img_4025

gomez

Felix LA at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

cover

olson

rm22

percover

more-cats-near-felix

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/los-angeles-plays/"></div>Everyone in Los Angeles has a fetish for Los Angeles.
I mean, particularly for this old Hollywood haunt vibe (anywhere circa 1920s to 60s), and I’m talking particularly of the art(s) crowd, whatever that means today. The romantics vie for Musso’s, the kinky ones frequent Taix and pronounce it without the x (the freaky ones with the x), the masochists prefer Dan Tana’s, and all of these and the rest still go to the Chateau, with some stragglers taking notes on the sites Eve Babitz writes of that remain in business. I could go on, with the group divisions between Lucy’s, Pacific Dining Car, The Apple Pan, the Los Angeles Breakfast Club (do you know the handshake? — maybe there’s an age maximum for this one), and those that swim between the Los Angeles Athletic Club (I only go for the drinks) and the Langham. Eight times out of ten when I cross the street from my car to an opening I hear a truck drive by blasting Little Julian Herrera!
I’m embarrassed to say that I am in no way an innocent bystander in this, waiting for my Norma Desmond non-moment moment as I write this across from the spinning 1936 Crossroads of the World sign situated within a deluge of nautical and cottage-themed bungalows. And in no way was the past week’s art fair madness not complicit in it either, with three major art fairs in Hollywood premised on or precisely located at these histories.
At a Frieze week kickoff lunch for the official launch of Barbara Kruger’s WHO BUYS THE CON mural on the facade of NeueHouse Hollywood, I was seated next to someone who works for the city on the preservation of historical landmarks. He’s the one you go to when you want to produce a mural — even if you’re Barbara Kruger — on a Los Angeles historical landmark that was the original 1938 CBS studios. I was so ecstatic to be next to him, prying him for new old places to check out, but all he offered me was what was being turned into housing. It seemed he had a very liberal take on preservation.
He left before dessert came out and before I could ask him how Frieze managed to be at the Paramount studios, Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Hollywood Athletic Club (now defunct as a club and only hired out for big Hollywood studio parties), and Felix at the Roosevelt. It’s a downright orgy and I don’t mean it in the sense of lovers, past, current and in between, caressing others’ faces (meaning not mine) or handing me flowers at the ancient castles or Japanese hilltop-restaurants of Los Angeles; or crushes rubbing faces and lips with others (such as a Real Housewife, of the show, that is, as a friend found out the next day) outside of the bar in the fair’s after-hours. It’s an orgy in the sense of this perverse fixation on “old” and “Hollywood” and the both together.
So what is it with this historical-that’s-not-actually-historical representation of Los Angeles? My friend Ted told me the other day that if he were in charge of an art fair it would be at the Slauson Swap Meet, something more true to LA. But then I remembered the first time we hung out we went to Colombo’s — his idea. The Australian-British gentlemen next to me at Kruger’s lunch also noted that we in Los Angeles are so attached to this history because we don’t have much history around us. Having just come back from four months in Paris, I can attest to this. No one in Paris chooses to go to “old haunts”… there’s nothing else there. And as someone with a particular investment in alternative historical narratives given she has had little and little access to archives of belonging and family, I am both disgusted and relieved by my participation in this fixation. This is all to say that rather than being focused on the facade of art at these fairs, I was much more hooked on and turned on by the literal facades — and that the facade perhaps is the truest testament to Los Angeles. (I think of the Dodger stadium facade, which precisely resurrects the ghost of Chavez Ravine.)
Vincent Ramos’s Frieze Project Room in the backlot consisted of the facades of the archive. Wolf Songs for the Dead (2020) specifically reflects on the Paramount Pictures archives and the gaps and stereotypes of Chicanx and Mexican representation within them. Sayre Gomez’s works, on the other hand, demonstrate an interest in facades of a different kind: the poetics inscribed on the various urban surfaces of Los Angeles in his solo exhibition at the Ghebaly booth and the facade of nature in Palm Tree Cell Tower (2020) — the namesake making quite obvious the simulation.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13704" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/gomez.jpg" alt="" width="376" height="600" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/gomez.jpg 376w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/gomez-188x300.jpg 188w" sizes="(max-width: 376px) 100vw, 376px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">Sayre Gomez, Tocayo 2020, 2020. High-density polyethylene, aluminum, high density carbon steel, EPS foam, enamel, acrylic, stainless steel, nylon. 
19 x 8 x 8 feet (579 x 244 x 244 cm). Installation view from Frieze Los Angeles 2020 Projects, curated Rita Gonzalez and Pilar Tompkins Rivas. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.</h6>
