With fellow filmmaker Fitzgibbon, Rivers discussed recreating utopian visions. A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness, made in collaboration with Ben Russell, is a three-part meditation on the possibility of making those visions real.

Paulo Bruscky came of age as an artist during the military takeover of Brazil in the 1960s and ’70s. In his native Recife, he developed a body of work for the dissemination of messages—through mail art, newspaper ads, flyers, and public interventions.

Vitiello and Roden are often mistaken for each other. It might have something to do with their early interest in punk, Cage’s influence on their work, and their sound-based collaborations.

“We face the book when reading. We do not read out of the corner of our eyes; to read is to turn the body toward the letter.”

Paul Bowles took Rey Rosa under his wing while he lived in Morocco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Like his mentor’s, Rey Rosa’s prose is equally at home with acts of violence and with beauty. Rey Rosa discusses his native Guatemala’s legacy of fear.

Amy Sillman, Steve Roden & Stephen Vitellio, Ben Rivers, Julia Holter, My Barbarian, Paulo Bruscky, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Goncalo M. Tavares, Florian Hecker, Simon Lee, Charles North, Juan Villoro, Susan Friedland …

Brecht’s estrangement, Artaud’s ritual theatre, Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, and camp inform My Barbarian’s performance work: an investigation of what constitutes transformative cultural practice.

I first spotted Sarah with Joseph Kosuth at a party somewhere in SoHo soon after arriving in New York in 1975.

Carl rarely makes “paintings,” though he started as a painter and is among a group of Guyanese visual artists who, since the ’80s, have gained international reputations. 

On the evening of June 9, 1956, a group of men gathered in a basement apartment in Buenos Aires to listen to the broadcast of a boxing match.

As someone who regularly buys unknown books because of their curious and enticing covers, the first thing I noticed about this publication is that it lacks an image.

Susan Richmond’s new book about Lynda Benglis, Beyond Process, examines the work and critical reception of the artist, who moved from Louisiana to New York in 1964. It is not an exhaustive assessment, but in 150 citation-packed pages, Richmond thoughtfully examines the artist’s motives and methods during the past five decades.

I will boldly let the Gertrude Stein in me (there is one in all of us) describe the scene she invariably has her back turned to: two women are two women are mother and daughter and nearly bare there is a nice thing to say then that this “is only the appearance of difference.”

Spain, summer, 1936. A trainload of passengers en route to Barcelona is halted by a general strike and the subsequent outbreak of war. The train becomes a space of activism, its travelers now an international collective.

One hundred years after its first and only enactment, Victory Over the Sun has re-emerged.

Submerged in the aging face lives the infant gaze, curiosity accompanying the always soft skin, which is even softer, more luxurious in our glistening elder years, laughter, sadness, 

I first became aware of Florian Hecker’s sound work through his CD Acid in the Style of David Tudor. 

FEEL BETTER: The exhortation, wish, or command, chiseled in “stone” calls to me in huge upholstered capital letters from what looks like a black vertical gravestone in relief hung as a tapestry on the wall.

There is a tone I want, but I don’t know how to get it. 

Translated from the Spanish by Kimberly Traube

for David Watson

She bored me terribly, but she seemed to fascinate my father.

Ten Ways to Mourn a Dead Language

1. Intersperse words from the dead language into your speech. When asked the meaning of the dead words say, I never said that.

A Tour of the Horizon

What fault did the sky contain
at ease in its stench of broken colors

As Kings Wharf remained congested with packets off-loading the first class—and the morning slipping away fast—Papee made arrangements with a fisherman, hailed over to the side of the Rosalind, to row us ashore in his small pirogue.

Simon Lee’s MOTHER IS PASSING.COME AT ONCE pairs layered collage with micro-narratives.