3 Contents

number 122 / Winter 2012

editor’s ChoiCe

BoMB speCifiC daniel Bozhkov

Artists on Artists

dAshA shishkin by ellen BerkenbliteriCA BAuM by kim rosenfieldGünther ueCker by Ahmed Alsoudani

the WiCk Anders nilsen

interVieWs

MusiC — dAVid LAnG by nico MuhlyLang’s recent multimedia work, love fail, intercuts the oddities of different medieval versions of the tristan and isolde story with Lydia davis’s tales of modern love. Lang and fellow composer nico Muhly go over the pros and cons of staging concerts and recording music.

Art — osCAr MuriLLo by Legacy russellin Murillo’s work, action, words, painting, and parties all speak with the same volume—fluently familiar and yet entirely untranslatable. Artist and curator Legacy russell finds out why.

theAter — rude MeChAniCALs by eric dyerthe ensemble theater collective based in Austin, texas, has six artistic directors and its own venue, the off Center. if the rude Mechs’ ethos was a draw for radiohole’s eric dyer, their bacchanalian re-creation of the performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 clinched the connection.

fiLM — CristiAn MunGiu by Liza Béarromanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills won best screenplay and best actress at Cannes. the film—like his previous 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days—fuses naturalism with the escalating dramatic tension between two young women.

LiterAture — MArk Z. dAnieLeWski by Christopher o’rileypianist Christopher o’riley provided the score for danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword, a ghost story set in the world of experimental literature, now ambitious-ly evolving into a vanguard work in multiple formats.

LiterAture — fAnny hoWe by kim Jensenfive of poet and novelist fanny howe’s most important novels have recently been republished in one edition, Radical Love. Both authors get to the core of a prose Jensen describes as “startlingly beautiful and terrify-ingly mysterious with reckless narrative swerves.”

on the cover: Alix Pearlstein, still from Two Women , 2000, single-channel digital video, color, sound. 2 minutes 20 seconds.

Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays.

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first proof BoMB’s LiterAry suppLeMent

horst AdeMeitGeorGe MinkoffLeWis WArshtrey sAGersuZAnne WisekAren GreendAnieL BorZutZkyJAMes hAnnAhAM

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Art — ALix peArLstein by John pilsonArtist John pilson zeroes in on Alix pearlstein, whose videos featuring actors appearing as themselves “de-scribe a visual arena where familiar competitions, seductions, vanities, and judgments are both the sub-ject and the object of scrutiny.”

Art — tony feher by saul ostrowrooted in minimalism, perhaps, feher is a scavenger sculptor who, like Merlin, transforms detritus—plas-tic bottles, marbles, jelly jars—into gold. A traveling survey show of his work opened in des Moines and is now at the Blaffer Art Museum in houston, before coming to the Bronx Museum next fall.

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Materializing six years: Lucy r. Lippard and the emergence of Conceptual Art

edited by Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin

N. E. Thing Co. (Iain Baxter and Ingrid Baxter), 1. Time. (from North American Time Zone Photo–V.S.I. Simultaneity, October 18, 1970) ,

1970, offset lithograph, 17 1/2 × 17 1/2 inches. Courtesy of Morris and

Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

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Mit press, 2012

pataphysics is a widely misunderstood but fiercely beloved theological pseudoscience that has, over the last half of the 20th century and athwart all reasonable prognostication, risen to pockets of prominence in and beyond europe. According to its chief postulate—not its only one by any means, but easily the most widely traveled in academic circles—God resides in the space between the thumb and the forefinger, meaning true re-ligious worship can be performed solely through hand gestures. keeping one’s thumb as perpendicular as hu-manly possible (and, in the cases of some legendary zealots, more so) to the index finger is held to be the disposition of ideal reverence, and the devout believer is expected to manifest his or her faith publicly at all times; in certain militaristic societies, especially when the “science” was in its infancy, this led to frequent physical altercations between unsuspecting nonpracti-tioners and pataphysical adepts who went around town with their hands molded permanently into crude gun shapes. Among the fascinating connections Andrew hugill draws in his lively and entertaining study ’Pataphysics: A Useless Guide (the apostrophe in his title is meant to suggest the curvature of the human thumb) is this custom’s unlikely but uncanny prefiguration of the sign language developed by American street gangs some decades later. More generally, he offers some dazzling reinterpretations of what might be called our popular manual lexicon: Considered from the pataphysical per-spective, for instance, the coitus-simulating motion of inserting the index through a ring formed by the thumb and forefinger of the opposite hand naturally becomes as offensive to a pataphysicalist as invoking the taber-nacle is to a french-Canadian. Conversely, the flippancy with which english-speakers sign loser and whatever belies the very real gravity, etymologically speaking, of these gestures. to his credit, hugill goes to great lengths to inven-tory the other far-reaching influences of pataphysical culture, proving beyond dispute that it has come to transcend milieu and métier. indeed, he himself is no theologian or philosopher but rather a retired women’s hockey coach with “only a passing knowledge of car-pal anatomy,” yet he is an enthusiastically devoted pataphysicalist. in addition to greater knowledge of a global tradition too long treated with the kid gloves of academic esoterica, the interested and diligent reader will reap such irresistible tidbits as the pataphysical synod’s stringent typographical rules, the proper pa-taphysical reading of the lyrics to “L’internationale,” and the amusing circumstances that led a pair of dutch pataphysicalists to invent the vuvuzela. — dAnieL LeVin BeCker is reviews editor of The Believer.

’pataphysics: A useless Guide Andrew hugill

Alfred jarry, Véritable portrait de Mr. Ubu , 1896. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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4Ad, 2012

Listening can be a daunting prospect because you know the reaction it brings will require everything from you. An upheaval, a complete change of life, or at least the feeling that you should be changing your life if you were as true to the music as the music is true to itself. A heraldic figure gets your hackles and deepens the silence that follows it. A wet black horse in an unexpected place looks up in terror and gallops away on muting moss. Laughter is the only response. to get up above the gloom you board the battleship. Watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the same eyes that you looked around from on the gangway. it’s late. Looking at the reflection there in the gloss of the eyes. turning off the tV but the audio continues—cartoon noises and the eyes still reflect the images. in a small, cold apartment, away away. trying to find those nois-es, smash them with a hammer, Bugs Bunny in the eyes. smashing up the place. neat as a pin, usually. Books splay like axed-at trees. the library, the dicta-tor’s library. they say his band plays drums of the skin of dissenters. you don’t want to know how the flutes are made. But what about those that feel good and don’t want to feel bad. he’s like a dictator in exile. not a dictator. the dictator’s right-hand man who woke up one day and split, maybe lover. Ashamed of behavior. Making amends now. When you hear a few dirty words, you start to hear everything as crude. Mishear, maybe. or does it just tune you into the depravity. rumsfeld does this, too. touches a part of me. Where a finger is not supposed to go. Absentmindedly squeezing my vena cava, he says, “solitaire, eh? Well, two can play at that game.” then he just stands there watching you play. Like something is happening that he’s never experienced. Always with the glint of drool. Vile smile. there is no beauty described as beauty because he knows fly eyes. deranged cousins of “Mairzy doats” shake him up at night. he found a shocking calm. once-per-year heroin. it’s unclear whom i’m talking about. i should have been doing this all along. A can-vas where absolutely anything can be said and it fits. All the walks put together. All the walks represented by one. nothing from daily life touches the music and yet it is of the goddamned moment like a pair of eyes staring at you. Waiting for your reply. Well? the music drops away to reveal a voice without a body. floating like oil and a fine tire on the ocean. All the times you ask yourself, “But where is the voice for this?” it’s here. — BiLL CALLAhAn is an Austin-based musician

and writer. Before 2005, he recorded over a dozen albums as smog; since then he has recorded four albums, all on drag City. he is the author of Letters to Emma Bowlcut, an epistolary novelette.

Bish Bosch scott Walker

Scott Walker. Courtesy of 4AD.

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david Lang is one of the most thoughtful compos-ers working today. his music is consistently probing, emotionally urgent, strange, and beautiful. it is also getting simpler as the years roll on—a sign that the mind behind it is undergoing a kind of ritualistic purifi-cation. i’ve been obsessed with david’s music since i bought a recording by mail order of his piece cheating lying stealing when i was in high school, and i have written a piano piece called David Lang Needs a Hug. — niCo MuhLy

david Lang by nico Muhly

Photo by Peter Serling.

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nM do you have a little minikeyboard?

dL no, i just take my laptop.

nM so love fail. What does it do? how does it go?

dL in 2007, i wrote this piece called the little match girl passion, which you know. it’s quasi-medieval and pseudoreligious, vaguely pleasant to listen to, and a cap-pella. it turns out there are lots of groups in the world that specialize in all those categories. i’ve heard from many of them since, asking “Can you write a pseudoreli-gious, quasi-medieval a cappella piece for us?” i got a call from Anonymous 4.

nM i grew up on those crazy recordings.

dL their recordings are great. i remember the record where they first did American folk music.

nM yeah, i was weirded out by that a little.

dL it was like Bob dylan playing electric guitar—a shocking moment! But i really love it. so they asked me what i would do, and i suggested that i could make a piece for them about their world—the medieval world—as it collides with some-thing more modern. i went and looked at every single version from the 11th and 12th centuries of tristan and isolde.

nM of which there are so many, right? A lot of them written in what was then french, in england.

dL that’s exactly right. you get these oddly international poets like Marie de france, who’s actually writing in england.

nM so crazy, i read her in college, i am obsessed with Marie de france. the Loup-garou, the werewolf one, is my favorite thing that’s ever been written.

dL What i loved about Marie de france’s tristan story was that, first of all, isolde’s name is never mentioned in it. the whole story calls her “she.”

nM it’s a little bit more Pelleas in its style.

dL the reason why tristan scholars love

the Marie de france story, is that tristan is trying to get a message to her, so he carves his name on a stick and leaves it for her to find. de france has isolde come along, see this stick, and know exactly what he means just from that single word. isolde decodes his name, and in doing so, understands an unbelievably complicated series of instructions of what he wants her to do.

nM does all of that come from a divina-tion tradition? Where you scatter the entrails of some rooster or the bones of an animal and the way they fall means—

dL i actually thought of it more like Victorian calling-card folding, or the lan-guage of flowers.

