• print • Dec/Jan 2015

    Star Traps

    Hollywood Babylon, then and now • Choire Sicha

    Until recently, Hollywood was the most famous American place in the world. Over the past decade or so, it’s been dethroned by Brooklyn (“Are you from Brooklyn? Do you like Interpol?” is what you are likely to be asked on Air France) and, of course, the World Trade Center. Still, third place is nice. Hollywood is a terrific and justifiably iconic American thing. It’s served ever since its founding as a cultural capital of sin as well as a focal point of American anti-Semitism.

    Two new books examine the great gossipy early days of Los Angeles as industry town: William J. Mann’s Tinseltown:

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    Still from “The Dream of the 1890s.” From Portlandia, Season 2, Episode 5.

    What Was the Hip Butcher?

    Looking at twenty years of American eating, from Big Macs to DIY bacon. • Melanie Rehak

    The holidays are fast approaching as I write this column, bringing the usual flurry of thoughts about what to cook for the rush of upcoming festive dinners. Whatever delicacies appear on my table (along with the family recipes that have been grandfathered in despite their dependence on canned soups), they’re guaranteed to be pretty different from what I, and everybody else in America, was making in the kitchen twenty years ago (heritage-breed turkey, I’m looking at you). Between then and now, the way we eat has evolved in ways both wonderful and worrying, and how we write about what we eat has

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    Viv Albertine with Keith Levine and Mick Jones, 1975.

    A Slit in Time

    Punk heroine Viv Albertine recounts a raucous life. • Howard Hampton

    In 1976, Viv Albertine was a twenty-two-year-old Brit punk looking to shock and awe the general populace: “I walk around in little girls’ party dresses, hems slashed and ragged, armholes torn open to make them bigger, the waistline up under my chest. . . . Pippi Longstocking meets Barbarella meets juvenile delinquent. Men look at me and they are confused, they don’t know whether they want to fuck me or kill me. This sartorial ensemble really messes with their heads. Good.”

    A year earlier she had been just another halfway-disaffected girl in art school dreaming of a way out of an aimless,

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    Stephen Shore, U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973, C-print, 17 × 21 5/8".

    Surface to Air

    The first in-depth survey of Stephen Shore’s work reveals a restless experimentalist • Richard B. Woodward

    Photography has recognized only a few prodigies during its history. Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986) was certainly one of them. The action shots he took before the age of twelve—of early French car races, experiments with manned flight, a cousin leaping down the stairs—have seldom been equaled. Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) was another wunderkind. He could handle a 4 × 5 view camera when he was eight and was exhibiting with Frederick Evans and other Linked Ring artists at eighteen. Francesca Woodman (1958–81) began her series of self-portraits in earnest when she was fourteen, and her

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    Le Corbusier with a model of the Villa Savoye, 1935.

    The Grand Master

    Revisiting the life of the man who engineered the modern world, for better and worse • Nikil Saval

    By the end of his life, the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris—universally known by his nom de pinceau, Le Corbusier—had emerged from decades of frustrated plans, encircled by controversy and dismissal, to become the world’s most renowned architect. For a man who had devised three hundred projects but seen only seventy-eight of them built, the high-profile commissions that belatedly started pouring in proved a glorious bounty: the National Museum of Western Art for Tokyo; a church, apartment building, and elementary school for Firminy, France; the Olivetti tower outside Milan;

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    George Herms, Zodiac behind Glass—Sagittarius Box, 1965, assemblage, 25 × 24 × 8".

