David Frankel

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  print May 1996

  Tim Maul

  Old-fashioned English teachers used to talk about the romance of names, about how a poet like Milton, by listing places like Ormus and Ind, Thule and Vallombrosa, could perfume his work with whole climates of sensation—riding on the reader’s imaginings of what it might feel like to be and see where those words point. Pictures, as visual experiences in themselves, would seem less needful of this kind of gambit. But at least in part, this is how the photographs Tim Maul has taken in Dublin’s National Library work.

  Sligo, Roscommon, Meath: names are full of place, of history, weather, landscape,

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  print March 1996

  Beth B

  If only because of their intrepid advent in the wake of last year’s demonizing of “victim art,” Beth B’s simultaneous film retrospective and exhibitions struck bracing poses this winter. At the same time, they also suggested some of the problems with the genre.

  B’s film work shows her to be a virtuoso of the talking head. In Stigmata, 1991, a half dozen men and women, each addressing the camera directly and alone, speak of their involvement with drugs. Cutting regularly among these hurt but articulate people, and occasionally interspersing shots of sunlit countryside, B brings out relationships

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  print February 1996

  Sophie Tottie

  To judge from her work, Sophie Tottie, a Swede in her early 30s, might be a woman schooled by the idea- and process-obsessed artists of the ’60s and ’70s but who goes home at night to worry about life in the computer age. Cool, muted, obscurely troubled and troubling, Tottie’s images suggest a curiosity about the orders innate to visual technologies and systems, particularly electronic ones. Yet she is as much as anything a painter, if one who also makes photographs and videos, and whose paintings arrive at their quite distinct mood through means less expressive than analytic.

  When Tottie executes

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  print January 1996

  Anne and Patrick Poirier

  “It is wrong to believe that these myths and ancient geneses do not concern us anymore. The human soul is made of memory and forgetfulness; these constitute being.” So Anne and Patrick Poirier once wrote, referring to the classical culture of the Mediterranean. The art that the Poiriers built on this faith in the ’70s and ’80s—microcosmic reconstructions of ancient ruined architecture, arrangements of outsize fragments of Greco-Roman sculpture, and related works—was among that period’s many signs of an esthetic shift: after the sublimities and stringencies of formalism, Conceptual art, and

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  print January 1995

  the Boys and the Bard

  “WELL, THIS IS THE FOREST of Arden”: the line, from As You Like It, is one of those blunt cues that Shakespeare often fed his characters, an audience pointer explaining the play’s whens and wheres. But it’s also something else: an announcement of entrance to the green world, the exurban universe beyond human order and law, in the comic mode the magical wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the tragic the terrible heath of King Lear, the space of the suspension of expectation, the realm of the reversal of role—all in all a pleasant spot, when picnicking there, for a chat about identity politics.

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  slant October 1990

  Czechered History

  It’s been a long time since the Rolling Stones have mattered enough to rock the body politic. Once, through music and otherwise, they seemed to be saying something serious, even in their habits of consumption—as in the 1967 marijuana and uppers bust that made Jagger and Richards symbolic foci of a new generation’s new life and of the establishment’s reaction to it. Attacking the heavy sentence (later overturned), a London Times editorialist was moved to ask, “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?,” adding his brick to a romantic construction inside which everything the band did had weight. But then

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  print November 1986

  Film

  ON A BLUISH GRAY EVENING, a Russian freighter glides into an English port, seen across the water as a collection of stately piles, dimly lit, as in mist. Pointing to these grand wedding cakes and spires, a suitably ursine sailor calls in Russian to a friend, “Piotr! Look! Quickly! It’s Liverpool! Beatles!” So begins this year’s British sleeper movie Letter to Brezhnev, with a concise evocation of a city through the architecture and music of the past. The present, we quickly learn, is at odds with its heritage: of the pair of heroines, local women who share the sailors’ shore leave for a night

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  print February 1984

  THESE THINGS ARE IN THE HANDS OF GOD

  THE ART OF THE AFRO-AMERICAN culture-within-the-culture (most easily experienced in popular music) is more immediate to many, both black and white, than the temporally distant, scholarship-encrusted, “high art” Greek drama. One doubts that Thomas Dorsey, often considered the father of gospel music for his pioneering work in the form, ever much heeded the concept of catharsis or other of the notions of Aristotelian poetics, or, for that matter, any of the thought of that heathen people of the pre-Christian era, the ancient Greeks. Classical Greek drama may appear in university syllabuses as a