culture Apr/May 2016

Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective

“I WANTED,” Marcel Broodthaers declared in his 1954 poem “Adieu, police!,” “to be an organ player / in the army of silence / but played hopscotch / on the pink dew of blood.” Either choice—each one an irresistibly visualized paradox—gives vivid testimony to the multifarious career of this Belgian artist who began as a poet and (after encasing fifty of his unsold volumes in plaster) became a sculptor, collagist, painter, filmmaker, and all-around provocateur who parodied the institutional qualities of a museum by creating one of his own in his Brussels studio. With strong roots in Surrealist

culture Feb/Mar 2016

String Theory

“My true vocation is preparation for death.” That was the reply offered by polymath, scholar, filmmaker, archivist, and painter Harry Smith when asked what among his many pursuits he believed to be his “truest.” “For that day,” he continued, “I’ll lie on my bed and see my life go before my eyes.” If Smith’s declaration evokes the gnomic, ironic, dissolute, and fanciful, it also characterizes an artist who prized his own obscurity (and the obscurity of his myriad and often uncompleted endeavors) even within the more rarefied cultural circles of the postwar decades. The underground’s underground

culture Feb/Mar 2016

Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting

A PARADOXICAL DILEMMA awaits the art restorer charged with repairing the damage done by time and mishap to an Alberto Burri painting, because his canvases were made by employing just those elements: aging, accident, and downright destruction. Trained as a doctor in his native Italy, Burri served as a medic during World War II, was captured in Tunisia, and was interned in a POW camp in Texas, which is where he began to paint. When he returned home, he found a culture beaten down by years of Fascist rule and a landscape blasted by Allied bombs. The ravages of war inform not only his technique

culture Dec/Jan 2016

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes

PILOTS CALL IT “spatial-D,” short for spatial disorientation—the dizziness and inability to determine where your body is in space when you’re deprived of a clear visual horizon. The phenomenon can send a pilot into a tailspin; viewers of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes won’t crash anywhere, but they will find themselves inhabiting a perplexing limbo where sea and sky meet uncertainly, their borders blurred, and the nature of each realm is thrown into question. Sugimoto has often chosen subjects that confound predictable responses: His images of glowing white cinema screens (achieved by capturing

fiction Dec/Jan 2016

Divine Lines

At a time when the notion of a poetic career—with its requisite curriculum vitae, residencies, prize panels, and sabbaticals—has long been in ascendancy, it can seem almost quaint to recall that poverty or a sad demise was once a not-uncommon fate for a poet (think Keats, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane). John Wieners met such an end in 2002, when he collapsed returning from a party in Beacon Hill, Boston. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where, lacking identification, he lay unconscious for days and then was removed from the respirator. Almost until

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2015

Tales of the Brothers Grimm: Drawings by Natalie Frank

“CHILD ABUSE, INCEST, rape, fierce sibling rivalry, animal brutalization, rebellion, fratricide”—no, this isn’t the sign-in sheet at the gates of hell; these are the subjects of fairy tales penned by the Brothers Grimm as listed in Jack Zipes’s introduction to this gloriously macabre illustrated selection. The all-too-familiar versions of “Snow White,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Cinderella” are not the stories that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected in a series of editions beginning in 1812. Even in that less fastidious time, the bloody mayhem was judged to be a bit much for children, and subsequent

culture June/July/Aug 2015

Dark Knees

EVEN MARK COHEN’S early photographs look utterly contemporary. Most of the images in this volume, which spans 1969 to 2012, date from the ’70s and early ’80s, but their seemingly haphazard visual style—oddly canted perspectives, complex compositions, and a general fixation on disconnected parts of people and things—suggests nothing so much as the smartphone videos that are now a mainstay of our journalistic and voyeuristic consumption. Cohen seems to have anticipated this disorienting jumble of perspectives when he began taking photographs in his native Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, decades ago.

culture Apr/May 2015

Type 42: Fame Is the Name of the Game

IN THE SPRING OF 2012, artist Jason Brinkerhoff found a cache of some 950 Polaroids devoted to television images from the 1960s and early ’70s. The photos—the book’s title takes its name from a popular Polaroid film stock, Type 42—gathered in this sampling from that collection are mostly of actresses appearing on what is probably a modest-size black-and-white television. Each actress has been shot during a close-up, and her name (whether famous, or quite obscure) has been inked on the snapshot’s border. Although attempts to trace the archive back to its creator have proved fruitless, a few

culture Feb/Mar 2015

Collected Letters

What is the wordness of a word? Is a word the sum of its letters—the way they look arrayed on a sign or page? Or is a word its sound when spoken, the feel of its syllables on the tongue and in the ear? Or is the essence found primarily in a word’s meaning, its service as a vehicle for communication? These are questions that typically occupy poets—whether composing epics to be recited around campfires, songs to be sung by troubadours, or intricate typographic displays for readers to puzzle over, poets have long been attuned to the shape and sound of language. Such focus, though, is hardly confined

culture Feb/Mar 2015

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time

TO PARAPHRASE astronomer Carl Sagan, there are one hundred billion galaxies, each containing one hundred billion stars, in our “vast and awesome universe.” Accepting the existence of something so incomprehensible is nearly tantamount to believing in God, and, much like that human yearning to know a Supreme Being, our attempts to understand the cosmos date back millennia. Cosmigraphics’ compilation of images of our solar system, our galaxy, and the whole enchilada ranges from Ptolemy’s geocentric conception, from AD 150, to maps so specialized that they only record, for instance, the spectral

