Transient Anthologies
Jun. 30th, 2012 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joculumTransient Anthologies, or, Editing as an Exercise in Daily Juxtapositions
Wading (almost literally) through seven years’ accumulation of Really Good Stuff in an apartment cleaning, I am depressed at the realization of how much a print-medium arts section editor’s greatest triumphs are the stuff of a single day, or a single week if the editor is lucky enough to have a readership that doesn’t recycle its newspapers until the next Sunday. (Web page arrangements shift even more frequently, but let’s stick with this example from print.)
The December 2, 2007 New York Times Arts & Leisure was a singular triumph in this department. Holland Cotter on Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot in flood-ravaged New Orleans raised the question of how public art alters perception of urban spaces (the productions, staged outdoors from Gentilly to the Lower Ninth Ward, attracted local audiences of thousands), but also how artstars from the outside might leave a lasting impact on a city, rather than preening and performing and then leaving with another item on their resumé. Jori Finkel on Jorge Pardo’s house-as-artwork in Los Angeles and how his retrospective at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art addressed his way of using furniture and architecture alike to turn our daily navigation of public space and private living space into the experience of art: “He says he is especially interested in the way we ‘absorb’ the visual spectacle around us. His house on Sea View Lane has deliberately clumsy passages to slow you down, including a staircase set in an unlikely place.”
Two stories that, taken together, sum up a whole dialogue in contemporary art. “’The issues I’m interested in have more to do with pictorial, spatial, perceptual traditions,’ Mr. Pardo said. ‘I’m talking about aesthetics, not a cool toaster.’ …‘A lot of people want to take pictures of themselves in front of [Pardo’s spectacular sculptural array of 96 butterfly lamps installed in Miami’s Aventura Mall]. In that sense it’s really cool, because it works like a traditional monument.’”
The dialogue about art and audience spilled over into the front page stories on “The Classless Utopia of Reality TV” (by Alessandra Stanley) and Charles McGrath’s story on the film version of Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass. The inside-page stories reprising the excessive naming of every corner of a new arts center after individual sponsors (including the stairwells and coat rooms), plus “a visit to the producer Danger Mouse’s studio of the moment” and more, intertwined a whole set of major conceptual issues so adroitly as to leave me gasping with admiration. Anybody who had an hour to spare on that particular Sunday in early December 2007 would have gained a quick education in the major talking points about how we navigate through the world by a combination of taking things for granted and not paying attention to things we should be noticing—a longstanding theme in neurological research as well as art—and how shifting trends in society and culture reflect this combination of attention and inattention. This is so whether the things not being noticed are the distribution of prestige and power, or the maintenance of the social order by means that we may not think about until we encounter them in a different context—Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward or the alternate universe of The Golden Compass in the movie theatre—or the distribution of physical space through which we literally navigate on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, since December 2, 2007 would have been the second day of a weekend in which every niche-market entity in the cities to which the national edition of the New York Times is distributed would normally hold a one-weekend-only holiday sale, most people probably did what I apparently did on that day, and tossed the whole newspaper section to one side, thinking, “I’ll read that when things slow down a little.”
It occurs to me also that the name(s?) of the editor(s?) of the Arts & Leisure section is a piece of information that the NYT assumes does not interest its readers (there is no editorial byline on the section itself), so whoever is responsible for this brilliant juxtaposition of essays remains effectively anonymous.
Of course, as with my juxtapositions of intermittently educational art reviews in twenty years’ worth of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. the transience and effective anonymity means that the worst failures will be lost along with the best successes. But I’m saddened that the successes are so foredoomed to oblivion—this is one advantage of online publishing, where quite often the archives of the actual webpages are readily accessible until such time as the website itself is taken down. You can find all the December 2 stories in the online NYT archives, but not in their original physical arrangement. And as I wrote in the beginning, this is also the disadvantage—the success of the original juxtaposition vanishes even more quickly, even if the raw data that was turned into a transient collage remains for as long as the nytimes.com website survives.
