The Man Who Would Be King: Method in Trump’s Madness, Contradictions in Trump’s Method
Trump can meet the expectations of those looking for a hard line on immigration and can grant his corporate backers the tax cuts and deregulation they greedily seek. But it is the economy that will be decisive for his populist base, and on this measure, Trump is very unlikely to succeed. As for the business elite, they have always assumed Trump was not so mad as to start a tariff war that risked undermining the American empire itself. As that danger materializes, business will rebel. The question will then shift from what Trump intends to do to what he will he do as his plans go astray.
Issue #49: Portraits of Divided Light: In Memory of Joseph Marioni (1943-2024)
In memory of the radical ambition and extraordinary achievement of the painter Joseph Marioni, this issue brings together four contributions in four different forms: poems by Michael Fried, photographs by James Welling, a film by Joe De Francesco, and an essay by Joseph Staten.
Painter: Making A Modern Painting
With generous permission
from the filmmaker’s estate,
we are honored to share
this extraordinary short
documentary, completed in
2017 by Joseph De
Francesco with Michael
O’Connell. Framed as an
intimate interview with
Marioni, it also contains the
only known footage of him
painting.
The Dialectic of Liquid Light
In speech and in practice, the term “liquid light” binds together the material and the immaterial; indeed, this binding is at the core of all painting. And it is the dialectical acknowledgment performed by the notion of liquid light that, finally, gives Marioni pride of place at this epochal moment in the history of his art form.
The Painter’s Studio: 12 Photographs by James Welling
From 1972 until his death on September 6, 2024, Joseph Marioni occupied a studio loft at 545 8th Avenue. These photographs were made during a single visit in late December of that year.
The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism
Instead, a race-essentialist understanding of epistemology lies at the heart of both Robinson’s notions of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. In the former, we find racism intrinsic to “European” culture as early as antiquity and reaching maturation in the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, while he presents African medieval societies and black colonial subjects as innately peaceful and less violent. And in this regard, Robinson’s claims are consonant with a longer line of black nationalist thinking in the United States, which inverts the assumptions of white supremacy and holds that white domination is an endemic phenomenon.
Framing the Working Class: Ray’s a Laugh, 28 Years On
Billingham’s desire to make something aesthetically rather than socially or politically moving can be understood not just as a form of complicity with individuals and their families but, in its commitment to structure, as the imagination of an alternative. For example, the question of the frame in the photo of Liz doing her puzzle is not reducible to the ethics of photographing your mother. Rather the photo ignores the questions of family ethics. More important, it doesn’t so much ignore as seek to overcome even the question of working-class identity. Liz’s dress, her tattoos, the couch she’s sitting on can all lend themselves to being read as the markers of such an identity.
The Uses and Abuses of Manet’s Olympia
Manet’s art is about challenging what we think we know about the world: about what makes a finished picture as well as about what constitutes a politics of class, gender, and race. And doesn’t the moral value of artworks lie in their resistance to our assumptions about the world, not how they reaffirm what we already think we know?
The Painter: 6 Prose Poems in Memory of Joseph Marioni
Joseph Marioni emails to say that he has finally resolved his large green painting. The last Archetype has fallen — not fallen, exactly, rather it has yielded to The Painter’s uncompromising efforts.
The Inauthenticity of our Class Discourse: or, Publishing Respects your Foodbank Usage
The issue, therefore, is not that we need to stop representation from benefiting elite minorities—that’s just representation in its most indefensible form—but that we need to stop believing that representation, or, more broadly conceived, anti-discrimination, should be our foremost social justice commitment. Without a prior grounding in a politics of economic equality, all anti-discrimination boils down to is the neoliberal promise that people should have an equal opportunity to escape poverty; rather than trying to get rid of it.
