A Group Show of Film and Video
Curated by Erika Vogt

Monday, February 28, 8:30pm
REDCAT Theater
$9 [students $7, CalArts $5]

This screening is an experiment. It is a group show in a theater that calls for cooperative public focus. The screening itself is a chorus of parts that includes moving parts, speaking parts, skeletal parts, muscle parts, parts for the eyes, parts for the senses, parts for thought, and parts for the imagination. The program began with a desire to focus on a group of film and video works utilizing the screening as a site for experience. It was also initiated as a community building effort. Each work in tonight’s program shares in its potential to engage with both theater and audience. Jean Marie Straub’s and Danièle Huillet’s Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice introduces the program. When I watch this film, I think of potential. Although it’s enigmatic and is tied to layers of political and artistic practices, each specific in its intent, as a reader and artist, I respond to the work through its details. The way the players look off screen. They way they speak the text. The geometry of their space, implied as shared through their off screen directions but notably separate in their topography. – Erika Vogt

The screening includes works by Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Math Bass, Madison Brookshire and Tashi Wada, Shannon Ebner, Alice Konitz, Adam Putnam, Lucy Raven, Paul Sietsema, James Welling and the activist group W.A.G.E (Working Artists and the Greater Economy).

Redcat

Overduin and Kite

Untitled, 2011 (detail)
stoneware with glaze, acrylic paint, and oil paint
25 x 10 x 10 inches
(63.5 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm)

March 3 – 6, 2011, David Kordansky Booth 615 at The Armory

Julie Burleigh with the fertilizer-producing bunnies. Photograph by Ann Summa

The Los Angeles Times
February 23, 2011
By: Jeff Spurrier

It’s a typical story: An empty lot where a house has burned down lies deserted for decades. It becomes a gang hangout, a place to walk dogs.

That was the situation on Raymond Avenue in West Adams, and for years artist Julie Burleigh wondered about turning the lot across from her house into a community garden. In the summer of 2007 she approached Al Renner, executive director of the L.A. Community Garden Council, for advice on how to convert the space, then waist high in cheese weed.

He put her on the path, detailing the setup steps and mentioned the four types of committee garden government he had seen over the years: rule by committee, by tribal consensus, or by benevolent or non-benevolent dictatorship.

“I was a benevolent dictator,” she says, laughing, noting that community gardens can be little microcosms of bad government. “Six months ago I stepped back so it’s more collective. Now it’s all just life lessons.”

The garden is on a quiet residential street, a block over from a cluster of immaculate Craftsman homes, a popular film location because it’s a dead-ringer for Ohio. In 2008, 37 raised bed plots were put in, city mulch delivered, and spaces allotted.

And now, three years later, Burleigh says she can see what she did wrong in her original design. The plots are 5 feet by 10 feet, neither too small nor too large, she thought at the time. In hindsight, she says, fewer and longer, narrower beds make more sense. Five feet is too wide to work easily and with a larger bed — 4 x 15 — it’s easier to see if something, or someone, is failing. Eighty percent of the gardeners live within a two-block walk — also a factor for success, she’s discovered.

Another lesson she has learned is don’t try too much, or, bunnies yes, bees no. She had bought a couple of hives but neither prospered so they’ll be coming out this spring. The rabbits in the hutch in the back, however, are doing fine, and will soon be moved to a larger and more protected cage in the shade of the meeting area. Momma Bun-bun just delivered six babies and every few days the trays beneath the cages are full with their prized poop — the only manure you can put directly on the garden without composting first. “I learn almost daily that you can never build the soil too much,” says Burleigh. “This soil is really hungry. It needs food all the time.”

The weeds in the soil are less fickle and even with raised beds and mulch remain a problem. Her solution is sheet mulching. To keep her plot clear, she laid down triple over-lapping layers of cardboard both inside and outside the wooden frame, wet thoroughly, and topped it all off with 6 to 12 inches of mulch.

What the bunnies don’t provide, Ivan Palencia’s compost worms do. He’s in charge of the garden’s three-bin compost system and doesn’t use tools. “I use my bare hands because I don’t want to harm the worms,” he says, pushing the earth aside to scoop out a handful. It blooms suddenly into serpentine writhing. “See how they are working for us? They are my babies.”

In his plot, Palencia has a bush of the sweetener stevia growing along with an onion variety he found sprouting in the compost, seasons back. It wanted to grow so he planted it. Now he’s letting the last of its children go to flower to collect the seeds for the third generation. It likes the spot, he says.

New gardeners Vanessa Guerra and Paul Scherzberg stand over their plot, a little startled perhaps by the vigor of the seeds they scattered a few months back. Although the lettuce heads are fat with leaves, they haven’t harvested anything yet. “We thought we had to wait longer,” says Scherzberg.

No, says Janet Sanchez, Burleigh’s assistant and an active gardener, driving in from Santa Fe Springs. Don’t wait to pick the whole head, start harvesting the bottom leaves now and they’ll last longer.

And the more you eat from the garden, the more it delivers. Burleigh knows that. She gets about 40% of the family produce from the garden. “It has changed my eating habits totally. I eat at least one big salad every day. That was not the case a few years ago.”

Thanks to Rodney Hill

Ettore Sottsass
Rug for Max Palevsky (1984)

LAMA March 6 Auction

Blinky Palermo, “Untitled,” 1968. Cotton. 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in. (200 x 200 cm)

Retrospective 1964-1977

Opens February 24 through May 15, 2011

Hirshhorn

James Welling, “War” (2005)

The field of photography is constantly changing. Technologies, theories, and what consti­tutes a ‘photographer’ or a ‘photograph’ are prone to unending developments. In the last decade, this rapid transformation has only accelerated due to pervasive digitization. Paradoxically, one might say that photography is now in a simi­lar place to where it was during the first few decades of its invention––a time when its emerging cultural significance quickly expanded due to innovative technological developments. Similarly, in the last two decades, we have seen an expanding definition of photography through the digital revolution, the Internet, and the accelerated stream of interest in new photographic processes and applications. Thus, it is impor­tant to reflect on this current moment – with the rapidly increasing permeation of photography throughout contemporary life – on what is the importance of photography as a specific medium or discipline from the perspective of a practitioner, user, pedagogue, technologist, historian, among others. Furthermore, how can we evaluate contemporary culture within the expanding photographic field while speculating the future of images? The Photographic Universe: A Conference will attempt to answer these questions through broad artistic, scientific, cultural, sociopolitical arcs to examine the implications of images in contemporary life.

The event is free and open to the public.

The Photographic Universe

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 20, 2011

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers — namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning — are exempted from the ban; it’s as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

THE WATERFALL (C55), 1981
Gelatin silver contact print
9 ½ x 7 ½ in.

Excellent Website/Archive

By SAM LIPSYTE
Published: February 19, 2011

I HATE cheats. They cut the line and snatch the bargain. They sweet-talk the customer service rep into bending the rules. They count cards and win the raffle with some sneaky ticket placement. They are the 100th caller every time. They trick you on mileage or square footage and bribe their way up the organ transplant list. They pump and dump their stocks, their families, their friends. They get ahead and they win. We lose. Then they explain ever so condescendingly that it’s not a zero-sum game.

I never cheated much as a child, not on tests or papers, not at Go Fish or poker or even board games like Sorry or Risk. It’s been the same since. I pay my taxes, under-claim expenses, give mistaken change back to the cashier. I don’t lie on applications. I’d probably fill out my own death warrant with civic-minded meticulousness.

I’m not bragging. I find this part of me repellent. I’m not noble or good. I’m adult enough to know that the victories of cheats don’t feel hollow to them. They live happy lives. They don’t think they are cheats. They consider themselves warriors of life.

The fact is, I don’t cheat because I’m scared of getting caught, and I will be caught, because my fear will give me away.

You have to hand it to cheats. They have drive and nerve, though their ends tend toward the nefarious. Many great fortunes, from those of the robber barons to those of the robber geeks, bear some taint, an original murk, land wheedled here, software appropriated there. The upright schmoes just stood around, bewildered, fleeced.

We often claim otherwise, but cheating helped build the wealth of this country. That and murder, slavery and outright theft, of course, but the subject here is cheating. Our capitalist system has always harbored cheats, catapulted them through loopholes into riches and glory. The country has paid dearly for it. Predatory loan, anyone?

Still, I was raised to believe that America was the one place you didn’t have to cheat. Hard work alone would deliver you. I think I learned this from a filmstrip at school. Boy, was that filmstrip wrong, and now it seems that Hasbro, the board game manufacturer, agrees.

The company has unveiled a new version of Monopoly, that Depression-era invention that along with screwball comedies made Americans in the 1930s think they might one day laugh non-psychotically and own property again. Monopoly Live has done away with dice, as well as the Chance and Community Chest Cards. Instead, standing in the center of the board is an ominous infrared tower that speaks to players like some regulatory Yahweh, keeping track of their money and making sure they move the right spaces and stick to the rules. No more Uncle Wilbur demanding to be banker so he can slip some bright bills under the board for later. No more illegal renting or avoidance of the auction rules.

Actually, with the dark ziggurat running the show, nobody has to worry about even knowing the rules: “Getting rid of the instruction book encourages a lot more face-to-face interaction,” Jane Ritson-Parsons, the global brand leader for Monopoly, told The Times earlier this week. “If you’re not having to read as much, you are all chatting more.”

The same holds true, I gather, for the Constitution, your lease or your employment contract. Forget the fine print: chat!

The tower of power also has ways of speeding up the game, or throwing random curveballs, like a hastily announced horse race upon which everyone must bet. No plans for a terrorist attack or market crash have been mentioned so far, but those could certainly add urgency and excitement to the game.

Most important, however, is that the tower prevents cheating; indeed, its mandate to monitor transactions and investigate irregularities seems to be going the distances the Obama administration has only gestured toward. People will differ on the consequences of this for our 8- to 12-year-olds, to whom the new game is pitched. It might instill good citizenship, but some experts believe it will stifle the creativity and socializing so necessary in our chatty era. Chiseling your family and friends trains you for the real world.

But even if the game really does prevent cheating, it also might inadvertently reveal the Big Cheat, the entire matrix of money and land and development and investment that’s already locked down, and show the overwhelming majority of young players how they will never share a board with the ultra-elites. Why have Chance cards, after all, when each one would have to read: “Congratulations, you belong to the half of 1 percent of the population that owns most of the wealth!”

So maybe I love cheats — cheats who are doing it for the common good, who are flouting the rules that bind us to an unfair system. That’s why I can’t wait to play the new version of the game with my own children: Monopoly Live might just prove a wonderful incubator of little resisters to the stale and broken ideas we keep trotting out about our level American playing field of dreams.

The truth is that most children follow rules if they are fair. Kids like order, or structure, as long as it’s not oppressive. But they can sniff out the fix, the rigged game, better than many political scientists and economists. Look at how the young people in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries have managed to call their despots’ bluffs.

However friendly and interactive that Monopoly tower might seem, maybe our own kids will work together to do an end run around the authoritarian monolith in the center of their world. And after they’ve torn down that huge plastic hegemon, they can all pass Go and head to the kitchen for equal shares of oatmeal cookies.

Sam Lipsyte is the author, most recently, of “The Ask.”

Luis Camnitzer, 1966

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: February 16, 2011

Some stars take longer than others to come into telescopic range. Such is the case with Luis Camnitzer, who, in his early 70s and with a half-century career behind him, is just now having his first New York museum survey.

The show, at El Museo del Barrio, is terse, almost to the vanishing point in places, as might be expected from one of the pioneers of 1960s Conceptualism. Much of what’s here is based on printed language: cryptic propositions, random lists of words and descriptive phrases — unmoored from, or very loosely tethered to, other spare-to-barely-there visual matter.

As elusive as the work looks, there’s a truth-in-advertising directness to it. From an early point, Mr. Camnitzer made clear that for him art was not about claiming mastery of a medium or refining an identifiable style. He wanted to use very basic, unglamorous visual and linguistic tools to clear a zone for thinking, without interference from the market or pressure to be predictable.

He has remained steadfast in that quixotic resolve, supporting himself primarily as a teacher and critic. Only fairly recently has the mainstream art world begun to show some serious interest in meeting him on his own terms.

Mr. Camnitzer was born in Germany in 1937. Two years later his family emigrated to Uruguay, and he grew up in Montevideo. He went to art school there, then briefly studied sculpture in Munich, before coming to New York City in the early 1960s, at which point he was making prints and topical cartoons, Expressionist in style.

With its potential for cheap production and wide distribution, printmaking has had a long history in Latin America, particularly as a political vehicle. And its utopian dimension made it a popular medium in the United States in the context of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. But Mr. Camnitzer began to find his skill with Expressionism to be a problem. It gained him attention, but it was too easy, demanded minimal thought. He felt he had to throw a wrench into the works.

With two émigré South American artists — Liliana Porter, whom he married, and José Guillermo Castillo — he founded the New York Graphics Workshop in a borrowed studio apartment in Manhattan, and began to push his printmaking in experimental directions, using unorthodox formats (printing on the side of a ream of paper, on cookies), and taking words as his primary visual elements.

In 1966 he made what he considers his first Conceptual piece, which was closer to a relief sculpture than to a print. It consisted of two unpunctuated phrases run together — “This is a Mirror You Are a Written Sentence” — spelled out in raised black plastic lettering against the light ground of what looked like an ordinary pegboard.

What did the words mean? That our reaction, positive or negative, to art is entirely scripted by habit and context? Or is there some other meaning relating to psychoanalytic theories of perception of a kind that fascinated many Latin American artists at that time? One thing was certain: the piece was intended to provoke thought and questions.

Other such works followed immediately, all making unorthodox uses of workaday media. From 1966 came a series of adhesive labels rubber-stamped and offset-printed with absurdist architectural proposals: “Ten story building with Styrofoam flowing out of the windows,” “A room with the center point of the ceiling touching the floor.” In the spirit of democratic distribution, the labels were suitable for mailing.

In the 1968 installation called “Living Room,” which has been recreated at El Museo, Mr. Camnitzer cooked up a full-scale architectural interior from words. All of the room’s elements — windows, desk, bookcase, carpet — were defined entirely by printed labels stuck to a gallery’s walls and floor. Labels printed with the word “window” outlined a window; labels printed “bookcase” outlined a bookcase. The piece was meant to be satirical: how boring bourgeois homes were, including his own, with everything generically tagged. At the same time, he was gladdened to see that the words could affect physical behavior. He observed that although visitors felt free to walk straight across the area of the floor marked “carpet,” they tended to walk around the area marked “desk.”

It’s worth noting that Mr. Camnitzer began using printed language as a primary art medium slightly before better-known North American Conceptualists like Lawrence Weiner. The catalog reminds us of this, chiefly to emphasize that postwar Latin American vanguard art was not, as it is often taken to have been, a passive recipient of Euro-American influence, but had developed ideas in advance of, in tandem with, or entirely apart from, art going on elsewhere.

For years Mr. Camnitzer made apartness a kind of personal ethic, which didn’t mean that he ignored the art market and its arbitrary values. To the contrary, he has commented on these subjects repeatedly. In a long series of print-based works from the 1960s onward, he offered his signature for sale, either hand-written or in different print formats — laser-cut, silk-screened, or ink-stamped — and priced according to conventional market hierarchies based on original versus copy, glamour of medium, etc. The hand-written signature was marketed as a master drawing. Ink-stamped signatures, with the purchaser doing the stamping, were low-end products.

With such work , Mr. Camnitzer was a precursor of the strain of recent Conceptual art known as institutional critique, which takes the art industry as its target. At the same time, though, he was directing his attention to more serious political subjects.

Although he didn’t leave Uruguay as a refugee, he had a strong reaction to the military dictatorship that eventually took control there. And his photo-and-text-based project called “From the Uruguayan Torture Series,” from 1983-84, remains one of the most potent, under-your-skin responses made by any artist to the nightmare phenomenon of the “disappeared” in Latin America.

Although widely exhibited a few years ago at, among other places, El Museo, this piece isn’t in the survey, which in general de-emphasizes Mr. Camnitzer’s topical and polemical work. This may be because of the source of the material exhibited: everything is from the permanent collection of a single museum, the Daros Latinamerica in Zurich, which opened in 2000.

Whether the Daros curators, Hans-Michael Herzog and Katrin Steffen, were constrained in their choices by what was on hand, or whether they set out to offer a particular view of Mr. Camnitzer’s career, I don’t know. But a particular, and partial, view is what we get.

There is certainly some polemical work here. The 1991 installation called “The Journey,” consisting of three big carving knives thrusting out of the gallery wall and engraved with the names “Nina,” “Pinta” and “Santa Maria,” is a blatant anti-colonial statement. It’s also a reminder that anti-colonial impulse shaped much Conceptual art from Latin America, distinguishing it from Duchamp-inspired Conceptualism in the United States. (It says much about the distance Mr. Camnitzer kept from international art world trends that his art stays close to a Latin American Conceptual model, even though he created most of it while living in and around New York.)

What the show conveys most decisively, though, is a poetic side of Mr. Camnitzer’s art. Various writers have compared his text-driven pieces to concrete poetry — a genre based on how words function visually, rather than verbally, and that takes the instability of language as a given. The artist himself rejects this reading, insisting that he has no interest in poetry, even dislikes what he sees as its artificiality and penchant for ego-centered sentimentality.

