Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn by Michael Smith
“We shared the desire to twist issues, to address them obliquely, to traffic in gray areas or in-betweeness.”
“I wanted to destroy my memory, because of some sadness in it. I’m very different from Mr. Marcel Proust, because he wants to recover the past, but the past cannot be recovered.”
“Cathedrals just seemed like big power chords to me. Or the biggest Marshall Stack you’ve ever seen. That’s what they were built for. They’re reverb units.”
“So few people understand what melodrama is. It’s not real life exaggerated, as so many people feel. It’s not the truth exaggerated. Exaggerating the truth would deform it, make the art dishonest. Really good melodrama is the truth uninhibited.”
In 1976 I had been making photographs for a couple of years. I had certainly been looking at a lot more photographs than I had actually made.
“Will it be a show if there is no script? If we just stand there in front of a curtain? If we open the curtain, is it then a show?”
In the fifth installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Frederic Tuten reads his story “The Bar On Tompkins Square Park,” originally published in BOMB 108’s literary supplement, First Proof.
This First Proof contains the short story “Wayward Sleep.”
This First Proof contains the poem “Wandermoment.”
This First Proof contains the an excerpt from the novel This Is The House That Horse Built.
It’s tough being a bohemian these days.
This First Proof captures the collaboration between Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe with text and paintings respectively.
Michael Combs by Rob Fischer
Michael Combs’s sculptures mix the Waspiness of traditional animal mounts with the taboo fetish sexuality of carved wooden birds wearing leather masks, emerging from leather strap-ons, and draped—flaccid—over Winchester gun stocks.
Dan Wolgers is in his third decade of delivering snapshots of the improbable, a kind of shock therapy, to his native Sweden.
Fellow artist Adam Pendleton discusses Xaviera Simmons composed and staged, yet disquieting, images.
BOMB Specific by Carrie Moyer
For the past several years, I have been looking for forms that are nearly representational, that hover somewhere between abstraction and figuration, and generate the preliterate force of the Venus of Willendorf.
Metz explores the public work and solitary life of Dan Graham.
Trevor Paglen’s Blank Spots on the Map by Nick Stillman
Ten years ago, during my first ever trip to Long Island, I was arrested in Montauk for federal trespassing.
The notion of secret identity is celebrated cross-culturally; worldwide, the entertainment and service industries exploit its implicit escapism, that very human urge to live out something beyond the ordinary, out of the grasp of the everyday.
Having just celebrated its eighth incarnation last April and May, Chicago’s Version Fest is a 10-day mash-up of curatorial projects, public interventions, musical events, and academic forums.
It’s tough being a bohemian these days.
The era is largely the 1960s—the Beats and New York School are active and on both coasts, poets and filmmakers are meeting in productive, transformative ways. In We Saw the Light, Daniel Kane distills these relations, referencing letters, social networks, historical group formations, and interactions between these men (and they are usually men)—whether as audience, scriptwriter, actor, collaborator, or even “houseboy.”
What does it mean to paint your name someplace you’ve been—a heavily trafficked location or a highly visible object, like a train, that perpetually traverses an entire city?
Working for Isamu Noguchi in the 1980s, Bobbie Oliver saw the time this artist took to study a stone before altering it in any way.
Brenda Wineapple, author of the new Emily Dickinson biography White Heat, recently spoke on “nudging narrative,” the massive effort needed to create a “biological narrative” out of the messy stuff of life.
The Sun City Girls were two brothers from Michigan and their friend Charles.
Who’d have guessed that Phillip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag would turn out to be a characteristically Lopatian occasion, a golden opportunity for his signature marriage of eagle-eyed erudition and vernacular ruminations and asides?
Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) writes prose like a poet, indeed he is one, with his rock-hard choice of words styled into deceptively simple sentences.
When a child is raised according to political doctrine, political decisions and personal habits become one and the same.
Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s seventh novel and it is as close to perfect as a novel can get.
The 96-page pilot volume of The New Anonymous identifies its stark black-and-white self as an “annual literary journal that not only publishes all work anonymously but also blindly screens and edits its submissions, ie, the entire publishing process is anonymous from beginning to end.