Wayne Koestenbaum, whose new book of essays is “Figure It Out.” Credit… Tim Schutsky.
[Wayne Koestenbaum] valorizes the intellectual seriousness of Sontag, and of the poet and translator Richard Howard, but also confesses his attraction to idleness and lassitude. Books are fine and good, but have you tried sex, or doughnuts?
So this review introduces me to Koestenbaum.
Whatever his subject — favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara — the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings. “The writer’s obligation,” he states in his new essay collection, “Figure It Out,” “is to play with words and to keep playing with them, not to deracinate or deplete them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering history, recovering wounds, reciting damage and awakening conscience.”
So I would walk a mile for a word like “deracinate.” So I can relate to his perverse glee in not coming down on a single side of anything. So have I misconstrued it in myself as a stubborn failing all along? So I may have to read “Figure It Out” to lose the answer.
An untitled 1978 watercolor by Madiha Umar recalls Arabic letter forms as well as ancient Mesopotamian crescent moons. Credit… Barjeel Art Foundation.
I once had to choose Arabic or Greek, the sole elective, in a course of study. It made a lot of difference in what I did next. I enthuse time and again over instances of letters lateraled into graven imagery in whatever tongue.
With its lacy interlocking and dotty swoopiness, Arabic script cries out to be pictured. A culture that scripturally abjures the human image has vented itself gloriously in calligraphic fashion. These artists take tradition to modern lengths.
An untitled piece by the Egyptian artist Omar el-Nagdi from 1970 shares its form with the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. Credit… Barjeel Art Foundation.
Most of these artists had some European or American training, and alongside unusual sandy palettes and a few unexpected details, you’ll see plenty of approaches that look familiar: lucid colors à la Josef Albers, crimson bursts of impasto similar to early Abstract Expressionism. But unlike European artists, they also have an alphabet with an ancient history in visual art — and this gives their abstraction a very different effect.
An untitled oil by Wijdan from 1970. “Each little dash, like a letter, insists on its granular distinctness, whatever their overall effect,” our critic says. Credit… Barjeel Art Foundation.
Jordan Casteel’s paintings come at you. There’s no subordination. They are like a roomful of stories told all at once.
“Jonathan” (2014). Lit by a nearby lamp, his body glows with patches of red, green and yellow. Credit… Jordan Casteel and Casey Kaplan, New York.
One figure hides in his colorful skin; two others iridesce, starkly defined. Sofas riot; a hot mirrored lamp commandeers its swatch of space. No crease of flesh nor fold of drapery escapes scrupulous modeling. Uncentered subjects in scenarios “awash with color and pattern… let their surroundings complete the picture.”
“Serwaa and Amoakohene” (2019), Jordan Casteel’s painting of a young man and his mother, in the exhibition “Within Reach.” Credit… Jordan Casteel and Casey Kaplan, New York.
(Jillian Steinhauer, “Portraits That More Than Meet the Eye,” NYTimes, 4-29-20)
This article is summative and conclusivist in broad spectrum, but its immediate service is the convenient running to ground of generation labels.
A national poll conducted in mid-March by the data intelligence company Morning Consult, which has been tracking public reactions to the coronavirus outbreak since January, found that 87 percent of baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) were practicing social-distancing measures, compared with 83 percent of Gen Xers (1965 and 1980), 76 percent of millennials (1981 and 1996) and 73 percent of the Gen Z crowd over the age of 18 (1997 and 2001). Numerous follow-up surveys confirmed this pattern, with boomers being the age group most willing to self-isolate.
Forthwith to be forgotten because they are both forgettable and misbegotten.
This sort of generational profiling is itself a form of misinformation. Aside from the fact that generational boundaries are imprecise, claims about systematic differences between generations are rarely of any empirical worth.
(Alex Stone, “Baby Boomers Were Blasé About the Coronavirus? Why Did We Believe that?” NYTimes, 4-30-20)
It is unclear who will be at the Theodore Roosevelt’s helm as its crew prepares to leave its weekslong quarantine in Guam. Credit… Tony Azios/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
Acting SECNAV Thomas B. Modly fired Capt. Bret E. Crozier, commander of the Theodore Roosevelt, when his plea on behalf of his crew after a coronavirus outbreak on the carrier went public.
Adm. Michael M. Gilday, chief of naval operations, recommended giving Capt. Crozier his job back.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper declined to endorse that finding, saying he wants to review the Navy’s investigation into the matter first.
Acting SECNAV James E. McPherson, who replaced Modly, said in a statement:
“This investigation will build on the good work of the initial inquiry to provide a more fulsome[my bolding] understanding of the sequence of events, actions and decisions of the chain of command surrounding the Covid-19 outbreak aboard U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt,” Mr. McPherson said.
(Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, “Navy Secretary Orders Deeper Inquiry Into Virus-Stricken Ship,” NYTimes, 4-29-20)
McPherson’s need for greater fulsomeness is thought to integrate with Esper’s demand for a heads-up from American commanders around the world concerning any decisions made about protecting their personnel from the virus that might “run afoul of [acting POTUS’s] messaging.”
