IN SILENT PRAISE OF SILENCE

Nothing like a long, holiday weekend. Emerging from an existential fog. The Noise in the System. I’d like to take a moment and apologize to any readers of this blog for what I feel has been a decline in the quality of the writing lately. Is it bad to admit this weakness? Perhaps. At any rate, I have not been satisfied.

[do not read this, space for contemplation, do not read this]

So, a few things about a few things:

The deadline for the first issue of Et Al, the new experimental, jet set, trash and five-star journal of the arts, is this coming Sunday, the 31st of May. Click here for more info. We have already received some very intriguing submissions.

The writing thread of last week, about issues of display & reception with artists’ books will continue, most likely with a few digressions. Museum visits always get me thinking about scale, scope, and ambition of artworks. (For those of you in the Bay Area, the William Kentridge show at the SFMOMA is incredible. I was, honestly, surprised by how much I liked it. The show closes this weekend. Go see it if you haven’t, and make sure you block out at least 2 hours so that you can watch all of the films.) So more on that old thing. Hopefully it will cohere into coherence.

The NewLights Press has made an official decision to return to painting, or, perhaps, more specifically, to intervene in the discourse of painting. What this actually entails is the execution of several (old, developing, marinating) ideas for hand-mechanically painted books. The crucial difference that is they will officially be referred to as “paintings,” and talked about/shown as such.

The bookarts critic and scholar Betty Bright has started a new blog to document her research. Here.

A few other things, swirling: a new essay (sub-manifesto?) for the third issue of Mimeo Mimeo, a book of poems by Kyle Schlesinger, a new book of concrete-performance-hand-mechanical-printing poems by NewLights, aforementioned paintings, the second volume of (De)Collage, the world tilting madly towards itself, and the brilliance of days.