John Yau and Albert Mobilio select a few choice titles from the past year.
Author Archives: Albert Mobilio
Albert Mobilio is a poet, critic, and co-editor of Hyperallergic Weekend. He is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, MacDowell Fellowship, Whiting Award, and the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Hambone, Open City, and Tin House. Books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, Touch Wood, and most recently Same Faces. Games and Stunts, a book of fiction, was published in 2017 by Black Square Editions. He is an associate professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and a former editor at Bookforum.
This Be the Verse 2019
John Yau and Albert Mobilio select a few of their favorite poetry books from the past year.
One Woman, 100 Men, and 100 Arguments
This 24-hour performance resembled a social psych experiment designed to test our patience and desire for change.
Garry Winogrand in Living Color
If the nostalgic atmosphere of the photographer’s black-and-white images threatens to obscure his compositional acuity these Kodachrome slides dispel it handily.
In Transit: Willem van Genk’s Cardboard Trolleys
The first United States exhibition of Dutch artist Willem van Genk’s work at the American Folk Art Museum offers a comic counterpoint to the recent Futurist show at the Guggenheim.
A Zoom with a View: Tullio Crali’s Death Loop
The affection, if not outright idolatry, the Futurists held for machines and speed initially focused on automobiles and locomotives, but in the early 1930s artists like Tullio Crali, Gerardo Dottori, Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), and Giacomo Balla turned their attentions skyward to produce glorifying images of planes.
Eternal Recurrence: George Widener’s Time Pieces
You will be relaxing on June 30th in 2030: The guess is based on information provided by George Widener’s mixed media piece “A Month of Sundays” currently on display at Ricco/Maresca as part of the show Time Lapse.
Memories Are Made of This: Tom Duncan’s Constructed Past
If the so-called “greatest generation,” those that fought in World War II, have mostly passed on, their children, the pre-boomers born just before and during that conflict are still around.
Single Point Perspective: Dead Man Rising
Viewing the WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY show currently at the Brooklyn Museum offers a test of emotional restraint as well as the inclination to aestheticize. If the number of images is daunting, the sum of human pain on display registers as a body blow.
Self-Portraits in a Complex Mirror: The Photographs of Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier spent some forty years working as a nanny in Chicago. When she died in 2009 at the age of eighty-three, she left behind well over a hundred thousand photographic negatives, evidence of decades spent wandering the streets of her hometown, as well as others cities and locales around the world.
Flow Charts: Edward Burtynsky’s Photos of the World’s Watery Parts
It’s well known that landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky thinks big — big subjects, big photographs. His large-format prints (dimensions up to 48 x 64 inches are not uncommon) match the physical scope of the oil industry, quarries, and ship breaking, as well as their thematic implications.
Star Search: Heaven’s Map for Getting Lost
“Billions and billions of stars.” Carl Sagan’s awestruck if indeterminate census of the universe became a comic catchphrase in the wake of his 1980s PBS series Cosmos. Johnny Carson would intone the line, exaggerating the astrophysicist’s sing-songish repetition of billions and we’d laugh. Not because Sagan’s estimate was so low (estimates currently put the figure at between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion), but in part because the mere idea of billions of suns and consequent solar systems like our own is a patently impossible notion to comprehend. Contemplating god (as a bearded chap on a throne or some vague organizing “force) is water off a duck compared to the mental rearrangements required by the proposition that everyone alive and who has ever lived amounts to nothing more than a mote of cosmic dust. Now that’s hilarious.