George Condo alludes to the pandemic as a species of “microbiological warfare” created to get someone re-elected. Then he gets down to art:
As to what I’m doing as an artist, I’m just exploring the psychological impact of… how fear, anxiety, panic — how do you put that into some kind of poetic language that maintains your identity and integrity as an artist?
It is true that we often respond to invincible enemies — drugs, terror, microbes — by declaring “war” on them. I hope Condo’s hope-filled desideratum for a post-Covid world is less delusional:
I think the idea of things being homemade, like the way we have to cook every night… and how to make yourself happy with your own two hands, I think that’s where we’re headed. I’m hoping that, post-Covid, people don’t forget that… I hope people don’t just go back to being money-grabbing and horrible.
(M. H. Miller, “Two Exhibitions Respond to Art in the Age of Anxiety and Distance,” NYTimes, 4-24-20)
Amazon employees at a distribution facility on Staten Island last month protested the lack of protections at the site, where numerous workers have tested positive for the coronavirus. Credit… Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
In 2008, an IBM study that sought to identify “workers who are “virtually indistinguishable from others’ in terms of the value of their contributions to the workplace” was reported. (www.workitdaily.com). It’s pointed to when you Google “fungible.”
In 2020, Kara Swisher writes:
In America 2.0, we must address the changing work force and figure out a new way to formulate what an employee actually is… It begins by acknowledging after the crisis that our essential workers are, in fact, essential and not fungible. (“How to Make America 2.0 a More Equitable Society,” NYTimes, 4-23-20)
I’ve tried to write something insouciant and witty about the notion that certain people are fungible (read “expendable” or “interchangeable”) in a society: that the elderly, the sick, the homeless, and those who work at menial jobs, for example, are candidates for culling from the herd when viral push comes to viral shove. But the ironic riffs I’ve drafted fall flat.
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s fatuous fusillade that older Texans should cheerfully re-mingle and risk corona-death for the sake of re-inflating the economy is horrifying, pure and simple.
Rightly considered, who isn’t fungible in a pinch? The person that matters to me most right now isn’t a Bolsonaro or a Putin or a Trump to mislead me; nor a David Geffen to comfort me from his yacht; nor a Franklin Graham to keep me in his thoughts and prayers; it’s my greengrocer and repairman. And my GP.
In a polity that took its piety seriously, no creature of a credible God would be dispensable to His or Her Creation. The joke the Almighty plays on the high and mighty is that, when our common need for cure, care and sustenance is in the balance, the highly placed are the ones who become highly fungible. No doubt it makes them nervous as they huddle over their calculus of how many they can inconsequentially let die.
“Zapatistas,” Clemente Orozco’s 1931 painting of the Mexican peasant guerrillas in the exhibition “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945.” Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City; The Museum of Modern Art, via Licensed by SCALA, via Art Resource, NY.
Holland Cotter reviewed in February “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945” at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 17, 2020.
Cotter traces a thread of Mexican art history leading from the “big three” — Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros, and José Clemente Orozco — to a number of American artists whom they influenced.
… Works by artists who learned from [Diego Rivera] — Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, Thelma Johnson Streat, Xavier Gonzalez and Marion Greenwood — outnumber his own. You can see why he was a popular model. There’s something expressively boilerplate about his art, making it adaptable to varied uses and settings and patronage.
Two of the many side-by-side comparisons that show the mingling of Mexico and the United States: José Clemente Orozco’s “Christ Destroying His Cross,” 1943, left, and Jackson Pollock’s “Untitled (Naked Man With Knife),” circa 1938-40. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Emiliano Granado for The New York Times.
Cotter highlights the student-teacher relationship between Siqueiros and a young Jackson Pollock beginning in 1936.
We see examples of the increasingly anti-conventional techniques the muralist developed: spraying, splattered, dripping paint, building up glazes in ugly lumps on the canvas surface, anything to make the results look unpolished and unsettling. And we see Pollock beginning to test out these unorthodoxies.
The critic advances a hedging conclusion about Mexico’s influence on its northern neighbor.
Is it too much to say that we owe Abstract Expressionism, at least the Pollock version of it, to Mexico? Maybe, but only a little too much… Did influence run both ways? Student to teacher? South to north and back? Undoubtedly.
(Holland Cotter, “How Mexico’s Muralists Lit a Fire Under U.S. Artists, NYTimes, 2-20-20)
EthicalDative 
So Playfully Valorized Seriousness
[Wayne Koestenbaum] valorizes the intellectual seriousness of Sontag, and of the poet and translator Richard Howard, but also confesses his attraction to idleness and lassitude. Books are fine and good, but have you tried sex, or doughnuts?
So this review introduces me to Koestenbaum.
Whatever his subject — favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara — the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings. “The writer’s obligation,” he states in his new essay collection, “Figure It Out,” “is to play with words and to keep playing with them, not to deracinate or deplete them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering history, recovering wounds, reciting damage and awakening conscience.”
(Parul Sehgal, “Wayne Koestenbaum’s Cerebral, Smutty Essays Playfully Disobey the Rules,” NYTimes, 5-5-20)
So I would walk a mile for a word like “deracinate.” So I can relate to his perverse glee in not coming down on a single side of anything. So have I misconstrued it in myself as a stubborn failing all along? So I may have to read “Figure It Out” to lose the answer.
(c) 2020 JMN