#peter schjeldahl

[dk-thrive]

To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.

Frank O’Hara, as quoted by Peter Schjeldahl in Ada Calhoun’s “Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me” (Grove Press, June 14, 2022) 

[doylewesleywalls]

In this video Steve Martin interviews art essayist Peter Schjeldahl. I recommend all of this interview, but I recommend especially the first six minutes of the talk. This six-minute section should be heard/watched by would-be literary critics, especially in graduate schools, as a warning about the pseudo-intellectual gibberish they are encouraged--or commanded--to write. Schjeldahl writes with clarity. Martin wisely sets up a contrast between Schjeldahl's writing style with the academic BS from a bad writer. Because I enjoy and care about the health of literature and the teaching of literature, I believe literary criticism should be a handmaid to literature. I also enjoy and care about art, and there I am also grateful when I find the writers who can help deepen my appreciation and joy as opposed to trying to make themselves sound learned (or, worse, hip to the latest "thing" with its own specialized language).

[tepot]

On Andy Warhol: Peter Schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings (2019)

[jacobwren]

God knows most of us Americans hate being alone. This may explain why our popular culture is the best in the universe. We keep pouring the cream of our genius and love into producing the antiloneliness serums that our movies, pop songs, and television shows. We take nothing more seriously than our fun. Well, all of this has been said many times before, often by pundits displaying that other familiar compulsion, to make people feel bad about what makes them human and sociable in whatever way their world allows. Loneliness is no sin. It is “an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing” in need of infinite consolation.

Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990

[collezionedicose]

Flier for Tiny Events by Poets at Longview Country Club (annex to Max's Kansas City), NYC, November 17, 1968.

[egoschwank]

al things considered — when i post my masterpiece #1221

first posted on facebook october 9, 2023

oscar howe -- "dance of the heyoka" (1954)

"the heyoka … is a kind of sacred clown in the culture of the sioux (lakota and dakota people) of the great plains of north america. the heyoka is a contrarian, jester, and satirist, who speaks, moves and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them" … wikipedia

"as late as 1958, he was denied consideration for a prize in an annual show of native artists because the new painting that he submitted, 'umini wacipi (war and peace dance),' was declared 'not indian,' despite its indubitable subject matter" peter schjeldahl

"are we to be held back forever with one phase of indian painting that is the most common way? are we to be herded like a bunch of sheep, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child and only the white man know what is best for him… but one could easily turn to become a social protest painter. i only hope the art world will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains" … oscar howe

"this is our art … and here is where we are making our last stand. … the least we can do is to fight this last battle, that indian culture may live forever" … oscar howe

"i would like to think i know the dance of the heyoka … happy indigenous peoples' day" … al janik

[kulturado]

The Story: The Art of Dying

The Writer: Peter Schjeldahl

(photo of Peter Schjedahl at far right, with family in 2019)

[luvwich]

🔫 FREEZE this is a STICKUP gimme 5 great lines that you wrote (whether you’ve posted them or not) and 5 great lines someone else wrote (whether published or fanfic) and nobody gets hurt!! *pew pew pew*

uhhh wtf u shot me anyway??? this is ridiculous 😤

anyway i too will start with lines other people wrote, also conveniently culled from my kindle highlights (i wish i had kindle highlights but for everything)

five lines by others

She felt as if she were caught in a firestorm and that the purest, smoothest part of her was being pitted. (tom robbins, Skinny Legs and All)

"It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me." (dashiell hammett, The Maltese Falcon)

And then the enormous midnight gave up all control, opening out her cumulous body from horizon to horizon, so that the air became solid with so great a weight of falling water that Flay could hear the limbs of trees breaking through a roar of foam. (mervyn peake, Titus Groan)

Are we pleased or displeased to observe that van Gogh gave over more of himself to painting than is wise for people to give themselves over to anything? (peter schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018)

In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. (junichiro tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows)