nM Bark biting art! have you seen those from the first nations peoples? people fold up a piece of bark, bite it, unfold it, and make flowers out of it. it’s crazy! i saw a show in Winnipeg.

dL Are you serious? i’ve never seen that.

nM i’m going to look it up right now. you’re going to absolutely die.

dL hilarious. so, anyway, there was something really weird in that this unnamed woman learned all this informa-tion from seeing this one word. i thought that i could go through all of the different versions of the tristan stories and take what was odd and unique in each version, avoiding telling the story part— nM Which we all culturally know.

dL especially classical music people be-cause we all know Wagner.

nM We at least know that chord!

dL yes, we all know it ends badly. there’s this other really great version by thomas of Britain—it’s the only one with this particular story of the end of tristan’s life. he’s called for isolde to come and heal him. she’s on the ocean and her boat gets caught in a storm. she thinks it’s going to sink, and she can’t believe it because she’s always been convinced that they’re going to die together. so she thinks, the only way this can work out is if the boat

goes down and i drown and get eaten by a fish. then years from now, tristan is sailing on the same part of the ocean, and he gets eaten by the same fish. she becomes ready to drown, if God wills it. it’s really creepy and i put it in my piece.

nM it’s so your piece!

dL so i intercut those fragments of the various versions of the story and i took out all the names, so it’s just “he” and “she.” And then i intercut all these legends with modern stories. there’s this really great writer, Lydia davis. do you know her?

nM no.

dL she did really great translations of Madame Bovary and of proust’s Swann’s Way. Most of her stories are small, apho-ristic. they’re this beautiful combination of very funny and very powerful. one of her stories i use in love fail is a list of all the things that two people who are hav-ing problems in their relationship can’t talk about: how much money he makes. how much money she makes. What newspaper he reads. Where he went to school. Where she went to school. it’s really to the point. And the issue in my piece is that we like all these medieval things because they allow us to project suffering elsewhere. But our lives can be pretty miserable too, so let’s pay atten-tion to that. nM right. so it’s four voices a cappella?

dL there’s a little bass drum and a glock-enspiel that come in once or twice. nM Little details.

dL it’s much simpler percussion than the little match girl passion. the sing-ers don’t move around, but they’re on a beautiful set that Jim findlay designed, lit by Jennifer tipton. the sound design is by Jody elff. inside every song the reso-nance changes.

nM But no electronic manipulation?

dL no, just resonance.

nM Are they miked?

you might go see live work to see little added theater elements, or because the people in it are stars, or because you’re hoping secretly that

they’ll fail and you’ll get to watch it.

35 Art — osCAr MuriLLo

oscar Murillo by Legacy russell

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LeGACy russeLL We’re here in London just after your return from paris last night and before you leave for Miami tomorrow. i’d love to hear about what you were do-ing in paris, and what you plan to do once you hit Miami.

osCAr MuriLLo My Berlin gallery, isabella Bortolozzi, is taking part in fiAC in paris. Around the fair other projects are happening, for example, “r4” is work-ing towards building up a museum in the outskirts of paris on this island called l’ile seguin. the curator of the Migros Museum, raphael Gygax, decided to commission about 20 artists to do out-door projects on the island, among them oscar tuazon, Annette Messager, ugo rondinone, nicolas party, Martin soto Climent, and me. My piece, called Make it Happen in Steps, was based on something i had done this summer in the south of france and which involved me and a collaborator running, jogging, and dancing in an amphi-theater. An amphitheater is a space that demands a spectacle. But the production value of my work is purposely low. i like to work with things that are—i wouldn’t say necessarily always around me, but i like to be resourceful, basically. i got a mirror, two empty cartons of coconut water, and a playlist of fania All stars music—Latin American artists like Celia Cruz and tito puente, who were major salsa musicians. so i created a one-hour playlist and jogged and danced in front of a mirror to this mu-sic. At the end of it, i just walked off and that was the piece. At l’ile seguin in paris, i didn’t want to do exactly the same thing, but i wanted

to use the same principles. i got myself a couple of sheets of reflective acrylic mir-ror, two speakers, some amplifiers, four car batteries, some disco lights, and an ipod with the same fania All stars playl-ist. the island is a heavily industrial place, a bit like detroit. there used to be a car factory there, and it’s quite run-down. the idea was to curate an installation that would play this music continuously, and not be dependent on someone having to turn it on and off. it’d just be there, kind of playing along—bringing some life to the place. so that happened last weekend, just before i did a two-person presentation with david hammons at fiAC. Lr And what about Miami? oM i met the rubell family for the first time in new york earlier this year. they got curious about my work, and we had a studio visit. My gallery called, “don and Mera want to come to your studio.” And i said, “Well, i don’t have any work in the studio.” the gallery said, “We’ll get some work from storage and bring it over.” i thought, Bringing paintings back to the studio, what’s the point? for me it was an opportunity to show my work in process because the process is very important. finished paintings they could see in the gallery. so before the rubells visited, i stayed up all night and made a couple of paintings. Making these works created a residue of the process. And the rubells understood that. every year they curate a show for their foundation in Miami; the last one was “American exuberance” with four huge paintings by sterling ruby in the main

gallery space. this year they invited me to do something there. i went to Miami this past April. they suggested this incredibly large room—i mean, it’s overwhelming! i didn’t feel comfortable making work for such a massive space without inhabiting it somehow. so i said, “i think it’s very important for me to come here and make the work from scratch.” Lr you occupied it—physically. oM At the beginning of summer, i trav-eled back to Miami with all my materials and lived there for six weeks, working at the rubell family collection. Lr so when’s the opening? When do other bodies get to occupy the space, along with you and your works? oM the work is done and will open in december for Art Basel Miami.

Lr you paint, you’re doing performance, you’re recording these performances and they’re being shown as videos. All these different strands connect. Where does painting situate itself in your prac-tice and where does it intersect with performance?

oM paintings happen in the studio where i have my own kind of system, although there can be physical residue of perfor-mance in them. i like to cut up the canvas in different sections, work on them individually, fold them and just leave them around for months. i don’t work on a painting with the goal of finishing it or having a complete and finished painting at the end of a work process. the idea is to get through as much material as pos-sible, and various materials go through various processes. in most parts there is this mark making that happens with a broomstick and oil paint. i make a bunch of those canvases, fold them in half, and put them on the floor. My studio is a cra-dle of dust and dirt, of pollution. i don’t tidy up at the end of each production process. it’s all very much on purpose; it’s continuous process, a machine of which i’m the catalyst. things get moved around, i step on them, and they get con-taminated. it’s not about leaving traces, it’s about letting things mature on their own—like aging cheese or letting a stew cook, they get more flavorful. that’s kind of how these paintings are made. Lr so the textures, these layers—they’re in part done by your own hand, but

Make it Happen in Steps , 2012. Ile Seguin, Paris.

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rude Mechanicals by eric dyer

BoMB’s theAter interVieWs Are sponsored in pArt By the seLeCt eQuity Group foundAtion.

Performance view of Lana Lesley, jason Liebrecht, Thomas Graves in The Method

Gun , directed by Shawn Sides, 2010, Humana Festival of New American Plays,

Actors Theatre, Louisville, Kentucky. Photo by Alan Simons.

43 theAter — rude MeChAniCALs

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Good Morning Eric,

I hope this letter finds you well, it’s a nice morning in Austin. I just fed the chickens, watered and weeded the garden. The signs of seeds planted last week are just starting to show. The lima bean sprouts and provider bean sprouts are curling up out of the soil. I’m sitting, looking out the window drinking a hot cup of coffee and eating a big bowl of granola and yogurt . . .

Love,Rude Mechs

PS This letter isn’t real. I’m not sitting at a window. I don’t even have chick-ens. The handwriting changes so much because several people, I won’t say who, have been passing around this paper, adding to a fiction.

shAWn sides Making Dionysus in 69 was completely different from our other processes. Well, none of them are alike, actually. We don’t really have a process (unfortunately, i say quietly to myself sometimes). We would like to have one,

but we can’t agree or figure out what it should be. We gather up in a room and hope. or maybe we do have a process, but it’s innate and automatic and invis-ible. We don’t see it as a process but as just living, going along, minding our own business.

eriC dyer What was your impulse at this time in your lives to take on Dionysus in 69 in this particular way, as a recreation?

LAnA LesLey We had had this desire for a long time. Around 2005, shawn came up with this idea for spaghetti dinners with our audience in Austin. We’re mak-ing work here in Austin, and for a long time had felt somewhat isolated from the field. from the outside, we weren’t quite a blip on the radar; for example, one of the review headlines for Lipstick Traces, the first show we ever toured, in 2002, was “texas troupe does play.” from the inside, we were the only people we knew at that time trying to create the kind of work we were making. We felt a need to contextualize our work for our audience. While it is not particularly

experimental—to us it is very accessible—people tend to approach it as if they were not going to understand it and, therefore, they don’t. (laughter) We felt the need to contest this notion. so shawn came up with this idea to have a spaghetti dinner once a month; we could show people vid-eos of works that influenced us and talk about why we do what we do the way we do it. We wanted to pursue that idea wholeheartedly, but it became quickly apparent that actually there was not a lot of documentation of the work that has influenced us.

MAdGe dArLinGton even when the documentation does exist, watching live performance on film or video is not ideal. With our “Contemporary Classics” series—where we reperform seminal works—we are archiving theater in a different way, more like it’s traditionally done in dance. We’re embodying a reper-toire of experimental theater.

