: Art and Life

Dickfish: A Rock & Roll Fable

by R.S. Moore, AuthorHouse, 2009

In this novel, fable, or “mock memoir” (as the author calls it), Axel Finn has escaped the poverty and neglect of his childhood in the rural South and ensconced himself among a close-knit group of hipster-lobbyist sophisticates—or are they merely misfits?—in Washington, DC, during the era of President George W. Bush. The story—loosely structured around quotes from rock ‘n’ roll lyrics—meanders from one sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll–fueled episode to the next, interspersed with screeds against the self-righteousness and moral hypocrisy of the Mandarin class’s conservative majority. While Moore exhibits an elementary command of alliteration and an epigrammatic wit, neither the book’s characters, who aren’t nearly as outré as the author imagines, nor the plot, which often seems random, rise above the author’s self-regarding superficialities.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

by Martina D’Alton, Five Continents Editions, 2009

As curator David Revere McFadden observes, paper has been such a ubiquitous commodity, “so ordinary and commonplace to an extraordinary degree,” that as an artistic medium it holds enormous transformative possibilities. Slash: Paper Under the Knife surveys the use of paper-cutting techniques by a wide range of contemporary artists—Kara Walker, Lesley Dill, Judy Pfaff, and others recently exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York—to create two- and three-dimensional works. The works under consideration attest to the incredibly subtle and sophisticated range of expression and scale, from silhouettes to sculpture and large installations exploring architectural space and topography, metaphorical potential of the human body, cultural and personal mythologies, political issues, words, and language through the medium
of altered books—even the moving image