Ellen Pearlman

Selected Works

Art Blog
New York's preeminent arts blog
Leonardo creates opportunities for the powerful exchange of ideas between practitioners in art, science and technology
Art21 produces the Peabody-winning PBS series Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century
The Number One English Language Journal of Chinese Art
Criticism, essays, interviews and reviews
Winner of the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Publishing Grant, three Utne Magazine Awards for Independent Publishing, as well as three IPPYs--The Independent Press Association Award.
Red Box Review - Chinese Art, Current, Concise
Online Magazine of Arts and Ideas
Reviews
Sacred Dance
The first book in the English language to explore the symbolism of the sacred and secular ritual dances of Tibetan Buddhism.


BROOKLYN RAIL - ART Letter From BEIJING Dragon Eats Tail China’s Post-Olympic Art Conundrum - A maximum-strength firefighter’s hose spews voluminous blasts of water, uncoiling and smacking against the insides of a sealed room.
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART Letter from ULAN BATOR - Mongolian artists, freed for little over a decade from the long, dreary shadow of Soviet rule, employ a bold, in-your-face Genghis Khan kind of style that gives them my vote as the hip hop gangstas of the As
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
The Third Mind - American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989
The Third Mind, a sprawling exhibition, tackles the vastly neglected subject of how Asian thought, defined as the eastern religions of Hinduism, Tantric Buddhism, Chan/​Zen
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Ellen Levy - Stealing Attention
Ellen Levy’s newest set of paintings at two solo shows, in New York and New Jersey, use optical and cognitive brain research to tackle issues artists have been obsessed with since the Renaissance; how
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
EMPAC
The opening of EMPAC (Electronic Media Performing Arts Center), a 200-million-dollar, 220,000-square-foot glass, steel, and cedar building is a massive step forward in developing the intersection of technology, media, and
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Art and China's Revolution
A collection of mostly Social Realist paintings about Mao and the Chinese Revolution, spanning the 1950s through the 1970s, is quite honestly nothing revolutionary to look at. But, like the Shroud of Tu
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Swoon: Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea
Swoon—a street artist whose moniker shields her from potential prosecution on vandalism charges—sailed her ragtag Burning Man on the Hudson-like flotilla of seven sculptures nee boats to landf
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Railing Opinion: Mao Is Like So Over
“Mao Crazy,” Jed Perl’s critical essay about contemporary Chinese art in the July issue of the New Republic, deals with commonly understood but not often voiced criticisms of post-Maoist political
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART BOOK
Andy Warhol in China
In 1982, before it was hip, fashionable, or barely possible, Andy Warhol tripped off to China with young photographer Christopher Makos, who documented the fabulous but anonymous Andy in Mao land. Now Ti
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Cai Guo-Qiang
While he was installing his current retrospective I Want To Believe at the Guggenheim Museum Cai Guo-Qiang took time out from his busy schedule to sit down and talk with Rail Editor-at-Large Ellen Pear
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Performa 07
Rose Lee Goldberg the director of the visual art performance biennial Performa 07 deserves an honorary key to the City from Mayor Bloomberg as a high/​middle/​low/​brow cheerleader for the arts. New and improved over Per
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Zhang Huan
In 1994, the pinnacle of China’s post-Tiananmen “Shock Art” phase, Zhang Huan lathered his nude body in honey and fish oil and sat down on a roughhewn latrine seat in a public bathroom in Beijing’s East Village art
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Xu Bing
Xu Bing is one of the most important expatriate Chinese avant-garde artists. Winner of a 1999 MacArthur (“genius”) Fellowship for A Book From athe Sky, which consisted of thousands of characters from an invented language
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART Letter From China. “In Beijing they shit ice cream and piss lemonade,” says Robert Bernell, one of the founders of the Dashanzi Art District, also known as the 798 Art Zone, and of Timezone 8, a bookstore and publishing company.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
The Rape of the Sabine Women by Eve Sussman.
Lust and Debacle seem to be on the mind of a coterie of avant filmmakers these days. First there was the Whitney Biennial
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Li Wei
Lost Gravity; the Photographs and Performances of Li Wei. Li Wei, a short and stocky man, clambered up a metal ladder ten feet, sticking his head deep into a hole in the wall. Two somber assistants using wire pulleys c
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Contemporary Asian Arts week, held since 2002, is dedicated to showcasing the best of Asian Art through a consortium of 28 participants. Though the week is pan-Asian, Chinese artists in particular are gaining rapidly in New York
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART
Fade To Black - Subtitled Day for Night, the Whitney Biennial is less about surface, glitz and shifting identities than it lets on, and more about anxiety than it admits.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART Performa 05, the first Biennial ever of “new visual art performance,” that ambiguous yet agreed-upon term encompassing spoken word, theater, film, video, computer art, photography, music, sound, travel, and lectures, stormed acro
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART - Japanese Anime, Expo 2005 and the Future of the World. I have seen the future: it is soft, green, and fuzzy. The future is named Morizo and Kiccoro, the mascots of Expo 2005
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. The Rubin Museum interior stairwell. Photo by Ellen Pearlman. There was a full-blown, fourth of July style fireworks display exploding over my head in ...
