By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 2, 2011
Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a blog post about the “mistake of 1937,” the premature fiscal and monetary pullback that aborted an ongoing economic recovery and prolonged the Great Depression. As Gauti Eggertsson, the post’s author (with whom I have done research) points out, economic conditions today — with output growing, some prices rising, but unemployment still very high — bear a strong resemblance to those in 1936-37. So are modern policy makers going to make the same mistake?
Mr. Eggertsson says no, that economists now know better. But I disagree. In fact, in important ways we have already repeated the mistake of 1937. Call it the mistake of 2010: a “pivot” away from jobs to other concerns, whose wrongheadedness has been highlighted by recent economic data.
To be sure, things could be worse — and there’s a strong chance that they will, indeed, get worse.
Back when the original 2009 Obama stimulus was enacted, some of us warned that it was both too small and too short-lived. In particular, the effects of the stimulus would start fading out in 2010 — and given the fact that financial crises are usually followed by prolonged slumps, it was unlikely that the economy would have a vigorous self-sustaining recovery under way by then.
By the beginning of 2010, it was already obvious that these concerns had been justified. Yet somehow an overwhelming consensus emerged among policy makers and pundits that nothing more should be done to create jobs, that, on the contrary, there should be a turn toward fiscal austerity.
This consensus was fed by scare stories about an imminent loss of market confidence in U.S. debt. Every uptick in interest rates was interpreted as a sign that the “bond vigilantes” were on the attack, and this interpretation was often reported as a fact, not as a dubious hypothesis.
For example, in March 2010, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Debt Fears Send Rates Up,” reporting that long-term U.S. interest rates had risen and asserting — without offering any evidence — that this rise, to about 3.9 percent, reflected concerns about the budget deficit. In reality, it probably reflected several months of decent jobs numbers, which temporarily raised optimism about recovery.
But never mind. Somehow it became conventional wisdom that the deficit, not unemployment, was Public Enemy No. 1 — a conventional wisdom both reflected in and reinforced by a dramatic shift in news coverage away from unemployment and toward deficit concerns. Job creation effectively dropped off the agenda.
So, here we are, in the middle of 2011. How are things going?
Well, the bond vigilantes continue to exist only in the deficit hawks’ imagination. Long-term interest rates have fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about the economy; a recent spate of bad news has sent them down to about 3 percent, not far from historic lows.
And the news has, indeed, been bad. As the stimulus has faded out, so have hopes of strong economic recovery. Yes, there has been some job creation — but at a pace barely keeping up with population growth. The percentage of American adults with jobs, which plunged between 2007 and 2009, has barely budged since then. And the latest numbers suggest that even this modest, inadequate job growth is sputtering out.
So, as I said, we have already repeated a version of the mistake of 1937, withdrawing fiscal support much too early and perpetuating high unemployment.
Yet worse things may soon happen.
On the fiscal side, Republicans are demanding immediate spending cuts as the price of raising the debt limit and avoiding a U.S. default. If this blackmail succeeds, it will put a further drag on an already weak economy.
Meanwhile, a loud chorus is demanding that the Fed and its counterparts abroad raise interest rates to head off an alleged inflationary threat. As the New York Fed article points out, the rise in consumer price inflation over the past few months — which is already showing signs of tailing off — reflected temporary factors, and underlying inflation remains low. And smart economists like Mr. Eggerstsson understand this. But the European Central Bank is already raising rates, and the Fed is under pressure to do the same. Further attempts to help the economy expand seem out of the question.
So the mistake of 2010 may yet be followed by an even bigger mistake. Even if that doesn’t happen, however, the fact is that the policy response to the crisis was and remains vastly inadequate.
Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it; we did, and we are. What we’re experiencing may not be a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s little consolation for the millions of American families suffering from a slump that just goes on and on.
June 3rd, 2011
Comedy, 2011
Lightjet print, mouted on Sintra and face mounted with acrylic, 12×9 cm
Through June 19, 2011
June 2nd, 2011By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: May 31, 2011
In Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” an American writer clambers into a yellow vintage Peugeot every night and is transported back to hobnob with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gertrude Stein in the shimmering movable feast. The star-struck aspiring novelist from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, gets to escape his tiresome fiancée and instead talk war and sex with Papa Hemingway, who barks “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” “Who wants to fight?” and “You box?”
Many Frenchmen — not to mention foundering neighbor, the crepuscular Casanova Silvio Berlusconi — may be longing to see that Peugeot time machine come around a cobblestone corner.
Some may yearn to return to a time when manly aggression was celebrated rather than suspected, especially after waking up Tuesday to see the remarkable front page of Libération — photos of six prominent French women in politics with the headline “Marre des machos,” or “Sick of machos.”
“Is this the end of the ordinary misogyny that weighs on French political life?” the paper asked, adding: “Tongues have become untied.”