~

five lines by me

Of molten glass which will never cool, never find a shape—cursed always to be this vast liquid, spreading, roaming, banished from form, sentenced to eternal flux. (arpeggio, ch.29 "wreck")

It buzzes now instead of swelling; it clangs a bit, a clanging that doesn't quite reach her toes like an orgasm used to, but in the place of richness and abandon there's a controlled mechanical delight that is its own highly structured tree of poetry. (red-black)

Taken together, Watson was the hollow echo of a once-promising port town, a long tail of fallout from corporate greed, an atrophying organ in the city's sprawling cyborg body: a nightmare, a dream, his home. (jaded, ch.2 "turf")

Gazing down into her eyes, he felt what the bullfighter feels at victory's gory edge. (crescent & redwood, ch. 5 "strings")

Sal's dead, he thought, and in the desperate need to extinguish this truth he leaned forward to scrape his teeth against Gale's warm neck, really a lovely strong neck, and buried his nose in dark, thick hair that smelled of campfires and patchouli and sweat, and in this manner, fist pumping, Rugan chased away the doom. (sellsword)

[onetwofeb]

Peter Schjeldahl

[virtualmemoriespodcast]

Episode 567 - Jarrett Earnest

For the last guest-episode of 2023, art critic Jarrett Earnest joins me to celebrate his beautiful new book, VALID UNTIL SUNSET (Matte Editions), which brings together his Polaroids and a second-person narrative to create a bewitching trip through memory, art, grief, friendship, and more. We talk about how the sudden death of his father paralyzed and then catalyzed him, the importance of making art before fully recovering from a bad experience, how the artist's job is to be a question mark, and how a Nan Goldin exhibition started him on taking pictures of the people and places that mattered to him. We get into his friendships with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Schjeldahl, and Genesis' imprecation to do/make/be the Most Fabulous Imaginable Version, the importance of road trips and pilgrimages, what he learned from interviewing a series of art critics, the freedom & addictiveness of writing in the second person, why we need to make an argument about why any art matters at all today, and why he loves writing about artists he knows. Plus, we discuss the value of public-facing life in NYC, how it felt to perform selections from Valid Until Sunset, how he thinks of writing in terms of shape, the importance of having a really good analyst and really dumb personal trainer, why you don't need to be part of Barbenheimer, and a lot more. Follow Jarrett on Instagram and subscribe to his Substack • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our Substack

Check out the new episode of The Virtual Memories Show

[dk-thrive]

I am beset by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames.

Twenty-some years ago, I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir. I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor. I failed for a number of reasons. I don’t feel interesting. I don’t trust my memories (or anyone’s memories) as reliable records of anything—and I have a fear of lying. Nor do I have much documentary material. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect. I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them.

— Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022 (Harry N. Abrams, May 14, 2024)

[yorkshireword]

PETER SCHJELDAHL

[I]t became apparent that Matisse (to cite an example I am constantly asked about) often had intimate relations with his models. [However,] it seemed useless as well as tasteless to resurrect long-forgotten events whose main interest is in the category of gossip about the great. —Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869-1919, 1986

I would be more impressed by Jack Flam’s delicacy, a standard compunction of Matisse scholars still apparent in the distinctly G-rated catalogue texts of John Elderfield’s great MoMA show, if I thought Flam covered his ears and hummed when interviewees started relating the artist’s amours. I rather suspect he listened avidly. So would you, and perhaps for reasons besides vulgar curiosity—not that there is anything felonious about vulgar curiosity, whose most effective cure is in being satisfied. You might, like me, be fed up with an exaggerated discretion that seems compounded of the indignantly maintained immunities of bourgeois gentlemen and the old formalist horror of tainting art with life. You might feel as well that a certain fullness of meaning and a depth of reality are missing from your comprehension of this figure so fundamental to everybody’s initiation into Western modern culture.

