Popular Culture – Nonsite.org

Don’t Let Me Be Universal: Or, the Postwar American Poem

June 22, 2015

She explains that much liver damage is drug-induced because the liver functions as a chemical purifier, stripping the blood of toxins by splitting poisons into less destructive chemical building blocks. The resulting toxins are excreted while the cleansed blood recirculates. When an overwhelmed liver fails to break down the blood’s contaminants (even beneficial ones, such as painkillers), the pollutants poison the liver cells instead.

“Crowded Air”: Previous Modernisms in some 1964 New York Little Magazines

January 16, 2015

Like Ed Sanders’s antagonistically and aptly named Fuck You Press, whose publication list includes bootleg mimeograph printings of W.H. Auden and Ezra Pound, little magazines from 1964 serve as case studies for an avant-garde scene that grapples with the enshrinement of/resistance to previous avant-gardes…and an engagement with social antagonism….Ultimately, these scenes’ interest in social self-documentation is propelled by an attempt to get around the problem posed by the relegation of poems (of whatever aesthetic genealogy) to the cultural sphere.

‘Endless Talk’: Beat Writers and the Interview Form

January 16, 2015

While we don’t tend to think of William Burroughs in terms of his engagement with the interview, in fact the form underpins much of his (and his collaborators’) work from the 1960s forwards, including the cut-up. Taking the Beat concept of self-interviewing to its extreme conclusion, Burroughs and frequent collaborator Gysin, turn the form’s interrogative function on the artist and the artwork. In doing so they highlight the interview’s potential to be a critically engaged, radical form.

Joe Brainard’s Grid, or, the Matter of Comics

January 16, 2015

A comic that merely uses Nancy, rather than a painting that appropriates Nancy, does not seek to elevate its subject matter. Instead, as is so often the case with Brainard’s Nancy drawings and paintings, the point is to devalue painting, to turn painting into a valueless form, by folding painting into comics.

Tag: Popular Culture

Don’t Let Me Be Universal: Or, the Postwar American Poem

“Crowded Air”: Previous Modernisms in some 1964 New York Little Magazines

‘Endless Talk’: Beat Writers and the Interview Form

Joe Brainard’s Grid, or, the Matter of Comics