BOMB 119 Preview

Number 119 / Spring 2012 EDITOR’S CHOICE

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ARTISTS ON ARTISTS MICHELLE SEGRE by Huma Bhabha DANIEL WIENER by Alexander Ross SHEILA PEPE by Ryan Johnson

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BOMB SPECIFIC

by Deana Lawson

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THE WICK

by Myla Goldberg & Jason Little

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INTERVIEWS LITERATURE — HEIDI JULAVITS 22

by Fiona Maazel The characters in The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits’s fourth novel, engage in psychic attacks and flash back into other people’s pasts. Julavits, The Believer’s cofounder and editor, chats with fellow novelist Fiona Maazel on these and other uncanny abilities.

on the cover: K8 Hardy, Position Series , Form #13, 2010, C-print with photogram, 20 × 30 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.

ART — CHARLES LONG 28

by Andrew Winer Known for his humanist, sometimes-ecstatic Emersonian foraging through the badlands of modernity, Charles Long makes art that enchants even while it plays with falling apart.

FILM — GERARDO NARANJO and 38 NICOLÁS PEREDA Two of Mexico’s most celebrated young filmmakers talk about their wildly divergent styles. Nicolás Pereda is a prolific minimalist who works with an ensemble of actors. Gerardo Naranjo, known for his highly stylized portraits of disaffected youths, tackles the drug-trade violence in his latest film, Miss Bala.

ART — K8 HARDY 46

by Ariana Reines Our obsession with documentation and web sharing might have caused K8 Hardy to press the stop button on performing, at least for now. With poet Ariana Reines she discusses the runway show she’s producing for the Whitney Biennial.

DANCE — DEAN MOSS 56

by Young Jean Lee The choreographer Dean Moss with one of his collaborators, playwright and director Young Jean Lee, about his early years as the son of civil rights workers and his current work-in-progress, a performance meditation on the abolitionist John Brown.

LITERATURE — INGO SCHULZE 70

by Eliot Weinberger Born in Dresden, Ingo Schulze is one of the most important writers to come out of a reunified Germany.

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CONTENTS

This wide-ranging conversation with essayist Eliot Weinberger goes from terra preta, top-quality Amazonian soil, to the novelist’s protean approach to literary style.

MUSIC — MOHSEN NAMJOO 82

by Shirin Neshat Iranian musician Mohsen Namjoo, now exiled in the US, fuses classical Persian poetry and musical forms with the American blues. He talks with artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.

88 ART — LIZ DESCHENES

by Kathleen Peterson Artist Liz Deschenes and poet Kathleen Peterson continue an ongoing conversation on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a novel that here serves as a springboard for musings on the nature of perception.

First Proof is sponsored in part by Amazon, the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation, and the Thanksgiving Fund.

This issue is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency; and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Supporters include readers like you.

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FIRST PROOF BOMB’S LITERARY SUPPLEMENT Richard Forster with an essay by Colm Tóibín Cristina Rivera Garza Jeremy Sigler Matvei Yankelevich Raphael Rudnik Etgar Keret Mary Jo Bang Zachary Lazar

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BOMB (ISSN 0743–3204) is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December for $22 per year by: NEW ART PUBLICATIONS, INC. 80 Hanson Place, #703 Brooklyn, NY 11217-1506 Periodical postage paid at Brooklyn, NY, and additional mailing offices.

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BOMB HAS RECEIVED A MELLON FOUNDATION GRANT TO SUPPORT PRESERVATION OF AND ACCESS TO PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTATION IN THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY ART We at BOMB are honored to have been awarded a major grant from The Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation to support a multidisciplinary initiative that includes the ongoing digitization of The BOMB Archive as well as the transformation of BOMB’s archives into a fully indexed, searchable online database that will be made available to the public at large free of charge. This large-scale digitization and indexing project will expand the potential for exploration and discovery of the living history that BOMB encapsulates.

Digital Archive History—In the summer of 2007, with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writing Initiative, The New York State Council on the Arts, and BOMB’s Trustees, BOMB re-launched its website, BOMBsite.com, as an online repository for its 1,000 historic artist-to-artist interviews from 1981 to the present. Since its inception, BOMB Magazine has delivered the artist’s voice across genres and generations, and more recently across multiple platforms.

Now available on BOMBsite.com, these in-depth interviews are primary-source material in which artists and writers discuss their creative process.

“This funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation comes at a critical time in our growth, when the exciting potential of the web, both in terms of outreach and capacity, is becoming an integral fact of life. We are grateful for this chance to increase our commitment to the innovative delivery of the artist’s voice, to substantial engagement with a committed audience, and to a history of creative expression. We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its support of this legacy and our future as a platform for the ongoing conversation between artists that BOMB cultivates and produces.”

— BETSY SUSSLER Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, BOMB With additional funding from Mellon, BOMB will launch an initiative to secure digital permissions for all content previously published in the pages of BOMB. In this way, contributions past and present will exist online where our contributors’ work, and its historical connection to other artists over the decades, can be accessed and studied.

Over the last five years BOMB’s digital initiatives have provided greater access to and awareness of the magazine’s archive of interviews, original poetry and fiction, artist projects, reviews, and artists’ essays.

Thanks to new publishing technologies, social media, and digital databases like JSTOR and EBSCO BOMB has become more and more of an online destination for students and scholars, as well as for artists and writers. Now, thanks to the Mellon Foundation, we will be able to offer visitors free access to the complete BOMB archives, which is in keeping with our nonprofit mission of delivering the artist’s voice.

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BOMB’s 31st Anniversary Gala & Silent Auction Honoring

Klaus Biesenbach Marsha Norman Richard Serra Monday, April 30, 2012 Capitale, 130 Bowery, NYC Cocktails, Silent Auction, Seated Dinner Toasters Patti Smith Theresa Rebeck and Hal Foster Co-Chairs Eric Fischl Dana Farouki Agnes Gund Dorothy Lichtenstein Diana Widmaier Picasso

Art for the Silent Auction has been donated by over 50 celebrated contemporary artists.

View the art and place absentee bids at paddle8.com/forgood/bomb Purchase tables or tickets and make contributions at BOMBsite.com/gala Online sale supported by

Editor’s Choice BLESSED MEG STUART / DAMAGED GOODS AND EIRA, 2011 Meg Stuart’s BLESSED, a dance piece performed at New York Live Arts this January, begins and ends with Francisco Camacho, a lone man in flip-flops traversing an artificial paradise. A one-room shelter, a palm tree, and a larger-thanlife swan, all made of cardboard, set the stage for what was soon to be a persistent downpour of destruction. Camacho moves carefully through the space; his joints fold and extend across a singular plane, as if to mirror the flatness of the landscape surrounding him. He slowly walks over to the cardboard shelter, sits, and stares out at us. Then, suddenly, rain begins to fall. And it does not stop.

Structures compromise under the force of the rain—palm fronds shrivel; the swan’s neck collapses; the roof leaks and eventually caves in. Camacho, still sitting in his shelter, reaches for a red spray-paint can and rapidly inscribes an image of the

palm tree and the swan side-by-side on the shelter’s back wall. He attempts to preserve what once was, while simultaneously desecrating all that’s left behind.

Camacho’s representation fails to stand in for the “real,” as representations tend to do. However, in this context, it exposes a slippage in the “artificial” and the “real.”

His swan and palm tree inscription is a copy of an already artificial landscape—a copy of a copy of a copy. While this is one of many poignant yet fleeting moments in BLESSED, it is this act of mimicry that invites the audience to drop into another perceptual space with Camacho, one in which notions of authenticity and context are highly unstable.

BLESSED offers a meditation on what happens when the world around us falls apart, wherein the state of falling apart is the only thing we can come to rely on.

In the darkness, Camacho makes many a failed attempt to find shelter in the now decrepit cardboard. He curls up and shivers in a self-made structure akin to a doghouse. A soaked cardboard blanket

renders him invisible. Later, Camacho is joined on stage by Kotomi Nishiwaki, who is dressed as a Las Vegas showgirl complete with feather headdress and patent leather pumps. In this scene, Camacho’s smile is overstretched and warped with the aid of a dental contraption and Nishiwaki prances gleefully around the stage to an eerie effect. No sooner has Nishiwaki left than the rain pours again.

Camacho’s situation remains unchanged

by Nishiwaki’s brightly distracting spectacle. He is alone in the rain, just as he was before.

BLESSED ends quite like it begins.

Camacho traverses his surroundings with the same careful steps, only this time each impression registers a sorrowful sense of understanding. Just a pile of soggy cardboard remains, and I am left with the feeling that if anything is inevitable about humanity, it is survival.

It is still raining.

— LAUREN GRACE BAKST is a dancer and choreographer. She is also BOMB’s development associate.

Francisco Camacho in BLESSED, 2012. Photo by Ian Douglas.

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Photo by Jill Goldman. Courtesy of Doubleday.

