Rain Taxi, Art in America, Hyperallergic, SuperRare
LitPub: An Interview with John Reed, author of A Drama in Time: The New School Century
(08/06/2024)
Kristina Marie Darling: Your newest book, A Drama in TIme: The New School Century, just launched from Profile Books Ltd. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
John Reed: Well, I’d like people to know about The New School and its history, and coming to the book with a very basic outline of The New School is something I’d hope for. There’s nothing like writing a book about a submarine and having someone ask you, “but what’s a submarine?”
I’d also love for people to know that it’s a reference book, with many pictures, and that it was designed to read through or to just peck at, reading now and then and going back to for information. That would make me really happy, knowing the book lived that kind of life on people’s shelves.
The last thing, hmm. I’d love for people to know that there are many mysteries to solve here.
KMD: In addition to your achievements in nonfiction, you are an accomplished poet and novelist. Why is it important for writers to allow themselves to move fluidly between genres? What can nonfiction writers learn from poets? And from their colleagues working in fiction? …
3 Quarks Daily: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm: A Conversation between John Reed and Andrea Scrima
(10/23/2023)
Andrea Scrima: John, to start off with, I’d like to talk about this decades-long mission of yours to demystify George Orwell and shed light on his lesser-known political leanings and activities. One of the aims at the heart of this project, and your earlier book Snowball’s Chance, has been to reveal that Animal Farm does not, as has been generally claimed, describe the dangers of totalitarianism as such but rather the dangers of rebellion and revolution. In your new book The Never End, you delineate Animal Farm’s hidden agenda: to squelch any incipient rumblings of progressive reform. The message to readers on the Western front of the Cold War—and particularly schoolchildren, because Orwell’s books have been part of the standard curriculum for over seventy years—has been that revolution, even when it’s unleashed not by the rabble-rousing mob but by the educated class, and for all the right reasons—is, due to our flawed human nature, doomed to failure. Meaning: better to maintain a status quo that is admittedly less than ideal than risk chaos.
It reminds me of that moment shortly after the pandemic hit when a mood of hope began to spread: nature had finally struck back, and humanity was recognizing the stark truth of its situation: that to survive, it would have to scale back virtually everything we associate with modern life and reduce the monster of production to a minimum. Suddenly, it was like getting a fleeting glimpse through a veil: the late-capitalist system of forever war we’re living in was created by humans and can therefore be changed by humans; it was possible to shift course, we just had to take responsibility and start. In retrospect, it’s sad to see how quickly the revolutionary power in that insight gave way to fear and resignation as we obeyed the powers that be and waited for the vaccinations that would save us—but for a moment there, our collective situation, and our collective power to change it, had become briefly, startlingly clear.
And so it seems to me that you’re looking at the great force arising out of hope—and why it’s essential for those in power to snuff it out as early as possible. What bearing does this have today?…
SuperRare: The myth, the meaning, the heirloom that is Studio 54 and 1970s New York: an extended interview with Bill Bernstein
(10/27/2021)
…John: Okay. So, what drew you to NFTs?
Bill: Willy, Willy. Honestly, NFTs are a little out of my realm. As a photographer, I started way back in the ‘70s. My theme, my personal theme, is about inclusion, freedom of expression, looking at cultures, looking at our culture, where we’re at. The whole NFT thing, honestly, is a little bit out there for me, in terms of connecting to it or accessing it, but I like the idea of using modern technology, especially for going back to earlier artwork, like ‘70s film photography.
John: What was your first experience with NFT’s?
Bill: My first experience? Let me see. I had a gallery show recently in Palm Beach. And that was kind of the first time I heard about NFTs. The gallery director said this might be a good match for your work, you know. There might be some NFT buyers out there. I’m not sure about the basic demographic of NFT buyers. Young and early adopters, probably. But many of them are particularly interested in club culture. And my work is about club culture, almost where it started—in the ‘70s in New York City, Mudd Club, Studio 54, Xenon, Paradise Garage, places like that.
John: Could you talk a bit more about Studio 54 culture and its internet mythology?
Bill: Internet mythology?
John: When I think about that culture, the way it was when I was a kid—and I loved it at the time—and I see it on the internet, in a way I prefer the vision of it now.
