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DONALD JUDD: 1971 Poster

On the occasion of the Rail’s fifteenth anniversary, we are pleased to introduce Verbatim, a new monthly page featuring selected primary sources preserved within small, independent archival repositories.

THE HELD ESSAYS ON VISUAL ART
Malthus Und Der Maler

By Michael O’Hare

Artists need some idea of what members of their public bring to the encounter with their work. A conventional “canon” of “stuff most educated people have probably encountered most of,” is essential for art to work, because figures and grounds are complements.

RICHARD LONG Crescent to Cross

By Ann McCoy

Entering the main gallery of Sperone Westwater, the viewer is dwarfed by Red Gravity (2015), a stunning, two-story-high, circular red clay drawing filling the height and width of the main wall. A suspended glass balcony allows the viewer to see the top half, which enhances the work’s scale.

Please Return

By Charlotte Slivka

I’m supposed to be writing about archives for Charles Duncan. This will force me to revisit my dissertation on stuff. No, I have never written a dissertation on stuff, but I could.

The Great Denial

By Taney Roniger

As its title suggests, the subject of Charlene Spretnak’s most recent book is the long history of artists’ engagement with the spiritual dimension throughout the trajectory of modern art.

Trans-Europe Exotic

By Marshall Yarbrough

Future Days, David Stubbs’s excellent Krautrock compendium, confronts readers in the U.S. with two distinctly foreign qualities.

Film In Conversation

ZHAO LIANG with Lu Yangqiao

Chinese documentary filmmaker Zhao Liang is mostly associated with brave and heartwrenching cinema that illuminates marginal lives in China. The images of artists being unreasonably evicted as illegitimate residents (Farewell Yuanmingyuan (1995)), abusive border police violently torturing ordinary citizens (Crime and Punishment (2007)), and petitioners getting sent to mental institutions for simply confronting the government (Petition (2009)) stand in stark contrast to the Chinese mainstream media’s negligence and elimination of this social landscape.

Three

By Uche Nduka

Uche Nduka is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, collagist. He is the author of 10 volumes of poetry of which the most recent are If Only The Night, eel on reef, Ijele, and Nine East. He presently lives in New York City and teaches at CUNY.

InTranslation

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From the Publisher & Artistic Director

Dear Readers and Friends,

By Phong Bui

I remember watching Alfred Leslie’s Pull my Daisy in my sophomore year of college and wishing that, one day, I would live the life of an artist with friends like his—fellow artists, writers, poets, dancers, composers, even art dealers (Richard Bellamy, who appeared in the film, was beloved by many artists).

Editor's Message Guest Critic

Visual Arts Archives and Artists’ Legacies

By Charles Duncan

Archives and their relationships to artists’ legacies are fascinatingly dense. “The archive” denotes both a theoretical construct and an actual collection of information types, be they physical or virtual. In the domain of the visual arts, archival collections had, until recently, largely been defined as conglomerations of documentation about works of art, their creators, and the contexts in which both are actualized.

Critics Page

ArtSeen

Table of Contents

Editor's Message

Publisher's Message

Art

ArtSeen

Critics Page

Books

Music

Dance

Film

Theater

Fiction

Poetry

  • Three

    – By Uche Nduka

  • Six

    – By Kostas Anagnopoulos

  • Two

    – By Trace Peterson

  • Six

    – By Susan M. Schultz

  • Five

    – By Tom Savage and Bill Kushner

Verbatim

Art Books

Field Notes

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The Brooklyn Rail

OCT 2015

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