Black Mountain Misfits

A quiet school for strange connections.

Art, poetry, philosophy, and other ways of paying attention. Come for one work. Leave through another door.

Current issue

Women in Art: Quiet Obliteration

Repetition, rooms, wire, thread and light, used to make isolation visible without making it monstrous. Seven chapters. It ends.

Image pending rights clearance

A contact sheet of seven works — a painted net, a graphite grid, a room built of salvaged doors, nineteen fibreglass cylinders, a looped wire form, a room of red thread, and a dress made of light bulbs.

The seven works this issue is built from. Each plate is empty until we hold the rights to show it.Images pending rights clearance.

Seven stations

Dissolve
Steady
Hold
Fail gently
Let air through
Hold absence
Become light

Begin the issue →

Today’s fragment

The dots are not painted. They are the gaps left over between thousands of hand-made arcs — the ground, showing through.

On Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Nets

Kept here because it is the smallest true thing in the current issue, and because it changes what you see before you have read anything.

More marginalia →

Today’s bite

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

Gertrude Stein, 1913

The most quoted line in modernist poetry is a demonstration, and it takes about eight seconds to run it yourself.

3 min

A thread to pull

Repetition

Ritual, obsession, labour, pattern, survival. A thread has stops and an end, like a walk. Each stop carries a note saying why it is on this line and not another one — nothing here was matched by a machine.

6 stops