But if you don’t view poetry as sentimental and ego-fixated by definition, and instead view it as a form of language that can evoke visual images and infuse them with ideas in peculiarly expansive combinations, then poetic isn’t such a bad description of some of what’s here.

A constellation of studio-floor scraps floats across a gallery wall, each scrap labeled with a single, random written word — “Error,” “Duty,” “Doubt” — that hints at large histories that we overlook and sweep away. In a photograph, we see a hand — the artist’s?, God’s? — holding a thin metal outline of a book against the sky, as if to absorb the cosmos. In a 2001-2 installation, stacks of real books fill two rectangular holes in the wall and are cemented into place, as if to protect from an invasion or to prevent escape from a bunker-library at the end of the world.

This piece, called “Window,” identifies a trail of darkness and pessimism that runs through Mr. Camnitzer’s art, and different surveys — there will surely be others — will want to track that. But the present sighting of his career is a bright one, and El Museo, which has come up with an immaculate installation in its modestly scaled spaces, is an ideal observatory.

“Luis Camnitzer” remains through May 29
at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem; (212) 831-7272.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The artist Lynda Benglis is the subject of a retrospective at the New Museum.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: February 17, 2011

The New Museum has become a busy place this year, and it is not yet even March. In January it opened a popular tribute to the market-hardy paintings of George Condo. Now it is offering a startlingly excellent resurrection of the prescient Post-Minimalist renegade Lynda Benglis and her gaudy, multidexterous and often gender-bending segues among Process, Performance and Body Art.

Ms. Benglis is something of a mythic character, as many female artists of the 1960s and early ’70s are by now. Working in pigmented latex, beeswax or polyurethane foam and even glitter, she made daring, often ephemeral or fragile works that have plenty of historical weight but little market presence.

Permanence seems to have been the last thing on her mind, at least in the early years. Many pieces were temporary installations that did not survive; others had the kind of willful fragility that makes collectors nervous. One of her most famous works is nothing but a brilliantly orchestrated magazine ad: a performance-slash-photograph that ran in the November 1974 issue of Artforum for which she posed, taut and well-oiled, wearing only a pair of rhinestone-studded cat-eye sunglasses and wielding a dildo.

Ms. Benglis was born near New Orleans in Lake Charles, La., in 1941. Her father was the American-born son of Greek immigrants who returned to their homeland, and she visited her grandmother in Megisti, on the Greek island of Kastellorizo, several times as a child and young woman. The decorative bravado of New Orleans Mardi Gras and the figurative tradition of Classical Greek sculpture are two points on the aesthetic compass worth keeping in mind when encountering her works.

After studying art at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College for Women at Tulane University in New Orleans, she arrived in New York in the mid-1960s and proceeded to become something of an art star. In 1970 she was anointed by Life magazine, with an article that compared her to Jackson Pollock. It showed her pouring big, bright, irresistible slurps of latex on the floor, making a resolutely abstract installation piece that spoke loud and clear of its own making. Borrowing variously from Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Pop Art and Minimalism in their embrace of process, vivid, physically intrinsic color and nontraditional materials, the poured-latex pieces look these days about as bona-fide Post-Minimalist as you can get.

But while Ms. Benglis embraced her generation’s devotion to soft, unstructured materials that had minds of their own, she abjured its predilection for gray-on-gray drabness or, at most, real-world color. She was on board with the concept of making art that didn’t look like art, of avoiding traditional forms of painting and sculpture by knocking their heads together. But she had no intention of relinquishing an iota of the visual power or immediacy staked out by preceding postwar art movements.

The New Museum organized this exhibition in concert with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin; Le Consortium in Dijon, France; and the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Given this broad-based genesis, the catalog is suitably profuse, full of essays, reproductions of long-lost installation pieces and series of works not represented in the show.

Usually this would be irritating. Ms. Benglis is a restless artist always trying new materials and techniques, undeterred by the prospect of diluting her brand or making works that don’t necessarily scream Benglis at us. But the show’s 50 works — including videos that predict the work of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley — span more than 40 years and touch most of the important bases. They have for the most part been elegantly installed by Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s chief curator.

From the beginning nothing was beyond the pale when it came to making a visual statement. Not even glowing in the dark, thanks to phosphorescent pigment. This is exemplified by the eerily glowing five-part “Phantom,” seen in a darkened gallery. Unexhibited since it was created on the spot at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., in 1971, it is the only intact survivor of six or eight ambitious foam-pour installations that Ms. Benglis made during these years. Its melting, cantilevered (and self-supporting) cascades of iridescent whiteness spring off the wall as if determined to escape all conventional art categories while burning holes in your visual memory — both of which they still do.

In the 1970s Ms. Benglis was constantly out there on her own, stopping traffic and irritating people with her innate sense of personal flamboyance, her penchant for formal excess and her calculated manipulations of art-world standards, the most extreme instance of which was of course the Artforum ad. It precipitated irate letters to the editor, the resignation of several longtime writers and the forcible separation of ad from magazine by various college librarians. (The catalog includes a photograph of an exfoliated magazine.)

To this exhibition’s credit the Artforum ad — which remains almost picture perfect in its heady confusion of gender, Hollywood and camp — is displayed in a vitrine in a back gallery, beside the Life magazine spread and across from five little-known grids of Polaroids from the same time that echo its overheated eroticism. It is but a small part of a much larger and more complex picture in which deviation, volatility and the body are explored along largely formal, abstract lines, with eccentric, often liquid materials reigning supreme.

There are two latex pieces — “Blatt” and “Contraband,” both from 1969 — at the New Museum. Slightly wrinkled and dusty, they still communicate an implicitly bodily, erotic juiciness. These works unleash Pollock’s drips from the rhythmic ordering of his looping gestures, bypassing his famous “dance” for a more visceral, unruly conjuring of the body, almost turned inside out and reduced to a kind of puddle of slithering color.

This exhibition stresses Ms. Benglis’s dual role as innovator and commentator, adept at extending ideas of her mostly male contemporaries while also skewing and skewering them with her own implicitly libidinous sensibility. The latex pieces are exuberant, Disneyfied retorts to Richard Serra’s splashings of molten lead. Her narrow, jewel-colored wax paintings from the same time take the waxen surfaces of Brice Marden’s early monochrome panel paintings to extremes: a brush width across and a brush stroke long, they maintain the integrity of each new layer of color with mouthwatering clarity, while building up a surface that feels dangerously (which is to say erotically) like skin itself.

From the foundation of the wax paintings and the latex pieces, this exhibition follows Ms. Benglis as she improvises her way from one series to the next. She adds foam and dimensionality to her floor pieces and then makes them leap off the wall in works like “Phantom.” In the mid-1970s she begins casting some foam sculptures in aluminum, lead and bronze, destroying them while contrasting their comical forms with the sober, more lasting materials of traditional sculpture.

Meanwhile the wax paintings, which here span from 1966 to 1972, give way to works like “Hoofers I” and “Hoofers II,” thin columns of aluminum screening covered with cheesecloth dipped in plaster that she swabbed with glitter. Next she knots these columns, evoking Pollock’s dripped skeins in three dimensions and then adding Pollock-like drips of paint and glitter, as beautifully exemplified by the 1973 “PSI.” Later knots are sprayed with metal and then elaborated with Fortuny-like folds.

In one gallery “Minos,” a simple torsolike wall piece in gold leaf over chicken wire and plaster, from 1978, contrasts with the extravagant “Zanzidae, From the Peacock Series,” a 1979 wall piece that incorporates glass and plastic in various forms and wouldn’t look out of place at Mardi Gras or in Zeffirelli’s production of “Turandot.” Also here are more recent excursions into glass and ceramics, mossy rubberized foam and pigmented urethane, which has a jellylike translucence.

Whether you have been watching Ms. Benglis’s varied career for decades or know her primarily from the latex pieces and her star turn in Artforum, this exhibition pulls together and elaborates her remarkable career in a thrilling way. It proves her work to be at once all over the place and very much of a piece, as well as consistently, irrepressibly ahead of its time. This would seem to be every renegade artist’s dream.

Paper Citizen 4329, 2011
Chromogenic print mounted on aluminum
63 3/8 x 49 3/4 inches (161 x 126.3 cm)
Framed: 66 1/8 x 52 1/2 inches (168 x 133.4 cm)

Through March 12, 2011

Daniel Buchholz

Through March 6, 2011

Miguel Abreu

John Cuneo

Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism is still gluttony.
By B. R. Myers
The Atlantic Monthly
March 2011

We have all dined with him in restaurants: the host who insists on calling his special friend out of the kitchen for some awkward small talk. The publishing industry also wants us to meet a few chefs, only these are in no hurry to get back to work. Anthony Bourdain’s new book, his 10th, is Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. In it he announces, in his trademark thuggish style, that “it is now time to make the idea of not cooking ‘un-cool’—and, in the harshest possible way short of physical brutality, drive that message home.” Having finished the book, I think I’d rather have absorbed a few punches and had the rest of the evening to myself. No more readable for being an artsier affair is chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, Blood, Bones and Butter.

