Read (books):

THE PIECES FROM BERLIN, MICHAEL PYE

Read (short stories)

The Weirdoes, Otessa Moshfegh

The Surrogate, Otessa Moshfegh

Read (Longform/essays/reviews/articles):

The Comedic Beauty of Laura Owens by Roberta Smith (NY Times, Nov. 16, 2017)

Amy Sherald’s Shining Second Act by Roberta Smith (NY Times, Sept 16, 2019)

Playing it Cool by David Salle (review of Alex Katz – NY Review of Books 1/18/2018)

Good Manners in the Age of Wikileaks by Slavoj Zizek, (London Review of Books, Jan. 20, 2011)

Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a  cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

Art in Free Fall by David Salle (review of Laura Owens – NY Review of Books, 2/8/2018)

Owens’s work is the apotheosis of painting in the digital age. The defining feature of digital art—of digital information generally—is its weightlessness. Images, colors, marks, text, are essentially decals in a nondimensional electronic space. They exist, but only up to a point. They can excite the mind, but you can’t touch them. An air of weightlessness remains even when they are transferred to the physical surface of a painting. If these images were to fall, nothing would catch them. They’re like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, just before he realizes he’s churning air.

[.  . . . .}

The Unbearable Lightness of Painting by Thomas Lawson (MOCA, 2003)

The Whitney's Laura Owens Book Comes in 8,500 Different Covers by Michael Wilson (GARAGE, 11/8/2017)

L’1%, c’est moi? By Andrea Fraser

Jailbait, by Otessa Moshfegh

How to Shit, by Otessa Moshfegh

[Title actually unknown – real talk]    Andrew Durbin, Frieze (on Laura Owens)

Rachel Kushner interviewed by Laura Owens, [The Believer, [on Kushner’s the Flamethrowers]]

Johns, by William H. Gass (NY Review of Books, 2/2/1989)

The Key to Act Two, by Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm.com, 3/29/2018)

Becoming a key is about rewilding your identity as a human, breaking it out of its domesticated uniformity, putting the variation back into the natural selection, doing your bit to reclaim our species nature from this benighted degeneracy – the mathematical term for a system expressing less than its full potential complexity – that is our premium-mediocre civilization.

Video:

Documentary on “Shoot,” F-Space performance piece by Chris Burden, 1971

Anthropocene:  the Humon Epoch  by Ed Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal et al.

Poems:

Sara in Her Father's Arms

Cell by cell the baby made herself, the cells

Made cells. That is to say

The baby is made largely of milk. Lying in her father's arms, the little seed eyes

Moving, trying to see, smiling for us

To see, she will make a household

To her need of these rooms—Sara, little seed,

Little violent, diligent seed. Come let us look at the world

Glittering: this seed will speak,

Max, words! There will be no other words in the world

But those our children speak. What will she make of a world

Do you suppose, Max, of which she is made.

—George Oppen

Men at 40, Donald Justice

A private singularity, John Koethe

Covers Band in a Small Bar, John Koethe

90% of the poems in Electric Arches by Eve Ewing

Re-read (books)

LIFT HIGH THE ROOFBEAMS CARPENTERS (SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION)

KISSING IN MANHATTAN

Re-read (short stories)

Wagner in the Desert, Greg Jackson

Reading:

WHISTLER, LIFE FOR ART’S SAKE, DANIEL SUTHERLAND

THE SILK ROADS

FAUST’S METROPOLIS