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Heidi Julavits by Fiona Maazel Call me populist, call me lazy, but to help prepare for this interview, I posted on Facebook that I was talking to Heidi Julavits for BOMB and asked if anyone had any questions for her. Turns out they did. “How does she pronounce her last name?” Jewlavitz. “Is she ever going to collect her short stories?” I forgot to ask. “How does The Believer, the magazine she cofounded and edits, continue its reign of excellence?”

I forgot to ask that, too. Other questions came in private and were rhetorical. “Why is she so smart and funny?” “How is she pulling off this career with two kids?” “How does anyone that intelligent also dress that well?” “What does she know that we don’t?” And so, Heidi, who tends to inspire this kind of awe among her readers and peers.

I don’t remember when we first met; I do remember one of the last times we met, at the MacDowell Colony, where I spent our two-day overlap slavishly trying to keep up with her wit, and fledging my girl crush with evidence that I had not, and would not, succeed.

Because what’s most winning about Heidi—in person and on the page—is the alacrity of her mind, the way it will scope the room for what’s of interest and make something memorable of it in about ten seconds.

Memorable, often hilarious, and in all cases shrewd, she is a real thinker, which sounds condescending until you consider the way so much contemporary fiction and—I’m just going to say it—so many women writers refuse to enter arenas of debate or stir us to a sense of bigger things. Refuse to stir or, just as often, are denied the chance. Heidi is a prolific novelist—The Vanishers, which publishes this March, is her fourth book. She is also a founding editor of one the most relentlessly compelling venues for nonfiction extant today, a teacher of literature and creative writing, and, in all these ventures, very much engaged with the big stuff. In her new novel, the big stuff comprises nothing short of identity politics, apprehensions of selfhood, and an allegorical rendering of self-sabotage whose MacGuffin is already pleasingly complex—a girl whose mom committed suicide when she (the girl) was just a month old, and who, at 26, is now vulnerable to assaults of grief. And that’s just for starters. The novel is by turns moving and funny and tanked up with ideas that stay provocative well after the novel ends. We talked about just a few of them in my apartment, over soup and beer and my cat, who kept molesting the recorder as Heidi spoke. Not surprisingly, neither lady lost her cool.

— FIONA MAAZEL FIONA MAAZEL Congratulations on the book. It’s fabulous, and your fourth novel, which means you are enviably prolific, or— HEIDI JULAVITS Enviably mid-career. (laughter) FM So is it getting harder or easier? Does the accumulated wisdom you get from book to book help when you start a new one or does it just get in the way?

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LITERATURE — HEIDI JULAVITS

HJ This novel was by far the hardest one for me to write. Like most people, my life is a gazillion interconnected moving parts held together with bread ties, and right around when I had my second kid, my Rube Goldberg machine totally failed. I was maxed out on every front, and I “lost perspective.” I passed a version of this novel to Bill Thomas at Doubleday in the summer of 2010, thinking it was pretty close to done. And then it turned out that it was not remotely close. Which really unnerved me. It was like learning that your husband was a long-practicing pedophile or something. You’re like, Wait! How could I not have seen what was right in front of my face all these years?! (laughter) I love being edited and I value honest, even depression-inducing, feedback; what unnerved me was that I had so wrongly estimated where I was in the process.

FM So for previous novels you had a much better sense of where you were?

HJ I did! Or at least I think I did. Another reason this book proved such a challenge was because, after writing a number of novels, you’re much more aware of what you can do easily and what you are forever avoiding doing. I was determined this time not to avoid what I’d been forever avoiding, which is earnest, unironized explications of emotion. Whenever I interview other writers, I always ask, “Do you read your own reviews, and have you ever read a review that influenced how or what you wrote in the future?”

FM What a good question.

HJ Years ago I read an interview with Michael Chabon in which he claimed that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay had been inspired by a review of his previous novel, Wonder Boys, about a down-and-out writing teacher. The reviewer complimented him but expressed the wish that Chabon apply his talents and imagination to a bigger canvas. And so Chabon took this as his next challenge. I vowed to remain as open to constructive criticism as he’d been, because look what might happen if you do?

My last book, The Uses of Enchantment, was reviewed by Sarah Kerr in the New York Review of Books, and since then I’ve let my subscription lapse.

(Sorry, New York Review of Books.) I’m not allowed onto the website and thus I can’t read this review again, and I kind of don’t want to, because my memory of it, even if that memory doesn’t factually check out, provided the marching orders for The Vanishers. Kerr said that the book was smart and intricately structured and other nice stuff, but she thought I had it in me to write a book that was more emotionally resonant.

That criticism made a lot of sense to me. It emotionally resonated with me. I’m very aware of preferring oblique and even slightly ascerbic approaches to feeling. But I’d grown tired of that, maybe in part because I’d identified my approach as reactionary. Maybe I

Charles Long by Andrew Winer Visible on a clear day from nearly anywhere in the Los Angeles Basin, Mount Baldy has tended during the last decade to bring to many a mind the singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, who in the ‘90s famously spent five secluded years at its remote Zen Center. But for me that mental association has been erased by the artist Charles Long and the unforgettable conversation he offered me at his Mount Baldy home and studio on a recent January afternoon. The mountain’s one road seemed more threatening than usual when I drove up to see him, and not because its narrow lanes were being fanned by the Santa Anas, those moody winds that harry Southern Californians into states of recklessness or torpor. It was my state of mind.

I’d first met Charles years earlier, when his pop abstractions were winning him acclaim as a sculptor and I was still trying to gain traction in New York as a painter. Though I made a relatively quick exit from the art world in order to embark on a life in letters, my path continued to cross with Charles Long’s, often at crucial junctures for both of us, and—I’ve never told him this—the mere sight of him had the haunting capacity to recall for me my truncated art career. It wasn’t

CHARLES LONG I’ve really tried to get away from attachment to something other than the process. And being on the mountain has something to do with it. Having come from a studio on the Los Angeles River, which presented this tumultuous problem of humans in the natural world and capitalism and manufacturing waste—the work I did reflected all that. That open-ended investigation led me finally to the bird shit pieces, which were really at the bottom. I couldn’t go any further. So leaving that filthy, low space, really the lowest space in LA, and coming to a mountain that’s over 10,000 feet high, was a whole other shift. And what I found here was that the beauty of it, though always inspiring, got messed up when I thought about it as any sort of content for new work. When I did try a few things, like, say, the project I did for the Hammer Museum, with the leaves that had text on them, it ruined my walking in the woods because I would think about the art world instead of just being here. This happened many, many times.

And it led me to think that the most important experiences had to be primary and could not be used for something else.

ANDREW WINER But how do you have primary experiences in your life? And how do you avoid becoming a scavenger from life when you are speaking to this artificial realm of the art world?

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Charles’s fault that he was my doppelgänger. Well, he isn’t anymore—another erasure of our conversation high on the mountain.

I can’t help thinking, in retrospect, of another tonic conversation or, rather, the many conversations that weigh upon the pages of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain as if the sanity and health of the whole mortal flatland world below has been wagered on the outcome of what is said about culture, art, politics, and our human fallibility by a few guys in the rarified air of a mountain sanatorium. I’d like to imagine that Charles’s and my sometimes humanist, sometimes ecstatic, Emersonian foraging through the alkali badlands of modernity and its innutritious scrub of contemporary irony could have fed a few nuts to Mann’s voracious and vocal digestion of his epoch’s bourgeois deficiencies. But perhaps Thomas Mann is the wrong choice here. If his ravishing new work is any indication, Charles Long’s effort to rid himself of his own purposefulness is making him into something more subtle: a secret seer of his time.

— ANDREW WINER

CL The easiest way is to accept it as a natural process. You are permeated and you permeate. You’re mixed up in this thing and it’s flowing through you. And experience is unlimited and never complete. It’s very random, things just drift into your consciousness. Henry James described it as a giant spider web inside the mind suspended in the chamber of consciousness and little motes get stuck here and there in it.

AW Let’s talk about James for a second, because he also says that it is “art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.” And I wonder what that means here?

CL The quote is, “I live intensely and am fed by life. My value, whatever it might be, is my own kind of expression of that.

Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance.”

AW And he goes on to say, “I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”

CL I think he is saying we really are just in the soup. Kippenberger talked about “eating your way through the pudding.”

AW (laughter) CL And he is such a great example of

an artist who didn’t calculate ever—if I may guess—he knew that art strategies were often hollow. And unnecessary. You could just live. And he did it in his own particular way.

AW Do you think the Kippenberger model is one of leaving a trail of your living? An aftereffect of these primary experiences that you value so much?

CL You know, I make so few hardened assumptions about what it is I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I ask these really stupid fundamental art school questions all the time. One of them is: “Is there even something called art?” And I usually answer it through a series of thoughts.

No, there is no such thing as art and the things I make are extremely contrived ritual acts—and I don’t mean in some sort of spiritual sense of traditional ritual. I mean that we do it. But we make these things. And that’s not to diminish the process. There is a view of art as making objects as commentary on something or, by contrast, as an empty, cynical, capitalist gesture, when in fact I look at it as all the more reason for me to do my best, to make an occasion for experience. In contrast to the rest of life’s experiences, it’s actually a very insignificant occasion.

