January 2014

Echoes of Mondrian

Sean O’Hagan reviews The Americans are Coming, Warhol, Burroughs and Lynch at the Photographers’ Gallery.

In this triumvirate of maverick American talents, David Lynch emerges as the most old-fashioned, that is to say, formally consistent photographer. In The Factory Photographs he is represented by his pictures of the single subject of the title – deserted industrial spaces. (He also photographs nudes and forlorn snowmen.) His black-and-white photographs of decaying buildings are really black and grey. Taken as a whole they make a kind of elegy to industrialism and, in their ominous darkness, possess a unified aesthetic that sets him apart from the other two artists.

Introducing: Darran Anderson

Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.

Fantômas, Lolita, cargo cults, poèts maudits, who better to tell a Serge Gainsbourg story than Darran Anderson? Whether it’s essays on memento mori, imaginary cities, the night, the Shipping Forecast or the literary nasty, if Darran keeps writing ‘em, we’ll continue to read. He is, as Lee Rourke says, one of our brightest minds. His essay for gorse is on the moderns and their literary and artistic antedcedents.

Making Something of It

By Alan Cunningham.

When I read The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanagh, I read a book that – had I also been born in 1904 – I think I, too, could have written, exactly as it is; a book, however, that if I were to write it now would be a somewhat different book, being much more concise.

I believe in the possibility of exact replication because many of the thoughts expressed by Kavanagh in his autobiographical work – a very good book, by the way, but also a very flawed one – reflect attitudes and modes of behaviour that have changed little in Ireland in the intervening years, irrespective of external changes. I, and others, are evidence of this, as are events that have happened to me in that country.

Je est un autre

The January issue of The White Review is a translation issue, edited by Daniel Medin, and features

• Hagoromo by Paul Griffiths
• Letters From a Seducer by Hilda Hilst, trans. John Keene
• Leg Over Leg by Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, trans. Humphrey Davies
• Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom, trans. Dalya Bilu
• The Black Lake by Hella S. Haasse, trans. Ina Rilke
• Three Poems by Antjie Krog
• Son of Man by Yi Mun-yol, trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé
• The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély, trans. Ottilie Mulzet
• To Kill a Dog by Samanta Schweblin, trans. Brendan Lanctot
• Vertical Motion by Can Xue, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
• Tuesday Will be War by Jáchym Topol, trans. Alex Zucker
• Afterword: Death of the Translator by George Szirtes

Dada serious

Brian Dillon on Hannah Höch, ‘art’s original punk.’

Cut With the Kitchen Knife is Höch’s best-known work, though it’s something of an anomaly – not least in its scale – and it does not appear in the Whitechapel Gallery‘s new exhibition. Höch claimed she had hit on the technique of photomontage while on a Baltic holiday with the married Hausmann in 1918; having come across mocked-up photos sent home by German soldiers, in which the young men’s heads were superimposed on pictures of musketeers, they realised the power of cut-and-paste to “alienate” images. This origin tale is slightly misleading, however, because since 1916 Höch had been working for the Berlin publisher Ullstein, producing embroidery and lace designs for such periodicals as Die Dame and Die Praktische Berlinerin. She was probably already familiar with the kinds of collage that an expanding print media practised with photographs. Höch worked on these handicraft magazines for a decade, and even wrote a manifesto of sorts for modern embroidery, in which she enjoined Weimar-era women to “develop a feeling for abstract forms”.