While contextually the art fairs seem to be — simultaneously both semi-intentionally and indulging in the Kool-Aid, I would presume — predicated on Baudrillard’s treatise Simulacra and Simulation in relation to Los Angeles particularly, I think this goes beyond the real/non-real binaries and the portrait of the city as simply and reducibly veneer. The veneer is so painfully thin here that it becomes translucent, making obvious the destruction it has hidden. I’m thinking about this in the sense of applying Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text to the Fairs’ version of Los Angeles: “Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.” We can see these erotics at play precisely in this seam/fault/flaw configuration, which can even be extended to a gap — a facade of a seam. Given LA’s apocalyptic nature (people think utopian dreams are actually nightmares), it is the methods and means that bring this sort of destruction and these violent overlooked histories merged with culture, art, and society that invites the erotic — instituting a forgetting, or a lame excuse. In other words, look no further than the napkins at Jack Nicholoson-approved haunt El Cholo, which read: “‘Virginia, you’ll wonder that I haven’t been home for dinner lately- your opposition is not a blonde, it’s the El Cholo, 1121 S. Western, C.K.’ ~ the Los Angeles Times personal ad, March 21, 1935.”
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13735" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/per.jpg" alt="" width="430" height="600" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/per.jpg 430w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/per-215x300.jpg 215w" sizes="(max-width: 430px) 100vw, 430px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">Alex Olson, Today, 2020, oil and modeling paste on canvas, 71 × 50 inches (180.34 × 127.00 cm) 
Courtesy of the artist; Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles; and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; photo credit: Jeff Mclane</h6>
But of course, there are honorable mentions of new works I saw at Frieze like Alake Shilling’s vibrant, multi-textured tableaux at the Jeffrey Deitch booth, Alex Olson’s hypnotizing oil and modeling-paste paintings at Park View/Paul Soto, and the fantastical and utterly immoral vanity mirror sculptures series Your Fantasy My Tyranny (2020) by Miriam Laura Leonardi at Bel Ami. Also, a kudos to Jenny’s for their The Dollhouse Bar, a makeshift bar featuring painted works by Pentti Monkkonen. Various friends mentioned to me that the bar was up and running until their next-door brunch favorite pop-up complained of cigarette ash discards tainting their something akin to Chaga-infused atmosphere. Fungi and ash don’t mix. I, unfortunately, did not see the bar fully functioning, but was able to enjoy the sights of Monkkonen’s works. Otherwise, the white walls and fair culture, unsurprisingly, diluted the essence of Marlene Dietrich having had walked across the same ground and so I looked instead for J.Lo and Justin Bieber, who were apparently concurrently walking the fairgrounds. Realistically, who wants to look at art at an art fair in a Hollywood movie studio? I have $6 lattes to buy and people (J.Lo and Justin Bieber) to see. Although I did try: I spent six hours at Frieze attempting to leave the backlot to get into the inside of the fair, but was distracted by small talk, apparent gift cards in the hundred dollar range at the Matches booth, and, quite frankly, sunshine coupled with an excessively obnoxious headache from the night prior.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-13703 size-large" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/img_4025-1024x768.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="480" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/img_4025-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/img_4025-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/img_4025-768x576.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">Installation shot of The Dollhouse Bar. Courtesy of the artist and Jenny&#8217;s, Los Angeles.</h6>
Felix was no different. You run into people, but not in the rooms that house each art space or gallery. You run into people at the pool and it’s the type of fair you do want to run into people and you do want to just be poolside the majority of the time. They still haven’t figured out the elevator situation, so I don’t see why anyone would bother standing in line to get to the upper floor rooms. I did enjoy the Jill Soloway-curated Judy Chicago works lining up the wait to the elevator, but the anxiety of missing poolside time was far too much. Modeled after the alternative Gramercy International Art Fair at the Chateau Marmont, Felix felt most like Eve’s Hollywood. That could be because the Roosevelt, where Felix is held, is right across from Babitz’s alma mater Hollywood High. But I would like to think that I could see Eve walking through the cabana rooms on her way to the pool to order a drink. It does feel glamorous in a risqué sort of way (the best way), seeing gallery directors’ toothbrushes next to pricey canvases. Otherwise, all I can remember of Felix is all the cat art and the more interventionist and exciting room of Sweetwater, Berlin where the decorative wall bases of the hotel room were torn off and re-attached to install Constantin Thun’s 2020 work. The work is composed of the text which functions as the title of the work: You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. I thought of this text especially when I went to the Coffee Bean nearby the Roosevelt and saw two women dressed in full on latex-cat-drip sipping their coffees by the windows. More cat art. Absolutely sublime.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-13705 size-large" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/bfa_31175_4212214-1024x819.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="512" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/bfa_31175_4212214-1024x819.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/bfa_31175_4212214-300x240.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/bfa_31175_4212214-768x614.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">Judy Chicago at Felix, photo: Adam Davis/BFA.com.</h6>
