Albert Mobilio Reviews Renee Gladman and Fred Moten's One Long Black Sentence

Albert Mobilio considers the drawing-work of poet and essayist Renee Gladman for Bookforum, looking in particular at One Long Black Sentence, a collaboration with Fred Moten. "The jet-black cover embossed with lustrous white fabric, black pages, almost exclusively white ink, and evocative title all denote the more-unified whole associated with an artist’s book," writes Mobilio. A brief excerpt:

…While Gladman continues to suggest—and dismantle—recognizable forms, the relationship between the drawings can be understood as continuous, organically developing, and aimed at sense-making, much like the grammatical unit she names in the book’s title. In many images, elliptical, looping lines dance through stacked rectangular shapes, suggesting an intimate connection between the biological and the built that recalls Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine. Such tensions not only animate each drawing but operate between them.…

Read on at Bookforum.