NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN
The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence by philosopher Juliane Rebentisch (Polity Press) is a book that only conditionally has to do with art, and more to do with ethics and politics. But to imagine their exclusion from the discourse of art would be unconditionally unthinkable.
Nairy Baghramian is an artist based in Berlin.
CARISSA RODRIGUEZ
When Hilton Als invited viewers to read Brenda Shaughnessy’s captivating collection Our Andromeda as part of his incisive exhibition at the Artist’s Institute in New York that so generously attests, “My art has always been other people,” I was excited to discover poems Shaughnessy had written to her younger self from her present perspective as an artist and mother. Als’s and Shaughnessy’s exhilarating conceptual moves through bodies and time inspire my thinking about how to show work and how to make experience perform not just retrospectively but retroactively—a delicate but seismic difference between looking back and transformation. I can’t wait to read Shaughnessy’s So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press) in city parks below Fourteenth Street, where I spent my teenage summers wiling out with other “new wave” kids of immigrants, being new to ourselves.
Carissa Rodriguez is an artist based in New York.