Tag Archives: contemporary

Claire Twomey: White Baroque

Posted on by
Claire Twomey combines a Baroque excess of domestic–therefore feminine–paraphernalia with a Minimalist palette that manages not to overwhelm in her immersive ceramic installations. The white palette is really interesting with the shadows that come into play. They are installations rather than sculptures because they not only interact with their environment but because they often involve the viewer as well.
A bit like Rachel Whiteread’s  signature plaster casts of the insides of ordinary domestic objects, like wardrobes, beds, floors and baths in 1988 that have been described as “minimalism with a heart”. This artist, also British, has done a number of cool things, including but not limited to:
  1. In London in 2006, Twomey created an intervention that wanted to  create an interaction between the Victoria & Albert Museum and the audience. The work, Trophy, filled the cast courts with 4000 Jasper Blue birds. The birds sitting amongst the classical sculptures created a three-dimensional landscape to walk within. 
  2. For Consciousness/conscience 3000 units of porcelain were produced to create a temporary floor at the Ceramic Biennial in Korea. The floor was crushed by the participation of the audience during the exhibition period. Crunch crunch. That kind of porcelain destruction seems absolutely delicious to me.

Book Review: The Septembers of Shiraz-Nobel Enough?

Posted on by

Sometimes books come to you in different ways: an intriguing cover, a recommendation, even a mix up at the library. This novel, written by debuting author Dalia Sofer, has come to me twice now. I proofed pages of it when I first moved to New York City as an intern with Ms. Sofer’s literary agent. Then my current boss, who works in finance, recommended I read it. The book had been published! And on the shelves of Borders, O sweet measure of success these days. So I finally paid attention this weekend, reading The Septembers of Shiraz like a zealot.

This story of a family living in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution conveys a vivid historical reality, but only as a backdrop to the changing relationship and lives of Isaac, his wife, and children. Isaac, being a prosperous Jewish jeweler, attracts the unwelcome attention of the Muslim revolutionaries. The novel opens on his arrest–seized and taken to prison on suspicion of being a Zionist spy. Isaac endures prison and torture until, with a well-placed Koran verse and his life savings, he buys his freedom. He returns to his home and long-estranged wife, who he had come to love in a most basic and humble way.

One of the joys of this book is how it tells the story of this long-married couple who have ceased to know each other and who need each other. Their ability to come together after great loss, as they escape into Turkey and freedom with their daughter, says much for the resilience of the human spirit. Sofer has a real gift for the nuances of how people relate to those closest to them, and the interaction of the family she creates in The Septembers of Shiraz feels as real and nuanced as one’s own.

But to follow my mental chain of thought away from the story itself, The Septembers of Shiraz strikes me decidedly as an American author delving into a different national character. Sofer left Iran at the age of 10. She is Iranian and also American. So I wonder what Enghdal, the permanent Secretary on the Nobel Prize for Literature, would think? Enghdal said recently that U.S. writers are:

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

I’m not proposing that Sofer has in any way earned a Nobel prize with this lovely novel, which does not approach greatness. But I am suggesting the American heritage is so diverse that it seems ridiculous to call it insular. I’m not sure what world dialogue is going on in European literature that is so enlightened, but doubtless that is because I am American. (Although by American, I mean to say I am both an American and a Swedish citizen.) However, I don’t wish to argue that excellent American authors are engaging in international dialogue in a way that merits a Nobel. I would argue that great writing, wise and brilliant and innovatice and beautiful, earns itself recognition for just those qualities. Whether the work is simultaneosly eccentric and insular is on no great importance, as so long as our common humanity is clear enough. That seems to be something that Sofer, Iranian or American, has done beautifully here; the same is said easily enough about John Updike or Philip Roth as well.

Cy Twombly and Tara Donovan: Connections

Posted on by

Tara Donovan’s recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art awakened me to how lovely and natural her sprawling forms can be, making me quite pleased she won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Composed of a single type of “ready-made” material, she deconstructs the material until you see the essence of its structure and qualities in the way she presents it. She uses mylar tape on the walls of the Met, tacking the shiny rings across the walls like the natural growth of fungus or barnacles. The photograph (below) gives you no true sense of the feel of the

walls, or the gloss of the transformed mylar. Donovan both brings the material into its essence, and gives it a new identity. The way she organizes her material, as one can see here, is organic and expansive, holistic in a way that encompasses chaos. I find the subtle, minor variations of the patterns of rings trance-inducing.


Let’s take another contemporary American artist, Cy Twombly, who I feel is more similar to Donovan than is immediately apparent. Wikipedia categorizes him as “well known for his large scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic style graffiti paintings; on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors.” For both artists, scale is large. Twombly’s abstract paintings create similar designs whose internal harmony mimics that of nature.

Obviously Twombly is quite painterly and messy, and Donovan has a clean-edged, minimalist aesthetic to her sculpture. However, the works of both display a harmony through sprawling, organic balance in patterns echoing Donovan’s work above. Both artists use organic arrangements to evoke a chaotic materiality. Their works are atmospheric, rather than explicit, and scattered rather than centered. What they are saying about the world, even in Twombly’s paintings where he writes it out, is unclear, but how they say it is tantalizing.