Sequence

I'm glad I walked through Richard Serra's Sequence before seeing it from above. I'd been in similar installations in places that run together in my memory. I entered thinking it would be a short little corridor, flanked by the two massive pieces of iron that are the only materials in this sculpture. But the path on the interior was somehow longer than the outside appeared. I was stuck in a TARDIS of rust and birdshit that reached twenty feet in the air and stole my voice without an echo. I started to get nervous as I passed what I thought was the same set of footprints on one of the angled walls. The curves seemed to double back and repeat. Finally I saw the rest of the world again.

I don't know if this was just a moment of natural selection about to take place, penalizing me for my inability to accurately estimate distances, or if Serra somehow managed to distort space with his two pieces of metal. I do know that I was changed while inside. Not monumentally, but I came out different than I entered. And it feels stupid to say that after something so simple. It's not even a situation in which something can be beautiful in its simplicity, like a crystal or a seashell. The metal is almost aggressively ugly. But while inside, I realized there were gossamer strands that marked wide concentric circles in the curves of the metal. Some imperfection in the ore, I suppose. It was so insignificant a detail but strangely touching.

Serra's piece is different because so seldom does an artifice of its size and magnitude ever have so little of a purpose. This kind of scope is usually reserved for buildings or structures. Serra's is pointless. But you still give it the power to direct you and guide you, like you would a bridge or tunnel. Since you enter with no goal, you emerge without one either. But for some reason, you're not satisfied by that anymore. Sequence is abstract in such a way that it leaves the viewer abstract. And I still don't know how to feel about that.

Life in the Red Stick

I've been conditioned from birth to hate Baton Rouge. It's a steaming concrete mass; a Northern city weirdly imposing itself on our state; a big city of small-minded yahoos doing their best to undermine everything we Cajuns and Creoles set out to do. It's fitting (and upsettingly so) that it's home to our Capitol Building, the tallest in the U.S., and home of some of the most corrupt and/or incompetent politicians in the nation. My father refers to it as Huey Long's stone phallus. It's the first thing you see of the city when approaching from the West, and it stands as a monument to the hubristic, greedy, self-centered desires that have fueled Louisiana politicians since time immemorial. Despite the affinity for nature and distrust of corporations that's within every Louisianan, our politicians routinely vote against our interests and whore out our beautiful country to oil and natural gas companies.

This is why “View of Exxon Refinery” by Richard Misrach hits home. It's from a viewing area on the Capitol looking out across the city, with the Mississippi River constituting the foreground and the smokestacks of the eponymous refinery making up the background. A significant portion of the image is given to the viewing area itself, a narrow gray walkway fairly high up with an unoccupied viewfinder. It points out directly perpendicular to the camera, focused on the cancerous scar of the refinery in the distance. A small but distinctly legible sign reads “For Distant Viewing” in all capital letters on the device. Smog gradually blends in with the low nimbus clouds hanging ominously above the city.

The photograph captures the bleakness of Baton Rouge, the hopelessness. Our politicians don't even look at what's happening to the land they represent. They can't see the aggressive and wanton destruction at the hands of the same companies that destroyed our coast in the oil spill. Considerations of the environment still have the looming ugly concrete of the Capitol thrust unnaturally into them, like the photograph. Everything comes back to the economic impact, or more likely, the chances of reelection for the congresspeople. Misrach's picture does what photography should do: Force us to face the gross unpleasant truth of a situation that everybody would just prefer to ignore.

Monster Mash

There's a monster behind you, below you, above you, around you. It's a monster that looks too close to human. It's a monster with emotion, with intent. It's a monster that gives birth to the beauty around you. It's a monster made to haunt you. It's a monster made by you.

This is the world of Lauren Youngsmith's Monster Month series, a set of eight beautiful ink and acrylic drawings currently on display at [gallery name]. There are two pieces corresponding with each season, color-coded, though there's no intention of sequencing. Each drawing can stand alone, as Youngsmith's wonderful use of a light acrylic wash combined with the ink cross-hatching gives each piece its own movement. The eye is drawn to the large chimeric monsters that take up most of the painting and is led from them to the humans that are unknowingly haunted by the beasts.

