Sunday, January 29, 2012

Rébecca Dautremer / The Secret Life of Illustrator


Rébecca Dautremer
The Secret Life of Illustrator

The art of French illustrator Rebecca Dautremer is like stepping through paper windows into miniature, rouge accented worlds of wonder. Dautremer has a legacy as an illustrator with a soft spot for fairytales touched by a sense of humor.  She has worked on such children’s book titles as The Secret Lives of Princesses and collaborated with her husband, author Taï-Marc Le Thanh, on an adaptation of the notorious child-napping ogress of Slavic-lore, Babayaga. Dautremer has recently brought her design talents and also her love of folklore to life in the animated salute to storytelling entitled Kerity: La Maison des Contes (the English title is Eleanor’s Secret). Kerity, directed by Dominique Monféry, is about a young boy named Nathaniel who inherits his aunt’s library and the real life stories contained within the books. The caveat to this imaginative inheritance is Nathaniel’s illiteracy which is relentlessly mocked by his bratty sister and the impending collapse of his aunt’s dilapidated house. Despite Rebecca Dautremer’s renown, I sadly found very little mention of her in the U.S. aside from the incongruously English dubbed version of Kerity (the sister sounds like a digitized Brit and the parents seemed stocked with awkward dialogue).  


 
BIOGRAPHY
Rébecca Dautremer was born in 1971 in Gap in the South of France (Hautes Alpes). She attended classes in the ENSAD of Paris and got a degree in graphic edition in 1995. She afterwards became a graphic editor and illustrator. A few years ago, she started to write books of her own. Now living in Paris with her husband Taï-Marc Lethanh and their three children, she also works for the press for children (Milan-Presse and Fleurus-Presse), school publishers, and in advertising.

WORK
Her picture books are very poetic, with a hint of humour. Inspired by fairy tales, she offers new and more entertaining stories, featuring Babayaga, an ogress, a funny Cyrano.
Rébecca Dautremer was born in 1971 in Gap in the South of France (Hautes Alpes). She attended classes in the ENSAD of Paris and got a degree in graphic edition in 1995. She afterwards became a graphic editor and illustrator. A few years ago, she started to write books of her own. Now living in Paris with her husband Taï-Marc Lethanh and their three children, she also works for the press for children (Milan-Presse and Fleurus-Presse), school publishers, and in advertising.


WORK
Her picture books are very poetic, with a hint of humour. Inspired by fairy tales, she offers new and more entertaining stories, featuring Babayaga, an ogress, a funny Cyrano, and weird princesses like P?tsec and Quart de Lune. Rébecca's recipe is : warm colours and precise drawings. Her books are a real success for children between 3 and 11 years old. L'Amoureux, a story she wrote herself, is a moving tale about love and children, that was recently adapted for the stage and performed by children.
It was awarded the "Prix Sorcière" (Witch Prize) in 2003.



A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gautier-Languereau Publishing:
- Cyrano, Taï-Marc Lethanh (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2005)
- Babayaga, Taï-Marc Lethanh (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator)
(2005)
- Le Ciel n'en fait qu'à sa tête, Jean-Luc Moreau (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2005)
- Lily la licorne, Christian Ponchon (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2005)
- Le géant aux oiseaux, Ghislaine Biondi (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2005)
- Les deux mamans de Petirou, Jean de Monléon (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2005)
- Les Princesses, Philippe Lechermeier (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2004)
- L'amoureux, Rébecca Dautremer (author, illustrator) (2003)
Flammarion - Père Castor:
- Nasreddine, Odile Weulersse (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2005)
Bilboquet-Valbert Publishing:
- Sentimento, Carl Norac (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2005)
- Lili la libellule, Florence Jenner-Metz (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2004)
- Le livre qui vole, Pierre Laury (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2003)
Magnard Publishing:
- Je suis petite, mais mon arbre est grand, Christine Beigel (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2003)
- Les fables de la Fontaine, Jean de la Fontaine (author), Rébecca Dautremer (illustrator) (2001)

WEBSITE




Friday, January 27, 2012

My hero / Nadine Gordimer by Tessa Hadley

 

Nadime Gordimer




My hero: 

Nadime Gordimer

 by Tessa Hadley

'No one writes as well as Gordimer about the conscientious unease of privilege'

27 January 2012



I
have a few heroes among living authors – but I've chosen the one who came first, the one who made a bridge for me into the present, out of my love of the classic writing of the past. In my early 20s, I was ignorant about contemporary fiction and hadn't come across anything that struck me with the power of George Eliot or Tolstoy or Lawrence. I opened A Guest of Honour in a bookshop and stood reading the first sentences. "A bird cried out on the roof and he woke up. It was the middle of the afternoon, in the heat, in Africa; he knew at once where he was." I can still remember the excitement.

