away from me, about two feet away, and wipe the surface with a wet yellow sponge. For lunch I eat several olives, a quail, three loaves of bread, and a sausage, and then I read through old letters in full view of the city, or in the garage. My views move to another room, always different, sometimes, or individual, a pull of some history (tonight the presence of a storm). But the letters carry on, hoping to probe our smoothed-out sense of self. They augment an unstatic perception. I watch the city through the gaps in trees. The city is an actualizing background for all kinds of arbitrary treatments. On the edge of my view is a communication, a light, a quick boom. I pretend to be increasingly deaf— in this way I put Haywood in a little book in the dark. I can’t pass it. I can’t possess it. I defeat myself in an afternoon, so I stalk monarchs across the lawn with a net. One kid says, “Happy birthday!” Another kid says, “Trick or treat.” The social-historical importance of this place is tenuous, and thus, necessarily, has a clear and definite aim. I produce documentary objects: Historical Varieties (i.e., Verities), apple pies, sexual feelings. Seen from
above, there is a peculiar pattern to our expansion: neighborhoods snake around supermarkets, hospitals, airports, malls. It’s wanting to not be left behind. Houses shimmer together with the weather. There’s a kind of earthy gravity to the weather. I uncover this fact by accidental research. I figure I might have an internal architecture, with buttresses, abundance, possibility, or an intestinal space in which nothing works the way it should, like buildings built on botanical models, or buildings based on your own dna, or whole rooms built to laugh in, or sticky gardens with the usual material but brighter, or more dull. On the kitchen counter are faded lily stems, white-faded, translucent in water, and tipped over, with yellow-orange spores streaking the cabinet to the floor. Nothing I do can deceive; the curtain is rendered convincingly in relation to the stereo with its red blinking lights, the heavy desk, the rug and couch. It’s all in the eye, the beauty of the suburbs, its sharp, whitish light, the lack of logical relationships; it’s been written about in local circles or schools. It’s a corner of nature demonstrated by bulldozers, machines, tractors, etc. It’s been recorded on accident, on film or video to preserve the years, the human marks, signs of light and air, an intuitive kind of creativity. Meanwhile, Haywood is undergoing subtle changes. He mumbles quietly in unknown parts of rooms. I watch from shrubs. I stand in front of the washing machine and eat a blood orange off a small white plate. I leave the plate and the peel on the edge of the counter and drink water from a tumbler and wipe my hands on my pants. Then I take the warm laundry out of the dryer and carry it into the living room. This is a program inaugurated over a century ago and handed down, which may help to account for its differences from other work that it resembles. These are private routines not visible in census data. I locate my body by grounding it against the bodies of others. I am interested in knowing about all the possible thresholds. Walking through the mall there is a scene in which a woman in red leans forward to hand an item of purchase to a man in a brown coat who stands behind a table covered in folded sweaters of various colors and wicker baskets filled with rolled silk ties under which a small child sticks his hand into a plastic bag
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first proof
Haarlems Starry Night, 2010, acrylic and ink on gelatin silver print, 13 Ă— 8.9 inches.
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Sebastiaan Bremer
InvasĂľes Holandesas, 2009, ink on Lamda print, 46 Ă— 45.5 inches.
Read an interview with Sebastiaan Bremer by Shoshana Dentz at BOMBsite.com.
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Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, 1973, performance view, musÊe galliera, paris. photo by Beatrice Heiligers.
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2005, performance view, Dia:Beacon, New York. Photo by Paula Court.
Lines in the Sand, 2002, performance view, Documenta 11, Kassel. Photo by Werner Maschmann.
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ART / JOAN JONAS
Joan Jonas by Karin Schneider
Left Side , Right Side, 1972, video, Total running time: 7 minutes. all images Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert gallery Paris, New York.
