issue 32 > visual art
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Empty Art: Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings
by Donald KuspitReading through Ad Reinhardt’s various writings on “art-as-art,” “black,” and his “black paintings,” I was struck by several remarks that suggest that, despite his oft-repeated insistence that “art-as-art is nothing but art,”(6) it is also something else, namely, a sort of empty, deflated, flattened, depleted breast—a depressingly bad withholding breast, if you want, rather than a benignly nourishing giving breast, rich with white milk rather than an abysmally “black hole.” I am suggesting that despite all his effort to deny that art has any symbolic import, his black paintings are what the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal calls “symbolic equations” for the dead breast of the inwardly dead mother.
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Buffalo
by Phil SultzWhen Benny and I were boys, the kitchen was the warm room in winter, but after we ate, we didn't hang around. There was no reason to. We didn't sit there discussing anything, or read books. There were none.
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Pioneer Homestead
by Phil SultzFrontier life by its very nature took root on the geographic rim of
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rough times.