v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Bewildered Male Cabal

Letter from Kenword Emlsie to Lucia Berlin:

 

Calais, VT

June 28, 2000

Dear Loosha—

The stabile home fotos are DEE-lish, so comfy, you all the way, love seats everywhichaway, art on the floor, which is where I leave it, sometimes. Very home-minded today, as there’s a Lady Party in the house. Pauline Camp, huge bod, erratic flesh flow, unsunned tallowy skin tone, prizefighter cauliflower nose, squinchy eyes, enormous misshapen ears, mouth down-turned, down-trodden—quite a beauty in a survivalist way, to my eyes. An Original, she’s doing summer cleanup volunteerism with Patty Padgett, who is barefoot, much to Pauline’s recurrent amazement and not-so-hidden shock. Harold, Pauline’s hubby, and I have formed a bewildered, helpless male cabal, in the thrall of this empowerment that old-fashioned “real” women are supreme at—Cleaning Up Menfolk Muss.

I’ve been in a reading-reading-reading mode, a pattern of adolescence, when all I did just about was read, that solo occupation that replenished me, offered luscious and reliable escape, and, though narrative was the hook, I did respond to the twists of language. My favorite rerun this summer so far has been A Handful of Dust.²

I grew to loathe [Stendhal’s] The Red & The Black. Fell for a Colette shortie, The Other One, and the standard Frenchy trio: wife, mistress, drippy boulevard playwright–hubby philanderer they both care for and decide to share. They’re so fond of each other, jealousy isn’t a problem. I got jealous at the theater world details: dress rehearsal, the performers, the routine I feel exiled from.

So adroit. Plus a [Marguerite] Yourcenar historical fiction novella, spare and gorgeous. Between novels, I dip into you to see how your stuff holds up, which it does, all the way—that Gothic Romance slays me, how it refracts out into politics, power plays. Beautiful and natural, nothing forced or gussied up, doomed feudal grandeur dealt with simply via virginal eyes.

Yesterday, raced through a Graham Greene potboiler I wearied of—suspense, yes, but not nearly as gripping as his true-life safari through the unmapped interior of Liberia, so terrific made me lust for more Greene.

Switchover to Harold, who has plunked himself down by my desk, rattles on whatever I’m doing at the processor.

HAROLD: “So I picked up a new belt, only charged me four dollars, now I’m going to eat dinner. Down to the last set now—then we’ll have some sharp blades. Got rid of the rubbish. This spring I got rid of it. I have a rubbish man comes right to the door, all the stuff the girls throwed away from the storage. He’ll get rid of it, he won’t mind, got one of those big crushers, pushes it right up, then when it’s full, gets rid of it. We’ll go eat some dinner, then this afternoon get the rest of the mowing done down there. The peonies are really growing, three bunches of lupinia. You never know, never know what’ll happen, but it’s been a good year for flowers.”

Me, again.

Glad flecks of happy dust have fallen on you off that great Swizzle Stick in The Sky. Hope the flecks continue steadily, now you’re resettled. Congrats from your boondocks pen-beau—and a Happy Fourth!

[…]

Time to see what the Ladies are up to in the house.

Love,

Kenward

Ciao Javier Marias

Javier Marias passed away this weekend before he could be given the Nobel prize for literature. Again, the irrelevancy of the Nobel shines again. Some recent influential and great writers that did receive it include: Nabakov, Borges, Cortazar, Sebald, Calvino . . . .

Here's a take on his life from The Guardian:

When Javier Marías was a student of English Philology in Madrid in the 1970s he says it was with a sense of "awe and reverence" that he would buy copies of "the then grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics. The authors ranged from Conrad to James, Faulkner to Joyce, Thomas Mann to Ford Madox Ford, Woolf to Camus. Not even Nabokov was allowed to be there." Last year Marías himself became one of just a handful of living writers to join that same list. "I must assume, therefore, that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s," he explains modestly. "But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can't help thinking I must be a fraud."

Far from being a fraud, it is difficult to think of many other living writers who are such an obvious fit for the list. In brute commercial terms, as was noted at the time, you could say his inclusion is not a bad hedge bet from his new publisher Penguin in the event of his winning the Nobel prize, something he is regularly tipped to do. In purely literary terms there is an even more compelling case. Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust.

