Jordan Stein’s Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada & Other Pieces

By Maymanah Farhat

MAY 2022 | Art Books

This takes the idea of an artwork that has gone from creation, to destruction, to reanimation as the premise for a book that offers a much-needed glimpse into the ecology of the Bay Area art scene. It presents a template for how documentation and analysis can be used to honor the region’s idiosyncratic art making practices.

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By Bianca Stone

MARCH 2022 | Poetry

Bianca Stone is author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014); the children’s book A Little Called Pauline, with text by Gertrude Stein, (Penny Candy Books, 2020). Her newest poetry collection is What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022). She teaches poetry and hosts a podcast as Creative Director at the Ruth Stone House in Vermont.

How to Get Free of the Rectangle

By Louis Block

MAY 2022 | ArtSeen

Absent any punctuation, How to Get Free of the Rectangle reads as a directive. Decades ago, it might have been a longing question, but now painting’s rectangle has been bent, torn, re-sewn, and looped in on itself, so it might be easy to scoff at the premise and how far removed it is from the radical. But this modest survey accomplishes a small miracle: it justifies painting’s bullish intrusions into other mediums.

Abigail Susik’s Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work

By Joseph Nechvatal

MARCH 2022 | Art Books

Binding Surrealist automatism to workplace sabotage, the book raises issues for deliberation that benefit opportunities to review the premise of the life-as-art/art-as-luxury-lifestyle aspiration as nothing more than a consumerist enterprise equipped with cloaking theoretical elements that have artfully ducked anti-capitalist and anti-art critical postures. This fever-dream history of subversion as sex machine invites you into a contemplation of your intimate erotic life, put in relationship to its oppression.