But there is this setup: You are already coming to see this thing; we are talking about it; a bunch of hoopla is being made

Untitled , 2007, papier-mâché, plaster, steel, acrylic, river sediment and debris, 138 × 71 × 34 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, unless otherwise noted.

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ART — CHARLES LONG

Stephanie Sigman as Laura in Miss Bala , 2011. Directed by Gerardo Naranjo. Photo by Eniac Martínez. Courtesy of Cananá Films and Fox International Productions.

Oscar Saavedra Miranda as Goliath in Summer of Goliath , 2010. Directed by Nicolás Pereda. Courtesy of FiGa Films.

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Gerardo Naranjo and Nicolás Pereda Translated from Spanish by Camino Detorrela Gerardo Naranjo and Nicolás Pereda are two great representatives of the thrilling and renovated state of contemporary Mexican cinema. Both of them have been able to establish a personal and vigorous film career in a very short time span. Not an easy task, considering that not so long ago, film careers in Mexico were reserved for very few directors, as the available public funds were scarce and usually went into the same hands.

Pereda has made five feature films: Where Are Their Stories? (2007), Together (2009), Perpetuum Mobile (2010), All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence (2010) and Summer of Goliath (2010). He has found an inexpensive, quick way of making films. In 2010 alone, he made three of his films back-to-back, working with his ensemble actors Teresa Sánchez and Gabino Rodríguez, who play mother and son in most of them. At 29, Pereda was the object of a traveling retrospective presented last year at the Harvard Film Archives in Cambridge, Anthology Film Archives in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archives and the UCLA Film & Television Archive in California, among other places.

GERARDO NARANJO How’s it going, Nico? Are you in Toronto?

NICOLÁS PEREDA Yes, I’m at home. You moved to New York recently, right?

GN Yes. We’ve been here three weeks; we’re dealing with furniture now. It’s exciting.

NP So how should we do this?

GN I’ve got no idea.

NP Why don’t I ask you a few things about the way you work, and then we take it from there?

GN That’s a great solution to our dilemma.

NP What’s your take on creating characters? Do you build them psychologically or only physically?

GN When I started, I based them on people I knew. I kept their names, their flaws. My approach was testimonial.

As I’ve gone forward, I have felt more confident to start with a concept and trust that characters don’t need to explain 39

Naranjo, on his part, has directed four feature films to date: Malachance (2004), Drama/Mex (2006), I’m Gonna Explode (2008), and, most recently, Miss Bala (2011). He also directed a short film for the omnibus feature film Revolución (2010). While his first films, containing multiple allusions to Godard and the French New Wave, are portraits of disaffected youths, Miss Bala represents a dramatic turn for his career—he set for himself high aesthetic goals in his depiction of the drug-trade violence in Mexico, as seen through the eyes of an aspiring beauty queen. The film premiered to great critical acclaim at last year’s Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival and has received wide distribution internationally.

BOMB brought the two directors together for a casual post-Christmas holiday conversation by phone. Both were born in Mexico City and studied abroad (Naranjo at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, and Pereda at York University in Toronto). Each approaches film in a highly distinct aesthetic and narrative way. Pereda loves keeping dialogue to a minimum and employing a minimalist mise-en-scène. Naranjo’s work, on the other hand, is highly stylized and chockfull of film references.

Theirs is a fortunate and original pairing—surprisingly, there’s very little of these types of exchanges between filmmakers in Mexican media.

— CARLOS A. GUTIÉRREZ

themselves much. I can distance myself more from what I already know—that’s my personal challenge now, to not speak about my own life only.

NP That character of a teenage rebel in I’m Gonna Explode, played by Juan Pablo de Santiago, was he based on someone you knew?

GN He’s my Achilles’s heel, the character that has given me the most trouble. He’s a romanticized version of who I thought I was as a teenager. Obviously he ended up having nothing to do with me.

NP Well, he’s not analogous to you, but he was inspired by you.

GN Yes. I needed a pretty container to transmit all the mixed feelings and confusion I had. The container was awesome, I adore Juan Pablo—he’s a very sensitive and believable kid. But he was way better than what I was able to communicate. He ended up coming across as good-natured and “cute,” as gringos say. To bring out his dark side was a true editing adventure. Juan Pablo is a happy kid. That was a big lesson for me in terms of casting— if something’s red you can’t make it blue.

FILM — GERARDO NARANJO AND NICOLÁS PEREDA

NP And what about the female protagonist of I’m Gonna Explode?

GN I do sense in Maria [Deschamps] more danger, gravity. She has the passion that might lead her to do stupid things. I was able to say more through her, I think. It was very difficult for her to make the film, and it shows a bit.

NP I’ve always struggled with what it means to create a character, and I like what you say because it’s as if characters were these living entities that you don’t know very well and therefore you can’t define easily. There are many ways to define your friends and family members, but none of them are concrete, don’t you think? So the school that believes in “building character” presupposes that you can define a person in one page.

GN Yes, there’s the introductory course, the nerdy version of how to build a character: you come up with its past, imagine its likes and its phobias.

NP But beyond the academic part of how to do it, there’s this underlying assumption that a character is definable. The idea in cinema is that you can understand why

K8 Hardy by Ariana Reines

Position Series #53 , 2011, C-print with photogram, 20 Ă— 30 inches. Images courtesy of the artist.

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Position Series Diptych (right selection), 2011, two C-prints, 20 × 30 inches.

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ART — K8 HARDY

When I first met K8 Hardy we were both wearing used fur. Hers was a bouffanty white-rabbit collar, mine was semihideous leopard-print cow-hair boots.

The artist Oscar Tuazon and his wife, Dorothée Perret, editor of the blog Paris, LA, introduced us. It was obvious K8 thought my boyfriend was lame. Charisma and open confrontation are so relaxing, especially when they come from a good, imaginative place. It’s nice to know where you stand. I told K8 I’d do anything she wanted. She said she wanted the Kiehl’s conditioner I’d just been given for my birthday. (I was broke, of course; Oscar and Dorothée know all I need is expensive emollients to feel rich and well loved.) I told K8 to hold out her hand and I squirted about an inch of thick white stuff into it, the best I could do for jizzing. After a few drinks, I realized I’d known her artwork for years and got really excited.

I think of the range of K8 Hardy’s work as totemic.

The objects, outfits, and assemblages she fashions blend elements of the ancestral, the urban, the fuckedup, the uncool, and the gorgeous in Frankensteinian mashups that exert enduring magnetism. There is something uncanny in garments—the way they preserve sometimes exquisite, sometimes nauseating essences of gender and class and race and time and place; the ways they help people to camouflage and

ARIANA REINES So, K8 and I are eating eggs and we’re staring at each other nervously.

K8 HARDY Yeah, I’m just thinking about making up a bunch of lies to tell you . . .

It’s really early in the morning.

AR It’s a perfectly legitimate hour for the honest people.

KH Okay, not that early. (laughter) I don’t have any planned questions for you.

AR You don’t have to ask me anything; I’m interviewing you. Plus, you cooked the eggs. All right. Do you find that your relation to technology, in particular social media, has inflected your art practice?

Do you resist social media or are you attracted to them?

KH I’m very attracted to them, but I mostly resist them. It’s media I could dive into and go completely crazy on. I definitely feel like I am always containing my desire to overshare. I just don’t trust it—the access feels weird and unsafe.

AR This strange combination of intimacy and extroversion is your work’s power.

In contrast with the Internet’s extreme openness, there’s a self-selecting privacy to making a zine on paper. I’m thinking of the limited circulation of your classic Fashionfashion zine from the ’90s, for 48

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to distinguish themselves. There is so much sorrow and hope in clothes, all the pathos and grandeur of an Emma Bovary. Every thrift store garment is a kind of ghost story, and K8 Hardy’s work involves dwelling with ghosts, making them fuck with each other, and then exorcising them. What she does in assembling all manner of identity disjecta membra into costumes and personae becomes a kind of fuel gathering for the catharsis of her blistering, shamanic performances.

“Persona is a reaction to patriarchy,” K8 writes.

The essence of fashion might be optimism, a malleability that makes it possible for misery and ugliness to be transubstantiated, for the traces of a shit social order to be rocked the same way tawdry bling or bland rags can be finessed into an air of fascinating dignity by the right person. Maybe fashion is a kind of “pure affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything,” to borrow a line from John Ashbery. An optimism that’s empty and, therefore, eternal. It’s the obvious pleasure Hardy takes in making her work and also the upward surge of world tatters magically fused to become new horizons of habitable imagination that account for the massive, revolutionary joy in everything she touches and transmutes.

— ARIANA REINES

example, or Frank Peter John Dick, your gorgeous new book of collages—if I had my way it’d be distributed to every teenager in existence as suicide prevention propaganda.