In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, as more Frenchwomen venture sexual harassment charges against elite men, the capital of seduction is reeling at the abrupt shift from can-can to can’t-can’t. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, still argues that “News always stops at the bedroom door,” but many French seem ready to bid adieu to the maxim.
As Libération editor Nicolas Demorand wrote in an editorial: “Now that voices have been freed, and the ceiling of glass and shame has been bashed in, other scandals may now arise.”
After long scorning American Puritanism and political correctness on gender issues, the French are shocked to find themselves in a very American debate about the male exploitation/seduction of women, and the nature of consent.
Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to reverse his spiraling fortunes by shaking off his old reputation as a jumpy and flashy Hot Rabbit and recasting himself as a sober and quiet family man. One newspaper noted that the enduring image from the G-8 summit meeting in Deauville was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in white smock, showing the other leaders’ wives her baby bump.
The French president wasted no time jettisoning a junior minister — also the mayor of Draveil — who was accused of sexual assault by two former employees. Georges Tron resigned on Sunday after the two women in their mid-30s said they had gotten the courage to come forward after the Strauss-Kahn arrest.
Tron, it seems, liked to give foot massages and sometimes more. It got to the point where some women would wear boots if they knew Monsieur Masseur was coming to a meeting.
“Yes, my client is a reflexologist,” riposted Tron’s lawyer, Olivier Schnerb. “He’s never hidden it. He has given conferences at the Lion’s Club. It’s a healing treatment.”
In Le Journal du Dimanche, Valérie Toranian, the editor of Elle, wrote about the puncturing of France’s “Latin culture of seduction”: “We laugh about our Italian neighbors, but the stone today is in our garden.” (She probably didn’t want to use a shoe-on-the-other-foot metaphor given the foot fetishist on the loose.)
On Tuesday, Libération presented interviews with a parade of women who poured out long-stifled grievances about their paternalistic culture: How they feel they must wear pants to work to fend off leering; how they’re tired of men tu-ing instead of vous-ing and making comments like “O.K., but just because you have pretty eyes”; how they’re fed up with married pols who come to Paris three days a week and sleep with their assistants; how, as Aurélie Filipetti, a socialist representative, complained, male pols and journalists squat on 80 percent of the political space.
Filipetti remembers hearing a male representative say during a ceremony, in front of three female representatives, “Hunting is like women. You always regret the shots you didn’t take.”
Corinne Lepage, a former environment minister, talked about the de trop dirty jokes, recalling how once, when a female representative mentioned a rape, a male colleague called out: “With her face, it’s not going to happen to her.”
Nicole Guedj, a lawyer and former minister, said wistfully of male colleagues: “One thinks, ‘I wish you wouldn’t just look at me. I wish you would listen to me.’ ”
Roselyne Bachelot, a government minister, warned about lechers: “Something important has happened in these last few days. The lifting of a very real omertà, which had been reinforced by a legal arsenal that protected private life. I think that public men have understood that the respect of privacy now has some limits.”
Getting French men to change will still, she said, be pushing up “le rocher de Sisyphe.”
June 1st, 2011
By ALICE RAWSTHORN
NY Times Published: May 29, 2011
LONDON — Walter Maurer’s paint shop in an old aircraft hanger near the Bavarian town of Fürstenfeldbruck is usually filled with racing cars, helicopters, jets and anything else with an engine. This spring it has been cluttered with chunks of aluminum tables on which he has painted boldly colored graphic symbols, just as he does on Formula 1 cars.
The tables were developed by the German designer Konstantin Grcic for “Champions,” an exhibition opening June 10 at Galerie kreo, a contemporary design gallery in Paris. “I love equipment covered with graphics suggesting that the objects are fast, dynamic etc.,” Mr. Grcic said. “I’ve never used graphics or pattern in my work before, but this project isn’t just about decoration. I’m interested in the meaning of the colors, words and symbols, and in what happens if we stick ‘fast’ on to a static piece of furniture.”
Mr. Grcic has been one of the most influential industrial designers of recent years. You could spot (generally dud) copies of his angular style in lots of younger designers’ work at the Milan Furniture Fair last month. Usually Mr. Grcic designs for mass production, and “Champions” is his most ambitious project so far in his development of objects to be made in a limited edition and sold by a gallery. It is also among the most eagerly anticipated design shows of the summer.
Only a few years ago, the collectors’ market for contemporary design was dominated by the record-breaking prices paid at auction for trophy furniture by “design-art” stars such as Marc Newson and Ron Arad. Things changed after several once-coveted works by Mr. Newson failed to elicit bids at a Phillips de Pury auction in New York last spring. There will be a few pieces by Mr. Arad at Christie’s design sale in New York on June 16, but not a stick of contemporary design at Sotheby’s auction on the previous day
“We made a very conscious decision to go purely historical this time,” said James Zemaitis, senior vice president of design at Sotheby’s in New York. “We had a terrific early Ron Arad piece in a sale last December. It was everything that was great about him, and sold for $60,000 to a single bidder. Back in 2007, it would have made $150,000 — no problem.”
