April 4, 2011 Issue

There’s a terrific GOAT blurb in this week’s issue about Karen Kilimnik’s show at 303 Gallery. It’s so good – where goodness means rich, surprising, delicious, nearly abstract - I’m going to quote it in full:

Like no one except Cady Noland – but with sweetness, rather than menace – Kilimnik decisively altered installational art two decades ago, imbuing it with an emotive, storytelling force. Here an early “scatter” piece, “The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers” (1989), is reprised, along with never before seen drawings from the eighties, recent paintings, and some new painting-like photographs (a full moon tangled in branches of nocturnal trees). Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium. Everything about it is shabby and surprises. The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance.

"The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance" – how fine that is! I wonder who wrote it? My guess is Andrea K. Scott, who writes GOAT’s “Critic’s Notebook” on art. But that “Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium” is very Schjeldahlesque. The way the verb “elevate” is buried in the middle of the sentence is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. For example, in a piece on Agnes Martin, Schjeldahl writes, “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint” (“Life Work,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). So … I think the “Kilimnik” blurb could’ve been written by Schjeldahl. It’s such a delectable piece that it intensified my appreciation of several other GOAT items this week, e.g., the “Joan Mitchell,” which features yet another of those gorgeous “buried verb” sentences - “Counterpoints of piled-up paint and blank surface convey that more is more and that less is heaven.” Now, that just has to be by Schjeldahl, doesn’t it? Either that or his piquant style is rubbing off on GOAT’s writers.

If you’re like me and you enjoy “catalog” sentences – exuberant compendiums of detail that bespeak love of life – you’ll like GOAT’s “Paul Ramirez Jonas” note, which describes the base of an equestrian statue that “doubles as a four-sided bulletin board.” On this board are pinned, “notes, business cards, ticket stubs, money, a dry-cleaning receipt, children’s art, a paper mobile, work-for-hire notices, and the inevitable ephemera of New York: a ‘no menus’ sign and a ‘Dan Smith will teach you guitar’ flyer.” Did I mention that I love lists like this? I devour them. John Updike, in his wonderful essay on Thoreau (in Updike’s 2007 collection Due Considerations), says, “It is the thinginess of Thoreau’s prose that excites us.” It’s the same for me regarding these great GOAT pieces: it’s the thinginess that excites me.

And the excitement continues, because there are at least two more dandy lists in this week’s GOAT: Mike Peed’s inspired “Tables For Two” description of Edi & The Wolf’s interior (“The inside holds what appears to be the hoard of an exuberant and undiscerning band of freegans: old wooden chairs affixed to the walls at curious angles, worn leather boots filled with dead flowers, a forty-foot rope salvaged from a Bed-Stuy belfry strung like crepe paper above the bar”); and a glorious passage in Richard Brody’s mini-review of Yasujiro Ozu’s wonderfully titled 1933 silent film Dragnet Girl – “His gleeful compositions put objects obsessively front and center – a drum kit, a set of dice, a row of Martini glasses, a billiard cue that pokes right at the camera – and presage the deep-focus symphonies of Orson Welles and even the vertiginous enticements of 3-D.” Great writing! I lap it up.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Steve Coll’s “The Casbah Coalition” and David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold.” They're both excellent – destined to be classics. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “A Murder Foretold” made into a movie. It’s absolutely gripping.