One Foot in the Other World

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Essays. Paul Maziar’s ONE FOOT is a chatty carousel, covering the last ten years of art in and around Portland, Oregon. Tumbling between observation, reflection, and digression, he tells the stories of what it’s like to be there, in front of that painting, in that art scene, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This has the great advantage of being a critic’s ‘first’ book, where the reader shares in working out foundational concepts of whatever ‘art’ or ‘painting’ or ‘writing’ is or might be. As Maziar says of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘shaved’ Mona Lisa–‘I like that he did this.’–Jarrett Earnest