Portfolio

The Nameless and Forgotten Ones: On Wim Wenders’s “Anselm”

EARLY ON IN Wim Wenders’s new documentary Anselm, we hear the whispers of Anselm Kiefer’s famous headless female sculptures. “We may be the nameless and forgotten ones,” they whisper, “but we don’t forget a thing.” These full-bodied specters haunt us in the way only Kiefer’s art can. His body of work interrogates myth and memory, wrestling with Germany’s past in ways that helped form the foundation of its postwar present.

What Was Unseen: On Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up”

FROM THE OPENING shot to the closing credits, Kelly Reichardt’s new film, Showing Up, centers art, artists, and the creative process, disarming you with how rare that actually is. As Lizzy (Michelle Williams) prepares her ceramic figures for an upcoming show, we enter a world of family dysfunction, professional rivalry, and droll commentary on all of it. Yet, the focus of the film, and even its texture, is artmaking itself. Showing Up may finally provide a long-overdue treatment to what seemed a permanent affliction: the representation of the art world on film.

A more sympathetic portrayal of the art world

On the big screen, the art world is often the object of sneering commentary about wealth and class. But “Showing Up”, released in American cinemas on Friday, is an account of ordinary artists, well, making art. Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is an introverted sculptor in Portland, Oregon, working as a receptionist by day and tending to her intricate clay sculptures by night. She also contends with the demands of her family and friends, most of whom have their own artistic inclinations.

First Time Viewer – It’s A Wonderful Life in Middle Age

Beginning in grade nine, I commuted every day on the Q35 bus from Queens to Brooklyn, straight down Flatbush Avenue to Midwood High School. Midwood had a magnet program that formed half the school, attracting kids from all over the city; the other half consisted of kids from near the school that couldn’t get in otherwise, and it made the school severely segregated –one program a model working- and middle-class mosaic, the other one almost completely West Indian and poorer. Gym was the only democratizing, and extremely fraught, force. 3,000 kids in one building in the middle of Brooklyn, sorting through adolescence and societal fissures together and all at once in 1990s New York.

Rockaway, Revisited

The tenth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy came and went at the end of October. The attendant retrospectives were perhaps a partial corrective to a year of hyperfocus on the ins and outs of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project. Also only very partially corrected: the physical vulnerability of the rest of the city’s communities, coastal and otherwise, to increased flooding and extreme weather events. Since Sandy paid its 2012 wake-up call, development has only intensified, and real estate values in the floodplain have increased by almost 50 percent, according to a report from the New York City Comptroller. Meanwhile, resiliency projects remain unfinished and more plans are needed. We’ve explored many of the contradictions that define the city’s progress, or lack thereof, here, too. There are the piecemeal protections, the innovative designs experiencing excruciating delays, to name a few.

“There’s No Such Thing as the True Self”: Camilla Taylor’s Art of Deception

THE EXPOSURE OF frauds and “overreaching entrepreneurs” keeps unfolding with dizzying speed, only outpaced perhaps by our own role as an eager audience. Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, the “Tinder Swindler,” Billy McFarland, and socialite scammer Anna “Delvey” Sorokin have been given dramatic treatments in podcasts, series, and movies their real-life protagonists could only imagine in their most fevered dreams. Yet we are also more than just sideline spectators: none of their schemes could exist without us. In trying to understand where their cases lie on a continuum of self-promotion and outright fraud, we also have to evaluate their performative role and its reliance on us.

At the Automat, Americans could find community and cheap coffee

One afternoon in 1969 Patti Smith peered into the glass hatches of an Automat, a cafeteria which dispensed cheap food from vending machines. It was one of the musician’s favourite places to eat in New York—she was particularly fond of the chicken pies—but on that occasion was longing for a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich. Seeing that she was shy of the 65 cents required, Allen Ginsberg came to her rescue. (Ms Smith says the poet mistook her for a “very pretty boy” at the time; they would later become close friends.)

A new archive preserves the creative legacy of the East Village

Howl! Arts/Howl! Archive, which opened in New York last month, documents the neighborhood’s intellectual and cultural ferment.

