You recognize it before you know what to do with it. A cartoon, a flower, a line that feels like it’s been there before. Kitsch comes to mind, maybe, but it doesn’t quite stick. Or it sticks and then loosens. The image doesn’t hold you where you expect. It keeps...
“Thus time goes by,” Robert Filliou writes at the end of Whispered Art History (1963), the short document in which he declares January 17th the official birthday of art. In Filliou’s telling, art begins not with genius or mastery but with an ordinary gesture made...
Desire can make you sick, or it can make you try. Los Angeles-based artist Nancy Buchanan, working steadily since the 1970s, has consistently chosen the latter. Hair Room (1973/2025), a closet-sized chamber where strings of hair caress the top of your head as you walk...
In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin reimagines human history not as a tale of conquest, but as one of containment. She proposes that the first human tool was not a spear, but a vessel—a bag, a bowl, a bottle. If stories are “carrier...
One of the performers—if “performer” is the right word—in The Mommy Leaks the Floor, a new work by Asher Hartman staged at New Theater Hollywood (May 16–25), is Pablo, a real-life infant, born earlier this year. Throughout the play, cradled in his mother’s arms on the...
I’ve always said that I have a crush on dance—on the medium itself, its libidinousness, its structural uninhibitedness, the insanity of memorizing your body’s movements on command and then repeating them. As a writer, I cling to permanence on the page, but...
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