Art
Upbeat and Edgy
With the rise of artists desperate to align themselves with one compromised avant-garde tradition or another, it is useful to remember that Stuart Davis never fit in.
John Yau
Art
Better Days
In 1987, Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark began investigating the possibilities of generating a Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) that would, among other things, enable a computer to encode, transmit, and translate one language into another.
Art
Fault Line
The first paragraph of Lev Manovich’s groundbreaking essay, “Database as Symbolic Form” (1999) came to mind about three minutes after I began pouring over the weird, wacky, wild and wooly stuff displayed under glass in Tony Oursler: The Imponderable Archive at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Books
Killed By the State
A few weeks ago, while I was reading In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, edited by Reginald Shepherd and Philip Clark, I was reminded of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad. This happens with poetry – one poem or book leads to another, l
Art
An Artist Who Possessed a Third Eye
Working in painting, drawing, assemblage, film, photography, photograms, performance, collage, and printmaking, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) made more discrete bodies of work across more mediums than any other postwar artist.
Art
Summer Carousing and Revelry
It must be summer. There are group shows galore all over Manhattan. This is when you get to discover new artists, get enthusiastic, become disenchanted, fall in love, fall out of love, all of the above, and none of the above, in one day, and still have time to sit back and read a book of poems in th
Art
All The World’s Bigger than a Stage
There is the artist’s artist, and there is June Leaf.
Books
The Many Pleasures of Reading Donald Britton’s Poems
This slim volume of poetry might stir up the tears you have been keeping inside you, especially if, like me, you are old enough to remember the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic, the seemingly endless roll call of people you knew and didn’t know who died horribly.
Art
Stephen Westfall Unscrews His Grids Even More
Ten years ago, in an interview that I did with Stephen Westfall, he said that he was interested in a skewed grid because it looked as if “the whole thing could tremble and be knocked over.”
Opinion
Nicole Eisenman: An Exchange
Editor's Note: This letter to the editor was received this week and is presented here (without editing). It is followed by a response by the author, John Yau.
Art
Joanne Greenbaum’s Amazing Parties
Joanne Greenbaum began making tiny sculptures out of Sculpey in 2003.
Books
Arthur Vogelsang Takes Us into Orbit
Being a poet in America is like being a submarine: you might be seen when you pop up, and, as a rule, people don’t go looking for you.