Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright

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Reviewed by Christopher Benfey

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 624 pp., $35.00
Harper’s Magazine

Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t just the greatest of all American architects. He has so eclipsed the competition that he can sometimes seem the only one. Who are his potential rivals? Henry Hobson Richardson, that Gilded Age starchitect in monumental stone? Louis Sullivan, lyric poet of the office building and Wright’s own Chicago mentor, best known for his dictum that form follows function? “Yes,” Wright corrected him with typical one-upmanship, “but more important now, form and function are one.” For architects with the misfortune to follow him, Wright is seen as having created the standards by which they are judged. If we know the name Frank Gehry, it’s probably because he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. And Gehry’s deconstructed ship of titanium and glass would be unimaginable if Wright hadn’t built his own astonishing Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue some forty years earlier. [Read more…]

The Haunting, Half-Lit World Of Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Virtuoso
by Yelena Moskovich
Two Dollar Radio, 272 pp., $12.74

“But I see my mind’s asleep.
Were it to remain wide awake from this point on, we should quickly arrive at the truth, which may well be all around us now (its angels weeping)!” — Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

And so, let us start by imagining those angels, weeping. Their tears, tiny silver scalpels. Their wings, mangled. Their faces, featureless and orphaned to pools of light. They are everywhere, traceless repositories for unheard screams and unheld children who grow fitfully into adults (housing mutated unheld children in the attics of their guts, the sacral basements of their anuses). Everywhere, innocents locked in metaphysical orphanages, everywhere, angels slashing at air with turquoise tears.  [Read more…]

A Labyrinth Of Interlocking Lives In Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies

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Reviewed by Ruth Franklin

Celestial Bodies
by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Catapult, 243 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Review courtesy of The New York Review of Books

In an engrossing book published last spring called Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, the Australian writer Jane Alison makes a trenchant observation about the “dramatic arc” long considered the foundation for plot. Swelling to a climax and then deflating, it resembles nothing so much as a phallus: “Bit masculo-sexual, no?” Alison’s book offers alternative possibilities for fiction based on patterns found in nature, such as the spirals of fiddlehead ferns, seashells, or whirlpools; the meandering path of a river; the radiating shape of a flower; the self-replication of trees or clouds; or the cells in a honeycomb. These structures aren’t necessarily feminine—as it happens, Alison’s investigation of them is inspired by her reading of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, a work of fiction written by a man with predominantly male characters. But if the dramatic arc has often been associated with the “hero’s journey” model of fiction writing (a lone man goes off on a quest to conquer something), it stands to reason that a novel centered on the stories of women—often communal, connected, operating on many layers—might best be served by a different narrative form. [Read more…]

Excerpt from Jaki Liebezeit: The Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer

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by John Payne

Jaki Liebezeit: The Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer
edited by Jono Podmore
Unbound, 320 pp., $16.94

The drum master Jaki Liebezeit pursued over a decades-long career an enduring fascination with the core truths of time as expressed via rhythm. Not just a musician who wished to perfect a technique or expand his range of drumming styles, Liebezeit took his fascination deeper, to realms in which the very whys and wherefores of rhythm’s true place in any musical mode were of paramount importance – as was by extension its metaphorical relationship to the human being’s role in larger collective society. [Read more…]

Subversion As Transmission In klipschutz’s Premeditations

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Reviewed by James McWilliams

Premeditations
by klipschutz
Hoot n Waddle, 120pp., $16.00

Premeditations is a poet’s ode to poets. With wry nostalgia, klipschutz (the name author Kurt Lipschutz goes by), a San Francisco poet and songwriter (who works closely with the musician Chuck Prophet), opens his paean to poetry by defending the increasingly endangered sacred space where one typically discovers words that fuel the spirit: a bookstore. “North Beach Threnody,” the volume’s opening poem, leads with this stanza:

A landmark, registered, and us inside it,
folded up in folding chairs, with
everything outside moving
fast in another direction.
 [Read more…]

Beauty In The Slaughterhouse: Francis Bacon’s Books And Painting

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Bacon en toutes lettres, Centre Pompidou, Paris (through January 20)
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 23 – May 25)

Reviewed by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker and Stephen S. Bush

Humans are susceptible to puncture and cut, and in the end, like all dead organic matter, we’ll spoil. Whatever else we are, we’re meat. Francis Bacon’s paintings incessantly remind us of these truths. Whereas Pablo Picasso’s cubism was perspectival and worked from side to side—merging left, center, and right, Bacon’s is physiological and works from the inside out: interior, surface, and exterior. Organs and bones intermingle with skin and hair. In his oeuvre, the human subject itself serves as the memento mori, it is always figured and disfigured, fleshy and skeletal, animated and decaying.  [Read more…]

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

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Reviewed by Katie Waldman

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
by Jane Alison
Catapult, 272 pp., $12.81(paper)
Review courtesy of the New Yorker