It’s quite something to go bare-handed up an animal’s ass … Its viscera came out with an easy tug; a small palmful of livery, bloody jewels that I tossed out into the yard.

Then there’s Kim Severson’s Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, which is the kind of thing that passes for spiritual uplift in this set. “What blessed entity invented sugar and cacao pods and vanilla beans or figured out that salt can preserve and brighten anything?” And I thought I knew where that sentence was going. The flyleaf calls Spoon Fed “a testament to the wisdom that can be found in the kitchen.” Agreed.

To put aside these books after a few chapters is to feel a sense of liberation; it’s like stepping from a crowded, fetid restaurant into silence and fresh air. But only when writing such things for their own kind do so-called foodies truly let down their guard, which makes for some engrossing passages here and there. For insight too. The deeper an outsider ventures into this stuff, the clearer a unique community comes into view. In values, sense of humor, even childhood experience, its members are as similar to each other as they are different from everyone else.

For one thing, these people really do live to eat. Vogue’s restaurant critic, Jeffrey Steingarten, says he “spends the afternoon—or a week of afternoons—planning the perfect dinner of barbecued ribs or braised foie gras.” Michael Pollan boasts in The New York Times of his latest “36-Hour Dinner Party.” Similar schedules and priorities can be inferred from the work of other writers. These include a sort of milk-toast priest, anthologized in Best Food Writing 2010, who expounds unironically on the “ritual” of making the perfect slice:

The things involved must be few, so that their meaning is not diffused, and they must somehow assume a perceptible weight. They attain this partly from the reassurance that comes of being “just so,” and partly by already possessing the solidity of the absolutely familiar.

And when foodies talk of flying to Paris to buy cheese, to Vietnam to sample pho? They’re not joking about that either. Needless to say, no one shows much interest in literature or the arts—the real arts. When Marcel Proust’s name pops up, you know you’re just going to hear about that damned madeleine again.

It has always been crucial to the gourmet’s pleasure that he eat in ways the mainstream cannot afford. For hundreds of years this meant consuming enormous quantities of meat. That of animals that had been whipped to death was more highly valued for centuries, in the belief that pain and trauma enhanced taste. “A true gastronome,” according to a British dining manual of the time, “is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.” But for the past several decades, factory farms have made meat ever cheaper and—as the excellent book The CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] Reader makes clear—the pain and trauma are thrown in for free. The contemporary gourmet reacts by voicing an ever-stronger preference for free-range meats from small local farms. He even claims to believe that well-treated animals taste better, though his heart isn’t really in it. Steingarten tells of watching four people hold down a struggling, groaning pig for a full 20 minutes as it bled to death for his dinner. He calls the animal “a filthy beast deserving its fate.”

Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as “gods,” to restaurants as “temples,” to biting into “heaven,” etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face. The mood at a dinner table depends on the quality of food served; if culinary perfection is achieved, the meal becomes downright holy—as we learned from Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), in which a pork dinner is described as feeling “like a ceremony … a secular seder.”

The moral logic in Pollan’s hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans—from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals—but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. This has much to do with the fact that the nation’s media tend to leave the national food discourse to the foodies in their ranks. To people like Pollan himself. And Severson, his very like-minded colleague at The New York Times. Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size? (The “slow food” movement that we keep hearing about has fewer than 20,000 members nationwide.)

The same bias is apparent in writing that purports to be academic or at least serious. The book Gluttony (2003), one of a series on the seven deadly sins, was naturally assigned to a foodie writer, namely Francine Prose, who writes for the gourmet magazine Saveur. Not surprisingly, she regards gluttony primarily as a problem of overeating to the point of obesity; it is “the only sin … whose effects are visible, written on the body.” In fact the Catholic Church’s criticism has always been directed against an inordinate preoccupation with food—against foodie-ism, in other words—which we encounter as often among thin people as among fat ones. A disinterested writer would likely have done the subject more justice. Unfortunately, even the new sociological study Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape is the product of two self-proclaimed members of the tribe, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, who pull their punches accordingly; the introduction is titled “Entering the Delicious World of Foodies.” In short, the 21st-century gourmet need fear little public contradiction when striking sanctimonious poses.

The same goes for restaurant owners like Alice Waters. A celebrated slow-food advocate and the founder of an exclusive eatery in Berkeley, she is one of the chefs profiled in Spoon Fed. “Her streamlined philosophy,” Severson tells us, is “that the most political act we can commit is to eat delicious food that is produced in a way that is sustainable, that doesn’t exploit workers and is eaten slowly and with reverence.” A vegetarian diet, in other words? Please. The reference is to Chez Panisse’s standard fare—Severson cites “grilled rack and loin of Magruder Ranch veal” as a typical offering—which is environmentally sustainable only because so few people can afford it. Whatever one may think of Anthony Bourdain’s moral sense, his BS detector seems to be working fine. In Medium Raw he congratulates Waters on having “made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification and fetishism look good.” Not to everyone, perhaps, but okay.

The Roman historian Livy famously regarded the glorification of chefs as the sign of a culture in decline. I wonder what he would have thought of The New York Times’ efforts to admit “young idols with cleavers” into America’s pantheon of food-service heroes.

With their swinging scabbards, muscled forearms and constant proximity to flesh, butchers have the raw, emotional appeal of an indie band … “Think about it. What’s sexy?” said Tia Keenan, the fromager at Casellula Cheese and Wine Café and an unabashed butcher fan. “Dangerous is sometimes sexy, and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.”

That’s Severson again, by the way, and she records no word of dissent in regard to the cheese vendor’s ravings. We are to believe this is a real national trend here. In fact the public perception of butchers has not changed in the slightest, as can easily be confirmed by telling someone that he or she looks like one. “Blankly as a butcher stares,” Auden’s famous line about the moon, will need no explanatory footnote even a century from now.

But food writing has long specialized in the barefaced inversion of common sense, common language. Restaurant reviews are notorious for touting $100 lunches as great value for money. The doublespeak now comes in more pious tones, especially when foodies feign concern for animals. Crowding around to watch the slaughter of a pig—even getting in its face just before the shot—is described by Bethany Jean Clement (in an article in Best Food Writing 2009) as “solemn” and “respectful” behavior. Pollan writes about going with a friend to watch a goat get killed. “Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.” It’s teachable fun for the whole foodie family. The full strangeness of this culture sinks in when one reads affectionate accounts (again in Best Food Writing 2009) of children clamoring to kill their own cow—or wanting to see a pig shot, then ripped open with a chain saw: “YEEEEAAAAH!”

Here too, though, an at least half-serious moral logic is at work, backed up by the subculture’s distinct body of myth, which combines half-understood evolutionary theory with the biblical idea of man as born lord of the world. Anthropological research, I should perhaps point out, now indicates that Homo sapiens started out as a paltry prey animal. Clawless, fangless, and slight of build, he could at best look forward to furtive boltings of carrion until the day he became meat himself. It took humans quite a while to learn how to gang up for self-protection and food acquisition, the latter usually a hyena-style affair of separating infant or sick animals from their herds. The domestication of pigs, cows, chickens, etc. has been going on for only about 10,000 years—not nearly long enough to breed the instincts out of them. The hideous paraphernalia of subjugation pictured in The CAFO Reader? It’s not there for nothing.

Now for the foodie version. The human animal evolved “with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth—so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them” (Bourdain, Medium Raw). We have eaten them for so long that meat-eating has shaped our souls (Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma). And after so many millennia of domestication, food animals have become “evolutionarily hard-wired” to depend on us (chef-writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The River Cottage Meat Book). Every exercise of our hungry power is thus part of the Great Food Chain of Being, with which we must align our morals. Deep down—instinctively if not consciously—the “hardwired” pig understands all this, understands why he has suddenly been dragged before a leering crowd. Just don’t waste any of him afterward; that’s all he asks. Note that the foodies’ pride in eating “nose to tail” is no different from factory-farm boasts of “using everything but the oink.” As if such token frugality could make up for the caloric wastefulness and environmental damage that result from meat farming!

Naturally the food-obsessed profess as much respect for tradition as for evolution. Hamilton, in Blood, Bones and Butter, writes of her childhood dinners: “The meal was always organized correctly, traditionally, which I now appreciate.” Even relatively young traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey must be guarded zealously against efforts to change or opt out of them. Foreign traditions destigmatize every dish even for the American. In Best Food Writing 2010, one foie gras lover asks another whether he would eat tortured cat if there were sufficient Mongolian history behind the dish; the answer is yes.

