The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  But the Mandarin duck is a symbol of marriage, of fidelity, and now, in some mystical way, the two young lovers began to swirl. They swirled until they became the ducks. They became, by magic, the souls of the ducks. They took to the air on bright wings. They had become transcendent, timeless. On the same ground where the sumo match was fought, the duck-souls attacked the wrestler. They danced this, darting and bending their backs. The ducks drove the cross-eyed villain to the ground, making him even more cross-eyed. Then the lovers’ costumes turned inside out, revealing brilliant plumage, plumage like an illustration in a children’s book, feathers as vivid as fire. Then they all froze in place and the curtain dropped.

  The Reconstructed Castle

  Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses tells, in part, the story of a samurai rebellion. In 1868 the reign of the shoguns ended and power reverted back to the emperor of Japan or (because nothing is ever as simple as the official story) to a group of powerful men acting in his name. One of the consequences of this event, which is called the Meiji Restoration, was that the large samurai class that had governed Japan for hundreds of years was stripped of its power and dissolved.12 Imperial edicts forced members of the former warrior caste to stop styling their hair in topknots, to stop carrying swords.

  In 1876, a group of 200 reactionary ex-samurai called the League of the Divine Wind launched a surprise nighttime attack on the castle in the city of Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. As the barracks burned, they drove back the conscript soldiers of the Imperial Army, wounding hundreds and killing the wounded. Fires broke out everywhere. “Even his garments, drenched in enemy blood, glowed crimson in the flames,” Mishima writes of one samurai. At last the soldiers regrouped and reached their guns and ammunition. The League, whose aim was to eradicate all traces of Westernization and return Japan to its feudal past, had chosen to fight with swords. With no firearms, the samurai were decimated. The leader of the attack, gravely wounded, called on a follower to cut off his head. Most of the survivors committed seppuku.

  Old buildings in Japan are seldom really old. A country that builds with wood instead of stone runs the constant risk of losing its monuments to fire. Ancient shrines are really copies of ancient shrines. The Imperial Palace in Kyoto has been rebuilt eight times, and its current layout would make no sense to any emperor who lived there. The main keep of Kumamoto Castle, which burned to the ground in another samurai uprising in 1877, was reconstructed from concrete in 1960. The forms return again and again. They end violently, and they never end at all. To live as a Japanese, Koga said, is to live the history of Japan.

  His building is there. Koga’s, I mean. In Kumamoto. Just down the hill from the castle. I found him a few hundred yards from the scene of the battle in the book that made me think of him in the first place.

  A trip on the Shinkansen train from Tokyo to Kumamoto takes about six hours. You change in Osaka. The train passes just below Mount Fuji at the start of the trip and stops near the end at Hiroshima, where it looks out on the baseball stadium. As it hurtles south, you pass into a misty country where hills drift toward you like ghost ships. If it’s raining when you get out at Kumamoto Station, you can buy a clear plastic umbrella for ¥350 from a bucket in the station shop. If you have time and don’t mind getting wet, you can walk into town along the river, the Shirakawa, which lies in a wide, ugly basin.

  The castle is on a hill in the center of the city. There is a tiny parking lot at the base of the hill with a vending machine that sells Boss-brand hot coffee. The castle’s fortifications merge with the hillside just behind the parking lot, a tortoiseshell of large, dark stones too steep to climb.

  His building is down the hill. A five-minute walk, if that. Come around the slope and you will see the complex, a series of squat, identical gray blocks, each maybe eleven stories tall. Cars speed by on a busy street. A security guard in a gray jacket and white motorcycle helmet stands beside the gate, near some orange traffic cones. The complex’s sign, printed in English on a black stone fence, is intersected at intervals by purple neon bars.

  There is a bus stop very convenient to the building. There is a MaxValu just across the street.

