• print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    Vice, Vice, Baby

    AN AWFUL DISCOURSE now heralds spring. It goes by “no kink at Pride.” Seemingly concocted on 4chan as one of their loosely coordinated Operations, it has been propelled for the past few years beyond the imageboard by earnest young queers and crypto-religious moralists, both keen to prevent the nonconsensual sight of leathermen. In 2020, arguments about parade logistics reached a fever pitch. The fact that, due to the coronavirus, parades were more likely to be canceled that year was no consolation. There was a more abstract problem: the question of sexuality in public life was at stake.

    Another

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    You Better Work

    FELIX KRÄMER, A GENERAL DIRECTOR OF DÜSSELDORF’S MUSEUM KUNSTPALAST, writes in the foreword to Captivate!: Fashion Photography from the ’90s that “galleries, institutions, studios and the people who work in both the public and private spheres are struggling for survival” during the pandemic. It makes sense, then, to lean on a cash cow: the fashion exhibition. Who wouldn’t love to stand in front of a blown-up picture of a phalanx of famously beautiful women shimmering in Gianni Versace’s gold chain-mail dresses, whether they remember seeing it firsthand or on Tumblr or in Donatella’s re-creation

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    Artful Volumes

    This year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, a survey of more than 14,000 studies, confirms that we are now in the management phase of the climate crisis: it can’t be prevented, only mitigated. What role can art play now that the “awareness” and “warning” stages have passed? Artist Alexis Rockman suggests that we take the long view: “It’s interesting to contextualize what’s happening in our lives, within the historical lens of the many times this has happened before.” That does not mean forgoing immediate action. As David Rimanelli writes in the opening essay of ALEXIS

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    Dial F for Father

    WHILE WANDERING AROUND the Jewish Museum’s haunting exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” curated by the artist’s former literary archivist Philip Larratt-Smith, I stopped at a melancholy sculpture called Ventouse, 1990, a double-decker hunk of hacked, chipped black marble that resembles a sarcophagus. The coffin is topped by protruding glass cups, their rounded ends lit from within by electric bulbs.

    For some reason, while studying this sculpture that’s heavy in every way (after all, it is part of a show of Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic art and texts), I couldn’t stop thinking about

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    Free Fallin’

    THE PRIMARY PROBLEM with freedom is that it’s impossible for everyone to have at the same time. Even circumscribed freedoms intersect, impose, and oppose, as conflicts about speech, masks, and vaccines remind us daily. “If and when we ascertain that our well-being is linked to the behavior of others, the desire to impugn, control, or change them can be as fruitless as it is intense,” writes Maggie Nelson in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, her attempt to probe the question of “how to forge a fellowship . . . that does not reflexively pit freedom against obligation.” The book was

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    She’ll Be Your Mirror

    NICO, BORN CHRISTA PÄFFGEN in Cologne, Germany, in October 1938, is one of the most underappreciated musical innovators of the past century. She’s undeniably famous: as the title of a 1995 film reminds us, Nico is an anagram for “icon.” Yet few other artists’ radical and influential body of work is so eclipsed in the public mind by their romantic and professional relationships (Yoko Ono comes to mind). Few of the people who recognize Nico’s name and face know she spent most of her life creating intense, remarkable, inimitable music under her own name. Everyone knows she fucked Lou Reed, though.

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    Perverted by Language

    TROLL, SYLLABIST, BANDLEADER, orator, pest, alcoholic, medium, stenographer, record producer, pedant, speed freak, duppy, redeemer, and glorious irritant, Mark E. Smith was, before anything else, a writer. We know this because of the Fall, a rock band he initiated, destroyed, revived, and maintained between 1976 and his death on January 24, 2018. Though it is tempting to imagine Smith taking a different path and becoming the world’s least biddable radio host, he became himself with and through the Fall.

    Mark E. Smith stood before this band, both connected and not, preaching from a psychic

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    The Escape Artist

    IN 2011, WINFRED REMBERT HAD ACHIEVED a sufficient measure of fame to be invited back to his hometown of Cuthbert, Georgia, to celebrate his success as an artist. Rembert’s artworks were sought out by collectors and hung in various galleries, including the Yale University Art Gallery. Growing up in Cuthbert in the 1950s and ’60s, Rembert was subjected to police harassment and beatings and, on one occasion, nearly lynched. He had been paraded through town in chains before being sent to prison. But now Cuthbert was honoring its native son with Winfred Rembert Day. He was presented with a plaque

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    He Liked Having Enemies

    HAS THERE EVER BEEN A WRITER more reviled or more admired than D. H. Lawrence? (His full name was David Herbert Lawrence but he had begun using the initials “DHL” or “D. H. Lawrence” as his signature already as an eighteen-year-old.) Almost from the moment he put pen to paper, this mad genius of English literature with intense blue eyes and a flaming red beard raised a ruckus, which he not only thoroughly enjoyed but did his part in fomenting. He wrote with great fluency—3,500 words in a morning was a snap for him—and he would go on to write an astonishing amount, in many genres, before he died

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2021

    Say Their Names

    IN DECEMBER 1964, the activist Fannie Lou Hamer stood beside Malcolm X in Harlem during a rally. Hamer described how, while once traveling to a voter-education workshop, she was arrested and beaten with a blackjack. Facing her listeners in Harlem, Hamer spoke of how that experience led her to the point of no return: “I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change.”

    And here we are still. Starting in the spring of 2020, the world witnessed an overwhelming expression of people of color being “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” when the largest

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  • excerpt • August 24, 2021

    An excerpt from God, Human, Animal, Machine on subjectivity and a visit to Kierkegaard’s grave

    The lanes of the cemetery were overgrown, lined with slender conifers whose branches were heavy with rain. I had been pushing the bicycle with my head slightly bowed, and when I looked up I realized I was back at the entrance. I had come full circle. I checked the cemetery map again—I had followed the steps exactly—then continued back in the direction I’d come, hoping to find the gravesite from the opposite direction. In no time at all I was lost. The paths were not marked, and there was no one I could ask—the only other person I’d seen, a woman pushing a baby stroller beneath an umbrella, was

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  • excerpt • August 20, 2021

    An excerpt from a new book calling for transnational, intersectional feminism

    There is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is perfunctory, form-filling, intended to silence and appease; the latter requires the dissolution of underlying structures and hierarchies for a complete reformulation. Whether it is the National Organization of Women or an organization like Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) or even the Women’s March, all require transformational change. This means reconsidering everything, from the way meetings are organized and conference calls are set up to the way public

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