Eventually, I had to pull myself away from all the feline frenzy and head over to Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC) at the old athletic club, formerly frequented by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino. Given that the Hollywood Athletic Club only opens now for exclusive Hollywood industry parties, it was pretty thrilling to be able to walk the space running into the club’s original frescoes and tall, gilded mirrors with hand-painted sculptures of Rudolph Valentino. On the whole, however, the most compelling works were outside of the fairs: Lauren Halsey’s mesmerizing show at Kordansky, Gelare Khoshgozaran’s LIKELY MINE at Visitor Welcome Center on the materiality and semantics of both exposure and surveillance, the ICA Los Angeles’s double feature of the fantastical Ree Morton and Ann Greene Kelly, the innovative shows, Boybrain at Real Pain Fine Arts and Polly at Insect, and the Alison Gingeras-curated restaging and expansion of Peter Selz’s 1959 MoMA exhibition New Images of Man exhibition at Blum &amp; Poe. The Gingeras-curated show focuses on both defining and undefining humanism viathe demarcations and subsequent disparate valuing of such — something to think about in this particular political and heighted anthropogenic /biometric-state/interspecies-solidarity moment. Most compelling is the intellectual, cathartic call for solidarity in such alienating times through works by Deanna Lawson, Lee Lozano, Ahmed Morsi, and Misleidys Castillo Pedroso, among others.
<h6 style="text-align: center;"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-13738 size-large" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/more-cats-near-felix-e1583691659978-768x1024.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="853" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/more-cats-near-felix-e1583691659978-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/more-cats-near-felix-e1583691659978-225x300.jpg 225w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></h6>
<h6 style="text-align: center;">More cats near Felix.</h6>
In his The Stars down to Earth: The Stars down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, Theodor Adorno equates astrology to authoritarianism exceptionally through alienation. He argues this through the pseudo-rational, ready-made, alienated (from experience and relations) sensibilities of astrology or the commercialized occult particularly through Los Angeles Times daily column “Astrological Forecasts” by astrologist-to-the-movie-stars Carroll Righter between 1952 and 1953. The tie to Los Angeles is, of course, uncanny. I’m not the first to admit that I have made some pretty big life decisions off of astrology app Costar (the real ones go for The Pattern). In his argument Adorno states:
<blockquote>Indulgence in astrology may provide those who fall for it with a substitute for sexual pleasure of a passive nature. It means primarily submission to unbridled strength of the absolute power. However, this strength and power ultimately derived from the father image has become completely depersonalized in astrology. Communion with the stars is an almost unrecognizable and therefore tolerable substitute of the forbidden relation with an omnipotent father ﬁgure. People are allowed to enjoy communion with absolute strength in as much as it is considered no longer human. It seems likely that the fantasies about world destruction and ultimate doom appearing in more extremist astrological publications than the Los Angeles Times column are connected with this ultimately sexual content in as much as they are the last vestige of the individual expression of guilt feelings grown as unrecognizable as their libidinal source. Apart from this zone, the stars mean sex without threat.</blockquote>
While Adorno goes into stars of a different kind, it’s not that far from what I’ve been talking about. Commercialized astrology, according to Adorno, indulges us in all our fantasies and promises them to us without actualization given we conform to what is dished out to us. We hand over our thinking capacities and autonomy over for intellectual shortcuts and fast, non-sustaining libidinal rewards. It’s not unlike how we all talk about having to completely delete Instagram: “it’s so toxic.” It’s as if merely saying it banishes away any toxicity, we do know better and demonstrate by verbiage rather than actualizing. The actual faux pas is making the social media call out that you are going to be off the grid and suddenly two days later, @user is posting again. Self-destruction at an apocalyptic all-time high.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-13708 size-large" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rm22-1024x771.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="482" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rm22-1024x771.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rm22-300x226.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rm22-768x579.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rm22.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
<h6 style="text-align: center;">RM22, Weeds of the Northeast #4, 1974 
Watercolor, crayon, pencil, and colored pencil with glitter on printed paper, 18 ¾ × 24 ¾ in. (47.6 × 62.9 cm) 
© The Estate of Ree Morton; courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York. Collection of Kathleen and Douglas Landy.</h6>
It’s both tantalizing to play spectator to this and cringe as the voyeur to total destruction that we can see mirrored onto ourselves. Witness to this, we cannot deny that we become further detached from material and each other. In short, total submission, sex, and apocalyptic destruction, yet still within a safe distance. And, contemporarily, this is through the combination of social media and Adorno’s commercial astrology. I’m not quite sure that encompasses Los Angeles, but a side of it for sure. It’s how I feel every time I walk into HMS Bounty. And the art fairs seem to certainly sustain this status quo.
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Los Angeles Plays Itself as Itself

sand

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/began-history-ariana-reines-sand-book/"></div>Toward the end of Ariana Reines’s new book, A Sand Book, she writes “The words aren’t mine.” Given the collection’s circular journey, this disclaimer (appearing in the notes to the last section) could be the beginning of her rumination on love, violence, systems and histories of oppression, feminism, social media, screens, sex, and spirituality — a collective voice of and for our time that transcends the writer’s own.
In Reines’s long-awaited A Sand Book, we move suddenly from the speaker’s quotidian rituals to (neo)colonial and violent histories to generational traumas. Ultimately a meditation on language (“We were lost in a language of images”) and that which remains unsayable, the book contains 12 sections. “MOSAIC,” the penultimate section, departs stylistically from the fluidity of the previous 11 sections, consisting of short, prophetic-like declarations in white capital letters on black pages. The motif of sand that occurs throughout in various forms — glass, deposit, dust — does not seem to pass through “MOSAIC,” recalling a line from the first section: “Sediments of our relations/ Now spun to so fine a mesh/ Even dust cannot pass through it.”
Reines’s poetry harnesses the potency and agency of language while also acknowledging its incapabilities and weaknesses. At times, the collection breaks out of language into image, including clouds and a mirror selfie with a superimposed emoji. While Reines’s use of images differs from the Sebaldian technique which draws on the speculative or imaginative via found photography, they are both fascinated by memory and history.
Reines strings together associations into a tangled, subsuming web. And yet, we reach a sort of center in “A PARTIAL HISTORY OF IRIDESCENCE” where the poem “Sandra” (in reference to Sandra Bland) is noticeably centered unlike the rest of the left-justified poetry in the book. Here we see both the shortcomings of words and images where
The other side of seeing being
It doesn’t stop them
It doesn’t stop them
It doesn’t stop them at all.
The repetition of “doesn’t stop” performs its precise function, refusing to stop at the level of language. Yet images, “film,” and “seeing” fail just as language does where “the saying feels futile / … because enough cannot be said / &amp; it is no longer a matter of words.” Yet Reines is not arguing for language’s lack of power. Her poems remind us that language and words are tied to systemic oppression and violence. Taking control of language, she suggests, can potentially destabilize these relationships. Still, we see her struggling to put into words precise emotions, injustices, and experiences. The centering of “Sandra” offers a different way of seeing, something more akin to a circle, the continuation of the perpetual violence on Black bodies and the larger systems and media at play.
Elsewhere, we see Reines’s struggle to contain and express such traumas — and place them within non-sequential, or rather circular, time — such as in “Legend” where:
<blockquote>
<blockquote>…More grief was pouring 
From me than I could comprehend 
&amp; I was one 
Not unaccustomed to grief 
This was the sorrow of a whole people 
It feels strange to declare 
It was yet stranger to behold passing 
Through me. ‘I’ was not the one 
In tears. ‘It’ was. 
&amp; there began my history 
Following a bird thru 
The sand &amp; its people.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
The grief and sorrow the poet mentions here is not just the speaker’s, but rather “of a whole people.” “It” has a lineage tracing back to peoples before the “I” and thus conflates past histories with the present. Rather than haunting the present, “it” is a “barely-remarked-upon catastrophe that was over / Both before and after it was too late.” Traumas of generations ago find themselves not as specters, but as palpable life in the present moment. The exchange of “I” for “whole people” and “my” for “it” replaces subjecthood with objecthood — the “I” is also an “it.” Language cannot come close to actualizing the great grief Reines evokes. Instead,  trauma causes the “I” to become an “it,” a stand in for trauma, itself. Such is the transformation in “Open Fifths,” where the poem comes to embody “colonial horror”: “Rather spiderish my poem unspooling out of me / . . . / Of me’s the sensation I’m being come into by six / Hundred years of colonial horror as in that Adrienne / Rich poem, the one that is for me her masterpiece.”
Violent circles continue in “Armorica,” where, after learning of a school shooting on her phone, a mother at a grocery store continues her shopping:
<blockquote>
<blockquote>She put rainbow 
Chard and arugula and fennel 
And spinach and kale onto the conveyor 
Belt and chewable vitamins and advanced 
Beverages friendly to the flora 
In the human gut and the local 
Craft beer her husband liked 
It was the fourteenth day 
Of February 2018</blockquote>
</blockquote>
The language, focusing on the quotidian of her day, seems undeniably futile in contrast to the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. The “list” form recalls the repetition of “doesn’t stop” in “Sandra,” as everyday rituals continue despite national tragedy. The poem doesn’t make a full stop until it ends with the date, sans punctuation, which suddenly seems arbitrary in a world where time “doesn’t stop.”
In “Thursday,” Reines continues to explore the simultaneity of time as “A cracker whitens on the tongue of the hanged man / My velvet is sucked down the sea / The sea wall is chipped blue/ The clock of Palestine.” The latter image brings to mind queer theorist Jasbir Puar’s scholarship on time in Palestine, particularly the withholding of futurity and the colonization of temporality, in part through checkpoints. In The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Puar extends literary scholar Rob Nixon’s term “slow violence,” which describes what war casualties do not account for, including but not limited to the ecological aftermath of war, generational trauma, and genetic deteriorations and alterations due to chemicals, such as depleted uranium. In the introduction to her previous book, Terrorist Assemblages, Puar describes haunting as the “becoming-future” — that is, the nonexistent future as both a cause of debilitation and the effect of debilitation.
The nonexistent future is evident in “Thursday,” which withholds what will become of the dissolved cracker and the chipped away sea wall. Reines seems to be suggesting how unnatural slow violence is as a marker of time and, much like Puar, is asking us to explore the social and historical forces that interrupt the natural progression of time. The title of the poem “Thursday” serves as a conventional marker of time as does the end of the poem marking the date, “14 february 2012” — another February 14th, as in “Armorica.” Is it a holiday? An anniversary? A coincidence? A return to a different type of violence, but violence just the same? The dust does not settle in A Sand Book. And this is its major strength: a timeless book of poetry that is concurrently of our time, embodying the “contemporaneous past.”
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There Began My History: Ariana Reines’s A Sand Book

There Began My History: Ariana Reines’s A Sand Book

oilspell

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/non-selective-heard-violence-interview-poet-claire-marie-stancek/"></div>In the opening pages of Claire Marie Stancek’s Oil Spell, as they do throughout the entirety of the book, words spill. This is destructive, violent, and dark, but always self-aware, violence confronted with violence. Words, phrases, and form all clash, dominate, subside and, most importantly, make noise with one another. 
Oil Spell comes after Claire Marie’s first poetry book, Mouths, which extends beyond the human and can be classified as a work of Ecocriticism. Oil Spell initially appears to focus on the human and the human capacity for destruction. But the means and consequences of this destruction extend far beyond the immediate grasp of the human. The book sources language from a leaked document about drone strikes, blurring the lines of human agency, and from a measurement of global biodiversity, stretching the boundaries of human impact.    
Upon my most recent reading, after closing the book, I found myself troubled by the silence that followed. Claire Marie’s investment in the aurality of poetic language throughout Oil Spell combats the various noises in the everyday, both near and far (seemingly foreign and other), subsuming them into white noise and, in the process, opening up  alternatives beyond the realm of the possible — in a way that only noise can. The poetry in Oil Spell asks for a specific type of listening (and seeing) that one must expand beyond the page and into immediate reality — negating the silence we hear from passive listening. Over email, Claire Marie and I talked more in depth about these ideas of sound, form, and destruction.
¤
PERWANA NAZIF: I’m interested in how you would describe the layout of Oil Spell… I find that the layout of the poems alternate between a duality, a leveling grid, and a sort of wrapping around, movement-inducing form. How did you consider the potential implications of these forms?
CLAIRE MARIE STANCEK: Often I describe this book’s form as an ill mirror: the opening poem invokes a rearranging force that descends on the book like nightfall, as when walking outside at dusk, you witness all the windows on the street become mirrors, reflecting a knotty and angled version of the same street you’re standing on, but with extra branches and cracks, and the ghostly back of an armchair, and a lampshade, or (you can’t discern) maybe the back of a person’s head, all superimposed on one another, all suddenly caught, glancingly, fleetingly, in the light and shade of the pane — so the poems recast one another, the spells spill. The poems in two columns might be read as bad translations, or simultaneous utterances, or mishearings, or equivalences, or oppositions. And the poems that take wrapping, moving shape bend and warp the line, as though pushing away from their own bodies, as though their sounds were keening, unspeakably, away. I still don’t know how to read these poems aloud in a way that communicates what I’m trying to show with form on the page.
Some time ago a very old antique mirror “fell into my hands,” to use Mary Shelley’s words — in its cracked wooden frame was carved a bird in flight, as though escaping from the frame and half mangled by the effort. In whatever room I placed or leant this mirror, it brought along a cloud, something shrouded, half-turned away, in the clouded glass all speckled with grey grains, wavy, warm. I don’t know how to describe the feeling that this mirror brought. But it changed the room where it stood. It breathed. I believe that poetic form is like that: cloudy with the past it carries, remaking by haunting, representing in dusty light whatever room or stanza it recasts with its own strange gleam.
I was particularly struck with the phrase “unhinged mouths” as that was exactly how I imagined seeing myself read the book — fully enunciating each word with an exaggerated mouthing out. The phrase feels loaded, especially when relating it to the power, or the spell, that words, sounds and voicing can cast. Is an unhinged mouth the ideal way to read Oil Spell?
Unhinged mouths — yes, I think that’s right. I think too, of unhinged Mouths, in the sense of taking the logic of my first book (Mouths, Noemi, 2017) to its furthest limit and then beyond that limit, unhinging. In <a href="https://lithub.com/on-apocalyptic-poetry/">my exchange with Brandon Brown</a>, which appeared online a little while ago, /I wrote that one of the most urgent questions in Mouths is, how should one sing at the end of the world? Oil Spell unhinges the prepositional orientation of the question: it asks how should one sing against the end of the world, or with the end of the world — or perhaps doing away with the preposition’s governance altogether: how should one sing the end of the world? Oil Spell plunges into that question beak-first, flailingly, inseparable from the muck and mire of imbrication.
The book is radical in many ways not limited to its focus on spirituality, awakening the political ramifications of passive and active terminology, and the heightening of the sublime in destruction. What kind of spell, or spells, would you say, are being cast in relation to this? Can you describe to us the types of destruction you had in mind when writing the poem?
This book foregrounds, on many different levels, language’s capacity to act: the spell is a speech act which is related to, and sometimes interchangeable with, the poem. Beyond the spell, other spellings: the news, the report, the language of machines. Late in the book, a poem called “r. i. o. t. of” considers how news language can obscure agency, as in the violent cliché (intended to obscure violence), “officer-involved shooting.” The US drone war, which is a subject of many of the poems in this book, demands that we think differently about what kind of activity or passivity might constitute violence. Barack Obama bragged that he could expand the drone war without putting any American feet on foreign soil. I was writing these poems under the shadow of those words, which to my ear invite a radical complicity: what does it mean, in this world, to partake in such a war? What does it mean to murder from thousands of miles away? The act of reading news reports, the act of bombing, the act of condoning a war that, to an American imaginary, might seem so distant as to be unreal, are all what I think of as non-active actions, and are all accomplished from a chair in front of a computer screen. I was influenced by Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence,” which asks that we come up with a new definition of violence, one that takes into account the incremental, accretive, diffuse, agentless violences that define our contemporary moment, such as climate change, trash, toxic runoff, Agent Orange. I was also influenced by Anne-Lise François’ idea of “recessive action,” as well as Sara Ahmed’s writings about “happiness objects,” “orientation,” and the ways in which objects can organize social structures and expectations.
Was there a logic to which sourced language was incorporated and remixed into the poems? 
There are many different logics that connect the sourced language, and I hesitate to impose one reading in a field where there are many. But one way I understand connections between the 19th-century language of the picturesque, scientific descriptions of birds, and news reports of war that run through the book, is that these discourses, in different ways and to different effects, all enact an objectifying removal of what they describe. Writers like Ann Radcliffe were influential in defining a western tradition of description that privileged the tourist’s gaze, the misty distance, the aestheticization of decline and sometimes also of poverty. Likewise, the scientific names for birds, which populate the margins of this book in grayscale, evoke for me the historical connections between scientific inquiry, colonialism, and notions of “progress” which are inextricably linked to environmental degradation and mass extinction. Part of the project of Oil Spell is to follow aesthetic inroads into these discourses of aesthetics, science, and violence, and to consider their complicated intersections.
Can you tell me about any upcoming works or projects?
I’m currently at work on two creative projects: one is a book in prose fragments called wyrd] bird, which brings together writing about loss, mourning, and the medieval mystic, Hildegard von Bingen; and the other is a book of poetry to which I’ve been giving the placeholder-title Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall — after the essays by Thomas Browne — and which performs an ecstatic reading of those essays, alongside more writing about saints. I’m also working on some academic writing: I recently completed my PhD at UC Berkeley, and am adapting the final chapter of my dissertation into an article about Emily Dickinson and sonic vibrations.
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A (Non-Selective) Heard Violence: Interview with Poet Claire Marie Stancek

