CATHERINE GOODMAN with Ann C. Collins
For London-based artist Catherine Goodman CBE, drawing and painting are meditative acts, whether performed in the silence of her studio or the landscapes that call her back time and again. She infuses her practice with inspiration gleaned from poetry, film, travel, and memory. Goodman and Ann C. Collins met over Zoom to talk about Silent Music, Goodman’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth that presents large-scale abstract paintings that pulse with her expressive brushwork and vivacious use of color.
TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam before his family moved to the United States. His work explores the multifaceted qualities of memory, be they historical, social, personal, and how those qualities inform our present moment. On the occasion of Nguyen’s exhibition, Lullaby of Cannons for the Night, he spoke with poet and translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng about his kinetic sculptures crafted from bomb fragments, the two-channel video installation which makes use of the song lyrics of Vietnamese poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, and the unsettling relationship of idolization and extinction.
LUCIO POZZI with David Ebony
Widely regarded as an elusive multidisciplinary artist who traverses abstraction, figuration, photography and performance, Lucio Pozzi defies easy categorization. Throughout his six-decade career, his art has thwarted conventional art-historical analysis and sidestepped trends in critical art theory.
SIN WAI KIN with McKenzie Wark
Sin Wai Kin brings fantasy to life through storytelling and moving image, performance and writing. Their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification, and consciousness. Sin’s film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, as well as screened at the British Film Institute’s 65th London Film Festival. Their work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally. In mid-February Sin joined McKenzie Wark on the New Social Environment (Episode 1160) to discuss their new exhibition, The End Time!.
CATHERINE GOODMAN with Ann C. Collins
For London-based artist Catherine Goodman CBE, drawing and painting are meditative acts, whether performed in the silence of her studio or the landscapes that call her back time and again. She infuses her practice with inspiration gleaned from poetry, film, travel, and memory. Goodman and Ann C. Collins met over Zoom to talk about Silent Music, Goodman’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth that presents large-scale abstract paintings that pulse with her expressive brushwork and vivacious use of color.
TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam before his family moved to the United States. His work explores the multifaceted qualities of memory, be they historical, social, personal, and how those qualities inform our present moment. On the occasion of Nguyen’s exhibition, Lullaby of Cannons for the Night, he spoke with poet and translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng about his kinetic sculptures crafted from bomb fragments, the two-channel video installation which makes use of the song lyrics of Vietnamese poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, and the unsettling relationship of idolization and extinction.
LUCIO POZZI with David Ebony
Widely regarded as an elusive multidisciplinary artist who traverses abstraction, figuration, photography and performance, Lucio Pozzi defies easy categorization. Throughout his six-decade career, his art has thwarted conventional art-historical analysis and sidestepped trends in critical art theory.
SIN WAI KIN with McKenzie Wark
Sin Wai Kin brings fantasy to life through storytelling and moving image, performance and writing. Their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification, and consciousness. Sin’s film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, as well as screened at the British Film Institute’s 65th London Film Festival. Their work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally. In mid-February Sin joined McKenzie Wark on the New Social Environment (Episode 1160) to discuss their new exhibition, The End Time!.
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March 2025
Critics Page
For the Critics Page in each issue of the Rail, a guest critic is charged with suggesting a topic or theme that can be explored and debated for this special section.
Guest Critic: Omar Kholeif
Pictures, Windows, Portals, Lives
By Omar KholeifThe voices assembled here, all artistic or literary in one way or another, have created a frame, a window, a tunnel, or a portal to tell stories that open into an emotional politics via the act of looking. Their work is a form of woolgathering, a vocation of and for the polyglot voice.
Field Notes
Accounts and critiques of the political and social state of things.
Much could be inferred based on the experience of Trump’s first presidency, the ideology reflected in Trump’s campaign (and in Project 2025), and early indications of who his nominees for top government health-related positions might be. But the first few weeks after Trump’s inauguration, marked by multiple presidential executive orders and the actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), added a sinister dimension and have created much confusion, chaos, and fear in the public health community about how bad things really could be.
