Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons objects on display at The Met’s Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between advance press event. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art/BFA.com

Rei Kawakubo invented Comme des Garçons (like some boys) in Japan in 1973, and her Paris debut in 1981 made fashion history. Rei’s art is boundary-breaking and remarkable:

Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942) for Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969), 18th-Century Punk, autumn/winter 2016–17; Courtesy of Comme des Garçons. Photograph by © Paolo Roversi; Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

• Women in Japan at that time were just starting to head their own businesses.
• Fashion was more tailored/traditional then.
• The French and, to a lesser degree, Italians, had a monopoly on high fashion.
• Fashion was a category separate from the fine arts of painting and sculpture.
• Kawakubo’s designs relate to universal human concerns beyond the scope of fashion.
• Kawakubo, with Issey Miyake, revolutionized the use of new materials, shapes, and textures.
• Kawakubo modernized ways of looking at cultural histories, as seen in her 18th-Century Punk collection.
• Kawakubo added intuitive, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions to her fashions.
• Kawakubo’s concepts for women gave them wild possibilities while her men’s line is not as experimental and is not featured at the Met.
• The Metropolitan Museum solo show for a living female artist is another milestone.

Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942) for Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969), Blue Witch, spring/summer 2016; Courtesy of Comme des Garçons. Photograph by © Paolo Roversi; Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Kawakubo has said, “The void (mu) is important” and “I like to work with time and space (ma).” Mu  and ma are part of the Buddhist philosophy that eschews the ego. Andrew Bolton, Head Curator of the Metropolitan Museum‘s Costume Institute points out that mu and ma converge in her black 1982 sweater pierced with holes. Kawakubo told The Detroit Free News, “Those are tears to some, but to me…those are openings that give the fabric another dimension.[1] Her art is like a Zen koan — a philosophical riddle that defies logic. Hamish Bowles, International Editor for Vogue, told me, “What makes it both fashion and art is: she has always thought beyond clothing the body in conventional ways. That transforms the pieces into sculptural elements.”

On large pages with some foldouts, the exhibition catalog begins with Bolton’s introduction and an interview with Kawakubo. They discuss their disagreements, her reluctance to have a retrospective, and her preference for the last seven collections created since 2014, starting with “Not Making Clothing” and up to “Blue Witch,” “18th-Century Punk,” and “Invisible Clothes”.

The many color images that follow are in mostly chronological order; the book ends with a full chronology and the titles of all collections. Many quotes by Kawakubo are sprinkled throughout.  Altogether, this catalog offers philosophies about life that cannot be easily summed up. Kawakubo always challenges herself to create in new ways. This includes fabrics, processes, and methods of construction, such as not using a pattern.

Rei Kawakubo (Japanese, born 1942) for Comme des Garçons (Japanese, founded 1969), The Infinity of Tailoring, autumn/winter 2013–14; Courtesy of Comme des Garçons. Photograph by © Collier Schorr; Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

She also aims for transparency; sometimes seams are on the outside or edges are not finished. The famous 1982 sweater with oddly-sized and placed holes shows emptiness/mu yet, ironically, this started an ongoing trend in the opposite direction – rips and holes to expose the body’s corporeality and sensuality.

The exhibition is non-chronological and not as easy to follow. Groups of shapes, which look like sculpture and only obliquely show the outlines of the human body, are displayed in geometric pods –round, square, angular, and curved — with some pods above viewers’ heads. The pods pair dichotomies or opposites – for example,  “Clothes/Not Clothes,”  “Order/Chaos,” and “Bound/Unbound.”  These titles seem generic — less exciting than Kawakubo’s clever collection titles. Also, the exhibition sub-title “The Art of the In-Between” connotes neither here nor there and does not convey the nuances of the word “interstitial,” which Bolton also uses. Interstitial suggests an invisible connective tissue in Kawakubo’s journey of discovery – and germinating new ideas.

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons/ Art of the In-Between by Andrew Bolton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 2017. 248 pages, 205 color illustrations. Distributed by Yale University Press. ISBN 978-1-58839-620-4.

 

In my view, the beautifully-produced catalog offers much that is not in the exhibition. Each work inhabits its page like sculpture; nearby Kawakubo quotes provide contexts missing from the exhibition. Kawakubo’s Blue Witch series of 2016 has all kinds of shapes that dance off the page in twists and roils of color. The richly exotic Blood and Roses series of 2015 is a signature collection for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo’s notes include:  “…Often in history the image of the rose was more connected with blood and wars, in relation to political conflict, religious strife, and power struggles.” [2]

Comme des Garçons is a brand located in the most fashion-forward cities around the world. Its uniquely-designed stores offer signature wearable clothes. Kawakubo’s musings at the Met are high expressions of her life on this planet and also collaborations with her design team.

By Jan Garden Castro

[1] Kawakubo quotes from pages 10, 12, and 13.

[2]  Page 170.

Lygia Pape (Brazilian, 1927–2004) Livro do tempo (Book of Time) 1961–1963 Tempera and acrylic on wood; 365 parts Photo by Paula Pape © Projeto Lygia Pape

The Lydia Pape exhibition at the Met Bruer through July 23 is a revelation. Altogether, every aspect of its catalog demonstrates the artist’s originality, her ways of championing Brazil’s indigenous cultures and architecture – such as the impoverished seaside Favela da Maré built on stilts, and her geo-philosophical ways of making art.

Lygia Pape lived from 1927 – 2004. Her art was widely respected but not widely sold or exhibited outside of Brazil in her lifetime. Her range as a sculptor, printmaker, poet, filmmaker, and installation/performance/mixed media artist are notable. Equally important was her base as a wife and mother, her close friendships with Mario Pedrosa; with Hélio Oiticica and his brothers César and Cláudio, and her ongoing acts as a teacher, including getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy in 1980 (around age 53).

The catalog barely goes into Brazil’s oppressive politics, including the 1964 military coup supported by the United States that deposed its elected President. Oppressive rule continued through 1985. The artist’s 1973 arrest, solitary confinement, and torture in a nondisclosed location is one example of horrors she lived through to stay with her family, friends, and students in Brazil — instead of choosing exile as many did.

Lygia Pape (Brazilian, 1927–2004) Divisor (Divider) 1968 Performance at Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1990 Chromogenic print Photo by Paula Pape © Projeto Lygia Pape

 

The catalog is beautifully-printed and designed, and its 278 illustrations, including many in which the smiling artist is participating in an art performance — popping out of a paper cube or under Divisor, a white tent-like form with openings for human heads— complement  the main essays, two interviews, Chronology and Bibliography. Pape’s aesthetic, her main achievements, and her stance against having her art become a commercial commodity are clear. The cover image Livro do tempo (Book of Time), 1961-63 shows 365 constructions based on the square that use only bright red, blue, yellow, and white hues in a range of geometric variations. Her series of geometric forms are only one aspect of Pape’s intermedia experiments.

Lygia Pape (Brazilian, 1927–2004) Livro do tempo (Book of Time) 1961–1963 Tempera and acrylic on wood; 365 parts Photo by Paula Pape © Projeto Lygia Pape

The artist’s own words are key:

I only make a work when I deem it ready to be made. So I’m not usually disappointed. I never do work related to a particular period but rather to a specific form of knowledge that I seek to materialize. For example, I think the Livro da criação (Book of Creation, 1959-60) is as fresh today as it was the day I made it. It hasn’t aged. It isn’t dated. Why? Because I believe I did a really good job solving some of the problems I was setting for myself at that moment; these problems were actually conditions for the making of the work. It wouldn’t have been worthwhile doing it any other way. The Livro da criação needed to leave the plane, move into three-dimensional space, and return to the plane. That was an extremely complicated problem and required a great effort of invention because it had to represent fire, water, the hunter, and the stilt house, and certain elements had to have the ability to be manipulated and rotated. I obtained a maximum level of systhesis and expression there. Whereas to me the Livro da criação “narrates” the creation of the world, it could have another meaning for someone else, in keeping with his or her own sensibilities or experience…It is, simultaneously, a poem and an art object. (p. 20)

The Book of Creation is among the important works discussed and shown throughout  Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms.  Iria Candela, the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,  calls Livro da criação “a book without words” in which “the body’s interaction with the abstract work” is central (p. 7). Contributor Dr. Sérgio B. Martins points out Pape’s Book of Creation uses a square as the point of departure, has a nonlinear unfolding, and its incisions fragment the plane virtually and actually (p. 30). It exemplifies ways the Neoconcrete movement challenged figure/ground relations and subverted the picture plane. The Book of Creation starts with “Light,” a yellow square with a tiny square cut into its center. Another work titled A quilha navegando no tempo (The Keel Navigating Through Time) is a white square with an erect double red triangle that interacts with its base. These singular meditations about ultimate creation interact with each other and the viewer.

In her essay “the risk of invention,” Curator Iria Candela discusses the growth of Neoconcretism in Brazil in relation to international developments and Pape’s roles in visually and literally articulating the new Gestalt strategy of letting figure/ground relationships engage dialectically, starting with a woodcut series called Tecelares. For a Neoconcrete ballet collaboration with poet Reynaldo Jardim, Pape built four white cylinders that each hid a dancer. As the lit cylinders moved to an austere score (no dancers were seen), the idea was to energize space. Some Pape works address the body, public spaces, shared identities, and culture. One graphic photograph  lingua apunhalada  is a Stabbed Tongue, 1968; an “Eat Me” installation of 1976 and Caixa da baratas (Box of Cockroaches), 1967, were shown at MAM-RJ, Rio di Janero’s new contemporary museum. Pape discusses Caixa das baratas: “…the starting point is a clear concept: … criticisms of dead art locked up in museums. I wasn’t working toward a merely discursive result; I was looking to create a situation of repugnance, of actual disgust…I made a box with cockroaches. And it really was loathsome.” Pape and Helio Oiticica were among the organizers for the “New Brazilian Objectivity” exhibition at MAM-RJ.  Her later geometric work includes Ttéia 1, 1976-2004 (Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, 2012) , an installation of straight, intersecting columns made of thin gold wires. This is dramatically recreated at the Met Bruer.

Lygia Pape (Brazilian, 1927–2004) Caixa das baratas (Box of Cockroaches) 1967 Acrylic, mirror, and mummified cockroaches Photo by Filipe Braga © Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal © Projeto Lygia Pape

 

In “birds of marvelous colors” and “outside the frame of the screen,” excerpts from 1997 and 1998 interviews, the artist discusses her art influences, her teachers, her travels, and her nontraditional approaches to making, showing, and curating art, and the contexts for her films.  Dr. Sergio B. Martins’ essay “an anticlass in avant-gardism” points out that Pape called her unorthodox classes “anticlasses.” Martins contextualizes Pape’s geo color series, the social and psychoanalytic underpinnings of her films, and Pape’s embrace of Brazil’s indigenous heritages.  In “lygia pape’s vital ideas,” John Rajchman explores some literary and formal sources, including Mallarmé’s famous “coup de des” poem (with its differing typefaces, spacings, and type sizes) and Ferreira Gullar’s scrambled letters pieces that showed Pape new ways to free letters and objects from their moorings.

By Jan Garden Castro

Walk on the Beach: Things from the Sea, Volume One  is a residual book, being a text and image diary of passing objects, and a short-term physical meeting of minds within the BABEL working group. Composed of artists, researchers, historians, philosophers and scientists, the group periodically works together, and then disperses; this book is one such meeting’s remnant.

It is a recently published record of a beach-based collection and exhibition, resulting from the group that came together in 2014 via the third Biennial meeting, on the beach. An opening text describes the work as a souvenir of this time, and as an object in the world on its own, the book is like an addendum to the objects they began with, or culminated in.

The collective apparently specialises in short-term outcomes: flash shows, and the rapid mixing of minds and ideas. The photos of the items collected for this exhibition have an incidental quality. They are often Polaroid snapshots, where objects are given agency in comparison with other small and unassuming things, or through prescribed words.

This is expanded upon in the texts of six artists, who write stories around pre-owned items discovered on beaches around the world. A brass key, a petrified egg, a drilled sheep’s horn and a tooth are each anthropomorphised, prescribing them human senses of time and sensations, by Maura Coughlin, Lora Webb, Asa Simon Mittman and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, respectively. These texts are a welcome anchor to the photos that are otherwise quite enigmatic to an outside viewer and help demonstrate the group’s ethos. When viewing the photos on their own, the work is not something that can readily be contended with, being only dotted reference points within a short space of time and assumedly huge variety of ideas. Whilst the images are captivating, they only hint at the dynamic nature that a congregation can produce.

In another text, unusually placed near the end, is the preconceived thoughts of literature PhD candidate Emily Russell prior to this meeting, based on the story of a Norse god sprung from driftwood. In a post-script she describes her interest in a kind of fixation with materials and what this can produce. It’s a clear thread running through this scrapbook-style collection. Reading materials for their potential past lives, beyond conventional ideas and finding patches of intrigue in the unknown and material remnants, echoes my process of finding this book as only suggestive of what is and what could have happened.

By Dorothy Hunter

Making Workbook inside cover.

In a previous blog post I reviewed the book and digital download Making Your Life as an Artist by Andrew Simonet, a considered insight into the role of art and methods for working efficiently with an art-based skill-set. This matter-of-fact publication has unsurprisingly expanded into an even further practicable format in the Making Workbook.

Making Workbook

Designed for use in small groups but also usable individually, the new publication is made to complement the original, and is similarly available to purchase or free to download on Artists U. By deliberately playing to the inherent skills that artists have – such as problem solving, or making intangible ideas exist within the world – artists using this book can single out their priorities, their means to create and their future work steps clearly.

The book is divided into 4 sections: planning, mission, money and time. Each one has a series of short exercises, often with a lateral approach to the task at hand – for example, using an interview set-up to talk around the elements of each other’s practice when make a statement. The potential embarrassment-factor is avoided by a down-to-earth tone and irreverence throughout – perhaps conscious of how averse artists can be to self-help and group work.

Key to the book’s pragmatism is its acknowledgement that the work of an artist can’t be compartmentalised from day-to-day life: goals and spending, for example, encompass everything in life, not just professional aspects. Central, too, is the author’s awareness of the human nature of those participating and possible pitfalls in doing the short writing tasks, recognising when to make things specific, and what elements are contingent upon other people.

The money section is not about saving pennies but heightening awareness of budgeting: finding avenues to gain more finances by breaking down skills from previous projects, and guiding you in finding your daily and hourly rate that are your baseline for making a living. The time section, in contrast, is about condensing, focused on taking on less to work more meaningfully, and has practical steps to limit procrastination.

