Tobi Haslett

• 

  books December 2020

  Yvonne Rainer's Work 1961–73

  A big black-and-white book, first published in 1973 and prettily reissued by Primary Information, Work 1961–73 collects screenplays, photographs, flyers, and essays, which comprise an odd monument to thirteen years of scrupulous, self-inflicted, paradoxically rebellious discipline that took the form, for Yvonne Rainer, of dances and films. Devotees will find much to relish: Loaded with documentation and reflections, the book gives a sinuous and often funny account of the first stirrings of Judson Dance Theater, breathing life into an avant-garde now hardened into history. But it’s also a tour

• 

  slant July 17, 2019

  The Tear Gas Biennial

  WARREN B. KANDERS DIDN’T EARN HIS PLACE as vice chair of the board at the Whitney Museum of American Art through his good taste alone. He has also used some of his estimated $700 million fortune to make tax-deductible donations to support exhibitions at the museum. What successful enterprise has made this generosity possible? Thanks to the collective, years-long effort of activists, students, and reporters to bring everyday brutality to light, we could tell you quite a lot about Kanders’s company Safariland, which does a brisk trade supplying batons, handcuffs, holsters, and body armor to police

• 

  previews May 2019

  “CAULEEN SMITH: WE ALREADY HAVE WHAT WE NEED”

  Curated by Susan Cross

  “The fragile, the forgotten, the flawed, the fugitive”—with this alliterative litany, Cauleen Smith announces the themes and preoccupations of her work. This summer, Smith will fill MASS MoCA’s first-floor galleries with video, textiles, a written manifesto, works on paper, and a selection from her “In the Wake” series of hand-stitched banners that dotted the infamous 2017 Whitney Biennial. At the heart of this swirl of mediums and messages will be an immersive installation composed of projections and still lifes—furniture, statuettes, foliage—that summon the appalling

• 

  print March 2019

  A PHILOSOPHY OF THE CAUTERIZED WOUND

  MELANCHOLIA IS BORING. No matter how violent the anguish or extravagant the sense of loss, to be melancholy is to be locked in a single, insistent, freezing feeling. The melancholic is obsessive; obsession stalls the self. Torpor, irritation, and relentless self-reproach are the only moves available to the gloom-addicted psyche. But that gloom is crossed with pleasure—a cynical relief. Walter Benjamin lambasted the poet Erich Kästner for his luxurious devastation, that air of “left-wing melancholy” that saps the political will. Catastrophe didn’t galvanize Kästner so much as feed his princely

• 

  print December 2018

  ALL FOR NOTHING

  WE CANNOT LIKE HER—her greed, her pomp, her fraudulence; her repulsive servility and inflated pride. There she is on The Apprentice in 2004, playing the villain. There she is on Frontline in September 2016, going for a kind of luxurious sadism. Her words are rich and theatrical as they come rolling out of her mouth: “Every critic, every detractor,” she says with relish, “will have to bow down to President Trump.” Frontline cuts to close-up as she breaks into a smile: “It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become

• 

  passages April 2018

  Mark E. Smith

  YOU CAN TELL how a trombone sounds by looking at its shape—just as you could see, in the scowl and bitter rictus of Mark E. Smith, the slashing vocal intensity that came pouring out of that face. Years of listening have nailed his words into my head: brittle consonants and yowled vowels, a spray of polysyllabic elocution cut abruptly short by something funny, something wounding, and thus moving, bristling, ragged with need.

  THERE IS NO CULTURE IS MY BRAG.

  MANACLED TO THE CITY! MANACLED TO THE CITY!

  LEAVE THE CAPITOL. EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!

  PARALLAX! ONE OF THE MILLENNIUM OF CONSPIRACY.

  TOO

• 

  print May 2017

  Tobi Haslett

  AIMLESSNESS IS A HAZARD OF BIENNIALS. The Whitney’s current edition is so twitching and distractible that it risks flattening itself into a vast, paratactic prairie. Time, in the art world, advances in mincing two-year increments, furnishing us with new batches of objects but seldom a new idea. Curators, then, saddled with the absurd task of “capturing the moment,” resort to the eclectic. But in the right hands, eclecticism can itself be spun into an expedient little point.

  “This Biennial,” proclaims the opening wall text, “arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and

• 

  film December 09, 2016

  Object Lessons

  “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” is the rhetorical equivalent of tear gas—a bit of blinding toxin to spray at the livid crowd. But behind the flash and menace of Trump himself, his advisors have begun to undertake other, subtler operations on our shared language, delivering, in their interviews and slogans, more insidious tweaks to speech. Steve Bannon, chief strategist and cofounder of alt-right Breitbart News, has proclaimed that he’s no racist, but an “economic nationalist” whose princely sympathies reach beyond the white working class to the minority poor. So his rapacious political project has

• 

  film November 01, 2016

  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

  OFFICIAL LANGUAGE acts upon politics the way gangrene shrivels a foot: It freezes while it poisons. Take “constructive ambiguity.” Behind the bland opacity of Kissinger’s phrase—with its haughty procession of Latinate syllables—is the childish wish to stop the world. It was in the name of “constructive ambiguity” that in 1975 Kissinger lied to Syria’s Hafez al-Assad (father of Bashar) about a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, shattering the alliances within the Arab world that threatened American power. A devious tactic, yes, but in the service of a facile belief: that it’s actually

• 

  film July 19, 2016

  Primary Colors

  THIS YEAR, the People (poor things) shall choose a new president. The attendant Grand Guignol will entail the usual insults to our collective intelligence. Now is the time for brayed assurances, spurious commiserations, mawkish appeals, winking threats, plagiarized bromides—a whole sloppy revue of cheap, bullying speech. And the stakes have been raised especially high this time, as Nixon’s “silent majority” finds its mouthpiece in a billionaire chauvinist who grasps—with an acuity that eludes the liberal elite—the sense of bitter abandonment that churns within the white working class. So this

• 

  film March 24, 2016

  Sound and Vision

  GODARD HAS ALWAYS made an art of his petulance. For as long as anyone can remember he’s been the stroppy malcontent, spitting rebuttals to Hollywood and the state, to the middling film industry and its slack-jawed forms. Hence his late-1960s dalliance with Maoism, his retreat into agitprop, and his decision (shocking at the time) to shirk the mantle of “auteur” and cofound the Dziga Vertov Group, a collective that, from 1968 to 1972, would inflict upon us the most ruthless works of his career.

  The editing got brutal; the politics, caustic. Italian militants belt out pledges and manifestos;

• 

  picks February 05, 2016

  Peter Hujar

  It’s been stamped on the collective retina: a reclining Susan Sontag, 1975, sheathed in a turtleneck, her hands stuffed in her hair, her face crowned with that smirk of effortless intellection. She looks like a sleek, belletristic otter floating on its back. This is Sontag as we’ve always thought of her—sly, a little wistful, possessed of a dark, delicate intelligence that pitches its gaze at something just beyond the frame. Embalmed in her persona, served like some pickled exotic fruit.

  But that embalmment—the aspect that has haunted both the practice and the theory of photography—gathers a