“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born,” professes Clarice Lispector in the first lines of her 1977 novel, The Hour of the Star. Like the universe, art also begins with a yes. Some yeses are small: get out of bed today, put this image next to that one. Other yeses are bigger: continue[…..]

It is a strange thing to sit in a room for an hour and experience two people producing something unrecognizable. When successful, the relationship between the audience and the performers depends on generosity and trust. We, the audience, trust that we will be entertained, and so we open ourselves to the possibilities of the experience. In exchange for our receptivity, they, the performers, abandon certainty[…..]

To enter the main gallery at the Drawing Center for a recent performance, we couldn’t use its front doors. Instead, we had to descend the stairs near the lobby, walk along the lower-level corridor from the front to the back of the building, ascend the rear stairs, and pass through the smaller gallery called the Drawing Room. There, the walls were adorned with several wooden[…..]

“Writing is painful, but having written is ecstatic, and the ecstasy induces amnesia, so you’re willing to do it all over again. Like falling in love.”

Ice, compromised vision, and colonial geography: These formed the conceptual scaffolding that supported Evan Calder Williams’ live essay, T-1, performed at Artists Space on July 21, 2015.[1] Despite the three subjects’ ostensibly divergent histories, Calder Williams wove them into a complex web that expanded into several narratives that highlighted epiphanic and unexpected connections. The dynamic multimedia event—comprising video, text, and images projected on perpendicular screens,[…..]

Though failure has an unfavorable definition, interpretations of the word fluctuate dramatically between negative and positive connotations, depending on whom you ask. While some people may consider failure as something to avoid at all costs, others recognize—and even welcome—the possibilities that arise when something does not go exactly as planned. The seventeen artists in I Dropped the Lemon Tart at Lisa Cooley examine the many[…..]

True catastrophes cannot be foreseen… True catastrophes are new information. They are, by definition, surprising adventures.—Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 1985 With the exception of a small community of daredevils, most people try to avoid disasters. There are, of course, various degrees of risk associated with everything we do that drive our precautions as well as the insurance industry. In general, the[…..]