Rather than a basis on financial success or personal fulfilment as an artist, this book is grounded upon the day-to-day life and approach of creative workers that has room for all types of practices. It’s a great accompaniment to the previous publication and beneficial for any artist stuck in a professional rut, particularly if guidance on finding the problem and its solution is required.

By Dorothy Hunter

Rosemarie Fiore, process photo, The Good-Time Mix Machine: Scrambler Drawings, 2004. Acrylic paint on vinyl, 60 x 60 ft. (Photograph courtesy E.G. Schempf)

Art creation takes more than time and money: it takes research, focus, and many kinds of support/teamwork. That’s one main message in Grand Arts 1995 – 2015 Problems and Provocations. When Glenn Harper assigned me to cover the Grand Arts opening of Pattie Cronin’s Memorial to a Marriage – a Carrara marble, Hosmer-inspired mortuary sculpture in Kansas City, Missouri around 2002, I had heard of Margaret Hall Silva’s arts foundation from artist Jeff Aeling (1996 awardee), but I didn’t realize until I read this book how messy and blindly optimistic Grand Arts was to commission work as revolutionary as Cronin’s Memorial and Sanford Biggers’ Blossom – a piano “born” from a tree, which, on its own, plays a soulful version of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit.

Problems and Provocations. Edited by Stacy Switzer and Annie Fischer. 2016: Grand Arts: Kansas City, MO. 448 pages. ISBN: 978-0-692-62553-8. $49.95. Publication: November, 2016.

 

The book cover, Florence Coyote, 2006 by Filip Noterdaeme, shows a coyote staring into a microphone as it paws an unsolved puzzle – a picture of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, which displays the dwarf’s head but not the dog beside her in the foreground. The inside covers illustrate  green blueprints of the site plan, and a few Grand Arts projects by Anthony Baab, William Pope.L, John Salvest, and The Propeller Group (AK-47 fragments).

This huge book is jammed with illustrations, memos, and photos that take us behind the scenes for 31 of the 92 art projects listed from 1995-2015. It also has five essays and a Questions section probing  risks and next steps for artists and arts organizations. It offers a free-thinking model for artists and arts foundations – one far beyond support money and/or space. Also, like Sissel Tolaas’ SmellScape project, 2012,  some projects don’t “look like art” and even pictures can’t deliver all sensations. The Grand Arts vision begun in Kansas City, Missouri has been transferred to a new group, Fathomers, which is based in Los Angeles, California. Stacy Switzer, formerly artistic director at Grand Arts, and now executive director of Fathomers, calls it “a philanthropic research institute born of Grand Arts.”

Patricia Cronin, installation view, Memorial to a Marriage, 2002. Carrara marble, 83 x 40 x 27 in.

 

As Ian Kerr points out on page 373, “The way of operating Grand Arts began to shift around the time Stacy Switzer joined as the new artistic director, in 2004. The most important and relevant shift for this discussion was the reframing of what Grand Arts did – from supporting artistic practices to supporting research creation.” Kerr points out that Grand Arts was already moving in this direction.  Cronin’s Memorial, 2002,  and Biggers’Blossom, 2007, are good early examples of research creation.

Patricia Cronin’s Memorial to a Marriage was a two year project starting in 2000. The idea was to celebrate her union with Deb Kass at a time when gay marriage was not legal in New York by creating a larger-than-lifesized marble mortuary sculpture  in the neoclassical style of Harriet Hosmer showing two sleeping women in a post-coital embrace. Cronin’s research & execution included travel to famed French cemeteries and to Carrara, Italy to select the marble, fabrication at Johnson Atelier in New Jersey, and hand-finishing the marble. The eight pages on Cronin pack in over 22 images, photos, correspondence, maps, etc. including an installation photo at Woodlawn Cemetery and the news that Cronin and Kass officially married in 2011.

Sanford Biggers, Lotus, 2007. Steel armature and etched glass, 84 x 3⁄4 in. 1 AP.

 

Part of what stuns me about Sanford Biggers’ Blossom, 2007, is that I’m still awed by seeing and hearing it. How did this piano grow out of a tree? What does that mean? Strange Fruit reminds me that black people/cultures are still oppressed and still sing. Just as the aesthetics and significances of Blossom—including its unexpected title – continue to resonate, the process views show a few of the hundreds of decisions that went into its making.

The 31 projects featured start with The Propeller Group’s A Universe of Collisions, 2015, a project that includes  “capturing” and documenting collisions of M16 and AK 47 bullets and other weapons in mid-air. The project ends by having the guns destroy each other.

The Propeller Group, process detail, The AK-47 vs. the M16, 2015. Fragments of AK-47 and M16 projectiles encased in ballistic gelatin.

 

All listed projects are complex and seem impressive, and the artists named whose projects are not featured, such as Teresita Fernández, seem equally provocative. I called one of these artists to ask about his experience.  Jeff Aeling, whose project The Layman’s Guide to the Passage of the Millenium, was funded in 1996, told me: “Margaret Silva and Sean Kelly came into the discussion one and a half years into my project. Grand Arts gave me the shop space and the money to execute large three-dimensional pieces. Margaret made it possible for me to complete something I’d wanted to do. That show got national advertising and made it possible for me to get into galleries. This, in turn, helped me to become a full time professional artist. It was a total dream situation.”[i]  The Grand Arts dream book has closed, but visionaries are encouraged to write to yes@fathomers.com  and to hop aboard the new organization moving the vision to its next outpost.

By Jan Garden Castro

[i] Phone conversation with Jeff Aeling on 10.30.16.

Front cover of “And Another Thing…” (detail). Courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing. Image: Zimoun. 25 woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system, 2009. Video, 55 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Bitforms Gallery

“And Another Thing…” is an exhibition-based publication, but builds upon rather than accompanies its counterpart. It was published this summer to contextualise a 2011 show in CUNY, New York, that shares the same title. This show, mainly composed of feminist and minimalist pieces, worked with nonanthropocentrism – a key aspect of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology – at a time just before those principles became popular touchstones for artists and curators.

Front cover of “And Another Thing…”. Courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing. Image: Zimoun. 25 woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system, 2009. Video, 55 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Bitforms Gallery

 

In light of this, the book has some re-framing to do. A photographic and text record of this exhibition is flanked by two sections of writing: two pieces by the curators and authors, and then post-scripts by Bill Brown, Robert Jackson and Patricia Ticineto Clough.

The curators’ texts build a picture of arts position as key to the development of this philosophical grounding, rather than suddenly illustrative of it. The dissolution of the subject/object divide in art is key to this. Emmy Mikelson’s Space for Things: Art, Objects and Speculation takes the work of 16th Century architect and artist Piranisi and contemporary installation artist Yatoi Kusama as examples of work using the removal of self – the former through unrealistic perspectives and lack of focus on people within etchings of a prison; the latter, through self-obliteration in the unifying pattern of dots. Katherine Behar’s Arbitary Objects: Minimalism and Nonanthropocentrism, meanwhile, re-frames minimalism’s history as completed by the viewer’s presence, going from a “theatrical” nature into something that places the viewer’s body as object.

Installation image of And Another Thing…, CUNY Graduate Centre, New York. reproduced through Creative Commons Licensing.

 

The latter three essays complement the curators’ position and the perspective on history they provide. These take this grounding and expand upon it, suggestive of the future implications of these object-based and inherently democratic frameworks, pertinent and resurgent the more ephemeral life’s structures become.

Whilst built on philosophical and critical references, the ideas in the book are easily digested and clearly explained, and so those without a theoretical background will still benefit from this short and fascinating book. The record of the exhibition gains immensely from the insight of the curators, where the alignment of two separate principles of nonanthropocentrism is certainly more clear – one, self-sustained through the work and lack of artist’s hand; the other responsive to the objectifying, and therefore erasing processes in wider culture.

By Dorothy Hunter

Rodin surrounded by plasterworks in his studio. Photographed by Eugène Druet Ph.203. 10 × 10 in. (25.6 × 25.2cm).

The new Musée Rodin book does an excellent job of framing Rodin’s multi-faceted legacy. It covers the artist’s beginnings, historical contexts, studio practice, and artistic achievements, including the surprising fact that Rodin failed the École des Beaux-Arts sculpture admissions test three times and largely developed his sculpture practice on his own. Due to space limitations, my review will address three facets not fully fleshed out in this well-illustrated volume: why Camille Claudel’s role is still under-explored;  how Rodin enlarged the platform for sculpture and public art as he ushered in subjects lacking conventional beauty and frontal male nudity; and how his erotic art challenged the sexual taboos of his era (and even our own).

Rodin, born in 1840, sculpted heads that brought him recognition by 1880.  The Man with a Broken Nose has a prominent physical flaw.  A damaged clay version was rejected by the Salon in 1865; a marble version executed by Léon Fourquet was shown at the Salon of 1875. This demonstrates Rodin’s practice of using assistants, some with superior training, and his solid belief in his vision as an artist.

Rodin, Raphaël Masson and Véronique Mattiussi. Foreword by Jacques Vilain. Flammarion and Musée Rodin, Paris, 2016.   Hardcover: 248 pages. 300 color and b & w illustrations. ISBN: 978-2-08-020239-0. $29.95 US & Canadian Publication: August 2016. www.rizzoliusa.com.

 

Camille Claudel:

Camille Claudel was born in 1864 and came into Rodin’s life in 1882 while she was still a student at the Académie Colarossi. She was 18 and Rodin was 42. She became Rodin’s muse, art assistant, and lover. Poet Paul Claudel described his sister as having “magnificent eyes of a dark blue rarely encountered anywhere other than in novels,” the “terrible forcefulness of her character,” and a “fierce talent for mockery” (pages 55-56). By 1886, Rodin’s passionate letters to Camille poured forth his anguish and ardor: “Oh divine beauty, oh flower who speaks and who loves, intelligent flower, my darling. My dearest, down on both knees I embrace your fair body. R.” (p.57). The chapter devoted to Camille Claudel develops her intellectual curiosity and shows a few works in bronze and marble, including Vertumne et Pomone, 1905, marble (begun in 1886), an anguished couple in a complex pose. The 1905 bronze was titled Abandon. The Wave and Gossips, two table-sized onyx and bronze works (1897 – 1902), are tableaus of women shrews; a bronze work from this period shows the young artist on her knees begging as Rodin’s aged mistress Rose pulls him away. Claudel was unable to establish herself as a sculptor, in part, because people accused her of assimilating Rodin’s style when the opposite may have been the case. These poignant sculptures show a mastery of craft that make me wonder whether Claudel or one of her “enemies” destroyed her works as she reportedly went mad. Claudel spent 1913 until her death in 1943 in an asylum.

This book does not clarify which works Claudel created in Rodin’s studio between 1882 – 1894 as Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell, his first major commission from the French government which was cast in bronze only after his death. The Gates features Rodin’s famous The Thinker as well as Fugit Amor and a range of sensuous, tortured figures that depart dramatically from Rodin’s earlier heads and from The Thinker in composition, theme, and flow.  This book does not clarify the degree to which Claudel inspired, researched, and/or executed the supple, entangled figures in The Gates of Hell, which are unlike another important work of the same period, The Burgers of Calais,1885-1895. This larger-than-life-sized grouping commemorates six heroic leaders who offered to sacrifice themselves to the British in 1347 in exchange for sparing the lives of the people of Calais.

The Man with a Broken Nose, Auguste Rodin S.974, 1875. Marble. 7 ¾ x 16 ¼ x 9 ½ in. (44.8 x 41.5 x 23.9 cm). © Musée Rodin (photo Christian Baraja)

 

Platform for Monumental Public Art and Unconventional Subjects:

Some chapters discuss how Rodin and Claudel carried forward the example of Donatello to create sculpture featuring decrepit aging women and unconventional figures. Rodin’s nude Balzac sculptures, one showing the subject masturbating and another with a triangular symbol extending between his spread legs from his genitals to his feet, used to be at the Rodin Museum, but are barely noted on the Museum’s website and in the book. According to Wikipedia, “Each sketch evolved and transformed into a different representation of the novelist varying from phallic nudes to heavily clothed and hidden figures.”  The final monumental public sculpture, completed in seven years instead of the contracted eighteen months, shows Balzac as a nine-foot-tall form cloaked in his writer’s robe. Viewers at the Salon of 1898 ridiculed this powerful abstract work, and it was rejected by the Société des Gens de Lettres that commissioned it. Rodin showed his plaster Balzac and a stripped-down plaster version of The Gates of Hell two years later in a solo show he organized to coincide with the Universal Exposition of 1900.  Rodin found investors for a specially-built white pavilion; inside were 60 sculptures (most plaster), 128 drawings, and 71 photographs.  Rodin thrived at promoting himself despite the irony that two monumental commissions he exhibited were not yet in the public domain. Balzac is a strong symbol for manhood, artistry that stands above the crowd, and for the artist himself. Rodin identified with the abstract form he labored over for seven years.

The Kiss, Auguste Rodin, S.1002 c. 1881–82/1889. Marble. 71 ½ × 44 ½ × 46 in. (181.5 × 112.5 × 117 cm). © Musée Rodin (photo Hervé Lewandowski)

 

Erotic Art:

The Balzac nudes are curiously not shown or discussed much in this book. Instead, the book’s cover art and contents display Rodin’s erotic portraits of women. Danaïd, the cover art, is the upside down head and shoulders of a marble sculpture that is curiously undated in the book. According to the Rodin Museum website, the work (in plaster?) was completed in 1889 and the marble version was carved by Jean Escoula in 1890.  The Museum website quotes Rilke’s view of the pose: “Exhausted, she rests her head ‘like a huge sob’ on her arm, while her outspread ‘liquid’ hair merges with the water from her overturned vase.” Danaïd ‘s submissive pose offering her nubile bare neck, shoulders, back, and buttocks to viewers is based on the myth that the daughters of Danaos “were made to fill up a bottomless barrel with water in punishment for killing their husbands on their wedding night” (Rodin Museum website). This myth projects Rodin’s tortured view of Camille Claudel as an ill-fated temptress. She ushered in his erotic period. Rodin and/or his assistants sculpted similar poses, such as one titled Sin, that express a palpable sexual charge. In addition to sculpture, Rodin left “an impressive corpus of drawings of nudes that glorified the female body…” (p. 186), especially toward the end of his life. Three undated works show women masturbating and climaxing (pp. 186-7). Rodin protected this work, which was criticized for being licentious. In the chapter on “Sources of Inspiration,” Veronique  Mattiussi points out that Rodin’s works like Eternal Idol, 1889 and Iris, Messenger of the Gods, 1895 are “a clear allegory of Rodin’s abiding admiration for female genitalia” (p. 182). Rodin’s entire erotic output has rarely, if ever, been seen.