"I've never had a literary project and feel I have been improvising all my career," he recently claimed. "But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure. There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before."

This flair for improvisation has seen him selling millions of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. His 12th novel, The Infatuations, is published in English next month, and work such as All Souls, A Heart So White, and, more recently, his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, have received almost universal critical acclaim. And he has not only been garlanded with prizes. Among his other titles he is King of Redonda, a real, if uninhabited, lump of Caribbean rock, the monarchy of which has been passed down through a line of writers.

"I've taken my responsibilities lightly," he smiles, "but I do follow the tradition of an intellectual nobility." He funds a literary prize and awards dukedoms to the winners, which so far have included among others Alice Munro, AS Byatt, William Boyd and Umberto Eco. "JM Coetzee was the first winner, and I was delighted that he accepted and joined in with the playfulness of it. Maybe it is time that I should start thinking about an heir. I inherited through an abdication, so I shall have to find another writer, as it is not passed on by blood but by letters."

Marías has never visited Redonda and lives in a book-packed apartment overlooking one of Madrid's oldest squares where he works on an electric typewriter, doesn't have internet and is equally old-fashioned in his prodigious cigarette consumption. He has a long-term partner, but she lives in Barcelona. "And that is usually my lot. Either my girlfriends have been married at a time when there was no divorce in Spain, or they lived somewhere else or there was something else in the way."

The Infatuations, featuring a rare Marías female narrator, is, among other things, a cool-eyed examination of love; in fact "Los enamoramientos", the Spanish title, could also be translated as "The Crushes". Maria has breakfast in the same café every morning, where she observes a married couple with the same routine. Some time after the couple stop coming to the café Maria learns that the husband has been brutally murdered, and she becomes embroiled in the life of the widow and the emotional ramifications of the husband's death.

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Beyond Capitalism Towards Modern Enlightenment

From a lively response to several reviews of his recent book, Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, he writes at LARB a confirmation that life as we know it is far from our control in the current ways society is organized and even among those in agreement there is disagreement on what a truly free existence would actually look like:

By contrast, This Life seeks to challenge the very measure of value that shapes the production of wealth under capitalism. There is no shortage of rhetorical indictments of capitalism, but what we need is a profound definition and analysis of capitalism that can illuminate the historical conditions under which we live, as well as the principles for an economic form of life beyond capitalism. That is what I set out to provide.

Given the stakes of the project, I am deeply grateful to Los Angeles Review of Books for organizing this symposium and for the critical engagement of the six distinguished respondents, all of whose work I have learned from and admire. In responding to them, my aim is not only to defend the arguments of This Life but also to elaborate the emancipatory vision of democratic socialism at the heart of the book. Democratic socialism in my sense would be a post-capitalist form of life, which cannot be achieved merely through redistributive reforms. Rather, democratic socialism requires a revolutionary revaluation of our collective measure of value, which would abolish wage labor and transform how we reproduce our lives, all the way from our production of goods to our forms of education and other social institutions.

To grasp the meaning of such a revaluation, it is helpful to begin with Benjamin Kunkel’s response to the book. Kunkel generously emphasizes that This Life makes a “magnificent case for democratic socialism” by “wresting the indispensable slogan of freedom away from the publicists for liberal capitalism.” To this end, I argue that Marx should be understood as the most important inheritor of the modern, Enlightenment commitment to freedom. Marx has no nostalgia for the premodern world. Rather, he makes clear that both capitalism and liberalism are historical conditions of possibility for the collective emancipation that he espouses. While consistent with Marx’s vision of communism, I choose to describe the post-capitalist form of life in terms of a novel conception of democratic socialism, in order to underline that the commitment to democracy is indispensable for Marx’s critique of capitalism. Through a critique of capitalism and liberalism on their own terms, I specify the general principles of democratic socialism and elaborate their concrete implications. What I call democratic socialism is neither an imposed blueprint nor an abstract utopia. Rather, I derive the principles of democratic socialism from the commitment to universal freedom and equality that is a historical achievement of modernity.

