Grove, Orchids, Boutonnieres, ag-091123A_8
Category: art
032026
(The essay on modesty) (in application for) (bodily autonomy)
(She lost that case) (on (wide is the gate)) (rhetorically memorable)
(Arbiter rise)(Attracted to) (the most minor) (advantages) (adopting gendered props)
(Assaying willingness) (I notice a certain scarlet letter)(Dream of a house) (it can’t be mine) (vast roominess)
(Dream of a beach) (but it’s a beach with a problem)
(In the smug of your (natural woman)) (I have had (a stain) (a conceit))
(Despite appearances (allegedly))
(A medical person) (declares the injury a non-emergency)(The essay on modesty), Krystal Languell
AG2026_1550009a, Then (if we’re lucky)
And isn’t everything risk?
The beloved lives
Then dies,
Then (if we’re lucky)
Rises again
Into a poem or song
Or into the world
In some other form
Impossible to predict.
Simplest story, oldest tale:
Sparrows sing it
From every hedge;
And swallows, also,
From their nests on the ledge.
[And isn’t everything risk?], Gregory Orr
From the shores of oval oceans
Constance Debré was in conversation about her work with writer and critic Alice Blackhurst. (LRB, 2024)
Also, her website.
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And “Immortality”
mildews …
in the museums of the moon
Lunar Baedeker, Mina Loy
AG2024_1088828a or puts his hand to this or that
The Original, Anahid Nersessian on “Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,” Peter E. Gordon (newyorker)
“he would come to exemplify a new kind of criticism, aimed at an audience of literate laypeople and marked by the application of left-wing political thought to the analysis of both high and popular culture, from Marx to Mickey Mouse.
Before the late eighteenth century, few would think to write an essay unpacking the hidden meaning of a novel or painting, let alone suggest that works of art might have ideological agendas or biases. Art was good if it was well executed and managed to entertain without being coarse, immoral, or sacrilegious. As Benjamin argued in his dissertation, it was writers such as Friedrich Schlegel who, around 1800, first began to consider aesthetic objects as capacious and mercurial entities, whose true contents could be revealed only through sustained scrutiny. For them, an art work became a “medium of reflection,” no longer simply a mirror of the world but a tool for understanding things about history, society, and politics, as well as about more familiar matters of the human heart. As for criticism, it was both a means to discover what the art object had to say and an extension of the object itself.”
“In 1928, he published “One-Way Street,” a collection of aphoristic meditations on objects such as gloves (“All disgust is originally disgust at touching”) and numbered lists of epigrams (“I. Books and harlots can be taken to bed. II. Books and harlots interweave time”). Elliptical and fragmentary, “One-Way Street” is, Benjamin said, an homage to the “inconspicuous forms” of urban life taken in by the flâneur, the man who strolls aimlessly about a city covered with “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” whose pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal style Benjamin borrowed as his own.”
John Duff, Reena Spaulings. January 18 – February 28, 2026; TEXT+LIST OF WORKS.
John Duff
Untitled, 1968
clamshells, wire, paint
dimensions variable, 106.68 x 63.5 x 38.1 cm; 42 x 25 x 15 in
JD/S 48
“He thinks, dreams, puts his hand to this or that, and we are welcome to eavesdrop if we care to do so.” via New York Art Critics Association
Architectonic
That [science] which treats of those conditions of knowledge which lie in the nature, not of thought itself, but of that which we think about?…?has been called?…?Architectonic, in so far as it treats of the method of building up our observations into system.
—Sir William Hamilton
…?one of which systems is a poem.
via Ed Roberson
i must be careful about such things as these.
the thin-grained oak. the quiet grizzlies scared
into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
in behind them closer in the snow. the snared
rigidity of the winter lake. deer after deer
crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare
with their eyes pressed to the ice. in a sleep. hearing
the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear
in the high quiet. i must be careful not to shake
anything in too wild an elation. not to jar
the fragile mountains against the paper far-
ness. nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.
of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious
words. like rocks. without one snowcapped mistake.
be careful, Ed Roberson
[Hyperallergic] A Surprisingly Enjoyable Show About Critical Theory, Cat Dawson
An exhibition about the influence of French critical theory on American art finds inspiration in diasporic thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire.