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART Digital Avant-Garde: Celebrating 25 Years of Ars Electronica a collaboration with the American Museum of the Moving Image, Eyebeam Gallery, and the Austrian Cultural Forum June 2004 Interactive
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART From 'da Hood to 'da Whitney: 3 Artists from Williamsburg Make Good March 2004 Julianne Swartz, How Deep is Your (2003), site specific installation with sound. Courtesy P.S. 1 M
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART American Effect = Death Threat: The Art of Saira Wasim, October 2003 Saira Wasim, Silent Voices. Courtesy of the artist. Saira Wasim s Mughal style paintings, part of the rec
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - ART Life at the VSC November 2003 The Studio Center courtyard at night. Photo by Howard Romero. When Le Quoc Viet smiled, his lips parted like a theater curtain revealing his glis
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART The Fallacy of Utopia: the artworld and current dialectic in Havana, Cuba. Tania Bruguera is eating dirt. Real dirt. The kind of dirt you find in your yard, or on the ground around the base of a tree. She’s kneading it into small b
BROOKLYN RAIL - ART In profile: Breakthroughs in Light: The Work of Tony Martin Tony Martin has always been first with light. He is the inventor of the original light show, as well as interactive media and the first implementation
Brooklyn Rail - ART - Interviews With Alison Knowles, July-October 2001, New York City
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - FILM
“I had to keep filming to figure out this modern crazy life,” Jennifer Fox says at the beginning of Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. In 2002, she was at a crossroads and needed to make a different life for herself. The result
BROOKLYN RAIL -Music
JEREMY OWEN TURNER AVATAR AUDIO PERFORMANCE IN SECOND LIFE
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION - Bora Yoon and Luke DuBoise at Roulette
BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC AVATAR AUDIO PERFORMANCE IN SECOND LIFE Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts, Calgary, Canada Jeremy Owen Turner has over nine years’ experience producing content in virtual worlds, which makes him a bona-fide doyen and agent provo
BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC
globalFEST
First established after 9/​11, when rampant xenophobia in the U.S. made visas for foreign musicians almost impossible to obtain, globalFEST this year showcased a smorgasbord of international music, with both relative unkn
BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC
DR. ATOMIC - JOHN ADAMS AND PETER SELLARS
Dr. Atomic, the opera composed by that dynamic duo John Adams and Peter Sellars and premiered in 2005 in San Francisco, has been reworked for its premier at the Met. A whopping three hours
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC
Funky But Sleek Nik Bartsch's Ronin: Holon
Swiss pianist Nik Bartsch and his neo–jazz-funk ensemble Ronin play music unlike anyone in recent memory. The group rummages through the work of a wide swath of global impresarios, ran
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC
Celia Cruz, affectionately known as “La Reina de Salsa,” was a force of nature, an irreplaceable, once-in-a-generation female singer whose life and music echoed for over sixty years the trajectory of the Cuban Diaspora’s effect
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC
Sporting spiky, orange-tipped dreads, and gesticulating like a rainmaker; conjuring invisible forces with her impeccable bel canto voice, feedback loops, and a MIDI-controlled device called the BodySynth, Pamela Z recently parac
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC Argentina's Diamond, Finally Mined - the Music of Geraldo Gandini. It is unforgivable that Gerardo Gandini, the most famous modern composer and pianist in Argentina, is virtually unknown
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC Bow Becomes Breath - Stringsongs - Meredith Monk, Kronos Quartet, Zankel Hall March 2005. The newest strand in Meredith Monk’s endless creative braid is the string quartet Stringson
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo by Ned Sublette Chicago Review Press November 2004. Ned Sublette has taken on ...
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC The Rebirth of DJ Spooky, September 2004 A still from DJ Spooky s Rebirth of a Nation. Courtesy of the artist. Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, presented
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC All Cage, All the Time (With a bit of Merce, Nam June, Shigeko, and Charlotte) March 2004 The five-day Cage-o-rama presented jointly by Anthology Film Archives and the Joh
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - MUSIC Nik Bartsch s Ritual Grooves by Ellen Pearlman April 2003 Nik Bartsch is an unsung wunderkind of European new music. I first heard him in Graz, Austria, with his trio Ronin; they played tig
Brooklyn Rail - Theater - Spaulding Gray on Zen and the Downtown Theater Scene by Ellen Pearlman Ellen Pearlman spoke to Spaulding Gray this past summer at his home in the Hamptons.