  So this is where I am. I am standing in the parking lot of the Max-Valu. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. The air is drizzly and cool. The cars that turn in to the lot are blunt, compact hatchbacks, little modern microvans in gold and pale blue and white. They are shaped like sumo wrestlers, I think, and it hits me that sumo is essentially a sport of refusing to die, refusing to be swept away, refusing to accept the insolidity of the dream. It was a street entertainment, really, until the early twentieth century. Then the samurai tradition burned down and had to be rebuilt.

  And soon I will think about this while I watch Hakuho wrestle Kakuryu on the TV in my hotel room, on what is supposed to be the last match of the last day of the tournament: Hakuho missing his chance to seize Kakuryu’s mawashi just as Kakuryu wins a two-handed grip on his. Kakuryu literally leaping forward with spasmodic sliding jumps, backing the yokozuna to the edge of the rice-bale circle, where Hakuho’s knees and then his ankles will flex frantically, until he goes toppling, the greatest wrestler in the world, off the edge of the clay, twisting onto his stomach as he falls. When he gets to his feet, Hakuho will offer no reaction. A few minutes later, in the playoff match to break their identical 14–1 records, he will grapple Kakuryu in the middle of the ring and then drop his hips and lift Kakuryu halfway off the sand and force him backward. They will both fall out of the ring at the same moment, but Kakuryu’s foot will touch first, giving Hakuho the Emperor’s Cup and his twenty-eighth tournament championship. The yobidashi will sweep the marks away.13 Hakuho will smile slightly, not a smile that is meant to be read.

  But that will happen later. Now I am leaning on a railing in the parking lot of the MaxValu, thinking about endurance at four o’clock in the afternoon. I am looking across a busy street at the apartment complex of the man who beheaded Yukio Mishima and then lived a whole life afterward, lived another forty years. I think: He is in there. I think: It is time to decide what to do.

  I get up and move toward the crosswalk. The wind is damp. It’s January, so I don’t see any butterflies. It is a cloudy day, so I do not see the moon.

  1. Japanese mythology, like many aspects of Japanese culture, was heavily influenced by China.

  2. There are two additional yokozuna who supposedly practiced before 1749, but it’s only with the ascension that year of Maruyama Gondazemon, the third holder of the title, that we can be pretty sure about names and dates and whether people actually existed outside folklore.

  3. Sample lyrics: “Built to last, like an Energizer bunny / Pushin’ 700, and still makin’ money.”

  4. After chasing him into the street and into a taxi, allegedly.

  5. The extent of Japan’s suicide problem is sometimes overstated by the media, but Japan may be unique in the way that suicide has been historically celebrated and seen as an honorable rather than a shameful act.

  6. E.g., the concept of mono no aware, which translates into something like “a pleasing sadness at the transience of beautiful things.” The literary scholar Motoori Norinaga coined this idea in the mid-eighteenth century to describe The Tale of Genji, the great Heian-period novel whose author—perhaps deliberately—left it unfinished. When the protagonist dies late in the book, his death is never mentioned directly; instead, it’s marked by a blank chapter called “Vanished Into the Clouds.”

  7. There had been no public instances of seppuku in Japan since the war era; incredulous editors concluded that their writers were getting the story wrong. One newspaper’s late-afternoon edition ran with the headline “Injured Mishima Rushed to Hospital.”

  8. Koga, too, was prepared to commit seppuku—all the young men were—but shortly before the coup attempt, Mishima ordered them to live, charging them to explain his actions to the world.

  9. The advice of the Yokozuna Deliberation Council carries immense
weight, but the Japan Sumo Association has final say in all promotions.

  10. Although in fairness, Japanese rikishi have been involved in their share of controversy; of Hakuho’s first five opponents, two were among the more than a dozen wrestlers suspended in 2010 for illegally betting on baseball.

  11. In the four tournaments since his losing effort in January, Kisenosato has gone 9–6, 13–2, 9–6, and 9–6. He has yet to win a championship and has not been promoted to yokozuna.

