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Forward, The New York Times, Time Literary Supplement, The Daily Beast, Wall Street Journal, New York Arts, Pitch, Vitamin PH, Paper Sky, Persona Diary, and VH1

Forward: When Even A Boy Einstein Doesn’t Have ‘All The Answers’

(12/07/2018)

Michael Kupperman grew up in Connecticut, hidden away in suburbia along with a family secret; Kupperman’s professor father, Joel Kupperman, had been a child star, one of the most popular and recognized child stars of his generation.

As the “genius” boy Einstein of the largely rigged show “Quiz Kids,” Joel Kupperman had been cast as exemplar to a less objectionable popularization of the Jewish people. His son, who characterizes his own childhood as isolated and singular, came of age in a manner nothing like that of his doted-on father, and his career could be best categorized as “graphic novelist,” a profession undreamable to the psyche of 1940s and ’50s network television, and a profession that promises, to the most successful practitioners of the oeuvre, near-anonymity. Even as a “graphic novelist,” Michael Kupperman’s published work has tended toward outliers; until now, Kupperman has been more concerned with off-kilter humor and parody than with narrative…

The New York Times: ‘Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir,’ by Michael Peppiatt

(02/07/2017)

When Michael Peppiatt, at 21, met Francis Bacon, the 53-year-old artist was already all artifice, well spoken when well rehearsed, his bistro doctrines applauded by clinking glasses. Peppiatt, having taken over a student arts journal at Cambridge, had shown up in London’s Soho. It was 1963, and Peppiatt laid claim to but a tenuous introduction to the renowned painter he sought. At the bar of the French House, the youth was handled by the photographer John Deakin, who loudly advised: “My dear, you should consider that the maestro you mention has as of late become so famous that she no longer talks to the flotsam and jetsam. . . . I fear she wouldn’t even consider meeting a mere student like you!”

Deakin’s proclamation turned the heads of the patronage, and a man called back, offering Peppiatt a chair. It was Bacon; Deakin had made an artful introduction, and Peppiatt, however accidentally, had found his apprenticeship. Over the next 30 years, Peppiatt would emerge as a critic, curator and publisher, and ultimately Bacon’s biographer. Joining Bacon for his nightly rounds, from restaurants to clubs, Peppiatt would ply Bacon with “interview” questions — a writer challenging the bromides of his celebrity subject. “Francis Bacon in Your Blood,” arriving some 20 years after Peppiatt’s seminal biography, “Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma,” is the result, a gouache découpé of a friend, against a background of art history…

Time Literary Supplement: Art star

(02/07/2016)

Wilfully, Americans tell the story of Georgia O’Keeffe: the story of the southwestern female artist and pioneer. The story is wrong in three ways: once for the remnants of the arguments it contains, mounted by art critics in the 1920s, that O’Keeffe embodied the art of a woman, more sensual, more sexual, more intuitive than any other; twice for the anti-intellectualism that O’Keeffe, in her disgust with the art world, at least partly abided; and finally for the lie that O’Keeffe was unschooled and unsophisticated. Even knowing that their O’Keeffe story is wrong, Americans will insist on telling it, because they opt for the history they prefer, and that O’Keeffe herself demanded. In her work, as in her life, she insisted that she would be outside of history; and the mark of her greatness is that we, the audience, still choose to believe such an artifice.

In Georgia, Dawn Tripp fictionalizes the friction between the New York O’Keeffe of Alfred Stieglitz and the Santa Fe O’Keeffe, self-made and self-sufficient. Through the mid- nineteen-teens, Stieglitz, a photographer, gallery director and arts impresario, had been seeking a female artist to fulfil his vision of what a woman artist should be. His ideal – while arguably forward-thinking at the time – was as sybaritic as it was liberated, and seemed, chiefly, an expression of his own desires. Stieglitz, however, was prescient; in 1921, his portraits of O’Keeffe (whose work he had first showed at his gallery in 1916) captured the imagination of New York society, and the press. As of 1923 and her second solo show, also curated by Stieglitz, O’Keeffe was a star of the art world…

The Daily Beast: To Be Young Was Very Heaven

(11/28/2011)

A kid washes in from Jersey. He’s weird-looking, with a not very urbane, sentimental aesthetic; he’s backed by a neighborhood bar band. He drives home to Jersey after his gigs. There’s another girl, also from Jersey, who moans her poetry to music, and thinks most mainstream music is full of shit. There’s a maniac who rents Yankee Stadium, not knowing how to fill the seats. There’s a Lower East Side bar, specializing in country and blues. There’s a guy with some home stereo equipment, trying to carve out a living as a DJ. It’s 2012, and they’re all doomed.