LL We also were interested in a stronger engagement with our company, as we started to slow down the pace at which

the first meeting between the Austin-based company rude Mechanicals and nyC’s radiohole was at the orchard project in hunter, new york, in the summer of 2007. Both companies were in residency, developing new projects—the rude Mechs (their common moni-ker) were beginning The Method Gun, which went on to premiere at humana festival in Louisville, kentucky, in 2010, and radiohole were beginning ANGER/NATION, which opened at the kitchen in 2008. it was a beautiful summer romance. that summer at orchard project was the first and, to date, only collaboration between radiohole and rude Mechs. it was a spontaneous single-evening performance witnessed by few, if any, outside the two companies, and it will never happen again. thomas Graves, kirk Lynn, and i performed naked tai Chi in the dark of night on the rocks in the middle of the schoharie Creek, illuminated by scott halvorsen Gillette standing in the river with an old fluorescent work light and oc-casional flashes of lightning. With Lana Lesley, shawn sides, Madge darlington, and the other rudes on the riverbank chanting, kirk, thomas, and i swayed gently back and forth until radiohole’s Maggie hoffman ap-peared on the rocks out of the darkness in her long black Carrie A. nation dress. We hoisted Maggie over our heads and slowly carried her over the rocks. We reached the edge of a large, deep pool and, with a col-lective exhaling, dropped her into it—we had made our sacrifice. there was a splash and Maggie drifted downriver into the darkness while kirk, thomas, and i resumed our swaying. i relate this story because i cherish the memory—this was a performance in itself, and the vast majority of our work as theater/performance artists takes place

in this way, hidden from view, outside the social-aes-thetic frame of our regularly scheduled performances. Both the rude Mechs and radiohole explore the idea of theater as ritual, as a form of communal religious experience, though in distinct ways. this is manifest in the rude Mechs’ work on the performance Group’s 1968 production of Dionysus in 69, directed by richard schechner—the first in a series of reenactments of sig-nificant experimental performances from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. our companies share a creative ethos that is re-flected in some basic structural similarities. each is collectively run: the rude Mechanicals by six artis-tic directors (five of whom founded the company in 1995) and radiohole by its four founding members. each creates original works from scratch, and each founded and runs its own venue. radiohole’s venue is Collapsable hole in Brooklyn; the rude Mechs’ performance warehouse, the off Center, has become home to many of Austin’s visual, film, theater, and music artists. the following conversation happened on the eve of the rude Mechs’ new york tour. it is pieced together from many fragments: emails, poorly recorded phone calls, and letters exchanged through the mail (remem-ber that?). the conversation is not linear and reflects the compositional process more or less characteristic of radiohole and the rude Mechanicals. By the time you read this, the rude Mechs will have brought their re-construction of the performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 to new york Live Arts. We hope you will have experienced it and that this conversation might retro-spectively bring new insight into that experience. — eriC dyer

we were making the work. for many years we made two or three plays a year. right around 2007 we got a Creative Capital grant—at the same time as radiohole. it sort of broke our company a little bit by suggesting that a collective seriously consider individual artistic ca-reers and satisfaction, but it also changed it for the better and gave us the means to extend the development process and put more care into it. We were slowing down the rate at which we made work, and our company members were getting to do less and less, since we were making fewer and fewer plays.

ed And that’s by choice, by people doing other things in their lives?

LL Just because we were making one play a year instead of three. Whoever was in that one play was working all year and whoever wasn’t wasn’t doing anything artistic with the company. We were trying to address all these ideas at the same time: we needed to give our company members more things to do throughout the year, we needed to contextualize our work, and we also needed to educate

Performance view of jason Liebrecht, Lana Lesley, Ron Berry, Kirk Lynn, Sarah Richardson in Get Your War On , directed by Shawn Sides, 2006,

the Off Center, Austin, Texas. Photo by Geri Hernandez.

Performance view of Hannah Kenah, Katie Van Winkle, jude Hickey, and others in Dionysus in 69 , directed by Madge Darlington and Shawn

Sides, 2009, the Off Center, Austin, Texas. Photo by Bret Brookshire.

45 theAter — rude MeChAniCALs

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Cristian Mungiu by Liza Béar

in 2005 irina Cornici, a 23-year-old romanian woman raised in an abusive orphanage, visited a childhood friend, now a novice at an off-the-grid, rural Moldovian monastery in tanacu. Cornici was planning to immi-grate to Germany. she died at the monastery a few weeks after her arrival, having been strapped to a plank, while the saint Basil’s prayers, said to “banish the devil,” were read by a resident priest with alleged healing powers. unable to conform to orthodox con-ventions, Cornici’s behavior had become increasingly confrontational, provoking a succession of restraints. Medical authorities diagnosed her as schizophrenic; the monastery viewed her as “possessed.” treated as a case of exorcism by the local press and abroad, what became known as the tanacu incident

created a furor in a country which has witnessed a re-surgence of the orthodox church in the past 20 years since the fall of nicolae Ceaus‚escu and Communism. the officiating priest and four nuns were summarily arrested, excommunicated, and subsequently tried and sentenced to jail. A more thorough investigation into the exact goings-on at the monastery prior to this tragedy by tatiana niculescu Bran, a former senior editor of the BBC’s Bucharest bureau, led to the publication of her two non-fiction novels—Deadly Confession, in 2006, fol-lowed by The Book of judges, documenting the trial. they are the books that inspired Cristian Mungiu’s film Beyond the Hills, which premiered in competition at Cannes this year, winning Best screenplay and Best

Actress for its two superb leads, Cristina flutur and Cosmina stratan. it’s also romania’s entry for foreign-language film at the oscars. Mungiu was in town for a new york film festival screening in october; i spoke to him in a break-out room at ifC, which will release the film theatrically in february. in the interview, Mungiu explores the broader concerns that eventually led him to make a dramatic film about the tanacu incident: eschewing the sensa-tionalist aspects of the case but taking his cue from tatiana Bran’s nonjudgmental account of the events. it’s in fact Mungiu’s second story about an intense relationship between two young women; the first was the riveting and unsettling 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, which documented a critical 24 hours in a student’s quest for an illegal abortion for her roommate. 4 Months earned him the palme d’or in 2007, the first romanian feature to win the award.

Mungiu’s signature directing style, evident in Beyond the Hills, uses widescreen naturalistic settings, long takes, a master-shot, observational approach; it draws its narrative momentum from a nimble script with crisp, racy dialogue that’s adept at nailing fluctuating and conflicting emotions. the screenplay (his own) is also well grounded in the physical and economic re-alities of the local community, the other institutions with which the monastery’s inhabitants interact—the orphanage, the hospital, the police. My interest in romanian cinema was sparked in the early ‘90s by Lucian pintilié’s The Oak, a vivid, biting satire of the Communist regime. ironically, the revo-lutionary romanian director plays a hidden role in the genesis of Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills, so this is where i started recording . . .

Cosmina Stratan as Voichita and Cristina Flutur as Alina in Beyond the Hills , 2012, 35 mm film. Photo by Sebastian

Enache. Courtesy of Mobra Films, Why Not Productions, Les Films Du Fleuve, and France 3Cinéma. Co-produced by

Mandragora Movies.

51 fiLM — CristiAn MunGiu

52 BoMB 122

LiZA BéAr you were saying that Lucian pintilié . . .

CristiAn MunGiu i was saying that for a while Lucian pintilié wanted to make a film based on the 2005 tanacu incident. he announced it publicly, he wrote a screenplay, and we were all expecting to watch the film. But in 2010 or ‘11, he gave up the project and decided the last film he would make in his life would be about Chekhov.

LB Good choice!

CM therefore, because i was really at-tracted by the story, i decided that it would be okay for me to make a film about it.

LB do you know him well, Lucian pintilié?

CM We met a couple of times but i can’t say i know him well. he moved back to romania right after the fall of Communism in 1989 and has been liv-ing here for the last 23 years. he had been forced to work in exile because the Communist regime wanted him to leave and let them be.

LB i noticed that you and two of your ac-tors were born in the same place, ias‚ i.What kind of place is that?

CM it’s a university town with 400,000 inhabitants and with a lot of universities,a school of medicine and polytechnics.But it’s not only the three of us who were born there. strangely enough, when i cast the film i wasn’t aware that many of the actors were also born in ias‚ i. And i wondered why i always end up choos-ing people from that region. this time it’s clearer. it has something to do with their accent and with the way actors deliver their lines. it’s the melody of the language, a way of structuring the way you talk. And my choice is part rational, part irrational. it feels natural, especially for this film. the dialogue is spoken with the accent of my hometown, though more with a Moldovian accent. it’s not easy for romanians to understand. you wouldn’t notice it in translation, but it’s a way of speaking very fast, both dropping letters from words and running syllables together.

LB it sounds a bit like Cuban spanish compared to Castilian spanish.

CM i couldn’t say! But for romanians, this accent mentally places the action in mid-Moldova, which people think of as an impoverished region, with very simple

people of very little education. And it’s much more believable that a story involv-ing a lot of voodoo belief could happen there and not someplace else.

LB so it’s in the northeast of romania?

CM My hometown is in the northeast; where the story is set is a little further south, more Mideast. it’s hilly. i couldn’t shoot the film in tanacu; i scouted there, but i needed something closer to Bucharest. Because of practical pro-duction issues, i couldn’t travel 1,200 kilometers away from Bucharest. All the film industry, the laboratories—we shot on 35-mm film—are in Bucharest. so are the actors. i ended up finding a place that looked a lot like tanacu 100 kilometers away. it’s a very hilly part of romania, and that’s why the title is Beyond the Hills. in romanian we say that there’s anger hidden in still water . . . partly what you see in the film.

LB there’s a proverb in english, “still waters run deep.”

CM it’s pretty much the same in romanian.

LB your first film, Occident, from 2002, was at directors’ fortnight, your second film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, won the palme d’or, and this one won Best screenplay and Best Actress for the two leads, Cristina flutur and Cosmina stratan at Cannes this year. An incredible track record. did you study film, or learn by working on other people’s films?

CM first i studied languages at one of the universities in my hometown. for a while, i was an english teacher and worked as a journalist. And then i moved to Bucharest and studied film there for four years; we had only one film school. But while i was studying film in Bucharest, i was also working for the American and french films that were being shot there. so i was able to see for myself how things work on the set in practice. And i was lucky that as soon as i graduated, the romanian cinema law was passed.

LB Which was?

CM it was a new law regulating cinema production. An institution, the national Center for Cinematography, was created, so financing films from that moment on—this was 1997—became more transparent, open. submit a screenplay, you get half the money immediately; you look for the rest, you make the film.

LB Very sensible.

CM yes. We’re talking about very small amounts, and it wasn’t easy to get this kind of funding, but the process was clear. so i was able to work immediately after film school. in fact, i didn’t have to do anything else but make short films and then my first feature. And i kept going. of course you learn certain things in film school and others from being on film sets. But most of the important things you learn by making films. for me it was important to read feedback about what i did, what people liked about my short

Cristian Mungiu on the set of Beyond the Hills . Photo by Cos Aelenei. Courtesy of Mobra Films, Why Not Productions, Les Films Du Fleuve,

and France 3Cinéma. Co-produced Mandragora Movies.

first proof — bomb’s Literary supplement

66 firstproof

portfolio

68 Horst Ademeit

interviews

70 mArk Z. dAnieLewski by Christopher o’riley 76 fAnny Howe by kim Jensen

fiction

84 GeorGe minkoff mrs. Job in Connecticut90 trey sAGer the father104 JAmes HAnnAHAm Q23

poetry

88 Lewis wArsH 96 suZAnne wise98 kAren Green from Bough Down102 dAnieL borZutZky data Harbor

This issue of First Proof is funded, in part, by Amazon and the

Thanksgiving Fund.

Additional funding is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural

Affairs and readers like you.

Contents

68 firstproof

Horst Ademeit portfolio

discovered shortly before his death, Ademeit’s work is composed of photographs and annotations that tell the story of an individual undergoing an emotional crisis and attempting to establish a sense of order in a world that he considered to be chaotic. obsessed with docu-menting the impact of what he believed to be harm-ful invisible rays that were capable of endangering life on earth, the artist used a polaroid camera to record his daily movements. the resulting photographs are accompanied by notes on the place, the situation, or the objects portrayed.

Coverandspread: by Horst Ademeit (1937–2001, Germany) Untitled observation photos, worked

over polaroids, 3 1/2 × inches 4, 3 each. Courtesy of Galerie Susanne Zander, Cologne, Germany.

70 firstproof

markZ.abyChristophero’riley

Photo by Emman Montalvan.

71 literAture—mArkZ.dAnielewski

i came to know and admire mark Z. danielewski’swork, initially, as with legions of others, throughHouse of Leaves. i remember browsing at Barnes &nobleinmanhattan—thebook’sdark,rune-embossedcover put me in mind of the Necronomicon, a favor-ite, thoughentirely imaginary, tomeoflovecraftiana.intheonlytimei’veeverseenabookstoreclerkbreakimpassivecharacter,iwasapplaudedandencouragedinmychoiceofthisculthorrornovel.myfirsttraversalofHouse of Leaveshookedme.luckily,bythen,Only Revolutionshadalreadycomeintotheworld,aprosepoem–roadnovelwitharchetypal teen loversaccom-paniedontheirjourneybyanepic,andepigrammatic,Historyoftheworld. mark and i became friends in the bygone era ofmyspace,withmystatingmyadmirationofhisworkand inviting him to a concert i was playing at theHollywoodBowl.HewasconvincediwasacounterfeitChristophero’rileyuntilticketsdidindeedappearwithhisnameonthemattheboxoffice,andmyimagewaswrit largeonthebowlJumbotrons.sincethen,we’vesharedmealsandfavoritewriters.ihavemarktothankforintroducingmetomanygreatbooks,mostmemo-rablythosebyrobertoBolaño,withwhichwehaveamutualobsession. it is mark’s deep appreciation of music that makesourfriendshipinspiredandreciprocal.Hespeaksamu-sician’slanguageandfeelsthecommunicativeeffectofthe unspoken. And so when considering a more thor-oughlymusicalsettingforhis2005novella,The Fifty Year Sword,markaskedmetoprovideacompletescoreandsoundscape.itwasessentiallyasummerproject.imadeimprovisationalforaysagainstthebackdropofaslowedandretunedgamelanorchestra(evocative,ithought,ofthestoryteller’smysticalapprenticeshipwiththemanwithnoArms in thenovella), sendingmark clips andpassagesofcharacter-associatedmotivesandmelodies.wethenfocuseduponwhichthemesneededtobeas-signed and be recognizable to each character group,sending sound files back and forth, eliciting reactionsand further direction. mark was always clear, as if healreadyhadthemusicinhishead.infact,oneofthefinalgrand motives was absolutely a danielewski composi-tionalcontributionwithmyturningitupsidedownandinsideout,thusilluminatingtheroot,fruit,andcourseofhismusing. Allthiswasdonewiththeideaofprovidingamusi-calscrimforthelivereadingofThe Fifty Year Sword,butmarksoonfoldedthisintohisalreadyburgeoningideation involving theevolutionof thee-bookformatintoanactiveandanimatedformat,sothatenlivenedtext on the page was to be accompanied by soundclipsofourvariousmusicalmotives.Justasheinvig-orated the book’s graphic possibilities in the printedformat,markistrailblazinginmakingthee-bookver-sionofThe Fifty Year Swordintoavanguardworkofthemedium. we met for breakfast one morning in Hollywood, aprefacetoanotherofourmarathonworksessionsatmyhomeinthehills. —CHristopHero’riley

mArkZ.dAnielewskiCanyouhearmyvoice?

CHristopHero’rileyicanhearexactlywhat’scom-ingin;icanheareverythinginhighfidelity.so,peoplesay,“writewhatyouknow.”Howmuchofyour life ispartoftheworkandhowmuchofitissomethingyou’vecomeupwith?

mZdwell,“whatweknow”isalwaysacomplicatedas-sertionbecausewe’remostlyundertheimpressionthatwhat we’ve managed to cobble together in our mindsandinourheartsreallydoesgotogether.(Server brings scrambled egg whites.)writingandtheartsareparticu-larlyprivileged in thisway.they’reexercisesaffordinga more intimate glimpse into understanding what andhowweknow.it’sahumanpreoccupation—assemblingthenarrativesofwhoweareandhowwelive—tocreatesomething thatcoalescesandcommunicateswhatweknow.sotheactofknowingisseldomfarfromtheactofdiscoveringwhatweknow.

Coisitalsoaquestionofnotbeingwhatyouknow,butwhoyouknow?imean,itsoundstomethatthehumanequationpresupposesasenseofcharacterastotality,asreality.eachoneofyourcharactersisnotjustavoice,it’salsoapointofview.thatpresupposesacertainamountofdepth—wheredoesthatcomefrom?doesthatcomeoutofasenseofresponsibilitytoyourrealityandallofitscomponents?

mZdthat’sawonderfulwayofbringing in the impor-tance of character and perspective: responsibility. thekeytocharacterisultimatelyvoice,andvoiceisnotnec-essarily something that harmonizes, let alone equals,whatanothervoicesaysorsoundslike.there’snothingmoredetrimental to character/voice thananencirclingby like voices, trapping oneself in an echo chamber,andhearingonlyone’sownviewsandpassionsreiter-atedoverandover.Character—especiallyinelizabethantimes, not to mention when this country began—cen-tered on how to negotiate, handle, observe, and learnfromdiscrepanciesindifferentpointsofview.onhowtograntentrancetothemindtothoseideasantagonistictoourviews,andnotjustbydevelopingacertainendur-ance—anddefinitelynotanobduracytowardnewpointsofview—butonhow toactuallycultivate thosevoiceswhichseemedtobeantinomiestooursenseofself.Andyetitwasonlythroughthoseinternalchallengesandob-jections, even atypical whimsy, that a compassionate,moreencompassing,and,iwouldliketothink,respon-sibleselfcouldemerge.

Cointhatsense,theantimonysortofbecomesthecen-tralforcethroughwhicheachcharacterassumesweightandtrajectoryandisabletoevolve.doyouthinkastorycancomefromthatkindofyinandyangsettingupofliterallyopposing forcesand letting themrideout thattensionandgravity?

mZdwithoutquestion.idon’tthinkitneedstobesoan-tipodal.wedon’tneedablackversusawhite,apositive

76 firstproof

Photo by Lynn Christoffers.

fannyHowebykimJensen

fannyHoweistherenownedauthorofover40booksofpoetry,fiction,andessays.BorntoanillustriousBostonfamilyofartistsandscholarsin1940,fannyHowebe-came involved in the civil rights movement and thenmarriedAfricanAmericanwriterCarlsenna,withwhomshehadthreechildren,includingnovelistdanzysenna.After the breakup of her marriage, Howe moved toCaliforniawhereshetaughtliteratureandfictionwritingattheuniversityofCaliforniaformanyyears. itwas insandiego, in1991,on theeveof theGulfwar,whereimetfannywheniwasastudentinhergrad-uatepoetryseminar.onesaturday, i ran intoheratanantiwardemonstrationandwespent thedaymarchingtogether.soonafter,isatdowntoreadoneofhernov-els,The Deep North,whichcontainedsomeofthemostevocative,beautifulprose ihadever read.love-struck,i fellheadlong intoaprolongedanddrunkenstretchofreading and studying her work. that stretch, and ourfriendship, has lasted these23 years—sparking severalcollaborations,includinganintertextualcollectionofpo-ems iwrotecalledThe Only Thing That Matters whichwillbereleasedthisspringbysyracuseuniversitypress. in an age when many American artists and writersseem focused on projecting an aura of glib certitude,fanny embraces radical indeterminacy. reading herfiction feels something like facing a patch of wilder-ness—startling, beautiful, yet terrifyingly mysterious.themes such as race and class, poverty and theology,women and oppression, are not merely explored, theyare exploded—in a cascade of startling provocations.linear chronology is abandoned in favor of recklessnarrative swerves. Characterization is loose, intuitive.impressionisticstorylinesgivebirthtoaproliferationofquixoticpassages,arcanespeculations,andintoxicatingdigressions.theonlytraditionalaspectoffanny’sfictionisitsunyieldingpursuitofbeauty.fiveofhermostimpor-tantnovelshavebeenrecentlycollectedandrepublishedunderoneeditioncalledRadical Love(nightboatBooks). ever the itinerant teacher–thinker–Catholic mystic,fannyHoweneverstaysrootedforlong.itwasthereforeastrokeofluckthatshelandedforastintatthelannanCenter for poetics and social practice at Georgetownuniversity this past year, not far from where i live inBaltimore.lastspring,wespentagloriouslysunnydaytogether, walking, resting, and talking—about her life,her ideas, and her writing, mainly her novels, since ihavebeenanavidreaderofthemforsomanyyears.inthe luxuriantgardenofher rented flat, i recordedpartofourmeanderingconversation.After transcribingtheinterview, i went back with fanny and we added themissingparts. —kimJensen

kim Jensen you’ve been teaching children’s litera-ture for a while and are finishing a two-year post atGeorgetown.whatbooksdidyouloveasachild?