  12. The twentieth-century Western idea of the samurai as an armored warrior, a kind of Japanese knight, is not particularly accurate. Some samurai were warriors, and samurai were licensed to carry swords. But by the nineteenth century the samurai class had evolved into a kind of hereditary government bureaucracy. Many were officials whose roles had nothing to do with war.

  13. In the Osaka tournament two months later, Kakuryu beat Hakuho, won the championship, and earned a promotion to yokozuna. Hakuho being Hakuho, however, he won the next three tournaments, including last month’s fall basho in Tokyo. He now has thirty-one championships, one short of the record.

  New York

  WINNER—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY

  “Even those who know little about art will find Jerry Saltz’ work fascinating,” wrote the judges who awarded his art criticism the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. “Knowledgeable yet unpretentious, Saltz wins the trust of the reader with writing that is itself painterly.” Formerly an art critic for the Village Voice, Saltz joined New York in 2007. His work was also nominated for the Columns and Commentary award in 2011. Since Adam Moss was named editor in chief of New York in 2004, the title has established new standards for magazine making. Just this year, New York received ten Ellie nominations, including its fifth for Magazine of the Year, and won three awards.

  Jerry Saltz

  Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same? and Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds and Post-Macho God: Matisse’s Cut-Outs Are World-Historically Gorgeous

  Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?

  For the past 150 years, pretty consistently, art movements moved in thrilling but unmysterious ways. They’d build on the inventions of several extraordinary artists or constellations of artists, gain followings, become what we call a movement or a school, influence everything around them, and then become diluted as they were taken up by more and more derivative talents. Soon younger artists would rebel against them, and the movement would fade out. This happened with impressionism, postimpressionism, and Fauvism, and again with abstract expressionism after the 1950s. In every case, always, the most original work led the way.

  Now something’s gone terribly awry with that artistic morphology. An inversion has occurred. In today’s greatly expanded art world and art market, artists making diluted art have the upper hand. A large swath of the art being made today is being driven by the market and specifically by not very sophisticated speculator-collectors who prey on their wealthy friends and their friends’ wealthy friends, getting them to buy the same look-alike art.

  The artists themselves are only part of the problem here. Many of them are acting in good faith, making what they want to make and then selling it. But at least some of them are complicit, catering to a new breed of hungry, high-yield risk-averse buyers, eager to be part of a rapidly widening niche industry. The ersatz art in which they deal fundamentally looks the way other art looks. It’s colloquially been called modest abstraction, neo-modernism, MFA abstraction, and crapstraction. (The gendered variants are chickstraction and dickstraction.) Rhonda Lieberman gets to the point with “Art of the One Percent” and “aestheticized loot.” I like dropcloth abstraction, and especially the term coined by the artist-critic Walter Robinson: zombie formalism.

  Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just “new” or “dangerous”-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what “new” or “dangerous” really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences. (It’s also a global presence: I saw scads of it in Berlin a few weeks back, and art fairs are inundated.) These artists are acting like industrious junior postmodernist worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction, deploying visual signals of suprematism, color-field painting, minimalism, postminimalism, Italian arte povera, Japanese mono-ha, process art, modified action painting, all gesturing toward guys like Polke, Richter, Warhol, Wool, Prince, Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Wade Guyton, Rudolf Stingel, Sergej Jensen, and Michael Krebber. I’ve photographed hundreds of examples this year at galleries and art fairs.

  This work is decorator-friendly, especially in a contemporary apartment or house. It feels “cerebral” and looks hip in ways that flatter collectors even as it offers no insight into anything at all. It’s all done in haggard shades of pale, deployed in uninventive arrangements that ape digital media or something homespun or dilapidated. Replete with self-conscious comments on art, recycling, sustainability, appropriation, processes of abstraction, or nature, all this painting employs a similar vocabulary of smudges, stains, spray paint, flecks, spills, splotches, almost-monochromatic fields, silk-screening, or stenciling. Edge-to-edge, geometric, or biomorphic composition is de rigueur, as are irregular grids, lattice and moiré patterns, ovular shapes, and stripes, with maybe some collage. Many times, stretcher bars play a part. This is supposed to tell us, “See, I know I’m a painting—and I’m not glitzy like something from Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons.” Much of this product is just painters playing scales, doing finger exercises, without the wit or the rapport that makes music. Instead, it’s visual Muzak, blending in.