A life in writing / Adonis







Adonis
 Adonis … the Syrian-born poet, critic and essayist sees himself as a 'pagan prophet'. Photograph: © Magali Delporte

Adonis: a life in writing


'A creator always has to be with what's revolutionary, but he should never be like the revolutionaries. He can't speak the same language or work in the same political environment'.
 


Interview by Maya Jaggi
27 January 2012


Adonis, the greatest living poet of the Arab world, ushers me down a labyrinthine corridor in a stately building in Paris, near the Champs Elysées. The plush offices belong to a benefactor, a Syrian-born businessman funding the poet's latest venture – a cultural journal in Arabic, which he edits. Fetching a bulky manuscript of the imminent third issue of the Other, Adonis hefts it excitedly on to a coffee table, listing the contributors "from west and east", many of them of his grandchildren's generation. He turned 82 this month. His eyes spark: "We want new talents with new ideas."
A Syrian-born poet, critic and essayist, and a staunch secularist who sees himself as a "pagan prophet", Adonis has been writing poetry for 70 years. He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, exerting a seismic influence on Arabic poetry comparable to TS Eliot's in the anglophone world. Aged 17, he adopted the name of the Greek fertility god (pronounced Adon-ees, with the stress on the last syllable) to alert napping editors to his precocious talent and his pre-Islamic, pan-Mediterranean muses. Since the death of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in 2008, it would be hard to argue for a poet of greater stature in a literary culture where poetry is the most prestigious form as well as being popular.
He moved to Paris in 1985, and was named a commander of France's Order of Arts and Letters in 1997. Last year he was the first Arab writer to win the Goethe prize in Germany, and each autumn is credibly tipped for the Nobel in literature – the only Arab recipient of which to date was the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988. Though Adonis was Ladbroke's favourite in the year of the Arab spring, he does not begrudge the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer his laurels, having introduced him to audiences on a tour of Arab countries. When the uprisings began in Tunisia and Egypt last year, he wrote "little poems to express my joy and happiness". Yet joy gave way to caution, and warnings of tragedy. "It's the Arab youth that created this spring, and it's the first time Arabs are not imitating the west – it's extraordinary," he says. "But despite this, it's the Islamists and merchants and Americans who have picked the fruits of this revolutionary moment." His reservations sparked impatience and were widely attacked: Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi poet, novelist and assistant professor at New York University, claimed that the Arab spring has "consigned Adonis, the self-proclaimed revolutionary, to irrelevance".
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There is, Adonis says, a "tendency for poets and painters in the Arab world to be politically engaged. There's a lot to fight for: for human rights and the Palestinians; and against colonialism, Arab despotism and closed thinking among fundamentalists. I'm not against this engagement, or against them – but I'm notlike them. A creator always has to be with what's revolutionary, but he should never be like the revolutionaries. He can't speak the same language or work in the same political environment." He adds that he is "radically against the use of violence – I'm with Gandhi, not Guevara."
Like VS Naipaul, a friend who has praised him as a "master of our times", Adonis can be a contrarian, though he lacks Naipaul's acidity and irrascibility. For critics, some of his pronouncements on the "extinction" of Arab culture, or the "Arab mind", have an orientalist taint. Yet his translator Khaled Mattawa, an Arab American poet, sees it as measured iconoclasm: "He's been unsparing against the deeply rooted forces of intolerance in Arab thought, but also celebratory of regenerative streaks in Arab culture."
Although English translations of his poetry have lagged behind French, in the past decade there have been five collections: Mattawa's Adonis: Selected Poemswon the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize for Arabic translation. Adonis will be coming to London for the award ceremony next month, and also to take part in a two-month celebration of his work, "A Tribute to Adonis", at West London's Mosaic Rooms starting on February 3, which includes an exhibition of the poet's recent art works. He began making small collages using Arabic calligraphy 10 years ago, during a listless period of poet's block, and friends suggested he exhibit them. "I found another way to express my relation to things, other than the word." He uses parchments and rags, "bits and pieces of nothing, thrown away. I rarely use colour; I prefer ripped things," adding fragments of his own poems, as well as classical Arabic poetry "as a homage".