Authors Raphaël Masson and Véronique Mattiussi write alternate chapters. Masson, former curator at the Musée Rodin and head of its library archives, is chief heritage curator at the Château de Versailles. Mattiussi is an archivist at the museum, responsible for manuscripts.

Rodin’s body of work is notable for its abstract, erotic and monumental qualities, and this book, though not definitive, adds substance to the field. I hope that the Rodin Museum has, somewhere, a catalog of Rodin’s complete work to inform scholars about each work’s genesis, two and three-dimensional studies, and castings.

Another new Rodin book that I could not secure by press time is You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett. (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2016) Rilke, whose eminence in literature now equals Rodin’s in art, assisted Rodin during his rise to fame. Rilke’s role is poorly documented in the Musée Rodin book. One telling quote (with no footnote or source) is Rilke’s insight into Rodin’s Balzac: “It was creativity itself that was displayed in Balzac’s form – haughty creativity with its pride, headlines, intoxication” (p. 102).

By Jan Garden Castro

Image from “Left-over Spaces: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers”. Photo by writer, courtesy of Rowman and Littlefield International

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The Political Space of Art is quick to clarify its title: rather than focusing on literal space within art, its reference is more figurative. Using four artists working in different art forms – filmmakers The Dardenne Brothers, writer Arundhati Roy, visual artist Ai Weiwei and musician Burial – the book explores the formation of creative work within a thick web of political relationships and spheres.

The Political Space of Art. Front Cover, courtesy of Rowman and Littlefield International.

That is not to say there is a disregard of literal space or materiality. Unlike most books about art, usually written from an art or art historical perspective, this publication is written from a political/philosophical standpoint. Dillet and Puri analogise in the introduction that, just as Deleuze and Guattari argue for a non-philosophical approach to philosophy to see the different facets of how it really operates, a “non-art approach to art” is required to open up insights into its effect. As such, the physicality of the media is one of many components of art’s “palpable co-habit(ation with us)”, particularly within the geographies they reference, exist or are produced within.

Before these discussions of each individual artist’s practice, the philosophical groundwork is laid out in “Aesthetics, Poetics and Techno-Aesthetics”. This is by far the most rigorous part of the book, dense with theory and a useful grounding to keep in mind for the more analytical chapters that follow. It explains and uses Jacques Rancière’s points of “three major regimes of identification” as an initial structure.

These regimes seem like an obtuse framework for art when considered alone, yet are significant to the political lens of the text: first is the Platonic ethical regime (that is, art judged according to authenticity, being “real” rather than a simulation), then the Aristotelian poetic or representative regime (work based in narrative, with story placed over character; poiesis is interpreted as production rooted in the impetus of work and a separate force from practical creation), and lastly aesthetics (once thought of as an “inferior knowledge”, Rancière wishes to democratise aesthetics, focusing on its aspect of sharing and what is sensible to everyone).  The final principle becomes a springboard to address ideas about social value in art and what makes shared experience, and with that, references Boris Groys’ work on the murky divide of producer and consumer, and stresses the key position of the spectator as an active participant in any piece of work.

Given their contemporary artistic touchstones, the following chapters are more straightforward. Helpfully they are full of description, so extensive knowledge of every practice is not required, and individual theories appear in the discussions. The Dardenne Brothers, for instance, have been accused by critics of making repetitious films, but in this first chapter Dillet and Puri argue that in fact they have been building a general visual portrait of the post-industrial Belgian town. This is despite “place rarely (being) the primary focus of the shot”; whilst focused on the journey of a protagonist, the interaction between character, film and location builds a cohesive sense of place, using filmic devices such as framing bodies rather than expressions, often from behind, and never filming without a person in the frame.

Image from “Arundhati Roy’s Language of Politics”. Photo by writer, courtesy of Rowman and Littlefield International.

 

Aside from Weiwei’s appreciation of Warhol, little is made of any artistic influences upon the practices discussed, perhaps to keep this non-art consideration within its bounds. At the same time, no artist discussed in this book is taken as wholly representative of a particular nationhood, medium or set political ideal. Instead, capitalisation on political unrest is a problem recurrently addressed, such as Roy’s issue with “behalf-ism” in  “Arundhati Roy’s Language of Politics”.

With this issue in mind it is fitting that, whilst at times venerating the artists, much of the book still addresses the political complexities of hyper-mediatisation in art, and from there, the splitting of artist persona and artwork. This gets particularly complicated when this fame becomes a platform for representation and social engagement, bleeding into their production, as is the case with Weiwei’s recent work.

Image from “Ai Weiwei’s Useless Materials. Photo by writer, courtesy of Rowman and Littlefield International.

 

Even though this book was published in the middle of recent controversies surrounding Weiwei’s actions in the refugee crisis, it makes a pertinent point when, comparing works like Sunflower Seeds, Coca Cola Vase and the 2007 work Fairytale, they compare the artist’s sculptural and social acts. In the latter piece, where 1001 Chinese citizens were brought to Kassel as tourists for the artist’s work in Documenta, the authors criticize of its easy media acceptability based solely on its inclusive nature, and argue “Ai Weiwei’s work is both more political and more collaborative when it reflects on material qualities and on our usages of history rather than….all-too-direct social collaboration.” Whilst seeing work from a loaded object does not equal a uniform experience, it is, as Rancière suggested, a shared experience, and can allow room for politics to materialise within art rather than be enacted within it.

By Dorothy Hunter

Crafted: Objects in Flux was a recent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Emily Zilber curated the show and wrote the accompanying catalogue.

Zilber is an astute art historian and has carefully chosen her words in titling this publication. The title does not denote a category of art, but references the concept behind this book.  Her approach created an opportunity for inclusion and possibilities. 

Crafted: Objects in Flux, Emily Zilber. MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (September 29, 2015)

 

The works assembled could easily be considered sculpture or conceptual efforts, yet this art is inconspicuously grounded in ideas that motivated the most progressive late 20th century craft artists. Each of the individuals Zilber includes has a heightened sensitivity to materials and fabrication, and at the same time, share a creative orientation driven by curiosity and intellect.

In this exhibition, Zilber confronts notions of craft versus fine art, which has been a contested issue in the art world for decades.  She does not argue a point of view. Instead by bringing together a group of artists so smart and insightful, she renders that conversation irrelevant. Their work demands consideration on its own terms, regardless of it being conceived by an artist trained as a jeweler, ceramicist, painter or sculptor.

Zilber structures the book into four chapters, each which looks at this art from a specific viewpoint. Starting with The Object in Flux, she lays the groundwork for the premise of the show. The next three chapters, The Re-tooled Object, The Performative Object, and The Immersive Object, profile the artists and their work.  The consistent use of the word “object” is a clue to the perspective Zelber brings to the discussion. The word object is often use by curators of decorative arts when referring to works in their field.  In contrast, it would be unusual for an academic with expertise in sculpture to refer to a three dimensional piece made for a gallery setting as an object.

Pending, 2014, Charlotte Potter

 

What Zilber seems to understand is that there are many ways to navigate the art world and all perspectives are equally valid. In the chapter, The Re-tooled Object, she writes, “The conventional understanding of craft objects emphasizes an artist’s mastery of complicated and transformative mate­rial practices, which are often tied in some way to traditions of making by hand. Yet, as much as craft is centered in the hand, it is also centered in the tool.”

Huge Ladle, 2005, Chien-Wei Chang

 

This point is often the focus of the art/craft debate. Yet Zilber explains that a concern for material and fabrication is not an end in itself. The work in this book demonstrates that a craft person can be as thoughtful and concept driven as any other artist.

The following chapters further develop this premise. They include performance pieces, installations, works addressing social justice and environmental issues, as well as art inspired by materials and new technology. While each artist profiled has a distinct aesthetic, they all rely on the careful manipulation of material to transform their ideas into form.

Crafted: Objects in Flux, is a well-designed book that offers an expanded view of contemporary art. Illustrated with over 130 photographs, it is visually engaging. In the exhibition she curated and the book that supports it, Zilber has brought together a group of artists who transcend expectations and challenge assumptions.

By Scott Rothstein

When one refers to the business of art, certainly in the context of artists, the focus is on artists as businesspeople, not only creating artworks for sale but marketing, promoting, exhibiting and selling this art. However, the skills in this realm that artists need to learn are similar, and sometimes identical, to those of art dealers and gallery owners, which makes Edward Winkleman’s recent gallery-oriented Selling Contemporary Art: How to Navigate the Evolving Market (Allworth Press) a useful addition to an artist’s bookshelf. (Full disclosure: Allworth Press also is the publisher of my books.) The author of How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, Winkleman looks at a variety of changes in the selling of art over the past decade that are likely to make a difference in whether a gallery thrives or closes, and what he has to say to dealers is often quite applicable to artists who sell on their own or through a gallery.

The changes he describes – the power of the Internet, the growing prevalence of art fairs and the globalization of the art market, for instance – probably are not news to readers, but he offers specific recommendations on how to position oneself in this evolving environment. “Most galleries located in English-speaking countries are so confident of English’s dominance that it is the only language they use of their sites,” he writes. However, he views as a “forward-thinking approach” the ability of those in non-English-speaking countries to navigate a Web site in their own language, such as Chinese in China or Arabic in the United Arab Emirates, which involves the acquisition of translation software.

Another recommendation is not to assume that what is done in the United States is done everywhere else. Google is the go-to search engine in the U.S. and Europe, but Yandex is more popular in Russian-speaking countries, as is Naver in Korea and Baidu in China. “Yandex and Bai, for example, favor social media pages over standard websites, which may mean you want [your] Facebook page to be always up to date, and…even multi-lingual.” Maybe not just Facebook, since “Kontakte is the dominant social network in Russia, and QZone is the dominant one in China.”

Selling Contemporary Art: How to Navigate the Evolving Market by Edward Winkleman,
Allworth Press. 344 pp. $24.99.

This book is aimed principally at gallery owners, small to medium-sized operations at that. They face stark competition from what are described as “mega-galleries,” which have large exhibitions spaces in different countries and who pick off rising talents from smaller galleries. They also must compete for admission into costly and prestigious international art fairs, wehre a growing percentage of art buyers go to shop. Who you know, or who knows you, matters. “Having served on a selection committee for a fair,” Winkleman writes, “I can confirm that proposals from galleries that no one on the committee knows, especially if they are located in major art centers, rarely received more than a cursory review.” True for galleries and for artists, too. What gets artists into galleries is their connections – who has a dealer’s ear and can vouch for them, who that the dealer knows and trusts will make an introduction – rather than the inherent quality of their work. Nothing new in this, although it is interesting to read the whining of a gallery owner rather than that of an artist.

Winkleman’s goal is to offer ways that the small may compete with the large, much of which is highly applicable to individual artists: Communicate more clearly and more often with the public about what is being exhibited; use strategic keywords to improve the chances of being found in online searches; develop a more public presence, through speaking engagements or online, which allows one to literally “seize the microphone” away from those with deeper pockets and more prestige. In effect, “you do not need to wait to be crowned as an industry leader to speak up and share your ideas.” With regard to making oneself known to those who may affect one’s career, he recommends “[m]aking sure they have heard of you, by visiting…galleries, introducing yourself, asking them questions…and ensuring you add them to your mailing list….”

He distinguishes between seeking public and art world attention to what one is exhibiting and the older assumption that a positive critical review will drive sales. Based on his own survey of collectors, a review in a newspaper or magazine “influences what they collect very little.” That should calm typical artist anxieties a bit.

Throughout Selling Contemporary Art, advice intended for gallery owners may be of use to individual artists. A dealer needing immediate one-time financial backing in order to pay a hefty entry fee to take part in a prestigious art fair might contact a good client to front the money, getting paid back through art fair sales. Similarly, an artist looking to pay a foundry might also contact a friendly buyer, offering terms that reimburse the backer in cash from sales or in artwork. A dealer needs to stay abreast of what the artists they represent are doing in their studios and pasting online, and artists need to keep their galleries informed of new work they are creating, rather than posting images on social media and hoping their dealers are paying attention.

In general, understanding the challenges of art dealers and gallery owners will help artists understand and negotiate their relationship with them. The goal of both artist and dealer is sales. However, the more artists learn some of the skills and techniques of dealers, the more likely they are to not need them.

By Daniel Grant

Eyal Weizman, Folly, 2013. Photo by Kyungsub Shin

For the latest edition in the Critical Spatial Practice series from Sternberg Press, Israeli intellectual and architect (and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmith’s College in London) Eyal Weizman has turned his attention to protest and revolution. In a perhaps timely (and at this point arguably necessary fashion), he gives particular attention to the Arab Spring Protests that began in Tunisia in December 2010, the ripples of which are still shaping global politics at the moment with Civil Wars in Syria and Libya especially.  

The Roundabout Revolutions
With Blake Fisher and Samaneh Moafi
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring photography by Kyungsub Shin. Sternberg Press, 2015.

Weizman begins in Gwangju, South Korea, in May 1980 as students and pro-democracy activists protest against the recently ascendant military government. A photograph of protestors occupying a roundabout in the city provokes his examination of more recent protest movements including those in Egypt, Palestine, Iran, Tunisia and Turkey among others. As he explores these roundabouts and the architectural elements that have become almost synonymous with these protests, Weizman arrives at a beautiful characterisation: “like a revolution, a roundabout is an event locked between function and deactivation.” Indeed as he examines these revolutions and the manner in which they came together, sometimes spontaneously but often at least partially orchestrated (primarily through social media), a recurring symbolism emerges, particularly in protests of solidarity which spring up like dominoes across the region.

Utilising these large public spaces, protestors attempt to both figuratively and literally disrupt the status quo, something which Weizman addresses in two chapters entitled ‘Flow’ and ‘Self-Regulation,’ as he unpacks the history of the Roundabout as it pertains to Colonial intervention in the Middle East by European powers. Modes of control refashioned as modes of resistance; sites of dominant Western narratives about modernity and efficiency reimagined as spaces of autonomous demonstration and self-determination. The power of these constructions as potential public forums for protest is particularly highlighted by the destruction of the Pearl Monument in Bahrain in 2011 after anti-government protesters occupied the area in reference to previous movements in Egypt and elsewhere. Interestingly, when the area was reconfigured as an intersection it was named ‘Al-Farooq Junction,’ a reference to the Islamic Caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattāb, a figure of contention between some Shia and Sunni Muslims. It’s analogous perhaps to the way roundabouts in formerly colonised territories frequently featured divisive figures associated with the ruling hegemony, indicative of a cycle that has not yet exhausted itself in contemporary politics or indeed architecture.

Liberated Gwangju: Protesters gather at the roundabout in front of Provincial Hall in Gwangju, May 26, 1980.