That’s the bad news. The good news is that another area of contemporary design collecting is much livelier: The “primary market” of new work developed by designers for commercial galleries, like Mr. Grcic’s “Champions” at kreo.
So much the better. Design purists (including me) loathed the “design-art” bubble, largely because it pandered to the woefully inaccurate but irritatingly pervasive perception that design is all about overpriced chairs. Nor did it always represent designers at their best. The collectors who once splurged up to $2.25 million on a Lockheed Lounge, one of the chaise longues that Mr. Newson made a few years out of design school, could enjoy a more refined example of his practice by buckling into a coach seat in one of the aircraft cabins he has designed for Qantas. Though one lasting benefit of the “design-art” bubble is that it focused the art world’s attention on design.
New commercial galleries have opened to represent contemporary designers. A new generation of design curators has emerged, and there are more collaborations between artists and designers. Among them is “Ernö Goldfinger v. Groucho Marx,” an exhibition by the artist Ryan Gander and the designer Michael Marriott running through June 25 at The Russian Club in London. It is their homage to 2 Willow Road, a Modernist house built in north London in the 1930s by the architect Erno Goldfinger. Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, lived nearby and disliked it so much that he named a particularly nasty villain after its architect.
Design has also been embraced by commercial art galleries. A highlight of the fall will be the September opening of an exhibition by the Italian designer Martino Gamper as the first design show at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin. Already a favorite of influential art collectors including the fashion designer Miuccia Prada, Mr. Gamper is to spend much of the summer in Turin making work for the exhibition, which will fill all nine floors of the gallery’s very tall, very thin, late-19th-century building, known as Fetta di Polenta, or slice of polenta.
More art and design galleries will commission new projects like this from designers in future. Not all them will be as interesting as Mr. Gamper’s, but as the prices of new works sold by galleries in what is called the “primary market” tend to be lower than those of existing pieces when flipped at auction, the work can be more challenging. Predictably, the first wave of contemporary design collectors tended to be attracted to the showiest, though not necessarily the most thoughtful or demanding, works. As the market evolves, collectors are becoming increasingly knowledgeable, and likelier to invest in more complex, experimental projects.
They should find some interesting examples at the Design Miami-Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland, from June 14 to 18. Kreo is to show a new collection of furniture by the French designer Pierre Charpin. Galerie BSL in Paris will exhibit new pieces by the Spanish designer Nacho Carbonell, and Helmrinderknecht in Berlin is to showcase work by the Swiss designer Nicolas Le Moigne.
Gallery Libby Sellers in London will present “Colony,” a new textile project developed by the Italian designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Studio Formafantasma at the Audax Textile Museum in the Dutch city of Tilburg. It explores the complex cultural history of Italy and its former colonies, and the current controversy over immigration.
There will also be some design historical gems on show at Basel, including a 1944 kit house, conceived by the French architect Jean Prouvé as emergency housing for war refugees, which is to be exhibited by the Parisian design dealer Patrick Seguin. The house was designed to be built by three people in a day, and will be constructed from scratch every day of the fair.
May 30th, 2011
Illustration by Sarah Illenberger, Photograph by Ragnar Schmuck
By JONATHAN FRANZEN
NY Times Published: May 28, 2011
A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.
I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.
Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.
Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).
Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.
And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.
When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.
Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.
BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.
And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.
Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.
And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.
How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.
Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.
And who knows what might happen to you then?
Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.
May 28th, 2011
“The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait),” oil on canvas, 1939
By WILLIAM GRIMES
NY Times Published: May 26, 2011
Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist and onetime romantic partner of Max Ernst whose paintings depicted women and half-human beasts floating in a dreamscape of images drawn from myth, folklore, religious ritual and the occult, died on Wednesday in Mexico City, where she lived. She was 94.
The cause was pneumonia, Wendi Norris, the co-owner of Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern gallery in San Francisco, said.
Ms. Carrington, one of the last living links to the world of André Breton, Man Ray and Miró, was an art student when she encountered Ernst’s work for the first time at the International Surrealism Exhibition in London in 1936. A year later she met him at a party.
The two fell in love and ran off to Paris, where Ernst, more than 25 years her senior, left his wife and introduced Ms. Carrington to the Surrealist circle. “From Max I had my education,” she told The Guardian of London in 2007. “I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything.”
She became acquainted with the likes of Picasso, Dalí and Tanguy. With her striking looks and adventurous spirit, she seemed like the ideal muse, but the role did not suit. Miró once handed her a few coins and told her to run out and buy him a pack of cigarettes. “I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself,” she told The Guardian. “I wasn’t daunted by any of them.”
Encouraged by Ernst, she painted and wrote. In 1939 she produced her first truly Surrealist work, “The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait).” Now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it shows an androgynous-looking woman seated in a room with a rocking horse on the wall, extending her hand to a hyena.