Last June, amid the bloody crackdown on the Syrian uprising, Adonis wrote an open letter to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the Lebanese newspaper al-Safir - "as a citizen," he stresses. Describing Syria as a brutal police state, he attacked the ruling Ba'ath party, called on the president to step down, and warned that "you cannot imprison an entire nation". He was none the less taken to task for addressing a tyrant as an elected president, and criticising the "violent tendencies" of some of his opponents. "That's why I said I'm not like the revolutionaries," he says. "I'm with them, but I don't speak the same language. They're like school teachers telling you how to speak, and to repeat the same words. Whereas I left Syria in 1956 and I've been in conflict with it for more than 50 years. I've never met either Assad [Bashar or his father, Hafez]. I was among the first to criticise the Ba'ath party, because I'm against an ideology based on a singleness of ideas.
"What's really absurd is that the Arab opposition to dictators refuses any critique; it's a vicious circle. So someone who is against despotism in all its forms can't be either with the regime or with those who call themselves its opponents. The opposition is a regime avant la lettre." He adds: "In our tradition, unfortunately, everything is based on unity – the oneness of God, of politics, of the people. We can't ever arrive at democracy with this mentality, because democracy is based on understanding the other as different. You can't think you hold the truth, and that nobody else has it."
His mother, aged 107, still lives in Syria. For 20 years after he left the country (when released from a year's imprisonment for membership of an opposition party), he was unable to see her. From 1976, he visited each year until two years ago, when "friends said it might be dangerous". But he is adamant that family circumstances have "never stopped me from saying what I think". Of those who accuse him of tardiness or equivocation in condemning the Syrian regime, he says wearily: "I've written many articles – I have a book of them coming out that's 200 pages long. These people don't read."
He lives on the outskirts of Paris, beyond la Défense, with his wife, Khalida Said, a literary critic. "For me she's a great critic, one of the best. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree." They have two daughters: Arwad, who is director of the House of World Cultures in Paris; and Ninar, an artist who moves between Paris and Beirut. Adonis shows little sign of having just spent seven months in Lebanon convalescing from two major operations. Before that, he had announced his retirement from poetry. It was while writing a long poem against monotheism, "Concerto for Jerusalem". "Jerusalem is a city of three monotheistic religions," he says. "If there's one God, it should be beautiful. Instead, it's the most inhuman city in the world. I said I was stopping poetry as an act of defiance." But alluding to his muses, he laughs: "The pre-monotheistic goddesses didn't let me retire."
He was born Ali Ahmad Said Esber in 1930, in Qassabin in western Syria, a "poor village isolated in the mountains". His parents were farmers, and he had no early formal schooling. "I'd never seen a car, electricity or a telephone till I was 13. I always ask myself how I was transformed into this other person; it was almost miraculous." His love of poetry was nurtured by his father, and at Qur'anic school. Aged 13, when he impressed the president of the newly established Syrian republic by reciting one of his own poems, his reward was a scholarship to the French lycée. He studied philosophy at Damascus university, and later did a doctorate in Lebanon.
During a year in Paris in 1960, he found his voice in the poem Mihyar of Damascus: His Song (1961), with echoes of Noah, Adam, Ulysses and Orpheus. While for him, poetry and religion are rivals, Sufi mysticism is a force for renewal.Sufism and Surrealism – the title of his 1995 book – are united in the idea, as he expressed it in a poem, that reality is "nothing but skin that crumbles as soon as you touch it". He is also drawn to a mystical view that identity is not fixed: "A human being creates his identity in creating his oeuvre." Yet Sufism is more profound than surrealism or existentialism, he says, "because it's related to a revolutionary idea – that the other is me; that I am the other. If I travel towards myself, I must go through the other."
This is no philosophical nicety. His family belonged to the Shia minority Alawites, and it is sometimes suggested that this gives him his sense of being apart. "It's not being Alawite that gives me a sense of difference," he objects, "but the present state of the Arab world. A man isn't Protestant, Catholic, Sunni or Shia by birth; it's through projects and pathways that men become Shia or Alawite. I never subscribed to that." He joined the secular Syrian Social Nationalist party, opposed to the colonisation and partition of Syria, "partly to get out of concepts of minorities and majorities". He was duly jailed during his military service in the mid-1950s. Since he quit the party in 1960, he has never belonged to another. "I was only 14 or 15 when I joined – a child. Later, I said I can't be both poet and politically engaged. Ideology is against art."
