Second Set

The Mexican artist Acamonchi uses stencils, silkscreen, tape and spray paint on wood, slaps titles like “Terrible Sexo Sexo” on his creations, and loves to appropriate sexist and racist ads depicting Mexicans, which may explain why the spray cans that have crept into his paintings (carrying the milk of his artistic expression?) inevitably look like breasts. A lifelong Fluxus fan (who wears the Fluxus logo inked on his arm) he emerged from the skate punk and fanzine scene of the 80s in Tijuana/Ensenada and southern California, and moved from San Diego to New York last year. The face of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio,who was assassinated in Tijuana during a campaign rally in 1994, often appears in his work as a symbol of Mexico’s entrenched political corruption (Acamonchi has outfitted him as Colonel Sanders and as a cosmonaut).

When I visited Acamonchi and his six-toed cat in Washington Heights recently, he showed me these paintings, among others:

Terrible Sexo Sexo

Doors Open

Super Limpio

Acamonchi, who studied graphic design, has worked with MTV, Reebok,Vans,Tribal Gear and Obey (and his Osiris shoes are pretty adorable.) But his focus, now, is art. He likes to paint fast, and his improvised stencil and silkscreen imagery adds depth to his chaotic graffiti work. You can see him in action here. Better yet, go to his show at Eyelevel BQE in Williamsburg, in May.

You heard right: Today, in an NPR interview about repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, California congressman Duncan Hunter said that opening the military to “transgenders, to hermaphrodites, to gays and lesbians” would be bad for “cohesiveness.” Hermaphrodites, that vast and unruly subculture of—homosexuals? Well, yes, you might argue, if you have mixed or ambiguous genitalia, either way you swing could be considered gay, especially by someone who hasn’t heard the term “intersexuality.” Should a congressman who doesn’t know that a congenital condition is not a sexual preference be soapboxing about either in public? Jeffrey Eugenides, white courtesy phone.

I interviewed Yayoi Kusama in Tokyo in 1983, where she had been living (voluntarily) in a psychiatric hospital for nearly a decade, making art, but forgotten by the art world. A few years later, her star reascended, and in 2008, her painting “No. 2” broke a record (over $5 million) for a living woman artist at auction (nearly double what a piece by her former lover, Joseph Cornell, commanded the same day).

Last week when I stumbled on her 2005 installation, “You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies” at the Phoenix Art Museum, it was a soul-shaking encounter. A darkened, mirrored room with tiny shifting LED lights suspended from the ceiling, the piece is like an existential baptismal font in which Kusama’s signature dots mark her signature distance-infinity-and promise to wash you away.

You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies, Yayoi Kusama, 2005. Mixed media.

Our 1983 conversation was supposed to be about the role of dreams in art, but I soon learned hallucinations were more relevant to her vision. She told me about waking up one day and seeing nets covering everything in her room, before she became New York’s “Polka Dot Girl” promoting self obliteration through the accumulation of “black polka dots of death.”

“Fireflies” makes you feel instantly disarmed, disoriented, lonely—and exhilarated: it confronts you with a terrifying sense of freedom, the kind you might savor, anyway, before jumping off a cliff. But Kusama, who still lives in a mental hospital, knows her limits: if not for art, she has always said, she would have killed herself. And look at her now: she’s an octogenarian superstar.

In “The Naked and the Conflicted,” Kaitie Roiphe stakes her claim as one of the brightest minds of the 19th century by arguing that feminism unsexes men. Her subject: Great American Male Novelists. Unlike Roth, Mailer, Updike and Bellow, says Roiphe, the girlie men of contemporary literature are sexual failures, and feminist scolds made them that way. Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen—their protagonists are cuddly, passive, ambivalent, “sweet.”

“Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation,” she writes,” [they have] an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with convoluted, post-feminist second guessing.”

Never mind that in the post AIDS, STD-plagued, post-feminist era, sex is more complicated than it was in Mailer’s day (when typically only one party’s sexual satisfaction was of consequence). To illustrate Mailer’s thrillingly violent virility, Roiphe offers this gem: “I wounded her, I knew it, she thrashed beneath me like a trapped little animal, making not a sound.” The line may constitute great literature, but that doesn’t make the sex good. (And it can only be considered progress that these days one first asks a lady if she wants to be wounded, trapped, and silenced in bed.)

No one expects more from Roiphe, the Ann Coulter of the literati, who made her name as a date-rape denier and disdains “the feminists” (some superannuated army of Andrea Dworkins she believes control vast numbers of impressionable minds). Her personal essay about new motherhood in Slate last August, for example, asked, “Why Won’t Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?” without so much as identifying the kill-joys against whom she defined her own post-natal pleasure.

But you might expect more from The New York Times. How is it that the last stand-alone book review section in the country can spare three full pages for this retro-rumination? (Great American male novelists? Still a conversation?) The essay is poorly argued (Roiphe traces the problem to the 1970 book Sexual Politics, in which Kate Millett takes the literary lions of her day to task for their sexism, which doesn’t explain who sissified today’s men of letters), and it’s biased: her contemporary authors are all middle class straight whites who hardly represent the scope of quality literature by American men. A more timely essay might have asked how women authors approach sex now that they have an equal shot at greatness.

But do they?

During the same week The Book Review was celebrating male conquest and consummation, The Washington Post ran author Julianna Baggott’s essay revealing that Publisher’s Weekly’s top ten books of 2009 featured only men, Amazon.com’ s Best Books of 2009 put just four women in the top twenty, and in the last 30 years, only 11 Pulitzer Prizes have gone to women.

“I wish I were scandalized, or at least surprised,” wrote Baggett. But she was ahead of the curve: she kick-started her career by taking a pen name and passing as a man, and promptly got herself shortlisted on a pick list, next to Bill Clinton and David Sedaris. Last month, business blogger James Chartrand (Men With Pens) came out as a woman, saying that by writing as a man, she had doubled and sometimes tripled her fees, thereby climbing out of freelance purgatory.

I notice that even The Guardian’s famously fun Bad Sex Award for fiction favors men: in its 17-year history, just two women have won—not, presumably, because women write better sex scenes; more likely, they just aren’t in the competition.

Baggott, a professor at the Florida State University, wrote that this year’s lists “forced me to explain to my students — the next generation of writers — that the men in the class have double if not five times the chance of this kind of recognition.” That goes for the bad along with the good.

If books can be considered bodies of information, then Stanford Kay’s paintings belong on Body Politic. I’ve been following his work for years, wondering why the rest of the world hasn’t. In an essay for his 2005 show at Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon, N.Y., I wrote that his book paintings “nod playfully toward conceptual art, inverting Lawrence Weiner’s insistence on language as art (where words replace the image) by rendering, in palisades of color, stacks of words the viewer can’t see.”

Titled, 2003

First, Kay showed books shelved vertically in neat rows. A few were overrun with rogue illustrations that crept across the spines and onto neighboring volumes:

Life Study, 2005

Sometimes, in satisfying bouts of violence, Kay abstracted the books beyond recognition:

Whaling Stories, 2003

Then he stacked them. The light and color shifted, and a Thiebaud-like touch emerged:

Learning Curve, 2006

Lately, Kay’s had a change of view. The books are laid flat in overlapping planes of color, with new depth. They’ve reclaimed their bodies.

My Back Pages (Gray), 2009

You can see Kay’s acrylic paintings at The Hopper House in Nyack, NY until Dec. 6, with the work of Buzz Spector, another artist in love with books.