Art as Experience

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using colored pens to “color-code emotions,” she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise—a work that creates its own poetics. She sought “a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition” of her own mind and to “perform this process of translation” on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called “magnificent.”

In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays "Immanence" and "Work and Love" and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel—who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century—she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing," situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism.

Whether discussing Simone Weil, Gertrude Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.

Art et production de Boris Arvatov fait partie des classiques oubliés des avant-gardes qui se sont épanouies durant la Révolution russe. Publié à Moscou en 1926, il vient porter le fer dans les débats qui agitent l’école constructiviste : que doit être le statut de l’art après la révolution, ses liens avec les techniques industrielles de reproduction, avec la critique de la vie quotidienne, comment doit-il entrer dans l’usine ? Autant d’interrogations radicales, témoignages d’une séquence politico-sociale bouillonnante. Une nouvelle conception de l’art émerge, qui laissera une empreinte indélibile sur une tradition de critiques matérialistes de la culture, de Walter Benjamin à Peter Bürger, en passant par Fredric Jameson, celle qui posera la question de l’articulation entre pratique artistique et logiques propres à la sphère de la production. Un document exceptionnel enrichi d’illustrations, paraissant en français pour la première fois, une porte prviliégiée sur un moment-clé de la modernité exthétique du XXe siècle. 

Boris Arvatov (1896–1940) est un artiste et critique d’art russe. Il est notamment connu comme théoricien du productivisme, un mouvement d’avant-garde post-révolutionnaire lié au constructivisme. 

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. 

The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text. 

Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge. 

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.