Number 2

Effects is a journal of art, poetry and essays. It is devoted to thinking about aesthetic effects, their social and philosophical histories and contemporary lives. Effects was founded in 2018 by Christopher Page and Orlando Reade and is currently edited by Clementine Keith-Roach, Lakshmi Luthra, Christopher Page, Matt Rickard, Jeffrey Stuker and Florence Uniacke.

 

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.