Page 29 - Rt Critic News Today

Featuring new books by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Richard Shiff, Ivy Zheyu Chen, Simón Ramirez, Carla Williams, and Esther Adler.

Tales of Brave Ulysses, which spans across the galleries of Van Doren Waxter and Garth Greenan, highlights a significant moment of counter-modernism within the 70s and 80s. The work of the artists Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, and Richard Van Buren are a weft and warp, interlaced in dialogue with each other to reveal an exchange of ideas and innovations.

In the field of art history, scholars who prioritize understanding artists’ perspectives over imposing their own interpretations are rare. Joseph Masheck is one of these exceptional scholars, distinguishing himself by his commitment to unraveling what artists thought about themselves, their work, and the world in which they lived.

In the world of conceptual art, there are good ideas, bad ideas, and then there are Minujín’s ideas. Perhaps the most impressive thing about this survey of Argentinian Marta Minujín is that many of those ideas were actually realized—mostly in a place that New York critics hadn’t been paying much attention to until recently, Buenos Aires.

Raven Row—an East London not-for-profit exhibition venue that claims an almost cult-like following—has resurrected the artist and unleashed her ghost across the three levels of the domestic-eighteenth-century townhouse-turned-exhibition-venue on Artillery Lane, just off the bustling Spitalfields Market. AYE! (short for “Are You Experienced” and titled after the 1992 video with the same name) seems almost like a game of truth or dare.

By coincidence, David Novros, Al Loving, Alan Shields, and Marilyn Lerner all have work up in NYC during December. These same four artists all danced in the late sixties, sometimes together, with the experimental choreographer Ellen Klein, in performances she staged in her loft on Broadway.

I met Kimberly Alidio in the summer of 2021, as a student in their Kundiman workshop, Documentary Poetics: Archive and Counter-Lyric. During our last session, we had been reflecting on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s interview in Jacket2, in which she talks about poetry becoming entropic, losing energy, and finding new form. My notes from this conversation include: “You go where the energy is.”

When I read Men and Sleep, and even before the explanatory note at the end of the book, I kept wondering about the process of its creation, which you announce succinctly just before the poems begin as a procedure of modified erasure. My question isn’t so much “what does that mean” as “what do you think of creative procedures in relation to the result?”

Rosa Alcalá is a poet and translator whose work has received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, and the NEA. Her book Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña was runner-up for the PEN Translation Award. Her fourth poetry collection, YOU, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

The opening line of Patricia Spears Jones’s elegy for Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet and journalist Claribel Alegría, who died in 2018, envisions a poet who “marked her days with rage & love.” Alegría is thus a model for Spears Jones’s fifth collection, The Beloved Community, which is similarly animated by such “rage and love,” as the poet navigates with grace and grief the “blood, blame, and curses” (“Fred Hampton Born This Day”) of Am...