Ma(r)king Myth, Imagining Nowhere: A German Exile's Alaskan Archive

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Ma(r)king Myth, Imagining Nowhere: A German Exile's Alaskan Archive

In this philosophical essay, Jackie Valle brings a phenomenological approach to vision and perception in the context of Carl Heidenreich’s late works, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and Invisible and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to call into question our understanding of reality as glimpsed through the transparencies, opacities, and layered pools of watercolor pigment in Heidenreich’s Alaskan Series.

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COVID-19 and Immersive Installation: Annette Messager’s “Penetrables"

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COVID-19 and Immersive Installation: Annette Messager’s “Penetrables"

Annette Messager’s immersive installation Penetration brings the beholder inside of the body into a forest of organs. The work takes up the iconography of medical and scientific illustration, a specific tradition of knowledge production that calls for re-examination considering our recent and ongoing experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, more specifically, the imaging of the virus. This essay primarily interrogates how the body and selfhood might be conceived of differently.

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Boys Fight

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Boys Fight

In Marina Tëmkina’s poem “Boys Fight,” one finds a taxonomy of masculinity in her inventory of big boys, old boys, mainstream boys, golden boys, and girls who look up to boys—all combative, doing intellectual battle, raging and sparring, and driven. Tëmkina’s lines are paired with the mixed-media drawings of Michel Gérard, which take their cue from an illustration of boxing techniques in the Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, a popular and practical French-language encyclopedic dictionary first published in 1905.

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