 

These musings come together beautifully in the chapters ‘Folly’ and ‘The Round Table,’ wherein Weizman addresses his participation in the Gwangju Biennale in 2013 as part of the exhibition Gwangju Folly II. Working under a brief “to exploit the ambiguities of a folly as a critical tool of inquiry to address the condition of public space as a political arena thirty–three years after the uprising,” Weizman worked with Samantha Moafi to design a folly, described here as “architectural, artistic, or literary provocations- frivolous, luxurious, speculative, foolish, or mad acts that implicitly questioned norms and the status quo.” The huge public work was positioned outside the Gwangju train station, rather than the roundabout from the photo which sparked this text. While that initial space had been changed in ways which made it unsuitable for such a public work, the train station was actually the first site of armed confrontation with security forces in May 1980, making it all the more appropriate as a setting.

The work itself was designed to include a series of concentric circles, the size of which were determined by sites of protest in Ramallah, Gwangju, Cairo, Manama, Tunis, Damascus and Tehran (ordered here from smallest to largest). They were painted like road markings, and changed colour to become virtually invisible when it rained, an understated reminder that those tensions are always there, hidden just below the surface.

Eyal Weizman, Folly, 2013. Photo by Kyungsub Shin

 

In the centre the architects designed a glass pavilion with a large table inside, something which Weizman relates to the use of the round table in Poland in 1989, when the ruling dictatorship under Wojciech Jarulezelski went into negotiations with the previously outlawed Solidarnosc (‘Solidarity’) Trade Union. This table, like the roundabouts themselves, is presented here as a space of dialogue and development, vital parts in the process whereby lasting, stable change can be constructed. But more than just that, there is a suggestion here that having the first without the second leaves these protests vulnerable to being defeated, either by a stronger and more organised government or military body, or through a muddling and mishandling of resources by the protesters themselves.

As a case study, Weizman’s book is beautifully articulated and illustrated. His forays into the history of both the political protests and of the roundabout as a space are fantastically synergised in the final work created in Gwangju in 2013 (presented here by Kyungsub Shin’s colour photographs). In an increasingly hostile socio-political environment (particularly here in Europe), exacerbated by ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and the steadily worsening refugee crisis, Weizman’s project here gives an interesting angle into how we arrived at this point, and how we might need to reconsider the way forward.

By Will Gresson

In the Makerverse, Tom Burtonwood is a familiar name. Since 2014 he has contributed to Make‘s Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing. Scroll Thingiverse, and you’ll likely cross paths with one of his more than 200 designs (most likely one of his score of scans for the Art Institute of Chicago). On occasion, one of his 3D projects makes a couple of waves on boingboing, 3Ders, and the tech section of other websites. Most recently, he’s produced a 3D-printed book entitled “Twenty-Something Sullivan,” which features nine architectural details created early in Louis Sullivan’s career. The project is a two-year collaboration with his friend, City of Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson, and will be on view in the exhibition “Transmissions,” at the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mount Vernon IL, Feb 20 – May 1.

Sullivan is probably best remembered as the so-called father of the skyscraper, and probably just as well for being Frank Lloyd Wright’s boss early in Wright’s career. And despite a prolific career before the dawn of the 1900s, of the nearly 200 buildings that were completed, only a few dozen remain standing—little more than half of that sum exists in Chicago where the bulk of his architectural practice was most dominant.  “Chicago has a rich Architectural history,” mentions Burtonwood. “And also a history of ripping down important buildings.”

Designed with a bind that allows the pages of the book to pinwheel like the petals of a flower Sullivan might design, each page is accompanied by relevant notes in English and Braille: the architectural work the ornament came from, its original material, and the dates of construction and demolition. The last part is perhaps most notable: Each of the examples in the book are from buildings that no longer exist, and all but one were rescued by preservationist, Richard Nickel, who died in 1972 while attempting to document Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building. “When urban renewal of the 1950s and 60s was resulting in demolition of the neighborhoods where these early Sullivan buildings were concentrated, Nickel was the only person who had the knowledge and interest to salvage the pieces,” noted Samuelson. Nickel also had the physical stamina to do it.

To demonstrate the weight of an original Sullivan terra cotta ornament, Samuelson lifted an example at a PechaKucha presentation at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in October 2015. His face beet red, he struggles to lift it above his head. “It’s incredible to think that Nickel went alone in the night to cajole this piece from a brick wall three stories in the air, while standing on a swaying wooden extension ladder,” Samuelson later wrote in an e-mail of his friend, colleague, and mentor.

“Twenty-Something Sullivan” is not the first 3D printed book for Burtonwood; in 2013 he produced a hinged accordion book, aptly entitled Orihon, consisting of six objects he scanned at the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The book was very much a part of the Hackathon at the Met,” he reflected, referencing the Met’s first Hackathon at the end of May in 2012 “I had thought about it conceptually. What does it mean to [scan] these things, and mash them up as an object?” He recalled a number of people did that, resulting in some criticism: most notably by Lee Rosenbaum, who griped the mashups ran “counter to promoting deeper understanding” of works in the Met’s collection.

It’s that kind of criticism that gets under Burtonwood’s skin. “All levels of culture and artistic production are about replication on some level… It’s how we learn things,” relating 3D scanning and printing to earlier methods of replication like photography and printmaking. “When did play become such a bedeviled activity that we have to stigmatize it?” Burtonwood, like his other colleagues from the Met, was just as keen to mashup some of his own 3D collage experiments later in 2012, eventually restructuring scans to fit on the heads of Pez dispensers. “A lot of my 3D printing work has a lot of humor… this particular technology has allowed me to do playful work.”

However, the playful work lead to more thoughtful reflection, and he sat on the information he gathered from the Met for over half a year. “I’m sensitive to the fact they are not originals: they are replicas. But think of a Matisse. A lot of people will never see the original, they will only see a replica.”

With the idea of access, Burtonwood made the finished version of Orihon—from scans to hinges—available on Thingiverse under creative commons for anyone to download and print. And for the interest of public display, he designed each plate within the book to double as a mold. “If I want to make a copy of a book, I Xerox from the book. A 3D printed book: you can’t quite do that. So how do I make a copy in a visceral, quick way?” In essence, anyone could stick a glob of playdough into the back of his mold and make an object from the relief. “It is its own photocopier and it can be shared many times,” Burtonwood reflected.

Once Samuelson saw Orihon, he asked Burtonwood if they could do something similar for the work of Louis Sullivan. Motivated by the ideas of preservation and access, Burtonwood agreed to the project. “Since so few of Sullivan’s earliest buildings survive,” notes Samuelson, “this period of ornament is largely unknown and unappreciated.  But in my opinion, their youthful vigor makes them among the best of all his work.” It’s that idea of ornamentation that now seems so foreign in contemporary construction. The International Style kicked organic flourishes of twisting vines and arabesques to the curb. Traditional patterns, usually tucked in the masonry between stories, were eliminated for glass curtains. “The irony about Modernism is that the whole building became the ornamentation,” Burtonwood mused. While a resurgence of Art Nouveau embellished skyscrapers is unlikely to percolate from this project, at the very least, with these 3D-printed replicas, Burtonwood and Samuelson have opened the possibility for a “deeper understanding” of the lost work of a Modern master.

By John Anderson

Among the male sculptors over 70 who have been practicing for half a century, Martin Puryear (born 1941), Frank Stella (born 1936), and Mark di Suvero (born 1933) are quite different in terms of their main themes, media, and processes. One common thread is that each has taken great risks, chosen new directions in sculpture, and created work with universal meanings that have not been explored in depth. Three new monographs each discuss how one artist draws inspiration from a range of subjects; however, only the essays on Puryear discuss craft and process in depth. Another topic that begs to be discussed in this trio’s arts is erotic allusions/tales/allegories. Mark Pascale’s analysis of sensory implications in Puryear’s “The Gates” gave me new ideas about additional sensory references in the artist’s oeuvre.

The newest books on these artists are reviewed below.

Mark di Suvero. Edited by David R. Collens et. al. with contributions by Mark di Suvero, Patricia C. Phillips, Nancy Princenthal, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. New York: Storm King Art Center, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2015. Hardbound, 240 pages with 150 illustrations, $75.

Mark di Suvero: Coldbent Steel: Poetry in Motion 

The cover of Mark di Suvero, Storm King Art Center’s new monograph on the artist, is the same size, length, and weight as the Stella book but instead of an abstract hot red, gray, and green abstract cover, a fire engine red steel sculpture, Figolu, creates ovals and angles against a clear blue sky. The ample Chronology highlights the artist’s life from his birth in Shanghai, China to Italian parents, his B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956, and his move to New York in 1957. Di Suvero’s many exhibitions and honors include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 1974, a solo exhibition in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, in 1975, the National Medal of Arts in 2010, and a gold medal for sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2013.

Di Suvero’s body of work includes paintings, drawings, and prints, yet this monograph focuses on di Suvero’s steel inventions, many monumental in size and most created for outdoor venues. Images emphasize di Suvero’s mastery of the monumental: red and two black sculptures on green grass fields line a wide boulevard in Paris, 1997. Figolu and other sculptures re-frame the Statue of Liberty and other vistas seen on and from Governor’s Island, 2011. Vivaldi, a red painted steel geometry that stands on three legs as it soars 48 feet high, dazzles on a Venice pier against blue water and sky as part of di Suvero’s citywide exhibition in 1995.

The volume opens with essays by Nora R. Lawrence, a curator at Storm King; by Patricia C. Phillips, a curator and dean at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design); and by Nancy Princenthal, a former senior editor at Art in America. What brings this volume alive is the art itself and di Suvero’s conversation with Ursula von Rydingsvard. The two talk like old friends – di Suvero’s Athena Foundation gave von Rydingsvard an art award in 1983 and gave other notables like Phillip Glass early funding. The two discuss the genesis of some di Suvero’s works, the trials of working with monumental materials, discovering how to believe in oneself, and resolving philosophical as well as material considerations in order to create, as in this exchange:

Mark di Suvero finishing Pyramidian (1987/1998) at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY, 1998

 

UvR:…You make models once in a great while, don’t you?

MdS:  Now I do. I never used to make models. For that piece that you were talking about I must have made at least fifty to a hundred models. I work with Mobius bands, right? Now I’m working with something that has to do with a Mobius band with a hole in it. It causes me all kinds of problems. I love to draw. Ursula, drawing is …like a cool swimming pool on a very hot day. You just dive into that paper and draw anything, and then you don’t have to build it.

UvR: No, and it’s not the commitment that building is.

MdS: But it suggests something else. It suggests the next step. That’s the beautiful part of it.

The entire conversation discusses logic, improvisation, total immersion, materials, processes, failure, and more.

Di Suvero’s names for his sculpture are important — from Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore), 1967 to Vivaldi, 1995 to work named for Gandhi, Van Gogh, and the janitor’s wife. He often alludes to poets, composers, and friends. Unlike Stella’s vortexes of energy and color, di Suvero’s compositions are closer to calligraphy in space, often in relation to sky and earth. His work is often painted red or is the rust hue of Cor Ten steel. The challenge for viewers is to “read” di Suvero’s sculpture – his ‘writing in the sky’, which combines literal weight with figurative outjuttings of joy, mischief, and interactive parts. Touching or even rocking on the movable platform inside one sculpture, is allowed.

Martin Puryear Multiple Directions. Mark Pascale; with an essay by Ruth Fine
New Haven: Yale University Press and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2015
Hardbound, 160 pages, with 140 color illustrations, $35.

 

Martin Puryear: Coded Compositions in Multiple Dimensions 

Anyone who has followed Martin Puryear’s career knows that he encodes his images  as keenly as he crafts and curves wood. Martin Puryear, Multiple Dimensions contains essays by Mark Pascale, the Janet and Craig Duchossois Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Art Institute of Chicago, and by Ruth Fine, formerly of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. that raise scholarship to the plateau on which, ideally, all essays should be written. Each shows a keen familiarity with Puryear’s relatively unknown large body of prints and drawings, and these, in turn, visually reveal many sources for themes that run through Puryear’s work.

Mark Pascale’s essay “Line, Shape, Form” ties together the origins of some of Puryear’s forms in multiple media with later work, starting during his years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and the period following when Puryear studied intaglio printmaking and etching at the Royal Academy in Stockholm. Pascale points out that the artist’s 1962 woodcut Bull has illusory depth, shows “careful observation,” and “shows the inside and outside of the animal simultaneously…” (p. 19). Pascale discusses the racial and sexual symbolism in Puryear’s 1966 etching, Gate, and another 1966 etching, Quadroon, two related forms, which lead to later sculpture. Quadroon is a term used to refer to a mixed race person.

Pascale and Fine limit their remarks about specific art works to materials and processes and do not directly address the ways that Puryear codes references to race, gender, and culture in his work. Despite this important omission, Pascale draws connections among many works, such as the source for Puryear’s first (and recent) uses of the ‘liberty’ Phrygian cap, a conical red cap with a soft, forward-curling tip. The racial symbolism is obvious in a 1794 image of a dark-skinned boy in the Phrygian cap, titled “Moi Libre aussi” (I’m free too) and in a series titled “Untitled” and “Shackled,” with its visual reference to slavery. Puryear’s untitled drawings and maquette a work titled Big Bling for Madison Square Park is another work that suggests that the whole legacy of slavery was treating people like property. Puryear has also used tar in some work; his clear and ongoing attention to racial injustice as an unresolved part of America’s history is an important –ironically somewhat overlooked — part of his legacy as an artist.

Martin Puryear, Maquette for Big Bling, 2014. Birch plywood, maple, 22-karat gold leaf, 40 1/4 x 9 1/8 x 40 in. (maquette); 40 x 10 x 38 ft. (projected size). Collection of the artist. © Martin Puryear. Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics

 

Pascale elucides how Puryear’s processes in drypoint, intaglio, and etching and his early themes show up in later work: “Gate remains one of Puryear’s most powerful works on paper, succinct in its composition and execution and a model for much that followed” (p. 20). As Pascale notes, “For Puryear, the act of drawing helps to refine the direction a sculpture may take by providing him with a way to explore possible materials, details of form, methods of building and joining, and approaches to surfaces. Essential to all of these decisions is the dynamic between positive and negative space…” (p. 35).

Ruth Fine, in her essay “Making Drawings, Drawing as Making,” continues the deep investigation into Puryear’s drawings. She seems to have studied a trove of work that is not generally known. Puryear’s early drawings include the woodgrain surface of a toilet, drawings of animals, nature, and birds. She discusses his Jug drawings of 2001 but not the Vessel sculpture in the exhibition associated with Multiple Dimensions; the large sculpture includes a big black ampersand inside its cage-like enclosure. Fine discusses Puryear’s untitled head (graphite on cut ivory wove paper) in relation to the monumental sculpture That Profile, 1999 in stainless steel and bronze.

