Poetry
FOUR
from Portraits of the Artists as Their Own Subjects
Contributor
Mike LalaMike Lala is the author of Exit Theater, winner of the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and the chapbooks In the Gun Cabinet and Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama (2016). Other works include the libretto for Oedipus in the District (OperaComp, The Juilliard School and National Sawdust, 2018) and Infinite Odyssey (Pioneer Works/Contemporary Temporary: Sound Works and Music, 2017; Patient Presses, 2019). He lives in New York. www.mikelala.com
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
79. (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Columbia County)
NOV 2021 | The Miraculous
An artist in his mid-30s living in New York and working in a 300-square-foot studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds himself consumed by frustration and anger. Although he is having exhibitions, after the shows close his paintings inevitably return to his studio, unsold. He’s not sure he wants to go on being an artist. A psychiatrist he consults helps him to understand that his anger revolves around his feelings about race, class and entitlement. Eventually the psychiatrist recommends that he begin working with a physical trainer, who has him start boxing and working out with a punching bag. Around the same time the artist, who is half-Choctaw and half-Cherokee, has been meeting with traditional Native American artists who tell him how the practices of dancing, drumming and beading have saved their lives. These experiences lead him to make a breakthrough in his work. Instead of focusing on painting, he begins to adorn Everlast vinyl punching bags like those he has been using at the boxing gym in extravagant styles inspired by Native American beadwork, pop culture, and everyday life. Along with beads, he adds tassels, sequins, brass and steel studs, yarn, chains, and sundry items. Some of the bags feature beaded texts quoting everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Public Enemy.
Artists and Writers
By Brandt JunceauJUNE 2020 | Critics Page
Authors say that writing sometimes writes itself, notably when their characters seem to speak out in their own voice. Visual artists claim a pristine silence for their own, which they prize, eye and hand alone together gladly, no words. The word that breaks that silence is often recriminatory, and resented. It came upon a scene uninvited, that should not have been witnessed. Words, they say, compromise sight, and the silent work of the eye.
Brooklyn 2020
By Steven TaylorDEC 20-JAN 21 | Poetry
Steven Taylor is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn. His latest works are Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, from Three Rooms Press, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from Ace Records.
Dara Birnbaum’s Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On/Deal With)
By Jennie WaldowDEC 21-JAN 22 | Art Books
Materially detached from Birnbaum’s finished products, her working documents chart the theoretical motivations behind each piece, along with the novel technical solutions she devised to translate thorny concepts into external space. While this is not a publication for the casual reader, its complexity and resolute physical presence dovetail with the concerns of Birnbaum’s body of work, linking means and ends.
