Page 49 - Rt Critic News Today

Jim Harithas was one of the few museum directors who would take chances on young unknown artists, and was willing to support experimental use of new technologies. I was fortunate enough to have been one of them. It was always exciting to be around Jim’s creative energy, his urgency about life and his willingness to roll up his sleeves and get into what I was doing and see where it was going with needed confidence.

Ten years ago I had successful open-heart bypass surgery. For several hours, with my heart stopped, I knew only black. “I” was outside of space time, “dead to the world”. When I awoke on the ICU gurney-bed with my mind returned to me, I laughed. I might have been Schrodinger’s cat (1935) in a closed box, dead and alive, a quantum entanglement. Now, in Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series we have our first quantum poet, who can be both within the physical/menta...

Larry Eigner’s work has been foundational for contemporary American poetry. What was missing was the biography, which now, thanks to the storied Modern and Contemporary Poetics series of the University of Alabama Press, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, we have. Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, is a terrific book. I, as they say, couldn’t put it down, finishing it in a day, and wishing for more.

Jim hit Houston like a tornado, and in terms of my life as a working artist, the effect was dramatic and immediate.

Who was Jim Harithas? Jim Harithas was an anomaly. He was outside the box.

Socrates Sculpture Park isn’t like any other arts institution in New York City. It has an ad-hoc, relaxed humanism that contrasts sharply with the crisp white galleries and grand museums across the river. It feels like a laboratory for art—a place where creation is as important, if not more important, than presentation.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

O’Brien is a poet and critic with an interest in mass culture before the information age; published by Terra Nova Press as an experimental novel, his Arabian Nights can be read as a marriage between criticism and poetry. It consists of short passages—organized under categories like “Loose Ankles” and “Laughing Sinners”—that follow the frenetic logic of the Jazz Age just before the Depression, as expressed by the movies that bottled that excitement and sold it b...

“Always historicize” is a good, deep slogan for cultural diagnosis on the left, but it tells us very little about what to do once the test results are in. This weakness was less significant in the 1980s, when Fredric Jameson formulated the slogan, than it is today. For the last generation or so, much artistic, literary, and cultural criticism has contented itself with “historicizing” in the simplified sense of “writing history.”

Having followed Edmund de Waal’s work as both a writer and an artist ever since the publication of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), and Atemwendeb, his first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2013, I’ve come to realize how Edmund has managed to maintain a remarkable balance between on one hand the making, and on the other hand the writing.