Another work in the exhibition, the drawing and maquette for Bearing Witness, 1994, bears a relationship to the head forms that Fine analyzes. Bearing Witness, a monumental public sculpture in Washington, D. C. is sited in a symbolic relationship to several important federal government buildings. It is also related to the Fang culture and to the shape of his daughter’s head as a baby. Bearing Witness is about justice and has many layers of importance, none of which are discussed. However, the spare essays by Pascale and Fine, along with 140 images connecting aspects of Puryear’s art, point readers toward deeper understandings of his work.

This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition that will be seen at The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. between October, 2015 and September, 2016.

Frank Stella: A Retrospective. By Michael Auping with essays by Jordan Kantor and Adam D. Weinberg, and an interview with Frank Stella by Laura Owens. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2015. Hardcover with slipcase. 240 pages, 157 color illustrations, $65.

 

Frank Stella: Spatial & Material Ingress

Frank Stella’s art charged each decade, cutting a wide swathe as he literally changed the ways we think about painting, sculpture, art history, and criticism. Frank Stella: A Retrospective, printed in Italy and published by the Whitney Museum, made Roberta Smith’s list for notable exhibitions of 2015, yet she doesn’t discuss the book at all. Michael Auping’s main essay proposes that Stella’s entire body of work creatively considers “the relationship between materiality, illusionistic space, and three-dimensional space”… and that Stella’s art is “about seeing literal space through and around materiality (pp. 38-39).

The colorful hardback cover is cut out on its lower portions to echo the cover’s abstract lines. The book is hefty in weight, and its 64-page Chronology is notable. Stella, born in 1936, had important classmates and teachers at Phillips Academy, Andover and at Princeton University; he joined charmed art circles as soon as he moved to New York in 1958 and Leo Castelli mounted his first solo show by 1960.  Early reviews by Irving Sandler, John Canaday, William Rubin, Emily Genauer, and other critics of his generation paid attention to Stella’s black paintings, his Aluminum and Copper Paintings, and his shaped canvases. Over time, Stella created art with its own skewed geometries, humor, and new strategies for engaging viewers.

Frank Stella, East Broadway, 1958. Oil on canvas. 85 1/4 x 81 in. (216.5 x 205.7 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; gift of the artist (PA 1954) 1980.14. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York.

 

The color plates, including foldout images of some large works suggest Stella’s Minimal to Maximal range. Exhibition curator Michael Auping’s essay “The Phenomenology of Frank: Materiality and Gesture Make Space” is the textual heart of the book. Auping takes readers to Stella’s jungle-like mixed media studio and proceeds to talk his way through Stella’s influences and periods. Part of Stella’s attraction for art historians is that his art may simultaneously allude to influences and decades even as it veers in other directions. Auping characterizes Stella’s Black Paintings as having a “moody and ambiguous spatial  depth” …with “the inexplicable emotional effect of their dark, vibrating space” (pp. 17-18). Stella’s use of “cheap and available” aluminum paint and household paint gave a nod to the working class, and he titled the talks he gave at Harvard in 1983, as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, “Working Space.” Even though his origins were far from working class, Stella cultivated a working class aura. His geometries on canvas led him to experiment with CAD and other imaging software; his Moby Dick series (1986-97), his Çatal Huyuk cycle , and other work begun in the 1980s launched his period of working in all media – painting, relief, collage, print, drawing, and large to monumental sculpture.

Jordan Kantor’s essay on “Frank Painting/ Some Aspects of Stella’s Work” discusses Stella’s approach to complex series including Moby-Dick. Stella’s short conversation with Laura Owens shows Stella as an unsentimental pragmatist, not the wordsmith who lectured at Harvard. 

Frank Stella A Retrospective is one man’s art odyssey over the course of six decades. His most recent aluminum, steel, and fiberglass constructions are mostly monochromatic. I personally like their silvery finishes and find Stella’s uses of color uneven – but better than Picasso’s. Neither was a colorist; to me, Stella’s loaded, clashing spectrums seem mostly arbitrary and pedestrian. The art in this exhibition and catalog was carefully chosen from Stella’s colossal total body of work.  I value the early work for its pioneering spirit; the late work has riddles – from themes to construction methods — that need to be examined.

Footnote

I was introduced to the art of Stella and di Suvero in St. Louis over twenty years ago and to Puryear’s art in Seattle around 18 years ago. Along the way, my poem for Stella’s print “Then Water Came and Quenched the Fire” appeared in Exquisite Corps, and my essay “Dragons in the Sky” became the title as well as the essay for di Suvero’s 2005 exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis.  My essays on Martin Puryear’s art came out in Sculpture Magazine in 1998 and 2008.  It’s significant that each artist has developed his own abstract language loaded with sensory, cultural, and cognitive associations over many decades, and that each has developed unique approaches to making art.

These are top books in the field with high production values, yet all leave much unsaid. The Pascale and Fine essays and the di Suvero-von Rydingsvard interview deliver new insights.

By Jan Garden Castro

Bob and Jessica at his studio working on the score for Resonant Nest. Photograph by Aisha Singleton, 2014

Mid-September saw the publication of A Better Nectar by University Art Museum at the California State University Long Beach: a profusely illustrated 88-page catalog for the exhibition of the same name by Jessica Rath. The exhibition ran from January 27 through April 12, 2015. As the title of the catalog and exhibition might suggest, it has something to do with bees.

A Better Nectar catalog cover

Rath’s previous works are steeped in research, examining how new apple hybrids were developed , for instance. Rath’s interests were turning toward bees in 2013, partly predicated on years of the news media’s drum beat sounding alarms about colony collapse. However, it was a subject she had been mulling over since 2007, when she discovered a fallen bee’s nest during a sound recording, and heard the hive bustling in a cold huddle, trying to keep warm. For A Better Nectar, UAM Curator of Exhibitions, Kristina Newhouse, noted in her catalog essay that Rath “consciously eschewed physical representations of bees.” Such a decision would be a visible departure from Ripe,  where the artist created, among other work, a series of 18” large Roma tomatoes.

The key to moving away from such representation was an interview with Dr. Anne Leonard  that Rath heard on public radio. Within the interview, Leonard discussed the relationship between flowers and pollinators, and about how bees perceive their environment: how they see the ultraviolet spectrum, smell the fragrance plumes of flowers, and feel their electric fields. The two eventually met, and the research began in full stride.

Resonant Nest (2014). Sound: 19 cell units 32 x 32 x 36 inches each. Polyester resin,

fiberglass, electronics, speakers. Cells and direction by Jessica Rath.

Music and interactive systems design by Robert Hoehn

What the catalog documents is an interdisciplinary, and collaborative investigation and response into the lives of bees by enlarging and transforming their environment to a human scale. Dimly-lit rooms become immersive experiences simulating the darkened environments of developing pollinators. The physical structures of flowers were constructed to such magnitude that gallery-goers felt welcome to poke their heads into the sculptures, to sniff and see, and visibly simulate the paths and actions of bees as they gather pollen. A multi-channel audio recording, composed by Rath and collaborator Robert Hoehn—and performed by the Bob Cole Conservatory Chamber Choir —sonically interpreted various states of a hive with compositions like Cold Huddle, Afternoon Forage, and Quiet Sleep.  Each composition played within resin and fiberglass larvae vessels, programmed to respond to current weather conditions in Long Beach that streamed onto an iPad from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

CSULB student Jessica Heredia taps on Staminal Evolution (Solanum Iycopersicum).

Polyester resin, fiberglass, sound, electronic components. Photograph by Aisha Singleton, 2015

The catalog serves as a rich document of this exhibition. Writings touch on the various collaborations with Hoehn and the chamber choir, as well as engineers, fabricators, lighting designers, and botanists that worked on the project. The catalog also notes the University Art Museum’s relationship and programming with area elementary educators in the Long Beach Unified School District, and how this project fit within STEM curricula. Dr. Anne Leonard’s essay is an engaging account of how bees experience the world. Along with other essays by Newhouse and USC French and Comparative Literature professors Antonia Szabari and Natania Meeker, they not only account for the process and experience of the exhibition, but they also serve to inform the catalog’s design, most specifically its cover: a luscious purple that has the depth and richness akin to Prussian blue. This is “bee purple,” a simulation of color visible to bees in the ultraviolet spectrum, which helps them navigate the anatomy of a flower when pollinating. The play on ultraviolet sight is also referenced in the printing of the artists name in a UV spot coat, which from certain angles becomes nearly invisible. A gold foil stamp of the title also references colors in the spectrum of bee vision. Die cut into the cover are an X, Y and triangle: patterns evolved by flowers to guide bees to their nectar. At a glance, the use of foil stamping, UV spots, and die cuts seem like decadent printing excesses, but each smartly reinforces the content of the exhibition, translating the experiential qualities of the exhibition.

As such an engaging resource, with luck, A Better Nectar will eventually let the project re-emerge from its cold huddle—in whole or in part—and guide it to a new location to pollinate the mind.

By John Anderson

Rebecca Marino, Observatory Floor. Courtsey artist.

Rebecca Marino began her relationship with Pump Project as a volunteer during her sophomore year at St. Edwards University and has been a part of the organization ever since. She is now the Co-Director of Pump Project with a particular focus on curation and development. From the beginning she was taken with the diversity of skills needed to run a hands-on, DIY, warehouse style gallery and studio complex. Now, as the Gallery Director and unofficial head of development, she does everything from painting pedestals and working with artists to writing grants and learning the ins and outs of city funding. 

 
Kyle Evans. Courtesy Pump Projects.

Now just over ten years old, Pump Project has secured itself as a staple in the Austin arts community. Joshua Green and Sean Gaulager started what was then called Shady Tree Studios ten years ago as a studio complex with a small gallery.  Since its inception it has grown steadily and continues to do so. In the coming year there are plans to enlarge the gallery and studio spaces greatly by expanding into the adjoining warehouse space. This will mark a huge shift in Pump Project’s community impact by increasing both the studio space and gallery footprint.

In 2010 Marino was brought on to work with Flex Space, Pump Project’s satellite gallery. After three years and changes in leadership, Marino became Co-Director at Pump Project’s main space. Her goals for Pump are ambitious, exciting, and needed: to provide affordable studios, increase gallery space, engage with the community, and continue to foster the nascent residency program.  All in all, Marino wants Pump Project to help in keeping young talent in Austin and minimizing the struggle that emerging artists face.

I’ll Be It. Courtesy Pump Project.

 

Coming from a background in art history and studio art, Marino is a curator, artist, and writer. Looking for a new critical outlook in Austin, Marino began Conflict of Interest with Thao Votang in 2015. This new project is a media outlet that covers the visual and literary arts communities, celebrating the tightly knit community in Austin. This new project is absolutely emblematic of Marino’s commitment to the arts in Austin. There are exciting things in the works for Pump Project and Marino in the next year- make sure to stay in the loop!

Please visit Pump Project and Rebecca Marino online for further information and images.

By Gracelee Lawrence

Trevor Paglen, Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4, Build 2), © Trevor Paglen 2015, image courtesy Eli
and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed that America’s “black budget” (money allocated for classified surveillance programs) was just under $53 billion. The money financed 16 spying agencies which employed 107,035 people. [i]   Trevor Paglen, a writer, photographer, and multimedia artist with a PhD in geography, creates art that addresses America’s clandestine security agencies, the “black world.”  Through September 27, East Lansing’s Broad Art Museum is featuring his art in the third and final installment of its Genre series in an exhibition loosely arranged on the theme of the landscape.

Paglen’s art is emphatically contemporary, but it conscientiously evokes tradition.  J.M.W. Turner’s Angel in the Sun, for example, inspired Reaper in the Sun, Paglen’s photographic print of a distant military drone cutting its way across the Nevada sky.  Acknowledging the tradition of landscape in art history, one gallery parallels Paglen’s work with a generous spread of related art from the Broad’s permanent collection, featuring artists ranging from Turner to Warhol.  Two subsequent galleries exclusively showcase Paglen.

Trevor Paglen, Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4, Build 2), © Trevor Paglen 2015, image courtesy Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

 

Here viewers encounter his Prototypes for Nonfunctional Satellites, one of which commandingly fills an entire room of its own.   These prototypes are deliberately archaic-looking throwbacks to Sputnik-era spacecraft.  Though designed in collaboration with aerospace experts, they serve ultimately as post-minimalist sculpture. Stand close to their reflective surfaces, and you’ll see your lucid reflection peering back.  Their large, imposing scale calls attention to the physicality of actual surveillance and reconnaissance satellites which, though virtually invisible to us, are nevertheless very real and omnipresent. These prototypes will never leave Earth, but in 2013, a hundred photographs by Paglen were etched onto silicon and launched into orbit aboard the telecommunication satellite EchoStar XVI; these images now exist in a nearly entropy-free environment and will, like all space debris above the atmosphere, probably outlast everything on Earth.

Trevor Paglen, Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4, Build 2), © Trevor Paglen 2015, image courtesy Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

 

Large photographic prints accompany his Satellite Prototypes, and in addition to serving as art-objects, they document performance.  In defiance of the NSA’s order not to, Paglen photographed the NSA headquarters from a circling helicopter (which was legal), producing an ironically luminous print of the U.S. Government’s most secretive agency.  Paglen also photographs classified air bases from adjacent public land (which is also legal).   Necessarily, these photographs are sometimes taken with a powerful telescopic lens from distances of up to 35 miles away.  The resultant blurry images of military drones and classified aircraft underscore the murky ethics of clandestine surveillance.  These photos are both conceptual and visually striking.  Eerily, Paglen can transform the White Sands Missile Range into an image as serene as a painting by Agnes Martin.

Trevor Paglen, National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, Maryland, 2013, C-print, 36 x 53-3/8 inches,
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, MSU purchase, funded by the Nellie M. Loomis Endowment in memory of Martha Jane Loomis, 2014.4. Trevor Paglen

 

Paglen is no conspiracy theorist, and he certainly isn’t anti-military.  His father was in the air-force, and Paglen grew up on military bases in many countries.  But his work serves to raise our awareness of the encroaching black world, and it initiates important and necessary dialogue regarding the increasingly uneasy balance between national security and personal liberty.

PBS recently featured Trevor Paglen in its series Art21 in the episode “Secrets”

Paglen’s website documents many more of his art projects and journalistic investigations, such as Torture Taxi, an exploration of the CIA’s Extraordinary Rendition program.

By Jonathan Rinck

[i] Gellman, Barton, and Greg Miller. “‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives.” The Washington Post, 29 Aug 2013.  Web. 7 July 2015.