Or is it 1973? And are we talking about Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, a legendary Latin-music concert, CBGBs (country, bluegrass, and blues), and DJ Kool Herc? What do you make of a sorta-hippie rock star financing drag-queen musicians garbed in condoms? What do you make of hucksters trying to capitalize on bands that haven’t yet learned how to play? New York in the ’70s made the future: Ziggy Stardust, and punk…

The Wall Street Journal: Gangs of Madison Square Garden

(12/10/2010)

The mobsters who ran boxing during its golden age knew the sport but were rarely in the boxers’ corner

At the end of the 19th century, the bluebloods took over the bare-knuckle prize ring, put gloves on the contestants and laid claim to the fights. It was the best and worst thing that had ever happened to boxing: Now civilized, the sport grew in popularity but compromised its savage soul. In the 1950s, televisions arrived in American living rooms and fans tuned in to watch the Friday-night fights. It was the best and worst thing that had ever happened to the sport: Though immensely profitable, boxing lost a primal connection with its most avid fans, the spectators in the arena. …

New York Arts Magazine: Solid Ground – John Reed on Holly Lynton

(03/13/2007)

The big story is this: you have a desire, whether it is something you should have or something you shouldn’t and you chase your desire, but to attain it, you must overcome who you are; you must either grow past your limitations, or find out what your true limitations are. When you have overcome—preferably a sin or a fault—you are redeemed.

Nowadays, the assumption is, that’s narrative. In fact, it is a Western construct, and usually a Christian one. That stories have beginnings, middles and ends—that stories have sin, redemption, salvation—has very little to do with the stories that we encounter in life. The epic, winding stories of mythology, the pure suffering of the classical stage: while these narratives are drawn on to bolster the credibility of the contemporary model, they are not indicative of the stories we tell today. Even in “hard news,” one is pressed to find a story that doesn’t start with a conflict, and end with a ray of hope…

Pitch: Melissa Dadourian 

(08/24/2006)

New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville, Kentucky, 2006

A strand of DNA.  A  spider’s web.  The stitches across a wound.  The perception of life is fleshy, heavy, but it is the gossamer thread that knots us to our bodies.  Nature itself, reduced to the rudiments of raw data, is the wavy line: the rings of a tree, the stratums of sedimentary rock, the concentric swirls of topographical and satellite maps.  

In the work of Melissa Dadourian, the line maps sexual/cultural identity.  Outlining 60s and 70s pictorials from Playboy Magazines, Dadourian fashions iconological fossils.  The line is raised, suggesting a physical body long since passed into an ephemeral state; the colors are primarily two-tonal, taking on a layering effect and the period hues of the pictorials.  Liberated from their own eras, the images are reasserted, reassigned.  Dadourian’s subject is not one of exploitation, but of transgression; any patriarchal architecture is supplanted by a more intrinsic expression of the female divine.  They are not playmates, but in Dadourian’s term “playgirls,” representing an emancipation from social constraints, and history itself…

Vitamin PH: Tim Davis

(01/26/2005)

A rumour about the landscape of New York City: the major avenues recreate the topography of the South West—the deep canyons, the stone walls of russet, ginger, grey. As the story goes, the exploration of the America West was contemporaneous with the rising buildings of the city—the architects and the populace recreated the Western dream of a vast frontier. Just around the next corner, at the end of Broadway, there is freedom.

Now, the West is a grid of highways, underground cables, dams…. The latest frontier, the internet, has also succumbed to civilization; monthly bills are collected. Where painters of the Hudson River school captured the notion of an American promised land, and Ansel Adams looked at a majestic, if endangered, national identity, Tim Davis is the cartographer of the American corpse. This is the United States that Robert Crumb backdrops with a crisscrossing of telephone poles, fuse boxes, and an inexhaustible array of urban warts. ..

Paper Sky Magazine: Miranda Lichtenstein, “An Empty City of the Future: Cyberjaya, Malaysia”

(06/19/2004)

Haunted houses and construction sites. Children visit with faithful adherence to an unknown past, and unknown future.

Malaysia, with an archeological record reaching back 40,000 years, and a history rife with racial conflict, is a quintessential haunted house. With a population approximately 60% Malay, 25% Chinese, and 10% Indian or Pakistani, the struggle of religion against religion is threefold: Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism. It is a land of ancestors, and offended Gods. 

From the American consciousness, take by way of example the 80s horror film “Poltergeist,” about a sacrilegious housing complex hastily constructed on ancient Native American burial grounds. The underlying pathos of the horror flick violence is that the strip mall homogeneity of the modern world will level differing traditions and obliterate the history of the land…

Persona Diary: Pia Dehne – Catalogue

(10/08/2002)

Several years ago I woke in the middle of the night with an insight into the book of Ecclesiastes.  In the King James Version, the repeated refrain is, “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.”  Various other translations employ the word “frailty.”  Ecclesiastes is a short, dark book of the Bible that is, though poetic, fairly direct.  This chorus of “vanity of vanities” always troubled me as being a little out of place, and maybe a little wrong.  And the translation of “frailty” was no better.  So, this word was one of those things that I was often mulling over, and, in the night, I woke up thinking that the right word, the mot juste, was “pretense.”  

Pretense of pretense, all is pretense.

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever...

VH1: Cool An’ Speckless

(08/20/2002)

London calling to the faraway towns

Now that war is declared—and battle comes down.

     —London Calling

It was 1983 and we were a scaly lot—wildly pimpled and wildly grinning.  And, by our own standards, mighty good looking, and ready for anything. 

We had been meddling with the other rock that was out there—The Minutemen, X, Fishbone.  And of course, the reggae—Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, Peter Tosh, etceteras.  All of us were Bad Brains adherents—whom we regularly saw at the Ritz on Thirteenth Street.  Yet none of it, exactly, was music that was ours.  We found ourselves on a continuous search for something we hadn’t yet heard, and on some level, the music we listened to was the imprecise answer of limited options…