Bill: That’s an interesting point. When you look back in history, sometimes there’s a romantic lens.
Hyperallergic: In Conversation with Miguel Angel Hernandez
(02/07/2016)
…John Reed: There are some books that I think about in the context of “painter” books: Flaubert’s Salammbo, The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz, maybe Kathy Acker, maybe Jane Bowles. Do you think of any books that way, or as “artist” books?
Miguel Angel Hernández: When I think of those kind of “artist” books, I think of a tradition starting in Balzac and Flaubert, and extending to Michel Houellebecq or Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. Art may be background to the plot, but there are also some artistic ideas in the way an “artist” book is written. Art is fully embodied in it. I wanted my book to be part of this tradition of books not only with a subject of art but penetrated by artistic ideas — so not only about art but with art.
JR: What’s the relationship, if there is one, between art and ethics?
MAH: As an art critic I am always worried about what are the limits of art, to what extent an artist can do anything, everything, and that is what I was thinking about when I started writing that book — this problem of ethics is at the core of modern art. In fact, I suspect modern art is a reflection on ethics. From Courbet, Manet, to contemporary art and the neo-avant-garde. My work as a critic and now as a fiction writer has been to examine that problem.
JR: In general, I think of art and ethics as running parallel; they occasionally intersect but seem separate. You can have art that is unethical, but it is still art. The quality of what is ethics does not influence and is not influenced by the quality of what is art. And yet, it seems that each act of art encompasses some transgression or criminal intent, or at the very least some kind of interrupted expectation. Yesterday I was hanging out with an old family friend — she was a dancer in the ‘80s and is a highly skilled potter — and she was showing me these big pots that she made. Some of them were just terrific pots and then another group of them had a glaze which gave the appearance that it had eaten into the clay, deconstructed the clay, which seemed really quite wrong; but those pots were art and the other pots were just pots. So that’s my question, what is it about the transgressive act that makes a pot into art?
MAH: Okay, that’s a hard one. I think that, like any job, in the profession of art there are some applied ethics…
Art in America: “To the Letter,” Peter Neumeyer and Edward Gorey
(10/18/2011)
…John Reed: From 1952–1960, Gorey worked in the art department at Doubleday, and designed over one hundred books. What is your impression of the influence of the Doubleday years on Gorey’s thinking?
Peter Neumeyer: The first time Ted visited us, I hadn’t really fully appreciated his work at Doubleday, until quite suddenly I realized that a whole pile of my “Anchor” paperbacks had Gorey covers. I laid them all out on the floor, and we all just sort of took in the glory of it all—Gide, Melville, Freud, Perry Miller.
As for “the design process” in collaborations, Gorey once said that he “never had anything to do with the author of a book [he] was illustrating” before. This was a new mode of working for him. In fact, the very first letter reproduced in Floating Worlds is fairly typical of how we often worked. I had started to write a letter to our editor, Harry Stanton, and thought better of it and decided to contact Gorey directly. The topic is the illustration of the housefly at the end of Donald and the . . .—whether he should be drawn in the context of the whole room, or stand there alone, in solitary splendor.
Ted and I discussed that fly over several letters, and that conversation more or less set the tone for how we were to collaborate henceforth. Perhaps a quarter of the book is detailed discussion back and forth both about specifics of text as well as of illustration. The first book we did together was, textually, a fait accompli when we began work. Each of the later books had its own evolution, documented precisely in the letters.
Reed: Gorey wasn’t much for writing letters. His 200 pages to you are rather extraordinary, aren’t they?
Neumeyer: I agree, I think they’re extraordinary too…
Rain Taxi: “Talking Animals”
(10/11/2011)
In Adam Hines’s debut graphic novel, Duncan the Wonderdog (AdHouse Books, $24.95), the animals can talk, and their revolution is underway. Hines moves beyond superheroes and the crusty assumptions of many graphic novels to tell his story with the patience and sprawl of a grand novel, or an epic television series. Humanity, he posits, is less evolutionary miracle than environmental upstart. Gauging by the seven years he spent on the first installment, the next four planned installments of Duncan may well take Hines the remainder of his life to complete, a Gaian pace, to move mountains. …