Secret Histories shantyboat in Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of Wes Modes.

The Mississippi River runs deep through American culture. From early Native Americans to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Blues and Hurrican Katrina, the history of the country is in constant flux, much like the river itself. The fascination with the mysteries and power of the world’s fourth longest river is subtle, but undeniable.

Secret History developed as the basis for Wes Modes’ MFA thesis in the UC-Santa Cruz in Digital Arts and New Media Program, which he completed in April of this year.  The project is an exploration of the stories attached to American culture and subcultures through its river systems. By searching for, documenting, and showing the stories by people along the way, Modes plans to stitch together a broader image of past and present culture, contradictory and complementary narratives alike

 
Wes Modes in the shantyboat. Photo by Matt Jacobson.

For the beginning part of the multi-river journey, Modes looks to give a voice to the untold histories of the Big River. His intention is to rediscover the local, personal narratives, regional cultures, and economic tales that have been shaped by living near the Mississippi and the fringes of society. In 2014, Modes spent one month navigating from Minneapolis to La Crosse, Wisconsin. In 2015, he will spend three months total from Winona, Minnesota to St. Louis, Missouri. Modes looks to continue his journey down the Ohio, Missouri and Tennessee Rivers in the future.

Part art, part adventure and part historical case-study, Secret History is really a vision to enlighten the modern lifestyle. In true anarchical, DIY fashion, Modes works with a group of people to fulfill a larger vision. Fantasy can become reality if people are given information and precedence to work with. The artist argues alternative lifestyles allow people to remove themselves from mainstream culture, become more creative and lead to a richer and deeper culture overall. It is one giant, collaborative effort that includes the strangers he meets as well as working with the National Park Service or other artists like Twin Cities-based artists Shanai Matteson and Colin Kloecker of Works Progress, a public-based art initiative.

Secret History shantyboat outside of the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. Photo by Matt Jacobson.

 

Modes project has close connections to Minneapolis’ own famed photographer Alec Soth, who’s project Sleeping on the Mississippi and subsequence photography projects locates characters on the margins of society. Modes has a similar search of the peripheries. Rather than using the deadpan style associated with Soth that allows for the viewer to complete the narrative using the framed imagery, Modes directs those who look to a more complete story through interactive browsing of his archives. Another local project that bares resemblance to Secret History is the Art Shanty Projects on the frozen White Bear Lake west of Minneapolis. The larger scope of Secret History has taken on the life of a documentary and a call to perspective Do-It-Yourselfers. The form of art and practice of artful living becomes the difference.

Meeting with Modes for questions resulted in broken sentences and thoughts due to the high volume of visitors to his shantyboat and his genuine desire to connect with every person that throws a glance towards the boat. It became apparent that Modes’ form of art was less the installation in the lobby than connecting with people and the actual adventure of it all. Similar to the stories Modes digs for from years ago, he is creating his own history and process of art making. Unlikely to fit categorically, Secret History becomes a fringe-style of art making itself.

Secret Histories shantyboat in Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of Wes Modes.

 

Recent displays of the shantyboat and installation were during the River City Revue at the Minnesota Historic Center in St. Paul on June 30 and at the National Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa in early August. To search the archives, find upcoming installations or follow Wes Modes and Secret History of American River People, check out the following websites: peoplesriverhistory.us, modes.io.

By Jake Weigel

The Object is the latest in the Whitechapel gallery/MIT press series “Documents of Contemporary Art”, and is a book that does the breadth of its topic justice. Exhibition texts, interviews, manifestos and essays are amongst a dizzying array of material in this relatively compact survey.

Collectively The Object is not so much grounded by the topic of the object in art, but explores its boundaries, the wider issues in philosophy and society that then feed back into it. The subject/object divide, the ripple effects of mass production, and consequences of the fetish are among many of the concepts examined and cross-referenced.

Interior quote (Phyllida Barlow). Image by writer.

Edited and introduced by Anthony Hudek, the collection of writing from artists, critics, philosophers and those around and in between is a sprawling and at times contradictory overview – a certain parameter is loosely set for “the object” within one text, whilst in another it is quickly counteracted, even along the same train of thought.

As a collection it does not make for light reading. Whilst the texts are divided into five areas, and unusually each writer’s entry is no more than a few pages in length, this does not do much to quell such a topic’s span and heavily theoretical nature.  As it is mostly compiled of extracts from a writer’s longer text, each entry is a new deep end in which to be immersed.

The first section, titled “Subject, Object, Thing” is the most philosophical of the book, focusing on the ontological distinctions of the three. Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter touches upon personhood as an arena for sexual objectification, the dissemination of bodily material, and the moralities of the subject/object boundaries, whilst Hito Steyerl’s A Thing Like You And Me discusses shifting the focus of emancipation of subjugated beings away from being considered a subject, to changing their role as object, to be “an object without a subject”.

Interior quote (Robert Morris). Image by writer.

“Everyday Objects, Useful Objects” pulls the book to a more physical focus, with standout texts from Mike Kelly in The Readymade and the Double, discussing the connection and dissemination between Duchamp and Manzoni’s signed nudes, and Mel Chin on the progression of tobacco as a background for his work. “Found Objects, Lost Objects, Non-Objects” hosts Ursula Meyers 1969 text De-Objectification of the Object that seems to have become more relevant in time, touching upon the effect of technology’s increasing immateriality. These two chapters, along with “Discursive Objects, Affective Objects” and “Event, Object, Performance” segue into one another as the human implications of the object – from society to personal sentimentality and utilization – comes more deeply into focus.

As an artist or theorist reader, this book is perhaps most useful when employed as an index, allowing one to locate particularly resonant texts for further reading. It is also an ideal starting point for those that wish to locate further conceptual placement in their three dimensional work. With each text longer than an abstract but quickly cutting to the heart of the matter, it is a book for the long and accumulative read.

By Dorothy Hunter

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts by The College Art Association

The College Art Association’s (CAA) newly published pamphlet, Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, is intended as a guide to assist visual arts professionals in understanding the principle of “fair use” first set forth in the 1976 Copyright Law as it relates to current practice in creative and scholarly work. Over the last two years, a series of focus groups made up of a broad spectrum of practitioners including artists and designers, art and architectural historians, curators and museum professionals, editors, educators and scholars gathered in closed meetings in New York, Washington D.C., Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles to develop commonly shared guidelines and standards in their respected fields. As emphasized throughout the pamphlet, this inclusive, consensus-based narrative, aims to reassure readers of the Code’s purpose, that is, to provide a practical and certain context for applying fair use to their scholarly and creative endeavors.

The emphasis on consensus underscores in our digital present how central fair use of copyrighted materials has become to the visual arts community even as the interpretation and application of its principles has grown vaguer since its codification in United States law. A presumed right allied to freedom of expression and a protection whose benefits extend far beyond the arts community, access to and knowledge of the ways to employ and apply fair use has become  nearly four decades later  an essential aspect of contemporary creative and scholarly practice.  Thus this CAA Code of Best Practices cannot be a more timely publication, one that continues this organization’s on-going mission to provide its membership with professional standards and guidelines. But, as the meticulous process of consulting and agreement on shared professional understandings laid out in the introduction and the text makes clear and frequently underscores, while the need for a code of best practices in fair use is evident, so too are the limitations of its possible applications. Seeking to address the most common situations while emphasizing the freedom of each member of the visual arts community to choose how to apply fair use, the pamphlet and its principles is intended for consultation and guidance not to establish legal liability or precedent.

The Code is subdivided into five sections of a similar format each covering one of the principles of best practice. These principle areas include Analytical Writing; Teaching about Art; Making Art; Museum Uses; and Online Access to Related Collections and Memory Institutions. Each of these situation/areas is  broadly described in an effort to encompass the many ways that these practices might interact with copyright material and fair use as well as the manner by which technology has changed and modified these fair use applications. The right to fair use of copyright is then affirmed in each of these principle areas of best practice. A list of limitations follows, qualifying the nuances of fair use in each area so that readers might apply their own practice and interpretation to individual purpose and circumstance. One aspect that is emphasized in almost every principle of best practice is the need for citation and, just as often,  the importance of including a rationale for fair use and, as well, of remaining respectful or faithful to source material.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts by The College Art Association

As both the introduction and an engaging appendix, written by one of the consultants involved in the study, Peter Jaszi, an expert in copyright practice, explicates, fair use as an aspect of the 1976 Copyright Law has shifted in its legal interpretation over time. Indeed, even as the law accorded rights and protection to creators, it purposefully left open the ways cultural materials could be “fairly used”, allowing the interpretation of its doctrine to adapt to changing and evolving circumstances. Jaszi discusses in his essay the four factors and examples of uses set forth in the original law and how critical consideration these aspects –the purpose and character of “transformative” fair use; whether the use is for new, possibly commercial ways; the appropriateness of the copyrighted material in relation to its transformational use; and the potential harm of fair use to the copyright holder–have been qualified and defined by court rulings especially since the 1990s.  More recently, judicial decisions have attained consensus on the nature of fair use doctrine, thereby collapsing the four factors into two questions: was the transformation of copyrighted material significantly different or but a substitute for the original and was the material taken appropriate for both the copyrighted material and its fair use?  Overall, the appendix provides its readers a balanced approach, one that demonstrates the continued viability of fair use law, its flexibility and its current consideration of good faith in terms of expectation and practice.

Written in a clear, jargon-free manner, Jaszi’s essay offers an articulate and insightful overview of the subtleties of copyright law and fair use and its evolving interpretation, an analysis that, along with the Code and its five principle areas of best practice, gives practical guidance on how -whether making, exhibiting visual art  or using it in publishing, teaching, researching, resourcing, and many other areas—one might construe the law and apply its fair use to creative and scholarly practice. With its use of  “crowd sourcing” of commonly held values and practices and  overview of judicial precedent to discuss and evaluate current application of the law, this Code of Fair Practice will certainly extend our understanding of fair use while serving as a useful guide through what Jaszi notes is the “social bargain” at the heart of copyright law.  A welcome addition to the College Art Association’s publications, this pamphlet will no doubt sustain the practice of all those involved with the visual arts for years to come.

By Susan Canning

Yoko Ono with Apple (1966), at press preview for Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, on view at MoMA, May 17 – September 7, 2015. Photo: Ryan Muir © Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono One Woman Show 1960-1971
New York: MoMA, 2015. 240 pages.

It is thrilling to see that Yoko Ono’s early contributions to innovative art and world peace are being recognized by MoMA’s Yoko Ono One Woman Show exhibit and catalog and frustrating to think that MoMA is celebrating its own history – by selecting Ono as other women are kept on the margins or excluded.[i] Before I sing the praises of the catalog, it is important to notice its cover – Ono posing in front of MoMA. Her upstage hand shows a two-fingered peace sign and her downstage hand holds a big brown paper shopping bag with a huge F.  However, this photo erases the original photo and context: on November 25 and December 2, 1971, Ono she took out Village Voice ads announcing her conceptual “Yoko Ono –one woman show” — on a sign attached to a limo in front of MoMA. She altered MoMA’s name to “Museum of Modern (F)art” (p. 208).  Ono’s show, minus the F(art), is up, 44 years after she conceived it. It contains work from 1960 – 71 and beyond whereas the original show was a large “body-sized” bottle of scented flies released in the MoMA garden.

Cover image: Yoko Ono One Woman Show 1960-1971. New York: MoMA, 2015. 240 pages.

Yoko Ono (Japanese, born 1933) Museum of Modern [F]art. 1971. Exhibition catalogue, offset, 11 13/16 x 11 13/16 x 3/8″ (30 x 30 x 1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. © Yoko Ono 2014

 

Has the focus on early work let Ono overcome her “unknown” status? The catalog fully documents Ono’s early artistic creations and collaborations.  As Holland Cotter points out, the exhibition is “essentially an archival display” (that)… “consists mainly of works on paper. And most of those carry words, the outstanding example being the 151 hand-typed note cards that, in 1964, became Grapefruit: A book of Instructions and Drawings. ”[iv] Two Grapefruit pages:

You may break many mugs at one time.  (1963 autumn)

Cut Piece (1964) performed by Yoko Ono in New Works of Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965. Photograph by Minoru Niizuma.. © Minoru Niizuma. Courtesy Lenono. Photo Archive, New York

 

Two favorite works  of mine are Film No. 4, 1966-67, which consists of a series of 360 nude buttocks (pp. 166-7) and  Bag Piece, 1964, which involves two people under a black bag. The original bag act involved nudity – undressing and dressing again under the bag, but this is not mentioned in the bags available for use at MoMA.  Half-A-Room, a series of domestic objects cut in half and painted white, was shown at the Lisson Gallery, London, in 1967 (pp.170-1).  Clive Phillpot  suggests, “This concept is likely to have had its emotional origins in Ono’s marital split” (p. 154) [from her second husband]. Yoko Ono had met John Lennon in London in 1966, and John and Yoko had a collaborative work in the 1967 exhibition. Lennon became Ono’s third husband in 1969.  None of this is mentioned in the exhibition.

The 240-page catalog closes with Ono’s all caps 2015 message “SURRENDER TO PEACE.”  The artist’s original approach to visual and collaborative arts and her early activism in the peace movement includes the “Bed-In” anti-war protests in 1969. The catalog rotates among essays by curators and collaborators, including Francesca Wilmott, Christophe Cherix, and Klaus Biesenbach, all from MoMA, and Midori Yoshimoto, Jon Hendricks, Clive Phillpot, and David Platzker; selected press clippings; and small excerpts titled “Yoko’s Voice.” In one of the latter, Ono’s December 1971 letter to George Maciunas tells him that she deserves co-credit with La Monte Young  for producing the Chambers Street Loft Series and he shouldn’t “talk about what you don’t know” (p. 70). In another passage, Ono describes an all-night event in Kyoto at Nanzenji Temple  and then expresses how important it is to recognize the mind’s complexity as well as the need to always keep the mind clear and uncluttered “like a bright mirror” (my paraphrase, pp.146-7). Ono’s philosophy of oneness and “Strawberry Fields Forever” goes beyond the 1960-71 timeframe as do a few works in the exhibition.  Why aren’t there more passages like this showing Yoko Ono’s voice? In contrast, troves of Louise Bourgeois’ spoken and written words were accessible before and after her death[v]

Two more points:  unlike Yayoi  Kusama’s work, which MoMA has featured, this is a conceptual, philosophical exhibition with few visual “wow” items.[vi] One catalog essay sparely notes that Ono lived in Tokyo in 1945 when the city was leveled by American bombs (Yoko was 12); it does not examine what this means and how/why Ono left Sarah Lawrence College in spring, 1956, around age 22, married composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, and began her art practice. Was her Japanese heritage discriminated against in the US (where she and her family now lived) during and after World War II? Finally, mentions of John Lennon in the exhibition do not adequately address Yoko’s and John’s roles in each others’ lives. As in the catalog’s re-shoot of Ono’s first concept “show,” MoMA has restaged parts of Ono’s history and art without examining it deeply or bringing it alive.