  Most zombie formalism arrives in a vertical format, tailor-made for instant digital distribution and viewing via JPEG on portable devices. It looks pretty much the same in person as it does on iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Collectors needn’t see shows of this work since it offers so little visual or material resistance. It has little internal scale, and its graphic field is taken in at once. You see and get it fast, and then it doesn’t change. There are no complex structural presences to assimilate, few surprises, and no unique visual iconographies or incongruities to come to terms with. It’s frictionless, made for trade. Art as bitcoin.

  Almost everyone who paints like this has come through art school. Thus the work harks back to the period these artists were taught to lionize, the supposedly purer days of the 1960s and 1970s, when their teachers’ views were being formed. Both teachers and students zero in on this one specific period; then only on one type of art of this period; then only on certain artists. It’s art-historical clear-cutting, aesthetic monoculture with no aesthetic biodiversity. This is not painting but semantic painterbation—what an unctuous auction catalogue, in reference to one artist’s work, recently called “established postmodern praxis.”

  Apologists offer convoluted defenses, saying that certain practitioners differ from all the others. Lucien Smith uses fire extinguishers to make his little drips; Dan Colen uses M&Ms for his; Adam McEwen deploys chewing gum; Parker Ito paints fields of hazy colored dots. There are many artists who make art that looks printed but is handmade; others make it look handmade when it’s printed. We’re told that a painting is made by cutting up other paintings, or that it was left outdoors or in a polluted lake or sent through the mail, or that it came from Tahrir Square. We hear that the artist is “commenting on” commodity culture, climate change, social oppression, art history. One well-known curator tried recently to justify the splattered Julian Schnabel–Joe Bradley–Jean-Michel Basquiat manqué of Oscar Murillo—the hottest of all these artists—by connecting his tarp- or tentlike surfaces to the people living under makeshift canvas shelters in Murillo’s native Colombia. Never mind that he was educated in England and largely grew up there. At twenty-eight, obviously talented, Murillo’s stil
l making his student work and could turn out to be great. Regardless, so many buyers and sellers are already so invested in him that everyone’s trying to cover his or her position. In one day at Frieze last month, three major art dealers pulled me aside to say that, although they agreed that we’re awash in crapstraction, their artist was “the real deal.” I told each dealer what the other had said to me, and that each had named a different hot artist.

  I’ll admit that I don’t hate all of this work. Frankly, I like some of it. The saddest part of this trend is that even better artists who paint this way are getting lost in the onslaught of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art. Going to galleries is becoming less like venturing into individual arks and more like going to chain stores where everything looks familiar. My guess is that, if and when money disappears from the art market again, the bottom will fall out of this genericism. Everyone will instantly stop making the sort of painting that was an answer to a question that no one remembers asking—and it will never be talked about again.

  Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds

  It’s all helixed into this: something fantastic, something disastrous. “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective” is upon us. One can’t think of the last thirty years in art without thinking of Koons, a lot. I’ve witnessed this career from very close range. I have seen him transform himself into the Koons hologram we know now; him polishing sculptures late at night in galleries before and during his shows; not selling his work; almost going broke; charging less for a sculpture than it cost to produce. In a Madrid club in 1986, I watched him confront a skeptical critic while smashing himself in the face, repeating, “You don’t get it, man. I’m a fucking genius.” The fit passed when another critic who was also watching this, the brilliant Gary Indiana, said, “You are, Jeff.” I agreed.