After sizing up the breadth and complexity of Matisse’s art in the MoMA show, I do indeed want gossip about the artist. I do not mean piquant anecdotes. I mean what Matisse did with which models, how he treated his family, what people who knew him really thought of him and so on. You know: the lowdown. Here was a man who agonized in the creation of apparently shadowless pleasure. Here was a galley slave of delight. Concealment of emotion—even as he drew energy from emotion—was his method, more or less. Elderfield in his catalogue essay theorizes ably on the psychological mechanics of Matisse’s work, but his account is frustratingly abstract for want of biographical grit. The how and even the why of Matisse’s sublimation are meager topics without the narrative nourishment of the what.

Start with Lorette, a smoking gun if ever there was one. Seemingly nobody knows so much as her last name. Matisse painted this black-haired woman, often with remarkable grimness, some 50 times in the years 1916-17. He was morbidly obsessed by her, it was obvious, during a time of decline from his period of greatest invention and also of the increasing domestic misery that he would flee when decamping to Nice. (Did he flee Lorette as well?) Elderfield helpfully hung a room at MoMA with nothing but Lorettes, including a full-length nude that is the most coarsely sensual of all the artist’s images. No reviewer I read picked up the cue. Face it. We have been as conditioned to overlook strange behavior in Matisse as children of a dysfunctional paterfamilias.

Matisse’s veiled private life is inevitably contrasted with the open book of Picasso’s. (Has anyone commented on the ethnic-class component of the difference? By being an arriviste Spaniard, Picasso waived a Frenchman’s privileged privacy; his monkeyshines were fair public sport.) I believe that backstairs stuff actually would be more useful in Matisse’s case than it is in that of Picasso, whose emotional and sexual motives—or their pointed abnegation (not sublimation) in the intellectual gesture of Cubism—are right out front. The tales of Picasso’s mistresses serve us mainly as aides-memoire in tracking his periods. The cold, shifty, self-absorbed Matisse is something else again, with his Arcadian thematics that twist and turn in obedience to obscure pressures. With a rare exception like Bonheur de vivre, where he left dreamlike clues in plain sight, Matisse’s pictures never expose his personality, only his talent. This very opacity is loaded with personal import.

Of course we should learn to take Matisse’s work, like that of any artist, in the way he meant it to be taken. But where is it written that we have to stop there? In wanting to know Matisse the man, I am seeking only a supplementary nuance, another point of access to the art—in this instance, the hidden term of a dialectic, the troubled feeling that accounts for the intensity of Matisse’s sunny-side-upness. The need for biographical data grows more peremptory with time (even as it gets harder to come by). Each new generation is naturally more ignorant of the social codes, including artistic style, that carried tacit information to the artist’s contemporaries. Less and less about Matisse, as about any historical figure, goes without saying. For no end of reasons, then, let’s dish.

[tepot]

On Pablo Picasso: Peter Schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings (2019)

[asecretvice]

I just finished reading Ada Calhoun's Also a Poet, which I greatly enjoyed.* Early on there are quotes from a writer and editor named Joe LeSueur about being queer that absolutely delighted me, and I thought I might quietly slip them into tumblr in case someone else might enjoy them as well.

LeSueur grew up in a strict family of Latter Day Saints complete with a polygamous grandfather and says, "It's quite a nice background to get away from." Calhoun's father asks him how he got away, and he responds:

By going queer. When I have any gay friends who grumble about how awful it is, I give them my "Be Glad You're Gay" speech, because it probably got you out of terrible middle-class things. It certainly did me. God knows I may have gone right along with it. Not that it's the worst life in the world, but it does shut you off from certain stimulating things in life that I wouldn't have wanted to miss.

Calhoun writes that LeSueur "didn't believe in assimilation. He never liked the word "gay," preferring "cocksucker, queer, or pansy." LeSueur said [poet Frank] O'Hara also felt it was important to affirm his homosexuality, to make sure no one tried to gloss over it. When straight people said, "I don't see difference," LeSueur would yell at them."

As LeSueur told her father:

Every so often, I would have to remind some of my straights that I'm queer and don't pull any shit on me and don't forget it. Like, Mike goes, "Oh, Joe, we don't mind!" I say, "What do you mean, you don't mind? I'm just going to remind you.