Insisting that “there is such a thing as social class in Palestine” might seem out of place when Gazans have been drowning under bombs for more than a year. No doubt I would refrain from doing this, or I’d do it in another way, had I been hanging about in Gaza and not in the West Bank. But I don’t insist on class in order to downplay the current massacre, but to combat the idea of a radical otherness, of an exteriority, of what is currently happening in relation to capitalist social relations, here as there.
In Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (London: Verso, 2024), Adam Hanieh—Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter—sets out to demystify the substance itself through a densely packed yet highly readable history of our interaction with oil at every step from its extraction to its consumption.
In his widely discussed book Spezialoperation und Frieden: Die russische Linke gegen den Krieg [Special Operation and Peace: The Russian Left against the War], Ewgeniy Kasakow documents voices from Russia in opposition to the current war—some of them supporting Ukraine’s “national defense,” some not.
Rail Community
Music Made by Walking
By Andrew WeathersThere is a piece by the British land artist Richard Long known by the straightforward title A Line Made By Walking (1967). The artist walked a straight line through a field of grass, repetitively, and photographed the result, a very subtle rut where the grass had been tamped down by his feet. No doubt this disappeared within a few hours.
Although now forty-five years old, Dark Music Days remains a strangely clandestine festival outside of Iceland. If we wake at ten, it is still not sunrise. Your scribe first visited Reykjavík in the summer of 2023, so is pleased to be experiencing the full snowfall winter during his three days at the colossally impressive Harpa concert hall (or halls, as it’s possible to discover a new, different sized space each day of the weekend).
Listening to “I’m alone on stage with / no exit” from “Maker Taker” off of Kaia Kater’s most recent release, Strange Medicine (Free Dirt Records, 2024), one wonders if French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has returned. In his play No Exit, Sartre asks us to assume our individuality, and be mindful of our relationship with other people.
From March through May of this year, Ars Nova Workshop will present special twenty-fifth anniversary programming, with concerts that range across the musical spectrum. These will include John Zorn’s New Masada Quartet, Thurston Moore, The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell with Tyshawn Sorey. This is a capstone and show of strength for an organization that has presented such major figures as Cecil Taylor, Rhys Chatham, Henry Threadgill, and Vijay Iyer.
The Dance on Camera Festival presents Who Cares About Pal Frenak, directed by Glória Halász, as one of their 2025 feature film selections at Symphony Space. The documentary follows French-Hungarian contemporary choreographer Pál Frenák from his tumultuous childhood to his inventive career in dance.
Mariana Valencia creates performances that approach work (and because it’s still dance o’clock, we should really use the word rehearsal) as material. She creates webs of form and feeling in order to bounce around them at the show, riding channels of communication that have as much to do with experimental dance as with standup comedy, talk shows, and conversations with friends.
Black Aesthetics, curated by Malcolm-x Betts and Arien Wilkerson, is an ongoing experimental dance series in residence at Judson Church.
The front studio at Kestrels in Gowanus transforms into a club. Red LED tubes illuminate the audience’s faces and gogo dancers’ asses. Sparkly dance music embraces us.
Douglas Dunn + Dancers will present the world premiere of L’Embarqement pour Cythère at Judson Memorial Church. The evening-length work for twelve dancers choreographed by Douglas Dunn features new poetry by Anne Waldman. Dunn and Waldman recently spoke with the Brooklyn Rail about their enduring creative partnership, artistic lineage, and Merce Cunningham.
Who Cares About Pál Frenák (I do, and you should too)
By Hannah LipmanThe Dance on Camera Festival presents Who Cares About Pal Frenak, directed by Glória Halász, as one of their 2025 feature film selections at Symphony Space. The documentary follows French-Hungarian contemporary choreographer Pál Frenák from his tumultuous childhood to his inventive career in dance.
MARIANA VALENCIA with Amit Noy
Mariana Valencia creates performances that approach work (and because it’s still dance o’clock, we should really use the word rehearsal) as material. She creates webs of form and feeling in order to bounce around them at the show, riding channels of communication that have as much to do with experimental dance as with standup comedy, talk shows, and conversations with friends.
MALCOLM-X BETTS & ARIEN WILKERSON with Candice Thompson
Black Aesthetics, curated by Malcolm-x Betts and Arien Wilkerson, is an ongoing experimental dance series in residence at Judson Church.
