Art by Ethan Pinch
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A sepia portrait of Agnes Martin next to her canvases.

Forcing Quiet: Notes on the Painting of Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin was one of the lesser-known abstract painters of the second New York School. This is largely because she was a woman working in a male-dominated field. It’s also because her paintings didn’t really look like other AbEx paintings so people didn’t know what to make of them. It wasn’t until after the minimalist craze of the sixties that people started really taking her seriously and calling her a pioneer and a feminist icon and such.

Martin’s compositions are invariably rectilinear and orthogonal. She started off with pencilled grids but towards the end of her career (the period I am most interested in) she settled on horizontal and vertical pinstripes. Her colours are muted pales and pastels. The scale—middling. Not large. Not small.

Agnes Martin uses paint in thin, transparent washes with traces of the underdrawing still visible. No bravura or technical virtuosity. Just cool, quiet regularity without being too evidently adroit. The reiteration is mechanical but not mechanically reiterative. There are exquisitely subtle modulations but whether they are unconscious or staged is impossible to say. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A stylized, red-lit photo of Elliott Smith performing at the Lit Lounge in New York City in January 2003, shortly before his death.

On Elliott Smith: Nickolas Rossi’s “Heaven Adores You” (2014)

I imagine many might wish to believe that our lives are marred by tragedy. That some sort of sadness exists as nothing other than to shape us, wherein we are then forced to grow as result. For the artist, too often this sadness looms underneath—and even with talent and some modicum of success, the artist remains mired in loneliness. (If not emotional, then intellectual.) This, I feel, represents the singer and songwriter Elliott Smith, as showcased in Nickolas Rossi’s 2014 documentary, Heaven Adores You. ‘I don’t feel so different on the inside,’ Smith notes, in an interview. ‘People just started asking me different questions. I am the wrong sort of person to be famous.’

The documentary, while offering a nostalgic view of the mid-1990s and early 2000s in Portland, Oregon, aimlessly offers little narrative into Elliott Smith’s character. To contrast, in Searching for Sugar Man, the 2012 documentary on the ‘lost’ pop artist Sixto Rodriguez, the narrative is stronger in how it unfolds. After all, the film begins with the question of what happened to this mysterious singer, believing that he might have committed suicide, to audiences learning that he is very much alive. However, in the case of Elliott Smith, those who know of his work are aware of his death at age 34 that, despite the cause still being deemed ‘inconclusive,’ has all the indications of a suicide. […]

Poetry by Ezekiel Yu
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A stylized photo of poet Pattiann Rogers delivering a lecture on Walt Whitman.

Nature’s Nurture: On Pattiann Rogers’s “The Determinations of the Scene”

I’ve never been deeply interested in discovering some knock-down argument for the question of determinism, hard or soft or what have you. It seems a given that we are thrown into existence equipped with certain capacities, which are, to a degree, non-negotiable; and our choices, going forward, will always be curtailed both by the limits of those capacities as well as the inevitability of outside interference, whether it be from environments or other actors—who are, of course, similarly limited by their own subjectivities.

While this seems to me to be almost boringly obvious, it’s at the same time difficult for me to square away the reality of human freedom. Yes, we’re pre-equipped with a particular physiology, rising out of protein codes and the processes of gestation, and on top of that are blown hither and yon by the previously mentioned exteriors; but it’s also boringly obvious that an essential element of our existence involves the ability to “mind” oneself, to abstract real decisions distinct from biology’s sundry impulsions and the effect of circumstance. While it may (or may not?) be technically possible to draw out a fully elaborated causal chain starting with the origins of the universe all the way down to my choice of sausage or pepperoni for last night’s pizza order, this still tells me nothing whatsoever about the role intentionality plays in this otherwise brute sequence of events. […]

Art by Ethan Pinch
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A stylized image of the artist Charles Ray, his arms folded in a red shirt.

Charles Ray & Postmodern Art: A Retrospective

Compared to other artists of a similar age, Charles Ray has made very few pieces—only a single sculpture every two years or so. It used to be that no one talked about him. Now everybody does. He’s the guy you mention to your hipster friends. Jeff Koons? Pfft. I’m over it. Charles Ray is much cooler.

Don’t know him? He’s the one who started all that controversy with his statue of Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim. MoMA didn’t want it standing in their courtyard because they felt it might frighten parents and families. Both Jim and Huck are naked. The older man reaches out, seemingly to caress the boy’s shoulder. It’s a psychologically charged moment. Ray is plunging headfirst into a sweaty world of race and homoeroticism.

Charles Ray began making a name for himself during the nineties. Neo-Geo was a phrase that got thrown around a lot back then. Not a genre, so to speak, but a catch-all for the kind of postmodern art that was le dernier cri in the big apple. In the halcyon days of MTV and Artforum, being a contemporary artist was a lot like being a rock star. In fact, painters and sculptors chummed around with rock stars all the time. Sometimes the artists even behaved like rock stars and the rock stars commonly mistook themselves for artists (take Tracey Emin and David Bowie, for example). The unspoken rules of postmodernism were as follows: whatever sticks, works. No pussyfooting around the last fifty years of modern art theory, gingerly kissing eggshells. As long as it felt fresh, and surprising, it was valid. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot of a miner's wife smoking in a cigarette from Barbara Kopple's "Harlan County, USA".

