Issues Archives - Page 13 of 26

Revisiting the Parental Horror Film

Adam Carston

It’s Alive premiered at Chicago’s Woods Theatre on April 26, 1974. To promote it, Cohen hired women to push strollers around the venue inside which snuggled tape recorders emitting growls. Audiences bit and there were strong ticket sales, but Warner Brothers executives found the film “distasteful” and hampered its most exploitable asset (a killer baby) with ambiguous advertising. Chicago Tribune Archive via nespaper.com. FEMINISTS, HORROR HOUNDS, metalheads, and cinephiles descended on Chicago’s Music Box

Not an Open Book: Stella Waitzkin and the Pathos of Discarded Things

Jennifer Baumgardner

A detail from Stella Waitzkin: These Books Are Paintings. © Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust. Photo by Jennifer Baumgardner. IN THIS ERA of compulsory eyeball luring, saying no to self-promotion looks courageous to me. Perhaps this is why a deceased, somewhat-obscure modern artist named Stella Waitzkin so captured my curiosity recently. Her enduring subject was refusal—of feminine roles, the art business, throwaway culture. Her welcome mat read “GO AWAY.” She made art every day for more

Cut: On Yoko Ono and Feminist Art

Ellen Papazian

Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall, New York, 1965. ⓒ Yoko Ono. Photo: Minoru Niizuma. YOKO ONO SELF-PUBLISHED Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings in Tokyo in 1964. In 1970, this visionary work of conceptual art was published in the US. Ono’s “instructions” were a radical approach to art because they centralized the participant in the work to manifest the piece, whether the artist was present or not. Some of the instructions

Obfuscation and the Growing Use of Gender-Neutral Pronouns

Noelle McManus

Kyle Channing Smith ON OCTOBER 5, 2021, writer Joyce Carol Oates tweeted: “they” will not become a part of general usage, not for political reasons but because there would be no pronoun to distinguish between a singular subject (“they”) & a plural subject (“they”). language seeks to communicate w/ clarity, not to obfuscate; that is its purpose. After receiving criticism, she issued several rather thoughtful apologies and acknowledged the impact her words could have

A Woman Alone at a Beach Somewhere, Gazing into the Sea

Meg Whiteford

Who is this woman looking out toward the sea? She could be me, she could be someone you know—I won’t say it’s you, I don’t know you. She’s probably white, possibly gay, but probably not. Able-bodied enough to climb down treacherous rocks to be near the water. She’s dealing with heartbreak or pending heartbreak; she either longs to be alone or is lonely. Nothing can stop her from this contemplation. This is why she looks

My So-Called Undocumented MFA Life

Aline Mello

All images from Presença: We Are Here, a series of embroidered 16 x 20-inch photographs. Aline Mello, 2022. IT’S SUMMER BREAK after the first year of my MFA at Ohio State. I am living with my stepfather and mother in their house about thirty minutes outside Atlanta. I am thirty-three, but when I’m at Mamãe’s house, I revert to thirteen. When I cook something, she sucks in air through her teeth. You made that this

In Harmony: On ‘It’s Only Life After All,’ Directed by Alexandria Bombach

Mya Spalter

Emily Saliers and Amy Ray c. 1990. Photo by Michael Lavine. ONE OF THE most powerful revelations in Alexandria Bombach’s new documentary about the multiplatinum, still-touring-and-recording Indigo Girls is the fact that Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met when they were twelve years old. I fucking knew it! I screamed at the screen. I didn’t know it in the wikipedia sense of knowing, but more so knew it in my bones. I didn’t go to

Bread and Circuses

Laurie Stone

Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke in True Things (2021) Photo courtesy of BBC Films. A few days before Christmas, we met a friend at a fancy grocery store in Hudson, where people sit at a long table, drinking lattes and eating focaccia. We hadn’t seen our friend in a while. She looked happy in the way of people who have recently jumped out of an airplane. I said, “I was thinking about Jesus.” She said,

Bones: On ‘Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Meg Whiteford

Cecily Brown. ‘Selfie,’ 2020. Oil on linen, 43 × 47 in. The Swartz Family Collection. © Cecily Brown. Can a painting be its own opposite? The works in Cecily Brown’s mid-career survey Death and the Maid are both abstract and figurative, canonically referential and hedonistically maximal, their carnivalesque palettes slashed with monotone grays. They are, at once, both surface and core. The show greets you with a large canvas titled Selfie (2020), which depicts a

Ring

Laurie Stone

The other night, we visited the South Street Seaport, where a branch of the McNally Jackson bookstore is located. On the pier, regular water cost six dollars and everyone was the age of the horizon. They looked beautiful in Bermuda shorts, walking dogs. At the event, I read a little from my new book and talked about freedom in front of the assembled group with the writer Vince Passaro. A man I had not seen

Issues