Art Books
Marie Darrieusecq: Being Here is Everything: The Life of Paula M. Becker
By Jessica HolmesThe portrait’s subject, a young woman with a snub nose in three-quarter profile, stares back at her viewer, the wide-set brown eyes direct but inscrutable. Something wry tugs at the corners of her mouth, leaving her with neither a smile nor a frown.
Gregory Sholette: Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism
By Gretchen CoombsIn her foreword to Delirium and Resistance, art critic and activist Lucy Lippard remarks how social media has flattened affect and effect in recent years, and suggests Sholette’s exposition might just be a necessary antidote to this apathy and paralysis.
Stan Brakhage: Metaphors on Vision
By Sadie Rebecca StarnesAvant-garde cinema and modern poetry have long shared the same arable ground. Each measured by its own “feet,” they both move through montage—a technique as common to T.S. Eliot as to Eisenstein. Among the greatest of the kino-poets is Stan Brakhage. Despite his poor eyesight and poverty, the Missouri-born filmmaker pushed his art beyond the apparent, behind the eyelid and the shutter, and on into the “Impossibility of it all.” In a new edition of Brakhage’s philosophy of seeing, Metaphors on Vision, we are reminded of the artist’s seminal innovations—especially of his meter that set the very rhythm of American experimental film for future filmmakers.
Lieko Shiga: Blind Date
By Sophie BarbaschThe title suggests that the subjects are on a blind date, but the real blind date is between the photographer or viewer and the subjects.
