#7 (8.11.25)
Edwin, Anna, Friends
SEE
Edwin Denby, by Peter Hujar.
Gelatin silver print, 1975
I think most people have at least one artwork to which their mind returns unbidden, drawn back by some element in the work, something that seems at once to invite and resist understanding. I often think of this black-and-white portrait of the poet and critic Edwin Denby, taken by Peter Hujar in 1975. It shows Denby, then 72, sitting on a divan or bed, wearing a casual shirt. His eyes are closed, his mouth a line: I want to say that he’s expressionless, but that’s impossible, and I know I should try again. One purpose of Hujar’s picture, and the way Denby appears within it, is to invite you to say that Denby feels a certain way, that what’s settling or stilling here may have been fatigue, or stress, some agitation caused by the world beyond the frame. If you know nothing of Denby, you might see an ageing man, and imagine fatigue, or world-weariness; but then you might learn a little of Denby, such as the fact that he suffered from depression, and would kill himself eight years after Hujar took his photo, and you might look again at the picture, and see weariness become pain. And then again, you might learn a little of Hujar, who liked to quietly glamorise, to sleeken, the emotions of his subjects, so that the line between real and fake, as we treat them in the everyday, soon becomes hard to divine. Denby’s face, in the richest sense, is an inconvenient fact.
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READ
Attensity!, by the Friends of Attention.
Particular Books
Attensity: “the free movement of attention in its fullness, freely shared”. The Friends of Attention, devoted to reclaiming our minds from the soul-void of digital capitalism, meet online — needs must — on the first Friday of each month. They maintain a sparkling bank of resources for those who’re drawn to their cause; now they’ve written this book, which spins each sentence of their short manifesto into a lesson for attentive life. Like all initiatives that matter, the scale of their importance may at first be hard to grasp.
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LISTEN
Anna Calvi, live.
EartH, London N16
In Dalston last weekend, at the top of EartH’s wooden banks, I talked to a friend about Anna Calvi’s glamour. She’d just finished a two-hour set of androgynous chic and pealing chords, a voice of breathtaking majesty. Calvi has more style than most performers, &, perfectly, “no small-talk”. (That confession was the only thing she said between songs.) If she hadn’t invented herself, she could have been a creation of John Galliano — I can’t think of a higher compliment — and she was, in fact, performing at haute couture dinners nearly 15 years ago, long before fashion realised that the literary world can fixate on image too.
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(PS: Denby was a wonderful poet, critic, man. I edited a little selection of his essays & poems last year; it’s published by David Zwirner Books.)