This past spring Joan Jonas’s Mirage was on view at MoMA, her Reading Dante III at Yvon Lambert Gallery, and Drawing/Performance/Video at Location One in SoHo. In this interview, I investigate with Joan the significance of her performances and installations by stressing her ideas-in-form. What kind of form: modernist poetry. Jonas’s language gives us a fertile semiological value to reflect upon. It has an organic open-work structure of experimentation that necessitates play along with a system of signs. Its mythology offers a visual image of a new Gestalt. In the formation of this new Gestalt, constructed from fragmented parts of the old one, Jonas dismembers the beholder’s experience of his/her relationship with the work. We become responsible for the production of the work’s meaning through a plurality of entrances and experiences, actively participating in its birth. The physical, parallel realities of this unfamiliar game embody a free play between the artist/writer/performer and the beholder/reader/participator wherein we encounter ourselves as a “subject-in-process.” Jonas extracts a sub-language from her readings of (non)chance encounters with texts—from fairy tales to The Divine Comedy—creating physical experiences with her (in)visible sentences that acquire a body produced by multiple threads: minimal gestures, a careful reading/writing/behaving of texts, organic hide-and-seek drawings, dilatory sounds, floating lights, handmade objects, snaking continuous movements, acoustic images, and lumen drawings in dark rooms. Although we are still (un)consciously negotiating the return of the repressed in the formation of language, in this meta-art there is the possibility of re-investing in our experience of the a/object. In this productive labor between artist/ participator and production/consumption, a free-willing sign blurs and discharges language into a fresh signification. The base of the experience relies on negative utterance; Jonas frees us from cultural associations without arriving at any definitive closure that might reduce its signification. —Karin Schneider K arin schneider: In your current exhibition at Location One, there are six monitors showing your video. Pieces made in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s; one
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BOMB 112
Edward Droste by Rick Moody
Photo by Tom Hines.
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music / edward droste
I had a conversion experience with Grizzly Bear, one having to do with their single “While You Wait for the Others,” which unexpectedly features a version with lead vocals by none other than Michael McDonald—former Doobie Brother and soul legend. I’d heard their 2006 album Yellow House in passing and had taken note of last year’s Veckatimest upon its release, but I’d missed, as one does sometimes, all the nuance, all the subtlety, until I heard McDonald doing his soul thing while the four voices of Grizzly Bear took up the descant choir behind him. A sudden obsession followed near thereupon, and I went back to find Yellow House ludicrously grand in its ambition and that Veckatimest solidified the confidence of that earlier effort and added strings and chorus here and there, as well as new production clarity and more electric guitar, all of it indicating to me how rewardingly far “indie rock” had come since the days of Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. Maybe Horn of Plenty, the first Grizzly Bear album, had a little of the off-kilter slacker charm of indie rock, especially since it is mainly an Edward Droste solo project, but by the advent of Veckatimest, all was picture-perfect arrangement, writing, and ensemble playing. Thus: I was, as an example of the recently converted and fully appreciative, excited to interview Droste, lead singer and one of the two principal writers in the band even more so when I learned that he’d also been a creative-writing student at NYU after leaving Hampshire College. Our conversation took place at an Italian joint in Greenpoint, the neighborhood whose latitudes include Droste’s residence. He is taller than you’d think, easy to talk to, full of enthusiasms and wonder at the strangeness of the world, and not at all preoccupied with the music business. He’s just a creative and, to use the word that comes up often here, intuitive guy. I think we could have talked another couple of hours without any difficulty. —Rick Moody Rick Moody: Could you start by explaining what happened at Hampshire College that made you leave after a year? What went wrong? Edward Droste: I took a year off after high school and did the classic “see the world” thing. I don’t know what I’d be doing now if not for that year. I did an art program in Italy and Greece. I lived with a family in Zimbabwe doing community service. I did some backpacking. By the time I got to Hampshire after a full 12 months, it felt like a small, irritating environment. I remember a guy on my floor who would always play didgeridoo in such a way so that you had to step over him and his didgeridoo to get to the communal bathroom. He’d look at you longingly, waiting to be asked, “What is that?” or told, “I can’t believe you play the didgeridoo!” I was extremely depressed there. RM: Because it was so small? ED: It felt remote and isolating. Developmentally
