Searching for Guy Debord

by Andy Merrifield

Express

Bellevue-la-Montagne is a sleepy, almost deserted village perched high on a 1000-meter hillock in the northern reaches of France’s Haute-Loire. At Bellevue, looking southeast, you do get a fine view of mountains, of the Massif Central, whose flat-topped volcanoes dominate this part of the rugged Auvergne.

David Rabinowitch

by Joan Waltemath

Art

Joan Waltemath (Rail): We can discount everything that came before…

David Rabinowitch: Yes, we begin in the middle. Virgil begins in media res as Homer did.

Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003)

by Phong Bui

Art

Art historian and writer Max J. Friedlander once said: "It’s easier to change your worldview than the way you hold your spoon." Many artists I know, myself included, grew accustomed to seeing all the works of art at the Museum of Modern Art in their respective places— everyone had his or her own favorite painting or sculpture, installed more or less in perpetuity for the duration of William Rubin’s tenure— until Kirk Varnedoe became Rubin’s successor in 1988 as the chief curator of painting and sculpture.

Jim Shaw

by William Powhida

ArtSeen

Generically titled Drawings 1979–2003, Jim Shaw’s mini drawing retrospective might have been called "There and Back Again." His recent body of work eschews the narrative driven pencil drawings of the 1990s for black-and-white experimentation.

Richard Pousette-Dart

by Rachel Youens

ArtSeen

Richard Pousette-Dart’s "Mythic Heads and Forms," abstract paintings which span the decade of the 1930s, with their elliptical organization of thick black lines that forcefully yet almost imperceptibly shift space, have an immediate impact, in the sense of both sureness and conviction.

Strangers: First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video by Megan Heuer
Landslide by John Hawke
Kristin Baker by Victoria Keddie
Jim Shaw by William Powhida
Steven Charles by Stephanie Buhmann
Ele D’Artagnan by Stephanie Buhmann
Kelly Heaton by Nick Stillman
Richard Pousette-Dart by Rachel Youens
Ben Parry by Jill Conner
Chris Caccamise by Benjamin La Rocco
Heidi Cody by James Kalm
Laurie Thomas by Benjamin La Rocco
Please Pay Attention Please by Nick Stillman
Marilyn Bridges by Tomassio Longhi
Another Art Story From Venice by Robert C. Morgan

George Plimpton (1927-2003)

by Maggie Paley and Dan Simon

Books

George Plimpton, who died suddenly on the last Thursday of September at the age of 76, led by all measures a brilliant life. He was passionate, first and foremost, about literature.

Johnny Cash (1932-2003)

by Theodore Hamm

Music

I never did make it to see Johnny Cash.

My wife Emily, our friend David and I had tickets for his show in Reno, the place he made mythic. It was October of 1997, and although Johnny had already started to take ill, we had no idea it would be one of his last performances.

Dancing in the Real World

by Shanti Crawford

Dance

The 12-story grain terminal in Red Hook has witnessed the rise and fall of shipping and manufacturing industries in Brooklyn, and the passing of countless waves of immigrants. It has seen just about everything, but until last summer it had never seen thirty rows of folding chairs and an usher.