Affinities

AffinitiesOn Art and FascinationBRIAN DILLON New York Review Books New York This is a New York Review Bookpublished by The New York Review of Books435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014www.nyrb.comCopyright © 2023 by Brian DillonAll rights reserved.Cover art: Allison Katz, Cabbage (and Philip) No. 21, 2020; © Allison KatzCover design: Katy HomansLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Dillon, Brian, 1969– author.Title: Affinities / by Brian Dillon.Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2023] Identifiers: LCCN 2022021682 (print) | LCCN 2022021683 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681377261 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681377278 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Artists—Psychology. | Communication in art. Classification: LCC NX165.D55 2023 (print) | LCC NX165 (ebook) | DDC 701/.15 —dc23/eng/20220718LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021682LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021683ISBN 978-168137-727-8v1.1For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com For Emily LaBarge “These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.”—ANNIE DILLARD, “Seeing” (1974)“One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities.”—JOAN DIDION, “New Museum in Mexico” (1965) ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyright and More InformationDedicationEpigraphEssay on Affinity IWhat Pitiful Bungling Scribbles and Scrawls (Robert Hooke)Third Person (Louis Daguerre)Resolving (Thomas De Quincey)Essay on Affinity IIVaguenesses ( Julia Margaret Cameron)Essay on Affinity IIIA Bright Stellate Object, a Small Angled Sphere (On Migraine Auras)Essay on Affinity IVBeautiful Scenic Effects Are Produced (Loie Fuller)Dada Serious (Hannah Höch)Discordia Concors (Aby Warburg)Preposterous Anthropomorphism ( Jean Painlevé)Essay on Affinity VL’autre Moi (Claude Cahun)Voracious Oddity (Dora Maar)On Not Getting the Credit (Eileen Gray)The Leaves of the Rhododendrons Did Not Stir (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)Life Is Good (William Klein)Essay on Affinity VISufficient Contortion (Diane Arbus)Star Time (Kikuji Kawada)Four Stars (Andy Warhol)Shinning Up a Doorframe (Francesca Woodman)A Mirror’d Be Better (William Eggleston)Miraculous! (Samuel Beckett)Essay on Affinity VIICosmic View (Charles and Ray Eames)There Are Eyes Everywhere (Helen Levitt)Common Martyrs (G. F. Watts, Susan Hiller)A Twitch Upon the Thread (On Brideshead Revisited)Essay on Affinity VIIIThe CharismaticsFor the Simple Reason IsPainting the Clouds (Dennis Potter)Essay on Affinity IXWhat a Carve Up ( John Stezaker)La Prisonnière (Tacita Dean)They Are All Gone into the World of Light (Rinko Kawauchi)Essay on Affinity XIllustrationsReadingsAcknowledgmentsBiographical Note Essay on Affinity II FOUND MYSELF frequently using the word affinity, and wondered what I meant by it. An attraction, for sure—to certain works of art or literature, to fragments or details, moods or atmospheres inside of them. To a sentence, for instance, or an essay, but just as easily to an impression diffusing in the mind that could not be traced back to source. A fascination with this or that artist, writer, musician, filmmaker, designer. With a body or a body of work. Fascination—already finding words with which affinity has affinities—as something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions. But also: the way things, images and ideas sidled up to each other, seemed to seduce one another, in ways I could not (or did not want to) explain. So that when I wrote affinity in a piece of critical prose, perhaps I was trying to point elsewhere, to a realm of the unthought, unthinkable, something unkillable by attitudes or arguments. Not a question of beauty or quality or taste, other eternal aesthetic values. Something fleeting in fact—affinities don’t all, or always, last. In the end, and for reasons above as well as others to come, something a little bit stupid.I’d been writing about images for about twenty years, finding affinities rather than deploying any kind of expertise, because I’m no art historian. Still, it had felt like an education, a second training in the image, after my first in the word. For a long time I had been saying or writing affinity, but also dreaming, never exactly conceiving, a way of thinking about art, about objects and images, that belonged to artists, including the contemporary artists whose studios I might visit and find myself staring at pictures (not their own) they had stuck to the wall, books and artefacts on their shelves. I had thought in passing about how these, or the smartphone photographs and notes-app reading lists the artist sent me afterwards—how they sat alongside each other in more or less oblique relations and then, when I came to write up my encounter with the work, would not easily translate into the language of influence, subject matter, research. (Would not do so, that is, if the art was of any worth; sometimes everything explained itself too well.) How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities.During the first pandemic lockdown of 2020, I imagined I might spend time in shut-in contemplation of many images and artworks (in books and catalogues or online) I had either written about already or long hoped to write about. Sometimes I drifted about staring at my bookshelves or handling the piles of books that gather around any writing project, no matter how small. What was I looking for? Free-floating reflection, liberated from the need for argument or judgement (or deadlines), somehow therefore more intimate, more attuned to its object. I thought I might stare at certain pictures—mostly photographs—and they would go to work on me, leach into soul or sensibility. I fancied I could memorize these images like poems. (As if I had ever in my life successfully memorized a poem, no matter how I loved it.) An idiotic project: naive, impossible, disingenuous in disavowal of knowledge, judgement, the privilege of planning such a monkish task before page or screen, while the world went to hell. But idiotic too in the original sense of an uncultured, uncivil, private urge. Was it quite so stupid to want to dodge at this moment the public and professional, try to refind a mode of dumb fascination? Could you make out of this a habit—or even a book?The volume you hold in your hands is not that book—the book of pure