Power-bottom Phantom Dance Theater
By Theo ArmstrongThe front studio at Kestrels in Gowanus transforms into a club. Red LED tubes illuminate the audience’s faces and gogo dancers’ asses. Sparkly dance music embraces us.
DOUGLAS DUNN & ANNE WALDMAN with Caedra Scott-Flaherty
Douglas Dunn + Dancers will present the world premiere of L’Embarqement pour Cythère at Judson Memorial Church. The evening-length work for twelve dancers choreographed by Douglas Dunn features new poetry by Anne Waldman. Dunn and Waldman recently spoke with the Brooklyn Rail about their enduring creative partnership, artistic lineage, and Merce Cunningham.
The Suicides, recently published by NYRB Classics, completes Antonio di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation. The nameless narrator, living in an unspecified Latin American city, waits in expectation of existential crisis or epiphanic revelation. His editor puts three photos of suicides on his desk and the narrator concludes that each victim saw something revelatory before the end. He wants to venture to the heart of these tragedies, perhaps even see what they saw, and enlists the aid of a partner named Marcela in his investigation. His question to her, at the end of the excerpt you are about to read, is whether or not she is capable of photographing an earthquake—not the effects, not the people fleeing tremors, but the earthquake in itself. In many ways this is the core distinction in The Suicides as a whole: how do we apprehend a process without mistaking it for a thing, or a series of things? How do we comprehend any of the events in any of our lives, or in the lives of those we love, in a snapshot rather than as an accumulation of all the decisions that brought the person to that point? The particulars drop away and the reader is left with an odd amalgam of page turner and quiet meditation on the human condition, all delivered with the tone of a Godard film.
Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo transmits the authoritarian abuses of Ahmed Sékou Touré in this novel of a female survivor, the eponymous Véronique, living in exile. Her initial entreaty to Madame Corre, that she write her own story, soon gives way to a contextualization of Guinean atrocities in the broader context of a century of devastation and the attempts writers have made to chronicle that destruction. One meditation from this excerpt particularly sticks with me, a notion building from Kundera's line that “Memory doesn't film, it photographs.” The narrator explains that all days contain all others, and fixing on the photographs mistakes the process of history for a dismal moment.
The abiding lesson of Svetlana Alexievcih’s works is that emotional needs in no way diminish amidst calamity or cataclysm. Even in bare life we see the recognizably human. Similarly, Trofimov depicts the relentless assertion of humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances. No Country for Love follows one young woman, Debora Rosenbaum, from her arrival in promise-filled Kharkiv, Ukraine, through Holodomor, only to be wedged into a corner by the jackboots of Naziism and Stalinism. Her resilience and hope in 1930s Soviet Ukraine holds obvious parallels for modern readers, but it’s a virtue of this novel that the reader can drop the historical analogies and immerse in each moment.
This issue’s original story, “Her Blue Hat,” plays with the intersection of psychology and voice. In narrating, Ohringer’s speaker runs up and down the register of early adulthood with confident falsetto, stammering fry, and warm imagery deep from the chest.
Premiering in the US at Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival earlier this month, new films by Ewelina Rosinska and Brigid McCaffrey are two anti-capitalist cine-poems in the most capacious sense of both terms.
While the future of the country lies uncertain save for its running institutional commitments to structural racism, queerphobia, and misogyny, plus the Damoclean threat of economic decline—Meanwhile, the latest release by Emmy-nominated documentary studio Aubin Pictures, has proven itself a necessary salve. I’ll admit: watching this film during a whirlwind week of social and political chaos had the same effect as staunching a long-running bleed. At least for now.
Tunde Kelani’s revolutionary and prescient satire about a fictionalized Nigerian community in 1999 speaks to contemporary struggles unraveling in the country.
Using her characteristically realist approaches, Moselle, alongside Harden, made The Black Sea on location in a small coastal town in Bulgaria, where they recruited locals to play themselves in the film. Harden also plays its protagonist Khalid, a Brownsville slacker who gets into a foreign fish-out-of-water crisis and embarks on an eventful journey of self-discovery far away from home.
Another Spell of Light: Unstable Rocks + Sanctuary Station
By Hannah BonnerPremiering in the US at Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival earlier this month, new films by Ewelina Rosinska and Brigid McCaffrey are two anti-capitalist cine-poems in the most capacious sense of both terms.