The monsters are fascinating. They live on the line between cartoonish and ghoulish. Each feels scary but clearly the work of someone interested in comics. Youngsmith isn't trying to scare the viewer. The monsters are involved almost banally with their humans' lives. One's drool causes a personal downpour for an umbrella'd man. Another holds up mistletoe above two oblivious lovers on a frozen lake. Their actions are for the most part not insidious. It's the emotion they have that's startling, an emotion remarkably subtle for a pen-and-ink drawing. The monsters exist only to perform some function in a human's life, but they go unnoticed and they have no motivation. We've created a world of monsters that go out of their way to craft the mundane realities of our world but are incapable of becoming aware of that.

Youngsmith's comic book sensibility only enhances how enjoyable and weirdly profound the series is. It makes me wonder if I'd want to live in the world she depicts. And then I wonder if I already do.  

art responses

Richard Serra

Sequence reminded me of life and the rust reminded me of home.

In the selectively echoing corridors formed by the whale-sized, reinforced steel slopes and caves, my footsteps became my greatest fear.  I heard them twice and three times and then they echoed silently, whispers by the time they met my ears.  Sequence was discordant, yet balanced, yet chaotic.  I couldn’t keep a straight line because of the angular structure that was both solid and fluid, causing me to veer off or place all my weight on one leg.

There’s something about rust and steel that indicate a sad past.  Rust happens when purity meets time and becomes imperfection.  The straight walls of a figure eight sequence invert and exhale and create imperfect sharp moments among passive aggressive smoothness.

I don’t know exactly what Serra was saying when he made Sequence but I think it was sad and chaotic and perfect.

Robert Misrach

Cantor’s lush green lawn reflects on the photograph’s plastic covering.  In the photograph the skies are gray, and the skies are gray, and clouds come from the west but I don’t know what they’ll rain on this graveyard.

When Katrina hit, there were formerly buried corpses floating with the freshly drowned.  In Louisiana, they try to bury their dead above ground to avoid that during the flooding.  Me Me Murphy lays beside her husband James, a WWII vet.  Their flower vases are comparatively empty, lifeless as the graveyard next to steaming refineries and chemical processes.  In front of their memorials grass peeks through the sidewalk, grown, overgrown, overwrought, unsung.  Jesus stands crucified among smokestacks, nailed by the iron that builds them.

The pipes that line the graveyard border barbed fences, to keep the dead out.  In the foreground a spigot shouts water from a cracked steel pipe, yet around it the grass is yellow and crispy.  The older tombs show lime and calcification, but the sedans parked on the other side of the fence are strong and shiny and clean.

Taft, Louisiana.  Cancer alley.

rework pipe, flooding, gray skies images

Youngsmith

I’m glad I’m going to get to talk to this girl before I fully decide to write about how I think her art is a reflection of herself.  The first word I wrote down was ‘IDENTITY’, which felts and feels cliché but was a striking sensation throughout her exhibit.  There’s something deeply personal about collecting your sketchbook into an animated film exhibition.  There’s also an inherently deep and personal connection to your art when you’re an Asian-American female at this school and you’re drawing ‘Super Geisha’, ‘Robot Ghost’, ‘Robogirl’ and the piece I focused on – ‘Hoarder’.  Her identity and personality as a woman, an Asian woman and a Stanford student seemed to be in forefront for her as an artist and us as its consumer.

‘Hoarder’ depicts a hunch-backed girl carrying an exorbitant load on her back and backpack.  The load is dipped in a pink haze that drips onto the subject herself and covers all the items, rendering one dimensional the various objects that this girl carried: a squid, cup noodles, a XOX hat, an apple, a flask from Colorado and a crown on top of it all.  These items that were once vibrant and individual are turned into pink sludge with a healthy dose of this translucent paint.  Her own colors are washed out and dull.

It’s an easier piece to guess at and ‘carrying something on your back’ isn’t too much of a metaphor for us thick students to draw from this piece.  Things that may have once may have made the subject happy are no longer happy things, just weights to hold her back.  She has already dropped a paper crane, a symbol of her culture, while carrying these other, apparently more important objects.

3 Art Responses

ORDER - LAUREN YOUNGSMITH

“Order” is just ink and paper, but Youngsmith manages to create an eerie parallel world in just a few strokes of her brush. The piece is fantastical: a young girl sits casually in the mouth of a disgusting wrinkled creature, which has a massive head balanced precariously on spindly legs, a goatee, a hairy mole on its nose, and a cane to help it walk. A frog with large webbed feet and a crown on his head sits idly atop the monster. He holds a fishing pole with a star dangling at the end in front of the girl’s face. Another star is tied around the monster’s nose and hangs in front of her, but she doesn’t seem to see either one. Seemingly unconscious of her absurd location, she stares out at us with a touch of disdain and a hint of sadness.

