Torbjørn Rødland, Headphones, 2016–18. Chromogenic print. 55 1/8 x 43 3/8 inches. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
The Strange and the Mundane: Torbjørn Rødland Interviewed by Osman Can Yerebakan
Photographs that make you look twice.In his photographs of sun-filled Los Angeles interiors or flora-dense backyards, Norwegian-born artist Torbjørn Rødland flirts with his viewer by contrasting clinical level hygiene with elements of contamination and excess. At first, seductive models of irresistible charm engage with fetishized objects or one another amid desirably impeccable atmospheres. However, Rødland veers away from safe territories with eerie accents he incorporates into his enigmatic visual narrative. The artist’s current exhibition,Backlit Rainbow, at L.A.’s David Kordansky Gallery furthers Rødland’s two-decade-long venture into complicating the border between the familiar and the eerie. The artist answered my questions over the phone while preparing for his exhibition with the gallery.
Simone Daillencourt and Nina Devos model for Italian designer Roberto Capucci in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna in 1960. Photograph: William Klein
The big picture: William Klein captures geometric elegance in Rome
The photographer, who died last week, balances monochrome cool and traffic chaos in this striking image of two Vogue models
Tim Adams Sunday 18 September 2022
B
y 1960, when he took this picture for FrenchVogue, William Klein had established himself as one of those artists who might help to define the look of the decade to come. Klein was born two days before the Queen in 1926 and diedlast week two days after her. He first made a name for himself in the 1950s with street pictures of the outer boroughs of New York, full of stylish visual irony and hard-won pathos.
Chris Killip: Retrospective for influential British photographer
11 OCTOBER 2022
A retrospective of work by one of the UK's most important and influential post-War photographers, Chris Killip, has opened in London.
Killip was best known for documenting the lives of working-class people in post-industrial north-east England, marginalised communities and disappearing ways of life.
IMAGE SOURCE,CHRIS KILLIP
Image caption,
Girls Playing in the street, Wallsend, Tyneside,1976
Born on the Isle of Man, in 1946, Killip became a beach photographer in 1964, before working as an assistant in Chelsea.
In the late 1970s, he co-founded Newcastle-upon-Tyne's Side Gallery, dedicated to photography.
People take part in the 10th annual Tomato Fight festival, known as Tomatina, in Boyacá. This year’s festival is the first to be held since the lifting of the Covid-19 restrictions
La Disparition (1969) Les Revenentes (1972) La Vie mode d'emploi (1978)
Joe Dunthorne Monday 19 January 2019
Here's Perec's best: three texts penned yet fewer letters selected. Every sentence remembers. A lipogram is a text without a given letter. Writing more than a paragraph with this restriction - and still making sense - can be tough. Astonishingly, in La Disparition Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter "e", the most common vowel in the French language. It is a playful detective story where characters try to solve puzzles and find answers that - often because of the language constraint - are just out of reach. Central to the novel (A Void in Gilbert Adair's virtuoso translation) is the idea of disappearance and, implicitly, the Holocaust.
Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec review – his long-lost first novel
Rejected by publishers and then lost for 50 years, this tale of an art forger whose attempt to go beyond imitation ends in murder is awkward but fascinating
Steven Poole Thursday 11 December 2014
Amaster forger conceives of a fantastic ambition: to go beyond the mere imitation of old painters, and instead “to create an authentic masterwork of the past”. That is the high concept behind the recently rediscovered first novel by the much-loved French experimental writer Georges Perec. Written when he was 24, it was never published in his lifetime, having been rejected by le tout Paris. Is it an authentic masterwork, or was the world not much the poorer after Perec’s typescript was accidentally thrown away in the wrong cardboard box?
Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual, a marvelous specimen of the Oulipean style itself, is a work which not only confirms that the writing still has it, but also exemplifies the unquenchable thirst for the unknown to burst straight out of it like
September 6, 2017
In a vast realm of anecdotes, being nothing more than just another floor of a multi-story edifice called “Life” (not necessarily the top one, neither the floor per se – it is probably more like an alcove so obvious in its presence, that we no longer pay attention to it, a not-so-heart-stopping crawlspace supplied only with an insignificant ‘cargo’ of chilling mysteries and thrilling miseries, etc.), there is a seemingly dull one about Karl Popper, who once allegedly asked his students during a lecture: “What do scientists do?”. When being answered ”They make observations.”, he replied: “Well then, observe.”. The slightly disoriented students inquired: “What shall we observe?”. This “what” was the focal point of Popper’s argument he wanted to clinch – we cannot get involved in any kind of scientific activity (e.g., assembling a device which is then applied to make our experiment work, developing the most efficient and the least time-consuming data gathering method, choosing the adequate mode of mathematical calculation for the corresponding phenomenon and its hidden, elusive essence we hope to eventually unveil one day, etc.), unless we, for lack of a better expression, ‘obey the rules’ of the theory, which we are struggling to prove with all our scientific actions and machinations. Avoiding further philosophical babble, Austrian-born thinker claims that the theory consisting of hypotheses comes first and it is only afterwards that it ‘tells’ us an approximate way of what we shall do to falsify and reject it or to corroborate and leave it be just for the next ‘cannonade’ of falsifying experiments. Cutting to the chase: cannot do anything without a theory.