I was dealing with some personal stuff, like coming out of the closet, so it was a transitional period. RM: You also studied writing at NYU. ED: I went to Gallatin, where every class is based on a canon of literature. RM: You had to know your Aristotle? ED: Yeah, of course. My memory will fail if you were to quote any to me. (laughter) And I got to do creative writing there. RM: The writing, that’s part of what I really wanted to talk about. Was it fiction writing? ED: No, mostly creative nonfiction. I don’t even do it anymore. When I was in school, I thought it would be great to write for The New Yorker or the Paris Review. RM: Can you give an example of your kind of creative nonfiction? ED: They were on the personal essay tip. Generally true, though not always completely. I never had the chance to write in any professional sense. Do you only write fiction? RM: I’ve done both. I once published a memoir, and these days I’m mostly writing music essays, actually. But enough about me. Did the NYU years include the famous moment when your mom said, “Take that guitar back to your dorm room and get it out of the house”? ED: Basically. But I didn’t start writing music until after college. I wrote some God-awful stuff in high school; glad there are no recordings of that. RM: Your mother teaches music and your grandfather ran the music department at Harvard. So there was a lot of music around when you were growing up. ED: I had a great relationship with music, with that weird Brahmin WASP accent, which my grandfather had, by the way. The stuff I was surrounded with was Benjamin Britten and Randall Thompson—that’s what my grandfather listened to. Also classic vocal jazz. RM: Ella Fitzgerald? ED: Yeah. Louis Armstrong. “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” My grandfather was very into us gathering around a piano and singing. Before dinner, after dinner, gather ’round! I remember friends being mildly mystified by the weird olden-day style of togetherness. My parents generally listened to classical and choral music, but could even get into Crystal Gayle-like stuff. But everyone around me had Thriller. We were no exception to that rule. The second you start having tastes as a kid they’re generally kid tastes: my first concerts were Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation tour (laughter), U2’s Achtung Baby, whatever was on the radio. Then in eighth or ninth grade I discovered Pavement, Liz Phair, and Jeff Buckley. The discovery of my own taste. RM: In the time of liking Pavement, did you repudiate things like Benjamin Britten? ED: You know what? I think I had completely forgotten about it. My bandmates brought me back to that
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jennifer egan by Heidi Julavits
Photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux.
In early 2003 I lived on the same street as Jennifer Egan, and, knowing her not really at all, but admiring her a lot, I’d mailed my second book to her house, praying she’d feel some vague neighborliness toward me and donate, to my sorry cause, a blurb. A writer always suspects (because it is true) that she is deeply inconveniencing, even temporarily ruining, the life of another writer when she asks for a blurb. To my mortification, I learned that the writer of whom I’d requested this favor had just given birth to a baby. A few days later I ran into Egan with her justhome-from-the-hospital baby. Before I could offer congratulations, she blurted out, “I’m so sorry I haven’t had a chance to read your book yet!” Egan’s niceness isn’t the crucial take-away from this anecdote, at least if you’re trying to meaningfully connect Jenny Egan the Person with Jennifer Egan the Writer. The take-away should be this: both Egans are unceasingly and penetratingly curious about the headspaces of others. To call this impulse empathy, however, is to shear it of its prickly intellectual component. Egan is a superthinky writer in quasi-disguise, a writer who alchemizes Big Ideas into works of emotional intensity and architectural intricacy, the result being sneaky books you can recommend to those friends and relatives who demand “recognizable” characters and thumping storylines, but whom you hope might find tantalizing, beneath these vibrant entertainments, the buzzing circuitry of Egan’s mighty brain. While beginning her career as an ambivalent realist—with her first collection of stories, Emerald City, and her first novel, The Invisible Circus—Egan started breeding her realist ambitions with more postmodern ones. The first result of this textual test-tubery was Look at Me, a semi-satirical critique of the cultural obsession with image and beauty explored through the parallel narratives of two females named Charlotte—one a model in Manhattan, one a teenager in Illinois—unknowingly connected via a man named Z. The Keep, a spooky gothic-inspired castle novel built from multiple levels of storytelling and fictionality, was that much more “out” as a novel with more than the usual realist aims. But I must admit that, adore these earlier Egan books though I did, nothing quite prepared me for the degree of flat-out-flooredness I’d experience (this floor was in a Mexican hotel room) while reading her latest book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Goon Squad defies the who-when-where-why perimeters of jacket copy so completely that any attempt at summation will prove a laughable stab. However. The book follows a group of interconnected characters. Possibly Sasha, a touchingly troubled soul, and her boss, Bennie Salazar, a famous music producer, reside at the center of the plot vortex (but this statement is highly debatable). Each chapter is told from a different character’s POV, though each
