Quarantine Reading List | Nate Lerner
Quarantine Reading List | Nate Lerner
My experience of reading during quarantine goes beyond printed books. A piece of music can function as a text, and many of us do a huge amount of our reading online. With that in mind, here’s a broadly conceived quarantine reading list.
Nate Lerner. Johnson, VT (2019). Image courtesy of the artist.
BOOKS
I’m sure I’m not alone in the experience of feeling that this lockdown situation would finally give me the time to lose myself in big thick books, yet instead, I feel too distracted and emotionally worn down to concentrate on anything all that durationally substantial. But short books are also good books, of course, and there’s a particular skill in being able to realize a complete world or concept in under 300 pages.
Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE is one such example. I admit to picking this from a shelf at Ebenezer Books solely based on its beautiful cover design without knowing anything about its groundbreaking style. What is a picture without a foreground? A portrait where the subject is defined only by what surrounds it? A narrative without a plot? Cusk explores these questions in a literary experiment that could easily be quite dry and instead is remarkably compelling.
The catalog for David Kennedy Cutler’s performance Off Season includes some poetry by dear friend Aude Jomini, which is why I ordered it from Printed Matter earlier this year. Little did I know how much the project, with its themes of isolation and survival, would resonate during a pandemic; rereading it this week was somehow comforting. The publication is so much more than a catalog and, along with beautiful documentary stills and reproductions of “surviving works” from the 9-week performance, includes a knockout essay by Cynthia Daignault and diaristic writing from the artist which extends the performance and transforms it into a separate, more permanent work.
Nate Lerner. From the series When the Spirit Moves You (2020). Image courtesy of the artist.
MUSIC
Music is saving us right now, right?
Spinster Sounds is an intersectional feminist record label founded by Emily Hilliard, Sarah Henson, and Sally Anne Morgan. (Emily is a folklorist, writer, and official pie and related desserts expert for NPR who I got to know while living in North Carolina.) Their latest release, Songs for John Venn by Lou Turner, is just the sort of warm, introspective music that can soothe the heart and mind, and I’m so glad to have received a tape earlier this month. (Yes, a cassette tape — a wonderfully democratizing medium as they’re cheap to produce, copy, and distribute, can actually sound great with the right equipment, and, well, they’re fun.)
Also, the Metropolitan Opera was forced to end its season early but has been streaming a free opera every 24 hours. Operatic plots can range from the ridiculous to the insipid, but hearing and seeing one of the very best orchestras collaborate with singers at the top of their game is well worth experiencing. Now you can, for free! (And then when this is over buy tickets and support working musicians.)
Nate Lerner. From the series When the Spirit Moves You (2020). Image courtesy of the artist.
THE INTERNET
No, not zoom, not social media, not work-from-home productivity tools. Traditional arts organizations are being forced to engage audiences online, and this isn’t a bad thing. What excites and inspires me at this moment, however, are the emerging collaborative efforts utilizing digital platforms. One such example is the newly launched Here Projects, co-founded by artists Tamika Rivera, Angelica Reisch, and Paige Martin. I got to know Angie and Tamika while in residence at Vermont Studio Center, and while they make very different work, both are artists who blend innate instinct, insight, and personal vision with ridiculous amounts of skill, thoughtfulness, and care in the creation of space for objects and ideas — I can’t wait to see what they build together.
Nate Lerner
Nate Lerner studied photography at Wesleyan University (MALS, 2017) and is concerned with human experiences of the sublime and the mundane (put differently, magic and trauma), especially the moments where those elements intersect. His photographs have explored themes of historical violence, domesticities, temporal hybridity, and borders; current projects involve algorithmically generated text, collage, and bookmaking. His work can be found at Artspace New Haven, the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University, in numerous private collections, and has been featured on the websites Ain't-Bad and Connecticut Art Review.
These recommendations are part of the Quarantine Reading List series. See the call for participation here.
