Join us at e-flux on Thursday, May 28 at 7pm for 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, co-presented with 4Columns.
RSVP HERE
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 writing 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 invites 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 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.
“To drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping 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
e-flux was started by artists in 1999. Online, e-flux.com spans numerous strains of critical discourse in art, architecture, film, and theory, and connects many of the most significant art institutions with audiences around the world. e-flux produces and presents original art projects, symposia, and exhibitions that have appeared at Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and art institutions around the world. At 172 Classon Avenue in Brooklyn, e-flux Screening Room hosts screenings of moving-image works by artists, frequent public lectures, experimental music performances, and a regular podcast series.
4Columns is a nonprofit, online publication covering the gamut of contemporary culture, from literature to film to the visual arts. We are committed to criticism as a writerly genre in which singular passions ignite public discourse. Find them at 4columns.org.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.
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 comes out in March 2026, published by David Zwirner Books.