print Dec/Jan 2015

Not Poetry

If the past couple of decades have seen poetry slip ever further out of the literary conversation (notices in mainstream book reviews often seem pointed at reassuring even avid readers that nothing’s happened since they parsed Wallace Stevens in college), the genre itself might be said to be laboring at self-erasure. And that actually counts as a promising development. While the conventions of an essay, novel, or memoir have always been elastic, verse has traditionally been defined by specifics enumerated down to the very syllable. A generation of poets, one including figures such as Susan

culture Dec/Jan 2015

The River Book

IN A 1999 EPISODE of The Simpsons, Homer attempts to build a backyard barbecue but instead ends up with a hodgepodge mess, a jumble soon hailed as great art. This genial parody (Jasper Johns has a speaking role) of found art depicted “creations” that are, in fact, hardly far from the mark. Found art and assemblage can sometimes appear to be work easily (or in Homer’s case, accidentally) accomplished, in part because the materials are so familiar and the presiding aesthetic prizes spontaneity. These two volumes, offering a generous sampling from the West Coast painter, collagist, poet, and

print Dec/Jan 2015

Twenty Years Booked

Bookforum asked contributors to weigh in on the most distinctive and influential works of the past two decades. The writers named the best works in a number of categories—and came up with a few new genres in the process.

LITERARY RANT - J. HOBERMAN

ART THEORY - DAVE HICKEY

PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK - GEOFF DYER

NEW YORK BOOK - LUC SANTE

INVENTIVE FICTION - WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

PORTRAIT OF EVIL - WENDY LESSER

CRIME - GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

FUTURE OF FICTION - CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN

NOT POETRY - ALBERT MOBILIO

BUSH-ERA NOVEL - CURTIS SITTENFELD

CULTURAL CRITICISM - ANDREW HULTKRANS

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

The Essential Cy Twombly

ON VIEW at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Cy Twombly’s 1955 painting Academy is a work you can look at, and into, for a long time. Providing an early example of the calculated offhandedness that came to distinguish both his style and technique (he employed not paint but pencil on a drop cloth rather than a canvas), Academy rewards close scrutiny, as it reveals expressive layer upon layer of choreographed lines. In fact, so lively is the dance that it tests the viewer’s certainty that the picture isn’t moving. That a former Army cryptologist might produce work requiring careful discernment

culture June/July/Aug 2014

Saul Leiter: Early Black and White

UNTIL RECENTLY, Saul Leiter was rarely named among the first rank of photographers (Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Weegee) who roamed New York’s streets recording the extraordinary ordinariness of life in the big city. When he died last fall at the age of eighty-nine, notice had just begun to be paid—exhibitions and books were followed by Tomas Leach’s well-received documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter. The photographer’s relative obscurity was owed, in part, to his inclinations—in the film, Leiter asks, “What makes anyone think that I’m any good? I’m not carried

culture June/July/Aug 2014

Post Modern

From our current vantage, it’s not hard to acknowledge that one of the presiding spirits of early-twenty-first-century art is Ray Johnson’s. Collagist, painter, poet, and the originator of mail art, Johnson took up the appropriative strategies of Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns, infused them with John Cage’s ideas about Zen and chance, and energized the mix with his own brand of deadpan Conceptualism. The art he made beginning in the early 1950s until his death in 1995 purposefully merged artist, artmaking, and art object in ways that were once disquieting but are now considered routine. The

culture Apr/May 2014

Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Works

VERY FEW of Hieronymus Bosch’s approximately two dozen paintings are on view in the United States (and none of his most iconic canvases are), yet the medieval painter’s imagery—at turns naturalistic and bewilderingly hallucinogenic—is broadly familiar, reproduced for High Times illustrations, dorm-room posters, and nearly every time the apocalypse is mentioned. Everyone knows Bosch, but far fewer people have actually seen the paintings in Madrid, Vienna, Bruges, and Lisbon, the locales where the most famous ones reside. Given that reproductions in books are gross diminishments of his sizable

culture Feb/Mar 2014

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible

In a 1948 letter to art critic Meyer Schapiro, Forrest Bess introduced himself as a “painter-fisherman.” Over the course of their correspondence (as well as in an exchange with art dealer Betty Parsons), Bess detailed the elaborate system of symbols encoded in his art. While the shoreline landscape of Chinquapin Bay in Texas, where he lived, figures vividly in his paintings, the symbolism expresses a different aspect of nature—his theories on sexuality, particularly a belief in hermaphroditism as a transcendent union of opposites. (The letters also recount—with photographic evidence—an attempt

culture Dec/Jan 2014

Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives

AMONG THE MANY cautionary examples cited by critics of the US security and surveillance establishment, the German Democratic Republic’s Stasi stands out in bold relief. The organization employed over ninety thousand full-time spies and police—but the truly depressing figure is its nearly two hundred thousand informants (some estimates run as high as two million). Since the wall fell in 1989, films, memoirs, and historical accounts have described a society riven with suspicion among colleagues, friends, and family members; a lot of citizens were their brothers’ keepers. Berlin-based artist Simon

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2013

Marcel Dzama: Sower of Discord

IN THE EIGHTH CIRCLE of Dante’s hell reside the Sowers of Discord, those who have caused divisiveness in their families, cities, and faiths. The poet, deploying his ever-apt touch with punishments, describes them being sliced and diced by a demonic swordsman. Since the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama has populated his ink-and-watercolor drawings with sundry dismemberments and wounds accomplished by swords, knives, arrows, guns, bats, and the occasional mace; the malevolent images may be inspired by hellish doings, but this is hell as circus ring or costume ball. Dzama’s discord sowers are a curiously

Albert Mobilio