I was in the seventh grade when Jane Alison’s début novel, The Love-Artist fell into my hands, and its effect on me was like a full-body blush. The book, which imagines an answer to the mystery of why Ovid was exiled to the edge of the Black Sea, in 8 A.D., stars a witch whom Ovid first glimpses rising from a pool in strands of water and wild grass. Everything is sensuous. Flowers are carnal. Alison has since written three more novels; she is also a translator and the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes. [Read more…]

Memory Palaces & The Hidden Art: Works And Studies Within The Collection Of Audrey B. Heckler

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Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz
Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler (through January 26)
an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC, January 26, 2020
 
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There are two stories, one might say, being told at the American Folk Art Museum’s current show Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. The first and more clear-cut is that the exhibition gives us a chance to see what must be one of the most discerning and wide-ranging collections of self-taught, or outsider, art in this country. There are top-notch works here by artists of varying degrees of recognition, many of whom were active in the middle and later years of the last century. Some, including Carlo Zinelli, William Hawkins, Adolf Wölfli, Thornton Dial, and Madge Gill, are known to people who follow this art but are not quite household names. There are strong works here as well by artists—such as Christine Sefolosha, Malcolm McKesson, and Edmund Monsiel—whose pictures may come as a welcome surprise to nearly everybody. And there are fine pieces by Bill Traylor and James Castle, and extraordinary ones by Martín Ramírez, who are all becoming widely known.

[Read more…]

Hazards Of Alienation In The Fool (and Other Moral Tales)

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Reviewed by John Biscello

The Fool (and Other Moral Tales)
by Anne Serre
Translated by Mark Hutchinson
New Directions, 228pp., $13.97

Among the linty cling of rumors and backwashed gossip spread around the barrooms and laundromats of the universe, circulates this mortuary nugget: Hey, did you know that Ego, when it dies, would love nothing more than to attend its own funeral? Ego, in brazenly counterpointing Woody Allen’s proclamation — “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens” — would happily play the role of phantom witness while enjoying the privileged position of being able to float above its own death. It could view itself through the ceremony of mirrored eyes, and gauge its impact upon the audience gathered in its name. Ego, or the I-self, aspires to dream itself into a permanent narrative, to secure tenancy in a time-loop — it longs to know its movements are in accord with something lasting. This fretful existential dilemma, as it relates to writing, to functioning as a writer, and to the amorphic realm of stories and narrative, finds itself swaddled in the gallows’ silk of Love and Death, in Anne Serre’s new book, The Fool (and Other Moral Tales). [Read more…]

Hiroko Oyamada’s Mordant Fable, The Factory

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Reviewed by John Biscello

The Factory
by Hiroko Oyamada
New Directions, 128pp., $13.95

The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, was Charlie Chaplin in his iconic film, Modern Times, which applied fool’s wisdom in overlaying its satire with calculated mania, circus-like antics, romantic aspirations, and a punch-drunk heart that refuses to throw in the towel. There is a visually brilliant scene in which the tramp gets swallowed up in the machine on which he’s working, a hapless Jonah churning within the gear-heavy belly of the industrial whale, and this image metaphorically underscored what Chaplin saw as the threats of dehumanization confronting “modern man.” [Read more…]

In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali

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Reviewed by John Biscello

In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali
by Sue Roe
Penguin, 295pp., $28.50

A fish rides a bicycle into the Seine. The fish begins to drown and then remembers that it is a fish and starts to fly off into the pipe-smoke colony of clouds. The bicycle floats down the river. It sees things, cycling through a flurry of wonders and impressions. There is the torn yellow umbrella making rapacious love to an industrial sewing machine under a bridge.  [Read more…]

An Eye Through The Knotted Peephole In Junichiro Tanizaki’s Devils in Daylight

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Devils in Daylight
by Junichiro Tanizaki
New Directions Publishing, 96pp., $9.95

“I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the thing that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”– Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Early 20thcentury, Japan. You, caped in shadows, find yourself watching two men who are watching, through a grainy peephole, two other people, a man and a woman, who are seemingly killing another man. The entire thing is busy, complex, furtive; erotic in its staggered geometry. Outside, where you are and where you aren’t, the rain-slicked street holds tiny concentric halos of light projected out from the window of an Inn that dizzies its patrons with licentious allure, while Rockwell’s paranoia blares from a jukebox — It always feels like somebody’s watching me, tell me is it just a dream — and you can’t help but look over your shoulder as you see a lantern-eyed black cat, smiling. Mind you, the song and the jukebox haven’t been invented yet, and Rockwell lingers as a figment awaiting popstar iteration, but still, they are there, this is happening, a confluence of elements, which includes you and five other people (one of them now very much dead), and the whole thing gets you thinking about the dreamlike immediacy of voyeurism, or the pyramidic folds of role-playing. You have entered that place between realms, where the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki so comfortably dwells. [Read more…]

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters

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Reviewed by Ann Landi

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters
by Phyllis Rose
Yale University Press, 272 pp, $26.00

We live in an age when shows of photography are a mainstay of many major museums, and a handful of artists who seriously pursue the medium have even achieved celebrity status (think Sherman, Arbus, Mapplethorpe). So it’s almost mind-boggling to realize that the struggle to get photography considered a “fine art” rather than simply a mechanical craft, at least in this country, is little more than a hundred years old, and that the medium’s meteoric launch into the public consciousness is largely thanks to the efforts of one man: Alfred Steiglitz. [Read more…]