So tradition is an absolute good? No. When it dictates abstention from a certain food, it is to be rejected. Francine Prose shows how it’s done in her prize-winning Saveur article, “Faith and Bacon.” I need hardly explain which of those two she cannot live without. Prose concedes that since pigs compete ravenously with humans for grain, her Jewish forefathers’ taboo against pork may well have derived from ecological reasons that are even more valid today. Yet she finds it unrealistic to hope that humans could ever suppress their “baser appetites … for the benefit of other humans, flora, and fauna.” She then drops the point entirely; foodies quickly lose interest in any kind of abstract discussion. The reader is left to infer that since baser appetites are going to rule anyway, we might as well give in to them.

But if, however unlikely it seems, I ever find myself making one of those late-life turns toward God, one thing I can promise you is that this God will be a deity who wants me to feel exactly the way I feel when the marbled slice of pork floats to the top of the bowl of ramen.

Yes, I feel equally sure that Prose’s God will be that kind of God. At least she maintains a civil tone when talking of kashrut. In “Killer Food,” another article in Best Food Writing 2010, Dana Goodyear tells how a restaurant served head cheese (meat jelly made from an animal’s head) to an unwitting Jew.

One woman, when [chef Jon] Shook finally had a chance to explain, spat it out on the table and said, “Oh my fucking God, I’ve been kosher for thirty-two years.” Shook giggled, recollecting. “Not any more you ain’t!”

We are meant to chuckle too; the woman (who I am sure expressed herself in less profane terms) got what she deserved. Most of us consider it a virtue to maintain our principles in the face of social pressure, but in the involuted world of gourmet morals, constancy is rudeness. One must never spoil a dinner party for mere religious or ethical reasons. Pollan says he sides with the French in regarding “any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.” (The American foodie is forever projecting his own barbarism onto France.) Bourdain writes, “Taking your belief system on the road—or to other people’s houses—makes me angry.” The sight of vegetarian tourists waving away a Vietnamese pho vendor fills him with “spluttering indignation.”

That’s right: guests have a greater obligation to please their host—and passersby to please a vendor—than vice versa. Is there any civilized value that foodies cannot turn on its head? But I assume Bourdain has no qualms about waving away a flower seller, just as Pollan probably sees nothing wrong with a Mormon’s refusal of a cup of coffee. Enjoinders to put the food provider’s feelings above all else are just part of the greater effort to sanctify food itself.

So secure is the gourmet community in its newfound reputation, so sure is it of its rightness, that it now proclaims the very qualities—greed, indifference to suffering, the prioritization of food above all—that earned it so much obloquy in the first place. Bourdain starts off his book by reveling in the illegality of a banquet at which he and some famous (unnamed) chefs dined on ortolan, endangered songbirds fattened up, as he unself-consciously tells us, in pitch-dark cages. After the meal, an “identical just-fucked look” graced each diner’s face. Eating equals sex, and in accordance with this self-flattery, gorging is presented in terms of athleticism and endurance. “You eat way past the point of hitting the wall. Or I do anyway.”

If nothing else, Bourdain at least gives the lie to the Pollan-Severson cant about foodie-ism being an integral part of the whole, truly sociable, human being. In Bourdain’s world, diners are as likely to sit solo or at a countertop while chewing their way through “a fucking Everest of shellfish.” Contributors to the Best Food Writing anthologies celebrate the same mindless, sweating gluttony. “You eat and eat and eat,” Todd Kliman writes, “long after you’re full. Being overstuffed, for the food lover, is not a moral problem.” But then, what is? In the same anthology, Michael Steinberger extols the pleasure of “joyfully gorging yourself … on a bird bearing the liver of another bird.” He also talks of “whimpering with ecstasy” in a French restaurant, then allowing the chef to hit on his wife, because “I was in too much of a stupor … [He] had just served me one of the finest dishes I’d ever eaten.” Hyperbole, the reader will have noticed, remains the central comic weapon in the food writer’s arsenal. It gets old fast. Nor is there much sign of wit in the table talk recorded. Aquinas said gluttony leads to “loutishness, uncleanness, talkativeness, and an uncomprehending dullness of mind,” and if you don’t believe him, here’s Kliman again:

I watched tears streak down a friend’s face as he popped expertly cleavered bites of chicken into his mouth … He was red-eyed and breathing fast. “It hurts, it hurts, but it’s so good, but it hurts, and I can’t stop eating!” He slammed a fist down on the table. The beer in his glass sloshed over the sides. “Jesus Christ, I’ve got to stop!”

We have already seen that the foodie respects only those customs, traditions, beliefs, cultures—old and new, domestic and foreign—that call on him to eat more, not less. But the foodie is even more insatiable in regard to variety than quantity. Johnston and Baumann note that “eating unusual foods is part of what generates foodie status,” and indeed, there appears to be no greater point of pride in this set than to eat with the indiscriminate omnivorousness of a rat in a zoo dumpster. Jeffrey Steingarten called his first book The Man Who Ate Everything. Bourdain writes, with equal swagger, “I’ve eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I’ve eaten bat.” The book Foodies quotes a middle-aged software engineer who says, “Um, it’s not something I would be anxious to repeat but … it’s kind of weird and cool to say I’ve had goat testicles in rice wine.” The taste of these bizarre meals—as researchers of oral fixation will not be surprised to learn—is neither here nor there. Members of the Gastronauts, a foodie group in New York, stuff live, squirming octopuses and eels down their throats before posting the carny-esque footage online.

Such antics are encouraged in the media with reports of the exotic foods that can be had only overseas, beyond the reach of FDA inspectors, conservationists, and animal-rights activists. Not too long ago MSNBC.com put out an article titled “Some Bravery as a Side Dish.” It listed “7 foods for the fearless stomach,” one of which was ortolan, the endangered songbirds fattened in dark boxes. The more lives sacrificed for a dinner, the more impressive the eater. Dana Goodyear: “Thirty duck hearts in curry … The ethos of this kind of cooking is undeniably macho.” Amorality as ethos, callousness as bravery, queenly self-absorption as machismo: no small perversion of language is needed to spin heroism out of an evening spent in a chair.

Of course, the bulk of foodie writing falls between the extremes of Pollan- esque sanctimony and Bourdainian oafishness. The average article in a Best Food Writing anthology is a straightforward if very detailed discussion of some treat or another, usually interwoven with a chronicle of the writer’s quest to find or make it in perfect form. Seven pages on sardines. Eight pages on marshmallow fluff! The lack of drama and affect only makes the gloating obsessiveness even more striking. The following, from a man who travels the world sampling oysters, is typical.

Sitting at Bentley’s lustrous marble bar, I ordered three No. 1 and three No. 2 Strangford Loughs and a martini. I was promptly set up with a dark green and gold placemat, a napkin, silverware, a bread plate, an oyster plate, some fresh bread, a plate of deep yellow butter rounds, vinegar, red pepper, Tabasco sauce, and a saucer full of lemons wrapped in cheesecloth. Bentley’s is a very serious oyster bar. When the bartender asked me if I wanted olives or a twist, I asked him which garnish he liked better with oysters. He recommended both. I had never seen both garnishes served together, but … (Robb Walsh, “English Oyster Cult,” Best Food Writing 2009)

I used to reject that old countercultural argument, the one about the difference between a legitimate pursuit of pleasure and an addiction or pathology being primarily a question of social license. I don’t anymore. After a month among the bat eaters and milk-toast priests, I opened Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries (2008) and encountered a refreshingly sane-seeming young man, self-critical and with a dazzlingly wide range of interests. Unfortunately, the foodie fringe enjoys enough media access to make daily claims for its sophistication and virtue, for the suitability of its lifestyle as a model for the world. We should not let it get away with those claims. Whether gluttony is a deadly sin is of course for the religious to decide, and I hope they go easy on the foodies; they’re not all bad. They are certainly single-minded, however, and single-mindedness—even in less obviously selfish forms—is always a littleness of soul.

Thanks to Basil Katz

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

James Kaston, with his cat, Pinky, in his antiques-filled apartment in Stuyvesant Town. He finds a tight glass case for curios helps, but he still dusts.

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
NY Times Published: February 9, 2011

THE world has a dust problem. There is more of it than there used to be. Apparently, the amount of airborne dust doubled in the 20th century, according to a recent scientific paper in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The claim sounds outlandish. The amount of dust in the world — like the amount of sin or acne — must be a constant. The finding was somewhat surprising even to Natalie Mahowald, the lead researcher on the study and an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University.

Although she was working with inchoate historical data, Dr. Mahowald said, “Nobody has come up to me and said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ ” Climate change seems to be one source for all the new dust. Human land use is another. Anyone looking for a scapegoat — and that’s all of us, isn’t it? — can start with the droughts and desertification in North Africa, she said.

Alternately, I asked, have researchers considered the possibility that the dust might have come from under my bed? Recently, my wool Schlitz hat fell down there. When I retrieved it, the hat had grown a full, gray rabbinical beard.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Dr. Mahowald said, without even pausing to consider my hypothesis. Her study didn’t measure dust from human sources, like our burping tailpipes and pilling sweaters, she explained. “Dust is such a vague term. I’m being very particular here: soil particles suspended in the atmosphere.”

