Page 21 - Rt Critic News Today

It’s 1977, about five years after Bettina Grossman moved into the Chelsea Hotel and eleven years since a devastating studio fire in Brooklyn Heights reduced much of her work to ashes. Sitting in her room on the fifth floor, she looks out on 23rd Street with her camera, continuing her ritual as the city’s oblique witness.

Is there more meaning in our deaths than in our lives? Cyrus Shams—orphan, recovering addict, poet, and the protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s ambitious and expansive debut novel Martyr!—is on a quest to find out.

In your room everything is / least as it can be and still / remain a thing.

How does one derive and then develop and sustain a transcendent identity in abstraction? This is the overarching narrative in Richard Shiff’s monograph on one of the most inventive American abstractionists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul, published by the artist’s gallery, Hauser and Wirth, in 2022.

It’s almost a punchline at this point: every writer is a little in love with and a little afraid of Anne Carson. Perhaps less with Carson herself (who is famously private, and allergic to the spotlight) and more with what she gets away with: living an unquestioned life of the mind on the page.

The inability of United States policy-makers to criticize Israel is unsurprising, since undemocratic authority is the bread and butter of American governance. At the most explicit level, millions of legally disenfranchised people who live and work in the United States, immigrants and prisoners, are excluded from having a say in a government that imposes its authority on them.

Charrière’s current ambit is diametrically opposed to the preservationist idea of nature articulated by the American Transcendentalists and neo-Luddites. This is not to say pessimism has won over. The exhibition prods at the ritualistic relationship between man and nature, veering closer to the ideas of the nineteenth-century German Romantics than those of current, activist environmentalists.

Flint, Michigan native Ash Arder’s single-room exhibition, Flesh Tones, is a rhizomatic exploration of the relationship between the artist, her family, and the automotive industry. A focal point of the project is a baby shower Arder’s parents threw at the General Motors Buick City Plant in Flint, where they both worked and which the artist attended in utero.

In 2016, the playwright Sarah Gancher discovered she was following a group of Russian trolls on Facebook. Their username was Blacktivist, and they were paid by the Russian government to spread disinformation about the US presidential election. Gancher found this fascinating. She started thinking about the trolls all the time—what they ate, how they talked—until she realized why she was so interested. “They’re playwrights,” she said. “Like me.”

Clare Schneider is a writer and audio producer from California who currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.