Category: art

AG2024_1100377a

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AG2024_1100377a
Untitled, 2024
Gouache, colored pencil, acrylic, gesso, paper, and solvent transfer on paper.
15 x 11 inches

Moira Donegan in Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics; New York Review and Lithub.

“In this sentence—“that a new majority, adhering to a new ‘doctrinal school,’ could ‘by dint of numbers’ alone expunge their rights”—that “dint of numbers” is a scathing phrase. Justices on the Supreme Court are not as mean to one another as I sometimes, as a court observer, would hope they would be. When there is a pointed line like that, it’s something to pay attention to. She’s saying what we all know, which is that the law does not support this decision, the facts do not support this decision, the will of the people does not support this decision, and the spirit of our constitution does not support this decision. You are not doing it because you have real legitimacy to do it. I think that’s a tricky conundrum we find ourselves in as feminists and as Americans: we’re facing organs of political power that cannot be moved by threats to their legitimacy, that are content to be seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the public so long as they have numbers.”

AG2024111100331a or of flying and bilocating

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Untitled_AdlerGuerrier-AG2024111100331a
111100331a or s–.

How should we interpret these stories of flying and bilocating, of demons and chapped nipples? Of the body and its impossible desires? Eire’s approach is idiosyncratic. Across his scholarship he has aimed to “re-enchant” history, in the words of Ronald Rittgers. Eire understands modern secularism as its own kind of methodology, with its own interpretive shortcomings. Atheism, as much as faith, shapes the questions we ask of our sources and limits the possibilities of interpretation.

[…]

Faith—and especially lived faith, not abstract theology—can make history, too. “Belief is the immortal soul of the imagination,” Eire writes at the close of They Flew, and the power of belief to make history “can be limitless.”
As Eire and others have argued, secularism involves its own, often unacknowledged assumptions about historical interpretation.

Wings of Desire, Erin Maglaque, NYRB

PXL_20240327_183506136 transposes and upends

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PXL_20240327_183506136

No by Anne Boyer (2017)

“History is full of people who just didn’t.  They said no thank you, turned away, ran away

[…]

Of all the poems of no, Venezuelan poet Miguel James’s Against the Police, as translated by Guillermo Parra, refuses most elegantly

[…]

It’s stealthy, portable, and unslouching. It presides over the logic of my art, and even when it is uttered erringly there is something admirable in its articulation. But even the greatest refusialists of the poets might be a somewhat ironic deployers of that refusal, for what is refused often amplifies what is not. The no of a poet is so often a yes in the carapace of no.  The no of a poet is sometimes but rarely a no to a poem itself, but more usually a no to all dismal aggregations and landscapes outside of the poem.  It’s a no to chemical banalities and wars, a no to employment and legalisms, a no to the wretched arrangements of history and the tattered and Bannon-laminated earth.

[…]

Transpositions and upendings refuse and then reorder the world.

[…]

There is a lot of meaning-space inside a “no” spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry’s no can protect a potential yes—or more precisely, poetry’s no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah’s multiple variations. In this way, a poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.