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Local In Conversation

Bucking Brooklyn’s Machine
LINCOLN RESTLER with Williams Cole

Lincoln Restler, a district leader in North Brooklyn, strikes one as a go-getting and earnest young man with an objective. I encountered him in person in July as he was going door to door on my block in Williamsburg asking people, “What issues are important to you?”

The Strange Case of Charles Taylor

By Nicholas Jahr

“My name is Dankpannah Dr. Charles Ghankay Taylor, the 21st President of the Republic of Liberia.” Taylor’s first words on the witness stand, seemingly a statement of the simplest facts, already hinted at his country’s tortured past.

OCCUPY and 350.ORG—You Come Down Here and Embrace!

By Reverend Billy

Occupy’s activist energy is a renewable resource.

Art In Conversation

DAN GRAHAM with Carlos Brillembourg

Carlos Brillembourg and Dan Graham spoke at length about contemporary architecture, Graham’s deep knowledge of which comes from his reading of the complex history of modern architecture and the subtle interconnections between different architects, their lives and the cities where they worked.

Art In Conversation

HOLLY ZAUSNER with Raphael Rubinstein

A few days before Holly Zausner’s exhibition of recent collages and film opened at Postmasters (June 21 – August 3), Raphael Rubinstein visited the artist in her New York studio to talk about her work across various media and why she decided to title the show A Small Criminal Enterprise.

Art In Conversation

BLESS with Barry Schwabsky

On the occasion of the current exhibition Fashioning the Object: Bless, Boudicca, Sandra Backlund at the Art Institute of Chicago, Barry Schwabsky met with Bless, the design team of Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag to discuss clothes, life, collaboration, and art.

Art In Conversation

JOAN SIMON with Anne Sherwood Pundyk

Joan Simon has worked as a writer, editor, and curator over the past 30 years. Of her approach to researching subjects, Simon observes, “I take a bath in it. Get immersed in it. And then see, feel, sense, think about, what’s there, the details as well as emerging patterns, and follow-up with further research.”

Suggestions for Summer Reading: Unspeakable Origins

By Robert Hullot-Kentor

This year, our third, we have directed the gaze of our contributors more inwardly still and asked each to divulge author and title of five books remembered as having once been decisively “most important,” but of which our contributors could never ever bear to again read a page. This, no doubt, is to date and by far our most Introspective List.

Absolutely-Too-Much

By Simon Critchley

Contemporary art is an easy thing to hate. All the meaningless hype, the identikit openings in cities that blur into one long, banal, Beck’s beer fuelled anxiety dream from which there is no escape.

Theater In Dialogue

Music is her Muse: Quiara Alegría Hudes and her Path to the Pulitzer

By Marcus Gardley

Quiara Alegría Hudes writes from the music in her bones. Her work, which delves deeply into notions about family ties, war, love, joy, and despair are all exemplary excavations into the mind of a poet-musician-playwright whose craftsmanship is as profound as her skill for lyricism and whose passion for writing is as infectious as her radiant laughter.

PASTORAL: Emmanuel Gras’s Bovines at Rooftop Films

By Daniel Walber

Simply put, Bovines is an hour of cows. Much of the production consisted of Gras and his camera alone among the stoic beasts, who seem to have barely even noticed their intrusion.

Cecil Taylor, Home At Last

By George Grella

December 1989, sitting next to my best friend at the time, young men drawn to exciting and daring artistic ambitions that we couldn’t quite understand. We’re in Town Hall, witnessing Cecil Taylor and Max Roach playing a concert celebrating the ten-year anniversary of their historic live recording at the Miller Theatre.

InTranslation

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Editor's Message Guest Critic

What’s New?

By Elizabeth C. Baker

Formal innovation as a prerequisite for serious, ambitious art prevailed into the late 20th century. Today, innovation is no longer an issue of central concern.

ArtSeen

Table of Contents

Editor's Message

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JUL-AUG 2012

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