The New Yorker, 2007-05-21

[fiefoe]

"Walking the Wall" / Peter Hessler

• .. fifty-eight _zhang and five _cun long... The bureaucratic precision of the inscription, in this forgotten place, seems as lonely as words can be.
• In the mountains he wore a red-checked wool hunting shirt, a flopy white Tilley safari hat, high-end La Sportia mountaineering boots, and large elk-leather gloves designed for utility-line workers by J. Edwards of Chicago.
• "David tends to remember days in relation to his wall hikes."
• He called this "hiking like a Mongol," and I hated it. I hated the thorns, and I hated the bad footing. I hated how my clothes got torn, and I hated the superiority of Spindler's bizarre wall regalia. I hated how branches that were chest-high for him hit me in the face. Mostly, I hated the Mongols for hiking this way.

"Ordinary People" / Peter Schjeldahl

• In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar.
• A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust...
• Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian... Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.
• Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive.
• For me, the dancing pull cord of the shade is one of the choicest details in art history, as an objective correlative, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, of “memory and desire.”

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