fAnnyHowemanyican’tremember.ithinkthebooksireadthemostweremoreseductivethaninstructivebe-causeoftheirillustrations.istillswoonoverTom Kitten.if you look closely, you can see that Beatrix potter’s

watercolors are filled with both vagueness and detail.distance is her medium. And the Greek and romanmyths adapted by nathaniel Hawthorne had picturesstrong in outline fitting to their certainties—gleaminghelmetsanddragons.ButithinkFerdinand the BullandThe Little House were very helpful to me as a youngchild.thecharactersstood theirgroundandwerenotdefeated,althoughtheywereweak,passive.

kJthere’sawholecategoryofbooksthatteachchildrenhowcharmingandusefulitistobeafailure.

fHStuart Littleisoneofmyfavorites.stuartisanoutsid-erfromthemomentheisbornasamouseintoahumanhousehold.Asanoddphenomenon,heisgivenchorestodo.He isuseful,brave,andclever.Aservant to thefamily. But his independent adventures almost alwaysresult indisasters.whenhe isalone,hegoes throughhilariousstrugglesand,attheend,hesetsoff intotheworldasacompletefailure.

kJinyourownnovels,thereistherecurringfairytale-likefigureoftheneglectedorisolatedyoungerchildwhoseesherselfasafailureandwhoidentifieswithservantsand outsiders. overshadowed by others, she retreatsinto her imagination, shielding herself from an adultworldthathoverslikethemenacingbootofanindiffer-entgiant.Canyoutalkaboutyourownchildhood,andhowitrelatestothisprominentmotif?

fH i grew up during the second world war and theCold war. it was an ominous time for a child. Absentfathers,mcCarthy, threatsofannihilation... .when itstabilized, i found myself in the arms of a lovely littlecity,Cambridge,massachusetts,withlotsoftreesandgardensandalongsideaverypowerfulandgiftedoldersister [susan Howe]. my irish mother, mary manning,producedplaysatatheatershefoundedcalledthepoets’theater,whichnowenjoyssomenotorietyinthepoet-ryworld.theyperformedfranko’Hara,w.s.merwin,Violetlang,JohnAshbery,yeats,etcetera.weirdly,thequality of the plays was of little importance to my in-trepidmotherwhobelievedintryingthingsout,ratherthanbelievinginthem. myfather,ontheotherhand,believedinfixedprinciplesand moral laws. He was on the side of the disenfran-chised.HetaughttheConstitutionatHarvardandactivelydefendedcivilrights.Hewasthecenterofmylife,butheneverheldourmotherbackfromherdrinkingoranythingelse.mysistersanditookontheproblemofherdramaticmoodswingsinverydifferentways.welefthomeearly,didn’tgetcollegedegrees,went into thearts,andhadboutsofmentaldistress.neitherofusstruckitrich.webasicallystayedatthesameincomelevelasourparentsforourwholelives.whenmyyoungersisterwasborn,iwasnineanditwasatthatmomentthatibecamecriticalofmyhomebaseandbegantorebelagainstinstitutions,parentalapprovals,andotherconstraints.

kJ your youthful rebellion led you to dropping out ofschool, then to being “exiled” to stanford university

77 literAture—fAnnyHowe

80 firstproof

inevermetakindermanthanthehomelessalcoholicwhointroducedmetothefatherofmykids.Hewasmyteacherthroughaperiodofmylifewhichwasbothanactualandanallegoricaljourney.wewerewrecksbutourrelationshipwascomplete.sufficient.Hewasmuchworseoffthani.Butiwasalostspiritcladinadirtypileofthreads.westumbledthroughtherockystreetsofthecitytofindourwaytogreenwoodswheredogwoodbloomed...wewentalongwitheachother,neverhavingsexordreamingofit...wesoughtadifficultroutetothenirvanaofawoodlandsetting,handinhand,imaginingaprospectbothphysicalandinternal.Awhitetreeisreflectedasawhitetreeinbrownwater.nomatterwhatyouwanttosayaboutit,isawapuresoulwhenisawhim. —fannyHowe,Radical Love (nightboatBooks,2006)

84 firstproof

GeorGe minkoff

mrs. Job in Connecticut

why it interested me is because it hap-pened. there are many things that happen that are of no interest to any-one. they are events without purpose, expended energy just for the practice of expending energy. but this business in Connecticut was quite different; not that i really believe it happened, you understand, the way they said. no, i can’t say i believe it totally. there really was so little proof, and proof is so necessary, if only to be examined, dis-sected, and then refuted. there were facts, but facts are so forgetful. it was the physicality of the event that dis-suades the eye. it was all a lot of sur-face, which may have an inner meaning to those involved. but to me, i can find no real purpose to it – just nothing. An empty event, purposeless, but i must say, arresting. i interviewed the whole crew. After all, i am a social columnist. it’s really not my kind of story, even though it happened at a luncheon, and every-one knew me. After they got to know me even better they were quite open, i think, or as open as people decide to be when they decide to be open. sometimes i interpreted what they said. other times i left it to you. it’s the damnedest story, a mystery of sorts —unexplained phenomenon. but they told it to me, and i leave it to you to judge. . . . As they say, all mysteries are the mysteries of the human spirit. even if you see shadows on a distant star, the mystery is us. i’m not sure mrs. Job ever thought i would write this down. i wasn’t sure myself. i wasn’t certain i had the cour-age. the mystery deepens as man sees his own reflection. His hand is the hand of darkness. maybe the story has noth-ing to do with the Jobs, or the Clapps, or melanie, or anyone else, just one of those crazy quirks of nature that some-how adopted them. i suppose one is not adopted by the inanimate, but i’m not sure. it started three months ago with the beginning of August. mrs. Job was going to have a luncheon. the Jobs’

lawn was having a hard time of it, a lot of brown spots. mrs. Job was looking for her gardener, sam, who was sit-ting on the roof in his pirate uniform, where . . . well, let’s start from the real beginning. real beginnings are always diffi-cult, but i suppose i’m it. i’m your basic real beginning. i think it’s best to start from what is known, proceed to what is unlikely, and finally come to rest at what is unbelievable. i’m the social col-umnist for the “beigewater sentinel,” which is all too tenable for me, almost disgustingly tenable. i would prefer to be almost any place else. but, when this position was offered to me one halluci-natory evening by a drunken red face which somehow seemed less drunk than the other drunken red faces in the room, i said yes. it seemed like a pleas-ant interlude between college and my youthful anticipations of immortality, so i took it. i’ve been interluding for five years now. the point at which interlude becomes occupation has always been somewhat problematic to me. but, as i sit here on my canvas-backed chair, with my feet on the rough, wooden desk, in the flickering twilight of my dying kerosene lamp, i know the truth, as i wonder if i’m inhabiting one of those legendary dead-end careers. i lean back in my chair and stare uninterruptedly at my canvas ceiling, listening to the sounds of nature propagating itself. i wonder even more. i live in a tent, rainbow colored and custom made for me. only in sum-mer do i live here. i’m just playfully eccentric, nothing doctrinaire, mind you. i cohabit with the golden mean. the ancient Greeks had a saying: everything in moderation. i once asked a professor of mine if that included moderation itself. He answered me three days later by running off with the departmental secretary. i learned it could be dangerous to ask certain questions of certain people. maybe that’s why i’m not a philosopher. i love the smell of wet canvas, the dull sound of rain hitting my cloth roof. there are still joys in the woods. i had gotten my assignment to cover the Jobs’ luncheon at pinwheel’s Garage. i use pinwheel’s phone. i have none, which is both a relief and an inconvenience. i can only take the human race in small doses, and no phone helps. each day i make the rounds of several strategically

located public phones and a few pri-vate ones. my office has my schedule and they catch me as they can. All this may seem very mysterious, but i culti-vate mystery. As much as bread, man needs it to survive. man does not starve by bread alone, my friends. seeing the Jobs again was not high on my list of priorities, but i have to eat. i always found the Jobs a little too strait-laced for my taste, but what the hell. of course there are the Jobs’ neighbors, the Clapps, and that voluptuous fifteen-year-old daughter of theirs, divinity. Ah, divinity. there has always been a real question whether divinity Clapp had a face. i always thought she did, giving the power and the silhouette human lips, but i am told i was just saying that to gain a few provocative favors with a certain variety of liber-ated females, some of whose phones i use. to me, divinity was really more than a well-blossomed phenomenon. she had her own special kind of style, a sort of untamed self-indulged wilder-ness. but, i’m getting ahead of myself; and i do like divinity. the heat last summer was relent-less – each day when the sun would set, the heat wouldn’t. the air hung on us as a bad memory. At eight o’clock that morning divinity Clapp stood at the back screen door of her parents’ house, took hold of the handle and opened the door. Looking back over her shoulder briefly, she walked into the morning air. she whined in that earnest teenage way, plaintively crooning each word into sounds too heavy for their mean-ings, “why is it always summer?” the screen door closed with a long squeak and a slightly hesitant slam. the small female hand left the aluminum-alloy door handle, corroded with years of intermittent Connecticut rain. divinity Clapp, dressed in a slight bikini, walked to the side of the clear aqua pool, put her portable radio on the iron wicker table, removed her towel, and sulked. Almost without looking, she sat down in a blue lounge chair by her side with a heavi-ness that had a strange resemblance to dead weight. she put her hands, which were now fists, on either side of her chin, and sighed through her manicured fin-gernails, “mother, eight o’clock in the morning is always boring.” she looked upward, as if some god were responsible for her teenage boredom. “mother.” the word was filled with a kind of pathos,

88 firstproof

deAr CommunArd

the satisfaction of human needs creates new needsmarx said, just as a poem gives birth to anotherAlmost immediately after you finish the one before,so there’s no sense of completion and only an occasionalword crossed out, deleted, “no completion” seemsto be the order of the day.

something left out calls for its other, A warm bed is all one needs, and the new poem is callingbut the operator is asleep, and the words are lostAnd found again, that’s the other theme—the ghostsof the past enter stage center, the animals and the streetpeople line up on the boardwalk, the ocean looms, scatterbrained birds of a feather fly south for the winter, the deletions add up—the Hotel de Ville burns to the ground—one wing of the Louvre is gone—a mural by delacroix turns to ash—the poem needs some sustenance but no one can Give enough, that’s what i was like when i was younger, insatiable, in my own way, so that people thought me strange for wanting more than i had, but the mystery is in the words “never enough”—i might have worn them on my sleeve—so what do you say we get down on our knees and pray for some god of forgiveness to man the barricades?or do we take it as it is, as it goes, while remaining cognizant of what happened down through time,All the thens and theres mingling with all the is and yousuntil a direct address is delivered to all of parison the day that 100,000 prussians did a victory lap down Les Champs-elysées—and it all really happened,

Dear Communard.

dArk side of time

time is the solution in which the livingand the dead confer—there’s no other place for usor them and there’s no other place to be (except where we are), putting our feet up on the balcony and staring out at the emptyplain—where everything is invisible and everyonehas a name (the only way back is the wayyou came), and once i played odysseus to her penelope, way back when, and we stepped from the bath in someone else’s house, and once all the lights went out in the middle of the night and we built a fire until the storm abated, and later—it’s getting late in the day—we’ll have caviar and champagne—at the edge of the crater on the sea of dreams, and look down to earth as if it was all one and the same, and leave our footprints for those who follow.