KH Thank you. When I made my first zine, LTTR, there weren’t blogs everywhere, so it didn’t seem like its production was about privacy at all. I haven’t made a zine in years. I do currently feel inhibited on social media. I could tell you why I want to protect myself, but I don’t want it in print.

That sounds a little bit paranoid, but— AR I have a similar feeling. Wait, I just interrupted you. We’re both Scorpios, which means we are both private to the point of paranoia and extremely extroverted. A huge part of your photographs’ power comes from the polarity between a performative intensity and something mysterious and secret that seems to be the origin of it all.

KH Yeah, maybe so. Part of the power of the photographs is about control, about deciding exactly when to reveal something. I have a tendency to open myself up and reveal myself in my work. You know, you’re a writer, so you’re sharing yourself with people in your writing. It’s a generous act and sometimes you have to protect yourself.

AR Technologically there are multiple

ways to exteriorize what you’ve made. But then, according to Paul Virilio, the more devices we have, the more prostheses, the more our bodies become immobilized.

I go through phases of feeling utterly paralyzed by all of the ways that I could turn whatever’s passing through me into a transmittable—if immaterial—thing.

KH Hmm, yes. Prostheses and defecation.

AR Sorry, I’m still absorbing the caffeine and getting over my hangover . . .

I imagine some kind of existence with the Internet that’d be like Jason Rhoades’s Black Pussy show. Did you ever see it?

KH A TV show?

AR No, an art show.

KH That’s stupid! This is like, “The Morning Brain.” A TV show called Black Pussy!

AR Yeah. (laughter) The Rhoades installation was this giant cavern with what seemed a lifetime’s worth of flotsam.

It was wildly inclusive and yet obsessively specific and arranged, blasting taste and chaos in this total archive fever.

Your work blends theoretical confrontation with a hilarious mashup of totems, taboos, and fleeting ultradork directness.

It always feels so fresh and immediate to

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56

BOMB 119

Dean Moss by Young Jean Lee

Audience participants and cast in final tableau of Nameless forest , 2011. Photo

by Julieta Cervantes. Images courtesy of the artist.

57

DANCE — DEAN MOSS

Dean Moss is a brilliant choreographer whose multidisciplinary shows are unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

They never give me that “eating your postmodern vegetables” feel I sometimes get when watching similar work. I find his shows utterly absorbing, and I’m always a little tense when I’m watching because I never know what the performers are going to do to me next, whether it’s inviting me onstage, sitting too close to me, or just doing things onstage that make me uncomfortable. Each show offers its own distinct set of pleasures. For example, in Kisaeng becomes you (2008–2009), a collaboration with traditional Korean dance choreographer Yoon Jin Kim, a group of Korean women invites two audience members onstage for a raucous drinking party that perfectly captures many of my favorite aspects of Korean culture.

YOUNG JEAN LEE Where did you grow up?

DEAN MOSS Tacoma, Washington. I grew up on some property that’d been a chicken farm—my parents bought it and built a house on it.

YJL And you have very interesting parents. Can you talk about them?

DM Both my parents are politicians. My father was mayor of Tacoma, but he was also, for a very long time, a civil rights worker. He established the Urban League there and now has a day and a building named after him. He was the first black city councilman, the first black mayor, the first black county commissioner, and the first black chairman of the Pierce County Council. My mother managed many of his campaigns and was the local director of Planned Parenthood. She became a city councilwoman. They were a real power couple. Much of my childhood was spent marching and campaigning and throwing parties and organizing around civil rights.

Dean has an inherent drive to foster up-and-coming artists, and he has been one of my most important mentors and collaborators. As a collaborator, he gives unstintingly to help bring the creative visions of his fellow artists to life. I’ve been lucky enough to work with him on two of my shows, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (2006) and LEAR (2010). He has also collaborated with sculptor Sungmyung Chun on Nameless forest (2011); and with painter Laylah Ali on figures on a field (2005) and a current work-in-progress, a performance meditation on abolitionist John Brown.

Dean’s work has been presented at museums and performance spaces in New York City and internationally. This upcoming fall it will be part of a performance series at MoMA. — YOUNG JEAN LEE

DM My parents had a whole support system around them. But my brother and I were doing the civil rights thing in our local school and felt that we had nobody around us. So there was a cantankerous relationship with society and also expectations from our parents for us to do well in school, to become professionals. Plus, my brother and I were combative since one of us wasn’t old enough to put a protective wing around the other. We competed for everything. By second grade I had separated myself from the rest of the class. I had the easel on one side of me, and the chalkboard on the other, so that nobody could see me. I felt like I was being stared at all the time and I didn’t want that.

YJL Was that true?

YJL How were you different from your classmates?

DM One brother, and one sister who was adopted and died about three years ago.

YJL I’m so sorry to hear that. I didn’t know. What order were you?

YJL It didn’t matter that your parents were such bigwigs?

DM I was the first; my brother was born about 14 months after. My adopted sister was six years younger than me.

DM We’re talking late 1950s and the early ’60s. It was a dangerous time. My father became mayor in the mid-’70s.

YJL Were you a typical older child—obedient, responsible?

YJL Were you a good student?

DM Hmm, I guess . . . no.

YJL Why am I not surprised?

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BOMB 119

YJL What were you into when you were a kid? Besides, you know, defying authority. Were you a jock?

DM I mean, I was seven. (laughter)

DM Just race. I went to a reasonably good public school. A suburban white school. That was at a time when little kids would say, “You can’t visit my house,” or, “Come visit me before my parents get home because they don’t like black people.” (laughter)

YJL How many siblings do you have?

I acted out, was suspicious of authority—that was built into the family and the civil rights movement. So the teacher was an extension of that authority. For me, the tempering of socialization took a long time, a lot of church going, and working with good teachers. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Gardner, made me president of the science club. She put me in a position of authority, so that year I did very well in school. Then, when busing started in junior high, things got really difficult again because my friends were a few white kids and not any of the black kids that were coming in. That tension magnified the isolation.

DM Socialization is the whole point of grade school—that and learning your basics. That was difficult for me. Once I bit a teacher really hard and drew blood.

DM I wasn’t! I was a nerdy, geeky kind of guy. I wasn’t popular. I liked Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. I was good at science and math. I thought I was going to be a marine biologist— YJL Wow. Were you good at English?

DM Horrible.

YJL What?! What about art?

DM I was good enough at art that I didn’t even think about it. My parents had friends who taught art in the summer— I took watercolor and drawing. I thought my parents wanted to be artists—they brought an environment of creativity to the house very early on. My father would do abstract paintings. One of my earliest loves was Picasso. I was exposed to that very early, but it was all part of the civil rights movement. We were going to a Unitarian church, where we came in contact with very progressive people.

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FIRST PROOF

BOMB’S LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Contents

IV — Richard Forster Cover Portfolio, with an essay by Colm Tóibín VIII — Cristina Rivera Garza The Carpathian Mountain Woman XII — Jeremy Sigler Plankticus #372 XIII — Matvei Yankelevich Excerpts from Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt XVI — Raphael Rudnik From On the Train XX — Etgar Keret Simyon XXII — Mary Jo Bang Canto XXXIV of Dante’s Inferno: A Translation XXVI — Zachary Lazar Meyer Lansky Breaks His Silence

On the cover: Richard Forster, Incoming Sea’s Edge Jan 5 2010 1130-1137 AM, graphite and acrylic medium on card, 14 parts, 17 7/10 × 11 4/5 inches each. Images courtesy of the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

This issue of First Proof is funded, in part, by Amazon, the Bertha and Isaac Lieberman Foundation, and the Thanksgiving Fund.

Additional funding is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and readers like you.

II

FIRST PROOF

Richard Forster

Portfolio

Richard Forster’s drawings have an extraordinary purity.

He works with absolute rigor and seriousness to create images which are instantly startling in the display of an exquisite talent, and then begin to repay the most careful and detailed scrutiny. He is interested in texture, finish, pattern, and essence, but also in allowing the viewer to experience the very process of drawing itself, its tentative and exploratory nature. His surfaces are thus deeply ambiguous in that they have a luscious, almost luxurious interest in tonal variety, and they also manage to be spare, almost severe. Forster is interested in time, setting himself a measure of time, usually a week, to make a drawing, and then capturing what happens in time—how the sea surges and withdraws in time, how building work is done in time, how the drawing itself freezes and evokes a moment in time. He plays with the hard-edged line, with the torn line, and with layers of remove and engagement, both technical and emotional. His work makes clear that he has put a great deal of thought into how to manage beauty; he makes images that resist its soft, easy sway, but seem filled with a strange sorrow which makes the afterglow of these drawings extremely powerful.

— Colm Tóibín

IV

FIRST PROOF

Twenty-Four Stills from archival video witnessed in Bauhaus, Dessau, 7 Jan 2010, graphite and acrylic medium on card, 24 parts, 17 7/10 Ă— 11 4/5 inches.

