Cindy Jackson’s Bevy of Boisterous Bodies
By Essay Issue 92
CONTEMPORARY FIGURATIVE ART may owe more to the golden age of comic books than many art watchers are prepared to admit. Beyond the ironic appropriation of comics by late art-world A-lister Roy Lichtenstein or au courant nihilistic punkster Raymond Pettibon, illustrated narrative has a much longer pedigree. Earlier in the twentieth century, the angular and…
Read MoreStill Mending: South Africa between the Shadow and the Light
By Essay Issue 92
NEXT TO THE ENTRANCE to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the chief justices meet to uphold what has been called the “most progressive” of constitutions, stands a bronze sculpture by Dumile Feni, a South African of Xhosa descent. It is based on a smaller clay work made in 1987, at the height…
Read MoreSovereignty of the Void
By Essay Issue 92
YOU MIGHT BE AT A DISTANCE from your life. As always: an ordinary state, banal. Your body headed straight for the abyss, with the forward momentum of age. And beneath the freshness of blood there is weakness, ashes. Nostalgia: the soul. Sick, yes. Without a doubt: sick. And the real name of that sickness would be…
Read MoreThe Cloud of Unknowing
By Essay Issue 92
I. The TAXI DRIVER stopped and gestured to the empty desert. “There.” I saw nothing. “Where?” “There.” Now I saw, or thought I saw, some irregularity in the distance, about a mile away—the reflection of standing water, or maybe the attenuated shadow of a dip in the ground. After I paid the man, he sped…
Read MoreChest Percussions
By Essay Issue 91
LURLENE MCDANIEL KEPT ME COMPANY in the hospital. Her young adult novels—which included Six Months to Live, I Want to Live, So Much to Live For, I’ll Be Seeing You, A Season for Goodbye, Sixteen and Dying, and Someone Dies, Someone Lives—featured stories of teenage love for the terminally ill. I was not terminally ill,…
Read MoreGathering the Light: Sean Scully’s Montserrat Chapel
By Essay Issue 91
THE FIRST TIME SEAN SCULLY told me about his commission for a chapel on the grounds of the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, in Spain, it was in a restaurant in Chelsea, in New York City, in November of 2010. Digging into his side pocket, he found a pen and started drawing on the paper tablecloth: the…
Read MorePresence in a Space: The Flickering Contradictions of Martin Puryear
By Essay Issue 91
IN 1997, THE ST. JAMES GUIDE TO BLACK ARTISTS called sculptor Martin Puryear a quiet revolutionary engrossed in the business of eroding art-world oppositions. “I would describe my usual working process as a kind of distillation—trying to make coherence out of things that can seem contradictory,” he says. “But coherence is not the same as resolution.…
Read MoreThe Doubt that Breathes Beside You
By Essay Issue 91
1. We are late to church and sneak along the outer edge of the sanctuary, the pine floors creaking under our careful steps. I slide into the pew next to my husband. My leg brushes against him, this man I love, a man who recently lost faith in God. I scan the bulletin and try…
Read MoreListening to Silence
By Essay Issue 91
I ARRIVED AT THE ADVANCED screening of Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence, in the worst possible frame of mind. I was running late, and I was starving. My only option for getting food in time was a fancy burger joint near the multiplex. After ordering a mega-burger and fries, I fidgeted at the table, waiting…
Read MoreDinner with Dona Adélia
By Essay Issue 91
Jessica Goudeau’s translations of the work of Adélia Prado, Brazil’s foremost living poet, appear in Image issue 91. The night I met Dona Adélia, she told me my husband was the perfect man. She came to the University of Texas for a poetry reading with her longtime translator and editor, Ellen Doré Watson. At…
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