In developing the vision of democratic socialism, I have two main aims, which are perceptively highlighted by Kunkel. At stake is both a recuperation of “the cause of freedom for the radical left” and a demonstration “through the existential register of This Life, that democratic socialism is properly the cause of everyone.” As Kunkel rightly underlines, the case for democratic socialism requires that we can explain why capitalism is a source of unfreedom not only for the working class but also for the ruling classes themselves. In short, we must be able to explain why “an ordinary citizen under democratic socialism” would have greater possibilities of leading a free life “than even an exceptionally rich person today.”

To establish my argument, I must therefore demonstrate “the existential bankruptcy of capitalist wealth,” as Kunkel vividly expresses it. He recognizes that I show the unfreedom of those “whose mortal schedule and daily priorities take shape as capital demands,” including “the comparatively well paid, the ‘privileged,’ even the working rich.” Yet Kunkel thinks my argument “could easily be appropriated by the idle rich,” since he misconstrues the notion of free time that is at the center of This Life. On Kunkel’s account, my notion of free time is an empty quantitative category: “the sheer number of free hours” in which “we might do as we please,” since we supposedly do not have to answer to any demands placed on us by others. The same conception of free time informs Michael W. Clune’s response. According to Clune, I subscribe to a notion of freedom and equality “that says you can do anything you want to do, that all desires are equally legitimate, that society plays no role in judging what form of life you should adopt, so long as you don’t harm anyone else in certain carefully delimited ways.” Indeed, Clune claims that I do not “distinguish between better and worse ways of spending one’s free time,” since my notion of free time merely amounts to “the freedom to do whatever we want.”

I am truly surprised by these assertions, since the conception of freedom they ascribe to me is one that I argue against throughout the entire book. To be free is not to be free from obligations and follow any inclination one happens to have, released from the normative question of what is the right thing to do. On the contrary, I argue that we are free precisely because the normative question of what we ought to do is always at issue for us. Being free is not a matter of being unconstrained but of being responsive to the question of what is worth doing and which ends are worthy of our devotion. From your first-person standpoint, there is always such a question at work, if only implicitly. By virtue of doing anything at all, you are in practice taking a stand on the question of what is worth doing. If there were no such question involved — if it were immediately given what to do, without any possible hesitation, deliberation, or alteration on your part — you could not even understand yourself as an agent, since there would be nothing for you to do; it would all be automatic.

By the same token, the distinction between better and worse ways of spending your time is always at stake implicitly and can become explicit. You must be able to recognize that what you are doing is not worth doing and that what you have done is not worthy of who you are trying to be. The ability to make such negative judgments is an essential part of leading a free life. That is why Clune can judge that, by his own lights, he has wasted much of his life on doing heroin, buying worthless consumer goods, and playing the computer game Slay the Spire. It is also why the free time of the idle rich can be spoiled by a sense of “guilt and futility,” as Kunkel notes, with the attendant “suicides, addictions, mortal frivolities, and terminal bad faith that plague the rich today.”

Kunkel admits that he does not know how to “articulate philosophically” why the free time of the idle rich is pervaded by pathologies, but that is because he does not grasp the notion of freedom that is at stake. In a revealing example, Kunkel assumes that “loafing” on a lawn is an inherently free activity, whereas maintaining lawns on which people can loaf is an inherently unfree activity. Socially necessary labor (e.g., “seeding, fertilizing, and mowing lawns”) would then be an external constraint on our freedom — a necessary evil that we should try to reduce as much as possible — since freedom supposedly consists in freedom from socially necessary labor. If that were my notion of free time, the idle rich would indeed be paragons of freedom, since their abundant monetary wealth apparently releases them from the pressure of obligations and leaves them open to indulge any inclination that emerges as they are loafing through their lives.

As I underscore, however, free time is not reducible to leisure time and it does not designate a merely quantitative category of time. Rather, I coin the term socially available free time to make clear that our freedom can exist only in a social form and that it always depends on the quality of our social activities. For the same reason, there is no inherent opposition between socially available free time and socially necessary labor. To have socially available free time is to be engaged in activities that we recognize as ends in themselves — which can include many forms of socially necessary labor — as distinct from activities that we recognize as mere means to an end. This is a formal distinction, in the sense that it is not given which activities should count as ends in themselves and which activities should count as mere means to an end. If you are mowing a lawn because you are cheap labor for a capitalist enterprise, your labor time is unfree and alienated, since what you are doing is merely a means to the end of earning a wage. However, if you are mowing a lawn because you are committed to the flourishing of green spaces in the society of which you are a part, your socially necessary labor can itself be an expression of your freedom, since your labor is a way of participating in and contributing to a social good that you recognize as an end in itself. Inversely, there is no positive form of freedom in being “free” from obligations. Loafing on a lawn is itself a form of unfreedom if you cannot see your leisure time as part of a life that is good in itself.

