Lucy Raven

“The traditional economies of film are a little more transparent, right? Like at the movie theater, you buy a ticket, and you have a sense of the way film production happens. But that whole apparatus is invisible in an art context.”

Radical Light recounts the sprawling stories and diverse trajectories of Bay Area avant-garde artists, who formed an experimental cultural landscape through film and video.

A brand new mother unsentimentally nudges her crying newborn toward her breast just after giving birth.

Hiding at the end of Vertov from Z to A, the thought-provoking new title co-edited by the filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn, is the book’s “Forward!” It not only introduces the premise—an investigation of a single frame of Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Cameraby a wide-ranging group of artists, writers, and filmmakers—but also acts as the project’s manifesto.

“Border crossing from a sort of artisan industry dominated by small entrepreneurs—coyotes—into an increasingly large-scale industry integrated and controlled by the super-violent narco cartels.”

In his new collection of critical essays, writer Alan Gilbert leads a probing, borderless investigation into countless contemporary moments in aesthetics that recognize, inhabit, resist, essentially interact with the realm of the social.

The 1966 evening William Christenberry borrowed a 35mm camera from his friend William Eggleston was warm enough for Christenberry to keep his jacket open.

Lucy Raven on how the mythology of underground guerrilla groups and the American frontier inspire the drawings and paintings of Adam Helms.

As the American occupation of Iraq drags on despite recycled timelines and White House reassurances, the timing of this show (which opened on the day of the Madrid bombings) felt unsettlingly right.

On a recent trip to Cuba I visited the studio of photographer and filmmaker Juan Carlos Alom in the small beach village of Cojimar, outside Havana.
Neatly bound in blue, Kenneth Goldsmith’s third book, Day, comprises every letter, number and symbol printed in the September 1, 2000 edition of the New York Times, laboriously retyped by the author to a length of 836 pages.

Lucy Raven compares filmmaker Jem Cohen’s Chain—and the excerpted cut Chain Times Three shown at MoMA—to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as a cataloguing of an urban cultural moment.

Pulseprogramming’s fourth album is not just an audio experience: listeners also get to view video art designed for a live performance of “Don’t Swell Up Your Glass Pocket” and construct their own model farmhouse from the liner notes.