Catherine Gund’s Meanwhile
By Brittany TurnerWhile the future of the country lies uncertain save for its running institutional commitments to structural racism, queerphobia, and misogyny, plus the Damoclean threat of economic decline—Meanwhile, the latest release by Emmy-nominated documentary studio Aubin Pictures, has proven itself a necessary salve. I’ll admit: watching this film during a whirlwind week of social and political chaos had the same effect as staunching a long-running bleed. At least for now.
Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide
By Michael KolawoleTunde Kelani’s revolutionary and prescient satire about a fictionalized Nigerian community in 1999 speaks to contemporary struggles unraveling in the country.
CRYSTAL MOSELLE & DERRICK B. HARDEN with Weiting Liu
Using her characteristically realist approaches, Moselle, alongside Harden, made The Black Sea on location in a small coastal town in Bulgaria, where they recruited locals to play themselves in the film. Harden also plays its protagonist Khalid, a Brownsville slacker who gets into a foreign fish-out-of-water crisis and embarks on an eventful journey of self-discovery far away from home.
![Joshua William Gelb in [Untitled Miniature]. Photo: Marie Baranova.](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstudio.brooklynrail.org%2Fassets%2F1a74a6ee-753e-43ce-9b3b-748380563b77.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
This book brings her Art Notes, Art into the world as a typed book, each page undated save for the year. What comes across is Hawkins’s dedication to art making and willingness to experiment.
Poet, artist, and publisher discuss the making of the collaborative artist book American Weather. Originally published as an essay in 2016, the artist book is about gun violence in the USA, as well as a deep and thoughtful collaboration between a city, a neighborhood, friends, and community members.
Of the 108 photos, many present pliant, almost gymnastic silhouettes: arched backs and curved torsos, outstretched balletic arms and upturned chins, bent knees and curtains of hair, standing alone or in intertwined pairings. Facelessness is a kind of recurrent hide-and-go-seek, timid more than coy, the older version of hiding behind your mother’s leg. In an essay by scholar Tiana Reid, she praises the “flourishes and rainbowscapes” of Bobb-Willis’s output, “this romance toward living and creating.”
From the book, we might expect a love letter steeped in nostalgia, “mi Buenos Aires querido,” as the tango goes. Or a nationalistic reprise of ambition and expansion. But Alfredo Srur’s own photographic practice of stark realism impels him to give us what Olds saw, unlaundered.
1×1
Original writing on singular works of art.
The first time I saw Monk by the Sea (1808–10) was in Intro to Art History at Duke University in the spring of 1986. Tough to say how good a slide Professor Walter Melion had when he projected it on the screen in the East Duke building lecture hall—until recently it was still difficult to get a good image of it. I now realize that it is because it is largely unreproducible.
I try to make sense of the suddenness of color—chartreuse, canary, and cerulean—that unexpectedly follows the gray and beige work-a-day palette of the previous room as Sylvia shifts to landscape, painting a grassy lawn that stretches out to a coppice of golden trees. A low ridge rises behind them. Puffs of clouds, white, silver, yellow, and gray, drift through a perfect sky. I take it in for a moment, then inch closer.
Japanese contemporary artist Genpei Akasegawa (1937–2014) created these offset lithograph editions of the Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note (Dai Nihon Rei-en Satsu or 大日本零円札) in 1967. This timing is significant, as Akasegawa had just appealed his criminal conviction, now art historically referred to as the Model 1,000-yen Note Incident...
Pope.L sits on his haunches alongside a building over the course of a few very hot and humid days in July. He is a curious sight—an unambiguously Black man with two jars and plastic spoons set before him. “Warm mayo?” he asks the passerby. “One hundred dollars a dollop,” he adds.
I met with the London architect Tony Fretton to discuss how reality could be incorporated into architecture. It’s not as stupid a question as it sounds.
In his latest book, Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space, the architectural critic and historian Julian Rose frames the design of museums today within the historical framework of architecture’s declining participation in broader social and political projects.
It was early November when I came across Álvaro Urbano’s exhibition TABLEAU VIVANT at SculptureCenter. Walking into the installation, I felt as though the wind had dragged the city’s debris into the interior space of the gallery.
