Agnes Martin (Dia Foundation)

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Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

Agnes Martin’s Perfection: Now and Not Yet

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This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 1. I come back to Agnes Martin again and again. This time, I did not anticipate how difficult -- how disturbing -- it would be to re-engage with her work. I thought I knew something about Martin’s art and life, her ideas and philosophies; I thought perhaps I could write a short appreciation piece, especially now that I have the “bloomer” angle: Martin painted for 20 years, into her mid 40s, before showing or selling the work she is known for today. But the beauty Martin finally came to express presents a difficult pleasure. One must wrestle a bit with Martin -- the inspiring, paradoxical, disturbing whole of her -- which lives in the work she left behind. 2. I’d seen some of Martin’s paintings in my early 20s, but it wasn’t until 2005, a year after she died at the age of 92, that I took more notice. It was a short personal essay -- a “Lives” piece in The New York Times Magazine by artist Susan York -- that caught my attention. In it, York described a visit to Martin’s compound in New Mexico that occurred in 1983, when Martin was 71 and York in her 20s: As in her books, she spoke in absolutes. "Never have children. Do not live the middle-class life. Never do anything that will take away from your work." Martin by then had achieved success, by art world standards; twice, in fact. In 1967, at the height of a first wave of recognition, she had disappeared—from New York, where she’d been living and working among the rising stars of Abstract Expressionism, including Ellsworth Kelley, Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, and James Rosenquist -- and more importantly, from painting. Some conjecture that she had had a nervous breakdown, others that she was fleeing a failed relationship, or that it had something do with the death of her friend Ad Reinhardt that year. In any case, seven years later, emerging from a crucible of soul-searching, Martin resurfaced -- her work did, that is, via Arne Glimcher's Pace Gallery. By then, she was living a reclusive life on a mesa in New Mexico, where she lived and worked in much the same way for the next 30 years -- producing paintings based on the penciled grid form that she’d come upon prior to her first coming out in the '60s. In her own words, [F]inally, I got the grid, and it was what I wanted. Completely abstract. Absolutely no hint of any cause in this world. It was York’s account of Martin’s directness and dogmatism, those “absolutes,” that struck me. I was myself recently divorced, and embarking on a late-blooming artist’s life. At the time, her directives registered with me as invigorating truth. I was in my early 30s, and just such decisions about how I would spend my time and energy, how I would make money and live, how these books I hoped to write would get written were all front and center. I had always preferred solitude, to such an extreme that I worried it was a neurosis. Most people reading the essay would likely hear Martin as a kook, an outlier’s voice crying in the wilderness; but to me she was cutting through noise and confusion straight to wisdom. "Untitled" 1963 Over the next few years, I saw Martin’s paintings whenever I could. I would have described the paintings back then -- the grid paintings I mean primarily -- as “quiet” and “spiritual.” I sought them out for emotional centering. But even as I “liked” the paintings, what kept me going back was a nagging feeling that something more was happening in them; of not quite perceiving them fully. They evoked both nervous tension and wide openness; with my eye I saw the hand-penciled lines and watery bands of color expressing orderliness and infinity, control and vulnerability. Sometimes the opposing sensations would layer confusingly, sometimes they would cancel each other out and leave me feeling flat. Later I would read that Martin worked on the 6' by 6' canvass because it was “the full size of the human body” -- a person could step into it, could be swallowed, and absorbed. 3. My first encounter with Martin herself, and her verbal conception of her work (other than York’s brief account) was through Mary Lance's documentary, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World. Martin was in her late 80s during the years Lance shot the film -- lumbering and weathered and short of breath -- yet apparently working as habitually and single-mindedly as ever: the steadiness of Martin’s massive 86-year-old hand as she paints, even as she sometimes labors to speak, is a wonder. An in-person encounter with Martin for those not brave enough to pick up the phone and call, then show up, as Susan York did (as Mary Lance also did) -- even mediated through film -- may have been timely. Her gallerists and curators have generally reiterated Martin’s own insistence that her