• THIS WEEK: A SELECTIVE GUIDE


    POETRY, SEDUCTION AND BEATBOXING | APRIL 15th 2008

    [Image]

    Greenwich Photography/flickr

    Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

    Our guide to what's on around the world, compiled by Ariel Ramchandani.  read more »


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  • KARA WALKER AT THE WHITNEY


    ART FROM THE BACK OF YOUR MIND | January 22nd 2008

    Ariel Ramchandani admires an artist whose work, rooted in the history of slavery and the American south, pushes poetic truth to the point of nightmare ...

    Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

    I rarely suffer from art-induced nightmares, but I have, more than once, woken up in a cold sweat after looking at Kara Walker's work. I am surely not alone in this. Her work excels because it is personal and penetrating.

    The current retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, entitled "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," is well designed, spacious and complex (although in a perfect world I would have wished for higher ceilings) and lets the work "work" on the viewer.

    The first piece you see on entering is the the larger-than-life "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." This early and defining work is quintessential Walker. The content is reminiscent of "Gone with the Wind"—but as if Walker took the book and ripped it open, shook it upside down, unshackled it and let the characters run wild. The black silhouettes on a crisp white background are formally seductive and familiar, as well as deceptively comprehensible in the language of the old south. The lush undulations of the plantation landscape, the sweep of a willow, the flounce of an antebellum dress, the master's house beckoning in the distance—it's all there, even as we discover it to be not quite as we thought we remembered it.  read more »


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  • STOPPARD IN MOSCOW


    "THE COAST OF UTOPIA" RETURNS HOME | November 26th 2007

    All photographs: Alex Gronsky, Panos Pictures

    Arkady Ostrovsky, who translated Sir Tom Stoppard's trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia", into Russian, finds that 19th-century liberal ideas can sound dangerously modern on the Moscow stage of today ...

    From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, December 2007  read more »


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