Youngsmith seems to hint toward the meaning of her piece with the title “Order,” suggesting that the unearthly creatures and their strange connections have a systematic significance. The spherical and almost planetary head of the monster becomes a world unto itself. The crowned frog, a play on the fairy tale frog prince, appears to be trying to lure the girl out of her comfortable seat in the monster’s mouth with the star as bait.

The creatures, distorted and oddly anthropomorphic, seem malicious. Their intent is unclear and yet the girl’s indifference to their existence is unsettling. Perhaps we all sit unknowing in the jaws of the world, calm in our t-shirts and tennis shoes, unaware that the stars are meant to lure us into complacency.

The rough quality of Youngsmith’s brushstrokes mirrors the painting’s terrifying subject matter. With loose and unfinished lines, the creature stands on open air and the paper, ripped, stained, and wrinkled along the edges, adds to the painting’s instability, its deep questioning of the status quo, and the ultimately horrifying prospect of this fantasy life, where fairy tale becomes nightmare and we all remain ignorant of an absurdist reality.

HOME AND GRAIN ELEVATOR - RICHARD MISRACH

Richard Misrach’s photograph “Home and Grain Elevator” comments on the devastating reality of life in Cancer Alley, the industrial wasteland between Baton Rouge and New Orleans so called because of the large percentage of residents afflicted by cancer.

Part of Cantor’s exhibition “Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley,” this photograph is hung on the back wall. By the time I reached it, I had already become aware of the devastation to the natural world caused by the area’s petrochemical industry. However, “Home and Grain Elevator” has a different message.

The photograph simply depicts a small trailer-esque house that sits at the base of a massive grain elevator. Framed to create straight lines, the elevator bisects the photograph, creating a strong center of gravity that lands squarely on the front porch of the house. The normalcy of the house, complete with patio furniture, shrubs, and mailbox, is at odds with the concrete behemoth that seems to rise up to heaven behind it.

The house’s location becomes even more desolate when placed in the context of the area, where communities are primarily poor and black. This is the American dream—well-watered front lawns and white patio furniture—distorted by industrial might. Dreams of betterment are dwarfed by the massive weight of the cement grain elevator.

The photograph’s angularity, with harshly slanted walkways, the house’s peaked roof, and the geometric shape of the elevator, evoke a sense of clarity and straightforward necessity. But amid the tone of resignation is a tinge of hope. Alongside the photos of polluted wetland, cemeteries haunted by factories, and abandoned shopping carts in empty parking lots, “Home and Grain Elevator” becomes a representation of resilience. While the residents of the house aren’t pictured, they rear up in my imagination, becoming a symbol of human adaptability and desire for normalcy amid the rush of change and the polluting forces of industry.

SEQUENCE - RICHARD SERRA

At first you are confused. What is it? Why is it here? And then you touch it, lean on it, feel its warmth in the California sun. You explore it slowly, savoring the feel of oxidized steel against your fingertips, the coppery color that makes it seem organic even though its made from industrial materials. You walk around its edges and when you tilt your head it appears to rotate, the curved edges creating an artificial horizon line.

This is “Sequence,” a monumental sculpture by Richard Serra that is currently housed in the courtyard behind the Cantor Arts Center, where it will stay until moving to SF MoMA in 2016 to join the permanent collection. The structure weighs 235 tons and is installed on top of a specially designed concrete pad strong enough to land aircraft on.

From an aerial view, it looks like two infinity signs nestled within each other, creating two large foci and a winding path around them. The experience of the sculpture is disorienting, inducing a kind of vertigo simply through the manipulation of curves.  As you walk through, the copper-colored walls undulate. You can’t walk in a straight line because the curved walls and their shadows seem to close in on you, making you feel like you are falling over.

Serra called the shapes “torqued ellipses,” shapes that “haven’t been made before.” After examining his models, engineers didn’t think the shapes would stand.

This is the first time it has been installed outside, which is difficult to believe. The steel basks in the sun, and its shadows, which swoop and carve up the concrete, seem part of the art itself. Lying on your back in the middle of one of the foci turns the sky into an oval, a real life fish-eye lens. When you drop your pencil, the ping of wood against concrete echoes.