Beirut, where he fled with his wife into exile in 1956, was a "second birth". He co-founded influential magazines, Shir (Poetry) and Mawaquif (Position), embracing colloquial Arabic and opposing both Arab nationalism and poetry as propaganda. TS Eliot was one of the first poets they interviewed, and Adonis collaborated on translations of The Waste Land, as well as on the works of Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell. He combined new sources with an encyclopaedic, "virgin" reading of Arabic classics. True creation, he says, is "always modern because it speaks to us – Ovid, Heraclitus, Homer, Dante. What's not modern are the imitators. In classical Arabic poetry, you have to know how to distinguish between the greats and their imitators."
His long poem This Is My Name (1970) was spurred by shock at the Arab defeat of 1967. The Book of Siege (1982) came out of the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which he lived through, before leaving for Paris. As he wrote in the opening lines: "The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust. / Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space." The six-day war "was terrible, but I wasn't conscious then of its tragic nature, as I was in 1982," he says.
He had first welcomed the Iranian revolution of 1979, but swiftly rejected its reactionary turn. His book The Fixed and the Changing (1974) on a struggle between creativity and intolerance in the Arab world, identified an Arab malaise of "pastism", which he defines now as seeing the past as the "source you must return to, despite the river running on with time. One has to break this circular time. You can't have a revolution to go back to the past."
As the Arab uprisings spread, Adonis said in a television interview that he could not take part in a revolution that emanated from the mosques. He was accused of siding with the regimes, and being out of touch with the dire circumstance of revolt. Asked whether he supports the peaceful protests, he spreads his arms as though pulling a concertina: "If you have a petition, I'll sign it." Does he worry that his words echo Arab dictators who pose as bulwarks against Islamists? "But with a difference," he says. "I'm against the regimes of Ben Ali and Assad, and against the Islamist opposition, because I don't want to fight one despotism for the sake of another ... If we don't separate religion from the state, and free women from Sharia law, we'll just have more despots. Military dictatorship controls your mind. But religious dictatorship controls your mind and body."
What of Islamist power through the ballot box? "In that case, democracy won't be a criterion of progress, so the notion of democracy has to be rethought. Truth is not always on the side of democracy – what can you do?" He concedes that democracy, "with all its failings, is much less bad than dictatorship". Rule by democratically elected Islamists would, "absolutely be better – but I'd be against it".
With Syria teetering on civil war – and speaking before President al-Assad rejected Arab League calls to step down – Adonis was unequivocal that "the present regime absolutely has to go. The Ba'ath party has to go, and another regime to be put in place that's secular, democratic and pluralist." Yet he is against both armed uprising and foreign intervention. "Guns can't resolve these problems. If everyone took up arms, there'd be civil war." Outside military intervention has "destroyed Arab countries, from Iraq to Libya". As for its humanitarian rationale, "it's not true – it's to colonise. If westerners really want to defend Arab human rights, they have to start by defending the rights of the Palestinians."
Calls for intervention from within Arab countries "are wrong; it doesn't make sense. How can you build the foundations of the state with the help of the same people who colonised these countries before?" At a talk this month in the House of Poetry in Paris, he held up a photograph published in al-Quds of some US soldiers in Iraq apparently desecrating the dead. "American soldiers pissed on Iraqi corpses," he says indignantly. "So these are the same people they want to call in to liberate Arabs, and piss on the living?"
Yet within the west, he argues "there are many wests – of Rimbaud, Whitman and Eliot, and of Bush, Sarkozy and Cameron." Explaining his view of Arab culture as extinct, he says: "What is civilisation? It's the creation of something new, like a painting. A people that no longer creates becomes a consumer of the products of others. That's what I mean by the Arabs being finished – not as a people, but as a creative presence."
Adonis holds no hope that poetry can change society. To do that, "you have to change its structures – family, education, politics. That's work art cannot do". Yet he believes it can change the "relationship between things and words, so a new image of the world can be born." Theorising about poetry is "like speaking about love. There are some things you can't explain. The world is not created to be understood, but to be contemplated and questioned."


