If you were going to make me wear one of those conservative shirts that are always advertised on blogs—and hey, about that, what's going on? what did I ever do to you?—I guess I'd pick this one. I have a kind-of similar shirt with Putin's mug done a la Warhol that garners me daggers from anyone who knows that Putin is a baby stomach–kissing despot. (Oh! And I have another shirt acquired abroad, one that entirely unironically says "Istanbul" across the chest, that earned me some nasty looks from a trio of teenaged Armenian protesters. Later that day I was planning to go into Wrapworks to buy a delicious smoothie, when I spotted them again and had to flee. Sans smoothie. The price of genocide.) This terrible "world tour" shirt forgets all the military's engagements between 1945 and 1991, a black-out that would make Keith Richards blush. But that one, I think, is one that liberals could co-opt, what with its 2003 listing of Iraq as "FREE." This one makes the American bald eagle shed a single tear, but this shirt—oh, it's so good—this shirt trades on pan-African identity to promote handgun ownership. Subtext that crisp doesn't wrinkle.
Anselm Kiefer, The Hierarchy of Angels, 1985–87.Maybe it's inappropriate to drag Milton into a discussion of an Anselm Kiefer survey, even one called "Heaven and Earth." Despite Kiefer's Christian upbringing and the encyclopedia of religious sources from which he draws—from Teutonic lore to the Sefer Hechaloth—the artist has said in interviews that he finds the Christian canon to be mostly rigid. But a passage from Paradise Lost powerfully rhymes the liminal realms that have been a subject in Kiefer's works for nearly 30 years.
The passage comes before the Fall: Seeking transit from hell to earth so that he may stage his insurgency against God, Satan passes through a space called Chaos, an indeterminate realm characterized by coexisting antipodes and dimensionlessness, an "illimitable ocean without bound" that serves as the "womb of nature and perhaps her grave." It is the place from which God obtains "His dark materials" for creating the universe (2.891–916).
"Heaven and Earth"—currently showing at the Hirshhorn Museum and originally curated by Michael Auping for The Modern in Fort Worth—casts Kiefer as an artist of dark materials. The first survey of his works to reach the United States in almost 20 years, the exhibition reveals Kiefer as an artist who ultimately sought to depict mankind's liminal situation: his station on the terrestrial sphere and its celestial better.
Anselm Kiefer, Book With Wings, 1992–94.If there's a temptation to read Kiefer's work as a search for salvation, the artist has always checked it with his caustic irony. The Secret Life of Plants (2001), a 6-foot-high lead book whose pages are fanned open wide to support the book's posture. (The lead pages threaten to collapse in on themselves unless the weight is properly distributed, and if you've been listening, you've heard all sorts of stories and mishaps related to the show's installation—I understand one visitor tried to turn the pages). On these pages the artist has drawn constellations, with stars titled by NASA coordinates—numbers in place of names, alluding to the victims of the Holocaust. The book's instability casts doubt on redemption, as if the book of heaven were not large or sturdy enough to support mankind.
The indeterminacy of Kiefer's depicted space also plays a role in defining the movement between and meaning of heaven and earth. The Hierarchy of Angels (1985–1987), like many of his monumental paintings, reveals a landscape from a perspective far above the earth; affixed to the canvas are a lead propeller and a group of "meteorites" representing the order of the angels, suggesting a phenomenal heaven above our world. The sculptural fixtures also resemble an aerial bombing, which changes the directionality of the painting from heavenward and sacred to earthbound and profane, the hierarchy perhaps stemming from the dominance over Europe enjoyed by Goering's Luftwaffe.
This is not, to be certain, a show of the Kiefer whose work has bridged the memory gap between Germany's present and its past. A survey that highlights one aspect of representation in Kiefer's work does not consider that it was the mere act of representation after World War II—after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno—that was transgressive: for the searing historical content of the works, for breaking with American AbEx, and for forging new ties to modernism after modernity devastated Germany.
Anselm Kiefer, To the Unknown Painter, 1982."Heaven and Earth" does highlight Kiefer's career-spanning effort to reinsert German painting into an historical context. In a watercolor titled To the Unknown Painter (1982), Kiefer references the architecture and crucifix form in Masaccio's Trinity (1425–1428). In the early Renaissance painting, the arched ceiling housing the crucifix scene is queerly distorted; accurate perspective falls away above the head of God, prefiguring the notion of a noemenal realm beyond the phenomenal. Kiefer draws orthogonals along the ceiling that lead to a false vanishing point—not in the figure of God, but rather in the head of the lone figure. Other, more recent works follow suit: Leviathan (2005) recalls Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, and for Melancholia (2004) Kiefer borrows from the alchemist's occult polyhedron in Albrecht Dürer's notorious engraving.
