Dear Editor: I’d like to address some of the hostility Keith Gessen shows toward Alexandr Solzhenitsyn while allegedly reviewing The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn by Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff (“Calamities of Exile,” Dec/Jan 2009). Gessen writes that
IN 1995, AS MATTHEW BARNEY became famous for his opulent, surrealist film epic, video artist Alex Bag rose to stardom as a kind of anti-Cremaster, creating no-budget video art with little more than cheap wigs, bedsheet backdrops, appropriated television clips, and stuffed animals. In Untitled
As brand-name gear, advertising, and competitive championships changed the look of surfing for the MTV generation in ways both brilliant and vulgar, it was a cruel (endless) summer for some. Sage surf photographer John Witzig spat, “This new generation has no experience of the laid-back hippy trip.
While Steve Pyke’s early photographs of philosophers featured white backgrounds, this latest collection favors a black backdrop, a decision that sets Arthur C. Danto, in an otherwise fine introduction, astir: “I prefer the black. The faces and figures are shown against the white but emerge from the
Pop artist Richard Hamilton once said of the work of Dieter Rams that it occupies “a place in my heart and consciousness that the Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne’s.” In thirty-five years as chief of design for German manufacturer Braun, Rams personally oversaw the development of more than
First, swallow a handful of needles. Chase with thread. Wash down with a glass of water, then retrieve from your mouth a fully threaded line. That's the East Indian Needle Threading Trick, and if you're not Ehrich Weiss—this ruse was one of his staples when he first took to the stage in the 1890s—you
A rubbery lump, the human brain swirling in a specimen jar is an unimposing sight—more an overgrown mushroom than the seat of consciousness. The old gray matter is just that: gray. But when depicted by skilled anatomists or subjected to microscopes, MRIs, and electroencephalographs by neuroscientists,
A haunting is a doorway into the private history of place. Such is the idea of Corinne May Botz's compelling collection of photographs (and accompanying oral narratives) from eighty allegedly haunted houses, which includes mostly private residences, like the one above from Orange County, Virginia,
Richard Misrach's camera follows hard upon carnage. Whether it's a crater-pocked desert landscape used by the navy as a bombing range or dead-animal disposal sites adjacent to contaminated military installations, he's drawn to the imagery of aftermath. No surprise, then, that he headed to New Orleans
As a photographer for publications like the Village Voice, Crawdaddy!, and Harper's Bazaar in late-1960s and '70s New York, James Hamilton captured one of the most vibrant music eras this country has ever experienced. His vast and spectacular archive from the time—black-and-white portraits, snapshots,
In 1847, Oliver Byrne, a little-known mathematician, published an illustrated volume of some of Euclid's theorems (largely those dealing with plane geometry and the theory of proportion). No one had previously hit on Byrne's idea to visually depict mathematical ideation, and he was derided by purists
