George Caleb Bingham,“Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (1845). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1. In December, I saw Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River, an exhibition of Bingham's river paintings co-organized by the St. Louis Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum of Art. It was wonderful when installed at the Amon Carter and it appears that the exhibition has finally landed in New York. Roberta Smith focuses on the stillness and what she calls the "American plainness" of Bingham's work, a legacy that she finds later in Winslow Homer and minimalism (if you see last week's clips, you can extend this legacy to Audubon and Ellsworth Kelly). Most important in Bingham's work, however, is that fact that Smith mentions but doesn't go into very deeply, that Bingham was the first major artist to live west of the Mississippi. His river paintings show a world still grounded in European traditions opening up to western expansiveness, Bingham stands astride a new, open gate pointing to strange territories. Every time, I see that wide-eyed innocent boy in Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, I see a boy that has already seen too much out west to be very surprised by the stranger that must be currently viewing him: there is something very wild and something very haunting in all that stillness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/arts/design/review-george-caleb-binghams-serene-images-of-rivers-and-frontier-life-at-the-met.html?_r=0
2. I often argue with people about whether or not Mark Strand's 2001 book on Edward Hopper is any good. I think it is amazing, getting at something in Hopper that art historians have neither the sensory equipment nor the temperament to get at in a proper way. I am beginning to think that you either like poets that write about artists or you don't. If you do, you might like this rough, cut of a review that Strand wrote in his notebooks before his death in 2014.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/25/edward-hopper/
3. Last April, Junot Díaz published a fascinating and searingly critical piece in the New Yorker about the failure of MFA programs to engage writers (both as assignments to be read and as the people they are trying to teach) as people of color or as people with viewpoints and perspectives outside of being white, straight, and male. The essay was no mere call for diversity, nor was it a call for empathy for people of color among people promoting the status quo. Instead, the essay illustrated that the experiences promoted and taught in MFA programs only partially resemble the world as it is and that the literature that flows from such programs is naturally myopic and small. I tend to agree with Díaz, so I was especially interested to see what he assigned his students. Salon has his (very good) list here:
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/02/this_is_what_junot_diaz_wants_his_undergrad_students_to_read/
Video of the Week:
4. My video of the week is not about Joy Division or the British post-war history of beatniks, mods, and rockers that eventually became punk. I know very little about that story. Instead, the video is about Greil Marcus's most recent book, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, published last September by Yale University Press. It is widely known that Marcus is perhaps at his best when writing on punk, but his chapter on the song Transmission by Joy Division is truly special. He starts with a scene from Anton Corbijn's 2007 biopic of Ian Curtis, Control, in which actor Sam Riley portrays Joy Division's troubled and suicidal lead singer performing the song Transmission. Then, Marcus tracks a network of circumstances and histories that somehow successfully demonstrates how British society, in sense, created Curtis and, subsequently, how those same strange histories could be tracked across a variety of platforms and works of art. All I can hope is to peak your interest about Marcus's chapter, which is a tour de force. Below, find the performance from Control of Transmission, a real life performance by Curtis of Shadowplay (you will see Control's creative liberties immediately), and a scene from Riley in the later film Brighton Rock. Then, you will be ready for Marcus's chapter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUdmLXq695E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LdEM9xhMUM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ1NNoIbF5E
Poem for the Week:
5.
“Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.”
Charles Simic, to keep the theme from above, wrote a
fantastic short volume on Joseph Cornell in 2011 called Dime Store Alchemy.
Even more than Hopper, Cornell needs a poet's eye and heart to interpret, and
Simic is the man for the job. His poetry collects items and lives from walking
the streets just like Cornell, and Simic is able to place those items in
positions where they can reveal everything or nothing, depending on the mood of
the evening or the long thoughts of the poet. I thought I'd post a Simic poem
this week, Hotel Insomnia, that I think is indicative of his work: .
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hotel-insomnia/
One Click Deeper:
6. Simic is perhaps the ultimate contemporary lonely wanderer of the street. If you liked the poem above, you may enjoy his extended mediation on why he is drawn to street life and the act of looking at strangers:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jun/17/joy-of-the-street/