from Take What You Need

By Idra Novey

MARCH 2023 | Fiction

Deep in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a sixty-six year old woman named Jean welds scrap metal into massive sculptures. These works, which she dubs her “Manglements,” assert themselves into the foreground of the story with the same haunting force of Louise Bourgeois’s works—which makes sense given that Bourgeois is Jean’s greatest influence and the central source of reflection on the artistic impulse in Idra Novey’s superb new novel, Take What You Need. Amid the sawdust and machine oil, there’s a whiff of distrust. The novel deeply examines the intersection of art and trust, which is a central, if quiet, conversation often overlooked in the sensationalist depictions of art monsters in contemporary fiction. Novey relates an outsider artist’s life, and her step-daughter’s reckoning with that life, with resonance and connection to the broader world beyond the workshop.

Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running

By Bryan Martin

MAY 2022 | ArtSeen

In his act of filming, Mekas meticulously captured the poetry of the everyday as he experienced it—springtime flowering bulbs, intimate weddings, dinner with friends, or a sunset on the beach. Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running at The Jewish Museum situates the artist’s displacement as the impulse for his lifelong search for joy through the camera’s lens in a moving, nuanced, and topical presentation of Mekas’s work.

François-Marie Banier: Writings & Pictures

By Ann C. Collins

MARCH 2023 | ArtSeen

Francois-Marie Banier’s Writings & Pictures, a small yet ebullient sampling of nearly sixty years of artmaking, provides a snapshot of an artist’s practice that is as unconstrained as it is prolific. Persistently following inspiration and impulse, Banier refuses categorization and has worked in whichever collisions of medium and style best serve his continuous need to create.

Bat-Ami Rivlin: No Can Do

By Nicholas Heskes

APRIL 2021 | ArtSeen

Rivlin abandons the impulse to make unlikely or surprising combinations of things convey a message, or play a role, if even a small one. The sculptures rather act out on their own, bringing attention to a permanent wound they share, not broken, repurposed, or fixed, but indefinitely repairable.