VI

FIRST PROOF

Cristina Rivera Garza Translated from Spanish

by Alex Ross rite this. We have burned all their W villages rite this. We have burned all their W villages and the people in them rite this. We have adopted their W customs and their manner of dress — Michael Palmer, “Sun”

“I f irst came here 20 years ago,” I answered softly as I pretended not to notice his intense blue gaze. He didn’t believe me. That’s what I assumed— that he didn’t believe me; so I went on to tell him I’d arrived on the back of a grey donkey with a bit of food and a couple of notebooks. He put a blade of grass between his teeth and said nothing. The hint of a smile between his lips. The sky as blue as his eyes. The wind.

“And you’ve been dressing like a man ever since?”

I remembered how he had taken me: violently. A stray longing in each hand. A private fury. His fingers like can openers in my mouth. How long I had gone without seeing an artifact like that! I remembered the smell of his sweat, vaguely carnivorous. And the bitter taste of his cheeks. Still bent over the river and still pretending not to see his intense blue gaze, I told him it was better to live alone as a man. He didn’t ask me why I said that. He picked up his small leather satchel and started to leave. I counted his steps without turning to look at him. When he got to number 23, he hesitated. He turned around.

“Will you wait for me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, still bent over the river water. I put my hand in the current and pulled out a smooth, round stone.

I held it in front of me as if it were a mirror. Then I slipped it into the righthand pocket of my trousers. I thought I wanted to remember that afternoon.

I thought the stone was in place of the stranger.

I never knew why I had mentioned VIII

FIRST PROOF

The Carpathian Mountain Woman that f igure—20 years. I also didn’t know what it was he’d made me promise to wait for.

Before choosing my destiny, I had read about them. A strange book, half history and half legend. A book from a library in the city. I read it immoderately, as I used to do in those days. With the moistened tip of my index finger perpetually poised to turn the page, I forgot to eat. I only stopped occasionally to get a drink of water, but I never actually drank it; as soon as I put the rim of the glass to my lips, I would become distracted again. Something urgent called to me from the across the room, and I answered the call. Before closing the book, I had already made up my mind: I would leave that place—that kitchen, that library, that city. I would become someone else. One of them. It’s difficult to explain why one does the things one does. But everything happened just like it does in books: I left that place, and, almost without a plan, I showed up in a small village where they needed men.

I put on my new clothes and committed myself to a life of celibacy. And they, who were so few, bowed their heads when I passed.

The stranger showed up in front of my door one day at around noon. He didn’t arrive, as I once had, on the back of a donkey, but on the battered seat of a military vehicle. A mud-spattered windshield. Four thick tires. A torn canvas roof. The letters on the door made no sense to me, but the words he spoke to me did. He asked me for water, and, since I didn’t move, he opened his canteen and turned it upside down.

“Do you u nder sta nd me ? ” he repeated, with growing exasperation, “I need water.”

I hadn’t seen anyone like him for a long time. His gestures, so childlike, so unnecessary, moved me. He seemed to be afraid of dying.

“Where are you from?” I asked him, trying to make him feel less uncomfortable as he stood there in the doorway.

Perhaps I was already trying to dissuade him, to distract him. I’ve never known how to get rid of people. When he gave a start, which he attempted to conceal, I realized that he couldn’t see me well. My house, like all mountain houses, was small and dark. Later, he would refer to it as “the shack.” Cool in the summer, warm in the winter.

That’s why our houses are that way.

“So you’re a woman,” he whispered in a tone expressing both surprise and amusement. His body was blocking the sun, so I couldn’t see him well either.

I didn’t know how to answer. Then he crossed the threshold. A long and voluminous stride. I was very slow to react.

He talked about the war. When he finished gulping down the water, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and sat down at the table. He asked for food. He asked for more.

“What’s that?” he asked when he heard the sound of the bells.

“A mass,” I said as I set a plate with pieces of meat in front of him. “Part of a funeral,” I murmured later.

He ate the same way he had drunk a few m i nutes ea rl ier : Eagerly.

Voraciously. He ate the food with his hands and he lifted it to his mouth without turning to look at anything else. Then he chewed and swallowed noisily. Then he sucked his f ingers clean.

When he’d had his fill, he began to talk. He lit a pipe and talked, without stopping, about the war. The words flowed from his mouth just as the food had entered it a few moments earlier: in a deluge. He told about the years of his life. He saw the adolescent he had been, thoughtful and serene. He heard gunshots, the echo of gunshots. He felt thirst. A relentless sun once more wrinkled his skin, blinded his eyes, dried his lips. He swallowed dirt. He desperately craved the taste of salt on his tongue.

He allowed himself to be hypnotized by color of fire. He walked for entire nights, climbing hills and descending them again, soaked with urine and with fear. He shot. He closed his eyes

Matvei Yankelevich Excerpts from Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt

I Eucalyptus leaves stir, a slow tremble outside the automobile factory. There is a world, an image completely undisturbed by speech. The article definitely missing from the gates.

VW crossing the plaid field.

You could say “of vision” but you don’t. There is a world, a repetition completely undisturbed by rhyme. The soccer player breaks his ankle thanks to the game he loves.

Small sacrifice. Poor trees— knowing so little of their own tragedy: To sway, to shake in the wind, to sough and bow.

XIII

JEREMY SIGLER / MATVEI YANKELEVICH

Raphael Rudnik

From On the Train

By his early thirties, Raphael Rudnik was acknowledged as one of America’s most promising young poets. He had been selected as a Guggenheim Fellow and was the first recipient of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, whose judges, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and M. L. Rosenthal, all showered praise on his work. John Cheever, who met Rudnik at Yaddo and became a lifelong friend, called Rudnik “one of the most brilliant poets of his generation.” Some time after the publication of his first two books—A Lesson from the Cyclops (1969) and In the Heart of Our City (1973) —Rudnik began writing a long poem.

Frank 207, another volume of poetry, appeared in 1982, but from then on his energies were focused on the poem he by then called On the Train. Over the last ten years of his life, Rudnik lived in subsidized housing in Brooklyn and subsisted on social security and occasional support from his friends. What’s more, he suffered from emphysema and other ailments that severely restricted his activity. Nonetheless, he worked on his poem every morning.

By the spring of 2009, Rudnik knew his health was deteriorating rapidly, so he made an intensive effort to finish On the Train. Just days before his death, he told his friends he had completed his final revisions. However, he was utterly flummoxed by simple computer operations like cutting and pasting and naming and saving files. What’s more, bizarre formatting errors found their way into his manuscript—sudden changes of font, font size, switches from boldface to italics to typographical symbols—a chaotic visual hodgepodge that would exasperate any editor.

At Rudnik’s death the question remained: did a finished version of On the Train exist? Fortunately, Paul Auster, one of Rudnik’s oldest and dearest friends, stepped in to pull together the jumbled formatting and drafts that Rudnik had left in his computer. Auster selected the best version of redundant passages, but his interventions went no further—not a word has been added or changed in this poem of over 6,000 lines.

Rudnik lived with On the Train for the better part of three decades. It was so braided into his daily life, so lifegiving to him, that it is unlikely that he would have ever allowed himself to complete it. In this sense, one can say that On the Train is unfinished, that it could never be finished. Nevertheless, in his last days, Rudnik expressed satisfaction that his work was done. What follows are the opening pages of his remarkable poetic project.

— Robert Hamburger

XVI

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Etgar Keret Two people were standing at the door.

A second lieutenant wearing a knitted yarmulke, and behind him, a thin officer with sparse, light-colored hair and captain’s bars on her shoulders.

Orit waited a minute, and when she saw that they still weren’t saying anything, she asked if she could help them.

“Druckman,” the captain tossed the word, part command, part reprimand, at the soldier. “It’s about your husband,” the religious soldier mumbled at Orit. “Can we come in?” Orit smiled and said that this must be some kind of mistake because she wasn’t married. The captain looked down at the wrinkled note she was holding and asked if her name was Orit, and when Orit said yes, the captain said politely but firmly, “Could we come in for a minute anyway?” Orit led them into the living room of the apartment she shared with her roommate.

Before she had a chance to offer them something to drink, the religious soldier blurted out, “He’s dead.” “Who?” Orit asked. “Why now?” the captain rebuked him. “Can’t you wait a second for her to sit down? To get herself a glass of water?” “I apologize,” the religious soldier said to Orit, clenching his lips in a nervous twitch. “This is my first. I’m still training.” “It’s all right,” Orit said, “but who’s dead?”

“Your husband,” the religious soldier said. “I don’t know whether you heard, but this morning there was a terrorist attack at the Beit Leed junction...”