They Too Are We: Reviewing Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County, USA” (1976)

Too often it is easily taken for granted certain life ‘luxuries’ that should otherwise be considered necessities—electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, and surviving without the limits of poverty. I am always agog when I hear the rich say, ‘Well, I worked hard for my money,’ as if to imply those who undergo poverty don’t work hard. Rather, those who struggle are often stuck in dead end jobs, remain prisoners of their town, and then there are the coal miners who undergo a daily suffering on another level altogether—long hours, low wages, black lung disease, and daily dangers are just some of the problems, not excluding their meager means of living—no decent home with clean, comfortable rooms and a bath. ‘Why don’t they just get out and leave?’ someone might ask. Well, without the financial resources, there is not much freedom for those living on meager wages.

Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA is a must-see documentary that showcases the seminal moment when the Harlan Kentucky coal miners joined the United Mine Workers of America, only to have Duke Power Company refuse to sign. Thus came the strike and the picket line. And that is what this film is about—commiseration, unity, fairness, and joining together for a greater good. The many little Davids who must stand up to this impending Goliath who, with its ‘electricity burning over there—there’s someone dying everyday for it.’ […]

Memoir & Fiction by Ezekiel Yu
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Two AI-generated images of East Asian men smoking cigarettes, done in a neo-Impressionist style.

In Memoriam: Carcinogens and the Common Isopod

I must have been younger than ten. These were the days of unanswered questions and rooms that dwindled in size and quantity the more we were tossed about the Greater Los Angeles Area. My father had lost his job, again, and I’d forgotten what he was doing for money when the man with the cigarette arrived on our door.

Was I home alone with my father, or were my mother and other siblings with us? It shouldn’t be difficult to remember, for we were always together, separated only by school or the occasional extracurricular activity, but for whatever reason, I see just my father and me in our cramped second-level apartment. It was summer, perhaps, as the air conditioner was on, although inconstant, and I can feel the sweaty doze of day when sunlight fans downward and blanches one’s musings, with nothing to do but await my older self’s dubious remembrance. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot from René Laloux’s La Planète sauvage (Fantastic Planet) of a Draag falling asleep next to an Om child.

Ethereal Circle: On René Laloux’s “La Planète sauvage” (“Fantastic Planet”, 1973)

There are some animated films that are not made for kids. In fact, some are not even made for most adults, and this may be one of them. So, let us not be mistaken that René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (La Planète sauvage) is, on all accounts, a savage and violent tale where humans (called Oms) are nothing more than tiny animals forced to bend to the whims of larger, more ‘sophisticated’ creatures, called Draags. Within this post-apocalyptic world, the Draags rule and humans at best are regarded as nothing more than pets and at worst, they are vicious vermin deserving of extermination.

Fantastic Planet opens with a frightened human (Om) mother running with her baby. She appears terrified, and in her attempt to find safety, she climbs up a hill, only to then be pushed down by some large, blue hand. Once more, she attempts to climb, and is pushed down again. Still clutching her baby, the hand then flicks her several feet away. Suddenly, the blue fingers lift and drop her, wherein the force of the fall inevitably kills her. ‘What a shame. We can’t play with it anymore,’ says a group of three Draag children. Following that, a young Draag child and her Draag leader father approach the scene. The Draag child (Tiwa) asks if she can keep the orphaned baby Om as a pet. ‘Why is he crying, father?’ she asks. ‘He must be scared. Or hungry,’ her father replies. He allows her to keep the baby Om, but instructs, ‘You must take care of that animal.’ […]

Art by Ethan Pinch
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A drawing by Pablo Picasso of Picasso and Manuel Pallarès looking at the Eiffel Tower.

Pablo Picasso and Apostate Cubism

The painting I want to talk about is this one: “Guitar and Mandolin”. It’s one of Pablo Picasso’s biggest still lifes and a prime example of what’s generally referred to by art historians as synthetic Cubism. It’s not as beloved or as famous as works such as “Guernica” or “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” but I would argue it’s a masterpiece and one that summarises something uniquely Picasso’s own.

Having invented Cubism, Picasso was probably the first artist to lose faith in it. For years he and George Braque had been a double act. Following the breakup came an odd shuttling back and forth of different styles across the next decade, of feints and impostures. But what precisely do these differences in style-type represent? Do they represent different prospective audiences? Different social attitudes to taste? It’s difficult to say. But perhaps they represent some deeper change or retrogression within the artist.

The most frequent point of comparison for “Guitar and Mandolin” is Matisse’s “Still Life after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘La Desserte'”. The similarities are intriguing when one considers the famous rivalry between Picasso and Matisse. But is it true that “Guitar and Mandolin” was intended as a kind of avantgarde diss track? Was Picasso really attempting to send-up what is Matisse’s least successful cubist venture? Admittedly I am not at all very interested in the veracity of this claim. But at the same time, it establishes an interesting line of inquiry. After all, if “Guitar and Mandolin” is a caricature of Matissean Cubism the question becomes whether the mockery of the mockery holds any kind of actual authentic status. Who in the end is actually being subverted? Is it Matisse or is it Picasso himself? […]