Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, December 11, 2021

December 13, 2021 Issue

I love artful description. There’s a wonderful example of it in Alex Ross’s “Grinding Bass,” in this week’s issue. Reviewing Ash Fure and Lilleth Glimcher’s performance installation “Hive Rise,” at the Geffen Contemporary, in Los Angeles, he writes, 

There are no steady beats, though various kinds of periodicity come into play, including a rat-a-tat flapping noise that Fure elicits by holding a piece of paper over an upturned subwoofer. The music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse.

Overlaid on the sonic foundation is a theatrical ritual conceived by Glimcher, an interdisciplinary artist and director who has worked in New York, Berlin, and elsewhere. At the Geffen Contemporary, Fure was stationed at one end of the gallery, amid an array of subwoofers. A squad of fourteen black-clad performers circulated through the crowd, vocalizing into bespoke megaphones that had been generated on a 3-D printer. When members of the group were close by, even their slightest whispers had a tactile immediacy, as if they were coming from inside your head. Full-throated cries bounced around the space with thunderous force.

The performers followed an unpredictable, jagged choreography. Sometimes they stood in place, in statuesque clusters; for a while, they were positioned around Fure, on risers. At other times, they whipped their bodies back and forth or moved swiftly from one place to another. The spectators milled about in pursuit of the squad, maneuvering around neoprene sculptural forms that were devised by Xavi Aguirre and stock-a-studio. We had our own choreography—that pandemic-era dance of avoidance we have perfected in crowded supermarket aisles. The mood was one of bliss and angst intermingled.

Bravo! That’s one of the great descriptive passages of the year.

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