Her interest in animal imagery, myth and occult symbolism deepened after she moved to Mexico and entered into a creative partnership with the émigré Spanish artist Remedios Varo. Together the two studied alchemy, the kabbalah and the mytho-historical writings Popol Vuh from what is now Guatemala.
“She was a seeker and a searcher,” said Whitney Chadwick, a professor of art at San Francisco State University and the author of “Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement”(1991). “In her work, she always sought to define moments when one plane of consciousness blends with another.”
In the 1940s and ’50s Ms. Carrington made a small number of carved wooden sculptures, and in her 80s and 90s she produced large-scale bronze sculptures of fantastical quasi-human forms, both comic and horrific, like “How Doth the Little Crocodile.” Located on one of Mexico City’s most prominent avenues, that work depicts a lizardlike oarsman steering a crocodile vessel and its four lizardy passengers on a voyage to places unknown.
Leonora Carrington was born on April 6, 1917, in Clayton Green, Lancashire. Her father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, and she grew up in a grand house, Crookhey Hall, where her Irish nanny entranced her with folk tales.
Her parents, both Roman Catholic, sent her to convent schools, from which she was expelled for eccentric behavior. At their wits’ end, they sent her to study at Mrs. Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence. On returning to Britain, she enrolled in the art school recently established by the French modernist Amédée Ozenfant.
Her father was dead set against her becoming an artist and had insisted that she be presented as a debutante at the court of George V. Her mother was at least mildly encouraging, and, little suspecting the impact it might have, gave her a copy of Herbert Read’s new book on Surrealism, published in 1936. It had a reproduction of a Max Ernst work on the cover.
After Ernst left his wife in 1938, he and Ms. Carrington left Paris and settled in Provence, near Avignon, but the outbreak of World War II put an end to their idyll. Ernst was imprisoned, first by the French and then by the Germans, and Ms. Carrington suffered a breakdown. She described the abusive treatment she received at a mental hospital in Spain in a memoir, “Down Below.” She and Ernst never reunited.
After entering into a marriage of convenience with Renato Leduc, a Mexican writer and friend of Picasso’s, Ms. Carrington made her way to New York, where she had solo shows at the Pierre Matisse Gallery and was included in group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery and at the Museum of Modern Art.
After her marriage was dissolved, she moved to Mexico and lived in Mexico City for the rest of her life, with interruptions. There she married Emeric Weisz, a Hungarian photographer who had been Robert Capa’ s darkroom manager in Paris. It was Mr. Weisz who spirited three cardboard valises filled with negatives of Capa photographs of the Spanish Civil War from Paris to Marseilles, where he was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Algiers. The negatives, believed lost, resurfaced in Mexico City in 2008.
Ms. Carrington is survived by their two sons, Gabriel Weisz-Carrington of Mexico City and Pablo Weisz-Carrington of Midlothian, Va., and five grandchildren.
Ms. Carrington wrote short stories and novels in the same Surrealist vein as her artwork. In 1988, Dutton published “The House of Fear: Notes From Down Below,” an anthology of her work, and “The Seventh Horse and Other Tales.”
She was the subject of Susan Aberth’s “Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art,” published in 2004 .
May 28th, 2011
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Gil Scott-Heron in his Harlem home in 2001.
By BEN SISARIO
NY Times Published: May 28, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.
His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had become ill after returning from a trip to Europe.
Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics.
Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West.
“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”
Mr. Scott-Heron’s career began with a literary rather than a musical bent. He was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, and reared in Tennessee and New York. His mother was a librarian and an English teacher; his estranged father was a Jamaican soccer player.
In his early teens, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote detective stories, and his work as a writer won him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in the Bronx, where he was one of 5 black students in a class of 100. Following in the footsteps of Langston Hughes, he went to the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and he wrote his first novel at 19, a murder mystery called “The Vulture.” A book of verse, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” and a second novel, “The Nigger Factory,” soon followed.
Working with a college friend, Brian Jackson, Mr. Scott-Heron turned to music in search of a wider audience. His first album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” was released in 1970 on Flying Dutchman, a small label, and included a live recitation of “Revolution” accompanied by conga and bongo drums. Another version of that piece, recorded with a full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr. Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971.
“Revolution” established Mr. Scott-Heron as a rising star of the black cultural left, and its cool, biting ridicule of a nation anesthetized by mass media has resonated with the socially disaffected of various stripes — campus activists, media theorists, coffeehouse poets — for four decades. With sharp, sardonic wit and a barrage of pop-culture references, he derided society’s dominating forces as well as the gullibly dominated:
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother.
During the 1970s, Mr. Scott-Heron was seen as a prodigy with significant potential, although he never achieved more than cult popularity. He recorded 13 albums from 1970 to 1982, and was one of the first acts that the music executive Clive Davis signed after starting Arista Records in 1974. In 1979, Mr. Scott-Heron performed at Musicians United for Safe Energy’s “No Nukes” benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, and in 1985, he appeared on the all-star anti-apartheid album “Sun City.”