Thursday, January 26, 2012

Diego Rivera at the Museum of Modern Art

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Diego Rivera at the Museum of Modern Art:

Then and now—revolutionary art for revolutionary times

By Clare Hurley
21 December 2011
Diego Rivera murals for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City
November 13, 2011 through May 14, 2012

The Museum of Modern Art’s curators could hardly have known that Occupy Wall Street protesters would be evicted from their encampment in downtown Manhattan the same week that their exhibition of Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) opened in November, but the coincidence has been widely commented on.
               Rivera’s name has become virtually synonymous with epic murals of social revolution in the first decades of the 20th century. Given the appropriate update, his image of a soldier lunging, sword drawn, across a woman and child to attack a crowd of workers in The Uprising, might have been drawn from today’s news.

              In this context, the modest scale of the exhibit at MoMA might be a disappointment, especially when compared to the exhaustive retrospectives that the museum regularly awards to major artists from the modernist canon. (Coinciding with the Rivera exhibit, a much larger show of Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning took up the museum’s entire sixth floor.)
              However, the impact of the Rivera murals, under conditions where the first significant social struggles in several decades are erupting in the United States, is not diminished by the exhibit’s size.
              It has been an ongoing challenge to show murals outside of their original physical context. MoMA’s current exhibit reprises the solution arrived at in 1931 when the newly founded museum proposed to feature Rivera in its second one-man show. Rivera devised these “freestanding murals,” painted on movable slabs, to reproduce frescoes that were impossible to move—literally embedded in the walls of the Ministry of Education (Secretaria de Educación Publicá) in Mexico City and other municipal buildings constructed in the early 1920s by the Mexican nationalist government of President Álvaro Obregón. Indeed, the very conception of the murals as a structural part of cultural life for the Mexican population—secular, revolutionary responses to church frescoes—was the antithesis of a travelling art show.
            By the late 1920s, Mexican muralism was at a decisive juncture—just reaching the peak of its influence as an art movement internationally, which no doubt was one of the attractions for the new museum in New York, while the political currents that it was bound up with were in fact turning.
            Something of this contradiction comes across in the exhibit itself, though it is beyond the organizers to address these issues adequately. The powerful appeal of socialist politics following the Russian Revolution was felt by broad layers of the population, especially with the economic collapse of 1929, and could not be ignored.
           Furthermore, Rivera’s connection with socialism was more than just a vague “sympathy with [Leon] Trotsky,” which is the exhibit's only note of the relationship. The power of Rivera’s work was integrally bound up not just with the radical nationalist Mexican Revolution, but more fundamentally with the establishment of the first worker’s state in Russia in 1917 and the sharp political struggles that arose in the subsequent decade.
          It is not a secondary matter that Rivera came out in support of Trotsky and the building of a new revolutionary international in opposition to Stalinism, before succumbing to the pressures of the bureaucracy later in life. The Mexican painter’s independence from the Stalinist orbit allowed him to treat life and society in a dynamic and fresh manner in the 1930s, unlike those who were following the dictates of “socialist realism” and other suffocating doctrines.
         The Museum of Modern Art’s first curator, Alfred H. Barr, met Rivera while in Moscow in 1927, where the already renowned painter and member of the Mexican Communist Party was a guest of honor at the festivities honoring the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. (Rivera’s marvelous sketchbook from the event is also included in the exhibit.)
         Some have found it ironic that Barr, who represented not only MoMA, but its founding patrons, wealthy socialite Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and her husband industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. invited—all expenses paid—an artist known for his Communist views to come to New York to paint murals for the museum.
         In addition to the fact that the American ruling elite no doubt had more enlightened artistic views than its counterpart today, figures such as Abby Rockefeller still had the confidence to associate themselves with what they considered the most progressive artistic trends of the time—to a point, as we shall see. Today, such an association would not be so much ironic as inconceivable.
        Rivera, always known for his prodigious artistic output, produced five “portable frescoes” for the MoMA exhibit in the course of just six weeks in November, working with a team of assistants in an unheated space in the museum. (The lack of heat was to keep the plaster slabs on which the murals were painted from drying too quickly.)
       These panels reproduce images from Rivera’s well known fresco cycle in Cuernavaca, Mexico, which depicts Mexican history in sweeping breadth: Sugar Cane, Liberation of the Peon, Indian Warrior, and Agrarian Leader Zapata were included. But instead of trying to recreate their original scale, Rivera indicated that these images were lifted from the much larger work through close cropping.


                 For example, Indian Warrior is no larger than a traditional painting, and seems almost too small to contain its subject: a peasant in a jaguar suit straddling a fallen Spanish conquistador. The large impassive eyes and white fangs of the mask emphasize the brutal determination of the man inside the suit as he plunges a knife into the armored man beneath him.
                Rivera was not only a productive but also somewhat unpredictable artist to work with. The original number of panels agreed to may have been eight, maybe six. In fact, the MoMA show opened in December 1931 with five panels, but Rivera continued working after the opening to produce three additional panels of New York scenes.
              Perhaps feeling he had given the museum the Mexican panels they wanted, Rivera turned his attention to what he considered his real subject and intended audience, in this case the American population.
Inspired by his experience of New York City, these panels show a modern metropolis at the height of a building boom made possible by the legions of available labor during the Great Depression. The skyscrapers that came to define the city’s iconic skyline all went up in a staggeringly short period of time. The Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world at the time, went up in just over a year, and was completed in 1931 while Rivera was in the city.
              But Rivera was responding to more than just the protean feats of modern industry. While American artists of the time, such as Charles Sheeler, painted pictures of factories as though no one worked in them, Rivera’s panels Pneumatic Drill and Electric Power, as well as his preparatory sketches of construction sites, emphasize the essential agency of human labor—man and machine seem as one—to these technological achievements.