Not a proper retrospective—voids in the survey, like the absence of pieces from Kiefer's "Occupations" series, disqualify it—"Heaven and Earth" does not address the lingering questions over the degree to which Kiefer, as Mark Rosenthal problematically phrased it, drew from the unqualifiable horrors of World War II to "make Germany whole again" (p. 96). Of course, many pieces investigate whether the horror prompted by German nationalism could be explained—or depicted, or even described—in such a way to make any sense of the nation's worst generation. Quaternity (1973)—one of few very Kiefer paintings that really looks like a painting—portrays three flames (the figures of the Holy Trinity) burning on the floor of the artist's studio; a snake completes the circuit. Scholars debate over the snake on the paintings (the same sort of argument over Chaos among Milton scholars, to float that line again), but conventional wisdom, which I think is right, is that the snake is Hitler.
Auping's show begs off the question—at best, it's presented as significant that the artist drew from religious imagery, but not important in a telling way. What about Germany? That unaddressed historical question—the problem of evil, the persistence of national memory—is tantalizingly hidden in the survey, since memory is, finally, the fixture that holds Kiefer's chaotic constellations.
SHELLAC plays next Thursday at the Black Cat—as the bloggers say, Aaron Leitko gets it exactly right. I'm sore about missing Beirut last night at the Warehouse—when I arrived before doors' opening there was already a line around the block, and they're no Charming Hostess or anything so I wasn't inclined to wait to try my chances, but if I'd shown some patience, my latecoming friends who got inside tell me, I'd've been able to see them—but I won't be so careless about lining up for Shellac. SHEL-LAC: Invite it in through pursed lips, loll it around on your tongue, punctuate it with a guttural stop like a crash symbol.
A fire at DCAC burned down the stairs between the gallery space and the theater. Neither space was damaged. Casualty of a discarded lit cigarette or promotional stunt for Home Fires (now playing)?
UPDATE: I put the full report on the City Paper blog.
In this week's City Paper I've got a short bit on Santana Miyazaki at Touchstone Gallery and more on Remix: East-West Currents in Contemporary Art at the Arlington Arts Center.
An anecdote in response to a longstanding question about whether artists "should" listen to music while making art: I recall drawing in a studio class in college, listening to Einstürzende Neubauten on a portable CD player, when someone asked me about listening to music while working, and I wondered whether the question would arise if there were merely loud construction outside the art building. If the question is whether artists ought to resist input that could determine their work, in some sense, music is just one sort of input that is less significant than nutrition and sleep patterns, which are also voluntary. I tend to believe that we're automatons no matter what. I do try to avoid drinking too much coffee before I settle into some creative endeavor.
While shopping for a copy of Catullus's Poems for a friend's birthday, I decided to spend a little extravagantly and pick up one for myself. I knew I wanted to buy a version with the facing Latin for the gift, so I picked up the Peter Green translation. Here's Catullus's poem 7:
You'd like to know how many of your kissesLacking the criteria to decide on the best English translation for myself, I settled on the Penguin Classics version, translated by Peter Whigman, because it was cheap and compact. Here is the same poem as it appears in this edition (formatted to match the text):
would be enough and over, Lesbia, for me?
Match them to every grain of Libyan sand in
silphium-rich Cyrene, from the shrine of
torrid oracular Jupiter to the sacred
sepulchre of old Battus; reckon their total
equal to all those stars that in the silent
night look down on the stolen loves of mortals.
That's the number of times I need to kiss you,
That's what would satisfy your mad Catullus—
far too many for the curious to figure,
or for an evil tongue to work you mischief!
Curious to learnThe Latin is, unfortunately, Greek to me, but I'll include it below the cut.
how many kiss-
es of your lips
might satisfy
my lust for you,
Lesbia, know
as many as
are grains of sand
between the oracle
of sweltering Jove
at Ammon &
the tomb of old
Battiades the First,
in Libya
where the silphium grows;
alternatively,
as many as
the sky has stars
at night shining
in quiet upon
the furtive loves
of mortal men,
as many kiss-
es of your lips
as these might slake
your own obsessed Catullus, dear,
so many that
no prying eye
can keep the count
nor spiteful tongue fix
their total in
a fatal formula.
