October 13, 2023 Arts & Culture Ask Me About God: On Ye West By Harmony Holiday Screenshots from “Donda Studio Session for Hurricane (2021).” After a nearly scandal-less summer of 2023, in the caustic August light, Ye West was spotted on a small boat in Venice, Italy, with his ass half out. His new wife had been giving him a blowjob in public. There were other patrons on the boat—it might have been a water taxi helping them from one place to the next. The couple appeared to be performatively oblivious to their surroundings. The boat became their black backstage, a transparent curtain between performance and private life, and it put me in the mind of Ye’s 2021 live performances leading up to the release of his tenth studio album, Donda. For at least one week, he lived beneath the Atlanta stadium where he was hosting the first two public listening parties to debut the album, which was still unfinished. The third performance, in Chicago, Ye’s hometown, also featured the installation of a replica of his childhood home, which he set on fire on stage, leveraging his Promethean dream against the serenity of fantasy. The album itself is not just an elegy for his mother, his martyr; it’s also one for him. He enacts his ego death by it, asks for forgiveness in advance, and retreats, “Off the Grid.” He’s ready to exercise his right to disappear into the next myth even as the old myth is not quite finished with him, not yet obsolete. In the Chicago version of this live listening show, he remarries Kim Kardashian and they walk offstage while the make-believe house keeps burning. Everything, even his family, is a prop on this set. This myth will not stop burning. And while Donda seems to genuflect and repent the loss of the maternal figure, the loss of the womb itself, the lack of access to that primal source of solace, there’s one line on the album that stands out to me as its deeper vendetta: “a single black woman you know that she petty.” Here, he denigrates the same power he uplifts. This is the same mother he laments; he’s hashing out lingering resentments. He’s just unsentimental enough to make a masterpiece that vacillates between grief and backlash. My favorite music begins and ends with this tortured erotic ambivalence; the most effective art is greedy about it, righteous and wicked at the same time, humble and opulent, minimal and spectacular, optimistic and despairing, unrepentant and begging for mercy. Read More
August 8, 2023 Studio Visit The Paris Review Print Series: Shara Hughes By The Paris Review Shara Hughes, The Paris Review, 2023, etching with aquatint, spit bit, soft ground, and drypoint on Hannemühle Copperplate bright white paper, plate size 18 x 14″, paper size 27 x 22″. Made in collaboration with Burnet Editions. Photograph courtesy of Jean Vong, © Shara Hughes and Burnet Editions. Earlier this year, The Paris Review released a new print made by Shara Hughes. Hughes, who was born in Atlanta in 1981 and works in Brooklyn, New York, describes her lush, chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees, and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as invented landscapes. The one she invented for the Review is striking in its rich color and vibrant dreaminess. We spoke to Hughes about her work this summer, touching on poisonous flowers, her unusual color palette, and landscape paintings. Read More
July 5, 2023 Arts & Culture On Mexican Baroque By Chloe Aridjis Carlos Adampol Galindo, Arena México por Carlos Adampol, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Each time I return to Mexico I find myself marveling at how many elements of daily life there could, in some way, be described as Baroque: our sunsets, our cuisine, our pollution, our corruption. Century after century, the country has exhibited a great tendency towards exuberance, and a natural bent for the strange and the marvelous. There’s a constant play between veiling and unveiling (even in our newscasts, one senses indirect meaning in everything), as well as a fluidity of form, in which excess triumphs, every time, over restraint. Three hundred years of colonial rule produced an intense syncretism of indigenous and European cultures, a bold new aesthetic accompanied by many new paradoxes, and these can be glimpsed today in both lighter and darker manifestations, some playful and others barbaric. Read More
