Uncharted waters: The West, as Declan Rexer argues in The Harper Review’s latest essay, was won by water. Harnessing the power of the Colorado River, Western states transformed themselves from deserts into capitalist dreamscapes, tamed and conquered by guns and steel as much as by dams and reservoirs. Throughout the twentieth century, the affluence, agriculture, and aspirations that fortified the American middle class and its dream were tied to the West’s greatest natural asset—and now, its most dire undoing. As undiminished water consumption strains one of America’s key water sources, the future of the Colorado river and its dependent states is grim. “How then,” Rexer wonders, “will the land of fantasy itself confront its sobering new reality?” Water levels will only plummet further and the West needs “yet another miracle.” And so, the decadent and secular West finds itself returned to a scarcity mindset, holding out hope and praying for rain.
Brady Santoro, senior editor
Concept and performance: Until February 22, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art is showing a 200-piece retrospective on Yoko Ono. You may know Ono as John Lennon’s longtime partner, but what you may not know are her contributions to the rich history of performance art in the 1960s avant-garde. Through ritualistic, oft-exploitative forms, Ono’s art experiments with ways of reaffirming the self and body. The event score to her 1964 Cut Piece, for instance, instructs the performer to sit motionless onstage as audience members cut off pieces of their clothing. The ambiguity of a debasing, renewing experience shared with the audience creates a sense of collectivity. In her music, too, she forms group identities through individual transformations—in “Have You Seen a Horizon Lately,” she sings, “If you have, watch it for a while / For you never know / it may not last so long.”
The MCA foregrounds Ono’s provocation for self-exploration and world peace through participatory art. Ritual rhythms beat across her body of work: Beat Piece (1963), part of her Instruction Paintings series, directs viewers to “listen to a heart beat”; Wish Trees (1966–present) bids participants write their wishes and hang them on a growing tree; Add Color (Refugee Boat) (1960–present) encourages visitors to draw on the walls. Integrating her music and films throughout the exhibit, including the banned Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966–67), the MCA makes it truly immersive. For interested Illinois residents, Yoko Ono: Music Of the Mind is free to visit every Tuesday evening until 9 p.m.
Jacqueline Oury, contributing editor
A “perfect” novel: Over winter break, a high school friend recommended I read Stoner by John Williams. I had never heard of it, and upon looking it up I found out that it was not merely a great novel—it is, in some circles, considered perfect, “so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away.” What, then, makes this book so remarkable?
William Stoner is a decidedly unremarkable man. That’s not just my judgement, but that of the people around him. Williams writes, on Stoner’s first page, that a student who hears his name “seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question.” His colleagues “speak of him rarely.”
The only distinguishing thing about William Stoner is that he loses things. Marriage. Family. Love. Students. Everything that Stoner gets, he seems to lose without recourse. He loses swiftly, he loses painfully; most importantly, he loses needlessly and often, unfairly. His wife pulls his daughter away from him. His colleague holds a grudge against him for refusing to pass an incompetent student. His late-in-life affair with Katherine falls apart.
The novel, a biography of Stoner, inevitably ends with his death. His story should be sad, depressing, nihilistic. It’s about a man who was only fleetingly happy and never really successful. Yet Williams believes otherwise. In an interview with Bryan Wooley in Williams’ Denver Quarterly, he describes Stoner as “a real hero” who had a “very good life.”
Really, John? You gave Stoner a callous wife, a distant daughter, dead parents, dickhead colleagues, and a doomed affair. How is this a “very good life”? How the hell is he a “real hero”? Continue reading here.
Charlie Phelan, assistant editor
Image: Julius von Leypold, Wanderer in the Storm, oil on canvas, 1835 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).