Narrate or describe? I say describe. I relish description,
particularly art description, e.g., Peter Schjeldahl’s superb rendering of
Nicole Eisenman’s Under the Table 2
(2014), in this week’s issue:
Jumbled heads share a bottle, which a single hand lifts and
pours out, under a table that is topped with a stuffed olive, a cigarette
emitting an arabesque of smoke, and a huge salami, its sliced end textured with
psychedelic dots of color. ["Seriously Funny"]
From my collection of Schjeldahl art descriptions, here are
three of my all-time favorites:
1. Agnes Martin’s The
Sea (2003) – “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines
cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black
paint.” ["Life Work," June 7, 2004]
2. Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Vertical-Horizontal
Composition (1916) – “Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue,
gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly
dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the
tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture.” ["Shapes of Things," January 7,
2013]
3. Laura Owens’s Untitled
(2013) – “Gestural glyphs and splotches in white, black, green, and orange on a
ground imprinted with a blown-up page of newspaper want ads.” ["Take Your Time," January 5, 2015]
Postscript: Another description in this week’s issue that I
enjoyed immensely is Colin Stokes’s depiction of a bartender: “One wore a
single black latex glove and smashed a large ice cube with a wand-like spoon to
make the gin-based Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and triple sec, from a
recipe he’d ‘found in a book not too long ago’ ” ("Bar Tab: The Ship"). What’s the key to great description? I think Schjeldahl nails it in "Seriously Funny": specificity.
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