Reading Artists Three

A look at what six local artists have been reading
by Susan Swenson

Ward Shelley describes himself as "kind of a hunter," when it comes to books. "When I have time I hunt in used bookstores. If I’m anywhere near one, I almost get pulled in. You know how Annie Herron always has these wild outfits? She knows exactly when to go into the thrift stores, when they’ve received a new shipment, when they have the good stuff." Shelley reads a lot of non-fiction. The only magazine he reads is Harper’s — no art magazines and not even the newspaper.

Of particular interest to Shelley is biology and, generally, science, especially anything by Stephen Jay Gould. He writes about paleontology and Darwinism. Instead of saying ‘what is it?’, he asks ‘where does it come from,’ or ‘how did it get to be this way?’" According to Shelley, this idea which is coming out of paleontology is influencing the other sciences. Sociology is now looking at things from this evolutionary perspective—how things have changed over time, throughout history. Gould also writes for Nature Magazine. Shelley recently read his book Full House, which is "about baseball, opera and natural science, all put together. It talks about 'explosions of diversity’ and ‘contractions of specificity.’ They found a way to sort of shave off the surface of fossils to figure out how to reconstruct all of the creatures that died off and that they never knew how to reconstruct before. It’s the kind of science that’s stranger than fiction." This is not an exact science (the extrapolations are still just that), but the drawings included illustrate a wide variety of bizarre looking creatures.

Other books by Gould that Shelley recommends are: Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History; Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History; The Panda’s Thumb; and Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale & the Nature of History.

Finnish fairytales are Shelley’s current bedtime reading. At the moment it’s Tales from Moominvalley, by Tove Jansson (translated by Thomas Warburton), originally written in 1962. "They are amazing children’s stories that are so subtle in their emotions. It’s like Winnie the Pooh in that the characters — the Moomintrolls — carry over from story to story. It’s a bizarre menagerie of stories."

The book Shelley is spending the most time with right now is one on magic — 19th-century magic — called Magic, The Great Illusions Revealed and Explained, by David H. Charney. "You know, levitating women, magic boxes, that kind of thing." He started thinking about this because of the idea of the box and the mystery of what goes on inside it. At the moment he is working on an interactive installation for a show in the fall — the Portrait-Labyrinth will be a cube with an internal labyrinth which participants crawl through while being photographed by 15 different video cameras. With the 19th-century magic boxes "it’s all about directing attention; directing the viewer’s attention toward specific things" or places, in order to do the trick where they are not looking. The Portrait-Labyrinth "cube will be different because people will encounter it on their own, without anyone there to direct their attention."

Also in this vein, he is reading Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: Unique, eccentric and amazing entertainers, by Ricky Jay who, according to Shelley, is the most well-known card shark. "Jay is also a musician and a Las Vegas personality, but the dark side of this, the opposite of David Copperfield. He’s often in David Mamet movies because they’re friends."

Shelley just finished Rock Climbing, by Phil Watts, as part of his research for a future project where he will climb across a forest in the tops of the trees. The book on hand is not specific enough, so he is now looking for something that details more extensively the techniques of rope handling in rock climbing. Shelley says that "the ambition of rock climbing is that the ropes are only [there] for safety. In caving, it’s just about getting to the end. They don’t care how they get there, so by the end they might be hanging" by the ropes. He will do a trial run in Minnesota this summer.

Flying out of Copenhagen, Shelley discovered a magazine in the back pocket of the seat in front of him with an article about the bamboo scaffolding used in Hong Kong and he "realized that with some bamboo and rope I could get just about anywhere." (All buildings in Hong Kong, even the skyscrapers, are built with scaffolding made of bamboo strapped together into a kind of lattice work.) He will use the bamboo to help him in getting across the forest top. Because of the Voyage Platform project Shelley completed at Socrates Sculpture Park in September 1998, someone gave him Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. "I immediately decided I didn’t want to do the obvious and just copy that, but then I finally realized that I did want to do just that."

For entertainment, Shelley reads science fiction, so he "almost always has one of those going. I’m reading one now that, oddly enough, is about art." This one is Carve the Sky, by Alexander Jablokov. Shelley likes to browse used bookstores around the world when possible and picked this book up in a shop in Oslo, Norway. In his opinion, the greatest science fiction book is Legacy, by Greg Bear.

