Publisher's Message
A Note to Our Readers
When the artist Shoja Azari visited the Brooklyn Rail’s headquarters and my studio in Greenpoint this past August, right after a flash flood claimed 20 percent of my recent work, he half-jokingly suggested that I call my forthcoming exhibition After the Flood. How poignant and prophetic. Work According to the Rail, Part I: After the Flood opened at Showroom Gallery on Sunday evening, October 29, the night before Hurricane Sandy’s arrival. Instead of postponing, we rescheduled the opening at the last minute to accommodate the imminent suspension of all public transit; poet Bob Holman called this “such a New Yorker thing to do.”
The next night Sandy’s assault destroyed the bulk of my work from the last 25 years, as well as most of the Rail’s selected archives. The water in our studio/storage space surged over six feet; many of our neighbors also experienced devastating losses to both their artwork and livelihood. New York’s atmosphere is somber right now. We at the Rail wish to commemorate those who have lost their lives and send our heartfelt condolences to all those who have suffered in the wake of the storm. On a personal note, I am grateful to our remarkable staff for their heroic effort during a difficult time. I also want to express deep gratitude to our neighbors Anibal Farran, Matthew Williams, Katherine Fitch, Marion LeCognic, Joe Mitner, and Stella Lee Prowse, whose amazing support helped to salvage some of the work.
New Yorkers weathered 9/11, and I myself survived the war and labor camp in Vietnam. I believe we will all rise above this time with a greater purpose in life and art.
Avanti,
Phong Bui
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Glitching Time and Time-Based Media
By Charlotte KentOCT 2022 | Art and Technology
Time is a socio-technological system with profound organizing qualities that feels, these days, exceedingly oppressive. There’s never enough time! For anything. Calendars are the earliest containing device with the purpose of determining a social order; the history of the Roman calendar reveals the role of international and national politics that play out across each new temporal infrastructure. Our temporal orders have been designed through the global proclamation of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 by colonial empires, the apocalyptic anxiety provocations of the doomsday clock established in 1947, the insistent instant-ness of digital time since the 1970s exacerbated by strings of video chat meetings of the last couple years, and the frenetic branding of our social/professional lives demanded by transnational corporate technology’s mediation of everyone and everything, all the time. It’s a mess.
Estefania Velez Rodriguez: Time’s Passage is probably an Illusion
By Robert R. ShaneSEPT 2021 | ArtSeen
We feel disorientation and ecstasy as we enter Estefania Velez Rodriguez’s large-scale landscapes in Time’s Passage is probably an Illusion. Illuminated by fluorescent oil and spray paint, the pattern-rich paintings strip away the surface of the natural world to reveal the inner life of nature and of the artist.
A Time of One’s Own: The Struggle Against One-sided Narratives of History
By Malala AndrialavidrazanaSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
The relationship to time escapes me regularly, and vice versa, due to a chronic desynchronization—an incompatibility of cruising speeds, even—that I experience in my ordinary quotidian life and in my artistic practice. Moreover, the gap between the measurement and the evaluation of time varies significantly according to cultures, eras, and perspectives, and is also reflected in elements of language and in current prejudices that consist, in particular, of praising the strong allure of the great powers as opposed to celebrating slowness.
Editor’s Note
MARCH 2021 | Fiction
This month, we bring you two works that explore the isolating effects of grief. In her short story “To the Sea,” Sharon Adarlo uses magical realism to explore the way a tragic event can change us. The protagonist at the center is so consumed by her grief after the death of her child that she must endure a kind of supernatural growth to overcome it. Beatriz Bracher structures novels—Antonio is the second of her four novels to be translated into English and published by New Directions—around the peculiarities of narrative: uncertain recollections, overlooked characters, and crucial details hidden in plain sight. This novel’s central character, Benjamim, father to the titular Antonio, seeks the details of his own father’s life. But rather than follow Benjamim on the case, we're reading the fragments he collects. As readers, we’re substitute-detectives sorting through the accounts of three narrators and pinning our own red thread to the evidence.
