Weekend - Hyperallergic (Page 170)

Books

Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten's ‘Questions of Poetics’

What is “language writing” anyway?

Books

The Great Kenward

Kenward Elmslie published his poems in Poetry magazine in 1960, and his first book, Pavilions, came out in 1961. Between then and now makes more than fifty years of work. And yet, in some ways, his writing cannot quite be contained by such definitions as “poetry” and “fiction.”

Art

Paintings We Need

In an era that celebrates celebrity, vulgar loudmouths, puerile provocateurs, selfie-addicts, and excessive materialists, Merlin James prefers subtlety over din, less rather than more.

Books

In a New Photobook, Stirring Memories of Man on the Moon

The Moon 1968-1972, an attractive new book containing photos from NASA’s Apollo Program, which 47 years ago landed the first men on the moon, evokes the rich mixture of emotion, yearning and speculation that have long surrounded Earth’s mysterious companion and neighbor.

Interview

Lines of Thought: An Interview with Ben Jones

Last month, Ben Jones exhibited a new body of work at The Hole gallery on the Lower East Side. The gallery’s walls and floor are painted a bright, startling white; Jones’s artwork, usually drenched in hot hues, here consists only of graphite-colored oil-stick line drawings.

Performance

Home Alone, With a Few Pills: Franz Xaver Kroetz's 'Request Concert'

With its task-based script, Request Concert may remind some of Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, tightly shot inside a small apartment. The pairing of everyday housework with suicide might also call to mind Marsha Norman's 1983 play 'Night Mother.