I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
—
Li Young Lee
John Morris by Adam Fuss
- Marc Ribot by David Krasnow
- Janine Antoni by Stuart Horodner
- Yayoi Kusama by Grady T. Turner
- Gary Sinise by Scott Elliott
- Thomas Vinterberg by Maria Mackinney
- Simon Ortiz and Petuuche Gilbert by Daniel Flores y Ascencio
- Jenny Diski by Frederic Tuten
- Michael Cunningham by Justin Spring
- Simon Winchester by Patrick McGrath
Interviews
- Janet Zweig by Amanda Means
- John Morris by Adam Fuss
Artists on Artists
- All Sweet Things by Anne Livet
- Two Poems by Deborah Gorlin
- Geographies of Home by Loida Maritza Peréz
- Two Poems by Mark Sullivan
- Susie, Kiki, Annie by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
- pops by Victor D. LaValle
- Heart of the Animal by William Tester
First Proof
- Larry Clark by David Schulz
- Cream by Calivn Reid
- David Ryan’s Crossings by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
- Amnesia by Bruce Bauman
- Bill Evans by Glenn O'Brien
- Robert Earl Keen by Gary Fisketjon
- Angela Carter’s Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings by Minna Proctor
- Ellen Douglas’s Truth: Stories I am Finally Old Enough to Tell by Betsy Sussler
- The Federal Writer’s Project’s Remembering Slavery by Suzan Sheman
- Henri Cole’s The Visible Man by Thomas Bolt
- Leon Wieseltier by Scott Smith
- John McNaughton’s Condo Painting by Rone Shavers
- Irene Worth and Peter Eyre’s Chère Maître: The Flaubert-Sand Correspondence by Betsy Sussler
- Walter Salles’s Central Station by Jenifer Berman
- De La Guarda: Villa Villa by Darrell Larson
- Ardele Lister’s Conditional Love by Allen Frame
Editor's Choice
John Morris, Untitled, 1993−1997, ink on watercolor paper, 10¼ × 7⅛ inches. All images courtesy D’Amelio Terras.
The art historian Carl Schusler’s vast archives document the decoding of patterns originating in the culture of the Paleolithic. Painted, scratched, woven, carved, and tattooed, these patterns represent statements of kinship and illustrations of genealogical history connecting the wearer or maker to ancestors (thus providing identity) and ultimately to the great genetic chain of being.
They survived over thousands of years, across all continents and in many cases outlived the cultures that preserved them, pattern as an unconscious language, whose origins and meanings were long forgotten. It was somehow preserved in custom and tradition.
The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter describes art as a great echo chamber reverberating with ancient images—these are the rooms in Queens, New York where a man is intensely focused in intuitive search, fascinated by patterns and systems. Are these drawings contemporary tartans and heraldic symbols commemorating corporate identities headed by ancestral beings wearing the transparent masks of CEOs? I believe so.
—Adam Fuss
John Morris, Bob Noyce Tribute, (Bob Noyce is an Intel executive), 1998, wax crayon and ink on paper, 10¼ × 7 inches.
John Morris, Untitled, 1997, wax crayon, ink, graphite on paper, 10¼ × 14⅛ inches.
Related
For the past five years, artist Margaret Ross Tolbert has been traveling to southern Turkey to the site of ancient Lycia, an autochthonous culture with roots in the Bronze Age, later Hellenized, and eventually controlled by the Romans.
“I’m fighting between control and letting nature take its course.”
Originally published in
BOMB 66,
Winter 1999
Featuring interviews with Janine Antoni, Yayoi Kusama, Jenny Diski, Michael Cunningham, Simon Ortiz, Petuuche Gilbert, Simon Winchester, Gary Sinise, Thomas Vinterberg, and Marc Ribot.