Bag Piece (1964) performed by Yoko Ono in Perpetual Fluxfest, Cinematheque, New York, June 27, 1965.
Photograph by George Maciunas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008. © 2014 George Maciunas

 

What is notable is that Yoko Ono’s art, along with the Fluxus Movement, was not unique. Creative expressions using nontraditional materials and processes proliferated from 1960 – 1971 — in St. Louis and Kansas City Missouri, San Francisco and Berkeley, California and many other locations. Anti-war and civil rights movements led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began in the deep South, in Washington, D.C., and on campuses like Cornell and the University of Wisconsin by 1962-1964 – before Ono began hers.  The MoMA exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925 showed how the Dada/ Synchronist/ Synchromist/ Cubist/ Surrealist revolutions from St. Petersburg to Paris to Germany to New York before, during, and after World War I surged with new ideas. Similarly, Ono grew up surrounded by feminist, civil rights, gay rights (Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch to note two books that challenged censors and changed the world forever), Native American rights, and John Lennon. The MoMA curators give us a limited view of the contexts for Ono’s arts. What issues of exclusion/inclusion did she face as a Japanese woman in America? Why did she keep doing Cut Piece, – in which audience members cut off her clothes — and what did this feel like? I, for one, want to learn more about the origins and underpinnings of Ono’s spiritual and aesthetic practices, such as uncovering (opposed to discovering) the truth. How did Ono practice this?

Half-A-Room. 1967. Various objects cut in half, most painted white. Installation dimensions variable. Private collection. © Yoko Ono 2014

 

Postscript: Since finishing writing this, I’ve re-visited Ono’s exhibition and read Lindsay Zoladz’s New York Magazine essay on Yoko Ono. These answer some questions and teach me what Ono means by uncovering.  Zoladz states that Ono’s cut piece intended to teach participants about themselves; however, some cutters were aggressive or disrespectful, so each participant did not always gain insights into his/her behavior toward others. Yet this begins to show what uncovering means – unexpectedly raising consciousness.

I am also uncovering answers to my question about Ono’s use of white. Ono says somewhere in the MoMA catalog that brides wear white and somewhere else that people may paint her white art as they wish. Zoladz’s essay mentions that when Lennon bit into Ono’s apple in 1966, he was Eve and she was Adam, and that Lennon and Ono both wore white at their wedding. Zoladz’s historical contexts and comments help underscore my own sense that Ono is more like a philosopher using mixed media to express herself than an artist. For example, as far as I know, Rothko, O’Keeffe, and even Twombly each focus more on making visual art than on articulating their distinctive philosophies. It follows, too, that Ono’s white chess set in the exhibition is a response to the chess fanatic Marcel Duchamp: an all-white set changes the game. Instead of battling, both players are on the same team or at least coordinating their moves. White is a unifying blend of all colors; a symbol for peace, for light, and for Ono’s philosophical art.

By Jan Garden Castro

[i]  The Björk exhibit also at MoMA and the Ono show both have audio components, and in 2013 MoMA produced an experimental group show: Soundings: A Contemporary Score. MoMA clearly has its own strategy regarding its choice of women artists.

[ii] See “Yoko Ono and the Myth that Deserves to Die,” New York Magazine: May 18, 2015 issue or this online version: http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/yoko-ono-one-woman-show.html. Zoladz applauds Ono’s dance moves at the 2014 Grammys and often refers to Lisa Carver’s book Reaching out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono.

[iii] Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry in Yoko Ono One Woman Show (New York: MoMA, 2015).

[iv] Holland Cotter, “Yoko Ono, The Concept,” New York Times, May 15, 2015: C28.

[v] See https://blog.sculpture.org/2012/05/23/louise-bourgeois-the-return-of-the-repressed/ and https://blog.sculpture.org/2012/04/25/louise-bourgeois/ and http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag01/janfeb01/bourg/bourg.shtml

[vi] Zoladz points out that Kusama staged a nude-in in the MoMA garden. This was in 1969 before Ono’s 1971 conceptual show. See http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/10/09/yayoi-kusamas-return-to-moma/

Robyn Backen, Andre Dekker, Graham Eatough, Nigel Helyer and Jennifer Turpin, Nomanslanding, 2015. Image: Darling Harbour / Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority.

During this centenary of WWI (2014-2018) a great number of ceremonies and memorials are proliferating in most of Europe in remembrance of the victims of the Great War. Australia, so far away as it is from that battle ground, is not indifferent to this sad anniversary as this year they celebrate the creation, 100 years ago, of the ANZAC, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, that took part, among others, in the tragic battle of Gallipoli in Turkey where 8,000 of them died. Nowadays, Anzac Day (25th April) also remembers to all Australians that lost their lives in WWII and in subsequent military actions up to date.

Tony Albert, YININMADYEMI Thou didst let fall, 2015, Hyde Park, commissioned by City of Sydney for the Eora Journey, Curator Hetti Perkins. Image by Paul Patterson.

 

On such dates one always wonders about the role of public monuments nowadays. In a time when the pervasiveness of media and the easy access to information through the Internet give us the opportunity to remember any historical event or personality in a matter of seconds from our comfortable lounge, what’s the meaning of a statue in the middle of a park remembering something that happened maybe centuries ago? Which guidelines stipulate who or what is worthy of a monument? How can we make sure that passersby know what is that monument about?

Doubtlessly, the heavy symbolic charge of public monuments and memorials doesn’t allow easy answers to our questions. From the first prehistoric communities, man has spread monuments around the world whatever the culture, civilization or period. In ancient times they were mainly sacred, and more recently they have been linked to the leading power structures of their time. Present day interactive technologies that lead to the so-called participatory culture -mainly in younger generations- demand a reassessment of the initiatives that affect communities and, I think, it should include contemporary public monuments. Turning them in spaces of gathering and reflection is a sensible option. Nevertheless, city councils and commissioners keep invariably a strong link with the tradition of permanent artworks non site-related.

Robyn Backen, Andre Dekker, Graham Eatough, Nigel Helyer and Jennifer Turpin, Nomanslanding, 2015. Image: Darling Harbour / Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority.

 

This Australian autumn, in the frame of the celebrations of the Anzac centenary, Sydney has presented two new public artworks of remembrance of both world wars. Their different approaches give us a very interesting view of the possibilities of public memorials.

Tony Albert, YININMADYEMI Thou didst let fall, 2015, Hyde Park, commissioned by City of Sydney for the Eora Journey, Curator Hetti Perkins. Image by Paul Patterson.

 

Tony Albert, the Aboriginal Girramay artist that is the author of the memorial, is deeply committed with the position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders communities in the Australian society. In his artworks he shows mainly images that unsettle the viewer in some way as they reveal the inequalities that even now exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia.

Robyn Backen, Andre Dekker, Graham Eatough, Nigel Helyer and Jennifer Turpin, Nomanslanding, 2015, Darling Harbour / Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. Image by Paula Llull

 

During the same week, a very different remembrance artwork dedicated to the WWI was launched in Darling Harbour on the initiative of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. Result of the collaboration between three curators (Katja Aßmann, Michael Cohen and Lorenzo Mele) and five artists (Robyn Backen, Andre Dekker + Observatorium, Graham Eatough, Nigel Helyer and Jennifer Turpin) from Europe and Australia, Nomanslanding is an accurate combination of the different artists’ disciplines: a structure whose limits between architecture and sculpture are vague, integrated in an urban aquatic environment and completed with sound, acoustics and performance as main features. These elements are embodied in two floating structures that become a dome when put together. Visitors access the dome through two walkways that start in the opposing shores of the waterway. The artistic experience starts from the moment when one wears the life vest that is situated inside an army tent in each shore at the starting point for the walkways. Once inside the dome it becomes a space for contemplation, war sounds take us to a tense atmosphere that ends with a poetic lament.

Robyn Backen, Andre Dekker, Graham Eatough, Nigel Helyer and Jennifer Turpin, Nomanslanding, 2015, Darling Harbour / Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. Image by Paula Llull

 

In spite of its structural complexity and its big size, Nomanslanding is a temporary artwork that is touring in Europe after its presentation in Sydney last April. The next sites, Glasgow and Duisburg, are two cities where waterways play a decisive role in their configuration apart from their participation in WWI. In this way, Nomanslanding answers successfully to the challenge posed by the curators at the beginning of the project: “how do we create site specific work that is both grounded in place and made to tour?” This is, I think, a really innovative approach to the idea of a contemporary memorial -although neither artists nor curators use this word to describe the work- which is creating an itinerant artwork that at the same time meets the site-specificity guidelines -whether they are physical or conceptual in each of the sites: Clyde river in Glasgow (Scotland, 13th July – 2nd August) and the river harbour in Duisburg (Germany, 14th August – 13 September).

By Paula Llull

For more information:

YININMADYEMI Thou didst let fall

Nomanslanding

Eora Journey project (City of Sydney)

Installation shot of “I’m Looking for Barbara” by Sarah Carne. Image by writer

There is something quite apt about making an artist’s book in response to an archive – beyond the more obvious similarities of physical format. Both sit in the traditional sense as prescript systemisations, located on the periphery of art making; they are often awkward realms where old material is circled or shoehorned. 

This placement can become interesting when conventional ideas of the archive and book are stretched – in the case of NIVAL (the National Irish Visual Arts Library), it is as an ongoing archive for the 20th and 21st centuries, yet unusually only established in 1997. In the case of Unfolding the Archive, an exhibition by artist’s collective Floating World at F. E. McWilliam Gallery, it is through fluid ideas of what a book can be.

How is a living archive applied in retrospect? By working backwards different values can be applied to old work, for bounds will always be pushed: as pointed out by Karen Di Franco’s catalogue essay, “work that would have been considered radical or contested is now absorbed within institutional infrastructures” Sarah Carne’s project I’m Looking for Barbara is focused on finding the artists that have been disadvantaged by parameters applied to containing the past.

Installation shot of “I’m Looking for Barbara” by Sarah Carne. Image by writer

 

“Barbara” is a personification of past women artists that have slipped through the criteria of possessing a physical file in archives. When work is sought from the past, it relies on a certain amount of publicity and prescribed importance to stand the test of time. Carnes seeks to find the women that perhaps “missed the zeitgeist” in this, for any number of reasons such as being underfunded, underproductive or not networking.

Her book is a Rolodex for viewers to add the names of female artists, working between 1970 and 1975, in order to complement more institutional archives. It sits at a study desk and chair, with images of known and unknown artists, printed books that describe her project and guidelines for NIVAL and the F. E. McWilliam archive, and an accompanying video diary of her research processes.

Installation shot of “Boundless (Work in Progress)” by Elizabeth Kinsella. Image by writer

 

At first I find the project, whilst valid, rather dry and contrived. However, Carne’s emerging doubts of her motives in such a project interestingly seem to echo the ways in which the older female artists were placed – finding themselves contained in prescript structures of power and exposure that disadvantage those who work another way. Both Carnes and the lost female artists find themselves working through the same predicament. The humour of the pamphlet’s pointed instructions to the institutions also lifts the project, addressing the problems of institutional and archival language. It feels particularly apt when considering the representation of women in McWilliam’s own work: a cabinet of faceless and partial female bodies is a permanent fixture in the exhibition space.

Elisabeth Kinsella’s book touches on similar limitations, but on a personal scale: Boundless (Work in Progress) is four large, wheeled wooden frames draped in irregular grids of knitting. The lopsided pattern marks the artist’s own found time as she works around familial commitments, casting off when her periods of work finished. Taking inspiration from the pattern of the spines of “The Bell”, an intellectual Irish review journal of the 1940s, and the colours green, white and black from old Aer Lingus posters, the work is an amalgamation of Irish romantic idealism with the reality of working with compromised time as a contemporary Irish artist.

Installation shot of “Raft for the Heart of Spring” by Andy Parsons. Image by writer

 

There is an act of negotiation in responding to an archival work, using an unavoidably limited understanding and shifting contextual placement. Many of the chosen items are remnants of faded elements of Irish culture, such as plans for religious alterpieces and stained glass, a folklore tale by W B Yeats and illustrated by Norah McGuinness, F. E. McWilliam’s Woman of Belfast no. 15 of 1972, and the portrayal of Irish life in late 20th century cinema. The artists’ work abstracts further from these items to allow for a comparison of contexts, removing iconography, using motif and place, employing performative actions and imbibing new importance to unloved, unfinished embroidery and studio equipment.

Looking into an archive, to create and perhaps contribute new work to it, permits a feedback system in which each artist can play with shifting importance and implicit margins. With the archival inspiration displayed alongside the artists’ responses, the boundaries between the pieces become less defined, taking on the properties of installation and a hybridised art/museum display. What is created through Unfolding the Archive does not exalt or fetishize passed elements of society, but instead uses its complex and at times problematic attributes to feel our way through cultural shifts and additional perspective.

By Dorothy Hunter

Unfolding the Archive is exhibiting at F. E. McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge, until July 19th.

Images from “Playing to the Gallery” by Grayson Perry. Photo taken by writer

Playing to the Gallery is the published and polished version of Grayson Perry’s Reith lectures. Whilst the BBC Radio 4 talks are widely acclaimed in the media, Perry is, to some extent, a dividing figure. The Turner prize winner has been the go-to presenter of Channel 4 art programmes for several years, a highly exposed and irreverent middleman between notions of the gallery and the general British public.

As an artist that takes familiar craft forms and processes and uses them for subversive contemporary narratives, his widely appealing work and affable yet pithy commentary make him perfect for working within “telly values”, as he calls them. Yet, despite being a “lovable character” he wishes for his art, and art as a whole, to be taken seriously. This is an unusual polarity for the mainstream media that favours defined roles and values, and not the world of art in general.

 
Images from “Playing to the Gallery” by Grayson Perry.
Photo taken by writer

This jarring of art and mainstream culture is touched upon in many ways, although not in a personal sense, in “Democracy Has Bad Taste’, the first chapter of four in this approachable guide to engaging with the gallery. He covers a myriad of issues such as the financial need for footfall, the curator’s need to push taste, the self-conscious nature of making art, where quality consensus comes from, and the cost and purchase of art. “Beating the Bounds” is another typically irreverent chapter on what qualifies as art and how, whilst “Nice Rebellion! Welcome in!” covers the art world’s contradictions, the difference between shock and rebellion, and the movements and pluralist nature of art today.