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/monsters-ballet-slippers-chagalls-designs-performing-arts/"></div>It’s the time of the year when you can hear the wind whistling through Los Angeles — not the sort of Didion-esque unsettling Santa Ana winds, but the Los Angeles equivalent of an enchanting winter wonderland. You can even hear it wailing inside the thick-walled Resnick Pavillion at the LACMA — though perhaps this sense is abetted by the tempestuous, nearly fanatical brushstrokes on Chagall’s costumes for the ballet, leaving you with the impression of the wind arousing the costumes into a performance worthy of their fantastical appearance.
As I wandered through <a href="http://www.lacma.org/chagall">Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage</a> — a journey of Chagall’s contributions to dance and music productions, from costumes to set designs, as well as paintings illustrating musical scenes or musicians — this silent wind that permeated the museum and initiated movement seemed to be aligned with and warmly welcomed into the phantasmagorical narrative central to the work.
<figure id="attachment_6672" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6672" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-6672" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/1_ex8350_lacma_chagall_015-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="427" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/1_ex8350_lacma_chagall_015-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/1_ex8350_lacma_chagall_015-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/1_ex8350_lacma_chagall_015-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6672" class="wp-caption-text">Installation Photograph, ​​Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, July 31, 2017–January 7, 2018, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, photo © Fredrik Nilsen</figcaption></figure>
Like Picasso and Matisse, who were often commissioned to create costumes and sets for the ballet, particularly for the influential Ballet Russes, many artists are no strangers to interdisciplinary art forms through performance and music. Chagall was a frequent designer and collaborator with the ballet, opera, and theatrical world, given musicians alongside Jewish and Russian folklore music culture often played center stage in his figurative-favoring oeuvre. Chagall: Fantasies for the State focuses on Chagall’s four productions for the stage, between 1942 and 1967: from Aleko to The Firebird and Daphnis and Chloé, finally culminating with The Magic Flute.
The show at LACMA, the first U.S. exhibition of its kind dedicated to the correlation between music and dance to Chagall’s artistic career, was adapted from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibition <a href="https://www.mbam.qc.ca/expositions/passees/chagall/">Chagall: Colour and Music</a>. Exploring this influence of music and dance on Chagall’s artistic career is a crucial part of the exhibition curated by Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s senior curator of modern art, in collaboration with the Costume and Textiles department, and designed by Opera director Yuval Sharon and projection designer Jason H. Thompson. The unifying factor between the costumes and their preparatory drawings with the selection of characteristic Chagall paintings is glaringly obvious. The star, or rather stars, of the exhibition, however and undoubtedly so, are the costumes themselves.
<figure id="attachment_6673" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6673" style="width: 571px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-6673" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2_ex8350_101-571x1024.jpg" alt="" width="571" height="1024" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2_ex8350_101-571x1024.jpg 571w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2_ex8350_101-167x300.jpg 167w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2_ex8350_101-768x1377.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2_ex8350_101.jpg 1171w" sizes="(max-width: 571px) 100vw, 571px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6673" class="wp-caption-text">Marc Chagall, Green Violinist, 1923–24, oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Founding Collection, by gift, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo © 2017 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY</figcaption></figure>
The exhibition is divided into four sections for the four productions, apart from the room holding Chagall’s paintings; the entry is dedicated to Aleko. In 1942, the early Modernist painter was commissioned by the American Ballet Theatre, formerly known as the Ballet Theatre of New York, to design sets and over 60 costumes for this ballet based on “The Gypsies,” a poem by Alexander Pushkin. Due to union restrictions, Chagall had to create the works in Mexico City, which undoubtedly influenced his designs. Interwoven into the garments, quite literally, with Chagall’s abstract shapes and Modernist ethos, are traces of Mexican traditional textile patterns and styles of dress. From instrument-shaped tunics to a tuxedo jacket paired with trousers covered in ecstatic faces, there is a rich vibrancy owed both to the artist’s surroundings in Mexico as well as the typical treatment of color and life in his works.
Chagall’s designs for both Aleko and Daphnis and Chloé take a traditional approach to the performers’ costumes when compared to the other productions — one can see how the performers would have moved and breathed in the garments, even guided by them. Their various patterns and materials are suspended on a threshold between surrealism and cubism, yet something altogether different and characteristically Chagall. These, however, felt like a minimalist Chagall approach, if ever there were such a thing, when taking into account the intensely imaginative costumes for the other productions, particularly The Firebird. 
<figure id="attachment_6674" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6674" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-6674" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/3_ex8350_lacma_chagall_018-1024x587.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="367" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/3_ex8350_lacma_chagall_018-1024x587.jpg 1024w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/3_ex8350_lacma_chagall_018-300x172.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/3_ex8350_lacma_chagall_018-768x440.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6674" class="wp-caption-text">Installation Photograph, ​​Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, July 31, 2017–January 7, 2018, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, photo © Fredrik Nilsen</figcaption></figure>