New York is still reeling from the pandemic. Almost 35,000 people have died from covid in the city; temporary morgues, in the form of refrigerated vans, were set up to store victims’ bodies. Many residents have left dense urban areas for leafier suburbs elsewhere in the state or in New Jersey. To some, the future of the metropolis seems uncertain.

A new cultural centre shows that good things can emerge from a city in flux. Howl! Arts/Howl! Archive (ha/ha), which opened on September 19th, celebrates the arts scene that was born in the East Village in the wake of the second world war. It is a reminder of how New York has coped with calamities in the past, often with the help of artists and storytellers.

Impostor Syndrome

In 1962, Kiryat Yam on Haifa Bay was one of many new communities mushrooming across Israel to keep pace with the immigrants and refugees pouring into the country. My grandparents and my mother had arrived in 1958, from Vilnius, Lithuania, by way of Wroclaw, Poland. They set forth on forging a new existence, modest but determined, eyes forward, hands busy — little chance to tempt fate like Lot’s wife and yearn for the world left behind.

One day, into this dusty moonscape of the recently displaced, arrived a sleek black sedan. When the doors opened, Prince Michael Romanoff — the famous Russian royal; Hollywood restaurateur; original member of the Rat Pack with Bogart and Bacall; regular subject of international headlines — stepped onto the roughly-paved sidewalk on Henrietta Szold Street. He asked the stunned onlookers the whereabouts of Nina Papirmacher, my grandmother. He had come to see her while accompanying Frank Sinatra on his Israeli tour.

A new documentary retraces Bruce Chatwin’s voyages

At a time when many around the world are leading more sedentary and restricted lives than usual, Werner Herzog has released a paean to roving. “Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin” is a portrait of one of his dear companions and a restless, singular storyteller. Mr Herzog narrates and acts as a guide, weaving together Chatwin’s writing, photographs and archival recordings with the testimony of those who knew him

In 2019 the BBC approached Mr Herzog about creating a tribute to his friend (pictured below), 30 years after his death from AIDS aged 49. Chatwin is still regarded as one of the godfathers of modern travel writing, someone who engaged with the world by walking through it. A product of English public schools, steeped in the tales of far-flung relatives, Chatwin fancied himself a modern version of the 19th-century explorer. He once told André Malraux, a French novelist, that he hailed from “an island of buccaneers and pirates.”

Jacob Lawrence’s portraits of America

By the mid-20th century Jacob Lawrence was one of the most celebrated artists in America. In a style described as “dynamic cubism”, he captured the joys and difficulties of the African-American experience and painted portraits of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a key figure in the Haitian revolution, as well as of the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In 1940, aged only 23, he created his acclaimed “Migration” series: the story of the “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the rural South to the cities of the north, told across 60 panels. It earned him his first major solo exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1949 Lawrence sought a new project. He began visiting the New York Public Library, mining the archives for letters, diaries, public speeches, legal petitions and military reports that might spark an idea. After five years of research, he decided that he would reimagine the history of America itself. “I gradually began to appreciate not only the struggles of the Negro people, but also to appreciate the rich and exciting story of America and of all the peoples who emigrated to the ‘New World’ and contributed to the creation of the United States,” he said. The new work would “depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy”. The result was the 30-strong “Struggle” series, completed in 1956

How film and television put last week’s Thanksgiving celebration in cultural context

What did you talk about at your Thanksgiving dinner?
 
A week after the celebration of the most American holiday, many people are still digesting dinner table conversations that might have wandered into current events. Whether they were contentious, or affirming, the Thanksgiving dinner table conversation as a reflection of our cultural moment has become a motif in popular culture. A survey of some of the most iconic enactments of the holiday meal in film and in television go some way toward putting last week’s conversations in context.
 
Unlike any other religious or secular American celebration, Thanksgiving offers a motif that resonates with nearly all American audiences, as Norman Rockwell shows in his iconic 1943 portrait of a family celebrating the holiday. The title of the painting is Freedom From Want; it is one in a series inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear), which he delivered shortly after the United States entered World War Two. Rockwell’s all-American family would, one hopes, look quite different today; but the propaganda potential is the same – almost everyone celebrates Thanksgiving, in similar ways, with similar cultural cues and breaks from the workweek.