Taking its title from a line in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, E.J. McAdams’ site-specific installation, “Trees Are Alphabets,” consists of salvaged sawed-off tree branches, most about seven or eight feet long, sculpturally arranged on the terrace of The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Louis Bury
Louis Bury is an art writer, author of The Way Things Go and Exercises in Criticism, and Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY.
Posted inArt
Clifford Owens’s Scatological Whispers
In the past five or six years, Clifford Owens’ provocative performance work has begun to garner notable, sometimes polarizing, attention.
Posted inArt
In and Out of Frame: Lorraine O’Grady’s “Art Is…”
Like a Choose Your Own Adventure story or a game of Mad Libs, the elliptical title of Lorraine O’Grady’s 1983 performance piece, “Art Is…,” creates space, playful and inviting, for structured audience participation.
Posted inBooks
The ABC of Art Criticism: Some Recent How To’s
It has often been said that writing about art is like dancing about architecture. Nearly as often, it has also then been said: But I’m going to do it anyway.
Posted inBooks
Fables from Artlandia: The Miraculous by Raphael Rubinstein
In a 1946 letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, poet Charles Olson articulated what has become a quietly influential conception of historiography in poetry circles. “There has been, is too much of everything, including knowledge,” he contended, quite presciently, “because it has not been winnowed.”