The Brooklyn Rail

For this Critics Page, I have invited contributors to reflect on practice beyond the horizon of the individual artwork, as a shifting composite of behaviors, procedures, and conventions that enables work to happen.

The new generation of artists that emerged in the late fifties/early sixties did not wait for the seventy-six-year-old Marcel Duchamp to be given his first museum exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 to be—or so the story goes—under his influence. Yet the wobbly concept of influence seems inadequate to account for such sudden efflorescence. How would you personally account for it? Do you think that the current MoMA exhibition will—or should—significantly change our critical perception of Duchamp’s work?

This month’s Critics Page features eighteen poets and visual artists responding to a call for hybrid poems that place poetry and image in generative encounters. Together, they blur the boundary between the read and the seen, joining each—text and image—into a sum greater than their individual parts.

This seemingly straightforward question opens into a larger project—not to pin the term down with a definition, but to let it unfold. What fascinated us was its ambivalence: its uses, misuses, histories, politicization, trends, and the ways it has been claimed to hold power—or to hold on to a dream, often defining positions that came to capture the zeitgeist of their era.