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Art In Conversation

On Larry Day

By Phong Bui , Sid Sachs, Ruth Fine, Bill Valerio, and Richard Torchia

On November 7, 2021, Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia hosted a panel discussion on the exhibition Body Language: The Art of Larry Day, which was organized by Woodmere in conjunction with the Rosenwald-Wolf Galleries at University of the Arts and Arcadia Exhibitions at Arcadia University.

Art In Conversation

Radcliffe Bailey with Ksenia M. Soboleva

Ksenia M. Soboleva sits down with Radcliffe Bailey to discuss the wide scope of multifaceted references in his artistic practice from ancestral deities to family travels. They dive into the important role that music plays in Bailey’s life and work, the potential for memories to function as medicine, and his intimate relationship to Atlanta, where the artist has lived almost his entire life.

Art In Conversation

Debra Bricker Balken with David Levi Strauss

David Levi Strauss talks with Debra Bricker Balken about her new book, Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, and how the battles among New York writers, poets, intellectuals, and artists in the middle of the 20th century set the stage for what was to come in the 21st century, especially when it comes to arguments about the relation between art and politics.

Art In Conversation

Mary Ann Caws with Jared Daniel Fagen

In an essay on Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, Mary Ann Caws writes: “The memory and the prophecy are not different: we must remember to remember.” Whether familiar with or new to her work, one immediately encounters, here, the infinitive: the not yet that is and from where all else will come. More than just the genius of art criticism, more than merely a marvelous instance which is the surrealist’s desire to keep intact, this single line of poetry—penned more than twenty years ago—remains one of the very principles of her poetics. Like Cornell’s Proustian remembrances, Breton’s haunting “Who am I?” and Char’s aphoristic-elliptical enjoinders, Mary Ann Caws makes us aware that life—that primordial passage—must be looked at anew and with ever-renewed looking, if we are ever to see the red chili pepper affixed with wings that form the dragonfly, or fall madly in love and at the same time lovingly into madness.

Art In Conversation

On Jasper Johns

By Richard Shiff, Scott Rothkopf, and Carlos Basualdo

Richard Shiff speaks with Scott Rothkopf and Carlos Basulado about their methodology for organizing the exhibition, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the emotional range of Johns’s work, and how the artist’s personality connects to his work.

Art In Conversation

Neil Jenney with Jason Rosenfeld

Jason Rosenefeld sits down with Neil Jenney on the occasion of Jenney’s solo exhibition, AMERICAN REALISM TODAY, which features the series “Modern Africa,” and follows on Jenney’s path of artistic experimentation from his early installations and metal wall sculpture, brushy oils on panels that he calls “Bad Paintings” in 1969 and 1970, through to his work of the last five decades that he refers to as “Good Paintings.”

Art In Conversation

Jennifer Packer with Amber Jamilla Musser

Amber Jamilla Musser sits down with Jennifer Packer to discuss Blackness, painting, and temporality. The lively conversation roams through art history, Black feminisms, and the political import of shifting hierarchies of valuation.

Art In Conversation

Cinga Samson with Amanda Gluibizzi

Cinga Samson was born in South Africa and spent his early life traveling back and forth between the Eastern and Western Capes. He received his art education from fellow artists, moving into a studio shared by the artists Gerald Tabata, Xolile Mtakatya, and Luthando Laphuwano who helped him to develop and hone his craft.

InTranslation

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From the Publisher & Artistic Director

Dear Friends and Readers,

By Phong Bui

As we’ve been experiencing the extreme fragility of our democracy in the last few years, we came to finally realize there was no “public intellectuals” who would stand in the middle mediating, working with the broader public, our middle and working-class Americans as means to “check and balance” both the left and the right for their ineffective policies, here and abroad.

Editor's Message

Sounding the Idols

By W. J. T. Mitchell

Idolatry and iconoclasm are evil twins. They need each other, feed on each other. The idol is said to demand human sacrifice. The iconoclast responds by sacrificing idolaters, or (more likely) exterminating them without the dignity of sacrifice. See Exodus 32, in which Moses melts down the Golden Calf, forces the idolatrous Israelites to drink it, and massacres half his people. When Poussin paints this scene, he cannot help himself. As a painter, he must glorify the Calf and its maker, and shroud the furious Moses in darkness. Why does Aaron, the artist who made the idol, get away scot-free? Was Milton a true poet, and of the Devil’s Party?

Critics Page

ArtSeen

Table of Contents

Editor's Message

Publisher's Message

Art

ArtSeen

Critics Page

Books

Music

Dance

Film

Theater

Fiction

Poetry

Art Books

ArTonic

In Memoriam

Special Report

Field Notes

The Miraculous

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The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 21-JAN 22

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