Books
Beguiling Simplicity: The Poetry of Robert Lax
Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read.
Louis Bury
Louis Bury is an art writer, author of The Way Things Go and Exercises in Criticism, and Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY.
Art
Speak, Memory: Becky Suss’s Painterly Anthropology
In his 1973 essay “Approaches to What?,” an underground classic of documentary aesthetics, French writer Georges Perec opposes the drive to find meaning primarily in “the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines.”
Art
X Marks the Spot: E. J. McAdams’s Sculptural Nature Writing
Taking its title from a line in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, E.J. McAdams’ site-specific installation, “Trees Are Alphabets,” consists of salvaged sawed-off tree branches, most about seven or eight feet long, sculpturally arranged on the terrace of The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Art
Clifford Owens’s Scatological Whispers
In the past five or six years, Clifford Owens’ provocative performance work has begun to garner notable, sometimes polarizing, attention.
Art
In and Out of Frame: Lorraine O’Grady’s “Art Is…”
Like a Choose Your Own Adventure story or a game of Mad Libs, the elliptical title of Lorraine O’Grady’s 1983 performance piece, “Art Is…,” creates space, playful and inviting, for structured audience participation.
Books
The ABC of Art Criticism: Some Recent How To's
It has often been said that writing about art is like dancing about architecture. Nearly as often, it has also then been said: But I’m going to do it anyway.
Books
Fables from Artlandia: The Miraculous by Raphael Rubinstein
In a 1946 letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, poet Charles Olson articulated what has become a quietly influential conception of historiography in poetry circles. “There has been, is too much of everything, including knowledge,” he contended, quite presciently, “because it has not been winno