Tag
Visual Culture
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Lauren Redniss on the Art of Dance
“The discipline and certain ideas from dance have stuck with me and inform more or less everything I’ve done ever since.”
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Let Us Now See Climate Change
How can we learn to see climate change around us? What would it really look like for climate change to come into our homes and lives? It used to be that climate …
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The Art of (Not Forgetting) War
Many of the images in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit World War I and the Visual Arts depict the war in such violent detail that their authors …
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If You Give an Adult a Coloring Book
What, exactly, makes a coloring book a coloring book for adults? Where are the lines that define this genre, and how can grown-ups make sure they are coloring securely (and maturely) inside them? Those questions nag at the margins of a recent blurb in the New York Times heralding the publication of two highly anticipated…
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Josef Albers in the iPad Era
In a crisp white shirt, his right knee on the floor, famed former Bauhaus instructor and future head of Yale University’s department of design Josef Albers holds a half-smoked cigarette in one hand and a color swatch in the other. He is demonstrating to a class of students at Black Mountain College the precarious principles…
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In Praise of Pulp
Like so many other once-disreputable cultural forms before them, comics over the past several decades have gradually shed many of their debased associations to become a respected aesthetic practice. It’s a familiar dynamic, as that which is first scorned as a low-minded entertainment for degenerates is then rehabilitated as worthy art. Think of the novel;…
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Urban Park Poetics: Summer in Marcus Garvey Park
For city dwellers, summer is park season. Warm weather draws people out of their homes, onto the streets, and, if they’re lucky, into a nearby park to enjoy recreation of all kinds (eating, napping, fishing, swimming, texting, Pokémon catching, furtive sex, sunbathing, people watching). We imagine public parks as democratic spaces par excellence, offering “relief…
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Rembrandt
Just outside Amsterdam there lives an old, well-known, and respected Dutch painter. He has worked hard throughout his life—but he has only produced, as far as the world knows, a few drawings and one large canvas which is in the National Museum. I went to see his second major work, a triptych of the war.…
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Pornography Porn
In the fall of 1990, at the beginning of my senior year of college, I became obsessed with pornography—or, rather, I became obsessed with the feminist debates about it. From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, pornography, along with sex work, butch-femme, and S/M, divided the feminist community, leading to public debates, legal battles,…
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The Price of Great Art
When someone who made good art is accused of being a Bad Mother, can she ever be remembered as anything but a Bad Mother? In 1992, Mann’s book Immediate Family tapped into collective anxiety …
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When Art Disrupts Life
Since its debut at last year’s Sundance festival, the raucous, gorgeous new feature Tangerine has received plenty of well-deserved praise. It has been called, alternately, a “triumph,” “remarkable,” a “small wonder,” and a “minor miracle.” And yet beneath many of those accolades seems to run a thin current of condescension, a reluctance to take the film completely seriously. The…
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#Normporn
In the penultimate season of 30 Rock (2006–13), the sitcom’s resident kinkmeisters and genderqueer lovers, Jenna and Paul, are faced with a profound sexual crisis: after chatting about their day …
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How Fascism Pushed Women out of the Frame
Italians today tend to draw a firm line between the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime that ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 to 1943 and the Italian Republic that emerged in its wake. The memory of Fascism and its cult of political violence, however, have never ceased to be timely in the Bel Paese, a…
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On Spectacle and Silence
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 1 We sat on the couch together. The burble-voiced sportscasters, the referee’s whistle, “First down and 10.” I was, I am tethered to my father. His fingers…
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Lotte Eisner Needs to Fly
Early in Werner Herzog’s 2006 film Rescue Dawn, German-born American fighter pilot Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale), shot down and held captive by the Vietcong, is given the choice to put his signature to a statement denouncing the war and the “corrupt American political establishment” in exchange for an early release. Dengler refuses, telling…
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Public Picks 2015
Welcome to the third annual edition of Public Picks, a selection of the books and art that most interested and excited our editorial staff over the past year. As with previous years’ Picks (2013, 2014), we aimed for a list that combines the best of the best with more idiosyncratic works that you may have missed. With admiring…
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The Best of 2015
It’s finally spring and we’ve settled comfortably in 2015’s controversies and think pieces, its soundtrack and landscape, its must-sees and many of its premieres and releases. But never fear: There is still so much to live through the year for. Here’s some of the best of what’s come and what still awaits us. Nate Marshall’s…
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Invasion of the Funny Animals
“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny …
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Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned solely with aesthetic quality, the imagination, enjoyment, and so forth. On the other are the partisans of “political art,” for…
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Summer in Snow Country: A Sound and Photo Essay
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Less than two hours from Tokyo Station by bullet train, the village of Osaki is nonetheless a country backwater. The town lies aside narrow Route 291, which snakes and tunnels its way to Yuzawa, the onsen (hot spring)…
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Otherworlds
In the history of modern comics—as in the history of comic’s cousin, film—there have long been two competing impulses. Film history contrasts the styles of two pioneers: the documentary realism of the Lumière brothers and the magical stagecraft of Georges Méliès. In comics, we can find a parallel fork in the road in the pioneering…
