I stumbled upon a talk that Sarah Charlesworth delivered in 2010. The video was uploaded by the Guggenheim Museum as part of its Conversations with Contemporary Artists series archive on YouTube.
Highlights include Charlesworth’s opening manifesto on photography as art, as well as her brief insights on some of her work. She talks about “Stills” at the 15:14 mark, describing it as an exploration of the narrative capacity of photography. The whole series, she says, asks this: What is our relationship to events via news and newspaper imagery?
That nugget recalls Charlesworth’s statement about how she came to understand art as a concept and practice:
“Art for me was defined not by the medium it employed but by the questions that it asked.”
It’s a perfect encapsulation of Charlesworth’s own work, which she built around photography precisely because she saw photographs as “central to the questions of [her] time.” For her, photography is “the dominant language of contemporary culture” — and as befitting somebody linked to a group inspired by the French deconstructionists, she turned that language in on itself in a reflexive interrogation.
I can’t help but connect Charlesworth’s talk to a Harvard PolicyCast episode I listened to recently. In it, scholar Claire Wardle and journalist Hossein Derakhshan discuss the information disorder plaguing the world. About halfway through the episode, Derakhshan talks about recognizing the extra-communicative aspects of disinformation. He mentions two approaches.
First, there’s linguist George Lakoff’s notion that emotion is fundamental to language, and how that idea leads, in turn, to the notion that language influences how we think (the famous Metaphors We Live By, among other works). Second, there’s the communication studies scholar James Carey’s idea of communication as a concept that goes beyond “mere transmission of messages” and denotes, instead, the process of constructing a shared symbolic reality.
What’s interesting is that Wardle and Derakhshan later single out images (specifically, memes) as “the most powerful vehicles for disinformation.” Images, Wardle argues, work outside the established grammar of news; cognitively, we’re not conditioned to parse them with the same scrutiny.
Popular disinformation techniques, in turn, hinge on abusing that cognitive “exemption.” Images are crafted to arrogate to themselves the dense extra-communicative associations we’ve formed with the particular language of legitimate news — but they bend all that towards, well, unsavory agenda. All this means we can understand today’s disinformation better, Wardle and Derakhshan claim, by evaluating visuals as another language, and by viewing language as more than just information exchange.
That brings me back to Charlesworth and how she works with photography. Her approach carries much of the Lakoff-and-Carey-inflected perspective that Wardle and Derakhshan are advocating. Charlesworth’s interrogation of imagery and representation is driven by an understanding of images’ ability to convey (if not cement) beliefs and shape viewpoints. There’s a whole galaxy of meaning swirling around a photo, its creation, its viewing. As Charlesworth states in her talk, photography isn’t mere documentation.
“All art is political,” blah, blah. Sure, it’s probably nothing we haven’t heard before. But it’s always fascinating to consider why an artwork’s particular politics strike a chord when they do, you know?
#12: A celebrity memoir – Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher gives readers a glimpse at the woman behind the famous Princess Leia. She mentions several times that the book takes, in part, from her show of the same name, and the writing proves it: Fisher takes a conversational — sometimes bordering on sloppy, but always clever — tone as she charts her colorful life, from her unusual (and occasionally tumultuous) childhood to her struggles with bipolar disorder and substance addiction.
The book is a breezy, scattershot read. Fisher jumps from vignette to vignette, sometimes with only the barest of narrative themes to facilitate the transition. There are lots of asides, too, but they don’t weigh down the writing; in fact, they buoy it, injecting sharp humor into a collection of otherwise bizarre and/or grotesque anecdotes. (I love the absurdity of her stories about Cary Grant as earnest LSD interventionist.)
If Wishful Drinking has an overarching theme, it’s Fisher’s fierce and gamely self-deprecating sense of humor in the face of difficulty; if there’s an emotional throughline that pulls it all together, it’s the deep love and rich relationships binding Fisher and her loved ones, especially her mother Debbie and her daughter Billie. The memoirs of people who grow up privileged often run the risk of descending into the entitled, affected whining that gets hashtagged #firstworldproblems. On the other hand, the outsized, alienating, and often-grotesque nature of a life lived under perpetual spotlights resists any approach that isn’t soaked in angst and anger. Fisher sketches out a life that is ostensibly both, but she manages to avoid the expected pitfalls with warmth and a winning aplomb.
Unfortunately, part of that’s due to the breathless way Fisher chews through her stories. Each gets mashed with rapid-fire quips and washed down with a wry, sometimes-too-pat summation, and whatever emotional weight the story has barely gets time to sit before the next round comes. This is not to say that Fisher is insincere: she acknowledges the surreality of her life while nevertheless surfacing the humanity in it. But for all her candor, she doesn’t give readers much time to dig into the travails she so airily mentions or the people who serve as constants in her whirlwind of a life.
