Eileen Myles

  • slant November 12, 2016

    My Most Recent Acceptance (2016)

    FRANKLY THIS IS A MOURNFUL LITTLE PIECE. Last Sunday we were all out there on the high line freezing our asses off—joyfully. Zoe Leonard’s I Want a Dyke President was wheat-pasted several hundred feet away from us and for about three hours ten or twelve of us including Justin Vivian Bond and myself and Layli Long Soldier and Fred Moten, poets & performers, thinkers, everyone emceed by Sharon Hayes read statements got up on stage and sang and read about sex and chatted and discoursed and generally filled in the details of the absolute political state of rage we are living in. It was beautiful

  • books Summer 2015

    Summer Reading

    HAL FOSTER

    Whither photo history and theory? A growth field in universities and museums a generation ago, it seems endangered today. For young people, photography is so last-century; for the rest of us, it is both everywhere and nowhere in a way that is very difficult to grasp. On the one hand, the great modernist accounts, such as the technophilic utopia of Benjamin and the traumatophilic pathos of Barthes, appear outdated; on the other hand, distinguished voices from somewhat outside the field feel empowered to tell us “why photography matters as never before.” (Answer 1: Its digital pictoriality

  • slant March 2010

    “ACT UP New York”

    ACT UP DID POLITICS with an urgent Pop splash. Comic-book chromatics and rage tweaked Reagan’s eyes pink and his face bright green; AZT, the first effective (and massively overpriced) AIDS drug to land on the market, got a Coca-Cola treatment in a red poster that urged us cheerily to ENJOY it. In the recent exhibition “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, one’s eyes grazed over an entire wall of posters—most in bold caps—full of information and accusations directed both to the half-awake people in the street

  • interviews September 2001

    1000 WORDS: RUSSELL CROTTY

    “FIRST THE OUTLINE OF PINES . . . oak and sumac darkened . . . backlit by the full moon rising in capricornus . . . talk radio company.. . coffee on the tailgate. . . the gloaming twilight to the west.” —Atlas of Lunar Drawings, 1996

    A lot of the pleasure in Russell Crotty's pencil-drawn vision of outer space is the commonplace grandeur of It. He draws and captions in “bad poetry”— sky we know, a contemporary LA sky with the problems of light pollution and the toll of encroaching development and the weirdness of nature itself jutting into the horizon: radio towers, ponderosas and palm