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Environmental Injustice

From NYRB, a review of Josiah Rector's account of environmental justice in Detroit:

In Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit, Josiah Rector, who teaches at the University of Houston, instead looks northward to Detroit and its environs. As a graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit a decade ago, he first came across records that charted the city’s rich and often overlooked history of environmental justice organizing. It was also in Detroit that Rector, a white newcomer in a city that is nearly 80 percent Black, witnessed one of the most naked displays of environmental injustice in recent memory.

Beginning in 2014, the City of Detroit shut off the water of more than a quarter-million people. Starting at the same time, authorities in nearby Flint made a series of cost-cutting decisions that resulted in lead-laced water being pumped into thousands of homes. Astonishingly, Detroit’s water has been so foul for so long that its rate of childhood lead poisoning is twice as high as Flint’s—despite the fact that the city is surrounded by the largest freshwater system in the world. During Rector’s time there, moreover, Detroit recorded the highest rate of childhood asthma among the nation’s largest cities. A 2017 study estimates that air pollution causes 7 percent of all deaths in Detroit—more than twice the city’s rate of homicide.

After interviewing activists and immersing himself in the region’s archives, Rector concluded that the “existing literature on environmental justice did not give me the conceptual vocabulary I needed to make sense of what I was seeing in Detroit,” both past and present. A decade later, he has written a book that advances two major interventions. First, it pushes back the environmental justice movement’s genesis to midcentury union organizing. Second, and just as significantly, it firmly connects the effects of debt and austerity—that is to say, capitalism—to environmental racism.

“While most environmental justice studies examine communities on the ‘fence line’ of billowing smokestacks and toxic waste dumps,” Rector writes, “finance and real estate have been no less historically implicated in racialized environmental injustice than heavy industry.” Toxic Debt concretely documents this history by recovering the voices, names, and actions of individuals whose fights have been forgotten or buried.

A Source of Our Problems

During my career in corporate America I remember running into the senior executives who ruled by the Welch principles-they all seem disconnected from reality, firing their bottom 10% of their rated employees and outsourcing the most critical work to India or Bulgaria. Here is clip from Gelles at the NYT who just wrote a book on this brute:

Almost immediately after Mr. Welch retired in September 2001 with a $417 million severance package, G.E. went into a tailspin from which it would never recover.

His pupils, though, went on to run dozens of other major companies, including Home Depot, Albertson’s, Chrysler and Boeing. Most of them failed.

And in the decades since Mr. Welch assumed power, the economy at large has come to resemble his skewed priorities. Wages stagnated and jobs moved overseas. C.E.O. pay went stratospheric and buybacks and dividends boomed. Factories closed and companies found ways to pay fewer taxes.

Beyond his enduring influence on the economy, Mr. Welch also redefined what it meant to be a boss, personifying an aggressive, materialistic style of management that endures to this day.

“Jack was the rock star C.E.O. of my era,” said Lynn Forester de Rothschild, one of the rare female media moguls of the 1980s. “We all thought Jack was doing everything right and that success was defined by meeting quarterly earnings to the penny.”

In retirement, Mr. Welch continued to hold sway over the business world as an elder statesman, penning books and columns, and appearing on cable news to praise the executives he had groomed and continue his assault on taxation and regulation.

Mr. Welch also pursued an unexpected retirement pastime: He became an internet troll. His old friend Donald J. Trump seemed to lead the way on many conspiracy theories that Mr. Welch embraced. But by 2012, Mr. Welch was picking fights of his own with his online adversaries, trying to own the libs on Twitter and promulgating conspiracy theories about the Obama administration.

It was a career defined by a ruthless devotion to maximizing short-term profits at any cost, and punctuated by a foray into misinformation. And it opened the door to an era where billionaire C.E.O.s are endowed with vast power and near total impunity.

