Confessions of a Conflicted Blogger

Illustration by Jon Han

The New Yorker has produced a wonderful 100th Anniversary Issue. I want to blog about it. I suppose I could do it here on The Driftwood Almanac. But doesn’t it make more sense to celebrate The New Yorker right at my old home – The New Yorker & Me? I think so. 

It's been only eight days since I published my “Last Post” on The New Yorker & Me. But already I’m having second, third, and fourth thoughts. Politics triggered the stoppage. I’m a Canadian. Trump’s tariff war and his musings about making Canada the 51st State infuriate me. Nevertheless, I now see that allowing politics to interfere with literary pleasure is crazy.

The New Yorker & Me has been a labor of love for fifteen years. Do I want to let it go just because of Trump? I don't think so. There’s plenty of life left in The New Yorker & Me. I’m going to resume writing it. 

The Driftwood Almanac has potential, I think. I’ll put it on hold for now. I’ll re-post the note on Svetlana Alpers to The New Yorker & Me. I apologize for the inconsistency over the last eight days. I think I’ve got it together now. The path is clear. The New Yorker & Me lives on. 

Svetlana Alpers's "Is Art History?"

I think it’s apt that my first post here is about Svetlana Alpers. Her The Art of Describing (1983) is one of my touchstones. It’s a study of Dutch art in the 17th century. It argues that central aspects of that art can best be understood as being an art of describing as distinguished from the narrative art of Italy. It’s basically a defence of description: “Meaning resides in the careful representation of the world,” Alpers says. I read that over forty years ago; it’s been part of my personal credo ever since.

Alpers has a beautiful new book out – Is Art History? (2024). It’s a collection of her essays, including the great “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation” (1976), in which she plants the seed that later burgeons into The Art of Describing. Is Art History? surprises in that it contains not only essays on old masters like Bruegel, Velázquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, but also pieces on modern artists such as Alex Katz, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Catherine Murphy, and Shirley Jaffe. One of my favorites is “Rebecca Horn: Chorus of the Locusts I and II,” a delightful account of Alpers’s discovery of two of Horn’s installations in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It begins wonderfully: “I came upon this pair of works by Rebecca Horn on a miserable rainy day in late winter in Hamburg.” Alpers explores the main floors of the museum and finds several “singular things” (e.g., “a dark vertical canvas filled to the top with a flower bed lit from the front – an alternative to a still life painted, surprisingly, by the young Renoir”). She finds herself in a happy and receptive mood – “happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking.” Then she happens on the two Horns. She writes,

Near the top of the building there was another staircase, as if to an attic. Worth the effort? I went up anyway and emerged in an odd room. I’d never seen anything quite like it. The ceiling was lined with rows of typewriters, neatly arranged. Monumental, out-of-date office machines hung upside down. Here and there and now and then one or two typed away for a time and then stopped. The beat was kept (was that the point?) by a blind man’s stick, white and hanging loosely down. The ribbon spewed out from one machine (had something gone wrong? could it be fixed?) onto the bare gallery floor. There was no real reason to bother with something like this, but I was intrigued and stayed on, attending to the erratic noise and trying to connect it to the movements that were going on. It took time. I never succeeded in getting it quite right.

Turning, I saw another room, companion to the first. This time the ceiling was bare, but the floor was covered for no apparent reason with row upon row of empty wineglasses – four thousand of them, Horn has noted – carefully set in place. The rims and bowls were glistening, reflecting the available light. Were they meant to contrast with the dull, black metal of the suspended typewriters next door? Perhaps seeing them this way, as still lifes grown to the size of a room, comes from looking at photographs of them after the fact. But there and then something moved ever so slightly. From the midst of many glasses certain ones struck their neighbors to make a distinctive, dull clink. The movement and the sound brough the objects to life. As in the first room, this put one in the mood for some attentive looking, the essential museum mood, one might say. The intermittent chatter of tapping keys and now, in addition, the occasional chatter of clinking glasses continued. Otherwise isolated objects or beings had been brought together and began to perform some odd ritual of their own. It was a clever construct, but also a melancholy one. 

I love Alpers’s description of the two installations. I love that she doesn’t strain to extract a meaning from them. She asks questions, and that’s enough. The pleasure of looking is the point (“happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking”). 

Susan Tallman, in her absorbing “The Occupation of Looking” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2024), a review of Is Art History?, praises Alpers’s “habits of slow looking.” She says, “It’s fun to watch her question her own responses, take things apart, look again.” The title of Tallman’s piece perfectly encapsulates Alpers’s brilliant art.