"This is the first English translation of an important novel by one of America's foremost contemporary writers. Experimental in form, lacking a strict narrative line and a conventional plot, it is a strange and shocking portrait of a woman's intense incestuous love for her brother. She is eccentric at the beginning of the story and grows progressively more alienated from reality as she recalls her past during a stay at the Villa Serbelloni above Lake Como in Bellagio, Italy, where she has gone to write a novel." "The book consists of her reminiscences of her dead brother which are addressed to him. It offers at once a highly poetic evocation of a troubled mind, an apparently realistic portrayal of life among her friends: the writers, artists, and musicians she knew, from the 60's to the present time, and a mordant and brutal commentary on a kind of family attachment that is found throughout the world. Her feelings and fantasies are described through her own language, subtly and sensitively, and she herself is depicted with keen psychological insight. One of the few works of fiction to treat the incestuous relationship from the viewpoint of the victim/perpetrator."--BOOK JACKET.
Rosalyn Drexler, I thought to myself... She'd been praised by Donald Barthelme and Norman Mailer and Annie Dillard and Gloria Steinem and somehow shrugged it all off and stayed underground, irascible, implausible...she touched Pop, she touched Pulp, she touched Porn, she appropriate and satired and surrealled and film-noired, all with an intimacy and eccentricity that made the work a genre of its own.
'Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968' is the catalogue of the exhibition of the same title and the first book to survey the achievements of women Pop artists. Artworks by more than 20 artists are reproduced.
(Applause Books). The script to "one of the most tender yet devastating plays of the Drexlerian oeuvre is the musical romance Dear . It takes place in the Eisenhower Fifties, the early years of television. There is an elegiac quality for the tragicomedy punctuated by the sentimental music of the era...The play is about Jessie Clup, a Queens housewife whose philandering husband has deserted her. Her only culpa is her fixation on Perry Como, the ex-barber, crooner kin, reigning TV star." Rosette Lamont, StageView .
Since 2000, The Brooklyn Rail has been a platform for artists, academics, critics, poets, and writers in New York and abroad. The monthly journal’s continued appeal is due in large part to its diverse contributors, many of whom bring contrasting and often unexpected opinions to conversations about art and aesthetics. No other publication devotes as much space to the artist’s voice, allowing ideas to unfold and idiosyncrasies to emerge through open discussion. Since its inception, cofounder and artistic director Phong Bui and the Rail’s contributors have interviewed over four hundred artists for The Brooklyn Rail. This volume brings together for the first time a selection of sixty of the most influential and seminal interviews with artists ranging from Richard Serra and Brice Marden, to Alex Da Corte and House of Ladosha. While each interview is important in its own right, offering a perspective on the life and work of a specific artist, collectively they tell the story of a journal that has grown during one of the more diverse and surprising periods in visual art. There is no unified style or perspective; The Brooklyn Rail’s strength lies in its ability to include and champion difference. Selected and coedited by Jarrett Earnest, a frequent Rail contributor, with Lucas Zwirner, the book includes an introduction to the project by Phong Bui as well as many of the hand-drawn portraits he has made of those he has interviewed over the years. This combination of verbal and visual profiles offers a rare and personal insight into contemporary visual culture. Interviews with Vito Acconci, Ai Weiwei, Lynda Benglis, James Bishop, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Francesco Clemente, Bruce Conner, Alex Da Corte, Rosalyn Drexler, Keltie Ferris, Simone Forti, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Suzan Frecon, Coco Fusco, Robert Gober, Leon Golub, Ron Gorchov, Michelle Grabner, Josephine Halvorson, Sheila Hicks, David Hockney, Roni Horn, House of Ladosha, Alfredo Jaar, Bill Jensen, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Matvey Levenstein, Nalini Malani, Brice Marden, Chris Martin, Jonas Mekas, Shirin Neshat, Thomas Nozkowski, Lorraine O’Grady, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Ernesto Pujol, Martin Puryear, Walid Raad, Dorothea Rockburne, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Robert Ryman, Dana Schutz, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, James Turrell, Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Kara Walker, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, Yan Pei-Ming, and Lisa Yuskavage Special thanks to Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, for their support of The Brooklyn Rail.