G.E., too, is still reckoning with Mr. Welch’s legacy. For two decades after he retired, a succession of C.E.O.s tried and failed to return the company to its former glory. Then last year, G.E. management admitted defeat and made an announcement — the company would be broken up for good.

 

 

Todd Hido Interview

 

From Lense Culture:

LensCulture: It seems that a lot of your work concerns the “internal” world (both yours and your viewer’s). How much do you let the external world—politics, the cultural climate—impact your photography?

Todd Hido: The internal/personal is often quite political, and external forces have always influenced my work. However, I learned from my mentor, Larry Sultan, that it is through the personal connection that one could relate to another in a truly impactful way.

For one of my last books, Excerpts from Silver Meadows, I was deeply influenced by a television that is constantly running in my kitchen, playing CNN. As I worked on my edit of photographs, there were a lot of really crazy things going on politically. These things absolutely filtered into my work.

Dorothea Lange said, “It is a photographer’s task to portray what exists and prevails.” I came to that message through the work of Robert Adams, who has clearly been doing this beautifully and accurately for almost all of his career.

One thing that is important to know about my work is that not all of it is about me or things that I have encountered. Many of the narratives, particularly in Excerpts, come from things I have seen in others.

My latest body of work, entitled Bright Black World, is very much a reaction to the current times that we live in. I was already working on a body of work that touched upon climate change in my own way, which is an issue growing far quicker than we could have imagined. That being said, I think my work became even darker in this truly horrific and inescapable political atmosphere in America today. There is no way you can turn a blind eye or be willfully ignorant to the tide of current events.

LC: Your photographs strongly remind me of Edward Hopper’s paintings; smooth vistas, and yet charged. Can you talk about some of the visual material you find inspiring? How do you see that material influencing and impacting your work?

TH: I am a fan of Edward Hopper, and I was delighted to have my work hung next to his at a show at the Whitney Museum. Other visual inspiration for me often comes from my library of over 6,000 photography books that I am constantly adding to and referencing.

I am also inspired by things that are in my daily visual path. I love to leave books open on my dining room table and walk past them 100 times. You would be surprised how much that sinks in and becomes reflected in your work.

LC: Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?

TH: Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.

LC: When viewers “place their own memories within,” do they ever react in a way that surprises you?

TH: While I know that my work does elicit a response in people, it is often something that is personal and not really shared with me. This, of course, is totally fine.

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Original Colonization

 

From Ed Morales:

In the United States, the politics of debt has mostly focused on personal debt and, in particular, student debt. Recent figures show that Americans owe just over $800 billion in credit card debt, and when you add in mortgages, car loans, and student debt, the total rises to over $15 trillion. Beginning in the years after Occupy Wall Street, activist groups like Andrew Ross and Astra Taylor’s Debt Collective have lobbied for aggressive student debt forgiveness—a policy that was originally part of the 2020 Democratic Party agenda but now seems to be flagging as a serious consideration for the Biden administration as it struggles to maintain the party’s majorities in Congress in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections.

Yet debt has become a central engine of the US economy, not only for consumers but for cities and states. In the US, local municipalities take on onerous amounts of debt to keep functioning. Meanwhile, throughout the world, debt is employed as leverage that allows wealthier countries to extract concessions from poorer ones. This practice was evident in the United States’ “dollar diplomacy” interventions throughout the Americas in the early 20th century, justified under the Monroe Doctrine, and has been repeated in the 21st century through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Union in order to sustain a capitalist hegemony over most parts of the globe.

In Colonial Debts, Zambrana situates Puerto Rico’s current turmoil within the politics of debt. The island had accumulated $74 billion in bond debt and $123 billion in debt overall, with pensions included, which spurred Congress to create PROMESA, a law designed to restructure and reduce the level of debt so that Puerto Rico can eventually reenter the sphere of capital markets and resume borrowing in a supposedly more responsible fashion. On March 15, a debt restructuring plan approved by the PROMESA-mandated Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) officially kicked in, ostensibly bringing Puerto Rico “out of bankruptcy,” but the plan’s austerity measures are still provoking protests and discontent. “Debt is an exchange that has not been brought to completion,” Zambrana writes. “During the time that the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy ‘takes hold.’” In Puerto Rico’s case, this hierarchy is embodied by the FOMB, which has had the effect of eroding democracy on the island.

