Delirious near the end, he said, “We’re going to the Savoy!”—surely the jauntiest dying words on record. But it was Riverside Memorial Chapel, the Jewish funeral parlor at Amsterdam and 76th, that we were bound for. I was obliged to reidentify the body once we arrived there from New York–Presbyterian Hospital. An undertaker pointed the way to the viewing room and said, “You may stay for as long as you like. But do not touch him.” Duly draped, Philip looked serene on his plinth—like a Roman emperor, one of the good ones. I pulled up a chair and managed to say, “Here we are.” Here we are at the promised end. A phrase from The Human Stain came to me: “the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly.” I wanted to tell him that he was doing fine, that he was a champ at being dead, bringing to it all the professionalism he’d brought to previous tasks.
To talk daily with someone of such gifts had been a salvation. There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was as plotless as friendship ought to be. We spent thousands of hours in each other’s company. I’m not who I would have been without him. “We’ve laughed so hard,” he said to me some years ago. “Maybe write a book about our friendship.”
Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the world’s “most influential” living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.
For those of us old enough to remember an era when we didn’t account for our existence on social media, when we could attend a dinner party without being tagged like a shot deer on someone’s Instagram story, when privacy was respected and deeper meanings had room to quietly take root and bloom, it is no surprise to see artists flinching from the din of publicity. How can we really look and listen when we are so busy being seen and heard?
It is axiomatic that certain pieces of technology are so incorporated into our lives that we can’t imagine life, or ourselves, without them. Less acknowledged is that necessary period, just after such a product’s release, in which it turns from novelty to given. This a two-way absorption – product into life, life into product – which, as part of its work, erases itself from memory: it’s hard to remember when smartphones were half-ubiquitous or sometimes essential. (It’s possible that I’m interested in this transitional phase because I belong to the small generation whose childhood, that is, the time in which our personal givens are formed, straddled life pre- and post-internet. I can recall days during which it was easily possible not to encounter a screen and I’m also able see the strangeness of that idea.)
Samanta Schweblin’s new novel Little Eyes is set across this kind of period of technological assimilation. It depicts the rapid rise of devices called Kentukis: zoomorphic cuddly toys with webcams in their eyes, owned by ‘keepers’ and remotely controlled, and watched through, by ‘dwellers’. Kentukis have wheels that permit their dwellers to explore the homes and lives of the keepers to whom they are anonymously and randomly assigned. They can make computerised animal sounds but cannot speak. At the start of the novel – which, appropriately disorientatingly, lacks temporal markers – Kentukis have recently been launched. They are being recommended by evangelistic shop clerks and forward-thinking psychotherapists to tentative or mystified customers. But by the end they are part of the fabric of everyday life: walking the streets of Tel Aviv with their keepers; independently exploring small Norwegian towns with the aid of remote charging points; installed on taxi dashboards, chirping to alert the driver to monitored zones.
With his Campbell’s Soup can paintings, exhibited in Los Angeles in 1962, Warhol was not pioneering anything new. He was merely upping the ante. More than Johns or Lichtenstein, Warhol concealed his own expressive capacity, burying it so deep that any evidence of the sensibility of the artist all but disappeared. You can look at a soup can and wonder at how familiarity, intimacy, warmth, even feelings of love might attach to an inert object, just as you can look at a painting of Marilyn, Liz or Elvis and wonder at how cold, inert, even alien the human form had become. One can say all kinds of things about the work but its power lies, finally, in its horrible silence. And what lies behind that?
I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went up to town
and busied myself all day.
The song of Cicadetta montana
is a static hiss, with irregular
lulls, and has not been heard in Great Britain