In The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky looks at the different directions that painting has taken since the turn of the millennium. He deflates the twentieth-century belief that abstraction and figuration in painting are dichotomous. Instead, Schwabsky argues, they are methods of asking or answering the questions: What is painting?

Walter Benjamin’s views on color, E. H. Gombrich’s theory of perception, Mel Bochner’s and Liz Kotz’s narratives of Conceptualism, and Sarah Thornton’s peregrinations in the “art world” are but a few of the topics explored in this volume of essays. In an era of hyper-specialization and rigid academic protocols, Barry Schwabsky revives a form of criticism one imagined barely existed—a criticism of varied interests and passionate opinions.

The fourth issue in the “Poetic Series” is a seasonally themed special issue, a festive anthology composed of contributions from more than twenty writers and artists. Noon on the Moon‘s title comes from a poem by Barry Schwabsky, featured alongside poetry by Charles Bernstein, Judith Goldman and Dorothea Lasky, prose by Veronica Gonzalez Peña, Andreas Schlaegel and Sarah Wang, amongst others.

The publication gives an overview of the 2012 curatorial year at MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38. Curatorial resident Clara Meister’s program focused on different concepts of translation, bringing together an interdisciplinary exhibition program based on the assumption that artistic ideas can be translated into disparate forms and therefore can take varying modes of expression.