“You could say that Arte Útil is anti-capitalist, because it is placed within another social ecology and is produced for another social class. It doesn’t belong in a society of heroes or saints; it is a practice for a society of the commons.”

“I like flirting with disaster. I like terms that are open and provocative and unusual and evocative and we don’t know where things will be going next.”

“I begin listening and recognizing silence, meditating until I hear the blood circulating, and then start following the beats, making marks, one by one, line by line, emptying myself until the entire surface of the canvas is covered.”

Navigating the concentric interiors of the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, the building unfolds along a serpentine walkway. Through the museum’s glass walls, the view opens uninterrupted. 

“One is constantly working over what happened and constructing the future based on the past. So there’s no way of saying now we’re done with the past and it’s time to look for our future. No, there’s a direct continuity between these things.”

A fear of alienating myself from approval by revealing my truest self … a fear of not being heard, being judged, being misunderstood … These things make me tremble.

“So I had this idea to get an anesthesiologist to knock me out during an art fair, and I could just lie there, well dressed, as if I were out looking at art in this center of commerce, but having totally checked out.”

The woman is in Iowa now, I hear. She moved there with her husband shortly after, and now she sees.

The reflection between an event in time and the memory of that event: “something shimmers like a heat wave between them.” 

The day after the gallery visit, I awoke with a lingering headache, alarmed by the sound of the phone. 

LOTHIAN

it was a great rush
to confront solidity

Brian got up early that Saturday to do his laundry then tracked down a friend who owed him ten dollars and scored some crystal meth in the process. 

CAUGHT

He spears me like a fish
on the spoke of pleasure,

In P__, we had a huge yellow kitchen. A garden. 

Chan is not an artist who also writes; he’s an artist and a writer.

With the landmark publication of De humani corporis fabrica in 1543, Vesalius may have forever linked human anatomy, at least pictorially, with the aesthetics of the sixteenth-century woodcut—its perfect draftsmanship, edifying gore, and rather ham-handed theatricality. 

When I began to read Andrew Lampert’s introduction to The George Kuchar Reader, the anxieties, fears, and dim career outlook I have often experienced, eased.

While the now-accepted wisdom is that Bertolt Brecht was one of the major dramatists of the past century, this same acceptance often tends to obscure the most unique aspect of his work, namely: his struggle through the decades to find new ways to present his deep political and social commitment—not just in his subject matter, but, equally, in the formal strategies of his distinctive theatrical form.

We are not all Pierre Guyotat, writing of our capture and interrogation in Algerian solitary in 1962, our words and acts subject to violent retaliation, but maybe we’ve seen our own soul’s bifurcation.

Dedicated to poet, journalist, and activist Brad Will, a friend killed while filming a street battle in Mexico in 2006, Brenda Coultas’s The Tatters summons powers too seldom called upon these days.

Pythagoras taught behind a veil to avoid distracting his students with his bodily appearance, which he considered an impediment to their pursuit of pure knowledge. His voice was an acousmatic one—its origin could not be identified.

Christine Wertheim’s recently released book mUtter-bAbel is gorgeously hyperbolic, a primordial pataphysics of text and drawings that explores relationships between babies, mothers, language, and “ugly archaic feelings and their troubling social effects.”

It’s hard to pin down exactly what happens with Lost Portraits, an almost mythical series of Super 8 and 16mm shorts—filmed between 1982–85 in Mexico City and New York—depicting Nicolayevsky’s young friends and peers while he was a film student at NYU.