The notion of "curated" is really because, if you look in the book, it's not only pictures, there's also the content - a lot of text, poems from great writers, people bigger than I am.
Nureyev's Romeo and Juliet, staged by the London Festival Ballet three decades ago, remains closer to Shakespeare than any other version: a reflection of the text, poems and influences he found valid.
In your visual art, you work with a range of literary texts – poems, plays, stories.
Many of those same words appear in the texts, poems by Messiaen based on scripture, and they all come vividly to life in his kaleidoscopic scoring (though it would be hard to make one-to-one correspondences).
Whether droll ("My stomach just/now made a sound/like a text message"), banal ("Kurtis spoke about/lava for several/minutes on the phone/from Oakland"), or full of art-film profundity ("When I turn on the/radio, often I listen to/what is not being said"), each one of Sarah Riggs's text-poems goes down easy — like hard lemonade.
To create his first major work, "Écriture Rose" ("The Rose-Colored Work of Writing"), Mr. Hantaï spent every day of 1958 copying written texts — poems, philosophical works, treatises on art and much else — onto a canvas of nearly 11 feet by 14 feet.
The text, a poem by Jorie Graham, examines the transcendental moment when Orpheus, leading Eurydice out of Hades, looks back.
In that text, the poem ends after the sixth couplet, with its glum reference to Tithonus being seized by gray old age.
(The spoken text, a poem by Tennyson about a shipwrecked sailor who, after many years, returns to his Scottish village to discover that his wife has married their mutual best friend, has inspired a number of Hollywood films).
The musicians seem to trade remarks, and sometimes talk along with one another, as if each were reciting a text — a poem or a scripture — which they then consider.
