Issues Archives - Page 5 of 24

Let Me Tell You What She Means: The Rebranding of Joan Didion

S. C. Cornell

We know how Joan Didion saw the world because she told us herself, quoting a psychiatrist’s report written during her 1968 breakdown: It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view[,] she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations . . . A

On the Cover 2.4

Charis Caputo

Front Cover: Bayan Kiwan. Lesser Legible Love, 2023. Oil on canvas draped in tulle; 44 × 35.8 in. I grew up in many different places, so belonging was always fraught,” says Bayan Kiwan. She hands me a bottle of coconut water. A weak but hopeful December light pours through the grimy window of her Soho studio at Hunter College, where she is working on her MFA in studio art. (They will clean the windows tomorrow,

Another Walk Across the Barren Planet

Noelle Richard

Volume 2, Issue 4 Winter 2024

Debbie Stoller

Volume 2: Issue 4 Winter 2024 Select articles available free below On the cover: Lesser Legible Love, 2023 By Bayan Kiwann. Contents DEPARTMENTS REVIEWS

‘Martha Graham, A Life: When Dance Became Modern’ By Neil Baldwin & ‘Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham’ By Deborah Jowitt

Mindy Aloff

Graham and Ted Shawn in Shawn’s duet, Malagueña, 1921. Photograph by Albert Witzel. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the New York Public Library. Martha Graham (1894–1991), whose dances—and the evolving technique for how to perform them—dramatically upended what audiences expected from theatrical dancing, did not identify as a choreographer. She was a dancer, even after she retired from the stage in 1970—a priority that affected the construction, content, and tone of her 181 works and determined

‘Salt Lake Sonnet,’ ‘Meno Pause,’ & ‘Confidence Men’

Alissa Quart

Salt Lake Sonnet Basalt rocks, gnats, red sea, plankton, skin fried. Holy Water cafe: where blondes eat sweets. Extinction all in CAPS. All signified. Hot Dome; salt dust. Canada’s forest heats. Bible landscape. A geologist shows me some Quartzite rock—my name—also in vain. What is worth saving now; the sand, seas, Spiral Jetty & other weathervanes. Geologic time? Yet we still decay: Oil pipelines mock parks; ski lifts snark Nature Smoke; 100 degrees! More *sad face* days. Without words, we

‘The Loneliness Files’ By Athena Dixon

Naomi Elias

In 2012, responding to reports of a foul odor, a New York landlord discovered the groundbreaking feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone dead in her apartment. It was estimated her body had been there for a month. Firestone, who lived reclusively, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1980s. Still, it’s hard to ignore the implications: the author of The Dialectic of Sex, that scorching takedown of romantic love, met a tragic spinster’s end. “Do you ever

‘The Shining’ By Dorothea Lasky

Mya Spalter

Wave Books, October 2023, 88 pp. The writing mind is a haunted house ringing with the voices of the dead. When I told her that I’d never seen the film, Dotti was astounded. It was raining. From beneath the awning, the air was washed with streaky neon and headlights. Dorothea Lasky was dressed brightly, characteristically. She was exhorting me in her particular fashion, an alternating current of insistence and surrender (you have to see it

‘to light, and then return—: Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann’ at Gagosian, September 14–October 28, 2023

Cynthia Payne

© Sally Mann. Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian. In a storied career spanning nearly fifty years, the photographer Sally Mann has known no shortage of either acclaim or controversy. Her latest exhibit at Gagosian, to light, and then return—, shows work as new, serious, and beautiful as anything she ever has made, but it seems to have escaped much attention. The title, a line from Emily Dickinson, suggests an interstitial space between two states, a

‘Art Monsters’ By Lauren Elkin & ‘Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery’ at David Zwirner

Rebecca Saltzman

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2023, 354 pp. To make art in a monstrous world, must we embrace the monstrous? Lauren Elkin’s newest book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, is a meditation on this question. Elkin takes her title from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, in which the narrator, a character named only “the wife,” tells us “My plan was never to get married. I was going to be an art

Issues