January 31, 2023 Arts & Culture All Water Has a Perfect Memory By Jordan Amirkhani I have seen the Mississippi. That is muddy water. I have seen the Saint Lawrence. That is crystal water. But the Thames is liquid history. —John Burns, quoted in the Daily Mail, January 25, 1943 In the upper left quadrant of Minnesota, a small winding brook and its bubbling waters form the beginnings of a journey from north to south, catching streams and tributaries along its track through the heart of North America toward the Gulf of Mexico. The name given to this massive system made of more than 100,000 waterways is the Mississippi River, a riparian sweep with a drainage basin touching approximately 1.2 million square miles, or 40 percent of the continental United States. With sand and silt ever flowing toward the river’s mouth, a wild wetland of marshes, swamps, and bayous reigns, turning solid land into sponge in the vast network of alluvial floodplains known as the Mississippi Delta. Just under one hundred miles from the Mississippi’s mouth, the river takes a sudden turn southward, snaking east and then north in a final return to its southeasterly course. In this crescent-shaped curvature between river, lake, and gulf lies New Orleans, named after Philippe I, duc d’Orléans by the French Canadian naval officer and colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. In his correspondence with Philippe, Bienville described this magnificent system of watercourses as “filled with a mud as deep as its oceanbed” yet “unmistakably Divine” for its navigational and commercial potential. Through royal decree, Bienville was granted two parcels of land for the establishment of a “new France in this riverside”—land financed by France’s first colonial trading corporation, the Mississippi Company, and cleared and worked by the first enslaved Africans in Louisiana. Read More
January 9, 2023 Arts & Culture A Room with History By Saidiya Hartman Door in shadow. Licensed under CCO 2.0. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. —Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return What is the matter of history through which Dionne Brand offers a guide? This history that arrives in the room with us is not the captor’s history, even as it is a history of captivity. It is not history as the project and handmaiden of Europe, or the plots and stories that create the fatal divide, the caesura between the West and the rest of us, or the self-aggrandizing romance of a nation, or even a narrative with fixed coordinates and a certain arc, no once-upon-a-time, no myths of origin or claims of autochthony. A Map to the Door of No Return is a philosophical meditation on the world created by the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492 and of the Portuguese on the West African coast in the fifteenth century, inaugurating one of the largest forced migrations in history, described euphemistically as “the trade in slaves.” The book is a hybrid of poetry, memoir, theory, and history, and its recursive and nonlinear structure formally enacts the open question of the door and its duration: “nothing is ever over.” As Brand writes, there is no way in, no return, “no ancestry except the black water and the Door of no Return.” The door is less a place than a threshold of the brutal history of capitalist modernity. The door is the end of traceable beginnings and provides a figure for describing the psychic and affective dimensions of black existence in the diaspora. Read More
December 19, 2022 Studio Visit LSD Snowfall: An Interview with Uman By Camille Jacobson Uman, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, 2016–2020 (detail). The Paris Review‘s Winter issue cover, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, by the artist Uman, looks from different angles like a field of floating Christmas lights, a confetti drop on New Year’s Eve, and a winter storm touched with a kind of bright magic. Uman worked on it over a period of four years, dabbing bright color on the canvas until, as they told me in our conversation, it felt a bit like “the mothership.” Born in Somalia in 1980, they grew up in Kenya and moved to Denmark in their teens. In 2004, they came to New York, where they continued to work in collage, painting, and sculpture before moving upstate. They are largely self-taught, and their signature style is bright, geometric, and vivid. We talked about their economical attitude toward paint, the process of making Snowfall, and their sheep. INTERVIEWER Have you always thought of yourself as an artist? UMAN I certainly drew as a kid. The earliest drawings I remember doing were on my actual schoolbooks. At school I ended up drawing on desks and lots of walls, sort of like tagging things—always female figures. I wanted to study fashion. In Kenya our TV channels were limited, but we had CNN, and on Saturdays I would watch Style with Elsa Klensch. I just remember being fascinated by fashion—drawing things, making things out of my imagination. And it felt really good. At one point, my parents were called to my school to pay for the damages I’d caused. I realized then that drawing wasn’t something I should be doing, so I became more secretive about my creativity. Read More