Wading (almost literally) through seven years’ accumulation of Really Good Stuff in an apartment cleaning, I am depressed at the realization of how much a print-medium arts section editor’s greatest triumphs are the stuff of a single day, or a single week if the editor is lucky enough to have a readership that doesn’t recycle its newspapers until the next Sunday. (Web page arrangements shift even more frequently, but let’s stick with this example from print.)
The December 2, 2007 New York Times Arts & Leisure was a singular triumph in this department. Holland Cotter on Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot in flood-ravaged New Orleans raised the question of how public art alters perception of urban spaces (the productions, staged outdoors from Gentilly to the Lower Ninth Ward, attracted local audiences of thousands), but also how artstars from the outside might leave a lasting impact on a city, rather than preening and performing and then leaving with another item on their resumé. Jori Finkel on Jorge Pardo’s house-as-artwork in Los Angeles and how his retrospective at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art addressed his way of using furniture and architecture alike to turn our daily navigation of public space and private living space into the experience of art: “He says he is especially interested in the way we ‘absorb’ the visual spectacle around us. His house on Sea View Lane has deliberately clumsy passages to slow you down, including a staircase set in an unlikely place.”
Two stories that, taken together, sum up a whole dialogue in contemporary art. “’The issues I’m interested in have more to do with pictorial, spatial, perceptual traditions,’ Mr. Pardo said. ‘I’m talking about aesthetics, not a cool toaster.’ …‘A lot of people want to take pictures of themselves in front of [Pardo’s spectacular sculptural array of 96 butterfly lamps installed in Miami’s Aventura Mall]. In that sense it’s really cool, because it works like a traditional monument.’”
The dialogue about art and audience spilled over into the front page stories on “The Classless Utopia of Reality TV” (by Alessandra Stanley) and Charles McGrath’s story on the film version of Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass. The inside-page stories reprising the excessive naming of every corner of a new arts center after individual sponsors (including the stairwells and coat rooms), plus “a visit to the producer Danger Mouse’s studio of the moment” and more, intertwined a whole set of major conceptual issues so adroitly as to leave me gasping with admiration. Anybody who had an hour to spare on that particular Sunday in early December 2007 would have gained a quick education in the major talking points about how we navigate through the world by a combination of taking things for granted and not paying attention to things we should be noticing—a longstanding theme in neurological research as well as art—and how shifting trends in society and culture reflect this combination of attention and inattention. This is so whether the things not being noticed are the distribution of prestige and power, or the maintenance of the social order by means that we may not think about until we encounter them in a different context—Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward or the alternate universe of The Golden Compass in the movie theatre—or the distribution of physical space through which we literally navigate on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, since December 2, 2007 would have been the second day of a weekend in which every niche-market entity in the cities to which the national edition of the New York Times is distributed would normally hold a one-weekend-only holiday sale, most people probably did what I apparently did on that day, and tossed the whole newspaper section to one side, thinking, “I’ll read that when things slow down a little.”
It occurs to me also that the name(s?) of the editor(s?) of the Arts & Leisure section is a piece of information that the NYT assumes does not interest its readers (there is no editorial byline on the section itself), so whoever is responsible for this brilliant juxtaposition of essays remains effectively anonymous.
Of course, as with my juxtapositions of intermittently educational art reviews in twenty years’ worth of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. the transience and effective anonymity means that the worst failures will be lost along with the best successes. But I’m saddened that the successes are so foredoomed to oblivion—this is one advantage of online publishing, where quite often the archives of the actual webpages are readily accessible until such time as the website itself is taken down. You can find all the December 2 stories in the online NYT archives, but not in their original physical arrangement. And as I wrote in the beginning, this is also the disadvantage—the success of the original juxtaposition vanishes even more quickly, even if the raw data that was turned into a transient collage remains for as long as the nytimes.com website survives.