I’m inclined to view this gloss as deliberate. Wishful Drinking carries the voice of a woman who’s gone through too much shit to let herself — and her readers — harbor any more illusions about who she is. But maybe that’s an illusion in itself: Fisher lays out her life behind a glass pane, though she pounds on that glass with a forcefulness that almost makes you forget it’s there. Considering how much detail she does give about the weird shapes that fame has given her life, that’s understandable and not at all surprising.
The portrait Fisher paints of herself here, in her supposed attempt to rebuild following ECT-induced memory loss, likely hews closer to reality than the likeness that pop culture will remember. What’s funny is that the further Fisher seems to get from the Princess Leia image, the more the similarities stand out: the strength, the resilience, the refusal to be ground down. But as Fisher points out, Princess Leia (and all the glitz of that role and Fisher’s own pedigree) is hardly hers — in fact, is pretty much public property. Wishful Drinking reads like Fisher letting us know what is hers and refusing, with signature sass, to hand that over to us, too.
I decided to try and read more last year, and 2017 ended with a respectable 36 books tallied. Not bad for a year spent in the intellectual doldrums. (That isn’t drama, either; the worst and longest of my depressive episodes had me vegetating on the couch, staring blankly as episodes played on loop on the TV.) This year, I’m trying to sustain that momentum by signing up for another round of the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge.
Reading challenges abound at the start of every year, but I love Book Riot’s for its focus on diversity and reading outside comfort zones. The tasks cover good ground, and with the total at 24 (around 2 books a month), the list is challenging enough without feeling impossible.
Not that Book Riot sets hard “rules,” let alone gets draconian about them: the Read Harder challenge operates on personal accountability. Participants set their own pace; they can choose to have one book fulfill multiple tasks; they don’t suffer any punishment for falling behind, skipping a task, or not finishing the challenge. For neurotic perfectionists like me who break out into hives when given a rigid set of rules for compliance, that kind of flexibility is a blessing.
I’ll post updates on my progress as the year goes on. (The plan is to write reviews or impressions after finishing each book, but I reserve the right to ditch that for capsule updates if life gets in the way.) I’ve already got some titles in mind for a few tasks — in fact, I’m reading a Carrie Fisher book for the celebrity memoir task right now. (Of course, I started that first. SMH.)
If a fellow challenge participant happens to read this, I’d love to hear from you.
Here’s the complete task list for this year:
[UPDATED: 30 January 2019 with final list, not all entries of which got a review, capsule or otherwise. 14/24, or a little more than half.]
A romance novel by or about a person of color: Huntressby Malinda Lo – not necessarily a romance novel per se, but a love story does anchor the book’s emotional throughline; alternatively, Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend, I guess?
A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60
An assigned book you hated (or never finished): The Once and Future King by T.H. White – I never finished this in high school, at least not in a way that let me appreciate it. The reread fixed that.
I’ve been organizing my LA trip photos, more than half of which cover our LACMA visit. The expansive LACMA campus houses more art than my phone memory can hold, but I did snap my favorites from the impressive modern and contemporary art collections and the rotating exhibits. As it turns out, that means amassing shots of one exhibit in particular: Doubleworld.
Collecting work from the artist Sarah Charlesworth’s 40-year career, Doubleworld is a striking examination of photos and how they shape contemporary culture. Sounds especially relevant, right? But Charlesworth died in 2013, and the bulk of her work took place in the pre-digital era. That contextual disjunct struck me right away: with so much of the digital age justifiably described as “unprecedented,” I wasn’t expecting someone to address it so well, and before it had even come about.
To be clear, Charlesworth wasn’t exactly responding to our world of Snapchat and Instagram and endless-scrolling newsfeeds. As part of the New York-based group that came to be known as the Pictures Generation, Charlesworth instead spoke to the swirl of low-definition ads, in-color media, nuclear war anxieties, and gnawing disillusionment that marked ’70s-’80s America. (You can see how the group’s taken on new relevance.)
In The New York Times, Gary Indiana notes that Charlesworth and her peers created art informed by deconstruction, by an acute awareness of the contrived nature and fallibility of institutions and popular narratives. As a result, the Pictures Generation’s work brings a pointed, critical self-consciousness to bear on representation — its subjects, its methods, its reception.
Take the Stills collection, my favorite section from Doubleworld. First shown in 1980, the series comprises 14 photos of photos: images clipped from newspapers, all of people falling. Each blown to just over six feet tall, these rephotographed clippings carry a solemn, arresting power. Viewers don’t just browse; they plunge into the images themselves, and hover, suspended, in their consideration. There’s no scrolling — or in this case, strolling — past.