You experience the sculpture sequentially, moving from piece to piece, from inner to outer, from beginning to end. Space exists out of time and reminds you of the limitations of perspective because you cannot see the entire thing while you experience it. This art is both physically and mentally disorienting, pushing you to find the peace within immensity and serenity between its interlocking infinities.

The Index: House of Balloons

The Index

House of Balloons, The Weeknd

Critics who were really excited that we were going to review 'Lemme Smang It' because it was playing in this author's room (ironically): 2

Reviews of 'Lemme Smang It' I will do: 0

Critics: 8 (record high)

Percentage of critics under the influence: 62.5 (record low)

Percentage of readers who will get the pun in the previous statistic on a first read: 10

Percentage of readers who will hate me for making that pun: 90

Critics arriving directly from a birthday party in a freshman dorm that featured a male stripper: 2

Number of this author's friends photographed in compromising positions with said stripper: 2

Critics who knew that stuff like that happened in Stanford freshman dorms: 0

Approximate volume of Pad Thai eaten by the critic who claimed last week that smoking didn't make her hungrier, in cubic inches: 50

This critic literally just walked into my room to ask for candy, while high: no statistic necessary

Revised percentage of critics under the influence: 87.5 (no longer a record low)

Time spent recording conversations before actually beginning the review, in minutes: 11.5

Percent of 'High for This' listened to in complete silence and, as requested by critics, darkness: 72

Year that this album was released: 2011

Time between release of The Weeknd’s first tracks and his first live performance, in months: 8

Kangaroo Jack references made during this review: 2

Rank of Drake on blogger Ghostface Killah's 'Softest Rappers in the Game': 1, 2 and 3

Critics who think Drake rapping about arguing with his mom justifies above ranking: 4

Percentage of Index reviews that have featured conversations about Drake: 100

Critics who have smoked with a kid named Kush: 3

Critics who have fallen asleep to the first few tracks of 'House of Balloons' only to be violently woken up by 'Glass Table Girls': 1

Rank of 'The Morning on this author's iTunes Most Played: 4

Critics who called 5-Sure to confirm her golf cart in the middle of this review while sprawled on this author's couch: 1

Critics who accused this author of disliking Spanish people because of this author's dislike of Pitbull: 1

Number of borrowed bikes that a critic has totaled in the past two months: 3

Acronyms related to Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric mentioned within a twelve second span during ‘The Party / The After Party’: 4

Minutes spent discussion the Loyola (Los Angeles) Cubs: 6

Number of critics who request we catch the visionary music video for 'The Knowing' instead of just listen: 3

Number of sizes this author's heart grew with that request: 2

Length of 'The Knowing' music video, in minutes: 8

Words spoken during its entirety: 0

Levels at which this video can be interpreted, according to a monologing critic: 3

Skeptical looks exchanged at this extensive assertion: 7

Time spent discussing the differences in landscape and fauna between Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston, Miami and the Bay Area, in minutes: 8

Ronlyn Domingue

Ronlyn Domingue is an accomplished author and essayist from Louisiana. Her debut novel, The Mercy of Thin Air, has been translated into ten languages. Her most recent novel is The Mapmaker's War, and its sequel The Chronicle of Secret Riven will be published next year. Her work has appeared in The Beautiful Anthology, The New England Review, the Independent, The Nervous Breakdown, and Salon.com, among other places. Stanford Arts Review talked to her about aspiration, inspiration, and orientation. 

SAR: At what moment did you know you would be a writer? Not wanted to or could be but would be.

RD: I had a terrific third grade teacher who realized I needed more than our regular classroom instruction. She gave me time every week, with another student, to build my vocabulary and work on reading well above grade level. Some of the activities involved writing, too. I have a distinct memory of sitting at my little desk with the book I was writing—a mystery called Ghost Mountain—and having a deep sense I would be a writer. I don’t think that’s typical for eight year olds.

SAR: Was writing always a part of your life? And has it always been fiction?
RD: I lost touch with the dreamy aspirations of being a novelist in my late teens. I majored in journalism as a practical decision. I figured I could earn a living that way. But I never did work as a reporter, instead using my skills working for a consulting firm, a nonprofit, and university research office. Rarely did I do any creative writing in those years. I thought, what are the chances of getting published, much less earning a living as a fiction writer? But around the age of 28, I felt compelled to write fiction again. Go ahead--look up Saturn return for an astrological explanation. At 30, I returned to school to get a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, and my first novel published when I was 36.