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LITERATURE / JENNIFER EGAN
one “recurs” (earlier or later in the book) as a supporting cast member. The book zooms around in time, but defies linearity so completely that I stopped envisioning time as the proverbial arrow on which I dutifully hopped pointward or tailward. In Goon Squad, time is deep, and Egan the literary equivalent of a paleoclimatologist drilling through layers of ice. Each chapter is like an ice core sample and the book, thus, functions more on an ice core timeline, better understood vertically than horizontally. It establishes, without question, that she is one of the most significant living practitioners of the art we call fiction. While Egan tends not to write directly from personal experience, a chapter in Goon Squad takes place in San Francisco, her hometown, around the time when Egan herself was in high school, and, depending on who you believe, hanging out with a punk-loving music crowd much like the one described in her book. —Heidi Julavits Heidi Julavits: So, my spies informed me that you were a “real” punk in high school. Jennifer Egan: I was not a punk in high school. (Ahem, who are these spies?) Except for blonder hair and no wrinkles, I have never looked much different than I do now. I did go to concerts at the Mabuhay Gardens, but always as a wannabe observer. The good news is I didn’t end up shooting heroin with communal needles, as many punks did in the late ’70s, just before AIDS was discovered. HJ: Given how different your early work is from your more recent work, are there anxieties you had when you first started writing that no longer preoccupy you? Do you have new anxieties now? JE: My biggest concern at the beginning was just being understood in a way that, looking back, seems very neurotic. I literally felt as if no one would understand what I was saying, even though I was writing a totally conventional novel. As usual, I had certain theoretical questions I wanted to explore in my first novel: I was interested in how the new mass media interacted with the ’60s counterculture and heightened its intensity, and also in the “out of body” nature of media coverage and the way that might dovetail with a basic human longing for transcendence. I probably hammered those points a little too hard out of a fear of being misunderstood. I was kind of crazy about literary theory in college, I spent way too much time reading texts about texts. More and more I feel you’d better not try and say anything too clearly or too loudly in fiction, because you end up eliminating the mystery that’s at the heart of any great literary experience. I’m also more aware of how I seem to work purely instinctively. For all of my theorizing about culture and the intellectual girding that I hope is in my books, I don’t think a lot about the actual act of writing or the way I’m going to do it. So there’s this
possible overtheorizing in terms of intent but a total lack of theorizing about method. HJ: But it also seems as if you’re trying to expose or question method, especially in “Safari,” a chapter from A Visit from the Goon Squad that I first read in The New Yorker. A term Zadie Smith used in her awesome essay “Two Paths for the Novel” is “not naïve.” There’s something extremely “not naïve” about “Safari.” It features this really overbearing narrator, as if to say without saying, “Look, people, at how lopsided the power dynamic can be in these third-person omniscient so-called realist stories!” Tragically your characters are captives, not of past acts and experiences—from which they could still arguably recover—but of future ones. These flash-forwards are so much more chilling, almost like death sentences—in some cases, that’s literally what they are. JE: I feel like you understand the story better than I do. HJ: (laughter) JE: The principles guiding me in terms of method might seem kind of obvious. With Look at Me, which is more experimental than my first novel, I remember thinking, I’m really tired of the way pages of text look. I wanted mine to look different. I had this feeling of not liking to read a book where you turn these pages and they all look the same. The biggest thing that guides me is a basic attempt to move away from anything that feels familiar. HJ: Meaning anything that’s too close to your personal experience? JE: If I’ve read it or done it before, then I’m not interested. My aesthetic, or my method, is basically guided by curiosity and desire. Again, there’s nothing very sophisticated about that. There’s no theory there. And I don’t know what the novel should be, but I do know that—well, I was a National Book Award judge last year, and I read some great stuff. But I also found myself thinking that a lot of novels feel really constrained and unaware of the possibilities at hand. I find that curious, because the novel