Effects

This issue explores the dual concepts of opacity and radiance. Effects 2 contains Lakshmi Luthra’s excavation of the concept of the “fetish” from ancient Roman gladiators to Portuguese colonial expeditions to modern photography; Kuba Szeder’s surreal taxonomy of invisible labor in contemporary art; Heather Burch’s photographs of gold bars placed in luxury interiors; Kay Gabriel’s praise for the violability of white bodies in Dennis Cooper’s punk novel The Sluts; a spell-binding essay by Noel W Anderson on black radiance and its betrayal in visual art and song; Christopher Page’s ambivalent obituary for the abstract painter Robert Ryman; Matt Rickard’s essay on the apotheosis of George Washington and the significance of kitsch in American political culture; a collaboration by Thomas Hutton and Clementine Keith-Roach on Michelangelo’s Day and Night, Dawn and Dusk, sculptures for the Medici Chapel in Florence; poems by Jenn Soong in which oblique morning light falls on a partner’s thought and a new idea fades with the afternoon; Anna-Bella Papp’s beautiful clay tablets that absorb, project and represent light; Danny Hayward’s email-essay on video-game designer Porpentine Heartscape and what it would take for art to oppose fascism; Jeffrey Stuker’s essay on the petrification of a jellyfish in a concrete poem by Marcel Broodthaers; a series of erotic and eco-critical poems by Erin Robinsong; a collection of creation myths by Daniel R. Small; stills from Abigail DeVille’s film about astral radiance and race politics; research for an installation on blindness, camouflage and the synaesthetic by Mary Helena Clark; Ed Steck’s diagram-poem on the physics of an unexplained event; poems by Helen Dimos on street-life, protest and tragedy; Nicolas G. Miller’s exposé of the cultural logic that goes by the name of Rick Owens.