PARIS — Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought at Palais de Tokyo is billed as an exploration of the influence of French critical theory — including and perhaps especially thinkers in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire — on American art. For those who have encountered critical theory and indulge in the occasional Marx meme, the show may sound like catnip, but such conceits often slip into theory- and text-heavy curation that is opaque to many viewers. So it was refreshing to find the exhibition’s theoretical points concisely made, historically situated, and woven through excellent wall labels that contextualize a wealth of strong artworks.
The show, which is staged across nearly all the museum’s available space, truly begins with pioneering abstract sculptor Melvin Edwards, whose work has its own space that viewers have to walk through to enter the main galleries. The pieces on view range from his small Lynch Fragments series to larger installations composed of barbed wire or sizable industrial objects — some freighted with meaning, such as a short length of chain or shackle, others more ambiguous, like a finial or a single metal cube — that play up the works’ formal qualities: the heavy made to look impossibly light, the razor sharp to appear delicate. Edwards’s sculptures lay bare the ways in which the material realities of labor, incarceration, and death still evoke violent associations even when the machines that enable those processes are broken out into component parts.
Edwards has long been in conversation with transatlantic networks of poets and theorists, including Léon Gontran Damas, whom he met through the Black Arts Movement, and Jayne Cortez, whom he married in 1975, and his art reflects much of the critical theory that undergirds the show. “Maquette for a sculpture in homage to Édouard Glissant” (2021) speaks to the belated recognition of diasporic Francophone thought on contemporary discourse: Born in 1928 in Martinique, Glissant moved to Paris for his doctoral work, then returned to Martinique to found the Institut Martiniquais D’études; there, he began to produce a body of work on coloniality, social movements, and the afterlives of the Atlantic slave trade, all of which are unavoidable in contemporary scholarly discourse.
The main show begins with Fred Wilson’s “Dear End” (2023), an array of oversized, wall-mounted glass droplets. Though widely circulated online and in art publications, it is born out in person to be impossible to capture, the nuances of the hollow blown glass forms utterly resistant to photographic reproduction. Wilson’s citation of capture, and almost absurd enlargement of the droplet form, exemplify artistic and critical strategies of addressing the questions and consequences of imperialism, enslavement, and the diasporic condition, while refusing to be reducible exclusively to those themes.
Though it includes blockbuster works and artists, the real revelations in Echo Delay Reverb come from some of the less widely known artists whose work is given space to breathe, expand, and connect across continents and generations. A room housing several of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s poststructuralist forays into film is adjacent to Cici Wu’s delicate but haunting tribute to the artist — who was raped and murdered at the age of 31. Wu’s installation of light boxes and other small objects physically expands on text and image fragments from Cha’s archive that take up questions of race, gender, and age. Other standouts include a selection of photographs, ranging from sweeping cityscapes to intimate shots of plants, by Miami-based Haitian-American artist Adler Guerrier. They’re accompanied by swatches of paint from South Florida that have diasporic symbolism; the colors can be found in neighborhoods in Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean as easily as in Florida.
Echo Delay Reverb leaves ambiguous the indexicality between the artworks and the theorists’ scholarly output. But by articulating the centrality of Caribbean thinkers to the French thought that structures the show, it makes an important and public-facing contribution to a larger project that’s often limited to academic circles: It communicates the significance of revolutionary diasporic thought to contemporary scholarship about the operations of power — with particular attention to the Caribbean theorists whose work remains under-recognized in academia compared to their White, French counterparts.
Yet even if viewers disregard this facet, the show is a pleasure to digest. While that might sound like a bug rather than a feature, it felt essential — for a show grounded in the abstract world of critical theory, Echo Delay Reverb is remarkably inviting.
Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought continues at Palais de Tokyo (13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, France) through February 15. The exhibition was curated by Naomi Beckwith with James Horton, Amandine Nana, and François Piron, assisted by Vincent Neveux, Romane Tassel, and Morgane Padellec.
Dawson, Cat. “A Surprisingly Enjoyable Show About Critical Theory”, Hyperallergic, February 11, 2026.
What we want, what we believe
10. WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY CONTROL MODERN TECHNOLOGY.