But by the mid-1980s, Mr. Scott-Heron had begun to fade, and his recording output slowed to a trickle. In later years, he struggled publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at Rikers Island in New York for parole violation.
Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr. Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.
That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”
Complete information about Mr. Scott-Heron’s survivors was not immediately available, but Mr. Byng, his publisher, said that they included a half-brother, Denis Scott-Heron; a son, Rumal; and two daughters, Gia Scott-Heron and Che Newton. Mr. Byng added that Mr. Scott-Heron had recently been working on voluminous memoirs, parts of which he hoped to publish soon.
Despite Mr. Scott-Heron’s public problems, he remained an admired figure in music, and he made occasional concert appearances and was sought after as a collaborator. Last year, XL released “I’m New Here,” his first album of new material in 16 years, which was produced by Richard Russell, a British record producer who met Mr. Scott-Heron at Rikers Island in 2006 after writing him a letter.
Reviews for the album inevitably called Mr. Scott-Heron the “godfather of rap,” but he made it clear he had different tastes.
“It’s something that’s aimed at the kids,” he once said. “I have kids, so I listen to it. But I would not say it’s aimed at me. I listen to the jazz station.”
May 28th, 2011
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: May 26, 2011
Scientists aiming their gene sequencers at commercial seafood are discovering rampant labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful.
Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi. Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role.
Recent studies by researchers in North America and Europe harnessing the new techniques have consistently found that 20 to 25 percent of the seafood products they check are fraudulently identified, fish geneticists say.
Labeling regulation means little if the “grouper” is really catfish or if gulf shrimp were spawned on a farm in Thailand.
Environmentalists, scientists and foodies are complaining that regulators are lax in policing seafood, and have been slow to adopt the latest scientific tools even though they are now readily available and easy to use.
“Customers buying fish have a right to know what the heck it is and where it’s from, but agencies like the F.D.A. are not taking this as seriously as they should,” said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist of the nonprofit group Oceana, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.
On Wednesday, Oceana released a new report titled “Bait and Switch: How Seafood Fraud Hurts Our Oceans, Our Wallets and Our Health.” With rates of fraud in some species found to run as high as 70 percent, the report concluded, the United States needs to “increase the frequency and scope” of its inspections.
DNA bar coding, as it is called, looks at gene sequences in the fish’s flesh. “The genetics have been revolutionary,” said Stefano Mariani, a marine researcher at University College Dublin, who has published research on the topic. “The DNA bar coding technique is now routine, like processing blood or urine. And we should be doing frequent, random spot checks on seafood like we do on athletes.”
Policing the seafood industry has historically been challenging because even the most experienced fishmongers are hard pressed to distinguish certain steaks or fillets without the benefit of scales or fins. And many arrive in supermarkets frozen and topped with an obscuring sauce.
Older laboratory techniques to identify fish meat looked at the mix of proteins in flesh samples, but were unreliable, expensive and cumbersome. Investigators often relied instead on laborious legwork, tracking inconsistent fish names on paperwork as seafood moved across international borders. Eighty-four percent of seafood consumed in the United States is now imported, often passing through a multistep global supply chain.
With the new genetic techniques, the gene sequence found in a fish sample is compared with an electronic reference library like that maintained by the International Barcode of Life Project, which now covers 8,000 varieties of fish compiled by biologists over the last five years. The testing is now relatively cheap: commercial labs charge about $2,000 for analyzing 100 fish samples, for an average of $20 apiece, but the cost is under $1 per sample for labs that own the equipment.
Douglas Karas, a spokesman for the F.D.A., said in an e-mail that the agency had been working with scientists to “validate” DNA testing for several years. It recently purchased gene sequencing equipment for five F.D.A. field laboratories and hoped to use it “on a routine basis” by the end of this year.
This new type of scrutiny could allow hundreds of thousands of samples to be tested each year, rather than the hundreds that are now rigorously analyzed, said Dr. Paul Hebert, scientific director of the Barcode of Life project, based in Guelph, Ontario. In March, the F.D.A. issued an alert to inspectors about mislabeled fish. It had already used bar coding as irrefutable evidence to prosecute sellers or issue warnings involving seafood “misbranding,” Mr. Karas said, much as prosecutors use DNA evidence in sex crime cases.
But it will take time to clamp down on a lucrative and, apparently, widespread practice. Dale Sims, chief fishmonger for Cleanfish, a San Francisco-based supplier of high-end sustainable seafood, said he’d seen thresher shark labeled as shark, swordfish and mahi-mahi all in the same market, as well as many other obvious substitutions.
“It infuriates me but it’s hard to correct,” he said. “I’m embarrassed to say that there’s been a lot of fragmentation in this industry. So if someone is unscrupulous, it’s been easy to get away with it.”
For consumers, the issue is about dollars and cents — wanting to get the quality and type of fish they paid for. “If you’re ordering steak, you would never be served horse meat,” said Dr. Hirshfield of Oceana. “But you can easily be ordering snapper and get tilapia or Vietnamese catfish.”
