Rather, the communal acts he encourages support the art practitioner, known or not, who has a real need to find companions who would help others in their artistic practice. Usually Bui seeks collective awareness, although not necessarily in political terms. By bringing people together, the social impulse behind much art since modernism is made alive again. Bui hopes that art will not only fulfill its artistic responsibilities, it will also join artists from various backgrounds, often with contrasting ideas, together in interactive relationships. As a result, he has merged esthetics with a consideration of social mores.

Participating in New York intellectual history through Schapiro’s reminiscences of his generation, including philosophers, poets, writers, academics, and artists, such as Sir Isaiah Berlin, Saul Below, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Barnet Newman, Willem de Kooning, among other were parts of a more integrated community, Bui was inevitably inspired by their concerns beyond art. Additionally, while in his twenties, he made it his concern to develop relations with members of New York’s formidable constellation of intellectuals Meyer Schapiro, the art historian and theorist, was a mentor and close friend. But he finds the social reality in which we currently live, a time of extreme confusion and misunderstanding, especially in regard to culture, a challenge he must address.īui, an immigrant from Vietnam, continues his artwork, which he started decades ago. Starr Gallery in late October), does not diminish creativity in any way. Bui, himself an artist (his realist drawings of the artists interviewed in The Rail will be exhibited at Craig F. The vehicle for doing so is art, which, in addition to creating its own artifacts, also forms a bridge between image-making and social context, structured by perceptions that exist within a public domain. His vision, Beuysian in nature, and Bourriaudian relational aesthetics in action, both are meant as social activations, for they relay a shared determined concern to involve people in a community. The Rail, as it’s been referred in the last 21 years, under Bui’s vision has been attempting the difficult task not only of making often peripheral art and experimental culture accessible to the public, but also regularly incorporating artists in various disciplines and their concomitant effort from the edges, marginal places into mainstream culture. and abroad, and just surpassed 600 episodes. Phong Bui, co-founder, publisher, and artistic director of the highly regarded art and cultural journal The Brooklyn Rail, has a long history of social projects, documented by and through countless printed and online archives, along with its highly active social media presence since the beginning of the pandemic, such as the New Social Environment, a daily digital platform for conversations that cultivate cross-pollination among artists, writers, poets, social activists, academics and cultural workers across the U.S.

Singing in unison