Building in this city is not easy: an odd-shaped lot, an unlikely access point, a steep sidewalk, dueling frontage on multiple streets, a looming neighbor, restrictive zoning. But difficult sites aren't necessarily bad, not architecturally at least.
In 2015, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro broke ground on The Shed, a 200,000-square-foot museum and performance space in downtown New York. A nod to the kinetic architecture of Cedric Price, DS+R’s design for the Shed includes a telescoping outer shell that glides on rails to embrace the adjacent plaza. In 2024, the Shed was selected to host the traveling exhibition, Luna Luna: A Forgotten Fantasy—a reconstruction of André Heller’s 1987 amusement park.
Currently on display at the Met Museum, Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph highlights this interplay between material and craft. The exhibition, a rare showcase of architecture, is a feast of Rudolph’s intricate drawings and models.
How can architecture be published? The first year of Architecture in the Brooklyn Rail has been an effort to draw out the transferences and vocabularies between blueprint and newsprint, which is already a natural drift.
A constantly shifting surface, like the skin of a snake, conceals the true essence of things, blurring them in a perpetual camouflage of fashions and styles, tastes and trends. Mies strips away this skin, revealing the skeletal structure, muscles, and mechanisms that enable movement beneath.
Art and Technology
Exploring the cultural crossroads of art and technology
What might we gather in looking and thinking more carefully? As we proceed with vital concerns for our planet, global and immediate communities, and the arts in all their forms, a critical engagement with AI may disclose ideas and practices for other causes that matter to us.
Though much of the work I will encounter in Japan has been described to me or identified in various articles as nostalgic, I found the term disorienting.
Taking Stock of Generative “AI”: Systematic Work of Michael Mandiberg, Penelope Umbrico, and Trevor Paglen
By Charlotte KentLast month, I ended this column on an argument made by the philosopher Jennifer Corns that agency may be best served when we consider our various agentive forms. Thinking in multiples challenges us because it presents different perspectives, and so requires considering assorted contexts. This moment around generative “AI” has some artists trying to express how “artificial intelligence” is not a single thing, and how it is a medium of quantities.
Posthumanist theories, science and technology studies, and social constructivism have argued for the way in which one is never isolated and independent, but a being influenced by and influencing an environment. So what kind of agency is possible regarding the climate crisis or generative AI?
Dispatches
David Levi Strauss writes brief and immediate responses to the major events that shape presidential elections.
The Signalgate scandal continues to unfold and enfold the entire Trump administration, but Timothy Snyder has made a novel argument for its underlying meaning. First, he asked, why is the Trump cabinet using Signal?
On March 21, Columbia’s trustees conceded to Trump’s demands in light of his threat to withhold $400 million in federal funds from the university.
The American people are split on some of Trump’s domestic policies, but they are not at all split on Trump’s policy toward Putin’s Russia and Ukraine.
US stock markets are falling like a stone, because of the trade wars driven by Trump’s excessive tariffs on our two contiguous neighbors, one of which he is threatening to annex as a 51st state. The S&P 500 lost $4 trillion in market value. Nasdaq just had its worst day since September 2022.
In our culture there are two often very distinct forms of art writing. There is art criticism, which is journalistic writing, as found in newspapers such as Artforum and the Rail. And there is academic writing, such as you find in the Art Bulletin and books about art.
Art criticism and art history are not two entirely different kinds of endeavor for they are both critical undertakings. They both seek to evaluate the critical worth of items their practitioners—and others—present as artworks.
I think the statement muddles two issues: one is about today (publishing and maybe writing) and the other is about forever (the relationship between art historical and art critical writing and thought).
Lately, I have been immersed in research on American mid-century modernism but my mind keeps turning toward the present. In a lecture of 1951 Jacques Barzun warned of “the dangers of bureaucracy in matters of the mind.” His warning reverberates in New York composer Morton Feldman’s lament of a few years later about labels and categories guiding the experience of art.
Period labels are useful for classification, and so essential for orienting ourselves when facing art. To identify an artwork as “baroque” or “modernist” is a useful, if very tentative way of identifying its place in history.
If all our experience and learning, both sensory and conceptual, has brought us (the world) to its present situation, then will learning still more along the same lines lead to a remedy? Or should we learn in a different way, as if occupying a different self?