Environmentalists worry that duped diners may be unwittingly contributing to declining fish stocks, buying food they have been told to avoid. Dr. Hebert said that in testing samples from the United States and Canada, his lab had even detected meat from endangered sharks being sold to diners. “If it were labeled endangered species,” he said, “you couldn’t sell it and you wouldn’t buy it, right?”
Most of the research has been done not by regulators but by individual fish biologists and geneticists; to date no definitive national study has been carried out on the scope of the fraud.
Dana Miller, a doctoral student who worked with Dr. Mariani in Dublin studying the mislabeling of cod, the most popular fish in Ireland, said, “we expected with all the policies and legislation and inspections, the numbers would be pretty low.” But 25 percent of samples of fresh cod and haddock and over 80 percent of the smoked products, were in fact something else. Irish cod stocks are overfished.
“If you can’t even trust that the name is right, then how can you trust anything else on the package, including the date?” she said. In Europe, seafood labels include the fishery where it was caught. In the United States, it must list only a “country of origin” although that is often the processing country rather than where it is caught.
The group Cleanfish is experimenting with an electronic tagging system through which each fisherman or processor would enter his code onto a tag on each fish, making its journey from the sea to the plate fully transparent. Cleanfish buys only whole fish since its outward appearance helps to verify its identity.
And bar coding is becoming more accessible every year. Today, fish samples are sent to labs for testing, but scientists predict that there will be desktop DNA bar coding systems within five years and, in 10, inspectors will carry hand-held detectors.
“Everyone should be using this technique — there should be spot checks and fines,” said Dr. Hebert of the DNA bar coding project. “If there were no speed traps and radar checks, there would be a lot more speeding.”
May 28th, 2011
In this undated file photo released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, inmates sit in crowded conditions at the California Institute for Men in Chino. (Associated Press)
By Steve Lopez
The Los Angeles Times
May 25, 2011
California worked at it, worked at it, worked at it, and finally, we did it.
On Monday, the way we jam inmates into prisons was found to meet the constitutional definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Our achievement here in the Golden State was to incarcerate nearly twice as many people as the prisons were designed to hold, and the amazing thing is that we pulled this off despite building a new prison every year or so. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, has ordered us to thin the herd by 33,000 or so.
The majority opinion called the conditions “appalling” and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy cited “telephone booth-sized cages” and inmates dying of cancer without medical care.
But others warned of disastrous results if inmates are freed, rather than shifted to county facilities, as Gov. Jerry Brown has recommended.
“Terrible things are sure to happen,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia.
Guess what, Mr. Scalia. Terrible things already did happen. That’s how we got to this point.
We locked up thousands of people for the principal crime of having a mental illness, which is Dark Ages terrible if you ask me. And over the last few decades, with legislative and electoral support for longer and harsher sentences, we’ve built a $10-billion industry in which thousands of people were sent to the state slam for nonviolent drug offenses. It would have been smarter to order them into rehab, and it might have cost taxpayers less. But humane, cost-effective policy doesn’t fit our profile.
Nobody is advocating a get-out-of-jail-free card or a light sentence for hard-core tough guys guilty of assault, robbery, rape or murder. But California took a sharp turn in the other direction, to the point where even a former warden and state corrections chief says we’ve been overzealous when it comes to crime and punishment.
“Prison is for seriously violent individuals,” said Jeanne Woodford, the former corrections chief who’s now with the Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at UC Berkeley.
Woodford told me California has run an aggressive “catch and release program,” in which we send tens of thousands of parolees back to state prison each year for violations, many of them minor, that could be handled more cheaply and easily at the county level. In her opinion, we incarcerate “many more prisoners than is necessary for the safety of the public.”
But Woodford and others said the Supreme Court decision is cause for hope, because it forces the state to address the situation.
We’ll be getting it wrong if all we do is transfer state inmates to county jails along with a few bucks to cover the costs, said Joshua Page, author of the new book, “The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California.”
“The main thing that got us to this point was increasing the number of people we send to prison and the length of time they stay there,” Page said. His book documents the legendary clout of the prison guards union, which has spent mega-millions of dollars on tough-on-crime campaigns and stuffed the pockets of political candidates — mostly Democrats — who later delivered the goods for the guards.
Page says the prison population has ballooned for a variety of reasons, including three-strikes legislation, the switch to determinate sentencing, the addition of sentencing enhancements and stricter parole requirements.
Unless the state tackles sentencing reforms, Page said, the combined population of prison and jail inmates won’t change much.
Brown’s so-called realignment proposal, still not enacted because of continued squabbling over the proposed extension of temporary tax increases, could satisfy the Supreme Court requirement by transferring as many as 40,000 low-level offenders to county jurisdiction.
Counties would then have more authority to implement sentencing reforms and send offenders to diversionary programs, such as drug and mental health treatment, rather than to jail.
