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Articles by John Menick
Amie Siegel Scrutinizes Aristocratic Estates
Is it possible to make a film in which objects are the subject of every shot? Not a film revolving around Alfred Hitchcock’s famous MacGuffin (a false object, in fact) but a film in which common, cultural objects, drive the narrative? Many films have skirted this counterintuitive project – Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), Chantal Akerman’s early work – but the installations of artist Amie Siegel have perhaps gone the farthest.
Enter Ghost - Believer Magazine
1. There is a kind of cinematic prophecy, a big-screen dreamworld that eerily anticipates the real. An event erupts into our attention—a natural disaster, a political movement, a war, a celebrity scandal—and we feel we’ve seen it already in a film, with worse writing and better-looking actors. How this happens is anyone’s guess. These are prophecies without a prophet, the result of no supernatural power. They are just a strange by-product of Hollywood narratives engineered to fill seats.
Enter Ghost - Culture.org
1. There is a kind of cinematic prophecy, a big-screen dreamworld that eerily anticipates the real. An event erupts into our attention—a natural disaster, a political movement, a war, a celebrity scandal—and we feel we’ve seen it already in a film, with worse writing and better-looking actors. How this happens is anyone’s guess. These are prophecies without a prophet, the result of no supernatural power. They are just a strange by-product of Hollywood narratives engineered to fill seats.
What Consistency Can Teach Us
This essay is the tenth in a series of memos by artists, writers, curators and scientists written to the world after the COVID-19 crisis. In homage to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), they are divided into six categories: ‘lightness’, ‘quickness’, ‘exactitude’, ‘visibility’, ‘multiplicity’ and ‘consistency’. Alexandra Kleeman's 'On Constancy and Form' was written in response to ‘consistency’. The moment I wake, I roll over to check the news.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Bidayyat
Part of frieze magazine’s 200th issue. Read more from the landmark issue here. Late in the summer of 2018, the offices of Bidayyat – a five-year-old organization supporting artists and filmmakers from Syria – were being pulled in opposite directions.
What 2020 Taught Us About Smell
Robert Muchembled’s introduction to Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times, published in July,attributes a spike in interest of ‘smell studies’ among chemical and neurobiologists to the profitability of food and perfume industries. Standing to gain from new insights into taste and smell, ‘hard’ science, he claims haughtily, follows the money, while ‘soft’ social sciences and humanities departments are being closed.
In Zeina Durra’s ‘Luxor’, History Shifts Shape
2020 is a year in which solitude has – literally – been a lifesaver. It’s a state to which Hana, the lodestar of Zeina Durra’s gorgeous, moody new film, Luxor, is no stranger. Played with exquisite restraint by Andrea Riseborough, Hana is almost as damaged as the Egyptian ruins she wanders through. The film opens with the view from a boat, drifting down the Nile to a soundtrack of crickets and the lapping of water.
El Museo del Barrio Documents its Roots and Celebrates Latinx Art
One of the many memorable prints in El Museo del Barrio’s recent exhibition, ‘Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop’, centres on an Afro-Latinx woman. With her rounded lips, wide hips and short, textured hair, she stands surrounded by disparate elements of an urban diaspora: a construction worker wearing a hard hat; high-rise buildings puffing steady streams of smoke; a village of small huts scattered below.
A New Chinese Video Game that Makes You Pay for Love
On 28 September, Genshin Impact enjoyed the biggest global launch of a Chinese video game ever. It’s easy to see why; the vast, open-world adventure filled with a cast of impeccably rendered characters combines the easy charm of a Saturday-morning cartoon with the painterly style of prestige anime.
Again and Again
1882: The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche publishes The Gay Science, a book that contains his first formulation of the concept of the eternal return. ‘What if’, Nietzsche asks, ‘some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” […] Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
Saying No to Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo’s 18th and latest novel, The Silence, is brimming with rhetorical questions, most of which can be answered with a simple no. ‘Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?’ No. ‘Is Europe one impossible crowd?’ No. (It’s several.) ‘Isn’t it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout?’ ‘Do a select number of people have a form of phone implanted in their bodies?’ No, no.
