The New Yorker & Me: May 24, 2021 Issue

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.

Monday, May 31, 2021

May 24, 2021 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his terrific “A Trip to the Fair,” in this week’s issue, says of Sigmar Polke’s Untitled (1990):

He created this work in the dark with slathered silver nitrate, silver oxide, silver iodide, and silver bromide. Exposed to light, the strokes resolved into a filmy gestural cadenza: quietly ferocious, if such is imaginable, like superimposed eddies in a whipping windstorm.

Polke is one of Schjeldahl’s touchstones. He’s the subject of at least six Schjeldahl pieces: (1) “The Daemon and Sigmar Polke” (included in Schjeldahl’s 1991 collection The Hydrogen Jukebox, with a detail from Polke’s Hallucinogen on the front cover); (2) “Sigmar Polke” (in Schjeldahl’s 2019 collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light); (3) “The Trashmaster” (The New Yorker, December 7, 1998; in Schjeldahl’s 2008 collection Let’s See); (4) “Many-Colored Glass” (The New Yorker, May 12, 2008); (5) “Lens Crafter” (The New Yorker, June 1, 2009); and (6) “Shock Artist” (The New Yorker, April 28, 2014).

Of these, I think the best is “The Trashmaster,” in which Schjeldahl says that Polke “attacked painting as if he meant to trash it.” The piece contains this delightful description of a series of Polke abstracts:

When Polke’s resinous medium is applied thinly, it turns its polyester ground transparent, like greasy paper. Marks may show through from the back, and shadows of marks may be visible on the wall. Some fabrics are iridescent. Many look webbed with chicken wire – actually, gold string mesh. Vaporous beauty dances, in a viewer’s eye, with tawdry glitz.

That last sentence is inspired. Polke’s art is so eccentric and original that it seems to defy description. But Schjeldahl, superb word painter that he is, rises to the challenge, creating exquisite, singular lines of his own.