Even if state legislators act, will the concept work?
Woodford worries that we’ll end up with “58 counties doing it 58 different ways,” and local officials are already wondering if the state will pass along enough cash to cover their new responsibilities.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan, who runs diversionary courts for drug offenders and those with mental illness, said it’s not yet clear “how all of this is going to shake out.”
But he’s a big believer in alternative sentencing and hopes there will be more of it as a result of the Supreme Court ruling.
To him, it’s a no-brainer. Although it’s not easy to treat addiction or mental illness, the best policy is to try to help people get better rather than churn them through courts and prisons, punishing them for the conditions that got them into trouble. Actually, a better use of tax dollars would be to treat those conditions before there’s any crime involved, but that’s for another column.
Right now, Tynan said, L.A. County is diverting only about 10% of the defendants who might be better served by diversionary courts.
And even at that, there’s virtually no funding available for new offenders to be sent into drug treatment.
“I’m very grateful for the opportunity to do what I do,” said Tynan, who holds rousing celebrations for defendants who complete rehab requirements in his program and return to work, home and family, rather than joining the teeming masses behind bars.
“I just wish there were more courts doing it.”
May 25th, 2011
An interview with big wave surfer and great white shark rider Mark Healey. Photograph by Team Effort Films.
By Brendon Thomas
Surfer Magazine June 2011
What’s it like diving with a Great White Shark?
If they want to take you, they’re going to take you. And the only way you’re going to interact with them is if you make yourself completely vulnerable and they make the decision to come to you. So you have to put yourself out there and there’s nothing controlled about it at that point. There can be a million people on the boat, 20 feet behind you, and all of a sudden when that thing tunes in on you, you’re all alone. It’s just you and the shark.
Do you carrying protection?
I was just swimming with my spear gun, just unloaded. Something to put some distance between myself and the shark, hopefully. I was interacting with wild, healthy sharks, and the only reason I’m able to is because they’re coming up out of curiosity. I would definitely not be in the water if they were acting like they wanted to feed.
How do you know if they want to feed or not?
Just by watching their body language. I have a really good idea of how to read sharks and their body language, just because I’m always around them, and I realized that white sharks feed primarily on large marine mammals, which are really intelligent—that’s completely different from any other sharks I’ve been around. So I knew that they were probably a lot smarter. Within the first 10 minutes there was a big one off the back and just showing me everything I wanted to see out of a shark and it’s like ok, time to put my money where my mouth is. I just jumped in and did it. But that first time when it tuned in on me, I’ve never been so intimidated in my life. I shrank to about 6 inches.
After being face to face with one are you more comfortable surfing in sharky areas?
That’s the funny thing. After spending all that time with the sharks, I don’t necessarily feel any better about surfing. And that’s the thing I realized through interacting with them, that they were a lot more intelligent than I expected, and with intelligence comes extra curiosity. You can tell they probably get bored. A couple of them just loved to hang out. They’re bored and had nothing else to do. I was always trying to really approach them well and get away from them seamlessly without spooking them or freaking them out, and a couple of times, I realized I was a little rough or my approach was shitty and I could see him following me with his eye. But then he’d come right back around and offer his dorsal fin to me. It was weird.
So you decided to grab on and ride it…
I rode three different sharks 12 or 15 times. But the thing is, they don’t like everybody. That’s the weird thing. The nicest sharks would kind of get pissed at some other people. Sometimes we’d let go of these fin rides at like 60 feet. And you have to swim up. That’s when other ones that are less dominant come in and you could tell which ones were going to be punchy. And a lot of the times they have a lot of scars.
So the younger ones are more aggressive and want to assert themselves?
Exactly. Those younger ones seem to be willing to take more chances because they’re last in the pecking order. So I
would imagine that they’d be more likely to hit a silhouette. And they would fully try to set you up and hunt you. Like Jurassic Park with the raptors—they fully try to set you up. They’re so smart.
Did you pee in your wetsuit.
Oh yeah, I peed all day in that wetsuit.
Why are you doing this? The sharks, the big waves…
I don’t know, it seems totally normal for me, for what I grew up doing, and maybe I’m so stuck on the inside of it that I can’t see outside, but it’s just the way I grew up and I’m pretty much doing everything that I wanted to do since I was a little kid. I’m getting it all done.
Which would you rather face, a Great White or a giant closeout set?
Closeout set. If a White wants to take you, it’s going to take you. Bottom line. Which they don’t, you know, they don’t want to eat people. It doesn’t seem like. But accidents happen. People get killed in friendly fire in war and humans are pretty intelligent for the most part. Animals make mistakes too.
May 24th, 2011
Untitled, 2010
Oil and wax on panel
50.2 x 37.5 cm
Through June 18, 2011
May 24th, 2011By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: May 23, 2011
That’s the conclusion you may come to after seeing “Cronocaos” at the New Museum. Organized by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, a partner in Mr. Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the show draws on ideas that have been floating around architectural circles for several years now — particularly the view among many academics that preservation movements around the world, working hand in hand with governments and developers, have become a force for gentrification and social displacement, driving out the poor to make room for wealthy homeowners and tourists.
