Recent reading, notables in red as usual:

J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man
Bill Buford, Heat
Joan Rothfuss et al., Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983

Another week, another Coetzee. Slow Man is nominally realistic; it tells the story of Paul Rayment, an unhappily divorced middle-aged ex-photographer and photography collector who loses a leg in a cycling accident and then slowly becomes infatuated with his middle-aged Croatian nurse, a happily married woman who has no feelings for him outside of the basic goodwill any care attendant bears toward a charge. Then, approximately halfway through the book, everything changes. A visitor arrives on Rayment's doorstep: Elizabeth Costello, a middle-aged experimental Australian novelist, a woman who never seems to eat, who apparently has no place to stay, and who claims that Rayment and his nurse "came to her," and that she is now simply waiting for their lives to unfold. Metafiction? Not quite: Cotezee delivers all of this straight-up, without the nudging and winking asides characterizing the work of writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. There is no pivotal moment characterizing Elizabeth Costello as a ghost, spirit, or Coetzee himself; everything she says and does could, conceivably, spring from some naturalistic source. Like James' Turn of the Screw, Slow Man hovers on what Duchamp called an "infra-thin boundary," a place where an interpreter's predelictions and beliefs can definitively shove ambigously presented evidence one way or another. An excellent novel, whose thematic density belies its two hundred-some-odd pages.

The Johns catalog: good reproductions, two long and ponderous essays by Richard Shiff and Victor I. Stochita, and an excellent essay by Walker Art Center curator Joan Rothfuss on Johns' "Green Angel," a presumably traced art-historical motif whose origin, unlike other Johns tracings from Cezanne, Holbein, and Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, remains ambiguous.

Rothfuss:

"Critics have been assiduous about mining Johns' images for iconographic sources. He has encouraged this, in a way, because many of his moifs -- the U.S. flag, the Mona Lisa, an abstracted flagstone pattern, and others -- are quotations or appropriations of preexisting images. Among these are several made by tracing reproductions of works by other artists, a practice he seems to have begun in the late 1970s with a copy after a Cezanne painting. . . .These motifs, at first unindentified, were puzzling to viewers. They clearly indicated something specific, but the referent was illegible. Johns intended this: as he later explained, he was interested in the articulation of the figures as line in space. 'Looking at [reproductions of the Isenheim Altarpiece], I thought how moving it would be to extract the abstract quality of the work, its patterning, from the figurative meaning. So I started making these tracings. Some became illegible in terms of the figuration, while in others I could not get rid of the figure. But in all of them I was trying to uncover something else in the work, some other kind of meaning...'"

- posted by cjb @ 10:32 PM