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma In American Art Since 1970

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Reviewed by Coco Fusco

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970
by Vivien Green Fryd
Pennsylvania State University Press, 349 pp., $49.95
Review courtesy of The New York Review of Books

In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table with seventy-two objects, including a loaded gun. Beside the objects was a document absolving the audience of responsibility for whatever they might choose to do to her with those objects.  [Read more…]

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

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Reviewed by Christopher Tayler

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark
by Cecelia Watson
Ecco. 224 pp. $19.99
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine

Pietro Bembo, a Venetian poet and scholar, staked his first claim to fame in a short book he published in 1496, when he was in his mid-­twenties. De Aetna described, in Latin, a hike Bembo had made to the top of Mount Etna in Sicily. Even in summer, he observed, there was snow on the peak. An ancient Greek geographer, Strabo, had said that there wasn’t, but the evidence of one’s own eyes, Bembo wrote, was “no less an authority.” This was Renaissance humanism flexing its muscles—a few generations earlier, an ancient geographer might have carried more authority than a firsthand report—and it wasn’t the only instance of that in Bembo’s book. Various marks subdivided his text. One of them, which signaled both a medium-length pause and a semantic boundary inside a sentence, hadn’t been used for that particular function before. Between them, Bembo; his publisher, Aldus Manutius; and Manutius’s type maker, Francesco Griffo, were introducing the world to a new punctuation mark: the semicolon. [Read more…]

Breadcrumbs For The Disenchanted: Peg Alford Pursell’s A Girl Goes Into The Forest

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Reviewed by John Biscello

A Girl Goes Into the Forest
by Peg Alford Pursell
Dzanc, 200pp., $16.95

In the dream I was sitting with my mother in a restaurant lobby, waiting to be seated for dinner. The hostess came over, asked me my name, which I confirmed, then told me to follow her — I had a phone call. At the hostessing station, I took the black phone with the cord and on the other end of the line was my sister’s voice: tremulous, distraught.  [Read more…]

Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories

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Reviewed by Ruth Franklin

You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories
by Kristen Roupenian
Scout, 225 pp., $24.99
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

It has happened only twice in nearly seventy years: a short story appears in The New Yorker and goes viral, setting off an avalanche of responses. Some readers, fooled by its up-to-date style, misinterpret it as a piece of reportage. Others attack the author as a sadist or a misanthrope. And many more are simply confused about what it means. Is it an allegory for the suffering that women face under patriarchy? A screed that indicts contemporary society more generally? Or just a tale taken from everyday life in which something goes horribly wrong? [Read more…]

Proxy Among the Spiders: An Imagined Louise Bourgeois In Now, Now, Louison

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Now, Now, Louison, by Jean Frémon
New Directions Publishing, 112 pps. $13.95

There once was a little girl named Louise. Sweet, endangered, watchful and tragic, this little girl, who in her permeable nomenclature was also referred to as Lousion, bore the embryonic shadow of the son and heir that her father desired. Louise and her mother, Louison and her father, a baleful diet of scissors and stones, a garden overgrown with weeds. Here is where the myth begins. [Read more…]

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

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Reviewed by Caroline Fraser

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh
Scribner, 290 pp., $26.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

As told in her ambitious and moving new memoir, Heartland, Sarah Smarsh’s life was ripped right out of a Bruce Springsteen song. “Spare Parts,” for one: “Bobby said he’d pull out Bobby stayed in/Janey had a baby it wasn’t any sin.”

That’s pretty much the tale the author tells of her own conception, except that her father was Nick and her mother was seventeen-year-old Jeannie. On Halloween night, 1979, Nick and Jeannie are having sex in his parents’ basement when Jeannie says, “Don’t come in me!” Nick pays no attention. Like most Springsteen songs, the story ends in melancholy, or what Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, his great Victorian novel about the debasement of poor country women, called “the ache of modernism.” [Read more…]

The Kids Are Not Alright In Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary

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Reviewed by John Biscello

The Emissary, by Yoko Tawada
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
New Directions Publishing, 128 pps. $14.95

I have seen the future and it’s murder — Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Death walks into a bar, wielding a scythe, which he intends to use in shaving God’s face. Death, in his wanderings, has been hearing rumors about the wooly burning bush that covers God’s face like topographical phenomena, and he has made it his self-directed duty and obligation to give God a clean shave. The thing is, Death doesn’t find God in the bar, so he begins using his scythe on all the people he encounters in the bar, and then continues his bloody shave-fest out in the real world, as he continues searching for God’s hairy, burning beast of a face. In the end, Death is a misguided barber, and God an absentee with bigtime street cred. To dance the razor’s edge between vaudeville and nightmare requires a certain sense of marvel and precision, a certain joie de vivre to keep one company while suspended over an abyss, and this is the sensibility that Yoko Tawada exacts with finesse and fluency in her satirical timebomb, The Emissary. [Read more…]