Dr. Mahowald seemed to have her hands full figuring out what all that dust might do to the earth’s oceans and climate. Academia can be petty that way.

So I compiled my own advisory panel of lay experts. They were people who live in white apartments and people who collect books by the myriad. The future is looking like a dustier place, I said. What can we do to prepare?

We could start by closing the windows, said Jane Novick, who lives on the fourth floor of a prewar building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. The buses and taxis crawl by all the time, she said. Except, that is, when they are idling.

“My husband tries to open the window,” said Ms. Novick, 62, who volunteers at a pediatric hospital in Manhattan and is active on its board. “I say, unh-unh.”

When dust gets inside — and it always does — it’s easy to spot. The Novicks have been working with the designer Vicente Wolf for 25 years. And his pale palette can create a blank canvas for dust.

The 4,000-square-foot apartment isn’t all white. There is some cream and beige, too, Ms. Novick said, and a celadon-colored couch. But even worse for camouflage is the herringbone floor, which is stained ebony.

“You clean constantly, but not crazily,” Ms. Novick said. Granted, one person’s constant is another person’s crazy. “Maybe I have more DustBusters than other people,” she added. “I usually have a DustBuster in almost every room.”

The Novicks employ a regular house cleaner, she said. But “I must DustBust every day — that, I will admit. Sometimes a couple of times a day.”

All that cleaning can have an unintended consequence: Oddly enough, it actually breeds dust. In fact, cleaning is one of the three main sources of household dust, according to research on indoor particles. Cooking is the second; movement is the third.

Every step disturbs tiny particles of dirt, fiber, soot, pollen, paint, food and dead skin. In common parlance, it’s all dust, said Richard Flagan, the chairman of the chemical engineering department at the California Institute of Technology. As soon as these motes lift off a carpet (or a TV remote or a ukulele), “you induce air currents” that propel them around the room, he said.

Several thousand particles of this stuff will waft in any cubic centimeter of air, a space the size of a sugar cube. We travel through life emitting what scientists call “a personal cloud” of dust. The only alternative is death, which is actually worse — what with the whole “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing.

Ms. Novick has learned to live with her dust. She has edited her possessions: the books, photos and travel mementos.

“You scale down as time goes on,” she said. A clean house is easier to clean.

THE Brooklyn-based design blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg makes the case for cleanliness in aesthetic terms. “Dust is not a problem for the minimalist,” she said.

Working under the name “swissmiss,” the 37-year-old graphic artist favors plenty of white space. The same rule applies to her condo in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, which Ms. Eisenberg shares with her husband and two young children.

Visitors to the apartment, she said, “say, ‘Wait a minute where’s your stuff?’ ”

Ms. Eisenberg’s secret? Being a “minimalist in the living room,” she said, means being a “maximalist” in the closet. It’s a honeycomb in there, though space might be tight for a bee. (Ms. Eisenberg describes herself as “the unofficial spokesperson for the Elfa system” of storage from the Container Store.)

For her, cleaning is not so much an activity as a state of being. She remembers having a no-mess childhood in a small town in Switzerland. Her mother ran an orderly home, she said, while working full time. When one of the family’s au pairs lagged in her housekeeping, Ms. Eisenberg’s mother sent her a gentle reminder.

“She wrote with her finger” on the dust that had gathered atop the grand piano in the parlor, Ms. Eisenberg recalled, leaving a single Swiss-German word, “sau.” Or in translation: pig.

James Kaston received his own childhood training in what to do with objects: collect them. Mr. Kaston started with his grandfather’s Indian arrowheads, unearthed at the family farm on the Hudson River. By age 9, he was tagging along with his grandmother to auctions.

Mr. Kaston, 53, still has the arrowheads (and 1,001 other artifacts) stacked up in a three-room Stuyvesant Town apartment in Manhattan. Naturally, he works in the antiques business. Perhaps 100 paintings hang, salon-style, on the walls. And he has covered the floor, a parquet that reminded him of “a dentist’s waiting room,” with Oriental carpets that date back to the 1880s.

In Mr. Kaston’s estimation, a crowded home is a comfortable home. “Those minimal places look like prisons to me,” he said. Mr. Kaston’s apartment, by contrast, resembles one giant cabinet of wonders.

Yet the real marvel may be its condition. The place is clean.

“People who come to my house are always absolutely shocked,” Mr. Kaston said. “They say, ‘Where’s the dust?’ And then they say, ‘You must have someone who comes around here and cleans all the time.’ ”

Mr. Kaston used to employ a house cleaner, he said. But she was a menace to the apartment’s permanent collection. “She broke a beautiful 19th-century transferware bouillon cup,” he said. “She broke a 19th-century Aesthetic Movement fish platter.”

Each time, Mr. Kaston added, “she kept saying they flung themselves off the wall.” His housekeeper was a lovely person, he said. “But eventually I said to her — and I said it to her three times — ‘No more dusting for you. Leave the dusting to me.’ ”

The best defense against dust, Mr. Kaston has found, is a tight glass case. And so he has staged vignettes out of his “curiosities,” like a taxidermied turtle and a monkey skull, in 10 different antique cabinets. Yet to show these objects to the best effect, the “glass needs to be a little sparkly and shiny,” he said. And that means more dusting.

THE term “dustjacket” is typically written as one word, said Bryan A. Garner, editor in chief of “Black’s Law Dictionary” and author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” He would know. The 52-year-old keeps a personal library of 31,000 volumes — or 31,100 if you count the titles he has bought in the last two weeks.

In recent years, Mr. Garner has begun wrapping his dustjackets in their own clear Mylar dustjackets. This precaution would seem to be the equivalent of washing soap with soap. So far, some 20,000 of his books have been Mylared. “I’m typically one who is reluctant to make proper nouns into verbs,” he said. “But this is certainly a very convenient one, and we do it.”

Mr. Garner stores most of his collection at the offices of his company, LawProse, including dictionaries and grammar books that date from 1491. A mere 4,500 volumes reside with him and his wife, Karolyne Garner, at their French Country Revival-style home in north Dallas.

The most effective dust management starts before a book ever reaches the shelf. “When I buy a book, I will carefully open it and slam it shut several times,” he said. “Sometimes these big balloons of dust will cascade to the floor.” This is where dust belongs, he said, down at vacuum level. Next, “you sort of riffle the pages.” Finally, he will run a dry paintbrush along the edges.

As protocols go, it’s a good one, Mr. Garner said. Yet at the same time he is dusting his books, many thousands of them are actually turning to dust. Acid paper, which was ubiquitous between 1870 and 1970, “tends to self-destruct,” he said.

There can be a gloom to antiquarian book collecting — the authors are dead, we are dying — and the dust doesn’t help. Mr. Garner likes to place musty books of questionable provenance in the sun to cure. And he opens the windows and airs out the house every fortnight, preferably after a good rain has knocked down the dust outside.

He discovered this advice in Cheryl Mendelson’s “Home Comforts,” he said, “which is my favorite book on housekeeping.”

Mr. Garner hesitated for a moment, as if picturing the book on the shelf. “It’s been a long time since I read it,” he said. “Mine is probably gathering a little bit of dust.”

Making an Iota’s Difference, or Not

HOW does dust fall onto a bookshelf? Slowly. Very slowly.

A piece of dust that is 100 microns in diameter (the size of a dot of chalk powder) will fall about a foot a second, said Richard Flagan, chairman of the chemical engineering program at the California Institute of Technology. A mote that is 1 micron in diameter, the size of a bacteria, will fall just 30 microns a second. And many of the particles created by cooking, which is a leading source of indoor dust, measure less than half a micron across.

Where does dust this small go? Anywhere it wants. Trying to herd it into a dustpan is either an act of hubris or a clown routine. Might as well try to snare a moth with a hula hoop.

Given these absurdities of scale, cleaning will inevitably scatter dust around the room. Still, the forces of chemistry and physics can help.

There may be no more primitive dusting tool than a damp cloth. You will not see it advertised on late-night TV. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work. “The reason that you use a wet cloth rather than a dry cloth,” Dr. Flagan said, “is the liquid introduces capillary forces.”

The dust will bond to the wet surface, he said. “And then the particle doesn’t want to pull off.”

As a form of chemical attachment, the connection between dust and rag is more a hookup than a marriage. All commitments are off when the cloth dries. Maybe the dust stays, maybe not.

The concept behind a vacuum cleaner isn’t hard to understand. The nozzle sucks air into a filter medium or a bag. “Some of the dust strikes the filters and sticks, and some strikes other particles and sticks.”

