Paula Fox by Lynne Tillman
“I don’t think in advance about psychology, because then I’d be a psychologist.”
I agree with the French. “Tacita Dean. Formidable!” She is an overpowering force and I cower before her in admiration.
We generally expect our artists to be more interesting people than those from other walks of life, and we reward them for their special abilities to help the rest of us find complexity of meaning, beauty and even grandeur in the world around us.
Dissection and dismemberment abound in Dana Schutz’s work, all offset by sunny colors and a pert sense of humor.
Adam writes like nobody else, his fierce poetic power as inescapable as the doom that waits for his characters. The work is bleak and true, his touch that of a master in the making.
I learned early to differentiate art from politics. But the best Israeli films are inseparable from the political forces that shape them.
The first time I saw Antony perform was November 1992; he was onstage at a downtown club with Johanna Constantine and Poison Eve, two other original members of the Blacklips Performance Cult.
Sensini by Roberto Bolaño
The way in which my friendship with Sensini developed was somewhat unusual.
When Abigail told me she wanted to break up, I was in shock.
It was the dry season in the Cordillera. At this time of year the Falls of Tequendama broke into mere threads of water, but rain had fallen over the savanna late in the afternoon the day before, a sudden, violent pelting of heavy raindrops, and today the Bogotá River was swollen, furious
Late afternoon the bus returned to the Trachis Inn. Ana Gathreaux entered the main house feeling worse than she had in days.
Brian Wood by James Casebere
James Casebere on the mesmerizing, indefinable anatomical forms found in the drawings and paintings of Brian Wood.
James Welling on the photographs of Louise Lawler and how photography is “a medium without grammar.”
Amanda Means on how Corban Walker’s intricate prints celebrate both the human mind and the technique of the machine.
Keith Mayerson on how Randy Wray’s paintings and sculptures channel a Southern gothic sensibility through a 21st-century surrealist technique. Mayerson is currently showing work at Derek Eller Gallery.
David Salle on how Kate Manheim’s work as an actor informs the creation of her rich, kaleidoscopic abstracts.
Jesal Kapadia by Jennifer Liese
Invisible Maps: a history of doing—puzzling and promising (to what territories would an invisible map orient us, anyway?), unassuming and all-encompassing (a whole history of the very act of doing? in lowercase?)—is a working title worthy of Jesal Kapadia’s fairly epic video-in-progress, two years in the making and poised to put the Mumbai-born, New York-based artist herself squarely, and visibly, on the map.
All I can remember about Bombay was everything seemed to be out of control.
This recently published box set of three books represents a comprehensive view of Lewis Baltz’s photography of the late ’70s, when he was identified with the influential photography movement New Topography.
Despite a flurry of awards and publications, Charles D’Ambrosio has remained under the radar.
This First Proof contains an excerpt from “The Chinese Sun.” Translated by Evgeny Pavlov.
When I read Alicia Erian’s remarkable first novel, Towelhead, I thought of the romanticized image from the film American Beauty: the teenage girl surrounded by rose petals. Ironically, that girl, a protagonist and the object of Kevin Spacey’s lust, was the least-known character in the film.
“Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them.”
The photographs in Adam Bartos’s Boulevard, taken in Paris and Los Angeles, document places that are at once ubiquitous and hidden.
Dada and Surrealism may have been centered in Paris, Berlin, and Zurich, but Dada, Pansaers et Correspondance (1917–1926), the first volume of an audio anthology of the avant-garde in 20th-century Belgium, documents contemporaneous creative activities.
Sometimes you see a thing done so thoroughly, pristinely, and with utter care, you wonder why anyone else would attempt anything similar—ever. Such is the case with the obsessively crafted CD reissue projects of Atlanta, Georgia’s Dust-to-Digital, whose Grammy-nominated gospel music overview, Goodbye Babylon, fit five unerringly-curated discs inside a pine box packed with cotton and a hymnal-sized book.
Cinema didn’t start with stories. It was hijacked by them. The journey from Lumière to Griffith was over before it began.
With the release this spring of Lady Vengeance, a kidnapping tale rendered in grim, minimalist tones and featuring seat-squirming violence, Korean director Park Chanwook ties up his methodically and ambitiously conceived revenge trilogy (with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 2001, and Oldboy, 2003).
James Welling on the photographs of Louise Lawler and how photography is “a medium without grammar.”
