Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

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From setup to snap and on through to print, the picture postcard of the early 1900s aimed to be a simple, participatory document for viewers and reviewers alike. For photographer Walker Evans, the penny-priced keepsake became a stylistic touchstone for his own hushed art: glossed in realism, unfussy in its representation of a rather ordinary subject or object, and anonymous. At the precocious age of ten, Evans began to amass what he would later term "folk document[s]," organizing his objets d’art into categories like "American Architecture," "Outdoor Pleasures," and "Madness." To illustrate Evans' debt to the mailbox art, the Met showcases his 9,000-count collection, including a dozen photographs that went the postcard route.

I Am Cuba

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Agitprop often tends to be like the tasteless sale of timeshares — it feels like they're tossing in everything and the kitchen sink. But the dazzling and dizzying I Am Cuba, in which Soviets teamed with Cubans as brothers-in-cameras, transcends any wholesale tag; in fact, it's unlike anything on celluloid. Ostensibly a Viva-Cuba piece of propaganda, Mikhail Kalatozov's 1964 docudrama is set in profligate, pre-Fidel Cuba, where four vignettes of capitalism-caused hardship — each featuring ecstatic cinematography and ravishing compositions — track the proletariat's stance from submission to revolution. Overwhelming in the best sense, the once-forgotten, eff-America production was ironically and thankfully saved by stateside enthusiasts (like Martin Scorsese) from obsolescence.

Valley of the Dolls

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Valley of the Dolls opens with Giacometti-esque silhouettes that eventually morph into monolithic tablets, towering in their primary-color glory — a high-art start for 1967. Yet while the cult classic harbors a taste for modernism, its impulse is for beautifully shot and costumed camp. Based on Jacqueline Susann's all-about-backstage-drama bestseller, the titular "dolls" are both a euphemistic term for pills and the three gorgeous dames who swallow pride, the uppers, and the downers of trying to make a name for themselves: the brain (Barbara Parkins), the body (Sharon Tate), and the ultra-talented bitch (Patty Duke). Alan Cumming introduces a pleasure-pleasing film that's tailor-made for tonight's boozy mood.

The Toe Tactic

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The daughter of famed animators Faith and John Hubley, Emily Hubley has crafted her own cachet through wondrous handiwork, as in her illustrations for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. For her feature-length debut, The Toe Tactic, Hubley interweaves live-action and animation to tell of a young woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown — the delayed reaction to her father's passing. In Hubley's magical alt-reality, four animated dogs complicate matters by playing a coded game with serendipitous, real-life repercussions. A hymn to memory and how one literally deals with the cards dealt, the whimsical film features the voice of David Cross and a spare, yet dreamy score from Hubley's sister Georgia and her band, Yo La Tengo.

Anteater Pantseater

This past Sunday, I was at the Museum of Natural History with my visiting friend. I saw a taxidermic anteater. It warranted a declaration: This is my new favorite animal. So, again, the koala gets the bump. This picture (from the Indoorkids blog) sums up my newfound devotion to the creature.

Naeem Mohaiemen: Young Man Was No Longer A...

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During the rough-and-tumble '70s, revolutionary movements were sprouting up around the world like weeds, the byproducts of sociopolitical factors x, y, and z. In his ongoing project Young Man Was No Longer A..., artist/activist Naeem Mohaiemen breaks down the calculus behind these failed crusades. Compiling found images, guerrilla tapes, and diary entries into a multimedia dossier on these would-be Bolsheviks, Mohaiemen lectures on cadres that veered from messianic to manqué, particularly their ties to the present and their long-term effect on, say, federal surveillance or punishment.