Then there is the considerable amount of dust that doesn’t stick to anything. A spinning brush may send small particles in a kind of appliance thrill ride. And while the vacuum nozzle inhales, the vents exhale. A HEPA filter, with its fine fabric grates, should capture petite-yet-nasty particles — the ones that wear size 0, so to speak.

As for those newfangled bagless vacuums with their racy cyclonic action? Dr. Flagan contends that a centrifugal windstorm won’t capture smaller particles, except by dumb luck. That said, on the filth mats that we call carpets, “a lot of the stuff is big aggregates,” he said. For that, “they’re pretty good.”

That leaves the great enigma of modern housekeeping: the Swiffer. How does it work? Dr. Flagan said a Swiffer is an example of an electret, a fabric manufactured with “an intrinsic surface charge.” Rub it against a baseboard and its static charge will attract dust.

Will any of these methods, judiciously applied, make a difference in the amount of household dust? This may not be a question of physical science, but a riddle of human nature. As an experiment, spend 10 minutes dusting, then look around. Is the room half-clean or half-dirty?

My Favorite Radio Show

Three colour drawing no. 7
2010
Coloured pencil on paper
14-3/4 x 11-7/8 inches

Through March 12, 2011

Marc Foxx

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 13, 2011

On Friday, House Republicans unveiled their proposal for immediate cuts in federal spending. Uncharacteristically, they failed to accompany the release with a catchy slogan. So I’d like to propose one: Eat the Future.

I’ll explain in a minute. First, let’s talk about the dilemma the G.O.P. faces.

Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

That’s the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They’re evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and — surprise — defense.

The only thing they clearly want to cut is foreign aid, which most Americans believe, wrongly, accounts for a large share of the federal budget.

Pew also asked people how they would like to see states close their budget deficits. Do they favor cuts in either education or health care, the main expenses states face? No. Do they favor tax increases? No. The only deficit-reduction measure with significant support was cuts in public-employee pensions — and even there the public was evenly divided.

The moral is clear. Republicans don’t have a mandate to cut spending; they have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?

Which brings me back to the Republican dilemma. The new House majority promised to deliver $100 billion in spending cuts — and its members face the prospect of Tea Party primary challenges if they fail to deliver big cuts. Yet the public opposes cuts in programs it likes — and it likes almost everything. What’s a politician to do?

The answer, once you think about it, is obvious: sacrifice the future. Focus the cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy.

If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)

Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.

In a better world, politicians would talk to voters as if they were adults. They would explain that discretionary spending has little to do with the long-run imbalance between spending and revenues. They would then explain that solving that long-run problem requires two main things: reining in health-care costs and, realistically, increasing taxes to pay for the programs that Americans really want.

But Republican leaders can’t do that, of course: they refuse to admit that taxes ever need to rise, and they spent much of the last two years screaming “death panels!” in response to even the most modest, sensible efforts to ensure that Medicare dollars are well spent.

And so they had to produce something like Friday’s proposal, a plan that would save remarkably little money but would do a remarkably large amount of harm.

Tatsuya Nakadai, foreground, in Kihachi Okamoto’s 1966 film “The Sword of Doom.”

By WENDELL JAMIESON
NY Times Published: February 11, 2011

OUTSIDE, the streets of Greenwich Village were drowsy and dull with summer. But inside, in the darkness, blades slashed, top knots bobbed, screaming swordsmen crashed through rice-paper screens, and blood sprayed

Ah, the summer of 1979. I was 13, and if it was Tuesday, I was at the Bleecker Street Cinema. Japanese movie day. More than likely my friends Ben and Dan were on either side of me. The screen was small, and the floor sticky, but we didn’t care. We were enthralled.

I’d like to say we were there to peer deeply into another culture’s cinema, for intricate tales of loyalty and honor, for the subtle and nuanced acting. But we weren’t.

We were there for the sword fights.

I’d like to say that as we emerged after a double feature onto the humid and yellowing streets in late afternoon, we engaged in thoughtful ruminations on character development, hidden messages and underlying themes. But we didn’t.

We acted out the sword fights.

Ben, demonstrating: “No — he slashed this way, downward, left to right.”

Dan: “No, no, no. You don’t know what you are talking about. Are you blind?”

They were brothers, two years apart. I was in the middle. I usually let them ague a bit before adding my two cents; invariably it was that they were both wrong.

We saw all the great ones: “Seven Samurai,” “Samurai Assassin,” “Samurai Rebellion,” “Yojimbo,” “Sanjuro,” “Lone Wolf and Cub,” “Lady Snowblood,” “Sleepy Eyes of Death,” Zatoichi this and Zatoichi that.

But my favorite, watched in stunned silence the first time and then, whenever it returned to that screen or that of any other revival house in Manhattan, was “The Sword of Doom,” Kihachi Okamoto’s black-and-white widescreen epic about an evil but monstrously skilled swordsman played by the great actor Tatsuya Nakadai.

It has a rare showing on Friday at Japan Society in a theater far more beautiful than those where I used to watch it. I doubt Ben or Dan or I will make it — we have six children among us, and I own the Criterion Collection’s fine DVD of the film — but I’ll certainly be there in spirit.

Our obsession with Japanese sword fighting led Ben and me to take up kendo, Japanese fencing, to which I returned several years ago. (I learned that actual sword fighting is not quite as easy as Tatsuya Nakadai makes it look.) I recently asked my sensei, then and now, Noboru Kataoka — himself an actor who goes as Ken Kensai — to name the greatest sword fight film of them all, and he answered, “The Sword of Doom” without missing a beat. He knows of what he speaks.

My love of Japanese cinematic dueling has always seemed to be an unexplainable but fascinating example of how, through the movies, we can became deeply intrigued by another culture, another time. What so deeply drew my greasy-haired 13-year-old self to this black-and-white world of slashing blades? I have no idea. But from the moment my dad took me to see a double feature of Akira Kurosawa movies at the old Thaila — “Throne of Blood” and “Yojimbo” — I had, for several years, a continual loop of samurai battles running in my head.

“The Sword of Doom” features three examples of that greatest of samurai movie confections, the all-against-one battle. In the first, Nakadai slays a score or so of swordsmen who are seeking to avenge a friend. In the second, Toshiro Mifune, playing a fencing instructor, cuts down a larger group that had mistaken him for someone else in a swirling snowstorm. And in the final fight — well, it’s got to be seen to be believed.

Haunted by his misdeeds, Nakadai goes berserk, and slays or maims an uncountable number of assailants while slashing his way through the apparently limitless rooms of a flaming teahouse. The reviewer in The New York Times called it “the chop-choppingest climax, ever.” It is a slaughter of breathtaking duration, ending in a chilling freeze frame. But it is also one of beauty.

The film came out in 1966, a dozen years after Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” which was among the first Japanese films to embrace wild and messy action over stagy theatricality. By the time “The Sword of Doom” reached theaters, the fights had become so intricately planned that it could take dozens of viewings fully to appreciate exactly what had just happened.

They are shot mostly at a distance, in long takes, unlike the close-in and jumpy shooting of action sequences today, so that every one of the actors’ carefully calibrated twists and feints can be appreciated. Nakadai’s fluid and catlike movements seem hardly human — his maniacal grin adds another level of malevolence — but are almost balletic in their elegance. He completes his strokes with graceful upward arcs even after they have done their damage.

The more samurai films I watched, the more educated my eyes became to the particulars of the fencing; I came to see that the actors and fight choreographers altered styles to reflect the characters. While Nakadai, evil personified, is fluid and deceptively passive in his movements, Mifune, representing honesty, uses a straightforward two-handed stance that would be familiar to anyone who does kendo today.

He fights quite differently in “Seven Samurai” (1954), in which he plays an unschooled and frenetic would-be warrior, Kikuchiyo, and wields an extra-long sword with a sloppy and utterly formless style of which his character from “The Sword of Doom” would surely disapprove. (“Seven Samurai” can be appreciated on a recent and shimmering, almost silvery, Criterion Blu-ray disc that puts that old Bleecker Street Cinema screen to shame.)

Nakadai and Mifune came to blows in many films, with Mifune usually winning, often with a blow to the midsection (called a “doh” strike in kendo). In Masaki Kobayashi’s “Samurai Rebellion” (1967) they fight a climactic duel in rigid stances, clearly meant to reflect the suffocating rules and pressures of their regimented lives in feudal Japan. By this point Mifune has already massacred a squadron of swordsmen sent to kill him. He hardly seems winded.

Nakadai confronts another legion of attackers at the end of Kobayashi’s “Hari-Kari” (1962), perhaps the most bitter filmic indictment of samurai codes of honor. In it he asks a lord for safe haven to commit suicide before revealing, in a series of flashbacks — which appear often in these films — that he is actually there to seek revenge for his son-in-law, who had been forced to kill himself with a wooden sword (with predictable blood-out-the-mouth results). In the end Nakadai takes out numerous attackers using an odd cross-your-heart stance before being felled by a bullet.