Quaeris, quot mihi basiationesI'll of course appreciate your strong opinions about the relative merits of the translations, if you're inclined to offer them; the differences between most poems don't seem so stark. I'll only note that the italics at least seem superfluous in the Green, and the formatting irritating in the Penguin, before begging off on this subject of translations from languages I can't read. Having posed the burning classics question, I'm off to take in Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane, surely a seminal text of our times.
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.
quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae
lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis
oraclum Iovis inter aestuosi
et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum;
aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
furtivos hominum vident amores:
tam te basia multa basiare
vesano satis et super Catullo est,
quae nec pernumerare curiosi
possint nec mala fascinare lingua.
"Academy 2006," in this week's City Paper.
Since I play the saxophone and my incoming roommate Spencer plays the drums, we're obligated to start a household band: Sax, Drums, and Rock n' Roll. If it happens that among our other roommates is a mallet percussionist and . . . some sort of media artist, we'll have a side project: Sax, Vibes, and Video Tape.
OF COURSE: Sax, Lyres, and Video Tape is much better.
We got a house! We got a house! The long national nightmare is over, and Yglesias and I won't be homeless after all. It's got the ugliest goddamned floors you've ever seen—they're a color that might generously be termed "seafoam green," and it's impossible to say what, exactly, they're made of—but they're our goddamned floors, goddamnit. The place is near 13th and Florida NW, which the owner hilariously advertised as being in "Dupont Circle." The Seafoam House on Dupont!
Pardon me while I do the Snoopy dance.
I plum forgot to mention last week that I'd written about "Conversions" in the City Paper an issue ago. Fresher is this week's piece on "15 Minutes" at Project 4.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to run to Union Station to make the final maildrop in order to mail my voter registration form to the District government, which does not seem to recognize that I voted in the ought-four general and primary elections. It's last call for voter registration. I recommend clicking here, whether you're sure you're registered or not.
former chief art critic of the Village Voice and founder of Chrysalis, is dead.
While Mike Grass is away for a couple of weeks, I'm picking up some of his Express-ive duties. Need to catch up on the haps in the District as of 6 a.m. this morning? I'm your man. In case you don't click over, I'll take the opportunity to especially plug Lynn Berenbaum's tennis blogging. She's covering the Legg Mason Tennis Classic here in the District, and while I couldn't tell you Legg Mason from Foghorn Leghorn, I can absolutely recommend Berenbaum's easy, locally focused, just-gossipy-enough writing style. If you, in fact, actually enjoy tennis, you'll love her stuff.
It's not a final Sleater-Kinney show until The DCeiver makes a joke about Axe body spray and "All Hands on the Bad One," but it's also not a final Sleater-Kinney show until . . . Sleater-Kinney plays. Which they didn't. Apparently the transformers at the 930 Club overheated (aptly evidenced by the furious black column of smoke pouring forth from the grate just outside the club), so just after the opener, the police canceled the headline.
Well, fuck. It's time to call it: This is easily the hottest summer I've spent in the four years I've lived in the District, and things are getting hairy. It's not pleasant to walk to places with AC (ignoring places without AC, for example, my bedroom), and far less to places whose units explode when you arrive. I was in Baltimore on Sunday watching a thrilling O's comeback victory against the White Sox in the 9th, and not once did the crowd even attempt the Wave. Dire times we're looking at! Human sacrifice, mass hysteria—dogs and cats, living together!
It's time to start pitching for some travel pieces due north (though, for now I'm working on finishing a few novels for reviews (which is a reason I've been out of touch)). In the meantime, if you can read this and not cry even just a few short, chortled tears, maybe it was a mistake to let you read my Web site in the first place.
Hello, blog (Hello, hello.)
How'd things go for you today?
Don't you miss me?
How I used to type away?
And I'll bet you dread to spend another postless night with me,
But lonely blog, I'll keep you company.
Hello, window (Hello, hello.)
Well, I see that you're still here.
Aren't you lonely,
Since our entries disappeared?
Well look here, is that a teardrop in the corner of your screen?*
Now don't you try to tell me that it's rain.*