L-R: Unidentified Man, Otani Hotel, Los Angeles; Unidentified Woman (Vera Atwool, Trinity Towers, Louisville, KY); Jerry Hollins, Chicago Federal Courthouse, from the “Stills” series, 1980. Black & white mural print, 78 in x 42 in. The Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Photo taken at LACMA.
Charlesworth’s choice of subject contributes a lot to that effect. There’s the morbid pull of a moment snatched before final, devastating impact, sure. But beyond that, there’s the draw of knowing that these moments are slivers of a bigger process, a larger sequence of stories and events. Something set these falls in motion (an accident, a decision); moments after these snapshots, these people would not be the same. Charlesworth, by holding these transitional moments up for consideration, nudges the viewer to envision beyond the images in front of them — and reminds them of a photograph’s inherent incompleteness, or at least of that inescapable conflict between essence and fragment at any photograph’s heart.
A Vogue article on the exhibit quotes a 1980 Cover Magazine interview where Charlesworth had this to say about the series:
“One of the things that fascinated me was the tension inherent in the image, the contradiction between the desire for information that completes the ‘story’ and the experience of an incomplete moment. One knows there’s a human history which exists outside the image, and yet as photographs they are complete. They are static. They never fucking fall.”
Dar Robinson, Toronto, from the “Stills” series, 1980. Black & white mural print, 78 in x 42 in. The Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Photo taken at LACMA.
Stills’ presentation highlights this tension. Each image bears the name and location of its subjects, if available; it’s enough supplementary detail to pass for “completion.” But those details themselves imply whole landscapes of lives that the photograph doesn’t capture, and Charlesworth adds layers to that whispered limitation by retaining the cut-outs’ ragged edges and bringing out the grain of the source newspapers. These photos of photos themselves are lacking, giving us the image without its original context, inviting us to consider the blanks.
In an interview quoted by The New Yorker, Charlesworth says of her process:
“I think of myself as a robber. … I plunder and pillage on paper. … I possess these things and give them my own meaning.”
Quietly, Stills emphasizes the photo’s nature as bounded — limited — yet polysemous artifact and challenges the notion of photographs as indisputable manifestations of reality, of truth. Images are objects, open for plunder, pillage, and possession — not just by people like Charlesworth in the process of constructing work like Stills, but also by people who view these exhibits and engage in the process of extrapolating meaning from them.
Doubleworld, from the “Doubleworld” series, 1995. Cibachrome print with mahogany frame, 51 x 41 in (129.5 x 104.1 cm). Courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New York.
Doubleworld takes its name from a 1995 photo of two stereoscopic devices holding images of two women standing beside each other. For Charlesworth, photographs were an “alternate universe,” increasingly ubiquitous and constantly suspect. She tried to articulate that by making the constructed nature of photos obvious (if not literal) through techniques like collage and re-appropriation, but the image’s spread to digital has given us tools like Photoshop and memes that could have worked just as well. Sarah Charlesworth’s world might not be an exact reflection (heh) of ours, but it is a rhyme, and that adds a whole new dimension to the exhibit’s doublings.
That resonance puts a new spin on the exhibit’s name, too. Doubleworld reaches beyond Charlesworth’s particular historical moment and visual culture to touch our own. The potent, incisive understatement of Stills and other series confronts us with the incomplete photo, the unfinished rhyme, and asks how we might craft the rest.
You can hear more about Sarah Charlesworth’s work in this fantastic panel organized by The Art Institute Chicago in 2014.
* Did I struggle not to make “train of thought” puns? Maybe.
(Update: We’re back in the Bay Area!)
Mass transit has been on my mind recently. In a piece for The New York Times, Jonathan Mahler examines the (in)famous New York subway’s deterioration and makes the case for the system’s repair and maintenance, if not its expansion. It’s an absorbing read.
Mahler frames the subway, foremost among public transit projects, as the backbone that allows cities like New York to sustain the densities — of population, of ideas, of connections —that engender further growth.
Agglomerationsits at the heart of his defense: taken from economics, this term refers to the productivity benefits that arise when people, goods, services, and ideas cluster together. Mass transit systems like the subway make it easier for a city to juggle those moving parts.
Anybody who suffers through Philippine traffic can tell you why that matters. It usually takes me 4 hours to get to Quezon City from Cavite, a province south of the metro. That’s typical for a city commute. No wonder our transport situation costs us around Php 2.4 B per day.
In high-density areas like today’s cities, inefficient transport systems and inadequate infrastructure gum up the works. They trigger literal slowdowns — tipping the density scales away from “asset” and deep into “liability” instead.
I’m reminded a bit of mathematics’ square-cube law. According to this principle, volume increases faster than surface area as a shape grows. In engineering, for example, bigger planes like the A380 need larger wings, rudders, and so on, to generate the lift needed to support the aircraft’s total weight.
