How Theater Failed America
The Last Cargo Cult
Mike Daisey at Victory Gardens April 26–May 9, 2010
Ira S. Murfin
Although the form, presentation, and structure of Mike Daisey’s monologue double-header, How Theater Failed America and The Last Cargo Cult resembles the talk performance of Spalding Gray and the other confessional first person performers who rose to popularity in [...]
Joel Kuennen
I went to Ryan Dunn’s studio and home at Enemy Gallery on Milwaukee Ave. In Chicago earlier this week to have a chat about sound art. As some may know, Enemy is located next to the blue line tracks and as I conducted this interview with Dunn, noise musician, sound and performance artist, I [...]
Max E. Katz
On July 22nd, the carcass of a lion’s mane jellyfish washed ashore a New Hampshire beach. The jellyfish’s detached tentacles still managed to sting swimmers, evacuating the beach and sending four to the emergency room. The dead thing stings.
Clement Greenberg died sixteen years ago, already a relic. But death does not deter Greenberg’s [...]
In Desire We Trust
The Artless Drawing: Neil Denari, 1982-1996
Ace Gallery / Los Angeles
Mike Yong
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In 1982, after graduating from the GSD at Harvard, interning at Airbus, and taking a job at Polshek in New York, the architect Neil Denari began to initiate his own design projects under the name Cor-Tex. Cor-Tex had the following mission statement:
Through [...]
Joel Kuennen
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At the Onset of the 21st Century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and [...]
Mike Yong
Bravado, nihilism, and emptiness mark the work of Robert Somol, an architectural theorist who has paradoxically made a career of undermining architectural theory’s hold on architecture. While Somol is styled as a theoretician, his work never rises above what can only be called the sloppy and superficial use of jargon. He once celebrated, for [...]
James Moskovic
Question: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think that is?
Answer: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some…people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like [...]
Bret Schneider
A cursory flip through the many websites featuring new media online often shows a widespread use of the gradient. Taking many forms – from multimedia collage, to Adobe Illustrator-style drawing, to plexiglass sculpture, photographic tableau, and many more – the gradient is a common material choice in a vast sum of new work. At [...]
Bret Schneider
Carsten Nicolai is at least equally renowned for his sound work as he is for visual work. Making minimalist digital music under the moniker Alva Noto, Nicolai has been a central figure in electronic music’s shift from dance music towards glitchy computer-based sound art. In the mid 90’s he started the Raster-Noton label with [...]
Bret Schneider
‘Formal’ has transfigured into a pejorative term when used to describe an art work today. Amidst the proliferation of social art, post-conceptual research projects, identity politic art, and general obsessions with trying to communicate meaning to the viewer, a purely ‘formal’ art work is often perceived as a relic interest of the past. Traditionally [...]
Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and editor of the book Manifestos: A Century of Isms that surveys literary manifestos of the twentieth century. When prompted for her favorite quote from any manifesto, she replied, “We are all presidents of Dada,” because it [...]
Bret Schneider
For some reason it is common among films portraying genius to aestheticize their intellectual process by showing the protagonist writing on glass, mirror, or other reflective surfaces. In Good Will Hunting the film opens with the solitary genius writing abstract mathematical formulae on mirror, with few other objects in sight. A man and his [...]
originally published in the Platypus Review, Issue 16, 2009
Bret Schneider
THE AESTHETIC experience of drone music is not just aesthetically defined, but socially and historically located. The significance of this location is especially intriguing when concealed in a music legacy that aims exclusively at the purely metaphysical presentation of sound – a music intent upon expelling [...]
Persian Electronic Music, Yesterday & Today 1966-2006
Sub Rosa
Bret Schneider
The double-disc Persian Electronic Music; Yesterday and Today 1966-2006 is yet another unearthing from the prolific archives of electronic music from the latter half of the 20th century. As such, these excavations often interrogate the developments of avant-garde music as it developed within a particular [...]
Bret Schneider
The reconstitution of the avant-garde in the postwar era was fraught with confusion over purpose, and guilt with picking up avant-gardism after the Holocaust. When Theodor Adorno suggested that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, he was speaking for an entire generation of artists, writers, and composers who felt the same paralysis, [...]