Quite simply, the history, not just of art in Los Angeles, but of modern American art generally will have to be reconceived on the basis of Now Dig This!, the exhibition curated by Kellie Jones, and her new book, South of Pico.
Barry Schwabsky
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015). Imminently forthcoming is a new book of essays, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017).
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Reader’s Diary: A Poetry of Alternate Takes
Marjorie Welish’s poetry, like Thelonious Monk’s music, is a montage of moving parts in which you’d be wise to expect the unexpected.
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Reader’s Diary: A Philosopher’s Fictions
It’s kind of wonderful when pure chance leads you to a book that unexpectedly illuminates another one you’ve just read.
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Reader’s Diary: The Potential Novel of a Conceivable Algeria
The 1950s through the mid-1970s were the great era of the unreadable novel. Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma was one of the first and most remarkable of these.
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Reader’s Diary: It Was a Colorful Year
Darby English’s new book 1971 decries black nationalist demands for a unified artistic community in favor of abstraction, individualism, and personal autonomy.
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Reader’s Diary: The Monastery Door Is Open
Pierre Reverdy’s novel The Thief of Talant is not a novel at all, but a long poem or sequence with elusive narrative underpinnings.
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Reader’s Diary: The Porn of Poetry
Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton isn’t exactly pornography, but it’s a step in the right direction.
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Reader’s Diary: The Importance of Being a Simile
Although the poetry in Geoffrey Nutter’s Cities at Dawn is almost always calmly descriptive, whatever it describes is somehow something else and not itself.
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Reader’s Diary: David Graeber’s ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’
It’s no wonder that few things inspire as much persistent paranoia as banking. But a little paranoia might not be such a bad thing.
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Reader’s Diary: John Mullan’s ‘Anonymity’
In case you were wondering, no, it was not by oversight that I didn’t bother to mention, when writing last week about Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, the recent brouhaha about the violation of Ferrante’s privacy.
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Reader’s Diary: Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lost Daughter’
What distinguishes the novella from the novel is not length, but the pursuit of intensity rather than breadth. A novella is devastating or it is nothing.
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Reader’s Diary: ‘Bresson on Bresson’
Before starting to make films, Robert Bresson had been a painter. Or rather, he remained one, since according to him, “It’s not possible to have been a painter and to no longer be one.”