Lewis wArsH

Lewis Warsh’s most recent books are A place in the sun (Spuyten Duyvil), i nsepa rable : poems 1995 –2005 (Granary) and the origin of the world (Creative Arts). He is the editor and publisher of United Artists Books and director of the MFA program in cre-ative writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn. mimeo mimeo #7 (Fall 2012) features his poetry, fiction, and collages.

90 firstproof

trey sAGerthe father

when Angie called he was washing the bottoms of his shoes, concerned that his soles were soiled with the runoff of other donors. Angie had tried to call his wife but couldn’t get through, she said. she quickly confessed that she and her husband were getting a divorce. the man wiped his tongue on his sleeve. He had a cat hair in his mouth. Angie asked if he was there. “yes,” he said. “Can you meet me?” she asked. He had an appointment at the sperm bank later that afternoon. He wondered aloud if she’d drive to the parking lot of the strip mall, the one with the small movie theater. “near the outer banks,” she confirmed. yes. okay. three p.m. three p.m. they hung up. He ran his hands under the tap water and washed them with palmolive. He then removed the cat hair. upon further examina-tion he discovered it wasn’t a cat hair. it looked more like a sweater thread or the fiber from a carpet. He didn’t have a cat. months before, he and Angie had chanced a bottle of wine while sarah was away. Angie had twirled her hair nervously with her forefinger, curling it over and over. she tinkered with the salt and pepper shakers, sliding them around like chess queens while she and Abe made small talk. when he asked if she was feeling okay, she admitted to a spate of recent panic attacks. she said she was afraid of her own pubic hair, scared to talk to men on the tele-phone. she’d come to believe her own menstrual blood was some kind of cor-ruption. she looked into the mirror and saw a monster. the man listened sym-pathetically. He looked her in the eye affirmingly but kept glancing at her mouth. it was like the zipper of a purse with lots of money inside. she said that a long time ago she’d been afraid of los-ing her teeth, and remembered a child-hood bike accident in which she skidded on sand and flew over the handlebars, smashing her mouth onto the curb. Her lip ripped into a chunk. At the hospital the doctor discovered two of her teeth missing and suggested she may have swallowed them. the man noticed the slightest furrow in her lip where the doctor had sewn stitches. Her makeup

helped disguise the scar, but he could still see it. Angie drank her wine, rest-ing the glass on her lower lip. Her eyes closed. Her teeth clicked against the glass. He imagined her eating a salad, the sound of the fork sliding from her mouth, the scrape of metal against her teeth. “i don’t see anything,” he said. “i know you can,” she paused. “it was when sandy turned six that i became afraid of losing my teeth. i know those kinds of dreams mean you feel power-less, but then i remembered the bike accident, which happened when i was six.” He reached for Angie’s shoulder and squinched it in his hand. “now sandy’s got her period,” she said. “i think all these anxieties are related. i think i’m re-experienc-ing puberty because she just turned thirteen.” the man did not have kids, but he’d heard of parents who rediscovered themselves when they had children. it always sounded like a wonderful expe-rience. they found their optimistic pur-pose, they could see a million shades of green again. they were happy. but Angie sounded harried, like she’d split into two different people, one rooted in the present, the other drowning in the ocean of the past. He wanted to console her but he didn’t know what to say. it sounded so dramatic. He placed his hand on hers and raised his eye-brows suggestively as he tilted the bot-tle toward her, offering her more wine. she made fists inside her sweater. “Just a little,” she said. shortly after she left, he finished the wine. it had been a gift, an extra bottle from a party, he couldn’t remember, something sarah wouldn’t miss. He sat down at the table, thinking of Angie and wondering about his own parents, if they’d ever experienced similar anxi-eties. Counting back, his mother had been thirty-four and his father thirty-seven when he was born. in ten months he would be thirty-seven. His wife had never wanted children, but lately he’d become surprisingly enthusiastic. in his mind he saw a strange reflection of himself, a gruff f igure holding in his arms a tiny piglet whose skin was downy pink. delicate white lashes made abbreviated canopies over its eyes, and a soft f lank draped over his bearish forearm. though it was a slight inverse

of what Angie had been talking about, his recent desire to have children and the discovered age of his father seemed like an odd coincidence, emanations of the same invisible government. He was half his father’s body, and he spec-ulated there could be a time release in his dnA, contingent on the moment he transitioned from one parent into the other. maybe there was a code inside him, an envelope mailed many years ago that had finally opened. when the wine was f inished he poured himself a whiskey. the late afternoon moved into the hollow blue of twilight as he stirred at the kitchen table, ruminating over the possibility of children. people called it a miracle. it seemed more like a pleasant math. when sarah came home he got up from his chair abruptly, gripped her by the arms and pushed her against the stove. “i’m thinking about kids,” he said.

He found Angie’s suV in the parking lot and pulled up beside her the way police officers do. Angie looked as if she’d been sleeping in the woods. Her hair was knotted and her eyes frenzied with makeup. He nodded and got out of his car. the interior of her suV was disheveled, too, the floor flooded with maps, newspapers, kleenex and plastic rings from six-packs. Angie had a beer in her hand and reached into the back-seat for another. she smelled vaguely of chicken soup. Ash and white butts bat-tled inside the ashtray. marlboro Lights were the one cigarette he could resist. the uniquely acrid smoke repulsed him, or maybe it was the whiteness. with other cigarettes he smelled toast and firewood. with marlboro Lights it was just chemicals. Angie lit one and resumed her anxious confession. she and bob were getting a divorce. He’d told her they were intellectually incom-patible. He was seeing another woman, a librarian he’d met on the internet. Angie had threatened to give him a vasectomy with a kitchen knife. “now i have to find a condo, something cheap for me and sandy, and i have to get a better job, maybe doing data entry.” He rubbed his hand comfortingly across her thigh, smoothing errant bits of ash into her blue jeans. she mewed softly into her beer. He tried to console her, telling her it was not her fault. He never liked bob. barbeque bob. no more big

96 firstproof

piLGrimAGe pAst tHe written

even when the book shut itself for good, it continued to inspire you.

it provoked you to thumb through its excremental dust. And so you shuffled

into some very sick terrain: it was a land of color drained, a land of cold and fog

and sweating. you might have turned back but what you’d left had already left you for dead.

All you had left was your left- handed pleasure in everything going right

toward nothing. the way ahead was the right way because it was the only way and it was thinning.

Leading the way is your jobyou said to your lame horse as it hobbled forward.

but then the horse stopped or the horizon stopped

jiggling and the drifts stopped drifting and the

fell into a gulley and the thing beneath your fingers now resembling a broken spine of chalk

lifted its pasty bone and blasted its plaster breath

and broke itself into a cumulous of dust.

A hush fell and could not get up. A needle scraping the grooves of a memory of an Lp

of a ghost story flew out of orbit, scraping a new gougeinto thinking. you prayed as best you could

under the circumstances. A prayer of ditches risen

of white noise, a prayer of broken middle-ear bones,

a prayer of blindfolds and dead ends, of white-wash rushing in from the left side

of the brain, a prayer of running toward and slamming

answer locking you out of its margin

of error, a prayer of bowing down and scraping at, a prayer of primer under fingernails, of metallic-

into walls

into the right

tasting flakes,

right way

a prayer of hollowing a dent big enough to fit one ear until listening became the prayer’s

substitute and what you heard was like the beatingof wings of a fly stuck to flypaper

on the other side of your rightmind. what separated you from what you heard

was that emaciated. but what you heard did not die and instead grew bigger wings and bigger wind

whistled through what you now pressed against,trying to hold back what already whipped about

in the coiled chamber of your cochlea—a squall of rage at being summoned beyond the words

you would have written down if there’d ever been words for such a sound.

tHe post

it might have been a tree once or a sign or a post for hitching or hanging. though it lacked a leaf or word or hook or rope, i knew it must have a reason,if not a strategy, and i resigned myselfto stick to it. i lay down and curled upat the foot of that post as a shadow would. As the sun rose and fell, i stretched out and curled up and stretched out while the post continued to sufferrigor mortis. yes, i had found my calling, and it was silent because it was dead or, if it wasn’t, it might as well have been. but i would not abandon my post. (though i did fall asleep for a time.)

when i woke, the darkness made me indistinguishable from the post as if i were half inside the earth and my legshad fused into one leg, foot chopped off, stuffed in up to thigh and sinking deeper still.i wrestled with my thigh until i yanked that post right out of the ground, which turned out to be easy, rotten as it was.

it broke beneath my fingers as i dragged it.i thought i might bury it faraway in an unmarked grave that i would tend to(and no one would know the post ever was). but soon i liked how dragging flayed it smaller and easier to drag and soon it didn’t matter how far we went

suZAnne wise

98 firstproof

kAren Green from Bough Down

the doctor wears his pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up. i see his flaws clearly before he gives me the shot which will put me to sleep until after the holidays. He is making a mercy call, and the needle is part of my invention. pink is a new color i am seeing.

the Googled pills are all different colors.

i don’t know how not to imagine submission, even after all this. someone says i need to be contained but i think he means constrained. i let him take away my sight and my hearing while he applies pressure in another language. He is very kind about assessing my needs, but there is a stri-dent protestor type inside who recoils and starts assembling contempt and mirrors.

what dreams the support guys have:

their sensible shoes wear out, they have the code blues, patients eat their own fingers down to the first knuckle; there are contraptions to keep hands down, mouths shut. they dream of consequences. they have their mcsanctuaries to dream in, and yet. faux-science is replaced with newer, quieter faux-science. the machines chirp like fledglings, they don’t beep. some souls are so lost they make their own privacy, they don’t need walls. the support guys are trained to say, why do you ask? they are trained to know when to train a patient to say, why do you ask. in their dreams they forget how to treat people, they forget how to work the machinery, how to deflect, manipulate and regurgitate accidents, they kiss their patients on the gurney while it rolls away, they run in slow motion to catch up, there is nudity under the lab coat, they beg for forgiveness in tongues. they remove the wrong eye, the one that sees.

