Disjecta Membra: Claude Lévi-Strauss & André Breton
Victor Cova introduces a 1941 exchange between Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton.
Some Observations on Charles Ray: Figure Ground at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2022)
Charles Ray is unquestionably one of the most powerful and challenging sculptors alive. His recent works presented at the Met carry within them a subtle and expansive understanding of space, a boundless wit and delicacy, and a deep sense of history.
Political, or Not
Cinema remains the least understood of major arts. So often film commentaries discuss mostly, or only, the plot. But to begin to understand any film, one must examine it as cinema, shot by shot, edit by edit, in terms of composition, lighting, movement, editing rhythms and juxtapositions, and more, because the way the viewer sees its depictions affects how one feels and thinks about what is shown
Disjecta Membra: Erik Satie
Personally, I associate Satie’s work with a feeling of the aridity that Nietzsche came to value over Wagnerism — the gentle sea-breeze in the highest mountains that wafts in from some strange land and tickles the senses with possibilities of spiritual freedom.
Groundwork for a Study of Maryanne Amacher
How did Amacher ultimately feel about being identified as a heroic “sound artist” instead of a hardworking composer who underwent a heroic rescue mission into the deepest undercurrents of music history?
Old News at the New Museum
It is full of work convinced that the world as we know it is doddering towards its end, but gives little consideration to the possibility that it is this old New Museum and old new media art, not the world around it, that has run its course.
The End of Avant-Garde Film
The view of art underlying the essay, and the type of film that remains my principal, though not only, model for greatness in cinema, have themselves been bypassed by much that has happened since, in particular the emphasis on the politics of an artwork, and on various aspects of the artist's identity rather than complexity of internal form.
Louise Lawler “LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK” at Metro Pictures
It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another.
Disjecta Membra: Mad Love by André Breton
As the artist, reaching deep into nothing, with nothing, and only for the sake of desire, creates something great, far beyond the imagined object of desire, fulfilling and exceeding every wish in a way which could never have been fully anticipated, so too does the lover encounter the beloved.
John Currin “Memorial” at Gagosian
They’re explicit pictures, and in a world so entirely scrubbed clean of transgression, any sense of naughtiness is its own form of pleasure. Dainty feet and hands poke out in flirty little kicks, one appendage in front of the trompe l'œil frame, the other receding behind. The effect is not unlike a peep show.
“With eyes like ripening fruit”: Manoucher Yektai at Karma
It’s not true that the world is ending — if anything, it already has. And yet life continues, alive in its death. These thoughts — speculations — give a perfunctory account of the work of the late painter and poet Manoucher Yektai, a member of the New York School whose first solo show in the city since 1984 opened at Karma two weeks ago.
The Legacy of Political Music: A Conversation with Frederic Rzewski
Jim Igor Kallenberg interviewed the late Frederic Rzewski.
Apocalyptic Vision: Poems by Ronnie Burk
He was not a literary artist in the sense that his work doesn’t seem to wrestle with questions of form; he’s not attempting to reinvent the surrealist modes at his disposal but rather making use of them as vehicles for his insurgent imagination and apocalyptic vision, the fury of which elevates his writing above and beyond the mere assemblage of irrational word combinations.
When the Critics Saw
A work of art has never graced the cover of the journal October. Since the first issue was published in 1976, the front cover has only ever carried the journal’s allusive title, spelled out in large capitalised letters underneath the smaller italicised headings of ‘art’, ‘theory’, ‘criticism’ and ‘politics’ (in that order).
The Acceptance of Loss, Part II
To read Kerouac, especially his poetry, is to listen to an already posthumous message sent from himself to himself in the void after the end of speech…
Meow Wolf: Revenge of the Artist?
When Meow Wolf’s claim to fame, House of Eternal Return, hatched in March 2016, the art world was forced to confront the monster that two decades of discourse around socially-engaged art had unwittingly created.
An Afternoon at MoMA
It’s hard to be the Museum of Modern Art when the modern has become a thing of the past and a rather suspect thing at that.
An Afternoon at the Met
But what of the museums themselves? The artworks, their placement, the hallways, the exhibits, the choreography of passing through?
Poems by Gerald Barrax
When I looked up Barrax’s collections, I found that his work spans not only relatively traditional-looking lyrics, but formally experimental poems that disarrange syntax and disperse words across the page.
Anvil and Rose 14
“I have yet to arrive / I will never arrive / in the center of everything is the poem / intact sun / inescapable night.”