Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The New Yorker , December 22 & 29, 2008 Peter Schjeldahl writes on the Dumas exhibition at the MoMA: There is a heaviness to the paintings of the South African-born, Dutch-based artist Marlene Dumas, as if they might fall off the wall and break the floor. And yet they are thinly brushed, for the most part, on ordinary canvases. There's a flypaper stickiness about them, too, though their usual surface is matte and dry. The impressions are emotional. * Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work's authority. She doesn't give; she takes. * [Of "Stern" (2004), based on Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977" (1988), itself in turn based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof militants] she drags the drama of a particularly haunting tragedy back to the secondhandedness of the photograph from the thirdhandedness of Richter's painting. By this and analogous uses of imagination, Dumas suggests, a li...

from Alex Ross's article "Song of the Earth" on composer John Luther Adams: "My music is going inexorably from being about place to becoming place," Adams said of his installation. I have a vivid memory of flying out of Alaska early one morning on my way to Oberlin, where I ataught for a couple of fall semesters. It was aglorious early-fall day. Winter was coming in. I love winter, and I didn't want to go. As we crested the central peaks of the Alaska Range, I looked down at Mt. Hayes, and all at once I was overcome by the intense love that I have for this place--an almost erotic feeling about those mountains. Over the next fifteen minutes, I found myself furiously sketching, and when I came up for air I realized, There is is. I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that i wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyong the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. I knew that it had to be its own space. And I knew that it had to be real--that ...