Music
Fagen's Critical Catalogue (June 2012)
This month, reviews of Plug, Silversun Pickups, Issa Juma & Super Wankiya Stars, Allo Darlin', Yuna, Amadou & Mariam, Odd Future and Beach House.
Weekend
Art
Lessons from an Unknown Master: Phyllida Barlow at the New Museum
Phyllida Barlow’s installation at the New Museum, siege, doesn’t waste any time telling you who’s boss. Post-industrial, post-modern — post-everything but post-sculptural — it all but pushes you back inside the elevator.
Books
Not the Man We Used to Be: An Anthropologist's View of the New Weaker Sex
According to a recent book, Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male is Not the Man He Used to Be, by Peter McAllister, modern men are basically fucked. McAllister, an archeologist and science writer, has analyzed the iron men of yore — the Neanderthals and Wodabees, the Tahitian seducers a
Art
A Wanderer Among the Rubble (Part 1)
Jocelyn once described her husband, Gandy Brodie (1924–1975) as a “delinquent Hebrew student.” In the novel Life on Sandpaper (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), the Israeli novelist and painter Yoram Kaniuk writes about the time he and Gandy hung out together in New York, befriending Lenny Tristano and C
Art
Portrait of an Artist with Three Lives
It is hard to resist the temptation to mythologize Albert Contreras’s adult life, to not see it take shape as a movie script or imagine who might get the starring role. But if you to stop to think about it, the only reason Contreras’ life story could be turned into a movie is because of his painting
Art
No Country for Old Men
Jan Müller’s heart gave out when he was 36. The brevity of his life is mentioned in just about everything written about him, but his tragedy is unlike those of other, more famous artists who died too young — whether it’s Masaccio (1401–28), Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Amedio Modigliani (1884–1920) or
Books
Sleeper Awake: Michael O’Brien’s “Avenue”
Poems often groan beneath their encumbrances: weighty metaphors, top-heavy conceits. Which is why I like it when Michael O’Brien, in his most recent book Avenue (FloodEditions), writes of a poem being merely “certain words in / a certain order.” This stripped-down formulation courts a charge of bana
Art
The Soulful Insolence of Sven Lukin
I have been a Sven Lukin fan since 1970, when I first saw "Untitled" (1969) in one of the concourses running under the Empire State Plaza in Albany. Made for, and located in, a long recessed area — and playfully hovering between flatness and volume, the pictorial and the sculptural — Lukin’s "Untitl
Performance
Happily Tangled Webs
On my way to the Joyce SoHo last Wednesday, while thinking about David Gordon’s 50th anniversary — and realizing that, while he has been making work for five decades, I would be seeing it live for the first time that night — I got to wondering: What does Gordon, renowned for resisting any sort of ti
Art
Oh Sue, If Only I Could Love You More
Sue Coe has called the art world “a zipped-up body bag of what they call culture.” Thinking about the troubling and troubled work of this extravagantly gifted artist, I found myself circling back to that statement, which is from a 1996 profile written by Steven Heller for Eye Magazine.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, inequality in the art market, is Tokyo provincial, the rise of Gerhard Richter, the new George W. Bush portrait, are online curators kidding themselves and more.
Books
Time Out
“A literary event!” — every middlebrow doorstop of a novel gets saddled with that cliché. You’d think aesthetic significance could be determined by weight. Or that literature had no other time frame than that of the publishers’ seasonal catalogue, destined to wait a bit longer to be trashed than the