In 1959, Richard Bellamy was a witty, poetry-loving beatnik on the fringe of the New York art world who was drawn to artists impatient for change. By 1965, he was representing Mark di Suvero, was the first to show Andy Warhol’s pop art, and pioneered the practice of “off-site” exhibitions and introduced the new genre of installation art. As a dealer, he helped discover and champion many of the innovative successors to the abstract expressionists, including Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Walter De Maria, and many others. The founder and director of the fabled Green Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, Bellamy thrived on the energy of the sixties. With the covert support of America’s first celebrity art collectors, Robert and Ethel Scull, Bellamy gained his footing just as pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art were taking hold and the art world was becoming a playground for millionaires. Yet as an eccentric impresario dogged by alcohol and uninterested in profits or posterity, Bellamy rarely did more than show the work he loved. As fellow dealers such as Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis capitalized on the stars he helped find, Bellamy slowly slid into obscurity, becoming the quiet man in oversize glasses in the corner of the room, a knowing and mischievous smile on his face. Born to an American father and a Chinese mother in a Cincinnati suburb, Bellamy moved to New York in his twenties and made a life for himself between the Beat orbits of Provincetown and white-glove events like the Guggenheim’s opening gala. No matter the scene, he was always considered “one of us,” partying with Norman Mailer, befriending Diane Arbus and Yoko Ono, and hosting or performing in historic Happenings. From his early days at the Hansa Gallery to his time at the Green to his later life as a private dealer, Bellamy had his finger on the pulse of the culture. Based on decades of research and on hundreds of interviews with Bellamy’s artists, friends, colleagues, and lovers, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties rescues the legacy of the elusive art dealer and tells the story of a counterculture that became the mainstream. A tale of money, taste, loyalty, and luck, Richard Bellamy’s life is a remarkable window into the art of the twentieth century and the making of a generation’s aesthetic. -- "Bellamy had an understanding of art and a very fine sense of discovery. There was nobody like him, I think. I certainly consider myself his pupil." --Leo Castelli
"Scrupulously researched, critically acute, and written with care, Playing Underground will become a classic account of an era of hard-won free expression." -William Coco "At last---a book documenting the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway theater. Playing Underground is an insightful, illuminating, and honest appraisal of this important period in American theater." -Rosalyn Drexler, author of Art Does (Not!) Exist and Occupational Hazard "An epic movie of an epic movement, Playing Underground is a book the world has waited for without knowing it. How precisely it captures the evolution of our revolution! I am amazed by the book's scope and scale, and I bless its author especially for giving two greats, Paul Foster and H. M. Koutoukas, their proper, polar places, and for memorializing such unjustly forgotten masterpieces as Irene Fornes's Molly's Dream and Jeff Weiss's A Funny Walk Home. Stephen Bottoms's vivid evocation of the grand adventure of Off-Off Broadway has woken and broken my heart. It is difficult to believe that he was not there alongside me to breathe the caffeine-nicotine-alkaloid-steeped air." -Robert Patrick, author of Kennedy's Children and Temple Slave Few books address the legendary age of 1960s off-off Broadway theater. Fortunately, Stephen Bottoms fills that gap with Playing Underground---the first comprehensive history of the roots of off-off Broadway. This is a theater whose legacy is still felt today: it was the launching pad for many leading contemporary theater artists, including Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and others, and it was a pivotal influence on improv comedy and shows like Saturday Night Live. Off-off Broadway groups such as the Living Theatre, La Mama, and Caffe Cino captured the spirit of nontraditional theater with their edgy, unscripted, boundary-crossing subjects. Yet, as Bottoms discovers, there is no one set of truths about off-off Broadway to uncover; the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than a singular, concrete reality. No other author has managed to illuminate this shifting tableau as Bottoms does. Through interviews with dozens of the era's leading playwrights, performers, directors, and critics, he unearths a countercultural theater movement that was both influential and transforming-yet ephemeral and quintessentially of its moment. Playing Underground will be a definitive work on the subject, offering a complete picture of an important but little-studied period in American theater.