“No,” Orit said, “I haven’t heard. I don’t listen to the news. But it doesn’t matter anyway because this is a mistake. I told you, I’m not married.” The religious soldier gave the captain a pleading look. “You’re Orit Bielsky?” the captain asked in a slightly impatient voice. “No,” Orit said, “I’m Orit Levine.” “Right,” the captain replied. “Right. And in February two years ago, you married First Sergeant Simyon Bielsky.” Orit sat down on the torn living-room couch. The inside of her throat was so dry that it itched. On second thought, it really would’ve been better if that Druckman had waited till she got herself a glass of Diet Coke before starting. “So I don’t get it,” the religious soldier whispered out loud, XX

FIRST PROOF

Simyon “is it her or isn’t it?” The captain signaled him to shut up. She went over to the kitchen sink and brought back a glass of water for Orit. The water from the faucet in the apartment was disgusting. Orit always thought water was disgusting, especially the water in the apartment. “Take your time,” the captain said, handing Orit the glass. “We’re in no rush,” she said, and sat down beside her. They sat like that, in absolute silence, until the religious soldier, who was still standing, started to lose his patience and said, “He didn’t have any family here, you probably know that?” Orit nodded.

“They all stayed in Russia or the CIS, or whatever they call it now. He was completely alone.” “Except for you,” the captain said, touching Orit’s hand with her own dry one. “Do you know what that means?” Druckman asked, sitting down on an armchair across from them. “Shut up,” the captain hissed at him. “You idiot.” “Why an idiot? ” the religious soldier asked, insulted. “We’ll have to tell her in the end anyway, so why drag it out?”

The captain ignored him and gave Orit an awkward hug that seemed to embarrass them both. “Have to tell me what?” Orit asked, trying to extricate herself from the hug. The captain let go, took a slightly theatrical deep breath, and said, “You’re the only one who can identify him.”

She’d met Simyon for the first time on the day they got married. He was serving on the same base as Assi, and Assi always used to tell her stories about him, how he wore his pants so high that every morning he had to decide which side to put his prick on, and how every time they listened to the regards-to-soldiers radio program, when the announcer said something like “To the cutest soldier in the army,” Simyon would always tense up, as if the message was 100 percent for him.

“Who could be sending regards to that schmuck?” Assi would say, laughing.

And that’s the schmuck she married.

The truth was that she’d suggested to Assi that he should be the one to marry her so she wouldn’t have to serve in the army, but Assi said no way, because a fictitious marriage to a boyfriend was

never completely fictitious, and it was a sure way to mess things up. He was also the one who suggested Simyon. “For a hundred shekels, that moron would even make you a baby,” Assi said with a laugh. “For a hundred shekels, those Russians would do anything.” She told Assi that she had to think about it, even though in her heart she’d already agreed. But he’d hurt her feelings when he said he wouldn’t marry her. She was just asking him for a favor, and a boyfriend should know how to help when he’s needed. Besides, even if it was only fictitious, it was no fun being married to a schmuck.

The next day, Assi came home from the base, planted a wet kiss on her forehead, and said, “I saved you a hundred shekels.” Orit wiped the saliva off her forehead and Assi explained, “That moron will marry you for free.” Orit said that seemed a little suspicious and they had to be careful, because maybe that Simyon didn’t really understand what the word fictitious meant. “Oh, he understands all right,” Assi said, and started foraging around in the refrigerator. “He may be a complete idiot, but he’s cagey like you wouldn’t believe.” “So why did he agree to do it for free?” Orit asked. “How do I know?” Assi said, laughing and taking a bite of an unwashed cucumber.

“Maybe he figured out that it was as close to being married as he’d ever get in this life.”

The captain drove the Renault and the religious soldier sat in the back.

They were quiet almost all the way, and that left Orit a lot of time to think about the fact that she was going to see a dead person for the first time in her life, and that she always found herself bastards for boyfriends, and that even though she knew it from the first minute, she still always stayed with them for a year or two. She thought about the abortion and about her mother, who believed in reincarnation and insisted afterward that the baby’s soul was reincarnated in her scrawny cat.

“Listen to the way he’s crying,” she told Orit. “Listen to his voice, it’s like a baby’s. You’ve had him for four years already and he never cried like that.”

Orit knew that her mother was talking

Canto XXXIV. Illustration by Henrik Drescher.

XXII

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Dante’s Inferno Canto XXXIV

Translated by Mary Jo Bang

“The banners of the King of Hell come forth,” My teacher said, “and straight at us.

Look ahead and see if you can see him.”

The three became one at the crown.

Like when a thick fog lifts, or like at dusk In the western world when one can just make out the hint Of a wind turbine turning in the distance, I thought I saw some mechanistic device like that; then, Due to the wind, I ducked behind my teacher, Since there was no other shelter.

I was now—and I’m filled with dread as I write these lines— Where the shades were completely covered, visible Through the ice like bits of straw trapped in glass.

Some are lying flat; some are standing head up; Others are upside down; some are bent over, Their faces facing their feet.

15

When we were close enough, My teacher wanted to point out the creature Who’d once been a pretty little love-god;

I didn’t die. But neither did I go on living.

Think about it, let your mind focus a little On what I’d become: not dead, but no longer alive.

If he used to be as handsome as he is now hideous, And raised his eyebrows in contempt of his creator, One can see how every bit of ire, envy, and despair Derives from him. I was totally astonished To see his head had three faces: The one in front, facing us, was red; There were two others, joined to the first By a seam that began at the center of the shoulder; XXIII

MARY JO BANG

They were featherless and webbed, Like bat wings. He flapped them nonstop To create three waves of downdraft, Which is why Cocytus is forever frozen.

He cried from all six eyes While tears and bloody drool dripped from all three chins.

In each mouth he chomped on a sinner, Using his teeth like a flax mallet To keep the three in perpetual pain.

60

“That soul up there suffers the worst,” My teacher said. “Judas Iscariot.

His head stays inside, while his kicking feet stick out.

Those other two whose heads hang down, The one dangling from the dark mug is Brutus— Look how he thrashes without uttering a word—

Exactly how faint and frozen I’d begun to feel, Don’t ask, Reader, because I can’t express it; Words could never capture it.

Than giants are to the size of his arms.

Imagine, now, how large the whole must be In proportion to a part like that.

45

The two enormous wings that emerged from under each Were of a size that makes sense for a bird that big; I’ve never seen a sail that large at sea.

For the one in front, the biting was nothing Compared to the clawing: at times His back was a mass of missing skin.

He stepped to one side and made me stop, saying, “Look, it’s Dis, and this is the place Where you have to arm yourself with courage.”

The Emperor of Kingdom Woe was stuck In the ice at the level of his chest; I’m closer to being the size of a giant

The face on the right was pasty yellow-white; The face on the left looked like that of those Who live where the Nile begins in Africa.

The other is Cassius, who looks much more muscular Without his skin. But night’s coming again And we have to go. We’ve seen all there is to see.”

30

As he wished, I put my arms around his neck.

He waited until the wings were open wide, and then, Like girls gathering roses, seized the time and place To grab onto the shag on the side and lower himself, Bristle by bristle, through the thin space Between the matted pelt and ragged ice rim.

When we came to where the femur pivots And the hip is thickest, my guide, straining And short of breath, Turned himself around so his head was where His feet had been, and clutched the hair and pulled Himself up, as if we were heading back to Hell.

75

Zachary Lazar Gila looked at the photographs and tried to connect them to the man she’d been secretly meeting this past year, but the pictures came from a different order of reality. They were separate from what she knew about him—what she thought she knew about him. His essential self was like his body, which you could only take in one aspect at a time—the belly, the slick gray hair, the small dark pupils of his eyes.

The photographs were in black and white—they were almost kitsch, they were so old—and it required an effort of imagination to see the violence in them as truly real. In one, a man was slumped over on a floral-print sofa in Beverly Hills. One of his eyes had been shot out, his face a clown mask of gore.

The blood blended with the darkness of his necktie to cover half his chest in a dark stain. He had been one of Meyer’s oldest and closest friends, Benjamin Siegel—“Bugsy,” the captions always called him. The nickname served to cheapen his murder into something picaresque and quaint.

T he nex t pict u re was a lso a n antique—17 years ago, 1957. In this one, there was little visible blood, just the body of a man flat on his back on a hairdresser’s f loor. His name was Albert Anastasia. He lay there in a near-cruciform position between two barber’s chairs, his legs draped by a sheet and his head, shoulders, and arms by another sheet, or maybe they were towels. The only things exposed were an armpit, a chest covered in hair, a nipple, an outstretched hand.

The photos and the words were sensational, that is they managed to paradoxically both magnify and diminish their subjects. The Meyer she knew was calm, not friendly, fastidiously clean, strategic. There was a reason his body had never turned up in a tabloid newspaper photograph.

On the ride into Tel Aviv, he noticed that the sidewalks were full of people looking up at the sky. His driver came off Kings of Israel Square— the City Hall like an assemblage of XXVI FIRST PROOF

Meyer Lansky Breaks His Silence cheap building blocks, pigeons in the big asphalt emptiness—and suddenly everything was cast in shadow.

Outside the cafés, waiters stood at the edges of mostly empty tables, arms crossed over their pressed shirts.

Right on Frischman, past Dizengoff, Ben Yehuda—juice stands, falafel, laundromats—then further toward the beach, where the concierges had come out of the hotels, peering and twisting, finding it. Crowds of people silently looking up at the sky, not looking at the car, not looking at him. They turned to each other over their shoulders, then went back to watching what was above, then slowly resumed their courses, heads still raised. There was no way to see from the car what they were looking at.

