Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - Posts
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As the latest Harry Potter movie comes rumbling into theaters tomorrow, I wonder: What major best-selling book has Hollywood somehow not adapted? Let's go to the Internet for a debatable list of best-selling books. The first five are the Bible, Quotations from Chairman Mao, the Quran, Xinhua Zidian (a Chinese dictionary), and the Book of Mormon. (I, for one, would love to see the Book of Mormon adapted by Steven Soderbergh and starring Brad Pitt as the prophet Moroni.) J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone lands at No. 6 with 107 million copies sold. Next is Agatha Christie's, And Then There Were None (multiple adaptations, including two TV shows under its original, scandalous title), then Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, then another Potter, then The Da Vinci Code, then yet another Potter.
The 12th book on the list is The Catcher in the Rye, with claims of 60 million copies sold. The latest rumor, circa 2006, had Terence Malick working on an adaptation. But even if a Catcher movie were somehow allowed to be made, today's teens may not care. Jennifer Schuessler wrote a great piece recently in the New York Times about how many of them don't like the book. On the list of best-sellers, Catcher is followed by three more Potters, Ben Hur, Heidi (adapted into a beloved Shirley Temple movie), The Alchemist, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, The Little Prince, and, at 21, The Mark of Zorro. Of these, only The Alchemist and Dr. Spock have yet to be filmed, though Harvey Weinstein is developing the former, and if Blink can be adapted into a thriller, surely a screenwriter can get a decent romcom out of Spock's manual.
The end of the list invites a further question: What classic book should be adapted but has not been? The Faerie Queene anyone?
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Though art in the past century has often sought to lay bare its own production—displaying the artists' inspirations and ephemera, making the circumstances of creation part of the work, parodying the commercial infrastructure of the industry—one subject that has largely been avoided is the complex, sometimes fraught, relationship between an artist and his gallery. A new exhibition at Brooklyn's Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery is trying to expose this symbiosis by making the show's planning process—e-mails, sketches, drafts—a part of its display. The exhibition's organizers have also archived the whole project (and thrown it open for discussion) on the Internet.
In May, Dam, Stuhltrager selected two young artists that it wanted to promote. One subsequently dropped out; the remaining artist, twentysomething Jerry Blackman, spent the next weeks preparing for a show under the gallery's aegis. The e-mail that he and the gallery's staff exchanged during this period—a fascinating chain of aesthetic discussion, logistic back-and-forth, and passive-aggressive notes—now hangs on the far wall of the gallery, opposite Blackman's central work, "Anchor (gradient)," a three-dimensional cutout that plays with the difference between icon and representation.
This is hardly the first time business and logistics have been unveiled together with the work—Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been blazing paper trails for decades. But the risks of such an undertaking in a small gallery space are particularly steep. For one thing, there's the danger of a reality-TV-type Heisenberg effect: How illuminating is this correspondence, really, if some of it was written knowing it would be displayed? (Gallery owner Leah Stuhltrager, for what it's worth, pooh-poohed the possibility that such self-consciousness influenced any of the e-mails.) There's also a risk that all this emphasis on process distracts from the work itself—a threat that Blackman, understandably, seemed quite aware of. When I asked him about the wall of e-mail printouts, he promptly redirected my attention to his working sketches for the anchor. The printouts, he said, were chiefly the gallery's project. Meanwhile, Stuhltrager told me the e-mail display had been Blackman's idea. The crossed wires seemed to say as much about the artist-gallery relationship as anything hung on the wall.
Photo of Jerry Blackman sculpture, courtesy of Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery