Where High Gets Low.
Occasionally, there’s a graphic novel that comes along that grabs you by the eyeballs and doesn’t let go. David B.’s Epileptic would be it — a memoir of the author’s youth that is centered on his family’s struggle against his older brother’s all-consuming epilepsy. All I gotta say is: Read. It. Now. (Thanks to Douglas Wolk for pointing the way on this one. Find his New York Mag review of the book right here.)
I have an interview over at WNYC with art critic Ken Johnson about his new book, Are You Experienced? which chronicles the influence of 1960s drug culture on the last half century’s worth of art. Also included: tips on the best New York museum to be stoned in. (Image of the painting Rabbit, by Judith Linhares, featured in the book, comes courtesy of Prestel.)
Hey Folks:
I’ve got a copy of Patrick Nguyen’s and Stuart Mackenzie’s Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art to give away (courtesy of the kind folks at Gestalten). It’s a who’s who of street art’s scene-y scene. Y’all know the drill. Leave a comment and this puppy could be yours.
As always, muchas gracias for reading C-Mon.
xox,
C.
Get This Now: PRISM Index, Issue #1.
I have been seriously remiss for not writing about this sooner: PRISM Index, a lovingly crafted, hand-made art and culture magazine straight outta Columbus, Oh. Not only does it feature an original silkscreen cover by artist and founder Jeffrey Bowers, it comes bursting with goodies: drawings, stories, photography, excerpts of graphic novels and a funny, stand-alone mini-comic called Horror of the Hodag! Oh, and did I mention the multimedia components? A CD and DVD chock full of music and video compilations — the latter of which contains Jay Rosenblatt‘s must-see I Just Wanted to Be Somebody. I’m still going through all of the pieces (this is the sort of publication you chew on in bits), but if I had to pick one reason to pick up this wonderful magazine, it’s for Trent Harris’s moving essay on his friendship with artist Bruce Conner. It left me gasping.
Find the first issue via the magazine’s website, along with a short list of bookstores and galleries that also carry it. It is worth every penny of its $22 cover price.
Ad Reinhardt’s list of desirable and undesirable words for describing art. Sadly, ‘ridiculosity’ did not make his list. (All images courtesy of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and Princeton Architectural Press.)
Any regular reader of this blog will know that I am partial to lists. One, because they’re handy. Two, because they can convey great meaning in just a few words. And, three, because they can reveal so much about the person that creates them. Which is why I’ve really enjoyed thumbing through Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations, by Liza Kirwin, who serves as curator of manuscripts at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
As part of her job, Kirwin combs through the files that she receives from artists’ estates or from the artists themselves, cataloguing important letters and diaries. Almost every single collection is accompanied, she says, by lots of lists. “Some have thousands,” she explains, from lists that chronicle artworks shown at a particular exhibit to lists that record day-to-day gallery business. Though often considered ephemera, these can often be invaluable. “One of our treasures in the archives is the list by Picasso of artists that he recommends for the 1913 Armory show.”
Her book, published last year by Princeton Architectural Press, contains a wide gamut of highly intriguing lists, by artists both well-known and forgotten. This includes Franz Kline’s liquor bill for a 1960 New Year’s Eve party. (He spent a sum total $274.51 for an extravagant quantity of booze — that’s more than $2,000 in 2011 dollars). There are Ad Reinhardt’s tidily organized lists of words on index cards, from 1951, in which he creates a schematic of art language. (Shown above, and after the jump.) And there are the lists of painter Adolf Konrad (1915-2003), who once created a pictorial packing list for a jaunt through Egypt and Rome in the ‘early ’60s (see below). “When this came in,” says Kirwin, of Konrad’s watercolor list, “I made a photocopy of it because I said to myself, ‘If I ever do a book, I want to include it in there.’ I just loved it. And now it’s the cover.”
One of the pieces Kirwin found particularly meaningful were the to-do lists of painter and collagist Janice Lowry (1946-2009. “She died of liver cancer,” says Kirwin. “She was working out a lot of issues with her family in her lists. She told me that she could look at the list and see which things she was really avoiding because she would migrate it to the next list. A lot of these had to do with going to the doctor and getting blood tests. She felt intuitively that something was wrong her.”
As technology changes, so does the nature of lists. More contemporary submissions to the archives, says Kirwin, often arrive on discs. These raise all manner of preservation questions: Do you preserve the list in its original formatting? Or strip it down to simple text? How do you store it? “It’s something we’re grappling with,” she explains. “But the lists, they’re not as much fun, for sure.”
See more sample lists below. Click on images to supersize. Want to see more? The Morgan Library in New York will display these, and many others, starting in June.
Continue reading ‘List of Lists: A book of artistic miscellany.’
Have you ever had a burning desire to admire the inkjet paintings of Jeff Koons doing it with his porn star ex-wife La Cicciolina? Well, consider this your lucky day. ‘Cuz I’m giving away one copy of the catalogue from the recent exhibit of Koons’ porny pictures from his exhibit at Luxembourg & Dayan.
Leave a comment and this little baby could be yours. All yours. Seriously.
xox,
C.
'Conditions' allows the reader to view the images in various configurations.
It might seem straight out of Borges, but it is possible to read a book in two directions at once. Late last year, blogger Jörg Colberg of Conscientious, slipped me a copy of Conditions, a new book of photography that features the work of Peruvian-born photographer Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann. The book is actually two in one: it opens at the center — like a gift — and has two separately bound sections. These are side-by-side mini-books that that can be viewed individually or together — in left to right order, in right to left order, or both at the same time. Likewise, you can dip into either bound section at will. This allows the reader to study one image, create random pairings of images, and in some cases, admire photographs across four pages simultaneously, such as the image of the religious icons below (after the jump).
“I think the viewing experience of the book really puts the focus on the ideas behind the project: perception and self definition,” Marroquín explained to me via e-mail. “Even though I try to use the same ideas in a gallery exhibition of the work, the book’s format invites the viewer to interact with the images in a more personal and intimate way than is possible in a gallery.”
Continue reading ‘Conditions: On Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann’s innovative new book.’
Hey Folks:
I’m a little late on this giveaway (I’m behind on just about everything these days), but it doesn’t mean it won’t be worth it — especially if you’re looking for an afternoon’s worth of spectacularly stonerrific entertainment. For this edition, I have a copy of Sebastian Denz‘s Skateboarding.3D (courtesy of Prestel) — which true to its name features skateboarders doing their thing in three trippy dimensions. Comes complete with four sets of super chic 3D glasses.
Leave a comment and it could be yours.
xox,
C.
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell, a highly intriguing memoir and analysis of why video games can inspire passion, anguish and even addiction.
P. 126:
As I sat there trying to figure out what to do, Mass Effect, despite its three-hundred-thousand-word script and beautiful graphics, was no longer a verbal or visual experience. It was a full-body experience. I felt a tremendous sense of preemptive loss and anxiety, and even called my girlfriend, described my dilemma, and asked her for her counsel. ‘You do know,’ she said, ‘that you’re crazy, yes?’ On the face of things, she was right. Here I was—a straight, thirty-four-year-old man, worrying over the consummation of my female avatar’s love affair. But she was also wrong. To say that any game that allows such surreally intense feelings of attachment and projection is divorced from questions of human identity, choice, perception, and empathy—what is, and always will be, the proper domain of art—is to miss the point not only of such a game but art itself.
The Painted Word, by Tom Wolfe, a breezy book-length essay that tracks the increasingly conceptual, immaterial path of 20th century American art (and the rise and fall of some of its biggest critics).
P. 108 (from the 1987 Bantam printing):
And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a ‘receiver’ that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projects, just ‘the artist,’ in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded of him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode — and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!