                However, it has been Frozen Assets, an image of the social relations that underlie capitalism’s achievements, which has drawn the most attention at the time, and in today’s social context.
                The painting inventively takes a vertical slice of the city to expose the layers beneath its towering skyscrapers: first, masses of workers lined up on a subway platform, beneath them, a barracks of sleeping homeless people, and, finally, under it all, a guarded bank vault where the wealthy are waiting to check on their loot.
                It is hard not to think that the criticism leveled at this mural in particular has less to do with aesthetics than irritation at its accuracy. Who fails to notice the resemblance to today’s banks hoarding the trillions received in bailout funds while the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression continues for millions of people?
               But, the bluntness of Rivera’s criticism has always rankled those who prefer their depictions of social relations to be more “nuanced”—i.e. refracted through the artist’s experience into personal, sometimes painful, often enigmatic imagery, found, for example, in the work of the Surrealists and others, such as Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo.
                Another section of the exhibition is devoted to the ill-fated mural Man at the Crossroads. While at work on the MoMA murals, Rivera received the commission to create one for Rockefeller Center, then under construction, which appears at the center of Frozen Assets.
               Abby Rockefeller’s son, Nelson [the youthful future governor of New York and US vice president], and his advisors determined the mural’s subject: “Man at the crossroads and looking with uncertainty but with hope and high vision to the choosing of a course leading to a new and better future.” The pompous ambiguity of the theme was echoed by similar verbiage in Rivera’s proposal. He then proceeded to design a mural showing humanity’s liberation from tyranny and war through what seemed at the time to be fantastical technology. The mock-up for the mural includes cinema cameras, televisions, space ships, etc.
                 Lest the point be missed that this rational, humane, egalitarian society would be a socialist one, Rivera planned to show a progression from a decadent party scene of millionaires, including a possible likeness of the famously teetotalling John D. Rockefeller, Sr. on the left to one of Lenin leading the working class to victory on the right.
               Despite what Kahlo described as “Mrs. R.’s radical taste,” this proved too much for Rivera’s “enlightened” industrialist patrons to take. There’s been debate over which straw actually broke the camel’s back. But in his letter objecting to the inclusion of Lenin, Nelson Rockefeller got to the gist:
“If it were in a private house it would be one thing, but this is in a public building, and the situation is therefore quite different.”
              When Rivera refused to replace Lenin’s likeness with that of an “unknown man”, the Rockefellers decided it was time to call a halt to their flirtation with “Red” artists, even as social tensions in the United States entered a far more explosive stage.
             In May 1933, Rivera was fired from the project, and mounted police were stationed outside Rockefeller Center to break up the demonstrations that erupted in response. In February 1934, the fresco was chiseled off the wall, only months before a strike wave broke out, spearheaded by the Toledo Auto-Lite and Minneapolis and San Francisco general strikes, led by Trotskyist and left-wing forces.
             However, before Rivera returned to Mexico, where he was able to recreate Man at the Crossroads in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, he completed twenty-seven magnificent murals in an interior courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) between April 1932 and March 1933. Apparently Rivera considered these his finest murals.
             Rivera’s degree of artistic influence was subject to shifts in socio-political conditions. In the 1930s, his conception of large-scale public artwork was absorbed by many artists who were employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to paint murals in US post offices and other municipal buildings, among other tasks.
             Stylistically, Rivera’s work is quite distinct from Stalinist “socialist realism,” with which it is often mistakenly and sometimes maliciously associated. Rivera’s work remained free of both aesthetic and ideological rigidity. Its power lies in this—that confidence in the historical process and social revolution flows freely through his veins and his brush.
            Rivera remained profoundly and unashamedly influenced by the experimentation of the Cubists and the early moderns from the decade he spent in the bohemian milieu of Paris in the 1910s, as well as by the Constructivist artists he met in Russia. While these artistic trends moved toward greater and greater abstraction, Rivera’s work maintained its figurative roots, but with a modernist sensibility.
           Just as in the early 1930s, the appreciation of Rivera’s murals and the struggles out of which they arose have potentially far-reaching consequences well beyond the realm of art.
           Rivera’s show at MoMA in 1931 set attendance records, even with an admission of 35 cents ($5 in 2011 dollars) during the Great Depression. The wider layers of the population whom Rivera considered his primary audience would be hard-pressed to pay today’s MoMA’s admission of $25 (Fridays after 4 pm are free).
          Nonetheless, the present show and the continuing power of the work are a vindication both of Rivera’s artistic approach and his orientation to the October Revolution and the possibilities it disclosed.
----
Photo Credits:
Diego Rivera. The Uprising. 1931.
Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized-steel framework, 74 x 94 1/8” (188 x 239 cm). Private collection, Mexico
© 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Diego Rivera. Indian Warrior. 1931. Fresco on reinforced cement in a metal framework, 41 x 52 ½” (104.14 x 133.35 cm). Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Purchased with the Winthrop Hillyer Fund SC 1934:8-1. © 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Diego Rivera. Frozen Assets. 1931-32.
Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized-steel framework, 94 1/8 x 74 3/16 in (239 x 188.5 cm). Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico
© 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York




Monday, January 23, 2012

Tobias Wolff / A sense of unease

A sense of unease:

Tobias Wolff’s recent fiction collected in Our Story Begins

By Sandy English
10 August 2010
Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, 379 pp.

