Best of 2019: GOAT

Jessica Pettway's photo for Shauna Lyon's "Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl's “Art: T. C. Cannon,” September 9, 2019 ("One of his last paintings, 'Two Guns Arikara' (1978), blazes with special promise: a stern man wearing a mixture of traditional and contemporary garb sits holding a pair of long-barrelled pistols. The picture’s uniformly intense hues—purple, red-orange, burnt orange, lilac, terre verte, sienna, cerulean, golden yellow, violet, black, and white—generate a visual cadenza, violently serene").

2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).

3. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”). 

4. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).

5. Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).

6. Briana Younger’s “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching ‘Adventure Time,’ shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).

7. Michaelangelo Matos’ “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).

8. Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: The Fulton,” July 29, 2019 (“Two words: chocolate mousse. The tiny tower of decadence, so elaborately layered with peanut caramel, chocolate crunch, passion-fruit sorbet, and vanilla ice cream that it appears almost indecent, represents the restaurant in a few ostentatiously luscious bites: a routine dessert spruced up into something needlessly sumptuous, but also unimpeachably satisfying”).

9. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: Aki Sasamoto,” April 22, 2019 (“Blown-glass tumblers the color of whiskey spin on a trio of round barroom tables, powered by gusts of air from H.V.A.C. tubes, whose nozzles suggest empty bottles of booze. The mood matches the circular logic of an alcohol-addled mind. Screening in another room is video of the artist performing a cryptic ritual; it was commissioned by Triple Canopy, a vital downtown nonprofit as uncategorizable as Sasamoto’s art. The enticing setup: a forest, a doughnut, an ant”).

10. Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” September 16, 2019 [“For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy”].