102 firstproof

dAnieL borZutZky

data Harbor

for Amina Cain and Adam Novy

i.

the manager at data Harbor quit her job to become a conceptual artist.

she used to oversee the harboring of the data, and now she works in a laboratory, injecting poetry into blood cells and bacterium, analyzing the data to understand the new poems that will form in the ooze of her petri dish.

in basements and cubicles we harbor the data and we are worried about formaldehyde and asbestos.

we harbor the data and we harbor the carcasses and we try to keep the two sets of information separate.

but sometimes the data and the carcasses merge into carcass-data and we are forced to ask questions about tissues and livers and kidneys that are beyond the scope of our limited expertise. the history of man is the history of pain though per-haps it is also the history of man’s perception of pain and perhaps it is also the history of man’s quantifica-tion of pain and perhaps it is also the history of the absence—words and the hole words that constitute man’s inability to give voice to his pain.

we wear masks to protect us from the data that has been ruined by nature’s intrusion into architecture.

we cover our bodies in liquids and lotions to prevent the accumulation in our orifices of abscesses, boils and furuncles.

we are afraid the boils will join with other boils and our orifices will fill with crust and oozing pus.

we touch the data then wash our hands. we do not touch each other while touching the data. none of us have any desire to touch each other even after we have touched the data. the data and the carcasses have eliminated the urge for sexual activity among all the data-entry specialists. we barely speak to each other when we are in the act of harboring the data.

As i travel back and forth between carcass-set and data-set, i daydream that the owner of data Harbor, a dutch man who has harbored data throughout the

united states and the european union, offers me $5,000 to set all of the data and all of the carcasses on fire. sometimes i accept the money and set the har-bor ablaze, while other times i set myself on fire on the walkway that runs along the harbor. i do this to protest the accumulation of data in my bloodstream. i do this so others will not have to fend off the data. no one in my data-dreams speaks on cellular phones.

instead, they leak emails out of their tongues and eye balls.

they defecate emails and faxes and i can see that their bodies are filled with buttons to activate the disper-sion of documents and data.

At a staff meeting, the owner of data Harbor, so as to inspire us to work more efficiently, poses the question of exactly what is at stake for the bodies who harbor the data.

He chants: everything is at stake. if everything is not at stake when you are harboring the data, then why harbor the data in the first place?

there is a plate of untouched pastries in the confer-ence room.

nothing is appetizing when your body is covered in data and the ooze of carcasses.

but this is not acknowledged by the managers at data Harbor.

they always give us croissants.

ii.

she sends my body through the fax machine because i contain vital information that might make or break the bureaucrats on the other end, but when i arrive through the wires i am stored in a box and put in a basement and a few months later the basement floods and i am stuck forever amid boxes of flooded data.

the scenario plays out in a variety of ways.

sometimes i am myself and sometimes i am my carcass.

sometimes i send myself through the fax machine and sometimes my mother sends me through the fax machine.

the conceptual artist wears high-quality corporate blouses and as she tests the petri dish for poetry she pretends she is once more being paid to oversee the harboring of the data.

104 firstproof

JAmes HAnnAHAm

Q23

the summer after i just barely grad-uated from high school, i had no idea what i wanted, or wanted to do, or how not to do what i didn’t want to that i wound up working at LaGuardia Airport. Hardly nobody f lew in the early 00s, and us Airways, the com-pany at my terminal, had went into Chapter 11. And even worser than that, like my homegirls in Hollis would put it, i didn’t work for no airline, i worked in the food court at burger barn. it said it was a chain, but i ain’t heard of another one before or since. only the air conditioning made that long-assed, two-bus trip worth it, since i spent practically half my paycheck on transportation. now, i had some problems at home, so even LaGuardia felt like the magic kingdom to me. in the middle of soph-omore year my mother served papers on my daddy, and he moved to new Jersey, which was like, you couldn’t get there from Queens far as i knew. daddy still had f ive of my maca-roni collages from elementary school framed in his living room. mama took up with this man i hated—i called him Jabba because he was gigantic and had a frog mouth. i wanted to go live with daddy, or my Grandma in brooklyn, or darth Vader, or freddie kruger, but mama had legal custody and would not give it up. even so, half the nights she slept with Jabba and the other time he was at our house doing it in the bed-room—loud. i said, mama, why i can’t live with daddy if you gonna spend all your time with wesley? don’t you know she slapped me upside my head just as hard? so if you looked at a chart of my grades from then, it’d be like, straight down into the Valley of death. i could not wait to turn 18, but that wasn’t going to happen until november. i was mad angry and depressed about life. i had this doom thing, that i’d be a old lady working at the burger barn. so i smoked a lotta lotta weed then, and when mama caught me and accused me of trying to escape reality i said

damn right i got a lot to escape from around here and got whacked again. burger barn, it probably go with-out saying, sucked. two famous-name chains sat right around the corner in the real food court. i wish i had got my salary off how many people came to the counter, looked at the menu, ordered a big bull with bacon, a large fries and a megashake, saw one of them other joints, and was like, sayonara. Leaving me there, all pissed off in my black and yellow striped polyester outfit, my back aching from waiting on orders all afternoon, breaking my nails voiding their order on them sticky-assed regis-ter keys. i’d fold my arms and pout and lean back against the soda machine with a five-finger-discount mountain dew, waiting for the next customer. that would take a long time, because this was not no fancy french cuisine— these were some fake grill-marked, wrapped in foil, microwaved, dripping wet with nasty special sauce, bun going stale under some sunlamps, burgers. because we had so much downtime, though, me and this other girl who worked there, tenisha, we always got up in other people business. mostly me, because tenisha wasn’t never there. And right across the walkway the mall had one of those technology-type stores, the Cutting edge, that sold all kind of wild future shit—noise can-cellation headphones, hands-free can openers, a security camcorder hidden in a clock, a floating pool thermome-ter with remote digital display (so you could check your pool’s temperature from inside your house, duh!), con-tour foam slippers—that whole deal. in my 1br-for-three-negroes world, i could not imagine who other than these white airport businessmen walk-ing around with gym bags and a rod up they butts could a) afford all this loot; and b) think they needed it. At the same time, it seemed like shit that everybody was right about to get, like fax machines and cordless phones used to was, and if you had it now, you was James mufugin bond. most important, you could try all of it out right in the store. so on my breaks, i made a bee-line for that joint. usually i put the hand-held back massager to my neck—i needed it—but sometimes i stuck my shoes in the vibrating foot bath—there wasn’t no water, i had to pretend—and hung out

until tommy the manager chased me away. And i quickly got to know who all worked there in the kind of oh who’s that, what do it say on the name badge way that everybody in the us Airways terminal mall did. mostly who was there was tommy, this skinny white dude named George, and then some-times this girl dahlia. the first time i went in the Cutting edge she mistook me for a real cus-tomer and i played along. i always took the hat and the badge off and put my jeans on top of the pants on breaks because wearing just the shirt, you could pass for a real person. Like for a hour you could shake off the shame. dahlia had almost sold me a $399 por-table ab cruncher when go, Look at me, i’m huge. there’s no way i could afford that working at burger barn. i thought she would get mad, but she blushed and said i knew i recognized you. i would have bugged out, but dahlia wasn’t nothing like me. she was pretty the way guys meant pretty: honey skin, straightened hair all sweeping against her polo shirt, worked out body, full lips, and a medium bra size. she was blatina, her mom was from the dr. whereas i was a “big chocolate easter bunny,” like my baby cousin said—and that’s the nicest way anybody ever put it. standing at the burger barn coun-ter, you could see everything going on at the Cutting edge, so looking over there was like my television. so one day dahlia’s spending a long time chatting with this white dude in a dark suit. At first he seemed like just another cus-tomer listening to her explain how to work the buttons on the musical toy dog, but this conversation go on for a half a hour. i know, i watched the whole thing out the corner of my eye. then he starts playing with her fingertips real gentle, like they a piano. i gave tenisha a nudge and said Lookit. tenisha had hot coffee in her hand and spilled a little because i nudged too hard, so she snapped at me and then apologized for snapping at me, but just to the customer. by the time that little drama got done, dahlia was talking to tommy and the white dude was standing out in the walkway, looking straight up. the us Airways terminal had skylights to make the passengers think about good things like the sun and God when they looked

114 BOMB 122

Dasha Shishkin by Ellen Berkenblit

MM POP , 2012, mixed media on mylar, 30 × 42 inches. Images courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery, New York City.

Mama, Love Me to Death , 2012, mixed media on mylar, 30 × 42 inches.

117 ARTISTS ON ARTISTS — ERICA BAuM

Erica Baum by kim Rosenfield

Head Band (“Naked Eye Anthology”), 2012, archival-pigment print, 15 1/2 × 17 7/10 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York City.

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Dolores (“Naked Eye Volume Two”), 2012, archival-pigment print, 17 1/2 × 16 inches.

TOp NOTES

First perceptible notes that strike the nose and can be very quick in duration—a few minutes.

At first, bright, luminous, opaque sudden burst of ylang-ylang, bergamot, orange blossom, neroli, anise. Bold vertical striping. Metamerism. Slowly creeping medicinal thread. Clinical but full of dusty shadows, traces, muted edges. Aging paperbacks. “Bulgarian rose in mothballs.” What’s yet to come? Tension (an-ticipation?) between order and dissolution? An initial hit of Nachträglichkeit (afterwardness). Halftone im-agery. What’s the story? “This is not simply a nice fresh scent.” Reframed.