Over the past thirty years, Tobias Wolff has produced several collections of short stories, novels, including Old School, and popular memoirs, especially This Boy’s Life, made into a film by Michael Caton-Jones in 1993, featuring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as In Pharaoh’s Army, about his service during the Vietnam War.
           Wolff himself has had his share of difficult experiences. He came from a poor family and moved around a good deal as a child. His father was a pathological liar and con man, a figure he has detailed in This Boy’s Life. Tobias himself lied his way into a prestigious boarding school as a teenager. Lying is a motif that appears in many of his stories, particularly the more recent ones.
           This element is not simply rooted in personal experience. The lying and the violence of the American establishment that Wolff encountered as a young Army Special Forces officer in Vietnam has had an enduring impact on his outlook on life.
           Wolff is sometimes associated with a variety of early 1980s’ American fiction come to be called “dirty realism,” along with novelist Richard Ford and fellow short-story writer Raymond Carver. Although they had a personal bond, Wolff himself downplays the literary affinity with Carver and Ford.
Other writers sometimes grouped together in this category include Bobbie Ann Mason, Annie Proulx (who wrote the short story on which the film Brokeback Mountain was based), Larry Brown and Jayne Anne Phillips.
          The exact contours of “dirty realism” always remained indistinct, but there is little doubt that after a spell of extravagant, self-conscious “postmodern” fiction in the 1960s and 1970s (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes), a trend in American literature emerged that looked more closely at the lives of working-class and middle-class families, often when they were the most vulnerable or dysfunctional.
         This ‘school’ of fiction generally treated its subject matter in an unornamented style and was clearly influenced by Ernest Hemingway and the dark vision of Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road, 1961).
This neo-realism was the product of and made possible by the postwar boom, when a far broader social range had access to higher education in the United States than ever before, including many people from humble backgrounds who came to write fiction. Writers found that they could support themselves by teaching in burgeoning creative writing programs. The careful (and sometimes, in its own way, self-conscious) focus in this fiction, especially Wolff’s and Carver’s, on literary suggestion and irony occasionally has an academic cast to it.
          In addition, the traumas generated by Cold War anti-communism in the 1950s, resulting in the purging or marginalization of left-wing figures and conceptions, helped to shift fiction away from associating everyday life, especially the life of ordinary people, with politics and history. This characteristic, which is notable in most of the dirty realists, has been reinforced in subsequent decades by the general trend of arts criticism, especially postmodernism, for whom only the microcosmic, the individual and the subjective exist.
         Such social and artistic tendencies help explain Wolff’s work and to some extent define it—however, he is anything but a typical representative of the trend. He tends to be the exception rather than the rule in recent American fiction.
        This is because Wolff’s stories often tell us something about the deep-seated social, emotional and moral crisis that has developed in the US since the 1980s. One of the things that can make Wolff’s work powerful is his ability to take on historical issues as they rise up with immediacy in people’s lives.
         Wolff’s Our Story Begins is a selection of 21 older stories and ten recent ones. All of the work is technically accomplished, often shifting from characters’ immediate surroundings to their fantasies and memories and then back to reality. Wolff seems not only to have absorbed the masterly technique of Anton Chekhov, the great 19th century Russian writer, but also the latter’s deep sensitivity to human suffering.
         Of the older stories included here, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” in my opinion, is among the most praiseworthy. A middle-aged professor, who has become quite settled in academic routine, loses her job when her institution goes under (“It seemed that ... the financial manager had speculated in futures and lost everything.”). She applies for various positions, and one day an old friend invites her to interview for a job and give a talk to showcase her work.
        She discovers that she has been invited to apply for the job not because she has any chance of getting hired—that decision has already been made—but to only fill a quota of female applicants. The situation is sad—and vividly recognizable—but Wolff fixes this experience in history, and implies much more than he says.
        In an incident that the author barely touches on, we learn that this woman, as a student, had remained silent during an anti-Communist witch-hunt, partly because she was developing a career as “an interpreter of history.” She kept her head down and went on to become an academic.
        The professor reacts to the dishonest academic culture, which she has helped to create, with a savage description of torture during the colonial era. It is an affecting story on first reading, but one gains even more by following it through again closely.
