What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read online

  Viewing Flanagan installed as a piece in a museum, knowing him since the 1980s, I felt disorientated—installed momentarily in his hell. “Voyeuristic” pales as a description of my looking. Was his métier disorientation? Flanagan’s conflation of art, body and disease bewildered me, rebelling against any modifier, such as progressive or regressive, which might characterize the politics of an art practice.

  Some say artists should make work for an audience, that anything else is indulgent; art should be “accessible.” To whom is never clear. Recently, in various newspapers and literary magazines, a debate about so-called “difficult books” has been unfolding. Writers should remember their readers, one side insisted, by making books enjoyable. For one thing, “difficulty” and “pleasure” are relative terms; without foundation, the argument lacked cogency and drifted into nowheresville.

  Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha reckoned with the concept of audience differently. Minh-ha was present at the New York premiere of Naked Spaces—Living is Round (1985), at the Museum of Modern Art. The film pictured women working, walking, socializing. No narrator explained the women or the spaces they inhabited. Instead, words shaped and suggested more impressions, ways of seeing.

  The first question to Minh-ha came from a man, who asked, vehemently: “Who is this film for? Who’s the audience for this film?” Minh-ha took a moment, then said: “I make films for sensitive people.” Her audience fell silent, maybe stunned by her brilliant tactic, which leaped over patterned responses. Minh-ha allowed for the contemplation of positions, by escaping the usual discursive traps. It’s the hardest thing to do, and in art and politics the most imaginative and stimulating.

  Z is for Jonze

  Stars In Their Eyes: Fame is a Frame

  Life’s tough as a street-art puppeteer, but when Craig Schwartz (cunning John Cusack) starts a deadbeat day job in an office where the ceiling’s so low everyone has to bend over, he discovers a way out—a secret tunnel into the mind and body of John Malkovich (playing himself, sort of). Spike Jonze’s first feature Being John Malkovich renders identity as the playground and prison it is. When everyone wants to be known, rather than to try to know, celebrity is the pinnacle of success. To the star-obsessed, being known might mean not having to know yourself, and if you don’t like yourself, this must be freedom. Dropped into the body of someone else, though, might allow for the ironic discovery that others are just as limited as you are. I laugh every time I think of Cameron Diaz—so thoroughly unglamorous she’s a sight gag—in a cage with a monkey; and Malkovich at home halfnaked, his paunch smiling at the fantasy of celebrity perfection.

  Acknowledgments

  The publisher and author would like to acknowledge and thank Stephen Frailey, artist/photographer and chair of Undergraduate Photography Department (The School of Visual Arts), for providing the title for this collection. Frailey edits a photography magazine, Dear Dave, and for its advertising campaign, several years ago, chose to run, in every issue, a powder-blue page, with white letters: “WHAT WOULD LYNNE TILLMAN DO?” (This was a great surprise to LT.) On the side of the page, it says: Subscribe to Dear Dave, WWW.DEARDAVEMAGAZINE.COM. We heartily recommend you do.

  Credits

  “The Last Words are Andy Warhol,” in Grey Room 21, Grey Room Inc. and M.I.T., Fall 2005, pp. 38-44.

  “Blame it on Andy: The Problems of Acting Natural,” In these Intemperate Times, Frieze Magazine, Issue 141, Sept. 2011, London.

  “Nothing is Lost or Found: Desperately Seeking Paul and Jane Bowles,” Tin House, Vol. 1, number 3, New York: Winter 2000, pp. 122-29.

  “Adieu, American Abroad,” Tin House, Vol. 12, number 2. Ed: Rob Spillman, pp. 70-79.

  “Cut Up Life,” Introductory essay in Water from a Bucket: Diary 1948-57, by Charles Henri Ford, Turtle Point Press, 2001, pp. vii-xiii.

  “Object Lesson” (on Fred Hughes’s house and art collection), Nest, New York: Summer 2000, pp. 54-61.

  “White Cool,” Elle 4:86, New York: May 1989, p. 86.

  It’s About Time: Definitions, in The Future Dictionary of America, McSweeney’s Books, 2004.

  “There, Not There: How our attitudes betray us,” In these Intemperate Times, Frieze Magazine, Issue 147, May 2012, London.

  This interview, Paula Fox by Lynne Tillman, was commissioned by and first published in BOMB Magazine, from BOMB 95/Spring 2006. © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. BOMB can be read at www.bombmagazine.org.

  “Borrowed Finery,” (memoir by Paula Fox), Bookforum, Winter 2001, p. 27.

  “The Coldest Winter,” (novel by Paula Fox), Bookforum, WORD: The Literary Magazine, ed. M Mark, June 1995, New York.

  “The Regulation of Pleasure,” Voice Literary Supplement, 1989.

  “A New Chapter of Nan Goldin’s Diary,” in the Sunday New York Times, Arts and Leisure, Nov. 16, 2003, p. 36.

  Interview with Harry Mathews, commissioned by and first published in BOMB Magazine, from BOMB 26/Winter 1989. © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. BOMB can be read at www.bombmagazine.org

  “SLANT,” Artforum, April 1990.

  “Try Again,” In these Intemperate Times,” Frieze Magazine, Issue 145, March 2012, London.

  “Of Its time,” In these Intemperate Times, Frieze Magazine, Issue 151, November-December 2012, London.

  “The Final Plot,” The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, pp 275-280. Ed: David Shields, Bradford Morrow. W.W. Norton & Company inc, New York 2011.

  “Downtown’s Room in Hotel History” in Downtown Film, TV and Video Culture 1975-2001. Ed. Joan Hawkins. Intellect Press: London, 2014

  “Boss of Bosses—The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano,” by Joseph F. O’Brien and Andris Kurins (review), Voice Literary Supplement 36:28, New York: July 9, 1991, pp. 6-7.

  “The Real McCoy: I Should Have Stayed Home” (Horace McCoy), Voice Literary Supplement 35:17, New York: September 11, 1990, pp. 15-16.

  “Guide for the Misbegotten:” Lynne Tillman on John Waters’s Role Models, Art Forum International, 2010.

  “Point of View,” In these Intemperate Times, Frieze Magazine, Issue 143, Nov. 2011, London.

  “The Rolling Stones, The Academy of Music,” in The Show I’ll Never Forget, ed. Sean Manning, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA., 2007, pp. 22-25.

  “Great Expectations: Underworld by Don DeLillo,” Bookforum, New York: Winter 1997, p. 17.

  “Future Shock” (review of George Saunders’s Pastoralia), New York Times Book Review, May 28, 2000, p. 8.

  “Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein,” New York Times Book Review, January 27, 2012, p. 13.

  “First Novel,” in Bookforum, July/August/September 2006, New York, p. 37.

  “Doing Laps Without A Pool,” Chapbook, New Herring Press, Brooklyn, 2011. Reprinted: Best Offense 2009.

  interview with Peter Dreher, commissioned by and first published in BOMB Magazine, from BOMB 57/Winter 1996. © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. BOMB can be read at www.bombmagazine.org

  “The Virtual President,” Art Forum, January 2009.

  “A Mole in the House of the Modern,” in The American Novel: The House of Mirth, ed. Deborah Esch, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Winter 2001, pp. 133-58.

  “History of Shit,” (review of Dominique LaPorte’s History of Shit), Bookforum, New York: Summer 2000, p. 9.

  “The Hardest Thing,” In these Intemperate Times, Frieze Magazine, Issue 149, September 2012, London

  “Stars in their Eyes: Fame is a Frame” (on Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich), Frieze, #49, London: Fall 1999, p. 58.

  About the Author

  Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She has collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on culture. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (199
7), a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Cast in Doubt (1992); Motion Sickness (1991); and Haunted Houses (1987). Someday This Will Be Funny (2012) is her most recent short story collection. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore (1995); Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999), a cultural history of a literary landmark, and The Broad Picture, an essay collection.