These poems channel the artist’s restlessness and longings into uncanny, animated visions.
Author Archives: James Gibbons
James Gibbons is an associate editor at the Library of America and a frequent contributor to Bookforum.
Dick Higgins: Avant Garde Provocateur and Philosopher
Higgins was a participant observer of outrageous innovations in art, music, poetry, performance, and independent publishing for decades beginning in the 1960s.
Family, Landscape, and Race in Sally Mann’s Photographs
Mann’s historical and social explorations are anchored in her embrace of her identity as a Southerner.
When Artists Move from the Margins to the Center
The most powerful outsider artworks in Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art evoke ideals about all artists: the belief, for example, that they are distinct from non-artists.
The Violent Forms of Alexander Calder And Cady Noland
The dialogue among four works — two by each artist — suggests a dissonant string quartet as each piece asserts its distinctive timbre and range.
Mark Bradford’s Gettysburg Address
Bradford’s installation at the Hirshhorn Museum takes as its subject the ways we think, and ultimately don’t think, about history.
Changes on the Land: 19th-Century American Photography East of the Mississippi
East of the Mississippi highlights how early photographic efforts homed in on Americans’ leisure pursuits, particularly travel to popular getaway spots such as Niagara Falls and New England’s White Mountains.
Not Settled: An Interview with Adam Zagajewski
Zagajewski consistently writes with lightness, wit, and a dry sense of irony that never shades into cynicism or self-satisfaction.
Liberation Theology: Ragnar Kjartansson’s “God”
At one point, watching Kjartansson’s facial expression grow increasingly blissed-out and almost absent, his eyes directed heavenward, I sensed an echo of Bernini’s ecstatic St. Teresa.
Sound of Silence: Michael Palmer’s ‘The Laughter of the Sphinx’
Michael Palmer’s trust in the generative power that emerges out of silence for poetry runs counter to a deep strain of pessimism throughout The Laughter of the Sphinx.
Only Abandoned: The Poetry of Marcel Broodthaers
Midway through the retrospective of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers currently at the Museum of Modern Art, the visitor comes across the witty short film La Pluie (Projet pour un texte) [The Rain (Project for a text), 1969].
Late Indulgences: John Ashbery’s Breezeway
A few months ago in the New Yorker, essayist John McPhee recalled an exchange with his editor at Playboy in 1970, Arthur Kretchmer, about whether to remove a certain reference in a draft he’d submitted.