Art

Nostalgia Unraveled: Peter Nencini’s “Secondment” at Beginnings

No Comments

I walked into Peter Nencini’s show Secondment not quite knowing what to expect. (The show runs at Greenpoint’s Beginnings through March 10.) The images I’d seen featured fabrics and patterns, some of them seamless, others fraying. Was I about to see a deconstruction of tote bag culture? Some evocation of textile work past and present, with its associations of industry and labor? Truth be told, the simplicity of Nencini’s work turned out to be deceptive. For me, what emerged from my visit […]

Continue Reading

Art, Comics

The Uneasy Transformations of C.F.’s “Comics”

No Comments

  There’s a classic structure to the comic strip. It’s a rigorously efficient format, and the best writer/artists making use of it can accomplish a lot, whether their desired effect is a solid punchline, a cliffhanger ending, or something more contemplative. That structure has also been borrowed by creators not necessarily associated with it, including Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ice Haven or certain interludes in the first volume of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles.

Continue Reading

Art, Books, Featured

At Portland’s Nationale, The Artist as Shopkeeper

No Comments

While visiting Portland last month, I visited a number of excellent shops with Yeti editor/publisher Mike McGonigal. One of these spaces was Nationale, which offered both a smartly selection of books and zines and contained excellent art. (At the time that I was there, they were preparing for an exhibition of Carson Ellis’s work.) I also noticed a stack of books by Don Carpenter, whose novel Hard Rain Falling remains seared into my brain. The Carpenter novels, I learned, were there as part […]

Continue Reading

Art, Books, Literary Ephemera

Burroughs In Vienna: Brief Thoughts on “Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs”

No Comments

I wandered into KUNSTHALLE wien’s exhibit “Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs” unsure of what I’d see. In fact, the first thing that struck me was something I heard: Burroughs’s dry, damaged, sonorous voice ringing through different rooms, reading from selections of his work. If you stood in the right place, you could hear Burroughses of different eras overlapping their narratives: a kind of auditory collage. Clever, I thought.

Continue Reading

Art, Daily Quotable

Daily Quotable: Dandy LeRoy Neiman

No Comments

  “Neiman was a first-class gadfly, a bundle of dandyish affectations. He wore eggshell-white suits and wingtip shoes, smoked long, thin cigars, and grew a mustache similar to that of his mentor, Salvador Dali (though Neiman once said it was inspired by Clark Gable). He cultivated his image as much as, if not more than, his art. “LeRoy has style,” one publisher told writer Pat Jordan in 1975. “He has some beautiful suits. Still, I don’t think he’s put his soul into […]

Continue Reading