As Within So Without

"The only thing valuable in art is what cannot be explained." the painter Georges Braque once wrote in his notebook. Double bassist, improviser and composer Daniel Barbiero, in this wide ranging collection of twenty essays on music, visual art, poetry, dance-and then some--never surrenders the prospect of meaning in these encounters with the inexplicable. He follows that possibility out to what appear to be breaking points of intelligibility in artistic expression, to those junctures that refuse to deliver an explicit, translatable message, only to discover in return something extra, something unexpected and surprising that can't be experienced any other way. Barbiero reconsiders Carlo Carrá in "The Anti-Metaphysical Metaphysician" and Umberto Boccioni in "The Painter as Clairvoyant". He looks within the poetry and poetics of Russell Atkins and portrays the bassist Joëlle Léandre. He writes about "Free Improvisation & How It Means," graphic notation as a variety of musical post-literacy, and about "Imagining Barnett Newman While Playing Long Tones." He guides us through "The Silver Age of Surrealism in Exile" and those anonymous public spaces that he identifies as atopias. Barbiero looks where we often don't, and his astute insights are continuously exhilarating and inventive.