THE BROOKLY RAIL - THEATER Maria del Bosco: A Sound Opera (sex and racing cars)Written and directed by Richard Foreman The real, as opposed to the imaginary, Maria del Bosco, which is translated from the Italian as "Maria of the forests," appeared to a
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - DANCE Descent. Choreography by Noemie LaFrance. Photos by Richard Termine. Courtesy of Sens Production. The Bessie award-winning Descent, created, directed, and ingeniously costu
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - DANCE Sound Itself Is No Sound A journey into process and performance with Meredith Monk, April 2003 I never imagined waking up in total silence at Zen Mountain Monastery in the
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - DANCEIn conversation: Meredith Monk with Ellen Pearlman April 2003 The following conversation took place in January of 2003. Ellen Pearlman (Rail): You said that there was no separation anymore
Brooklyn Rail - DANCE Hail, Baryshnikov: White Oaks’s Judson Dances at BAM -Only the force and persistence of the greatest living dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov could have gathered the resources necessary for restaging a retrospective of the seminal Judson D
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - FICTION In conversation: Rikki Ducornet August/​September 2003 Rikki Ducornet spent her childhood in Cuba and Egypt. In addition to a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she has also
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - POETRY POETRY from print edition web exclusive Anne Waldman, as told to Ellen Pearlman February 2004 Infra-red photo entitled Nuclear Family (1985) of the poet Anne Waldman, her then husband Reed Bye and their son Ambrose Bye. Photo b
Brooklyn Rail - Books
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, The Letters, Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, Viking Press. I started reading The Letters as Peter Orlovsky, poet and longtime lover of Allen Ginsberg, was dying in a hospice in Vermont on May 30, 2010, and began writing this review after his memorial at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery two months later. Fourteen years previously, on April 5, 1997, Ginsberg passed away in a hospital bed in his apartment in the East Village. Jack Kerouac left this earth on October 21, 1969.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - BOOKS The New Psychedelia
Three books have appeared, heralding a quiet resurgence in certain circles of the use of hallucinogenic drugs for spiritual or visionary purposes. Designed to redirect us from the environmental, religious and
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - BOOKS Biography "Trungpa" What Becomes a Legend Most -Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, though certainly not the only Tibetan Lama hounded out of Tibet by the Communist Party’s pogrom of Buddhists, was undeni
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - BOOKS photo by Ellen Pearlman Winter 2003 Daniel Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Boo
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - BOOKS Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki with Rande Brown, Atria Books. So, what was is the life of a geisha really like? Not the made up fantasy of a western m
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - BOOKS Sparks in Nevada photo by Ellen Pearlman Winter 2003 Drama in the Desert: The Sights and Sounds of Burning Man, based on the images of Holly Kreuter. A Raised Barn Press P
THE BROOKLYN RAIL -BOOKS SCROLL to bottom, Strange, Dark Places, "Ring of Fire" Anne Arden McDonald: Installations and Self-Portraits (Autonomy and Alchemy Press - Anne McDonald is one of the 60 artists living on Water Street in Dumbo
THE BROOKLYN RAIL -SCROLL to bottom, BOOKS - Poetry - An Ongoing Experiment- Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2003) The St. Marks Poetry Project has long ser
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - BOOKS SCROLL to bottom- Fluxus, by Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, (University of California Press, 2003) Hannah Higgins, child of Fluxus progenitors Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, cut her baby teeth on legendary
BROOKLYN RAIL - BOOKS
Diane DiPrima's New York Diane di Prima, Recollections Of My Life As A Woman – The New York Years (Viking Press, 2001)
BROOKLYN RAIL - EXPRESS - Buddhism in Havana - Cuba’s revolution is slowly dissolving, like rain-soaked plaster into a mud-soaked puddle of Ché and sex, rations and Rum, Marxism and Santeriá, Soviet-style minds and Tropi-Cola enterprises.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - HISTORY (2nd Essay) HISTORY from print edition web exclusive A Brief History of the Brooklyn Rail by Theodore Hamm On the occasion of the Rail s 10th full-format issue, the editor reflects When my wife, playwright Emily DeVoti, named T
Planet 3D
A blog concerning 3D, Telematics, Aesthetics, Theory, Innovation and its impact on society and culture
Nothing and Everything - The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant Garde 1942 - 1962
Furtherfield.org, Arts, Technology and Social Change
Ultimate Synaesthesia, Brian Eno, http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews/ultimate-synaesthesia , Upstage from New Zealand Performance, http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews/upstage-101010-new-zealand-based-festival-performance-art
My Lunch With Mihoko
American Buddhism as a Way of Life - SUNY Press
Art Asia Pacific Magazine - On Location: Ulaanbaatar
Profiles: On Location, Ulaanbaatar
Sculpture Magazine
Review of Zhang Qing, Beijing, Kathy Bruce, "Ritual Renewal", Quijhijie
Art Party in Mongolia
Authors Guild
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