92. Fort Greene

The MiraculousMarch 2022New York

Two young artists, one of whom has traveled by subway from his home in Manhattan, are in a small one-room Brooklyn apartment writing a dialogue on a typewriter. While one of them is typing, the other sits on a bed, waiting for his turn. They have been composing dialogues in this manner for nearly a year, creating a dozen texts on the subjects that interest them: sculpture, photography, poetry, film, painting etc. After finishing the final dialogue, the artist who has come from Manhattan makes his way back to the nearest subway station, a journey that takes him through Fort Greene Park. It is softly snowing. As he walks through the park, he notices a man improvising on a saxophone. When, 15 years later, he learns the identity of this musician, he wonders if his appearance that wintry evening in 1963 was the result of a convergence “secretly prepared” by his and his friend’s many evenings at the typewriter.

(Carl Andre, Hollis Frampton, Sonny Rollins)

Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.