        In “The Night in Question” a devoted adult brother and sister, children of an abusive father, visit and talk with one another. He tells her about a sermon he heard: a railroad switchman finds himself forced to choose between saving his child or a trainload of passengers. This simple story unleashes a flood of emotions in his sister. She had saved her brother from their father—would he now save her? The present, the destructive past, and the story of a worker’s life are tightly integrated here. There is oppression and there are moral choices to make in life, although here, as in so much of the fiction of the last 30 years, they exist only at a personal level.
         “Bullet in the Brain” is one of Wolf’s most anthologized stories, and has all the hallmarks of contemporary fiction, which is not necessarily a good sign. The story plunges quickly into the action and has a quirky, somewhat extreme situation. A bank robber shoots Anders, a literary critic, in the head after he says something snide and sarcastic while he is in line to make a deposit. As the bullet passes though Anders’s brain, we see the images—most of them memories gone from his conscious mind—that occupy the man’s last few seconds.
       They form an astonishingly sympathetic account of the man’s life, mostly made up of things he has forgotten: respect at a college classmate’s first publication, the suicide of a woman that he witnessed, and the slow years of disappointment that turned him into the arrogant, sneering person who gets himself shot. The one thing he does remember is a hot summer’s day playing baseball as a boy when he was “strangely roused” and “elated” by the Southern dialect of an acquaintance.
        Wolff’s strength lies in his ability to locate optimism and kindness in a generally over-stressed and false America, without dismissing or hiding people’s shortcomings. Often in his stories, one encounters a sense of poverty, deprivation, and estrangement dominating life, but he dives a little deeper and we find that the situation is seldom simply grim. His people often surprise us.
        The last decade has seemed to sharpen the critical side of Wolff. There is less of a focus on the self-contained family in his work. A more despairing and disturbed America tends to overshadow his individual characters. Wolff seems to have become less sure of the state of things and more opposed to the given conditions of life.
          Among his newer stories that exhibit some of these qualities is “The Chain,” which begins with a breathless scene of a father rescuing his little girl from an attack by a dog.
         The protagonist, Gold, tries to hold on to his sense of justice and proportion—but he is pressured by his lack of success, envy, resentment, and the search for emotional support and personal satisfaction. A friend wants to fight back against the injustices of life, but in a vengeful and disturbing way. The story is composed of a chain of accidents, and it feels contrived in that respect.
        But the emotional truth-quotient is high. The feelings of anger, helplessness, confusion, and social isolation with which the United States seethes are all there. They don’t strike one as particularly well worked out, but they are powerfully expressed.
        “The Deposition” depicts Burke, a lawyer deposing a witness in a malpractice suit in a decaying, former industrial town in upstate New York. He goes for a walk and looks around and is disgusted that the people in America “voted for the robbers instead of the robbed.”
        There is a hint of contempt at the population because “nobody is fighting back,” but a large dose of sympathy, too. He admires the sacrifices his client has made to fight back. As he strolls around, he surprises a young woman (and himself) with a lascivious look. Soon the police and the locals are involved, and Wolff lets us sense the built-up popular anger directed at the lawyer, an upper middle-class professional.
         One of the most powerful of Wolff’s new pieces here—indeed, one of the best stories yet written about how thoroughly the Iraq war has shaken up American life—is “A Mature Student.”
        A career Marine sergeant has retired from the military and enrolled in college. While she is outside a classroom smoking, she meets her art history professor, a somewhat cold European intellectual. The professor asks her if she has ever been under fire, and then proceeds to tell the former soldier about her own betrayal of her friends to the Stalinist police under interrogation—quite realistically depicted—as a student in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.
        In a particularly insightful contrast of historical experiences, brought forth in real people, Wolff shows how the ex-Marine’s attention turns to her son who has enlisted in the Marine Corps and is now serving in Iraq. A fear arises in his mother of what he might become.
        Wolff is not alone in trying to grapple humanely with the feelings that the events of the last decade have produced. Mary Gaitskill, in particular, caught a sense of it in her recent book of short fiction, Don’t Cry, which also includes attempts to deal with, among other things, the impact of the Iraq war. But Wolff has delivered the most artistically precise expression of the smoldering social anger in the American population so far.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/wolf-a10.shtml



Monday, January 16, 2012

Jorge Luis Borges / Paradise


Jorge Luis Borges
BIOGRAPHY

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.


Jorge Luis Borges
Siempre he imaginado que el Paraíso será una especie de biblioteca.