Approaching the stage housing the extravagantly experimental designs of The Firebird, Norma Desmond immediately came to my mind. Like the silent film star from Sunset Boulevard, Chagall’s mythical costumes for the performers of the Stravinsky ballet — with costumes like the Green Rooster rotating on stage for exhibition goers to get the complete 360° vision — appeared to be awaiting an audience at any given moment and, unlike the fading film star, immune to time’s effects with the bright hues of the yellow monsters, green monsters, and monsters with donkeys’ heads still radiantly intact. Anamorphic, corporeal, unearthly, it was how I imagined Chagall running wild with the wind, paintbrush in one hand and sewing kit in another. Having abandoned art while grieving his wife Bella’s death, Chagall’s creations for The Firebird were pivotal both in signifying his return to art as well as a more experimental approach to his costumes, sets, and stage curtain. Chagall collaborated with his daughter, Ida, resulting in new materials and techniques for his creations consisting of elaborate, collage-style needlework that ultimately resulted in his most avant-garde costumes.
<figure id="attachment_6675" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6675" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-6675" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/4_ex8350_134a-e-20160812-729x1024.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="899" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/4_ex8350_134a-e-20160812-729x1024.jpg 729w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/4_ex8350_134a-e-20160812-214x300.jpg 214w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/4_ex8350_134a-e-20160812-768x1078.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/4_ex8350_134a-e-20160812.jpg 1496w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6675" class="wp-caption-text">Marc Chagall, Costume for The Firebird: Monster with Donkey’s Head, 1945, wool/synthetic knit, painted, with polyurethane and wool/synthetic knit appliqués, New York City Ballet, New York, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo © 2017 Museum Associates/LACMA</figcaption></figure>
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<figure id="attachment_6676" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6676" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-6676" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/5_ex8350_041-808x1024.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="811" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/5_ex8350_041-808x1024.jpg 808w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/5_ex8350_041-237x300.jpg 237w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/5_ex8350_041-768x973.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/5_ex8350_041.jpg 1657w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6676" class="wp-caption-text">Marc Chagall, Costume Design for The Firebird: Green Monster, 1945, watercolor, gouache, and india ink on paper, 17 × 14 in., private collection, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo © 2017 Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris</figcaption></figure>
Indulgent in boisterous, bulging silhouettes, Chagall’s costumes for The Firebird — perhaps better described as sculptural forms — kept me wondering. How does one pirouette with a uniform that consists of a towering fish mask and a grotesquely swelling gut? Another myth to add to the ever-growing list of Chagall’s fantasies. These fantasies share a likeness to that of a Pina Bausch piece, albeit exclusive to thematic concerns of absurdity and the body, or costume, as an agent of exaggeration.
Ultimately, Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage left me with just that — fantasies. Elaborate fantasies of watching Chagall’s reveries in real time and extravagant fantasies of experiencing the mythical, dream-like costumes in action. And that’s all that is ever really need from an exhibition — the motive and conditions provided for passive observers to engage with the artist’s dream world and their own imagination. Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage runs until January 7, 2018 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is now included in general admission.
<figure id="attachment_6677" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6677" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-6677" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6_ex8350_170a-h-av001-20160811-756x1024.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="867" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6_ex8350_170a-h-av001-20160811-756x1024.jpg 756w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6_ex8350_170a-h-av001-20160811-221x300.jpg 221w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6_ex8350_170a-h-av001-20160811-768x1041.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6_ex8350_170a-h-av001-20160811.jpg 1550w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6677" class="wp-caption-text">Marc Chagall, Costume for The Magic Flute: Green-Faced Monster (with Reproduction Mask), 1967, cotton knit, painted, with synthetic/lurex plain weave appliqués, silk plain weave (chiffon) appliqués, synthetic knit, painted, and papier-mâché, Metropolitan Opera Archives, New York, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo © 2017 Museum Associates/LACMA</figcaption></figure>
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Header Image: Marc Chagall, Costume Design for The Firebird: Blue-and-Yellow Monster from Koschei’s Palace Guard, 1945, watercolor, gouache, graphite, and india ink on paper, 18 5/16 × 11 7/16 in., private collection, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo © 2017 Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris
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Monsters in Ballet Slippers: Chagall’s Designs for the Performing Arts

Perwana Nazif­­­ is an independent writer and curator in addition to her work as the art director for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in&nbsp;The Quietus,&nbsp;Artforum, SFAQ,&nbsp;and&nbsp;the Vinyl Factory, among others.&nbsp;

Perwana Nazif­­­

What Is L.A. Art?

LARB Lit

In the Shadow of Forward Motion

Against Inertia

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa

Art &amp; Architecture

Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

Love, Icebox

Changes

Coincidences, Chance, and Champignons

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

Archiving Revolution on 858.ma

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

Perwana Nazif­­­ is an independent writer and curator in addition to her work as the art director for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in&nbsp;The Quietus,&nbsp;Artforum, SFAQ,&nbsp;and&nbsp;the Vinyl Factory, among others.&nbsp;

Perwana Nazif­­­

Perwana Nazif