Maryse Condé's First Encounter with Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin, White Mask'
For me, it all began with a trip to the US, which my parents gave me for my 20th birthday. They had never been to the US themselves, but they were convinced that I would be able to push open the heavy doors of the American dream.
The Fire This Time
What’s the relationship between art and disaster? A fire starts, it moves from room to room and then engulfs a building. People are trapped inside, people throw their children out of the windows. A scene drawn from Dante’s Inferno: ‘The more I looked up,’ an eyewitness to the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London said, ‘floor upon floor, endless numbers of people. Mainly the kids, because obviously their voices, with their high pitched voices – that will remain with me for a long time.
Diane di Prima’s Guidebook to Revolution
Poetry, for Diane di Prima, was a living thing. Poetry lived in myths, histories and obscure hermetic texts as much as it lived in the cadences and rhythms of daily life: meals, homes, children, friends, contemporary happenings. Nowhere is this orientation toward poetry as a living entity more prominent than in di Prima’s books. In her 86 years, di Prima published over 40 books and wrote many more.
Chaos Theory
It is rare to see a box of Quality Street chocolates juxtaposed with a pig’s trotter; as rare, perhaps, as witnessing a teenager in spats dressed as a killer whale having a panic attack. Familiarity and logic are, however, thin on the ground in Emily Wardill’s films.
Some Thoughts on Emily Ratajkowski's ‘The Cut’ Essay
In ‘Buying Myself Back: When Does a Model Own her own Image?’, published in New York Magazine's The Cut earlier this month, the model and influencer Emily Ratajkowski narrates a history of men taking possession of her image. The article culminates in a bleak incident involving the photographer Jonathan Leder, who Ratajkowski claims sexually assaulted her during an unpaid photoshoot in 2012.
The Body Snatchers
They came like the past returning, Philip Guston’s ‘Klan’ paintings, which is to say through a channel that opened up in his memory, connecting the violent year of 1968 with the agitations of his youth. How could you keep painting abstractions, walls of exquisitely distressed paint, when there were bleeding bodies in the streets? 1968 had been a year of assassinations: first, Martin Luther King Jr. in April and, then, Robert Kennedy in June.
The Monsters of ‘Lovecraft Country’ Live Among US
If you were a weirdo growing up, seeking solace from a mediocre world in the pages of speculative fiction and fantasy, you likely stumbled upon Lovecraftian horror. The genre is named for its antisocial progenitor, H.P. Lovecraft, who, in the years following World War I, published stories about interdimensional beings, New England arcana and investigators at the end of their rope.
To Save a Temple from Drowning
‘Excuse me! Are you staff?’ I was so entranced that I hardly noticed the slouched young man until he spoke. After the woman escorting me flashed her badge, he waved us on towards the Temple of Dendur. Without its dramatic spotlights and water feature, the bland modernist gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art felt stripped of its set dressing. We stopped by the below-ground offices to pick up a copy of the museum’s 1978 Bulletin. The place was a catacomb, frozen in time.
Sarah Manguso on How Lockdown Is Re-Inventing Slowness
This essay is the fourth in a series of memos by artists, writers, curators and scientists written to the world after the COVID-19 crisis. In homage to Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), they are divided into six categories: 'lightness', 'quickness', 'exactitude', 'visibility', 'multiplicity' and 'consistency'. 'How Lockdown Is Re-Inventing Slowness' was written in response to 'quickness'.
The Self-Moving Image
1. FUTURE A shot of the desert, long focus, a rectangle of sand wavering under a blue sky. An automobile of no recognizable model glides right to left across the horizon, its chrome body a silver droplet in the distance. Close-up on the car’s only passenger, a woman, played by one of the most well-known actors of the day. Dressed in a dark business suit, she is seated in the car’s back seat, the panoramic rear windshield wrapping around her. A briefcase is handcuffed to her right wrist.
How to Write in a Pandemic
This essay is the second in a series of memos by artists, writers, curators and scientists written to the world after the COVID-19 crisis. In homage to Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), they are divided into six categories: 'lightness', 'quickness', 'exactitude', 'visibility', 'multiplicity' and 'consistency'. 'How to Write in a Pandemic'was written in response to 'lightness'. My first impulse in any crisis is to buckle up and get to work.