Le Chat Noir: Yelena Bryksenkova?s 2009 drawing of Georges Perec, whose master work, ?Life: A User?s Manual,? was published in 1978. Click for larger view.Image by YELENA BRYKSENKOVA
A Renaissance for Belleville’s Georges Perec, Master of the Lipogram
Benjamin Ivry May 12, 2010
One of France’s most daring postwar writers, perhaps best known for writing an entire novel without the letter “e” (a lipogram), French-Jewish author Georges Perec, is coming back into vogue. Two of his books were reprinted by publisher David R. Godine last year, and new interest is being taken in his Polish-Jewish roots.
From Kant’s routines to Frantz Fanon’s astonishing wartime work and Simone de Beauvoir’s vexed position in history, these books thread together ideas and the lives that animated them
Peter Salmon Wednesday 18 November 2020
What is the relationship between the thinker and the thought? This is a question that all writers of intellectual biographies grapple with. One must relate the life to the thought without conflating them, without ascribing to every effect a cause, and every argument a reason. As Jacques Derrida warned, “You want me to say things like: ‘I-was-born-in-El-Biar-on-the-outskirts-of-Algiers-in-a-petty-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but …’ Is that really necessary? I can’t do it.”
And yet Derrida also argued that one of the great unacknowledged aspects of all philosophical writing is that it is a type of autobiography. Would Socrates have developed the gift of the gab if he wasn’t so ugly? Would Julia Kristeva have developed her ideas about the symbolic if she wasn’t an outsider by birth in her adopted France? Would Nietzsche have proclaimed the Overman if he was less shy at dinner parties?
The very best intellectual biographies enrich our understanding of great thinkers by situating them in a time and a place, and by exploring how they negotiate the difficult art of living through the products of their minds. Here are 10 wonderful books that thread together the lives and ideas of their thinkers in a way that intensifies our understanding of each.
1. St Augustine by Rebecca West “I write books,” noted Rebecca West, “to find out about things.” Here my stone-cold favourite writer of all time turns her combination of searing intellect and droll wit on one of the shapers of Christianity. She is particularly moving on Augustine’s final encounter with his mother, Monica: perhaps, writes West, “the most intense experience ever commemorated”. As bold and opinionated as you’d expect from the woman who wrote: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk For anyone studying philosophy, reading Wittgenstein can feel like taking a draught of cool water. Suddenly the deepest problems seem easy, to be mere problems of language, easy to solve. And then, as you read more deeply, that all falls apart as every problem becomes knottier, every question deeper still. Ray Monk’s biography is the gold standard in the genre, revealing a man whose life was as simple and complicated as his work.
3. At Home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil Any thinker worth their salt needs to have a Simone Weil obsession at some point. No intellectual of the 20th century was as prepared to take their thinking to its logical conclusion, making her for many a secular saint. And yet sainthood is often better appreciated at a distance, as her niece Sylvie reveals. Sleeping on the floor next to a lovingly made bed at the house of your brother (the revered mathematician André Weil) is noble in the telling, irritating in the execution. A writer herself, Sylvie Weil presents a biography of three minds, working for and against each other.
Thorough … detail from Kant and His Comrades at the Table by Emil Doerstling, 1900. Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy
4. Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn Very few people read Kant for pleasure. If you know anyone who has, I’d like to have a chat to them. Kuehn’s biography is always promoted as revelatory, in that it shows Kant was occasionally five minutes late in having his breakfast, and sometimes put his shoes on in the wrong order. In fact this biography is everything Kant was – thorough, witty (in the way philosophy lecturers are witty: that is, not very) and goes on just a bit too long. Even the title is suitably dull. But, like The Critique of Pure Reason, it is also magnificent and to read it is to enter into a glorious dialogue with one of the great minds.
5. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman by Toril Moi “To say that existence is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.” It’s hard to go past Deirdre Bair’s biography of De Beauvoir. But Moi’s telling is also brilliant and affecting. A powerful, critical investigation of De Beauvoir’s thinking, it situates her in a history of female thinkers and the way their thought has been marginalised, or treated reductively as fully explicable by their lives (and loves). In a challenging read, Moi forces you to argue with her, and to be damn sure of your position as you do so.
6. Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey Derrida’s childhood in Algeria was crucial to his thinking, as he himself noted, and one cannot write about Algeria without reading Fanon’s political works. Macey explores them brilliantly, but it is Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist that is a revelation. During the war of independence, Fanon often attended to patients suffering mental trauma after being tortured, as well as to the mental traumas of the torturers. That he attended to both with equal care is astonishing, and that he did so while writing the tracts that would make him famous is even more so. Macey does him justice, which really is saying something.
7. Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos One good life option is to just read everything David Bellos has ever written (as well as his translations). His life of Jacques Tati is wonderful, but here he is in his element trying to pin the butterfly that is Perec. Perec is the sort of writer most writers want to be, brilliant, inventive and prolific, managing to combine huge erudition with the ability to tell a really good yarn. A novel without the letter “e” (or a novella that uses only that vowel)? Why not? A novel that does a knight’s tour of an apartment block and seems to cover every aspect of life as it skips around? Sure! We should all be grateful he found Bellos to write his story – no one else would have got it right.
8. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell Along with Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss, this has become the ne plus ultra of group biographies, to the point where any pitch for a book in this area these days has to say: “It’s like At Existentialist Cafe meets The Rest Is Noise.” There’s a reason for this. Bakewell’s ability to connect a thinker’s ideas to their life and personality is impressive. I particularly love her slow, minutely reasoned, takedown of Heidegger the man: displaying Paul Celan’s books in the window of his local bookshop is, she writes, “the single documented example I can find of him actually doing something nice”.
Angela Davis speaks at a street rally in Raleigh, 1974.
9. Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis Note this is “An” autobiography, not “The” – Davis is always in action, and this is just one moment on the way somewhere, politically and intellectually. Writing in her late 20s, Davis had already served time in jail and been instrumental in the civil rights movement, making this an intoxicating trip through an era of incendiary politics and intellectual ferment. That she has maintained the rage and continued to put both body and mind on the line is exhilarating – another autobiography would be no less thrilling.
10. War Diaries by Jean-Paul Sartre Sartre is a bad biographer. In forcing Flaubert and Genet through the sausage machine of existentialism he performs the astonishing feat of making you want to avoid reading them. As a man, philosopher and novelist he is also hard to love. And yet love him I do, because of these diaries. They are the story of a mind finding itself, groping about for the theoretical scaffolding on which he would erect his thought. They are also the moving chronicle of a mind recovering from depression, thrown into a world of senseless chaos, before there was a Sartre to theorise absurdity. Of his breakdown, he writes: “I suddenly realised that anyone could become anything.” What he became is astonishing.
It's to the other man, to Borges, that things happen. I walk along the streets of Buenos Aires, stopping now and then -- perhaps out of habit -- to look at the arch of an old entranceway or a grillwork gate; of Borges I get news through the mail and glimpse his name among a committee of professors or in a dictionary of biography. I have a taste for hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the roots of words, the smell of coffee, and Stevenson's prose; the other man shares these likes, but in a showy way that turns them into stagy mannerisms. It would be an exaggeration to say that we are on bad terms; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his tales and poems, and those tales and poems are my justification. It is not hard for me to admit that he was managed to write a few worthwhile pages, but these pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good no longer belongs to anyone -- not even the other man -- bur rather to speech or tradition. In any case, I am fated to become lost once and for all, and only some moment of myself will survive in the other. Little by little, I have been surrendering everything to him, even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsification and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things try to keep on being themselves; a stone wants to be a stone and the tiger, a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is so that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in those of others or than in the laborious tuning of a guitar. Years ago, I tried ridding myself of him and I went from myths of the outlying slums of the city to games with time and infinity, but those games are now part of Borges and I will have to turn to other things. And so, my life is a running away, and I lose everything and everything is left to oblivion or to the other man.
The 1977 Penguin paperback edition of The Book of Sand is in two parts. Part one consists of a baker’s dozen of late short stories which take up 90 pages. Part two contains 35 poems taken from two of Borges’s final volumes of poetry, The Gold of the Tigers and The Unending Rose, presented in the original Spanish with English translations by the Scottish poet Alastair Reid on the facing page, and also taking up about 90 pages.
In 1981 Cardinal published a collection of all the short stories which Kafka published during his lifetime, from the first story in 1904, to the last ones published just after his death in 1924 – a working life of precisely 20 years. They are all here in new translations by J.A. Underwood. The edition is interesting because it gives a brief textual explanation before the major stories, explaining when they were written, and when published.
Killip was best known for documenting the lives of working-class people in post-industrial north-east England, marginalised communities and disappearing ways of life.
