UPCOMING EVENTS
EKPHRASIS IS THOUGHT, EKPHRASIS IS SURVIVAL
Thursday, May 28, 2026
7 pm
e-flux Screening Room
172 Classon Ave, Brooklyn
Free admission!
RSVP here
An evening of conjuring art through words, inspired by Emily LaBarge’s new book, Dog Days (Transit Books), featuring LaBarge, Catherine Quan Damman, Johanna Fateman, Dan Fox, and Lynne Tillman
“To drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seep¬ing through—I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.” — Samuel Beckett
“Making sense of mute things is a normal activity of language, and any patter about the special un-translatability of paintings misses that obvious point.” — T. J. Clark
In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage at gunpoint while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat. Her new book, Dog Days, unfolds in the long shadow of that freak violence—where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can’t. An electrifying synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory, Dog Days channels form into political inquiry: interrogating how language and institutional structures constrain and distort our understandings of trauma, violence, and care.
Throughout, LaBarge draws from theory, literature, film, music—and art, about which she writes ecstatically, ekphrastically, conjuring for us images including Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei, Botticelli’s Primavera, the raucous paintings of Mary Barnes, Joan Mitchell’s Girolatas. “Images,” LaBarge writes, “which is what art is made of, do not happen all at once, they repeat themselves, they bear repeating; and it is the duty of writ¬ing to imitate or address that state of suspension or dispersal that looking at art can be.”
To mark the US publication of Dog Days, 4Columns and e-flux invite you to an evening of ekphrastic communion that considers writing about art as a form of survival and thought, that considers what criticism is for, far beyond an evaluative process. Invited respondents Catherine Quan Damman, Johanna Fateman, Dan Fox, and Lynne Tillman will open the evening by each evoking a single artwork of particular importance to them—sight unseen—followed by an invigorating conversation with LaBarge.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, frieze, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Her first book, Dog Days, was published in the UK in 2025 by Peninsula Press, and is forthcoming in the US and Canada, with Transit and Hamish Hamilton, in May 2026.
Catherine Quan Damman is an art historian and critic; she holds the Valeria Napoleone Linda Nochlin Professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art. Her first book, Performance and Contradiction, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2027.
Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and co-chief art critic for CULTURED magazine in New York.
Dan Fox is a writer, filmmaker, and musician. He is the author of the books Limbo (2018) and Pretentiousness: Why it Matters (2016). A former editor of frieze magazine, he is also the co-director of the BBC film Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle.
Lynne Tillman’s novels include Weird Fucks and American Genius, A Comedy; her story collections include Someday This Will Be Funny and Thrilled to Death; her nonfiction What Would Lynne Tillman Do? and Mothercare. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters for contributions to literature. Her art and culture collection PAYING ATTENTION is out in March 2026, published by David Zwirner Books.
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Past Events
PLACE IS THE SPACE
Thursday, June 26, 2025
7–9 pm
Francis Kite Club, 40 Loisaida Ave, New York, NY
Open bar! Click here to RSVP (it's free!)
4Columns warmly invites you to join us for Place Is the Space, an evening of time-and-space travel marking the publication of Jennifer Kabat’s new book, Nightshining.
Published as a diptych with The Eighth Moon (Milkweed Editions, 2024), Nightshining and its predecessor both ask how place holds history:
Does a land rebellion that occurred in the nineteenth century still last on that very land into the present, permanently etched there—through memory, through memorial, through blood in the soil?
Does a childhood home still contain the ache of imagined possibility, long after the child has grown up and left—can place hold a feeling, forever?
If the answer to those question is yes, then maybe place makes time become three-dimensional, past and present and future collapsing into a physical point, all at once. And crucially, for Kabat, trying to write these functions of place can break writing (its conventions, its teleologies, its neat plots) altogether, creating space for new forms and ways of writing, reading, thinking, being.
Place Is the Space is a “call and response” mini-symposium asking artists and writers to consider one place that has held and still holds them, even if they are (or it is) no longer there.
Our illustrious respondents include:
Paul Chan
Sowon Kwon
Sukhdev Sandhu
Lynne Tillman
And a special video missive from Chris Kraus
Each respondent will present these places and the spaces they have created within, for, and outside themselves, followed by a conversation with Kabat and a book signing.
We look forward to seeing you there!
MANIFESTO!
Twelve Theses Toward the Reformation of Criticism
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
7–9 pm
KGB, 1st Floor
85 East Fourth Street, New York City
Open bar! RSVP NOT required—first come, first served!
These parasites had it coming . . . I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done.
—Luigi Mangione
Manifesto. Read my Manifesto. I’ve written a Manifesto. It’s all in the Manifesto!
—Ted Kaczynski
I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles.
—Tristan Tzara
If criticism is dead, why are we all still here? Down with academic panels on critical crises! Let’s look instead to a bold new future! WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS.
4Columns warmly invites you to MANIFESTO!, an event in three acts featuring six of this generation’s most exciting voices in arts criticism, dreaming together of what is to be done.
ACT ONE: The Manifestos. Each reader will present, in turn, a brief manifesto declaring their vision for the future of criticism and a grand total of twelve theses toward its reformation.
ACT TWO: Rebuttals and Debate. Each reader will have the opportunity to rebut, refute, consider, and/or exalt their fellows’ statements.
~brief drink intermission~
ACT THREE: Are tired words ready for retirement? Members of the audience are invited to propose words, phrases, and expressions that they would like to see retired from arts criticism. After a trial by committee, we will collectively vote on whether these terms should be sent to pasture.
The readers:
Brian Dillon
Johanna Fateman
Ciarán Finlayson
Harmony Holiday
Alex Kitnick
Emily LaBarge
Master of Ceremonies:
4Columns Senior Editor Ania Szremski
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Love Letters & Break-Up Notes:
An Evening of Impassioned Criticism
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
7–9 pm (open bar!)
KGB Bar
85 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003
4Columns warmly invites you to an evening of impassioned criticism, with all drinks on us from 7–9 pm!
On Wednesday, September 18, at the iconic KGB Bar in downtown Manhattan, join us to judge Team Love Letter and Team Break-Up Note, each consisting of 4 critics who have either written amorous reviews or scathing smack-downs for the magazine, which they shall read aloud for the drinking public.
At the end of the evening, the audience will vote through applause for the team that won their hearts.
Featuring:
Melissa Anderson
Andrew Chan
Aruna D’Souza
Sasha Frere-Jones
Jennifer Krasinski
Sukhdev Sandhu
Helen Shaw
Pamela Sneed
Master of Ceremonies:
4Columns Senior Editor Ania Szremski