    George Herms’s The River Book

    Albert Mobilio

    IN A 1999 EPISODE of The Simpsons, Homer attempts to build a backyard barbecue but instead ends up with a hodgepodge mess, a jumble soon hailed as great art. This genial parody (Jasper Johns has a speaking role) of found art depicted “creations” that are, in fact, hardly far from the mark. Found art and assemblage can sometimes appear to be work easily (or in Homer’s case, accidentally) accomplished, in part because the materials are so familiar and the presiding aesthetic prizes spontaneity. These two volumes, offering a generous sampling from the West Coast painter, collagist, poet, and

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015

    Eastern Promises

    A book about an autobiographical Russian writer takes an unreliable narrator at his word • Sophie Pinkham

    The French writer Emmanuel Carrère wrote several novels before finding his home in the more ambiguous genre of novelistic nonfiction. His work often explores the perils of self-invention and the fraught relationship between fact and fiction. The Adversary (2000), for example, tells the story of a mediocre man who was so desperate to please that he created a fictitious life for himself. When his lies started to unravel, he killed his family so they wouldn’t be disappointed in him. Eduard Limonov, the subject of Carrère’s newly translated “pseudo-biography,” Limonov, is a different kind of

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    Marlene Dumas, Stern, 2004, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 × 51 1/8".

    Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden

    Johanna Fateman

    MARLENE DUMAS’S PAINTING Stern, 2004, is named not for the woman it depicts, Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction member who was discovered dead from hanging in a Stammheim Prison cell in 1976. Rather, Dumas titled her portrait after the German newsmagazine that published the sensational photo of Meinhof’s corpse—a telling emphasis from the preeminent figurative painter, who often works from mass-media sources. Gerhard Richter famously used the image, too, in his series October 18, 1977, 1988 (the title is the date three other RAF prisoners were found dead). While his versions are part of a

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    Joe Shlabotnik/FLICKR

    Lena in Love

    A newly minted celebrity remembers her mistakes, but forgets her readers need to make some too • Kaitlin Phillips

    Lena Dunham’s anxiety about success was initially her avenue to it. In 2009, while living in her childhood home, she created the web series Delusional Downtown Divas with two friends she’d known since preschool. The three parodied their fates as “children of the art world,” lying around their parents’ lofts, smoking pot, and preening their personal brands. A diva on the telephone: “Father, it’s AgNess. I have some bargaining to do with you. I will not sell the Frank Stella painting, and in exchange I want Jeffrey Deitch’s phone number. . . . I would like to have his screen name also.” When they

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015

    The Audacity of Hope

    A new bio treats a pioneer of comedy as a relic of cultural conservatism • Ben Schwartz

    During a 1969 Christmas show from Vietnam, Bob Hope failed, for once, to heed his own advice for entertaining troops. He got sentimental. He got preachy. At the time, Citizen Hope was a well-known flag-waving hawk. But Comedian Hope was something else. He had spent nearly forty years playing the coward’s coward, an icon of irresponsibility, showbiz egomania, and skirt-chasing self-absorption, preferring whenever possible to let his fellow Americans do his part for him. Now he told ten thousand GIs that he had just been to the White House—and added in dead earnest that President Nixon had assured

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015
    Jean Fouquet, Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels (detail), ca. 1450, tempera on wood, 36 1/2 × 33 1/2". Right panel from the Melun Diptych.

    Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces

    Prudence Peiffer

    INTO A contemporary landscape of data mining and information fracking comes Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces, a beautifully absurd accumulation of useless numbers and gravid blankness. This slip of a book—written in French in 2004 and published this year as one of twenty-two volumes in conjunction with the Whitney Biennial—inventories artworks that “are either unfinished, lost, forgotten, destroyed, or that were never even made” in fragments culled (without footnotes) from ghostly references in biographies, newspapers, and the like. What are we to do with the fact that “ninety percent of

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2015

    Performance Studies

    Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts • Anna Altman

    Elmgreen & Dragset are a Scandinavian artist duo known for making realistic environments in unlikely contexts. These projects—among their most famous is a fully realized Prada store in the desert outside Marfa, Texas—poke fun at the moneyed art world. In 33 Artists in 3 Acts, Sarah Thornton first encounters the pair at the opening of the Venice Biennale in 2009. They are presenting “The Collectors,” an exhibition for which they transformed two of the Biennale’s national pavilions into homes for a wealthy family and a gay bachelor, respectively. An actor playing a real-estate agent lets slip

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