For Zambrana, the story of PROMESA is really the story of colonialism reinventing itself. The debt crisis in Puerto Rico is not a simple case of an incompetent government borrowing beyond its means; it is the result of the many years in which the island served as a profit machine for US corporate interests, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a tax shelter for businesses and, increasingly, individuals. Puerto Rico’s debt grew, Zambrana shows, because most of the profits generated there were siphoned off into US and offshore banks, not reinvested in the island, and because a series of laws allowed US interests to treat it as an American state when it was convenient and as a foreign country when it wasn’t. Unable to make autonomous trade arrangements with its neighbors, and subject to laws like the 1920 Jones Act, which made it overly dependent on US maritime commerce, Puerto Rico could never grow enough economically to create an adequate tax base and keep its government out of the red, even after it developed a manufacturing industry in the postwar years.

As an appendage of the US economy, Puerto Rico, which had enjoyed a period of prosperity in the 1950s and ’60s, ran into trouble with the economic convulsions of the 1970s, and it began to borrow in the form of bond issues in the millions of dollars just to pay for essential government services. The market for Puerto Rican bonds has grown rapidly since then as banking was deregulated and bond investment became more volatile in the 1980s, while in 1984, Puerto Rico’s status under Chapter 9 bankruptcy law was changed to that of a state, which had the effect of making it ineligible to declare bankruptcy.

As the island became increasingly shackled to its debt, Puerto Rican bonds became more and more attractive for speculators. Since 1917, with the passage of the Jones-Shafroth Act, the bonds have been triple tax-exempt, and as speculators jockeyed for position in the 1980s, they became a hot investment, especially for Wall Street underwriters and hedge and vulture funds, the latter always on the hunt for “distressed” economies from which to extract profits.

Zambrana tells this story of colonial manipulation and financial speculation, but she also does something else interesting: Fusing the theorist Aníbal Quijano’s idea of the “coloniality of power” with Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “afterlife,” she argues that Puerto Rico’s “decolonization,” ostensibly accomplished in 1950 with the creation of its “commonwealth” status, allowed its original colonization to have an afterlife in the form of this debt. It was more than just a way for Wall Street speculators to get rich, Zambrana notes; Puerto Rico’s debt was a means to reassert US dominance over the island “within and through the strictures of financialized neoliberal capitalism.”

Zambrana wants to demonstrate how the idea of coloniality very much resembles Hartman’s concept of the “afterlife” of slavery. “It specifies the persistence of slavery in the present in the fact that black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago,” she writes. Zambrana insists that it is “not a legacy…rather an operating rationality and sensibility organizing the very reproduction of life through the attrition of life in the present.” This sort of literary framing very much uses the same logic as legal scholar Michelle Alexander did in The New Jim Crow, and alludes to Critical Race Theory’s central concept of systemic racism. 

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Quote from Dan Graham

"When you define the audience, the performer becomes what the audience wants. Politicians do that all the time."

Dan Graham

Learning About Luigi Ghirri

 

From a discussion at Aperture with the curator of a Luigi Ghirri photo exhibition:

Michael Famighetti: The installation for The Idea of Building was quite beautiful and worked so well in the Matthew Marks Gallery space, which has the feel of a modest chapel. How did this project come to be?

Matt Connors: I have been a Ghirri fan for a long time, and a conversation developed with the gallery about me curating a show. The first time they showed Ghirri was in a Thomas Demand–curated show, so I think they were interested in me to see what would happen, because I wasn’t a photographer, but was someone invested in his work. 

Famighetti: Did you work closely with the Ghirri estate on the selection?

Connors: I went to Italy to the archive to meet with Adele, his daughter. Before that, I was buying every Ghirri book. I was freaked out because of how admired and loved he is in the photography world, and I felt acutely aware that I was not a photographer. But I kept digging in on my personal research and wrote a minithesis to send to Adele. And then I went in January 2020, one of my last trips before the COVID-19 pandemic. The archive is in what was once Ghirri’s house; it was an absolute fantasy.

Famighetti: What vision of Ghirri did you present to the estate?

