It all comes down to faith. “There has always been a devotional cast to Ms. Rapson’s art” (Holland Cotter).

Looking like some mongrel mix of Lettrisme recalling Raymond Lull, more formal than abnormal, Walter Sipser’s pen and soft lead opaque icons pose convincingly as prints but are instead hand drawn. Before apprenticing himself to encryption, did he plan to lay siege to the city of Richmond?

quizzed Matvei Yankelevich (Yank-e-LAY-vich), star and Tsar of Ugly Duckling Presse, early into UDP’s month-long March NYC onslaught, which featured an exhibition of past publications, projects, film, and historical ephemera at PS1, the Octopus Books release of his own Boris by the Sea, and over a dozen performances and poetry readings spanning citywide venues from the Invisible Dog to St. Mark’s Bookshop.

Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle has been published in poetry journals as diverse as Boog City and The Boston Review, including Fence, Verse, Purple, Jacket, and Action Yes, among others. He is the editor of Dear Bear, the author of one book of poetry, Nuit Maudit, and of the paranormal detective thriller Kook! His film credits include Tremors, Finding Forrester, and Our City Dreams.

Now, Marcel Duchamp “made” but one readymade when in Argentina during 1919. This, near as immaterial as Archimboldi.

Fuck the Furries. This show goes one better. If the Furries were sexual misfits who couldn’t cuddle up (or “yiff”) without first dressing up as foxes, raccoons, rabbits and bears, converting whole hotels into dens and lairs for their unconventional conventions, prosthetic artist Yuukyuusai here trades her original face for a second nature.

Rimbaud’s vision did not fail once he abandoned poetry and Paris. In Harar, he planned a railroad for North Africa, even surveying its route.

he Brooklyn Rail has broadened its map and its definition. Once designating solely the L and G trains it now runs west to burgeoning Chelsea, and includes the JMZ to Bushwick. Beyond the trains, it means also to rail against the foe, affords a balustrade on which to lean when staring into hell below—and stands as the one sure hold we seize in heavy weather.

In 1968 Jasper Johns silkscreened the title and blank facing page of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets to his painting Screen Piece Number 3. The painting is a masterpiece of radical reserve, exigency, and untamed elemental elegance. The poetry too was a provocation, one the wilder for its recklessness kept in check by rigor. Note the date.

The eternal return of the same is not metaphysics; it’s an aesthetic! The obsessive-compulsive busies herself frantically to insure that nothing happens, furiously weaving nets to bind trauma. That “trauma” is real life. Shock, lack, and the abyssal wail remain in force then wrest control, but such discord is not well captured by mere fracture.

Lucretius thought that pictures flew through the air on films, alighting on our eyes to grant us vision. When asked about the primacy of perception, materials, or space, Do-Ho Suh asserts “The image is always first.” Further, he maintains, “I have a desire to create my piece without any material.”

There is a spidered but unbroken vein feeding cannibals (Yes, I said that) into Concrete Art, snaking through the 20^th century from the deepest reaches of the Amazon River in Brazil.

The subliminal image disappears below our conscious threshold, losing none of its effect, surreptitiously perhaps even gaining power. Used in mainstream 1950’s films to stimulate the audience’s appetite for candy, a discrepant image hides inside a stream of images similar to themselves.

A one-second film composed of 24 hand-lettered frames bearing versions of the artist’s signature M.B. shown at 24 frames per second.

While many lament the dubious quotas, super-size-me scale, showboat marquees and recycled red carpet art stars unwholesomely coupling with the hydra of bureaucratic curatorial diplomacy that clog, clot, and clumsily commandeer today’s more than 200 international biennalés, few have devised as covert an alternative as has Lori Der Hagopian with her Strange Bird Productions.

Susan Bee’s paintings are a savage mix of Expressionism and Pop schadenfreude populated by cut-and-paste pictures. She has had four explosive solo shows at the artist-run A.I.R. Gallery, where she will show again next year. (Founded in 1972, A.I.R. was the first women artists’ co-op in the U.S.) G

What does a man taking a different drug every day for a week while drifting through Copenhagen in 1996 have to do with 500 men using shovels to move a mountain of sand just four inches outside Lima in 2002?

The title of Pedro Reyes’ first New York solo show, _Principles of Social Topology, _ refers to the work of German social scientist Kurt Lewin, founder of a psychological typology known as Field Theory. A “field” is defined as “the totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent.”

What signals the advent of the Sublime for Kant is awe: dread wonder at the sheer power of beauty or terror in Nature. While this experience exalts the soul, even the moral character of the beholder, it is absorbed in degrees, like the stages of a perilous initiation.

The praying mantis plays dead to avert destruction…

How many home movies do we need of some wide-eyed wannabe’s pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s Pére Lachaise grave? In _The Abandonments, six new, regrettable, fortunately forgettable, video shorts looking like unclaimed footage flooding a tourists’ fast photo developer’s bin, Slater Bradley brings his butter knife to a gunfight.

In 1970, John Baldessari cremated all his paintings, baking some of the ashes into cookies. Documented as a cutoff point in his career by the photo piece “The Cremation Project,” included in his Ways of Seeing exhibit now at the Hirshhorn, Baldessari has since strictly sought to keep his hand out of painting by imposing counterintuitive constraints such as hiring sign painters to execute his artworks.

Friend or foe? Freud maintained that the uncanny is a mere change of light: that minimal, immaterial difference detectable in your girlfriend after she’s been replicated by invading body snatchers. The Dark Side is but alien malevolence hidden behind what’s most familiar.

Outré art’s an inside job. Can there still be any doubt? Bad boy/bete noir Mike Kelley is showing in Paris at both the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou simultaneously. A product of Cal Arts, Valencia’s prestigious “post-avant” art program, Kelley now teaches at the Art Center in L.A. While reaping undeniably heavy street cred for the extended summer vacation he took between graduate school and his first teaching job.

Four new artworks by Cai Guo-Qiang are now being exhibited on—and above—the Cantor Roof Garden at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 29, 2006. Bringing even the sky into play, “Clear Sky Black Cloud,” three successive explosions each releasing a dark smoke-cloud, will appear over Central Park six days a week at noon for the next six months.

Conceived and directed by performance artist Joan Jonas with original piano score by Jason Moran, the central narrative focus of The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is the unprecedented life and work of art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929).

The high risks and rewards of an uncurbed passion for nearly impossible art.

Lame sisters rake heat into blisters.