Applied sideways to cities, the denser a city is, the more support infrastructure you’d need in proportion to the population. Otherwise, the whole — in this case, the city — collapses under its own weight.
Who’s most likely to get crushed? Everyone who can’t afford to drive themselves everywhere.
“The questions we are facing today are not so different from the ones our predecessors faced 100 years ago. Can the gap between rich and poor be closed, or is it destined to continue to widen? Can we put the future needs of a city and a nation above the narrow, present-day interests of a few? Can we use a portion of the monumental sums of wealth that we are generating to invest in an inclusive and competitive future? The answer to all of these questions is still rumbling beneath New York City.”
Here, Mahler positions the subway as a key answer to persistent questions of inequality and inclusive progress. I’m not surprised; public transport looms large in any look at class and city life.
In the Philippines, for example, a private vehicle is a status symbol in large part because it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. In places where commuting is hell, nothing says heaven like being rich enough to, as Mahler puts it, “consistently avoid mass transit.”
I like Mahler’s use of the word avoid. As it turns out, private vehicle ownership doesn’t just mean an exemption from the indignities of daily commutes on decrepit subways. It also implies a degree of immunity from the broader economic and socio-political impact of deficient public transit systems, too.
But only up to a point. Not even the fastest car models can outrun the density issue completely. (Unless we’re talking private jets and helicopters. That’s a different matter altogether.)
Consider the immediate chain of potential effects: Pair the increased productivity typical of high-density areas with the aspirational air pinned to car ownership, and the consequences of neglecting mass transit spill into the streets — literally. If those streets are as narrow and underfunded as the mass transit systems, the creeping effects of bad subways will swallow even the people who aren’t taking mass transit, sooner rather than later.
That’s not taking into account any increases in city density that will further strain the system. As Mahler points out, time adds more thorny dimensions to public transport problems. Unlike an A380, which has a weight ceiling that’s set pretty much in stone, urban transport planners have to account for an ever-changing density variable.
I got a cute little computer game from the recent Steam winter sale that hammered this point home for me.
Mini Metro, as the name suggests, has you building trains to connect stations throughout the world’s biggest metropolises.
Sounds easy, right? Here’s the four-part catch:
More destinations pop up as the game goes on
Commuter “demand” for some stations also changes over time
You get limited resources (tracks, interchanges, etc.) doled out over the course of the game
The total commuter population keeps increasing until the game ends
When does it end? When your transit system can’t shuttle people around fast enough to keep one of your stations from overcrowding.
It’s an absorbing little game that got me thinking more about what makes for effective mass transport. One of the first and most lasting impressions: there is no one-and-done solution. As Mahler tries to show, a mass transit system needs to keep adapting if it’s to sustain the same growth that it helps kindle.
And that leads to trickier problems of who takes charge of that adaptation, how it’s to be carried out, where the funds will come from, and so on.
(Cue the inevitable intrusion of politicking. In the Philippines, for example, politicians hurl the perpetually broken-down MRT at each other like toxicsludge. The MRT’s operations and anomalous attempts at “improvement” have even been the subject of Senate inquiry.)
Of course, Mini Metro simplifies the transportation knot immensely. In a way, so does Mahler for NYC’s particular variant. As the public transit consultant Jarrett Walker points out, effective mass transit systems depend on many factors, not just capacity. For cases like the NYC subway, there’s a host of locale-specificcircumstances that affect a system’s development — or decline.
Where does that leave us?
Well, I agree with Mahler’s placement of the subway (and mass transit in general) within the larger framework of the city’s growth. It enriches the context of maintenance and development issues for systems like the NYC subway.
Other comments about the piece on the NYT site have pointed out shortcomings, such as Mahler’s alleged failure to hold public officials/institutions accountable for what’s happening to the New York subway. That may be the case; I don’t know enough about the NYC public transit situation to tell. Still, I can appreciate how Mahler forges clear and urgent links between transport and economy, society, growth.
Nipping back to Jarrett Walker’s Mini Metro review, he highlights the accuracy of the game’s “message”:
“Politicians demand that transit systems spread out but not that they provide enough intensity — whether that means frequency, speed, or … capacity. Transit agencies are always being told to spread themselves thin.”
I think it’s safe to extend that comment beyond the politicians. In his NYT article, at least, Mahler presents a good case for why we should change that.
It’s been a few months! I just wanted to do a quick check-in, since I’ve been making some (admittedly slow) progress but not always with the titles I’d planned to read.
Finished tasks have been crossed out, and the titles that were actually read are bolded and in italics. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post thoughts on some of the books I’ve finished so far.
Read a collection of stories by a woman. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love. Li Po and Tu Fu: Poems
24. Read a book wherein all point-of-view characters are people of color. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang Gunpowder Alchemyby Jeannie Lin
