Arts & Culture

Dora García’s Instant Narrative

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* Mary Camille Beckman *

Before Dora García’s Instant Narrative was installed there, the apse of the local university art museum was the kind of space I’d cut through on my way somewhere else. The bathroom, the contemporary galleries upstairs, the auditorium in the basement. Nineteenth century American landscape paintings line the walls, visible between marble columns. The mood: quiet, cold. The mood: formal, save the rumpled students slouching through on their way, like me, elsewhere. Before Instant Narrative, I moved through the apse largely unnoticed and unnoticing.

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Come Spring

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* Claire Skinner *

If you’re a poet (or anyone with a sensitive personality prone to changeable moods), Spring can pose some emotional challenges. It can be grating–cruel, even–when the beauty of the outside world (daffodils! baby robins! teens in love!) seems at odds with whatever’s going on in the hidden cupboards of the self.

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Toward a Muppet Theory of Literature

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* Kevin Haworth *

The core problem with Muppets Most Wanted is that it contains no grief. In the new movie, the Muppets are back, with the world no longer needing to mourn their absence. Miss Piggy, too, has returned, filling that pork-shaped hole in Kermit’s chest. Yes, things are happening—shows are being staged and crimes are being solved—but it all just feels like objects in motion staying in motion. Kermit gets shipped off to a gulag, but, notably, he doesn’t seem all that sad about it.

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Query and Response: “The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison

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Leslie Jamison answers Antoni’s implied imperative: use yourself, your emotions and your responses, as an analytical and critical tool. Antoni’s ideas illuminate Jamison’s primary techniques—Antoni and Jamison, perhaps, share a working definition of empathy: empathy as an effort of imagination, effort of intellect; empathy as a door through which to enter art, for reader, viewer, and maker; empathy as inquiry; empathy as the site of analysis; empathy as resistance to tradition or traditional tropes; empathy as choice.

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Shelter

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* A.L. Major *

The weather in Michigan this winter is stubbornly cold. March has arrived, but spring seems distant. Used to be on days of obstinate gray, I would curl up on my sofa and read a great novel, but lately I can only read a few pages before the author’s beautiful prose charges my insecurities about my own writing. Instead of relaxing I’m analyzing every sentence, thinking again of that scene I need to fix, and then I’m worrying that I’ll never finish and I will be a failure. So instead after I’ve finished writing for the day, I wrap myself in a fleece blanket, and I watch a movie, often a romantic comedy.

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Emergent Modes of Seeing and Display: Helen Marten & Camille Henrot

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* Nicholas Johnson *

How does an artist make something now that compels us to look longer than our modernised attention spans are accustomed to looking? The piling up, ease of access to, and relentless mutation of cultural information occasioned by the internet has so drastically altered the way we look and process images that it’s nearing impossible to remember a time when it was any different. Two artists: Camille Henrot and Helen Marten, present two new methods of dealing with this increasingly dense accrual of objects and information.

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