Remembering Richard

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Twenty years after his sudden passing, Richard Roud's fingerprints on our film culture are evident in any repertory program. During film's revolutionary '60s and '70s, Roud helped found the New York Film Festival and was an instrumental tastemaker who hyped foreign filmmakers as varied as the Nouvelle Vague auteurs (Godard, Truffaut, Resnais) and the arthouse twosome, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Lincoln Center pays homage to his eclectic — and continental — film eye with a double bill of the man's must-sees: Max Ophüls' once-embargoed (for immorality), six-degrees-of-sex tale La Ronde and Straub and Huillet's spare, near-motionless study of Bach, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

Stephanie Lempert: GeoBiographies

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As dense with words as the asteroid belt is with space detritus, Stephanie Lempert's photographs are framed in quotation marks. In her latest series, GeoBiographies, the artist layers line after line of kaleidoscopic type atop picturesque photos of Boston and New York parklands, each a future-aware conversion from city landfill. The telltale text itself is taken from interviews with those who instigated the redevelopment, highlighting the process from salvage site to salvaged space. Reminiscent of the atomized style of the neo-impressionists, Lempert's visually mesmerizing presentations of newfound terra firma include renderings of Dead Horse Bay, Fresh Kills Park, and Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

Fred Sandback

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Fred Sandback's famed wire and colored yarn "sculptures" are as precise and chaste as priests preparing for mass. With their vertical, horizontal, or diagonal arrangements, the American artist's 90-degree beauties string along your imagination — their shadows and negative space only aid and abet the onlooker's projected visions. Beginning today, the David Zwirner Gallery and Zwirner & Wirth each present selections from Sandback's simple and altogether striking oeuvre.

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors

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Like many early 20th-century painters, Pierre Bonnard retreated to the hinterland for his twilight years. But rather than twiddling his artistic thumbs, it was during this spell in Le Cannet, France, that Bonnard summoned some of his loveliest compositions. Painted from pencil sketches and his imperfect recollection, his rustic still lifes and interiors (of furniture, friends, and his wife Marthe) are defined by punched-up colors and an intimate pas de deux between light and depth. Beginning today, the Met's Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors marks the first exhibition to honor and hone in on the artist's surprisingly fruitful coda.

Alex Brown: Fodderland

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Alex Brown's puzzle-like oil paintings are Op-Art wonders: landscapes and headshots as elaborate, pixilated mosaics in a Pantone-worshipping color palette. Brown's geometric brushstrokes (often triangles, ovals, or squares in precise increments) dominate many of his compositions and create an image that's not unlike the distorted reflection from a turned-off television — that is to say, beautifully and fascinatingly unfamiliar. Brown welcomes the new year with his cleverly named exhibit, Fodderland, featuring the artist's latest hypnotic, multilayered illusions/illustrations.
Picture from Feature Inc.

American Politics: From the Archives

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Thanks to Illinois' backroom politics, Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — in which a crooked governor handpicks idealistic, straight-arrow James Stewart for a vacant Senate seat — comes with a new life-imitates-art context. The Capra-corn classic joins nine other politically minded films for MoMA's salute to both President-Elect Obama's Inauguration Day and MLK Day. Besides o-captain odes to Lincoln from American film forefathers D.W. Griffith and John Ford, there's the original All the King's Men, Sidney Lumet and Joseph Mankiewicz's compulsive King: A Film Record, Montgomery to Memphis, and Robert Drew's direct-cinema documentary Primary, which enlists Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, and D.A. Pennebaker to shoot Wisconsin's 1960 Democratic primary between JFK and the phonic delight, Hubert Humphrey.

Holiday with Preston Sturges

A piece I wrote for The Fanzine on the one-of-a-kind Preston Sturges. Click the snapshot for more!

Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund presents Docs on the Shortlist

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Before nominees become lapidary, Tribeca slates a two-day program off the Academy's shortlist for Best Feature Documentary. The honorary roll call: Man on Wire, the titular monsieur being Philippe Petit, who crossed between World Trade Towers 1,350 feet above other pedestrians; They Killed Sister Dorothy, which investigates the current, cutthroat Amazon; Pray the Devil Back to Hell, the acclaimed spotlight on the stouthearted women who helped elect Africa's first female head of state; The Garden, a telltale look into the tussle for an inner-city community farm in Los Angeles; At the Death House Door, which examines the uneasy charge of ministering to the to-be-executed; and I.O.U.S.A., a dollars-and-common-sense profile of our fearsome national debt.