Carter Ratcliff

Carter Ratcliff is a poet and art critic who lives and works in Hudson, New York.

The Capa Space, an exhibition venue in Yorktown, New York, is currently showing a selection of Taro’s photographs. Some are grim. Two Republican soldiers carry a third, wounded soldier on a stretcher. A dense crowd waits at the entrance to the morgue in Valencia, hoping for a chance to enter and of course hoping not to find family members and friends there. 

Gerda Taro, Air raid victim in hospital, Valencia, 1937. Gelatin silver, 7 × 9 1/4 inches. Courtesy the Capa Space.

Qui dentro/in here, the Lucio Pozzi exhibition at Magazzino Italian Art, in Cold Spring, New York, is among the season’s most important.

Lucio Pozzi, Untitled, 2002. Acrylic on plywood. 30 x 9 x 2 inches (variable). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art.

In 1968, I began to publish poems in The World, the Poetry Project’s magazine, and in the scene’s many other mags. During that year, I wrote make-believe versions of various things, including the short gallery reviews in the back of ARTnews. By the end of 1969, I was writing those reviews in earnest, though my “real” reviews weren’t all that different from my parodies.

I was impressed and a bit daunted by the inaugural exhibition at The Campus—works by over eighty artists, nearly all of them represented by the six Manhattan galleries that banded together to purchase the venue, an abandoned high school in Claverack, New York.

Installation view: 2024 Inaugural Exhibition, The Campus, Hudson, NY, 2024. © Lara Schnitger; Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. © Trenton Doyle Hancock; Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. © Dianna Molzan, Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto, New York. © Gabriel Orozco; Courtesy the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York. Photo: Guang Xu.
How does architecture bring us closer to utopia? Most architects don’t address this question. They’re too busy being professional. Yet the question nags some architects, or so I gathered from Pamphlet Architecture: Visions and Experiments in Architecture, an exhibition on view last October at ‘T’ Space, a building in the wooded hills near Rhinebeck, New York.
Installation view: Pamphlet Architecture, 'T' Space, Rhinebeck, NY, 2022. Courtesy 'T' Space.
In 1993, Robert Mapplethorpe gave the Guggenheim nearly 200 of his photographs, a gift the museum credits with launching its photography program. Last January, it opened Implicit Tensions, a survey of Mapplethorpe’s career. Part Two of the exhibition opened half a year later with a small selection of his prints and work by half a dozen artists who have, in various ways, responded to his imagery.
Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (detail), 1991–93. 91 offset prints and 78 text panels. © Glenn Ligon and all Mapplethorpe images © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission. Photo: David Heald, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Ariane Lopez-Huici takes many of her photographs in the studio, yet it wouldn’t be quite right to call her a studio photographer. Her oeuvre includes photographs taken on trips to Mali with her husband, the sculptor Alain Kirili, and a new series of images that emerged from their recent trip to Angkor Wat, in Cambodia.
Portrait of Ariane Lopez-Huici. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Based on a photo by Alain Kirili.
In Chapter 42 of Moby Dick, Ishmael arrives by apprehensive steps at a disquieting thought: “the whiteness of the whale” makes tangible the deathly void that lurks beneath the world’s appearances.
Both Vincent Katz and Carter Ratcliff have recently published new books: Katz’s Swimming Home (Nightboat Books) in May, and Ratcliff’s Tequila Mockingbird (Barrytown/Station Hill Press) in June. The two interviewed one another for the Rail on the subjects of poetry, novels, the audience, and the point of writing in the first place.
VINCENT KATZ & CARTER RATCLIFF
Simón Bolívar once said that all who serve the revolution plow the sea. The Surrealists, who presumed to teach the unconscious to be revolutionary, sailed the surface of a placid lake. For they had no sense of the unconscious, no feel for it.
Ariane Lopez-Huici is a photographer. Alain Kirili is a sculptor. Whether he makes them from solid chunks of iron or airy swirls of wire, his works are volumetric. Hers, of course, are flat. His are abstract, hers are figurative. As artists, then, they have nothing in common—nothing but their subject, which is the human body, and that gives them everything in common.
Ariane Lopez Huici, "Aviva," 1996. Silver gelatin print. Courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France.
Long ago, Willem de Kooning and John Cage were sitting in one of the downtown cafeterias that New York artists used to frequent. Throwing a couple of packets of sugar on the table, Cage said, “This could be art.” De Kooning’s reply: “No it couldn’t.”
Portrait of the artist. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
Floating in this blue panorama are forms that look like chunks of limestone, though some look more like clouds hit hard by sunlight. Of course, this is just a first impression. The second impression is of forms that are neither clouds nor stones but unique to this setting and, for all their differences, united by a family resemblance.
Jim Holl, "Low Lying Clouds 7.15.10." Courtesy the artist.
Thanks for having me over the other day to look at your new paintings. It’s a great place! Not very many painters have an oblique view of the river to the west and in other directions a sky filled with high-rise buildings.
Martin Mullin, "Strata," 2012. Oil on linen. 46 x 48". Courtesy of the artist.

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