Seeing Jazz: Artists and Writers on Jazz by Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (review)

I The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art by Guy Davenport. Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., 1997. ISBN: 1-887178-55-4. Reuiewed by Roy Behrens, Department o f Art, Universityo f NorthernIowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0362, U.S.A.E-mail: cballasl@netins.neb. Guy Davenport, a MacArthur Fellow and an award-winning translator, poet, critic, short fiction writer and visual artist , is also one of the finest essayists of our time. This is his third collection (the first two, Geography ofthe Imagination and Every ForceEvolves a Form, were both nominated for the National Book Award). His delightful essays, like his more difficult short stories, are literary montages; they begin by combining unlikely events, people and ideas, then show us a sensible, elegant way by which these all flow together. Among the 40 essays in this book are commentaries on Thomas Merton, Franz Kafka, revolution, the Shakers, Gertrude Stein,John Ruskin, Grant Wood, the Bible, Paul Cadmus and snake handling . Davenport grew up in rural South Carolina, in the Old South, and his most exhilarating passages are often colorful childhood memories, as when, for example, in a brilliant essay titled “On Reading,” he remembers the people who encouraged him to read: Aunt Mae, who was married to Uncle Buzzie and never drove over 30 miles an hour, and Cora Shiflett, a neighbor who lent him his first volume of Tunan, in which the Lord of theJungle survives in the Sahara Desert by dispatching a vulture and drinking its blood. Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design by Steven Heller and Karen Pomeroy. Allworth Press, NewYork, NY, U.S.A., 1997. ISBN: 1-880559-76-5. Reviewed by Roy Behrens, Department of Art, Universityo f NorthernIowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0362, U.S.A.E-mail: c:ballast@netins.net>. In the past several decades, various authors have objected to approaches to graphic design history that focus on individual masters, movements and styles; that analyze the structural attributes of a work (derided in this book as “eye candy”); or that feature highbrow examples while leaving out simpler, more popular works. This volume, which is one of the more inventive and thoughtprovoking books on design history in recent years, offers a plausible alternative : it consists of 93 “object lessons” in the form of engaging, short essays about a wide variety of graphic icons, from the late nineteenth century to the present, ranging from the ubiquitous (shooting targets, the swastika,Joe Camel) to the esoteric (Emigre magazine , the Cranbrook posters and April Greiman’s self-portrait). Organized somewhat chronologically but in eight thematic categories (Persuasion, Media , Language, Identity, Information, Iconography, Style and Commerce), the essays form readable “stories”about the objects, the designers’ thought processes ,and the social and political circumstances from which they emerged. I I 1 EXHIBITIONCATALOG 1 SeeingJazz: Artists andWriters onJazz Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A., 1997. ISBN: 08118 -1732-6. Reviewed by Roy Behras, Department o f Art, University o f Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0362,U.S.A.E-mail: cballastanetins. net>. Some people are capable of synesthesia, which results in a kind of connection among the various senses. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky,for example, often heard specific sounds when looking at colors, or saw colors when listening to sounds. The intent of this catalog is not dissimilar,in the sense that it tries to establish a link between the musical experience ofjazz and the sensory experiences of other art forms, including painting, sculpture,photography and the written word. The result is a kaleidoscopic assortment of more than 160visual artworks, anecdotes, poems, lyrics andjazz-related writings, including, for example, four Romare Bearden collages ; Piet Mondrian’s famous Broadway Boogie Woogie;Lee Friedlander’s photograph of Sweet Emma Barnett; and poignant excerpts from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man andJack Kerouac’s TheBeginning ofBop. Divided into three sections (Rhythm, Improvisation, and Call and Response), each introduced with a brief essay byjazz scholar Robert Meally, this is the catalog for a traveling exhibition that began at the Smithsonian Institution in October 1997and will travel around the U.S. until July 1999. William S. Burroughs...