“What’s happening?” Lansky finally asked the driver.

“I don’t know,” the driver said.

“There must be an eclipse. Something like that.”

He spoke fluent English, though with an Israeli accent that at times sounded oddly German.

“I read the paper this morning,” Lansky said. “There was nothing about an eclipse.”

“Clouds maybe.”

“Maybe a patch of clouds. Not an eclipse.”

A crowd of men in suits stood outside the lobby doors, the driveway two lanes thick with black cars. Everyone still kept looking at the sky. Lansky waited in the back seat while the driver went in to clear his way. He saw his bag sitting in the sun on the bellman’s cart.

The driver returned and he got out of the car and he and the driver walked past the doorman into the brown lobby.

The driver nodded as Lansky got into the elevator by himself and the doors closed.

Gila was sittting in a chair, smoking, still in her uniform, slumped like a child in the beige blouse and black skirt, black nylons. Instead of looking at him, she closed her eyes and exhaled.

“Yosha took my shift,” she said. “I need the money, but it’s okay. What is bad is

the way she makes me grovel for it. She knows I’m coming here, so she makes me grovel.”

He looked over at the bar, the ice bucket, the tongs. “You shouldn’t be begging around like that. You shouldn’t be working here at all.”

“I should be in Ramat Gan, shopping for a new Mercedes. Is that what your wife drives?”

He nodded absently or dismissively and walked toward the window.

Beneath them was the Mediterranean, the beach with its spatter of orange umbrellas, green umbrellas, swimmers standing in the shallows. Everything was ordinary—the sun had come back out. He went to the bar and made them both a drink.

“I drove into town and all of a sudden it was very cloudy,” he said. “Like an eclipse, that was how cloudy it was.

Everyone looking up. The whole way down here, I’m worrying how I would get in the hotel without everyone seeing, all the cameras lately, but everyone was just watching the sky. There weren’t any cameras anyway. It was just luck—the clouds, no cameras.

My whole life I said that people who believed in luck, they lose, period. Fate, luck, whatever. I guess you can’t really get away from it.”

She was taking off her shoes. He watched, sipping his drink. She knew he was watching. She looked up at him, bent forward, her hair falling in her eyes.

“Where will you go if they make you leave?” she said.

“What makes you think I’ll have to leave?”

“Fate, luck. Those are dangerous words. Maybe you should go back to Poland, that would give them a surprise.”

“You should watch your mouth.”

“Watch my mouth.”

“Whatever comes into your head, you just say it. Maybe that’s why you’re still serving cocktails at the Dan Hotel.”

His luggage arrived, f ive identical changes of clothes. He was tipping the bellman when she put on the

Bomb Specific by Deana Lawson

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BOMB SPECIFIC — DEANA LAWSON

Ingo Schulze by Eliot Weinberger

Photo by Tobias Bohm.

Translated from German

by Beatrice Fassbender Ingo Schulze became famous in Europe early on as the first important writer to come out of the “new Germany.” It was literally true: Born in Dresden in 1962, he had spent his life in the GDR (East Germany) but didn’t begin writing fiction until a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Moreover, the unification—which, as he says, was more a nonhostile takeover of the East by the West than a true unification—permeates his wonderful stories of the unheroic.

In English, he has been extremely fortunate to have as his translator the astonishing John E. Woods, who specializes in three utterly dissimilar writers: Schulze, Thomas Mann, and the more-Joycean-than-Joyce (and funnier) Arno Schmidt. Available are 33 Moments of Happiness, stories written out of Schulze’s time working in Saint Petersburg; the novel or linked stories of Simple Stories; the long epistolary novel, New Lives; the book of stories called One More Story (which had a better title in German, Handy—the word for cell phone); and, most recently, Adam & Evelyn, set in the GDR and Hungary, which partially transplants the Fall of Man to the Fall of the Wall. All are published by Knopf.

Germany, unlike the US, takes pride in its cultural producers, and Schulze is one of the many German writers who are sent all over the world to give talks 70

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and readings. This interview, which starts with Ingo in the Amazon and makes a side trip to Vietnam, was interrupted when he went off to Sri Lanka. We first met in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2004, and have been friends since, with dinners at his favorite Chinese restaurant in Berlin—which is better than it sounds— and readings and public conversations in New York and various German cities. He always draws a huge crowd. This time, we “talked” via email, with our mutual friend and my editor at Berenberg Verlag, Beatrice Fassbender, acting as translator along the way.

— ELIOT WEINBERGER ELIOT WEINBERGER Before we start talking about your new novel, let’s get down to the real dirt: What is terra preta and how did you become involved with this?

INGO SCHULZE Three years ago, I was invited to a workshop about the significant narratives of our times at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. Among all the artists and humanities scholars, there was one scientist, Ralf Otterpohl, an expert on wastewater treatment at the Hamburg University of Technology. Ralf was very intimidated by this group of people and he only spoke very briefly. But one of the interesting things he said was that the flush toilet was an aberration of civilization, a fatal aberration. With it, close to 90 percent of much-needed nutrients are being flushed into rivers and oceans, and 10 percent into

Michelle Segre by Huma Bhabha

Synapse , 2011, metal, papier-mâché, plaster, foam, plastic, modeling clay, pebbles, and string, 59 × 70 × 64 inches.

Images courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery.

One of the bonuses of being friends with an artist for an extended period of time is that gradually, after countless openings, studio visits, and long conversations, you become somewhat of an expert on that person’s work. I have been fortunate to have such a relationship with Michelle Segre and her work—from collages of gangs of legs cut from comic book pages, gnawed alien-bone mobiles, and giant pieces of moldy bread and larger-than-life mushrooms recalling the soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, right up to her current work. Her recent sculptures retain the core theme of literally digesting Pop art (food and digestion are timeless themes in Segre’s work) while introducing a new, seemingly raw, but actually quite sophisticated, deconstruction of its cartoon narrative.

This new direction approaches the material from a childlike point of view that goes beyond the obvious gigantism of much academic Pop art in that it also has a seemingly childlike playfulness on a conceptual level. The cat-and-mouse narrative of cheese, traps, and holes is splattered into postmodern DNA 76

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samples. Where Segre’s history begins remains a mystery—the work of Nancy Graves provides a clue, Franz West another. Plaster and mesh wormholes, as imagined by the architect Antoni Gaudí, lead to countless art-historical dimensions.

The wax, which was predominant in Segre’s work till 2008, has now been peeled away and discarded like old, burnt skin to reveal what lies beneath, forgotten broken relics of her own past work, which, in one piece, take the form of an enormous bone ready for its American Idol solo. The geometric patterns that appear and disappear like rashes refer to her older drawings that influence the sculptural forms. Segre’s recent sculptures function as enlarged models of the brain at work based on superstition rather than on science. Planets and galaxies symbolize ideas that are linked together by webs combining hippie and spiritual craft with industrial craft, as embodied in the metal mesh, which was once completely covered in wax. The importance of the absence of the wax cannot be emphasized enough, because it is through this deletion of

Daniel Wiener by Alexander Ross

Around the Nether Reaches , 2011, Apoxie Sculpt, 37 × 24 × 20 inches.

Blooming , 2008, Apoxie Sculpt, 48 × 12 × 13 inches.

“Wow, that’s quite a baroque nightmare happening there on your wall . . . It’s petrified dragon skin, right?”

I’m imagining dinner guests arriving at some home where Daniel Wiener’s acid-trip sculpture Flame Meander is threatening to crawl down and fuse with someone’s spinal column. They are saying things to their hostess like, “I trust you haven’t paid for this yet, you’re just trying it out to see . . . ” Yet by the end of the evening, my fantasy continues, after having sat with glasses of wine on a Wiener “bench” sculpture, with their fanny fat Sagging into the Space Between the Slats, (2011, Apoxie Sculpt and metal) they are thinking that they too need one of Wiener’s alien-bog artifacts for their own homes.

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These art objects attract and eventually seduce because Wiener works with his hands and his tools firstly, as a process in motion for finding and inventing.

This is a refreshing approach in our current gallery-museum stream of one-liner idea art. His “workmanship” process also playfully trounces on territory occupied by that vast tribe of craftspeople who like to handmake everyday things for human uses. Objects such as pedestals, vases, tables, stools, and even “wall pictures” are readdressed in rivers and wads of molten color, like smushed-up, melted crayons that have congealed to then be sliced, polished, and madly junkassembled. Or left off as halfhunks. Or twisted and pulled and ripped. Or wound around and added onto, or just jellied, jabbed, and joined. One piece is named after a frog! Some have thick glass baubles enmeshed.

One hunky chunk of a thing juts from the wall. It contains sculpted letters that say “making is thinking” in a childishly gooey nonfont.