:)

*A book that's part memoir about her relationship with her father, poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl, part the saga of Schjeldahl trying to write a biography about poet Frank O'Hara in the 70s, and part, well, biography of Frank O'Hara. It's wonderful.

[dreimalfuermich]

Montag, 14.11.2022

ORCHIDEE NAMENS OLAF

Halb Drei, und die Nacht schaut schon um die Ecke hier, “Hallo, ich bins, ich fang schon mal an”. Oder so: Die Nacht haut den ersten Nagel. Puh.

Orchidee: bedecktsamige mit hodenförmigen Wurzelknollen. Da kann man nur sagen: Glückwunsch, Herr Bundeskanzler. Wenn man mich fragte: ich hätte gerne ein Kleinsttier nach mir benannt, eine kleine Echse oder eine Garnele oder einen Schmetterling. Garnele = Tier ohne Gesicht?

Grad ist die Fotografin die Tür raus, Repros und Ausstellungsansichten sind also schon gemacht. Es läuft immer recht rund, was so Aufbau und all die sekundären Tätigkeiten dazu angeht. Ich denke dann manchmal: ZU rund? Aber der perverse Protestant würde sich sogar aus dem sonnigsten Glück noch einen Strick bauen, denn das ist, let’s face it, seine gottgegebene (sic) Aufgabe, die ewige Grundsünden-Bedecktsamung, hodenförmig. Sogar Mareike, die Fotografin, die mich auch ein bisschen kennt mittlerweile, meinte eben: du bist viel zu streng mit dir. Sie hat auch recht, und ich schäme mich für meine Dummheit dahingehend. Aber ich sage auch: als Künstler sollte man es sich auch bisschen schwer machen. Ich meine es genau so. Diese Alles-Easy-Low-Hanging-Fruit-Dinge ist halt Bullshit, das ist was für Funktionierer, nicht für Künstler. Wenn man “Sinnloses” macht, dann sollte man das ernst nehmen, und sich durchaus hart rannehmen.

Ich gehe grade, auch deswegen, ein paar Peter Schjeldahl-Texte durch, so in den letzten Tagen. Gezieltes Gegoogele, Gesuche, Interviews, gerne in Podcast-Form, falls überhaupt vorhanden. Ich fand eins, da ist seine Stimme aber schon vom Krebs so papierdünn und todnah, das ich es kaum aushalten konnte. Dieser tolle Mann, dieser beschissene Raubbau, die ewige Erinnerung. So it goes. Und dennoch hörte ich natürlich weiter, wie er, Schjeldahl, da den jungen Jeff Koons und seine Kunst der späten 70er und 80er Jahre sozusagen verteidigt, weil oft schon der Ausspruch des Namens Jeff Koons wie eine Anklage klingt, heutzutage, von einem Balloon Dog herab.

Deborah Solomon: How did things change for your writing when you moved to the New Yorker?

Peter Schjeldahl: Instead of saying “Sigmar Polke,” I say “the German painter Sigmar Polke.”

[egoschwank]

al things considered — when i post my masterpiece #1143

first posted in facebook january 14, 2023

e. mcknight kauffer -- "bananas" (1926)

"how come i had never before now heard of the commercial poster designer e. mcknight kauffer, the subject of a startlingly spectacular show, 'underground modernist'" ... peter schjeldahl

"never put bananas in the refrigerator" ... roz chast

"the artist in advertising is a new kind of being. his responsibilities are to my mind very considerable. it is his business constantly to correct values, to establish new ones, to stimulate advertising and help to make it something worthy of the civilisation that needs it" ... e. mcknight kauffer

"the housewife is not here. she is running for congress" ... bob dylan

"a beautiful bunch of ripe banana (daylight come and we want go home) hide the deadly black tarantula (daylight come and we want go home)" ... traditional jamaican folk song

"never put tarantulas in the refrigerator ... let alone a banana in congress" ... al janik