began as this explosion of craziness. I mean, look at Cervantes and Sterne. Two of the first novelists. There’s nothing holding them back. They haven’t learned to be afraid to do anything. You do need to be in control, and, in a way, the more chances you’re taking the more you need to control them. But now I feel like the control is coming before the chances. For example, this idea that you can’t change the point of view. What? Why? If you can make it work, you can do anything. HJ: In the past you’ve written books that were clearly short story collections or clearly novels. How do you categorize Goon Squad, genre-wise, in terms of your own past work? Did you start writing it with a category in mind or did that kind of categorizing never influence your thinking? JE: If I had been telling myself I was writing a
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My first encounter with Elizabeth Streb was when a friend brought me to a performance at the Joyce Theater in New York and those of us sitting up close were asked to don helmets and goggles as Streb or one of the dancers in her group dove through a pane of glass, shattering it into our laps. We were more formally introduced when a mutual friend brought me to Thanksgiving dinner in the apartment Streb shares with her longtime partner, Laura Flanders. The scene was chaotic: Streb stirring huge cauldrons of food over a large industrial-grade stove, Streb chopping vegetables Samurai style, practically hurling knives back and forth to others who seemed familiar with this well choreographed whirl. Flames were jumping too high on the stove, loaves of bread were thrown around the room—time flew past, and within the hour a delicious feast was served at a very long table. It was like an elaborate circus act, a magic show of sorts, filled with lots of pratfalls—physical comedy. At some point there was a trick involving eggs—which broke and landed on the floor. Streb loves a good laugh, a random practical joke, to be surprised, caught off guard. More seriously, Streb is one of the most daring thinkers and performers I have ever known. She’s always expanding the boundaries of what can be done with the body, with physics, with gravity. A cross between Emmett Kelly, Albert Einstein, and Martha Graham, she is inspiring, fluid, and lives to think, deeply and profoundly, about quite literally what makes the world spin. Her new book, How to Become an Extreme Action Hero, is blazingly articulate, brimming with ideas on space, time, and movement, like Batman and Robin gave her the secret code on how to explain all that happens behind KAPOW, SPLAT, and ZOWIE. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2003 she established S.L.A.M. (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics) in Brooklyn, which has an open-door policy; the community is encouraged to watch rehearsals, take classes, and learn to fly. Each week, more than 400 children take classes at Streb’s Brooklyn hub—and “streb” has actually become a verb, used to describe her own brand of “pop action.” As in: W hat are you doing? Strebbing! Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome America’s first Pop Action Heroine, Elizabeth Streb. —A.M. Homes A.M. Homes: You’re described as a choreographer and a dancer, but the philosophical, mathematical, and scientific aspects of what you do aren’t really about dance. Elizabeth Streb: They’re not, no. AMH: So how do you begin to describe them? ES: It’s difficult to describe motion’s “objectness” in words. It is interesting to think about how movement gets perceived and to ask, “What is the experience of being a witness to someone who moves?” There’s an integral problem, a lack of serious vocabulary—certainly for dance writers—that tends to cite what your body is
Above: Breakthru, 1997, performed at the Joyce Theater. Below: Deborah Kass, Streb, 1998, silkscreen and acrylic on canvas, 81 × 81 inches. Courtesy of paul kasmin gallery, new york.
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DANCE / elizabeth streb
elizabeth streb by A.M. Homes
doing, not what’s happening to your body, and therefore, how it affects the audience. For me, the subject is an unnamable thing in terms of what the actual, true function of movement as language could be or what content, motion is capable of holding. Every time you sit down to write, you’ve got to think, How am I going to tell this story in a way that no one’s ever heard before? Similarly, trying to invent action with the body that we inhabit everyday—this hackneyed relationship of body to self and all the embedded clichés lurking there—makes speaking of it even more out of reach than the doing. Twenty-five years ago I started constructing a series of questions about what I felt to be an unanswered set of principles in the dance world. Time, space, and body forces, when mixed, act as if a chemical explosion has occurred. They could create such extreme movements that, as a watcher, you’d be forced to experience it as a paradigm shift. What I try to create and present on stage as “Extreme Action Events” has defaulted into the field of dance because it’s based in movement.
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the wick / guy richards smit
Guy Richards Smit, The New Adventures of Grossmalerman, 2010, gouache and ink on paper.