BY frieze in Culture Digest | 26 APR 19

Weekend Reading List: The Sporting Life of Charlie Brown; The Many Lives of Dinosaurs

What the frieze editors have been reading this week

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BY frieze in Culture Digest | 26 APR 19

Courtesy: Charles Schulz

  • ‘[Billie Jean] King writes: “Snoopy has rightfully established himself as Everyman’s tennis player. [...] Hang in there, Snoopy, and don’t ever stop swinging away. We need you.”’ For Racquet magazine, Patrick Sauer traces the influence of pro tennis upon one of America’s best loved comics – and vice versa
     
  • At Harper’s, an excerpt from María Gainza’s novel, Optic Nerve, about Henri Rousseau and hot air balloons, translated by Thomas Bunstead
     
  • And from the March issue of frieze, Gainza on the strategies that artists and galleries in Buenos Aires are adopting in order to cope with the economic crisis
     
  • ‘The postpartum period is just one particularly intense period of damage. Or of forward momentum, which is maybe a better near-synonym.’ Sarah Manguso and Kate Zambreno discuss writing postpartum, for The Paris Review

    (Keep an eye out for the May issue of frieze, published next week, in which Sarah Manguso traces Vija Celmins’s career-long quest for silence)
     
  • ‘One night, amid the scandal, Fan went out to dinner with her best friend, the director Li Yu. As they were driving home, Li recalled, Fan reached for her hand and held it tightly. Li was surprised: Fan had never done that before, through their four movies and 12 years of friendship.’ May Jeong on the mysterious disappearance of Fan Bingbing, the world’s biggest movie star, for Vanity Fair
     
  • ‘Time and time again, the dinosaurs in the ‘Jurassic’ franchise resurrect and depose. It’s the kind of miracle that makes Christ look like an amateur.’ For frieze, Olivia Rodrigues writes on how ‘Jurassic Park’ changed the way we exhibit dinosaurs
     
  • A variation on that same theme: in the New Yorker, Douglas Preston profiles Robert DePalma, a young paleontologist who may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth

Charles Lang and Barnum Brown working in lab with the T. rex skeleton, 1942. Courtesy: © American Museum of Natural History Library, New York

  • ‘On April 18, 2018, Adrian Abramovich appeared before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. […] The agency identified Abramovich as the source of 96,758,223 illegal robocalls.’ In a six-part story for Wired, Alex W. Palmer goes on the hunt for the kingpin of robocalling
     
  • At The Believer, James Pogue’s long-form report from Tulare County, where a rogue conservation outfit is fighting to save the sequoia tree from climate change
     
  • In the lead up to the 58th Venice Biennale, Negar Azimi asks: can Ralph Rugoff’s ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’ exhibition address histories of narrow nationalism, fascism, and empire head-on?
     
  • ‘Instead of shaking all over, I read the newspapers. I listened to the radio. I had my lunch.’ Colm Tóibín on his battle with cancer, for the London Review of Books
     
  • Bruno Munari, Irma Boom and beyond: at Freunde von Freunden, Alice Rawsthorn runs through the five books that will open your eyes to the importance of design
     
  • ‘The German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey recently wrote in the New York Times, “the stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end.” That monotony has a name: Alternativlosigkeit, or alternativelessness.’ For n+1, Adrian Daub explores what has been hiding Germany’s hidden crisis
     
  • In the latest episode of Vox’s series, ‘Darkroom’, Coleman Lowndes explores why the pioneering photographer Hippolyte Bayard faked his own death
     
  • ‘8:23 P.M. — I’ve completely lost the thread. I think he has too.’ For Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson provides live-commentary of the recent Žižek-Peterson debate
     
  • ‘How to Fuck Your Neighbour’: Maryse Meijer on the radical politics of Mr. Rogers and Andrea Dworkin, for the Los Angeles Review of Books
     
  • Let’s Party Like It’s 1919: Jennifer Higgie on Josef Albers’ photographs of a Valentine Day’s Ball, for frieze

Contemporary Art and Culture

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