Editor's Message
A Self-Evident Truth
“For milk to become yogurt, it needs culture.”
—Willem de Kooning
In Germany, under Hitler’s regime, artistic expression was banished as a form of Bolshevism. In Russia, under Stalin, it was denounced as “bourgeoius cosmopolitanism”. In mid-50s America, Abstract Expressionists met with aggressive censorship by members of the House Un-American Activities Committee. More recently, in October of 1999, Rudy Giuliani threatened to cut off city funding for the Brooklyn Museum because he deemed a painting in one of its shows to be “offensive.” And last month, Governor George Pataki issued highly publicized threats against the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center for their display of “anti-American art.”
History has not been kind to those who attack the creative spirit. Nor should it be. Freedom of expression is our birthright as Americans. And so we dedicate this issue to all our comrades in this genuinely patriotic “war for freedom.” All of us here at the Rail wish you a great summer!
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Partial Reveals & Inclusive Revelations in the Post-Truth Simulacracy: The Poetics
By Chris CampanioniJUL-AUG 2020 | Books
The Poetics is interested in exactly this conjunction, and Ives questions both the narrative of history and the history of narrative as a form in elaborate, strident observations that are illuminating and speculative.
The Regime is Female
By Alexis SpiegelNOV 2019 | Theater
Who said to kill all* the men? [*almost all] The answer to that question stays ominously unanswered in Sarah Elizabeth Grace's new play The Regime is Female, but we get a mounting sense that the eradication of nearly all the white men happened quickly, without “feminist” consensus and perhaps as non-intersectionally as other women's movements have been enacted historically in The United States.
Barbara Happe and Martin S. Fischer's The Auerbach House by Walter Gropius with Adolf Meyer
By Morgan RidlerDEC 19-JAN 20 | Art Books
Edited by the house’s current owners, the new edition advances the earlier publication’s argument that the rather little-known Auerbach House was crucial to the development of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus style. This edition of the book improves the quality of the wall painting images and utilizes recent scholarly work to update the analysis of the book.
Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House
By James W. FuerstOCT 2019 | Books
The subject matter of her memoir, however, is vastly different: it centers on the passionate same-sex relationship between the author in her mid-twenties and another young woman that quickly turned sour and became abusive. The eponymous Dream House, the author informs us, is neither a Hollywood set nor a narrative prop, but rather an actual place—the idyllic-seeming home that Machado and her lover shared in Bloomington, Indiana—as well as a “haunted house” where “metaphors abound.”
