Art
James Bishop’s Incommodious Beauty
I have been waiting to see a large selection of James Bishop’s paintings since the mid-1970s, ever since reading John Ashbery’s appraisal in a secondhand copy of Art News Annual 1966.
John Yau
John Yau is an award winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism.
Interview
John Yau and Justine Kurland Discuss the Relationship of Photography, Poetry, and Narrative
The following email exchange with the photographer Justine Kurland focuses on her exhibition, Sincere Auto Care, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which is accompanied by a self-published book with the same title.
Poetry
An Occasion to Celebrate Occasional Press and the Artist Joe Wilson
I have been a fan of small and independent presses ever since I discovered the Grolier Poetry Book Shop (6 Plympton Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts) during my senior year of high school.
Art
Weekend Studio Visit: Denis Farrell in Oughterard, County Galway, Connemara, Ireland
The first work by the Irish artist, Denis Farrell, which I saw was a box titled Ukiyo (2011), containing seventy equally-sized, abstract watercolors. Ideally, the watercolors are supposed to be framed and mounted across all the walls of a gallery, becoming a sequence inviting the viewer to look at e
Art
Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons and the Culture of Hyperbole
Recently, I read a statement by Kenneth Turan, film critic for the LA Times, that struck a chord. As a poet and art critic, it is impossible to ignore the reams of exaggeration I am bombarded with on a daily basis, from blurbs attesting to the gorgeous mastery to be found in a young poet’s first boo
Art
Weekend Studio Visit: Marilyn Lerner in Chelsea, New York
I first went to Marilyn Lerner’s studio shortly after I reviewed her show at John Good for Artforum (May, 1989), and have gone periodically ever since.
Poetry
What Happens After Eric Baus’s Pharmacy Fills with Sand?
The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights Books, 2014), Eric Baus’s fourth book, is his best yet. It consists of more than sixty compact prose poems, some of which are only one sentence long, and with none as long as the first one, “The Illuminated Egg,” a single block of ten sentences.
Poetry
Marilyn Chin: Poet, Translator, Provocateur
A few weeks ago, on Centre Street–just north of Canal, the longtime boundary between Chinatown and the rest of Manhattan–I was on a panel, Re-imagining Asian American (and American) Poetry, at the Museum of Chinese in America (MoCA).
Art
Weekend Studio Visit: John Willenbecher in Tribeca, New York
John Willenbecher tells me that his recent paintings are about “connecting the dots.” One of his lifelong interests has been the night sky – abstraction in nature – which he traces to his childhood interest in astronomy while growing up in eastern Pennsylvania.
Art
Ed Paschke’s Portraits of Brooding and Tortured Souls
Ed Paschke (1939-2004), who is considered a Chicago Imagist, is one of the important painters to emerge from America’s heartland in the late 1960s that New York has never fully embraced. One reason for this resistance is his lifelong interest in misfits and the creepy flipside of celebrity, which im
Film
China’s Buried Past and Submerged Future: Patty Chang and David Kelley’s 'Flotsam Jetsam'
In the opening moments of the film, Flotsam Jetsam (2007) by Patty Chang and David Kelley, currently playing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a bridge-like structure is seen in the distance, partially traversing what seems to be a wide river.
Art
Postscript to the Whitney Biennial: An Asian-American Perspective
Now that the Whitney Biennial is finally over, did anyone notice that Patty Chang, Nikki S. Lee, and Laurel Nakadate weren’t included, just to mention three mid-career, Asian-American women artists who were conspicuously absent?