A few years ago, I started writing nonfiction essays. A friend of mine connected me with The Nervous Breakdown, an online literary magazine, and they were looking for contributors at the time. I was exhausted by the project I was working on. The essays gave me an escape in a way. It was more satisfying too, a finished piece in a matter of hours, days, or weeks, instead of the long slog through a novel. I discovered I like writing nonfiction. It’s easier than fiction, frankly. A friend of mine says that’s because you’re working with known material. I know all too well fiction requires forced intimacy with the unknown.

SAR: Do you think you read differently because you're a writer?
RD: Absolutely. It’s more difficult to get lost in a book the way I did when I was younger, although when that happens, it’s like a gift. Evan S. Connell, Jr.’s essay collection A Long Desire was the last book I read which gave me a great escape.

Before I entered graduate school, I started to train myself to read as a writer. I diagrammed stories and novels to see how they were structured. Then once I was in the MFA program, the training became more focused. Workshops and forms of fiction classes changed the way I approach any text now. I try to be observant rather than critical. Other books and stories are good teachers. I’m a published writer, but I’m still a student on some level, working on my craft.

SAR: Do you feel like readers should read your book in a certain way, or do you want them to have unique experiences?
RD: Every reader comes at a book with his or her life experiences which shape the way he or she perceives. It’s unrealistic to expect anyone to see my work in the same way I do. I hope, of course, there’s some affinity between my work and a reader, that she connects with the main themes or deeper meanings. And readers bring another dimension to a story. When I receive notes from readers or visit with book clubs, I’m often shown layers I didn’t know were in my work, even meanings I missed. I love that. It’s an engagement with someone else’s perception and creativity.

SAR:  You play a lot with person and perspective. Is this how the stories present themselves to you, or is that an authorial touch?
RD: The stories dictate the way they will be told. A book spends years in a research and incubation phase before I actually start writing, and I know the point of view once do begin. I also have a good sense of the structure as a whole.

My debut novel The Mercy of Thin Air is in first person, just as Razi, the narrator, wanted it. The story takes place primarily in 1920s New Orleans and Louisiana at the end of the 20th century. It’s a love story, and it’s not, and it’s a ghost story, and it’s not. Razi drowns in an accident in 1929, but she remains behind, although she wouldn’t call herself a ghost. Her narrative crosses through time—her past, her years between life and whatever comes next, and the present. I didn’t make a conscious decision about this—a craft one—but all scenes from the past are written in present tense and those in the present are in past tense. It suits the story because Razi has never been able to let go of her past, so it exists as her present as well.

My recent novel The Mapmaker’s War is about an exiled mapmaker who must come to terms with the home and family she was forced to leave behind. It’s written as a fictional autobiography and a legend…think Margaret Atwood meets Beowulf. With this one, I had to honor what the narrator insisted upon but rationalize it on level of craft. This book is written in second person. Why, considering the perfectly good options of first or third? The primary reason is Aoife [pronounced ee-fah] required it to be that way. I’m being literal here. Once the writing began, after years of thought and waiting, she was insistent about how the story would be told. For me as a writer, characters have their own minds and wills, and it’s best if I respect both. But, as I came to realize in terms of craft, the point of view works for this particular story. She’s speaking to herself, writing to herself. Most people have the experience of talking to themselves in second person. “You did ____.” “You are _____.” “You should _____.” Aoife takes herself beyond confession—which is the effect of first person’s I—and enters a place of inquiry and reflection.

SAR: Does your inspiration come mainly from literature, or other forms of art, or people you know, or the world around you, or...?
RD: This is always a tough question. The first short story I published was sparked by a little boy I saw walking alone to school every day. I never met him or learned anything about his life, but his presence triggered something for me. The Mercy of Thin Air has a vestigial tie to a comment I made to an annoying co-worker decades ago, which was, “If you don’t stop bugging me, when I die, I’m going to come back and poltergeist you.” But when I started to work on that project, the novel took on a life of its own, nothing I could force. As for The Mapmaker’s War and its forthcoming sequel, well, I still can’t explain in a rational, lucid way how those books came into being. The mystery of the creative process has a dark side. I often say I don’t get to choose my novels; they choose me. Perhaps that’s more of an act of possession than inspiration.

SAR: Lastly, what do you view as either your job or your goal as an author?
RD: I hope when people read my work, they’re prompted to question the world around them and reflect on their own beliefs and assumptions. The experience might deepen some people’s opinions or present opportunities to change. Either way, I think that’s valuable.