I’m A Hustler Baby: Uncut Gems, Parasite and the Cinema of Scammers
Midway through the Safdie brothers’ thriller Uncut Gems (2019), Howard Ratner – played with maniacal intensity by Adam Sandler – sits in an elite New York auction room next to his father in-law Gooey (Judd Hirsch). Howard’s enchanting black opal, the uncut gem at the film’s heart, is up for auction and Gooey is there to artificially raise its value.
Will Disney Kill Your TV?
Recently, having sat through yet another episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-19) on Netflix with my four-year-old daughter, I felt moved to tell her about my own childhood experience of watching TV. In Britain in the 1980s, I explained, there were only four channels, and kids’s shows were broadcast for only a few short hours a day.
How Grindr Changed Gay Life Forever
Hal Fischer, Handkerchiefs, 1977, carbon pigment print. Courtesy: © Hal Fischer and Project Native Informant, London Tiny bottles of artisanal poppers on silver platters, held aloft by shirtless models, cut a gleaming path through the crowd of B-list gay celebrities on the top floor of the Standard Hotel. Outside, fireworks burst across the Manhattan skyline. It was June 2016, I was 24, and it was my first Pride in New York City.
How Cecelia Condit’s Video Art Became a Viral Curse for Teens on TikTok
Cecelia Condit, Possibly in Michigan, 1983, film still. Courtesy: the artist The first time American video artist Cecelia Condit’s 12-minute film Possibly in Michigan (1983) found some online attention was back in 2015.
How a Google Spreadsheet Broke the Art World’s Culture of Silence
There’s one entry on ‘Art/Museum Salary Transparency 2019’ – the Google Spreadsheet currently turning heads in the art world – that stands out from all the other anonymous respondents, which at the time of writing totals nearly 2,000. Listed as associate curator at MoMA PS1, it features a starting salary of US$90,000, but under the column headed ‘current salary’ there is no figure.
Why Artists are Struggling to Make a Living From Their Art (and the Activists Fighting Back)
Making a living as an artist is impossible for all but a few high-profile practitioners, and the lack of sufficient financial remuneration for artistic labour is the dark reality at the heart of the contemporary art world. If that sounds like hyperbole, perhaps the recent Twitter thoughts of London-based Tai Shani are worth considering.
‘A Voice No One Wants to Hear’: Confessions of an Amazon Employee
Heike Geissler, Seasonal Associate, 2018. Courtesy: Semiotext(e) In the run-up to Christmas in 2010, with her earnings slumping in spite of the critical success of her books, the German writer Heike Geissler took a job processing gift orders at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Amidst the exhaustion and repetition of her shifts, Geissler took notes on Post-its, which she began turning into a work of non-fiction in the evenings.
Golden Globe-winning Biopic ‘Vice’ Unwittingly Boosts Dick Cheney’s Neoconservative Legend
In a series of comedies that started with 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and culminated in its 2013 sequel, Anchorman: The Legend Continues, director Adam McKay has established himself as America’s high poet of white guy imbecility. Those two films, plus three feature-length comedies in between, all starred Will Ferrell as some sort of insufferable idiot whose obliviousness to his own destructive tendencies bordered on magical.
The Artificial Divide Between Fine Art and Textiles is a Gendered Issue
An imposing wooden structure bisected with lines of thread greets visitors head-on at the entrance of the current Anni Albers show at the Tate Modern. The contraption – a shaft countermarch loom – is echoed at the end of the exhibition, with a Structo Artcraft loom that was used by Albers herself.
Postcards from DC
I am standing beside a small male cop. It’s four days before the Kavanaugh vote, and we still have a kind of hope or momentum from the encounter with Flake, the one that went viral. I look into the small cop’s eyes and say, “You like that we’re here. Admit it.” I am part of a pack of bird-dogs, putting politicians on the spot. We wear purple stickers that say Believe Survivors, so you know who we are, except you would know anyway from the fact we are standing around instead of rushing along blindly.