The Patrick O’Brian 20-volume Aubrey/Maturin series of novels are some of Shelley’s all-time favorites. They are seafaring books based on the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. He recently read Desolation Island, the fifth volume in the series. Shelley considers them "the best historical novels. I only read about one each year because I’m saving them." According to the publisher's note, in Desolation Island Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon Stephen Maturin are commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame and "sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy — and a treacherous disease that decimates the crew."

Guns, Germs, & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond is another favorite. This "is kind of the liberal dream. It discusses the cultural relativism of accidents of history and natural history, primarily natural history. It’s sort of the sociological approach to...Gould’s question. It starts with him quoting a friend in New Guinea who asks, ‘Why do you guys have all the stuff?’" Diamond attempts to determine why certain cultures have more material wealth, more technology...whatever the ‘stuff’ is. He suggests that things have happened the way they have because of the accidents of place and nature. Diamond also wrote The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, which is about our biological relationship to the chimp.

With a deadline for his solo show at Daniel Weinberg in Los Angeles, Jim Torok had little time to read this spring. But he did manage to finish one book describing how to find land dirt cheap. No, this is not a book about looking for property in Williamsburg, or anywhere in the New York area, for that matter. It takes place in Iowa and is the story of one man looking for land. In Torok’s words, "this guy’s a nut. He even goes into churches asking about available land. He’s out in Iowa somewhere and just wants to own some land. He doesn’t even want a house, he just wants land and a tractor. Maybe a barn to keep the tractor in." Country Property Dirt Cheap: How I Found My Piece of Inexpensive Rural Land...Plus My Adventures With a $300 Junk Antique Tractor, by Ralph C. Turner.

Yun-Fei Ji just finished Waiting, by Ha Jin, a Chinese-American author. Ha Jin was born and raised in mainland China like Ji, although Ha Jin grew up during the Cultural Revolution and so is a little older than Ji. He has lived in the United States for about the same length of time as Ji (Jin moved to the U.S. in 1985 to attend Brandeis University), and Ji says that he speaks very honestly about China.

In Waiting, the setting is an army hospital. Ji’s father was in the Chinese army and worked in an army hospital so there is a significant resonance to the story for him. "The writing is simple and clear and yet there is very much going on. This is a love story between a doctor and the head nurse, but for fourteen years they can’t hold hands or even walk beside each other outside of the hospital because the doctor is in an arranged marriage. Every year he goes to the small village where his wife lives to ask for a divorce," but she will never grant his request. "This kind of waiting is the main thing" in the novel. Waiting was awarded the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award.

In 1993 while Ji was doing a residency at the MacDowell colony, he met a poet who had a collection of Ha Jin’s poetry. At the time Jin was not well known. The poems are about the Cultural Revolution in China and Ji was very much taken by the writing. Ji just got Jin’s new collection of short stories, The Bridegroom, but hasn’t had a chance to start it yet.

Another Chinese-American writer Ji appreciates is Maxine Hong Kingston. According to Ji, she is "kind of the 'grandmother' of Chinese-American writing." Ji considers China Men and The Woman Warrior: memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, to be her two best books. In The Woman Warrior, she writes "about the building of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese men who worked on the project, including her father and various male ancestors," according to the publisher’s notes.

When I first mentioned this reading list to Ji, he immediately responded that one of the authors he always enjoys reading is Joseph Conrad. "He’s describing this...weird colonial world, talking about race and power relations. It’s a European point of view but it’s still very interesting. Ji has read Nostromo, which he describes as "very dense kind of reading," The Secret Agent and, of course, The Heart of Darkness. In the latter, Ji remarks on the extremely well-dressed agents in the middle of the jungle where almost everyone else is basically naked. It’s about keeping up the colonial, masterful appearance; this super-dignified ‘gentleman’s’ appearance. Conrad doesn’t give individual characteristics to the Africans. He describes them as a group, without the dignity of individuality, so that’s problematic."

Ji has been reading some Chinese history as well; about the missionaries coming to China and the beginning of trade with Europe. Now he’s looking for more sources of this kind of historical material.

In between packing boxes for his move, Jef Scharf unearthed two books he just finished last week—Letters from the Earth: uncensored writings by Mark Twain, and The Manuscript Found in Sarogossa, by Jan Potocki.

Marilla Palmer just started reading White Teeth, the debut novel of Zadie Smith, a young English writer. This far into it Palmer can only say that it takes place in the 70s and opens with a guy who’s 47 and has just failed at committing suicide. The publisher’s synopsis notes that in the story "[a]n Englishman, Archie Jones, and a Bengali Muslim named Samad Iqbal, who first met after World War II in Turkey, encounter each other again 30 years later in the North-West London neighborhood where they live with their families. The daughter of Archie and his Jamaican wife falls in love with Samad's radical fundamentalist son. Archie's sister-in-law is a fervent Jehovah's witness. Samad is plagued by guilt over his affair with his children's schoolteacher. And a nearby Jewish family tries to interfere in their lives. In a stew of often competing multicultural elements, Archie, Samad, and their families struggle to find their identities amid the complexities of the 1970s. Zadie Smith calls her acclaimed novel ‘a utopian view’ of race relations: ‘It's what it might be and what it should be and maybe what it will be.’" The book is a New York Times "Editors' Choice" for one of the best books of 2000 and was nominated in 2001 for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Palmer is just finishing Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons (also translated as The Possessed, and The Devils = The Possessed). She is slowing down on her Russian reading now, after having read quite a lot of Russian literature over the last few years. She finished Crime and Punishment and found it "great. It’s about alienation and is sort of surrealistic. The main character is sick and he kills someone. But you’re not sure if he’s crazy or just delirious. There is a lot of this kind of slippage in the book," where you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. "In the end he’s saved. It’s a very hopeful book."

Palmer said she is also "finally getting around to Air Guitar," by Dave Hickey, which she is finding very entertaining.

The first book on Jim Hyde’s list is The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss. In between that and other books he regularly reads anything by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker’s "Talk of the Town" section. Recently, Hyde has found Hertzberg to be "on a great streak. He has beautiful way of slamming [George] Dubbya. He’s a lot of fun to read."

High on Hyde’s list is The Unknown Masterpiece, a novella by Honore de Balzac. "This is a great book. Anyone who’s a painter should read this. It’s written in 1840 and he predicts impressionism, then abstraction. It starts out with a young painter who’s just moved to Paris. A few pages into the story Balzac lets the reader know that his young painter is based on Nicolas Poussin." This effects "a ratcheting up of authority." The young artist plays the part of an absolute novice. He visits an older painter who is a hero of his and...is being critiqued by this older man who is a real master." So, the criticism comes at a very high level because at the time Poussin was considered a master. "There are absolutely beautiful resonances throughout. It’s monumentally interesting."

Another must-read for artists, according to Hyde, is Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson.

In "bits and pieces" Hyde has been reading Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience and the Origin of History, by Giorgio Agamben. Although it starts out on the boring side, it gets very interesting. "It talks about what experience meant in a classical and medieval sense, and then what happened with modernity;" how modernity disrupted the prior notion of experience. "It is post-Fouccault, post-Benjamin."

On a lighter note, Hyde found Bob Nickas’ Live Free or Die a fun read.

A book which Hyde loves, although he did not read this year, is In An Antique Land, by Amitav Ghosh. He describes this as "a beautiful non-fiction book about a Hindu grad student, living in London, who goes to muslim Egypt to do research. He studies the patterns of kinship and political relationships, and ends up researching a Hindu slave to a Jewish merchant in the 10th or 11th century, just before the crusades. The Hindu is more of an employee than a slave, and he discovers that the merchant had probably freed the slave and moved to the Indian sub-continent, where he probably married the slave’s cousin. It is a wonderful book." Other books by Ghosh include, The Calcutta Chromosone: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery, and Glass Palace.

Another all-time favorite, "just because it’s a wonderful thing" is The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Caroll. According to the "e-book" synopsis, this is "[n]on-sensical verse of the highest order. ...[T]his humorous poem about the adventures of a motley crew in search of an elusive Snark is a fantasy written with surreal images."

Hyde also likes to read a lot of magazines, especially on art criticism. He finds The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker to consistently have good criticism. And, as a motorcycle aficionado, he always likes his motorcycle magazines.

The AIA Guide to New York City, an architecture guide to the city published by an association of architects, is a volume Hyde picked up recently and highly recommends. "It gives a little history of buildings in different neighborhoods" which helps create a texture to those areas.

A new Leo Steinberg book of art criticism is due out soon, which Hyde says he will get as soon as it is released. Steinberg gave the best lecture Hyde has ever seen on "The Last Supper." "It was entirely, relentlessly thorough on every point." Other titles by Steinberg include, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art; Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion; and Encounters with Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture.

Susan Swenson is a writer and is also editor/publisher of Pierogi Press.