Desire

With her latest book, The Freezer Door, Sycamore breaks down language and genre to confront intimacy, the politics of gay bars, and to find the communities we desire.

In this excerpt from her interview in BOMB’s winter 2021 issue, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore discusses activism, gay bars, and her forthcoming book, The Freezer Door.

Two artists recast the iconography of consumerism—one into tradition-bending Kuwaiti dowry chests and the other into sculptures evoking raw flesh.

From personal ads compiled as narrative to a frame-by-frame retelling of a short film on grazing sheep, Nao’s poems and stories are acrobatic experiments in form.

Two artists manifest, claim, and demand space in a society that operates around violence against black women’s bodies while pretending that they don’t exist.
If the experimental French writing group Oulipo were to be reborn today, would they return as performance artists? Anne Garréta’s 2002 Prix Médicis–winning novel, Not One Day, marks her as a literary acrobat suspended between those who hold on to the group’s relevance and those who have let it go in favor of conceptual art practices.

Homebody, the title of Mike Goodlett’s first New York solo exhibition, playfully refers to his life of relative seclusion in rural Kentucky.

Lyle Ashton Harris’s work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic.
Woodchuck was wandering on a path through woods one day when his leg caught in some vines.

Weinstein elaborates on the sources behind his animated videos with Simmons, with whom he has previously collaborated. These range from telemarketing, Brecht, entertainment, and what Weinstein calls the “national pastime” of self-absorption.
Terence Gower’s latest video, New Utopias, is a lecture filmed in the style of a 1950s Walt Disney documentary.

Some images in life and art remain seared in one’s memory because of their sublime effect and power. Such images are found and masterfully constructed in the films of Cauleen Smith.
This First Proof contains the story “Theta” by Carolina Lozada, translated by Katherine Silver.