Connors: The process of choosing a Ghirri photograph is kind of like a psychological intake, because there is so much, many different bodies of work; it involves confessing what you like.

After looking at many images, I started to dig out a vision of him as a painter. It sounds self-serving, but because I’m making paintings all day, putting color together materially, I started to see that parallel so clearly in his work.

In the book Project Prints (2012), which is about how he would make contact prints and cut them out and make little maquettes to play with, you can see that the materiality of his approach was key. He was obsessed with building, actually building things—like making tables, folders, and containers—and that just seemed so present in the work. That became the paradigm. I think his entry into art-making via the drawing that was part of his cartography and surveying work set the stage for him to use photography in a more tactile, painterly, material way.

Famighetti: Ghirri was also a prolific author of concise reflections on photography, and he wrote about how he didn’t take pictures, or compose pictures, but rather saw himself as creating things from images—your building angle seems to naturally emerge from his thinking.

Connors: Yes, and there was a nervousness that the title—The Idea of Building—would read as if the show was about architecture. (I had just seen a show that was all about his photographs connected to architecture.) But I did use a few photos he took of Aldo Rossi’s studio, and there are a few others included that are focused on architectural frameworks. He would go back and then make photographs based on his surveying work. Architecture is embedded in how he sees.

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15 Question Interview with Tomas Phillips

 

Words On Music · TOMAS PHILLIPS + MARIHIKO HARA - Prosa

 

From 15 Questions, an interview with sound composer, novelist, etc.:

How do you feel your sense of identity influences your creativity?

My sense of identity has certainly changed over the years. There was a time when identity and the creative act were inextricable in my case. Even as I embraced a minimalist sensibility that ostensibly influenced my sense of self, I took great pleasure in identifying with the role of specialized artist.

For the most part, I’ve been able to distance myself from this perspective and now reserve pleasure for the creative act alone. The latter is always better, more profound, innovative, enriching, when stripped of the personality that would grasp at self-expression and recognition, in my experience.  
 
What were your main creative challenges in the beginning and how have they changed over time?

This really takes me back to the earlier question regarding imitation. The central challenge was alleviating that impulse. On the other hand, it’s useful to have a notion that what you’re doing will go somewhere, find some kind of audience, no matter how small or large, to feel oneself part of a community. That took time, particularly given that what I was doing tended to be quite marginal, which is still generally the case.

Having come from an early 80s punk scene, of course, went a great distance in affirming the value of community and transgressive artistic practices.

How do you see the relationship between style, form, plot and storytelling – and how would you rate their importance for you, respectively?

The first two of these are inevitable, one way or another, while the latter two are common but inessential. Even when I’m working with relatively conventional literary devices or meolodies, form is always at the forefront of my process.

What I find most exciting about writing or composing along the lines of convention is, first, learning how to do that, and then subverting it enough to make it interesting. Telling a story the plot of which is more accessible than the work of the nouveau roman writers, for example, is difficult, though the difficulty lies not simply in reporting events but in marrying clarity and ingenuity. Moreover, I’m usually prone to some level of artistic provocation, form being a perfect medium for that in light of how attached many people are to convention in this regard.

Observation and research are often quoted as important elements of the writing process. Can you tell us a bit about your perspective on them?

It really depends on the project. I’ve done a great deal of research about places, customs, classical composers, historical moments, to help inform certain narrative events. Because I’m an academic, it’s a familiar, mostly enjoyable process. As for observation, I jot things down on occasion, when something strikes me as especially amusing, remarkable, or disturbing. They’re both necessary in the right context.

How do you see the relationship between conscious planning and tapping into the subconscious; between improvisation and composition? When dealing with the end of a story, for example, do you tend to minutely map it out or follow the logic of the narrative as it unfolds itself?

It’s the same between music and writing for me: there’s always a balance there. For a novel, I make notes but never too far in advance of where I am in the writing. Certainly ideas will occur as to a conclusion or other key events, and those are recorded, though I write better, more fluidly, when I’m allowing it to happen, as opposed to imposing too rigid a frame.

Teaching is identical to this, at least when leading a seminar. It’s critical to let other voices enter, work off and through them. With writing, those voices may be your own, but they’re true to the immediate operation rather than a fixed idea or mode.