Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Dubuffet’s ‘Welcome Parade’ on Park Ave.

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I was drifting down Park Avenue last night on my way to hear a talk on Buckminster Fuller by Jonathon Keats, when I came across Jean Dubuffet’s huge “Welcome Parade” of “pathetic monsters.” Both the piece and the placement — the sheer incongruity on that stretch of Manhattan pavement — made me smile. But whatever […]

Remembered Depths

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Ian Kershaw writes in a review of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, a newly published book by Nikolaus Wachsmann: Is it possible to say anything new about Nazi Germany? This is, after all, probably the most thoroughly researched period in modern history. … [C]an a major work that alters our perceptions and […]

A Music Theater Work in Progress

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Truth, or at least the effort to capture it, can be problematic. William Osborne and Abbie Conant have been working for several years on “Aletheia,” a music theater chamber piece for performance artist and digital piano. It feels like “forever,” he says. “The deeper we go the slower it reveals itself.” The ambition of the […]

Boris Lurie’s ‘NO!art’ Mounted in Berlin

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NO COMPROMISES! | The Art of Boris Lurie at the Jewish Museum Berlin looks like a major, absolutely must-see show. But the title reminds me of a huge compromise at the heart of it. Lurie, a Holocaust survivor, lived in New York like a pauper. But when he died he left about $80 million. He’d […]

MoMA’s Hidden ‘Electro-Library’ Show

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It’s only a couple of vitrines, and they seem like overflow storage — as though they’ve been placed out of the way in the downstairs mezzanine of the Museum of Modern Art’s education building on 54th Street. But the slide show for THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY: European Avant-Garde Magazines from the 1920s is magnificent. In visual richness, […]

Diderot Had the Right Idea

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“…neither the white silences / of Beckett, nor the black … / Grace & good nature / like a transparent forest / rooted in facts, / thoughts like crickets / in dry August grass. / Not to climb the ladder, / not to cling or sneer, but / to be invisible. / Though poor and […]

Who Are the World’s Most Famous People?

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You’d be surprised. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the world’s best-known American, followed by — are you ready? — Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, and Ben Franklin. Those are the top five. How do I know this? And on what basis? I checked Pantheon 1.0 at the MIT Media Lab, which did the elaborate […]

Le Vent Macabre

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Note to Henri Lefebvre: A long-track F2 tornado on Sept. 16, 2015, destroyed the home of two of my friends. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Mc Neill & Burroughs: Art Meets Occult

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Hieronymous Bosch has nothing on Malcolm Mc Neill. And that’s not even counting the underlying theories Mc Neill has about time travel, biological mutation, and evolutionary transition that he and William Burroughs worked on together in Ah Pook Is Here, a failed word-and-image collaboration that led nearly 40 years later to Mc Neill’s memoir Observed […]

MoMA to Mount Tzara’s Magnum Opus

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Samy Rosenstock’s idea for a great big book is getting a great big show nearly 100 years later. Dadaglobe Reconstructed reunites over 100 works created for Dadaglobe, Tristan Tzara’s planned but unrealized magnum opus, originally slated for publication in 1921. An ambitious anthology that aimed to document Dada’s international activities, Dadaglobe was not merely a […]

Where Have You Gone, Jackie Robinson?

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Pianist Kathleen Supové is to perform “Achilles Dreams Of Ebbets Field” by Dylan Mattingly in a world premiere at the Di Menna Center for Classical Music in New York. The Brooklyn Dodgers will be there in memory only. A massive, visionary piece in 24 parts, the solo piano work deals with heroism, passion, loss, grief, […]

Pélieu Show, With Norman Mailer Cocktail

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Feeding Tube Records offered some swag at its exhibition of Claude Pélieu’s Bosch-derived collages. “We made buttons as giveaways,” Byron Coley says, “and we featured a urine-colored cocktail called Norman Mailer’s Pocket.” You can be sure that Pélieu is somewhere in Bosch heaven enjoying the joke. The little yellow buttons said, “je pisse dans la […]

Meeting the Hangman

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By Heathcote Williams I used to speak out against capital punishment From a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner. This was when it was thought that hanging people Was helpful in maintaining order. One day someone called Barry Trenoweth came over. His father, Gordon, had been hanged for murder. He’d killed a shopkeeper in Falmouth during the […]

Books That Truly Were Something Else

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My staff of thousands informs me that “The Something Else Press Collection” just went on the market. Although some of the books are rarer than others, it’s the collection as a whole that’s notable. Early titles included Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, Dick Higgins’ collection of performance scores and art polemics; correspondence art pioneer Ray Johnson’s […]

Headstone With Michaux Text Superimposed

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This drawing is from a series of ‘Headstones’ by Gerard Bellaart. “buries everything outside of himself everything he has known up to now everything that surrounds him with scorn” — Henri Michaux And here is the artist Arman’s actual headstone ‘Alone at Last’ in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. The irony of course is […]

Horrorscope

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Mary Beach could draw horoscope charts in great detail. It was a serious hobby of hers. She only did them for people she knew, and if they piqued her interest. I completely forgot she had done mine — it was so long ago, circa 1967. An old friend reminded me the other day of what […]

The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries

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Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]

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