Mr. Koolhaas’s vision is even more apocalyptic. A skilled provocateur, he paints a picture of an army of well-meaning but clueless preservationists who, in their zeal to protect the world’s architectural legacies, end up debasing them by creating tasteful scenery for docile consumers while airbrushing out the most difficult chapters of history. The result, he argues, is a new form of historical amnesia, one that, perversely, only further alienates us from the past.
“Cronocaos” was first shown at the 2010 architecture biennale in Venice, the ultimate example of what can happen to an aged city when it is repackaged for tourists. In New York the show is housed in a former restaurant-supply store next to the museum on the Bowery, in a neighborhood where the threats to urban diversity include culture as well as tourism. The Bowery’s lively bar scene has been pushed out by galleries and boutiques. CBGB, the former rock club, is a John Varvatos store.
To highlight this transformation, Mr. Koolhaas and Mr. Shigematsu have kept the supply store’s yellow awning, painting the show’s title directly over the old lettering. Inside, the architects drew a line down the middle of the space, transforming one side into a pristine white gallery and leaving the other raw and untouched.
The result is startling. The uneven, patched-up floors and soiled walls of the old space look vibrant and alive; the new space looks sterile, an illustration of how even the minimalist renovations favored by art galleries today, which often are promoted as ways of preserving a building’s character, can cleanse it of historical meaning. (To sharpen the contrast further, Mr. Koolhaas scattered a few beat-up tables and chairs, salvaged when CBGB was closed five years ago, throughout the room.)
This has become a global phenomenon. All over the world, historic centers are being sanitized of signs of age and decay, losing any sense of the identity that buildings accumulate over time. Facades are carefully scrubbed clean; interiors, often blending minimalist white walls and a few painstakingly restored historic details, are reduced to a bland perfection. And new buildings are designed in watered-down period styles, further eroding the distinction between what’s real and what’s fake, and producing what Mr. Koolhaas calls a “low-grade, unintended timelessness.”
Mr. Koolhaas argues that this process continues to spread. Using an assortment of graphs and charts, he claims that 12 percent of the earth’s surface has already been landmarked by groups like Unesco, and that figure is expected to rise steeply in the near future. What’s more, the age of what is being preserved continues to shrink. In the late 19th century only ancient monuments received legal protection; today buildings that are 30 years old are regularly listed as historic sites. (Mr. Koolhaas’s own architecture is part of this trend. A house he designed in Bordeaux, France, was declared a national monument only three years after its completion in 1998.)
This phenomenon is coupled with another disturbing trend: the selective demolition of the most socially ambitious architecture of the 1960s and ’70s — the last period when architects were able to do large-scale public work. That style has been condemned as a monstrous expression of Modernism.
In Germany monuments like the Palast der Republik, whose government offices, restaurants and nightclubs were once the social heart of East Berlin, became shorthand for a period many West Germans wanted to forget. Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 capsule tower, one of the most radical housing experiments built in postwar Japan, lies in a state of ruin, awaiting demolition. To Mr. Koolhaas, these examples are part of a widespread campaign to stamp out an entire period in architectural history — a form of censorship that is driven by ideological as much as aesthetic concerns.
The New Museum show is essentially a manifesto, of course, but what saves it from becoming pure polemic is that Mr. Koolhaas is a first-rate architect as well as an original thinker. Some of the best parts of the show involve his efforts to find ways out of this mess.
A 1995 competition design for an expansion of Zurich international airport sought to make sense of what had become a confusing labyrinth of mismatched terminals built over several decades. Rather than tear down the existing structures, Mr. Koolhaas proposed filling in leftover spaces between them with centralized entrance halls and new retail zones. He then created a circulation route to tie it all together. The experience would have been more like traveling though a real city than through a conventional airport. By keeping the various historical layers intact, and playing up their differences, he aimed to breathe new life into a dead environment. (The plan was rejected.)
In another, more extreme proposal, from 2003, Mr. Koolhaas suggested creating preservation sectors in Beijing, in which everything from traditional hutongs to postwar Communist housing blocks would be protected, along with the way of life they housed. The rest of the city would be a kind of free-for-all, where planners and architects could experiment with new ideas and urban strategies without the crushing burden of history.
Not all of his ideas are viable; some seem intended mainly to challenge conventional wisdom about preservation and its benefits, and in doing so, to liberate architecture just a little from stale ideas. Yet Mr. Koolhaas’s bigger point is worth paying attention to: in the realm of preservation, as in so much else, we seem to have become a world terrified of too much direct contact with reality.
“Cronocaos” is on view through June 5 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.
May 24th, 2011
I Love NY Bag, 2011
C-print
69.5 x 51.7 in (176.5 x 131.3 cm)
Through July 2, 2011
May 23rd, 2011