This demise crops up again and again. Mifune in “Samurai Rebellion” and — spoiler alert! — four of the seven samurai in “Seven Samurai” are fatally shot, not slashed or stabbed. It’s as if the directors could simply never allow anyone else to appear on screen who could wield a sword as well.

In recent years three films by the director Yoji Yamada, beginning with 2002’s “Twilight Samurai,” has added a new layer of realism to the genre, showing sword fights to be messy affairs where opponents receive numerous blade-point pricks before going down, instead of one arching cut with an elegant follow-through. The films tend to be a little light in the sword fight department for my tastes, with just one or two, but I’ve always got that DVD of “The Sword of Doom” when I need a jolt.

Of course it has long been a question, never more so than today, as to whether violence on screen leads to violence in real life.

I can say unequivocally, when it came to me and Ben and Dan and samurai films, that it did.

After our sidewalk duels we’d take the subway home to their house in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, which was narrow and of vaguely Dutch appearance and, in the early evenings, usually void of parents. We had several bokkens, heavy wooden practice swords meant to practice kata, or basic forms, in kendo, and not meant to be used as actual contact weapons.

No matter. Shrieking and swinging and smashing, we’d range up and down those narrow staircases. I don’t remember how most of these battles ended, but I do recall our chop-choppingest climax, ever.

Dan made a bad move: he lunged for Ben’s head and missed — he probably would have killed him had he connected — and the bokken went into the wall, gauging a hole. Ben, already in motion, brought his bokken down on Dan as he turned to escape, striking him in the backside with a thunderous and nauseating smack!

Then I struck Ben in the head with such force that he looked momentarily disoriented, and seemed to lose his balance. I paused to contemplate what I had done. Bad idea: Dan, miraculously recovered, grabbed Ben’s bokken and delivered a debilitating Mifune-to-Nakadai blow to my midsection as he let out a blood-curdling yell.

It was over. No one moved for a few moments. I thought I might throw up. It was if we had our own personal freeze frame. Then we heard the door open downstairs — their mother. She called up: “Daniel?” “Benjamin?”

There was a hole in the wall. Plaster dust coated the floor. Ben had a growing welt on his head. Their mother was going to have a total freakout. For all I knew I had a broken rib, but I didn’t care. I knew when it was time for the Japanese characters spelling “The End” to flash on the screen.

I went downstairs, paid my respects to their mom, and headed out the door. I could hear the screaming begin as I got to the sidewalk.

Installation view

Through March 11, 2011

Tanya Bonakdar

Greg McFall/NOAA

A team of marine archaeologists found the whaler Two Brothers in 2008 while on a trip looking for other wrecks in the Pacific.

By JESSE McKINLEY
NY Times Published: February 11, 2011

HONOLULU — In the annals of the sea, there were few sailors whose luck was worse than George Pollard Jr.’s.

Pollard, you see, was the captain of the Essex, the doomed Nantucket whaler whose demise, in 1820, came in a most unbelievable fashion: it was attacked and sunk by an angry sperm whale, an event that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.”

Unlike the tale of Ahab and Ishmael, however, Pollard’s story didn’t end there: After the Essex sank, Pollard and his crew floated through the Pacific for three months, a journey punctuated by death, starvation, madness and, in the end, cannibalism. (Pollard, alas, ate his cousin.)

Despite all that, Pollard survived and was given another ship to steer: the Two Brothers, the very boat that had brought the poor captain back to Nantucket.

And then, that ship sank, too.

On Friday, in a discovery that might bring a measure of peace to Captain Pollard, who survived his second wreck (though his career did not), researchers announced that they have found the remains of the Two Brothers. The whaler went down exactly 188 years ago after hitting a reef at the French Frigate Shoals, a treacherous atoll about 600 miles northwest of here. The trove includes dozens of artifacts: harpoon tips, whaling lances and three intact anchors.

The discovery is believed to be the first of a Nantucket whaler, one of an armada of ships that set sail during the early 19th century when the small Massachusetts island was an international capital of whaling. It was a risky pursuit that led sailors halfway across the world — and sometimes to the bottom of the sea.

“Very little material has been recovered from whale ships that foundered because they generally went down far from shore and in the deepest oceans,” said Ben Simons, chief curator of the Nantucket Historical Association. “We have a lot of logbooks and journals that record disasters at sea, but to be taken to the actual scene of the sunken vessel — that’s really what is so amazing about this.”

The discovery was, in some ways, as fortunate as Pollard was cursed.

The Two Brothers — which was bound for the newly opened Japan Grounds after whalers had fished out the Atlantic and parts of the South Pacific — was long known to have sunk on the night of Feb. 11, 1823, off the French Frigate Shoals.

A shrimp-shaped collection of reefs, the shoals were a notoriously tricky spot. Charts were not particularly reliable in that area, and Pollard was steering the Two Brothers without the aid of stars, since the sky had been overcast.

Several dozen boats are known to have sunk there or in neighboring atolls, all of which are now part of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, an enormous conservation area that covers nearly 140,000 square miles of ocean west of Hawaii.

In 2008, a team of marine archeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries set their sights on investigating several other wrecks, including a British whaling ship called the Gledstanes, which sank in the remote Kure Atoll in 1837, and the Churchill, which went down carrying a load of coconut meat in the French Frigate Shoals in 1917.

With a few spare days left before returning to Honolulu, however, the team decided to poke around a tiny sandbar known as Shark Island.

Kelly Gleason, the leader of the team, was in the water — crystal-clear shallows about 15 feet deep — when a colleague suddenly signaled that he had seen something.

“All of a sudden,” said Dr. Gleason, a marine archaeologist, “we came across this large anchor.”

The anchor, some 10 feet long, was peacefully resting on the seafloor, and was far too heavy to lift. (The federally protected monument also has strict rules about removal of artifacts.) Anchors, like so many other types of maritime technology, evolved over the years, making them easier to place in a specific time period, and Dr. Gleason was pretty sure the anchor she was seeing was from the early 1800s.

Divers soon found more debris, including several iron trypots, cauldrons in which blubber was boiled down into oil, the ultimate goal of the lucrative but highly speculative whaling trade. It was a brutal pursuit for both the whales, which were hunted nearly to extinction, and the sailors, who faced years at sea, meager rations and the omnipresent possibility of death.

“Nantucket whaling captains were renowned for being what was called ‘fishy men,’ meaning that they didn’t care what was involved,” said Nathaniel Philbrick, a maritime historian and author of “In the Heart of the Sea,” the acclaimed account of the Essex’s sinking. “They were hard-wired to bring in whales, because whales meant money.”

Pollard, however, was different, “a little more contemplative,” said Mr. Philbrick, despite earning his first helm — the Essex — at the young age of 28.

“He definitely garnered his men’s respect,” Mr. Philbrick said. “But he was twice unlucky.”

And understandably gun-shy. According to an account by Thomas Nickerson, who had been on the Essex — and nearly starved to death at sea after it sank, but still re-upped for another voyage with Pollard — the captain froze on the deck of the Two Brothers after the ship began to sink, and he had to be practically dragged into a smaller whale-chasing boat.

“His reasoning powers had flown,” Nickerson later wrote.

Dr. Gleason says she was impressed that Pollard even went back on a boat at all, considering, you know, the cannibalism of his first trip.

“You just imagine this man who had the courage to go back out to sea, and to have this happen?” she said. “It’s incredible.”

All told, archaeologists have found about 80 relics from the Two Brothers, including four cast-iron cooking pots, fragments of glass and ceramics, riggings and blubber hooks. Monument officials say they hope to eventually make some of the smaller artifacts part of a permanent exhibit in Hawaii, though larger items will remain in the water of the Shoals.

For his part, Captain Pollard was rescued a day after the Two Brothers sank. He returned to Nantucket, where he settled into a sedate, quiet and decidedly nonseafaring life, though other sailors quietly deemed him a “Jonah,” or star-crossed mariner.

He eventually took a job as the town’s night watchman. In the 1850s, he was visited by a 30-something writer who had just published a novel — “Moby-Dick” — to middling reviews. A former whaler himself, Melville had sought out Pollard and found, according to Mr. Philbrick, a kind of soul mate in the older man.

“Both of them had experienced the ultimate in terms of living,” he said, “and then went on quietly in their lives ignored by everyone.”

Indeed, Melville worked as a customs inspector until several years before his death in 1891. Pollard died — alone but apparently beloved by fellow Nantucketers — in 1870. But while Melville’s reputation soared, few know of Captain Pollard.

Dr. Gleason, for one, hopes that this discovery in the reefs of the Hawaiian islands, a place that could boggle any sailor, today or in 1823, goes a way toward repairing Pollard’s legacy.

“He was up against these incredible odds,” she said. “And it’s an incredibly hazardous place.”