Elliott Green’s paintings, on view February 18–March 26, 2017 at Pierogi Gallery in New York City, appear to be in continuous motion. They can’t help invoking intellectual movement as well: they set the viewer’s mind tumbling toward successive interpretations. The idioms of landscape painting have been set loose on Green’s canvases, and we’re invited to see top-shelf vistas everywhere—with all that we expect of them: peaks, shores, skies, and the great luxury of distance itself, which signifies time.
In Jules Allen’s Marching Bands, a stunning collection of social documentary, portraiture, and panoramic photography, he takes us into this behind-the-scenes world of African-American marching bands all over the country. The roots of historically black college marching band performance stretch back to the post-Civil War period, when newly freed African Americans began to experiment with sounds, styles, and what it meant to be an American citizen.
Skepticism about vaccines is as old as vaccination itself. But contemporary vaccine refusal has its roots in 1998. Today, President Donald Trump is not only the most prominent and media-savvy fear-monger in the English-speaking world, but also a dedicated, unabashed, very loud purveyor of myths about the dangers of vaccines. The stakes are huge—the danger being that Trump’s support for the anti-vaccination position will pry open and expand these pockets of resistance.
Fake news is hardly new. The production of fake, semi-false, and true but compromising snippets of news reached a peak in eighteenth-century London, when newspapers began to circulate among a broad public. In 1788, London had ten dailies, eight tri-weeklies, and nine weekly newspapers, and their stories usually consisted of only a paragraph. In fact, the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients.
Intended to rejuvenate public sculpture in Britain, in 1972 the City Sculpture Project gave sixteen artists £1000 each to produce a site-specific sculpture, to be installed in one of eight cities across England and Wales (now documented in an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England). The main responses to City Sculpture seem to have been of public indifference and barely concealed philistinism.
Within moments of entering the Tate’s exhibit Paul Nash’s paintings, my brisk walk slowed to a mesmerized linger as I encountered something new and strange, watching the artist make discoveries and adjustments, trying in different ways to fit his vision to dark experience and to blend his “Englishness” with international modernism—and not always succeeding. Even at its most urgent, Nash’s painting seems tremulous, poised between past and future, dream and reality.
The overwhelming rejection of Trump’s travel ban by the courts and by the American public has been triggered by an order directed at foreign nationals, not US citizens. It wasn’t our rights that were at stake, but their rights. If this is what measures aimed at foreigners trigger, imagine what will happen if and when he issues an executive order that infringes on any Americans’ rights.
Early manuscripts of the Koran are now on display, under glass, at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., together forming an ur-text in fragments. They are yellowed pages, splotchy at the edges, with lines of brown Arabic text in the stark, vertical script known as Hijazi. One of the striking features of the show is the visual progression of the Koran from the simplicity of early Arabian styles to ever more detailed and colorful traditions of graphic art, fed by Persian influences.
The first weeks of the Trump administration have felt at times like the onset of a kind of cold civil war. Everything about the present moment feels different than protests of the past. In 2003, protests against the invasion of Iraq received virtually no support from elected representatives and were dismissed by most news outlets as knee-jerk pacifism and therefore inconsequential. Today, the opposition to Trump’s policies from a broad range of present and former elected officials has been immediate and appears to be spurred on by, and in visceral agreement with, protesters on the street.
As Donald Trump denies entry to the already small number of pre-screened refugees the US had agreed to accept—among them Syrian and Iraqi families fleeing terrorism who have been carefully vetted and approved by the UN Refugee agency and by the US Department of Homeland Security—Europeans face a far more dire situation: the hundreds of thousands of desperate people from North Africa and the Middle East, who, without any UN help, are attempting to reach their shores. This is the focus of the haunting documentary Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea).
