Dennis Cooper’s GIF books include ZAC’s CORAL REEF (2018), ZAC’S FREIGHT ELEVATOR, a novel (2016), ZAC’S CONTROL PANEL (2015), ZAC'S HAUNTED HOUSE, a novel (2015), and ZAC’S DRUG BINGE, a novel (forthcoming, spring 2020). They are published by Kiddiepunk Press and are free to download at www.kiddiepunk.com/zines.htm. His GIF works have been exhibited at Art Basel (2019), Cabinet Gallery (London), Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris), The New Museum (NYC), and elsewhere. 

WHEN I HEARD of Suellen’s passing, I thought back to my first meeting with her. As I recall, she wasn’t at the get-together we had for the planning of the first Hairy Who show. So I did the “grown-up lady thing” and invited her for lunch, even though my kitchen skills were severely lacking. No matter, it was getting to know each other that was important. I served a packaged soup, but didn’t stir in the required amount of water, so it was sort of lumpy, powdery, and weird. Suellen was gracious and such a good sport, laughing with me, not at me. We gradually choked it all down.

She was kind,

IN ELIZA HITTMAN’S SUPERBLY UNDERSTATED Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a seventeen-year-old high schooler named Autumn (Sidney Flanigan, in a strikingly honest and emotionally layered screen debut) needs to have an abortion. Need is the operative word, not want. Autumn’s need is not medical. She needs to able to control her life. She needs to get out of the small failed Pennsylvania town where every man treats every woman as if she’s a punching bag, existing only to prove his power. If she is forced to care for a baby, Autumn knows she’ll never be able to get away.

In Pennsylvania, a minor must

THE QUARANTINI IS THE DRINK OF THE MOMENT. It’s just like a martini, except you have it alone. The Californian pop star Lauv, by the sound of it, has been downing quarantinis for a while. His is a songbook of solitary anguish, with titles like “f*ck, i’m lonely,” “Lonely Eyes,” and “Sad Forever.” Take the chorus for “Modern Loneliness,” the lead single for the twenty-five-year-old’s new album, released a couple weeks ago: “We’re never alone / But always depressed / Love my friends to death / But I never call and I never text.” Lauv might just have missed the mark on this one: Now, many of us

Dennis Cooper’s GIF books include ZAC’s CORAL REEF (2018), ZAC’S FREIGHT ELEVATOR, a novel (2016), ZAC’S CONTROL PANEL (2015), ZAC'S HAUNTED HOUSE, a novel (2015), and ZAC’S DRUG BINGE, a novel (forthcoming, spring 2020). They are published by Kiddiepunk Press and are free to download at www.kiddiepunk.com/zines.htm. His GIF works have been exhibited at Art Basel (2019), Cabinet Gallery (London), Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris), The New Museum (NYC), and elsewhere. 

LAST MONTH WAS SUPPOSED TO MARK the grand opening of the Albertina Modern in Vienna. Instead, the city’s last public gathering took place just days before the museum’s scheduled opening, on March 8, when the Croatian curatorial collective What, How, and for Whom (WHW) inaugurated their exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien with nearly two thousand visitors who hugged, kissed, drank, and sang songs of solidarity with the self-organized anti-fascist polyglot choir Hor 29. Novembar. Since then, the habitually sleepy capital of the Alpine state has gone into a state of near-total social and civil hibernation.

Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art, by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 632 pages.

ACCORDING TO AN ANCIENT TEXT attributed to Aristotle, black bile “can induce paralysis or torpor or depression or anxiety when it prevails in the body; but if it is overheated it produces cheerfulness, bursting into song, and ecstasies and the eruption of sores and the like.” Such “fits of exaltation” were believed to be conducive to creative achievement. “Maracus, the Syracusan,” the text tells

The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing, by Danielle Aubert. Los Angeles: Inventory Press, 2019. 240 pages.

A YEAR AFTER the May 1968 uprisings in France, essayist Maurice Blanchot defended the revolt—which, beginning as a student movement, had culminated in a near-cataclysmic general strike—as an expression of social treason: “In the so-called ‘student’ action, students never acted as students but rather as revealers of a general crisis, as bearers of a power of rupture putting into question the regime, the State, society.” In breaching the norms of the ruling order, this

THE LATE COMPOSER-LYRICIST Michael Friedman entered my life in such a whirlwind that I can’t even remember exactly where we met. Perhaps our most significant encounter was at “A Safe and Special Place”, a fundraiser for the Trevor Project and KIND (Kids in Need of Defense) organized in response to a line from one of then president-elect Donald Trump’s tweets: “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.”* I contributed a song but wasn’t going to be available to attend, so Michael was slated to play and sing it for me—but then the evening wound up running long, and I made it there just

Portland, Oregon–based Stephen Malkmus is a songwriter, singer, and guitarist best known for his work with Pavement. His third solo album, Traditional Techniques, was released last month by Matador Records.

Pioneering Net artist Olia Lialina was one of the first to make work for networked browsers and she’s one of the few from that first wave to persist. She not only offers metacommentary on the evolving conditions of the World Wide Web, but also consistently speaks and writes about its vernacular iconography and the social conditions created by its content, protocols, and devices. Lialina maintains her own archive of Geocities pages, can recount the art history of sparkly star gifs, and is herself a noted “animated gif model.” Her current show, “Best Effort Network,” is up at arebyte Gallery,

10 AM ON THURSDAY, March 5, 2020: That was when I was supposed to have a coffee in Tribeca with the artists who use the pseudonyms Eva and Franco Mattes. I would be in town for the art fairs, and scheduling this meeting with the Italian duo, who are based in New York, was my consolation for missing “What Has Been Seen,” their survey at the Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal. Before Facebook transformed the internet into a place where we use our real (or “real”) names, Eva and Franco began making Net art under the moniker 0100101110101101.org, focusing on how identities and information