THE BENzOIN OF pERCEpTION: ALONE WITH ERICA BAuM’S “NAkED EYE ANTHOLOGY”

In 1912, as legend has it, iconic perfumer Jacques Guerlain strolled alone along the Seine in paris at twi-light. He was so overcome by the beauty of the light and the depth of his own emotions that he could only express his experience through creation of a perfume. Thus, so the story goes, the infamous L’Heure Bleu fra-grance was born. Named for the “blue hour” in which there is nei-ther full light nor complete darkness, L’Heure Bleu captures a “threshold” experience—a liminal state of being wherein previously known experiences of time, order, and identity begin to give way to a yet unknown state of being. To encounter Erica Baum’s “Naked Eye Anthology” series is to reach something akin to a Jacques Guerlain L’Heure Bleu threshold state.

Red Lines (“Naked Eye Volume Two”), 2010, archival-pigment print, 17 × 15 3/4 inches.

Flowerpots (“Naked Eye Volume Two”), 2011, archival-pigment print, 19 × 13 inches.

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Günther uecker by Ahmed Alsoudani

Doppelspirale (Double Spiral), 2012, nails and white paint on canvas on wood, 78 3/4 × 59 1/8 × 7 7/8 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison.

122 BOMB 122

First of all, I like Günther uecker as a person. This is really important for me as an artist. understanding his personality allows me to understand his work and to appreciate his honest and clear approach. I also ap-preciate that he is a person who has endured a lot of hardship in his life. Born at the beginning of the Great Depression, he lived through war and dictatorship and intensely difficult times. As an Iraqi, I relate to experi-encing turbulent and extreme situations, having grown up in a war-torn country and under a brutal dictator-ship and, more recently, being exiled. I am thousands of miles away from where most of my family still lives under dangerous and precarious circumstances. uecker’s works, especially his big installations, are usually discussed in relation to light and space. I’m most fascinated with his use of the nail as a medium and with his persistent exploitation of it (now for 50 years). For me the nail is an object loaded with mean-ing. perhaps this is subjective relative to my own work, but I see the nail as a symbol of violence. The nail is also a symbol of religion, that is, Christ’s Crucifixion. using this sharp and hard object the way he does, uecker is able to make it appear smooth and nonthreat-ening. For instance, he creates large expanses with hundreds of nails driven into wood in subtle patterns, geometrically arranged or loosely scattered, forming

lines, clusters or swirls, and casting shadows. These panels often appear soft and flexible, reminiscent of skin with hair or grass moved by the wind, simultane-ously inviting and dangerous. The nail is transformed from a rigid, threatening object to a part of a seemingly flowing surface. The nail becomes almost peaceful. Then there is also uecker’s play on words. In our dai-ly conversation, we say things such as “let’s nail that down,” to affirm and secure plans. You freeze time for that moment when you nail something down. uecker upends assumptions in terms of meaning. Driving nails into a canvas or a chair or piano, he makes them look as if they grow out of the object or as if the object is suf-fering an infestation—or an invasion. I am fascinated with his minimal and sparse approach to complicated subject matter. I recently saw a work he made in the 1970s with just a cluster of nails in a corner of a small, unprimed canvas. There is no paint on this painting but it is an intensely powerful work of art. — AHMED ALSOuDANI is an Iraqi artist based in

New York City.

I Heard the Grass, That Was Rubbing Itself in the Wind, Like Violins, Like Grasshoppers That Chirp , 2009, white paint on nails on canvas on board,

each 35 1/2 × 23 2/3 inches.

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Alix pearlstein by John pilson

125 ART — ALIx pEARLSTEIN

Artists are expected to participate in all sorts of conversations in a multimedia-interdisciplinary world but the shared language and historical highlights of specific media—even one as wild and wooly as vid-eo art—hauls out the funniest stories, the hottest arguments, and the sharpest insights. Recently, after watching Broadway Danny Rose for the 19th time, I was left fixated on the opening scene in which a group of comedians and writers are swapping stories over pastrami sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli. The scene inspired a flurry of emails that resulted in the first of what became a semiregular lunch date for a collection of NYC “video artists” (sounding as specific and dated as vaudeville artists with every passing year) to kvetch over ambitions, neuroses, hardware, and software re-lated to our trade. The neighboring tables would never accuse Alix pearlstein of being the loudest voice, but the serious eavesdropper would immediately notice the pattern: Alix says something quietly provocative and then the arguing starts. While rarely glimpsed in her work, Alix consistently reveals herself as a quiet provocateur at every level of her productions. Across her videos and installations she describes a crucial and primarily visual arena in which familiar competitions, seductions, vanities, and judgments are both the subject and the object of scru-tiny. The prospect of interviewing Alix initially struck me as strangely formal in contrast to our sprawling lunches until I realized how, for all the kvetching, I still had a lot of questions. — JOHN pILSON

Production still from The Window , 2013, single-channel HD, color, sound. Pictured: Veronika Duerr, Megan McFarland, Park

Krausen, Ismail ibn Conner, and Joe Skyes. Images courtesy of the artist

and On Stellar Rays.

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Installation view of Tony Feher , Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA.

May 11–September 2, 2012. Organized by Claudia Schmuckli, Photo by Jill Fleming Photography. All images

copyright Tony Feher and courtesy D’Amelio Gallery, New York unless

otherwise noted.

135 ART — TONY FEHER

I remember seeing Tony Feher’s first show and not being impressed by it. The work seemed to be about arranging stuff; some of it was detritus, the rest the type of things one would find at a garage sale—jelly jars and goldfish bowls. Though carefully composed—that is, ordered by size or color or shape—the work appeared to have no purposeful end. It all was too ef-fortless and too slacker—Feher made making art look too easy. Though you might think the above to be damning, you may suspect that I was wrong in terms of what I wanted from his work. I was expecting something di-dactic, some message. Instead, there was sensibility. In hindsight, I had missed the simple poetry in Feher’s type of kitchen-table minimalism. By his second show I had begun to get it. The work is not about anything; it is just what it is, in the same way that an early Robert Rauschenberg Combine or a Donald Judd box is what it is. Ironically, once I ac-cepted this, the work opened to interpretation and association. plastic bottles partially filled with water hung from the ceiling, individually or in multiples, sug-gested people who had been lynched or, less macabre, an elementary school science project concerned with

demonstrating the principles of plumb and level. The work takes on an emotional aura that is at once vulnerable and full of pathos, while remaining some-what ordinary. Over the years, subtle changes of attitude and ap-proach have taken place within Feher’s work. While the syntax has remained that of minimalism, there has been a shift in strategy—the work has grown increasingly diverse in both composition and materi-als, though no less matter of fact. His materials have changed; they appear to be more pristine and new, and, when site permits, Feher works on a larger scale. In fact, recently he has begun to engage in making public and site-specific works. After 20 years of mak-ing his somewhat eccentric brand of work, Feher is the subject of a traveling survey show and a coffee-table book. I determined that there was no better time to discuss his views and gain some further insight into his process. We met in his Bronx studio this fall and the interview started almost midsentence, for while his work is modest and sublimated, Feher is a talkative fellow who has much to say about what he does and who he is as an artist. — SAuL OSTROW

Tony Feher by Saul Ostrow

SAuL OSTROW So where is your next exhibit and what are you doing for it?

TONY FEHER In San Francisco with Anthony Meier. It’s a beautiful townhouse exhibition space. It feels a bit like walking into a wall of north-facing windows with lots of reflective light. It’s great for paint-ers—come in, turn, and then you have this wonderful light. But you put a sculp-ture there and it’s always in shadow. So I wanted to do something that would take advantage of the glare and also defeat the issue of uV fading. The plastic bottles with water that I use are great as long as you keep them out of the sunlight. But people tend to ignore my warn-ings and instructions. So I stumbled upon Depression glass, which has these funky shapes and crazy colors. I started buying quantities of it to work with; it’s pretty affordable stuff. I noticed that the center of gravity is very curious with these pieces. They are top heavy—if you wrap a wire in the middle of a stemmed compote, it hangs upside down. And a vase is going to hang with its mouth up and open; plates and flat things are going to hang on their sides. There is a kind of self-abstracting suggestion of motion—some down, some up, some sideways as if they are tumbling. The pieces look like they’re spinning in space, up and down and around. A compote or bowl

loses its function and becomes the thing that I want it to be, which is shape and color. The glass pieces are spaced verti-cally along a chain and from side to side in front of the window. Because of the irregularity of the sizes and shapes, the spacing is uneven and there is a sense of motion. Each of them can rotate on a central axis but they don’t seem to swing side to side, at least not too much.

SO I had never been aware of how site specific your work has become. It seems a lot less portable now.

TF I take advantage of situations that come along. Robert Irwin made the distinction between site specific and site determined, the latter of which sounds more precise to me. usually the site-determined works come in the form of museum installations or larger archi-tectural opportunities, like at Berkeley, where there is that big spiraling, cantile-vered concrete museum building. They offered me a slot in their mini-matrix program where you do art in odd loca-tions in the museum. They said, “Well, what about here?” and I said “No, it’s the hallway to the bathroom.” Instead I fo-cused on the circumstance of the seismic retrofit, these huge pylons that were em-bedded in the ground and rise 30 feet up to the underside of the cantilevers, with

a one-inch gap in the flange between the pylon and the building—if there were an earthquake, the movement would be no more than an inch. That little one-inch gap fascinated me because that’s where the action is. So, I took a common three-quarter-inch-diame-ter yellow polypropylene rope you can get at any hardware store and looped it over the pylon into that little one-inch space. As in Cinderella when the birds are flying in, throwing gold brocade on her dress, with this simple gesture I cast a golden thread upon the architecture and engi-neering and completely deflated it. The building became a support mechanism for my artwork. My gesture negated the architecture and the engineering, and the art assumed primacy.

SO Did that transition to greater scale happen with the opportunity to address institutional spaces?

TF In the early ’90s, Bob Gober called my work “tenement art.” It fit in my East Village apartment and was primarily composed of materials that were readily available in the area. In 2001, with my ex-hibition at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, I felt for the first time successful at incorporating architecture into my art. You were not simply standing in a room looking at an artwork; you were standing

144 THE WICk — ANDERS NILSEN

Anders Nilsen is the author of Big Questions and Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow.

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