Yes, I’m very interested in all this muscular, colorful plasticity. Some of it is ugly. Many of the pieces are insanely gorgeous. A few are actually elegant. Take, for example, Blooming, a green vase on a tall green stand ,from 2009. Here Wiener has crafted a supremely weird biovase using a traditional, rubber mold that he has handpressed hot, colored epoxy into. It comes across as a balled-up, cephalopod-shaped juice jug and it is entwined with its stand the way coral grows around sea rocks. I am reminded of Chinese scholars’ rocks and their custom-made rock stands. I am reminded of 1960s sci-fi illustrations. I even hear prog rock when I put my ear up to it, ha!

This guy Wiener is active. He makes QuickTime animations. He makes fast sculpture sketches that sit on ledges. He makes labor-intensive tabletops and their labor-intensive table legs. He photo documents his working methods and posts them on his website

Sheila Pepe by Ryan Johnson

A Mutable Thing , 2011, crocheted string and fabric, dimensions variable. Installation view at Sue Scott Gallery.

Mind the gap , 2005, nautical towline, shoelaces, paint, and hardware. Installation view at the University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Mohsen Namjoo by Shirin Neshat

Mohsen Namjoo rehearsing with his band for a concert in San Francisco, 2010. Photo courtesy of Payam Entertainment.

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Translated from Persian by Siavash Karimzadegan As a young musician, Mohsen Namjoo first captivated Iranians’ attention with his magnificent album Toranj from 2007. This album, mostly produced underground, exploded among the Iranian community, both inside and outside of the country, because of its subversive words and, most of all, for its unusual fusion of classical Persian poetry and music with Western melodies and instrumentation. Namjoo’s bold music broke through all social, cultural, and musical taboos. It also insulted the Islamic regime, which called for his arrest, and, eventually, in 2008, forced him into a life in exile. Considered a phenomenon within Iranian culture, Namjoo has pioneered a contemporary readaptation of Persian music, which has been trapped in its own

MOHSEN NAMJOO I learned to play the setar eight months prior to university, for the entrance exam. At that time, I had big plans in mind, and not necessarily the popular five-minute song format that later emerged and that suited the socio-political situation. In reality, in the beginning, I was not in any way sensitive to the outside political or artistic atmosphere. I was thinking about my own music projects, with some hopes and dreams that someone would come along and invest in recording them. These were all plans for a large orchestra, especially fusion projects with Iranian poetry and music.

SHIRIN NESHAT Did you write poetry as well?

MN No. Back then it was research on poetry. We had poetry circles, and I had put friends’ poems to music and liked them very much. I still do.

But after a point, I saw that everything was being lost. Other than a couple of student concerts at the university, those projects and ideas of mine were not getting done. I saw that if I wanted to consider music as a profession—something I had decided at 16—it would be difficult and grinding. So at the age of 25, I came to the pessimistic conclusion that maybe it was a mistake. All these projects were left in the drawer and I went into military service.

During my military service, two things happened simultaneously. I was still making music and gravitating toward Western musical forms and the five-minute song format—rock, pop, and blues. At the same time, the official narrative told you that if you wanted to release an album in Iran, the prerequisite was to go toward these eight or nine five-minute pieces to 83

MUSIC — MOHSEN NAMJOO

conservative and stagnated rules. With a classical voice and musical training from childhood, he has passionately studied Western music even while living in a repressive social environment that considers Western culture its greatest threat. Yet he has fearlessly navigated his own musical way to arrive at a rare form of maturity and refinement. Hugely popular and respected among Iranians of various generations and classes, he now appeals to a wider audience that, I predict, will not easily reduce his work to simple marketing labels, such as Eastern or ethnic music. Its echoes are complex and far too close in ethos to American indigenous music such as jazz and the blues. I worked with Namjoo on the recent theatrical production OverRuled, commissioned by Performa 11, and can attest to the universal appeal of his music—it was apparent on the beaming faces of our audience.

— SHIRIN NESHAT

fit the market. And you had to include certain content, for example, one piece for the Messiah or a piece for Imam Ali definitely had to be there. Frankly, those conditions made me give in to the market. I didn’t want to be “underground” at all. On the contrary, all my efforts at that age went into getting my music out officially. This was the reason why I kept waiting.

After a couple of years, there was an investor and we began recording. First there was an album that was half finished, then there was Jabr, and after that Toranj. These were recorded in the studio, and the whole time I was concerned that the material did not get leaked, that no one heard it prematurely. Since I was 20, I had been carrying the idea that one day these records would be released.

The cover art is published, it’s yours, and your name is on it.

That record never happened because for one reason or another each one was rejected at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Actually, this phenomenon we call “underground music” has always been around. We can refer to people like Parviz Meshkatian, Mohammad Mousavi, or Mohammad Reza Shajarian—who were all official musicians, but whatever they produced that was never officially released could be called “underground.” It was circulated among people. But this time around, in 2002, underground music was starting to grow because of the Internet. Suddenly the podium was accessible to everybody and everyone realized there was no need for permits or a thing such as the Ministry of Guidance. People could create whatever they wanted and release it. My music too was released in this way for the first time—I don’t know by whom. I meant

to work officially, but things turned out differently.

SN But it’s interesting that as radical as your music was when it was first released, you were expecting it to be accepted commercially. Was there a strategy or a model that you had in mind?

Or was it simply the environment that you lived in at the time, as a young artist divided between his own tradition and Western culture, encountered through social media?

MN At first I gravitated toward Eastern sounds. When I was 23, I took the music I wrote to the university, but no one cared. However, we had a group and performed the work together. We had several orientations, including mystical music. Another was experimenting with new sounds—for example, a percussion that has all the characteristics of drums but gives an Eastern sound, anything from Japanese gong to our own local and folkloric percussion instruments.

Another part of it was literature. I had an interest in “linguistic poetry,” poetry with an emphasis on playing with words and language instead of explication. The idea was to use music and poetry to place the audience in the middle of an experience, instead of describing that experience. For instance, “I’m cold from your distance.”

You try to transfer the feeling of “coldness” by the letters c, o, l, and d. The way these letters are arranged places your audience in a situation of coldness. You create an image by repeating words and letters. It’s a higher, more modern form of expression. It comes from the literary theory of the Russian formalists and, later, the French structuralists. For example, you see it in the works of Allen Ginsberg,

Installation view of Shift / Rise , 2010, Sutton Lane, Brussels. Courtesy of Campoli Presti, London/Paris.

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Liz Deschenes by Kathleen Peterson

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ART — LIZ DESCHENES

I met Liz Deschenes at Bennington in August 2010. I had just started teaching poetry and the humanities at the college, where Liz has been a vital intellectual presence for several years. I immediately discerned her rich attentiveness and intuition, and, from students, I heard that her teaching effortlessly combined a sense of discipline and a sense of play. When she and I began to talk about art practice, language, and images, I exhilarated in her mind’s unique ability to merge technique and dream, impersonal and personal, heavy and light. As a poet, I’m utterly intrigued by the way Liz can stay with a practice rather than fixate upon an idea. It is interesting to me that so many of our conversations have lingered on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a novel that, in Liz’s view, celebrates perception rather

KATHLEEN PETERSON I’ve been thinking about your work in reference to photography and composition—and here are a few questions: What kind of a relationship does your work have with time? Thinking, specifically, of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I keep coming back to the notion of everyday time having some relationship not primarily to content but to the form of an artwork. To you, what would be the character of that relationship: Is the passage of time distressing or comforting?

I think Woolf felt the passage of time to be quite terrifying and uncontrollable, so she sought in her work both to represent it and to keep it at bay. This is interesting in reference to your work because Woolf is often misunderstood as someone who merely wants to depict time, to show time for what it is. But I don’t think her novels are representational exactly. I thought this might interest you.

I am also interested in thinking with you about the difference—not the connection, but the difference—between lived, personal experience, the teeming struggle of forces that bolster and create the conditions of the photo, and the photo itself. I believe the work of women, specifically, in all the arts, has much to say about this. But when I think about an artist like you, I consider the force and depth of our mutual intellectual investigations and conversations and the (abstract, colorful, flat, playful) surfaces of your artworks. This question that I have in mind isn’t, How does your work relate to your life? but, If the work is not representational of the life, directly, in what manner is the struggle of the life significant to the work? I mean “struggle” in the broadest sense, from the political (economics, sexuality) to the physical (even merely the experience of pain) to the familial and the spiritual. I am interested in this myself, as I have gone, as a poet, from writing 90

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than description as the central, and most vital, task of an artist. Liz Deschenes’s haunting work certainly does the same—reorienting the viewer and revivifying our relationship with the image. Rereading To the Lighthouse, I found this passage—the thoughts of the woman artist Lily Briscoe—which captures the spirit of Liz Deschenes’s upcoming work for the Whitney Biennial: “For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge . . . ” We wrote this interview—back and forth over time—via the new epistolary method, email.

— KATHLEEN PETERSON

Installation view of Systemanalyse , 2011, Langen Foundation.

Courtesy of Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany, and Campoli Presti, London/Paris.

Shift / Rise #2 , 2010, chromogenic photogram, 40 × 20 inches.

Courtesy of Campoli Presti, London/Paris.