Mister Badger

Karl Wirsum, Through the Crack in My Head I Heard Someone Call My Name, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 44.75 x 50.75 x 2 inches.

Georgina Hay, Plant study #8, 2017, color photograph.

Wendy Red Star. Top: iilaalée = car (goes by itself) + ii = by means of which + dáanniili = we parade, lithograph, 24 x 38 in. Bottom: Spring, 2006, color photograph. From the series “Four Seasons.”

Penelope Umbrico, For Sale / Televisions from Craiglist, 2008–2011, thirty-five  digital c-prints mounted to aluminum, 11" x 17" each.

Nobuaki Takekawa, Club Burning-Hell, 2015, acrylic on canvas.

Yuri Masnyj, Life in Cities: Self Help, Condo Development, Task Management, 2016, graphite, watercolor, acrylic paint, colored pencil, ballpoint pen, and correction fluid on paper, 38 x 28.5 in.

Monday morning.

Waldemar Cordeiro, Idéia Visível, 1956.

Roger Duvoisin’s cover for the June 13, 1953, issue of The New Yorker.

Letterpress posters by Amos P. Kennedy Jr., bookmaker, journeyman printer, and Alabaman.

Léon Bakst, May (costume study for La Nuit ensorcelée), 1923, graphite and watercolor on paper; Etude de motif, 1923–24, gouache on paper.

Richard Tuttle, Lable 5-8, 2003, suite of four etchings with aquatint, spitbite, sugarlift, softground, and fabric colle, 16 x 16 in. 

Caroline Sury

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, 5 Umezebi Street, New Haven, Enugu, 2012, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, color pencil and transfer on paper, 7 ft. x 8.75 ft.; Her Widening Gyre, 2011, charcoal, acrylic, collage and xerox transfers on paper, 6 ft. × 4.5 ft.

The handmade, low-fi quality of the book—bits of cutout paper welded together, the pulpy newsprint on which it is printed—is sympathetic to the title’s reference to a manual mechanism that has been superseded by a more technologically advanced version, the vacuum cleaner. That notion of irrelevance plays out in the stories in the various ways men behave toward women. In one story, a man pursues a woman’s affections; she demurs, uncertain of his proposal. “I am Dust-Resistance for you. Me Clean ‘Magic’ carpet love,” he purrs. “When a woman Carpet Sweeper,” she sighs, trailing off. And later (and elsewhere in the book), she exclaims, “Ford you sweepmaster!” In the language of domesticity and commodities Doucet employs, this becomes an ultimate statement: a man can be a sweepmaster, but women regularly are made to feel like carpet sweepers. (The phrase carpet sweeper and its shabby connotations reminds me of Bashmachkin, the bullied clerk of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” whose name means “carpet slipper.”) Read more.