personality, her life history, are irrelevant to her work: Arne Glimcher wrote: “...she was extremely self-effacing and separated her persona from her art. She believed she was the locus where her art happened rather than its creator.” And yet critics, and the public, are generally not so easily satisfied: who was this reclusive Agnes Martin, and from where do these so-called “inspired” paintings come from? Who is the person generating these canvasses of quiet beauty? The average person finds comfort in narrative; in comprehensible cause and effect. With My Back to the World, however, provides little new insight or access, especially for those already familiar with Martin’s writings. In my recent rewatching of the film, and through corresponding with Lance, it is evident that Lance approached her subject with reverence, allowing Martin to dictate the process. That reverence translates into the film’s mode and aesthetic: if Agnes says her art is about purely abstract emotions, not personal experience or history, then the film will enact that same vessel-like receptivity; it too will be a locus, a transparent vehicle. Much of what Martin says on camera are close versions of what she has written or said before; periodically she reads directly from her writings. “I think all aggressive behavior is wrong -- where you go out and do, and attack things, like an army. That’s aggression.” “I’m just going forward. I’ve been working on the same theme for 10 years.” “The intellect is a struggle with facts...you’re certainly never going to find out the truth about life guessing about facts...I gave up facts in order to have an empty mind. I gave up the intellectual entirely.” “Beauty is the mystery of life. Beauty illustrates happiness.” The film is thus a spare and loving introduction to Martin’s work and to her verbal accounts of what the work is about; it is, I think, a better introduction than the writings alone, which, in their imperative, aphoristic, disembodied form, can come off as rigid and bloodless (she uses the word “obedience” quite frequently, for example). On screen, we see Martin’s ruddy cheeks, her deeply lined and sun-weathered face, round blue eyes, mussed pageboy; and we hear her frequent chuckle: “I made a movie about happiness, beauty, and innocence,” she says about Gabriel, her one foray into filmmaking, “to see if it would be responded to” (chuckle). Referring to her absolutist attitude (frustrating to curators and collectors) toward her earlier work, all of which she made efforts to track down and destroy, she says, “At the end of every year, I had a big fire, burned them all” (chuckle). The chuckles are both nervous and knowing. They convey at once, I guess folks think that’s pretty silly and I know better. The Martin we meet on screen, in her natural habitat, calls to mind a wry bit from York’s essay that escaped me, all those years ago: Opening the door to her studio, she said, "Never let anyone in your studio." (Surely Martin chuckled as she said this.) Lance’s film is one Martin would have approved of. And yet the virtue of unmediated presentation -- scripted as it sometimes feels -- is that Lance also gives us Martin in her self-contradictions. “I would rather think of humility than anything else,” she reads from one of her published writings, while earlier, she’d said, “Lots of painters paint about painting. But my painting is about meaning.” She resists being thought of as a mystic -- “I’m not any different from anybody. You’re not a mystic when you respond to beauty.” -- but also describes her clear memory of being born: “I thought I was quite a small figure with a little sword, and I was very happy.” She says, “It doesn’t matter where I work, it’s all the same. The environment doesn’t have any impact on my work because I don’t paint nature,” but also, “I saw the plain driving out of New Mexico, and I thought the plain had it; just the plain...When I draw horizontals you see this big plain, and you have certain feelings like you’re expanding over the plain.” 4. The contemporary culturati, however, are not satisfied. Martin’s pure abstraction and Zen-ish spiritualism negate too much of the humanist tradition, not to mention a century of psychotherapeutic theory and practice. In 2004, writing about an exhibit at Pace, Peter Schjeldahl expressed marked impatience with Martin’s as yet uninterrogated legacy of “ascetic abstractionism” and “dedicated idealism”: Her rather blowsy theories, invoking nature in strictly heady ways and harping on “perfection,” consort oddly with her pragmatic, unsentimental practice. He does grant a dynamic experience in beholding her paintings: As with Tantric diagrams, you see exactly what the work is, even as, with patient looking, you may undergo a gradual, and then sudden, soft detonation of beauty...Edge and shape, figure and ground, and matter and atmosphere are reversible, bringing about, for me, a sense of oscillation in the optic nerve...a conceptual traffic jam: sheer undecidability. My analytical faculties, after trying to conclude