Decision Engines
Scenario One. A self-driving car with four passengers is approaching a two-lane crosswalk. In the left lane of the crosswalk, a homeless man is pushing a baby in a stroller. A concrete barrier blocks the entire right lane of the crosswalk. The self-driving car, driving in the left lane, experiences brake failure. If the car continues straight, it will kill the homeless man and baby. If it swerves into the right lane, it will crash into the concrete barrier killing all four passengers.
Job Opening: Production Manager
n+1 is looking for a sharp, enthusiastic, and meticulous Production Manager to work full time in our Brooklyn office. Health benefits are included and salary is commensurate with experience. UPDATE: Please apply by 11:59 PM on October 10, 2018.
The Painful Sum of Things
I saw the news about Naipaul. I was expecting it: I had heard he was seriously ailing as far back as 2015, and since then I have returned intermittently to his books, rereading several, with a strange uneasiness or sense of preparation. Now that he has died, the preparation feels insufficient: the uneasiness remains.
Why the Art World Needs to Stand Up to the UK’s ‘Humiliating’ Immigration Demands
The UK’s ‘hostile environment’ policy towards those seeking to come to the country is beginning to make it look like a cultural pariah, and its historical ‘special relationship’ with an inward-looking, Trump-damaged US isn’t helping. The recent visa debacle at the Edinburgh International Book Festival is, says its director Nick Barley, a clear indication that there’s something rotten at the heart of the system – and that the UK’s arts community needs to pull together and do something about it.
David Goldblatt's Photographs And What It Means to Bear Witness
A young man stares blankly into a space somewhere beyond the camera, his presence registering a dual sense of emotional alarm and physical fatigue. His long black arms are in plaster. As the caption tells us, the image records Fifteen-year-old Lawrence Matjee after his assault and detention by the Security Police, Khotso House, de Villiers Street, Soweto, Johannesburg. 1985.
A New Struggle Coming
Sitting in Durham, North Carolina this week, I’ve been thinking about Calhoun County, West Virginia, where I grew up. The teachers there and in the state’s fifty-four other counties are out on a wildcat strike until they get something resembling decent pay and real health insurance. Some of the teachers in the Calhoun high school where I spent three years were splendid. More were at least diligent.
Experiments in the Field: Why are Artists and Scientists Collaborating?
'Are we working for the corals,' asks artist Sonia Levy,' or with them?' Levy – whose previous projects have included collaborating with a whale researcher in Iceland and recreating 20th century crystallization experiments – is currently working in the basement of the Horniman Museum in south London, where, for the very first time, marine biologists have successfully induced corals to spawn within a captive environment. That alone makes 'Project Coral' noteworthy.
Beginning, Middle, End
Age and ageing affect artists and writers, their reputations and images, in every sense. Their debuts can stimulate fervour in those who charge artists’ careers with value – gallerists, curators, collectors, critics. The first show, first novel, might claim attention; the fall off can be fast. The middle years: the worst period for careers. A mid-career artist is perceived as snoozing in the studio, doing the same old same old. And writers are presumed to be at work on, essentially, the same novel.
This is the Subtext
In New York, Barbara Kruger appeared to be everywhere this November, with the artist creating four concurrent works for Performa 17, the multi-venue performance biennial that was staged across the city. At Coleman Skatepark under the Manhattan Bridge, she collaborated with Steve Rodriquez on a text-based redesign of the ramps and half-pipes (‘Whose hopes? Whose fears?’ one large banner read); across town, at 10th Avenue and 17th Street, she posted a billboard that read ‘Know Nothing.
Alone Again, Or
‘There’s so little risk of finding her.’ Rosemary Tonks She turns her back on you; this, it would seem, is her appeal. She’s been painted like this for centuries, and, more recently, photographed. Often she is naked, in a bathroom or bedroom, solitary, sleeping or day-dreaming, or at a picnic, momentarily stilled, enveloped in a vague, dark space. The one constant is that her face is obscured.
Trump and the Republicans
In the 1950s, a more sedate time in American party politics, a piece of folk wisdom held that Republicans washed their laundry indoors while Democrats hung it all out on the line. No longer. Donald Trump’s Republican opponents deem him, nearly in the same breath, an avatar of dark forces—as if a party playing on racial fears for fifty years were some kind of innocent—and an apostate against true conservatism.
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