that what I’m looking at is one thing or another, give up, and my mind collapses into a momentary engulfing state that is either “spiritual” or nameless. Ultimately, though, he is skeptical of such experience as spiritually meaningful: When unrelated to a particular belief, might transcendence be no more than a neurological burp, soothing the mind as the alimentary kind does the stomach?...This may be the upward limit of what liberal culture can provide for the common soul. Perhaps it’s enough. Jonathan D. Katz, in “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,” collected in a 2009 book published by Dia, goes further -- arguing that Martin has been too often shielded from identity-based analysis, and that she herself has conjured a “trap,” a game, disingenuously manipulating the discourse: Martin’s critics have too often been satisfied with accounts of the work’s formal operations, rarely putting even its most sophisticated analyses of structures of meaning making...into broader social-historical frames...When critics...recuse the artist in favor of the artist’s means, they unwittingly fall into Martin’s well-made trap: she has already mediated that response, not only in her paintings but through her copious statements and parables, her eremitic self-sufficiency, her Zen-inflected paeans to humility -- all of which serve to underscore that there is nothing individuated, nothing “encoded,” in her art. But what if, instead of playing along, we were to try to see beyond this authorial transparency and ask why, in the first place, an artist would strive to erect a Trojan horse of signification, seeking to elevate the operations of meaning-making ahead of the maker of meaning herself? Why. The question is about psychology, about cause and effect. Where there is a person, surely there must be an interpretable narrative. Artist Zoe Leonard, in another essay in the Dia book, expresses something similar: I can’t help but wonder what role gender played in Martin’s art making. Whether it was a factor in the choices she made regarding society and isolation...Somewhere in the work, informing the work, is a biography of a person. A person who lived, as we all do, with the specifics and complications of her own desire. A person who lived within a certain time, surrounded by society. A person who was a woman, in America, at a specific moment in history. You can see the heads butting in conflict: Martin’s moment of salvation is the social historian’s very sticking point. Finally, I got the grid, and it was what I wanted. Completely abstract. Absolutely no hint of any cause in this world. The “aggressiveness” of Katz’s investigation alone would surely have elicited Martin’s disapproval (or, perhaps she would merely chuckle and go back to work): You’re hiding something, Agnes Martin. You are evading, repressing. Your “insistently prescriptive aesthetic absolutism,” is driven by latent, unacknowledged personal experience (homosexual experience, in Katz’s analyses). Katz draws attention to Martin’s emotional instability -- by her own account and others -- along with Ann Wilson's claim that she relied on “psychopharmacological medication” for most of her adult life. He also quotes sculptor Mary Fuller (McChesney) from a 1994 interview: Talk about a manipulator. Agnes Martin was like that...she said, “I’m going to make it. I am going to make it. And I don’t care who I have to fuck or how I have to do it. And now all these things of New York are totally, totally different from the stories Aggie told us about her background...She’s re-writing this whole history. [laughs] Why not? Innocence is a great theme of Martin’s work, and at this point I find myself nostalgic for my first experience of her paintings (and increasingly grateful for Mary Lance’s unintrusive approach); for Martin is right about the perils of intellect: you can know too much as you stand before a painting, you can find yourself in a mental “traffic jam.” Are paintings with titles like “Happiness,” “Contentment,” “Innocent Love,” and “Perfect Happiness” really about those things? Can those things be experienced so purely and simply, in life or in art? And if so, can they be expressed by someone so isolated from regular, messy human connection, and potentially isolated from her very own emotional reality? Can an artist let go all emotional contradiction, and can she truly disappear from her art? 5. Sitting in the MoMA research library recently, books on Martin piled high and my head throbbing -- I wonder if I will ever experience that quietness, that centering, before an Agnes Martin painting again. I wonder if I’ll ever step inside and be absorbed. I am not buying Katz’s assault on Martin as a repressed con artist; but I am weary from the contradictions, how Agnes Martin As Presented By Agnes Martin is not computing. She said things to Arne Glimcher like, To realize yourself is great art and to do that you need absolute faith that life is perfect. Louise [Nevelson] and I have it and that’s why we’re at the top. I am the best painter in the world today. and wrote to him in a letter, I have only one worry in the world! It’s that my paintings will show downtown and fail there. They will fail because they are non-aggressive...in a competitive environment, with big displays of aggressive artwork...With the dark paintings it was not bad because they do have some ‘force.’ I did not get one compliment on that show, however! Here she seems vain and a little manic, more narcissist than Obi Wan of the desert. There is substantial evidence that she experienced mental imbalance -- in Jack Youngerman’s words, “extremity of distress,” and in her own, “unheard of torment” -- but the tight lid she kept on those parts of her life undermines the trust I might otherwise put in a concretely evolved quietude. The sun has set and the library will close shortly. My appreciation piece has gone nowhere. I reach into my pile and begin flipping through a thin catalog from 2000 -- 11” by 11”, unpaginated -- published by Pace. Martin’s paintings reproduce poorly in general, but here they are printed on vellum, in color, overlaid on white linen. There is nothing else in the catalog -- no text, no essays -- but these prints. Unexpectedly, a wave of emotion comes over me as I slowly turn each page. The throbbing in my head quiets, and I feel something gathering, pulsing, in my chest. Maybe it’s the stress of all the reading I’ve done, but I have the distinct urge to weep -- to release something. I feel happy and sad, that’s the best I can describe it. The next day I make a trip to Dia: Beacon. I spend most of my time with Martin’s “Innocence” series, initially standing in the center of the gallery and slowly turning to each of eight paintings one by one. Lines, rectangles, symmetry. Pale radiant color swathed wetly inside hand-rendered depictions of absolute form. Again, emotion wells up: I feel sorrow, and gratitude, and pity. I don’t know what I am sorrowful about, for what I am grateful, or for whom I feel pity. But I feel these things, teeming and indistinguishable. Exercising my eye now, I step closer to each painting: glowing bands of red, yellow, blue, fade or thicken at random on either ends of the canvass; wavering graphite lines dive under and reemerge over top layers of paint and stop short, inexactly, of the canvass’s edge; broad swift brush strokes wash a monochromatic canvass in ambivalent gray textures; bright white gesso gleams like artificial moonlight against the mundane white of the gallery walls; blue and yellow make green in just a few places where rectangles bleed together. My hand comes to my mouth and the emotions brim and pulse, like whiskey in the blood; like warm sun on the skin; like happiness. All this speaks to me of the paradox of perfection. Of imperfection reaching for perfection -- for truth, happiness, innocence. The artist’s received awareness of the existence of that perfection is everywhere in the work; it is the work’s “voice.” The emotion I feel could be described as the tragedy of beauty, of perceiving and expressing impossibly pure emotions. When Agnes Martin makes commands of the artist -- insisting, prescribing, “harping” -- I believe she is directing the imperatives, first and foremost, consciously -- unconsciously, to herself -- who is both the locus of art that is genuinely about “perfect happiness and innocence” and a finely cracked vessel. She is the little figure wielding her paintbrush-sword; but the paint will not stay within the lines. Unlike MoMA curator Leah Dickerman, who sees the “tension between the regularity of the grid and the handmade quality of the lines” as a calculated message on Martin’s part -- “what she gets you to focus on are the subtle variations in making the grid” -- I believe that Martin was focused on perfection, her awareness of perfection, and on heightening the viewer’s experience of life. That her own imperfections -- of her hand and her life -- live also in the paintings may not have pleased Martin, but in this sense she truly was a vessel, then: the inspirations she “obeyed” illustrate poignancy as much as perfection. Pure abstraction, perhaps not; but moving and transformative still. For a few minutes, standing in the Innocence galleries, I really do forget what was on my mind that day, the worries of the week past and coming. The holidays, with all its materialism, revealed to me anew that the physical clutter of my middle-class life is cluttering my mind. I am en route to a brief solitude retreat, and was anxious about leaving home, partner, appointments, dog. Departing the museum, as intellect kicks back in, I think of a phrase that modern Christians have used -- The Now and the Not Yet -- to describe the Kingdom of God as both fully realized, via the resurrection, and still in process, by good works. I’ve always liked the phrase. It is at once proclamatory and replete with longing, exultant and heartbreaking. * Click here to read a Q&A with filmmaker Mary Lance. Agnes Martin photo credit: Mildred Tolbert, 1954. Homepage portrait via Phaidon.