There are no clear-cut answers given to the contradictory values or prevailing questions that the public often have when it comes to viewing and evaluating art – really, there are none to give. Instead Perry discusses each topic in a roundabout fashion, in a way that more fascinated than critical of the internal processes of the gallery and art, and that encourages others to embrace its follies and contradictions with a pinch of salt and humour.

For all of Perry’s gentle teasing of the idiosyncrasies of the art world, he is equally challenging of the values the public prescribe to “good art”. For each issue touched upon, its potential roots are briefly discussed; for example, how beauty comes from familiarity, and that we like to be challenged, yet not too much.

Images from “Playing to the Gallery” by Grayson Perry. Photo taken by writer

 

All this is covered in an easy, meandering written style, laden with personal anecdotes and observations that make it an entertaining read, and dotted with Perry’s arch illustrations. One shows Jackson Pollock peeing into Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace and hitting his painting instead, his urine stream illustrated with a flower-shaped brush in Photoshop. These drawings punctuate the deeper concepts that are covered, such as the nature of memory, quality and use. The book reads as a condensed, more whimsical form of Sarah Thorton’s Seven Days in the Art World, illuminating the roles of art world professionals and the often-unknown aspects of their work.

Ultimately this is a book meant for and best suited to the unseasoned gallery goer, the friend or relative we all know that tries to approach art the way they might approach an algebraic equation. Yet at the same time this is a fun, light read for an arts professional to reacquaint themselves with the wider issues of art’s sitting in the “real world” and contemporary culture, and be reminded that certain questions are not as moot as originally thought.

Check out this article or the book on amazon here.

By Dorothy Hunter

In 1979, Rosalind Krauss wrote the essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” that defined sculpture in terms of a structural diagram of differing fields. Outside of the dualities between landscape and architecture, not-landscape and not-architecture, and the differing combinations of these quadrants, there were zones of creation that defined what it was that human beings did when they went out across the earth to intentionally build a construction. In her essay, Krauss said that this structural definition was necessary to understand not the historical meaning of sculpture, but the current definition for that place and time. In an era when artists like Nancy Holt, Sol LeWitt, Michael Heizer, Mary Miss, and many others were exploring the boundaries and overlaps between architecture, landscapes, sites, and sculpture, it was not so much material definition that was necessary, but a field in which artists could experiment.

But Krauss also concluded her essay with a question outside of this structure:

 
Where is Production: Inquiries into Contemporary Sculpture

But clearly, since this is a matter of history, it is also important to explore a deeper set of questions which pertain to something more than mapping and involve instead the problem of explanation. These address the root cause-the conditions of possibility-that brought about the shift into postmodernism, as they also address the cultural determinants of the opposition through which a given field is structured.

Nearly 35 years later in 2013, SculptureCenter produced a small publication called Where is Production? Inquiries into Contemporary Sculpture. Stemming from a series of conversations about contemporary sculpture held at the Center, the text features essays from a number of artists and curators. In this first paragraph of the introduction, Krauss’ essay is mentioned, as a common shared reference for many in the conversations, despite the fact that the field seems to have expanded even more since 1979, into time-based works, video, and other areas that might be grouped under the name “performance”. The introduction then draws attention to the title of the book, in claiming to look away from the question of definition with its subject. This slim volume is “less to do with ‘what’,” the introduction claims, than ‘how’: concerning “infrastructure, dissemination, and the specificities of art as experienced by a network of stakeholders.”

And indeed, this is the subject of most of the essays in the publication. The word “production” is used more often than “sculpture.” Production is a loaded concept, with echoes of Marxist and materialist theory. But a conceptual “seizing” of production by the artistic process is exactly what is on the minds of contemporary artists. Who is making the art, how, and where? The materials, the process, the networks of distribution, and the labor involved are all new fields that are being drawn into the current sculptural diagram. Production defines an action, rather than the object being made. It is a function involving multiple equations, leading to a cascading chain of actions that often crosses larger borders than those of the gallery. If in 1979, the history leading up to the current structure was Krauss’ question, today artists are preoccupied by how the current structures of artistic production will lead into the future. Where is Production? asks not just about the substance of current sculpture, but about its status. In a time of networks, to produce sculpture becomes a algorithmic, contingent activity. From these essays, one can see that today’s artists are not shying away from the question or simply posing it, but trying to answer it for themselves in as many ways as possible.

By Adam Rothstein

The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture presents an exhibition in a book, in a more satisfactory format than the usual catalogue. The show, which ran at the Hayward Gallery (which also published the book) in London from 17 June to 7 September last year, includes 25 artists working during the past 25 years. The sculptures demonstrate a very wide range of media and strategies in figuration, from manequins to boxy molds to elaborate tableaux. Essays by Ralph Rugoff, Penelope Curtis, Martin Herbert, James Lingwood, and Lisa Lee helpfully contextualize the work on view and the argument of the exhibition that there has been an upsurge of figural work over the past two and a half decades. 

Not every important figural artist is represented, but there’s a wide range of styles and artists, arranged alphabetically rather than according to any of the material or formal issues raised in the essays. There are also a couple of inserts among the plates that address the issue of the production of the works.

 
The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, By Ralph Rugoff, Eimear Martin, and Debra.
ISBN: 1853323225. London: Hayward Publishing, 2014. $35.08. 208 pages

Both the straightforward arrangement of the images and the non-glossy paper on which they are reproduced are positive choices: the categorization of the work is left to the reader (with or without having read the essays) and the matte paper somehow makes the images more accessible, less separated from the viewer than would be the case with a coffee—table style glossy production.

There are some interesting juxtapositions possible among the works. Both Yinka Shonibare and Ryan Gander re-think Degas’s Little Dancer from a socio-political perspective. Both use humor and realistic representation, but to quite different effect. Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy both use hyper-realism to investigate contemporary culture, and both tweak our sensibilities and sexuality, but each is disturbing in a contrasting manner. Pavel Althamer and Pierre Huyghe deploy impermanence and natural processes, but in ways that diametrically diverge.

The majority of the figures is in a relatively straightforward form of representation, whether in appropriated or constructed forms, but some of the most powerful work in the show uses distortion to interrogate the figure and its meaning, particularly the sculpture of  Rebecca Warrenn and Huma Bhabha.

Whether one accepts the notion that there is a current resurgence in the use of the human form or not, The Human Factor demonstrates the vitality of the figure as a means for investigating the current state of both art and life.

By Glenn Harper

The work of Boaz Vaadia is among the most recognizable sculpture in today’s gallery, museum, and public art venues. His stacked-stone figures (solo, in family groups, sometimes with companion animals) are evocative and distinctive. A handsome book from Hudson Hills Press, with text by Wendy Steiner, Ivan C. Karp, Anthony Brown, and the artist himself, not only gives many excellent photographs of the work but also a great deal of context for the sculpture and a good sense of the origins and development of Vaadia’s art.

Karp’s very brief foreword is as good a concise analysis of Vaadia’s work as possible; here it is in its entirety: “Boaz Vaadia may be acclaimed as one of the handful of living artists who have successfully challenged 5,000 years of figurative sculpture to produce a consistent body of work of singular identity within the compass of classical composure.”  The figures are indeed composed: There is none of the agony or distorted emotion of some recent figural work, and none of the existential straitness of, for example, Giacometti (nontheless an artist Vaadia admires). These figures are typically at rest, sometimes in meditative poses and sometimes seeming just about to step off in one direction or another. Within the groups, there is an emotional dynamic, but more of a bond than a conflict. And there is a profound sense of honoring ordinary people, rather than memorializing “heroes,” in all the work.

 
Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture 1971–2012. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2012.
284 pages $60. ISSN: 978-1555953768

Anthony Brown’s text speaks of the harmony that one feels in the presence of the sculpture, but also of collectors who think of the works as friends, companions in their living spaces (and the public works elicit a similar response. And Wendy Steiner says that the calm serenity of the work is for Vaadia “the goal and meaning of art making.” She also points to the origins of his respect for nature in his family’s small farm and the origin of his sculptural interests in the ancient architecture and sculpture of his homeland, Israel.

Always interested in working with stone (though initially in abstract works), when he moved to New York Vaadia discovered (according to Steiner) discarded roofing tiles and broken bluestone sidewalk slabs, establishing a vocabulary for the stacked stones that Vaadia still builds and carves (though frequently now casting the result in  bronze).

Not only in Steiner’s text, but also in short passages by the artist, accompanying a series of plates, the book gives a deep sense of not only the works themselves but also how they have developed from Vaadia’s life history and artistic vision. This is a distinctive book about a singular artist.

By Glenn Harper

I tend to approach artist’s self-help and how-to books with scepticism, so Making Your Life As An Artist didn’t hold high expectations for me. Had it not been available as a free download on Artists U I’m unsure if I would have even given it a second glance.

Although suspecting the woolly motivational rhetoric that’s fairly common in such titles, I was drawn to the publication by its open-source nature and conviction to reach 100,000 artists. At the time of writing the book has been reportedly downloaded 65,447 times, and in this post I hope to bring this number a little further along – for rather than espousing unrealistic ideas, this book provides fresh and valuable advice for the working artist.

 
Making Your Life As An Artist by Andrew Simonet.
E-book downloadable here

Written by North American choreographer Andrew Simonet as a guide for all arts professionals, I found this book to be applicable to my own practice within a very different environment and medium – in fact, this publication would hold value even for those not placed within the art world. An essay of succinct, direct and digestible information, it reframes artists’ practice in society, and thus what artists, funders, and society should expect from their work as both a single and collective force.

Beginning with a discussion of wider definitions and effects of artistic practice, the author uses a memorable analogy to describe the skewed perspective of artists’ work by the wider world – the process is widely compared to sport, yet has much more in common with scientific research. As such, the “success” and outcomes of our work have shifted focus, away from what is important, fulfilling and sustainable – and in turn, confused art’s role and art’s effects.

Outlining a different perspective, the book goes on to suggest ways of utilising what is routine for an artist – such as statement writing or the skills used in making art – for their wider benefit. Broken down into sections covering areas such as planning, money and time, small and practical steps are outlined that can easily help structure the frenetic life of an artist.

To summarise such a concise and freely available book feels redundant. I can only encourage you to spend a short time reading this publication for the applicable and pragmatic advice within a considered philosophy of making art. In re-placing the role of the artist in society and time one gains a fresh respect for what we do, why we do it, and where we fit into the world as artists.

By Dorothy Hunter

Vasily Klyukin’s beautifully produced book is a compilation of imaginary architecture. The artist has carefully placed, digitally, his fantasy architecture into the context of cities around the world. The book is divided into building types (towers, hotels and apartments, “leisure time,” business buildings, and street art. That last section may be the key to the whole book: Klyukin there transforms existing buildings (rather than inserting his own) with elaborate, “full-body” graffiti (covering entire building faces) that is site specific and very colorful

 
Legends by Vasily Klyukin. Publisher: Skira, 2013. 288 pages, $75.00 hardcover .
ISBN: 978-8857220383

In a way, the other projects are a kind of “full-building” graffiti, “tagging” the city as a whole with the addition of the artist’s own imagery. There is the “Comet Fortuna” building, which seems to have dropped from outer space to plunge partly into the harbor edge of a city. There is the “Tulip Palace,” one of the most colorful (and in a way most buildable) of the projects, a Christmas-tree-bulb-llooking glass tulip along the water’s edge.

Not all are representational, in terms of imagery. The “In Love Towers” simply lean geometrically together. The “Jungle Park Hotel” is all green patios, surrounding an elevator core. Some of the projects are hardly more outrageous than some of the real buildings that surround them in the photos. Some are funny: “L’Île à hélice” is a huge cruise ship run aground on the beach. “Red Carpet” is just that, running all the way up a ziggurat of a building.

Klyukin is indulging in a playful critique of contemporary architecture and the post-Modern city, but it’s really an “artist’s book,” or in the parlance of the previous century, “un livre d’artiste.” When I typed the first sentence of this paragraph, I accidentally spelled the 10th word as “artcchitecture,” a slip of the finger but nonetheless an accurate description of Klyukin’s elegant project.

By Glenn Harper

Beverly Pepper’s catalogue Monumenta opens with an introduction by art historian and curator Robert Hobbs, “Beverly Pepper: Time as Space,” in which he situates Pepper’s work within the critical context provided by Henri Bergson, André Malraux, and Walter Benjamin. The continuum of time and space and their indivisibility are apparent in Pepper’s works, which are often monumental—if not in size, in presence—and integrated with their surroundings, the materials of the sculptures interacting and changing with their environment over time.

 
Beverly Pepper: Monumenta by Robert Hobbs. Publisher: Skira, 2012. 300 pages,
$72.00. hardcover. ISBN-10: 8857210626 ISBN-13: 978 8857210629

Hobbs’s idea of time as space as it relates to Pepper’s work is most accurately described by Bergson’s theory of duration, his “view of a single moment as a multiplicity in which one can intuitively grasp truth happening.” Rather than crystallizing a moment in time, Pepper’s sculptures “catalyze a range of disjunctive temporalities” and present the viewer with the tension of polarities—i.e., past and present, nature and culture—opening them to the fluidity of experience and thus a range of emotional response.

Pepper’s work—integrated with nature, space, and time—seems universally affective, but most of Hobbs’s densely argued essay obscures the importance of its emotional and cultural impact in his endeavor to situate her work within an extensive art-historical and critical framework. We are several pages in before Hobbs provides a more accessible view into her work.

Pepper’s interest in sculpture was largely catalyzed by a trip to Angkor in the 1960s (prior to her interest in sculpture, she had been a social-realist painter). The banyan trees, their relentless expansion and stranglehold on the surrounding man-made constructions, emphasized the collision of nature and culture—the unbridled growth of nature against civilization, a tension which Pepper began to explore through sculpture. Her first show, at the Galleria Pogliani in Rome (1961) consisted of cut-up trees. She continued to explore the clash of nature and culture by using materials affected by time and environment—e.g., iron, open to atmospheric conditions, becomes patinated with rust; the reflective quality of polished steel negates its heaviness, the reflected images seeming to emanate from within.

Pepper was concerned with the relationship of site to sculpture, that they form an ongoing dialectic—that they “supplement and enliven each other,” the sculpture inseparable from its site as they change together over time. She used the term “earthbound” to describe such works, “situated so the earth appears as if it has given birth to them or as if they are rising up from it.” In much the same way as the buildings of Angkor were enveloped by the surrounding banyan trees, her works acknowledge the futility of imposing on the natural world, instead attempting to become seamlessly integrated, to grow and change with it. Her sculptures also present the dialectic of past and present, their physical appearance bearing the marks of time. Constantly in flux, transforming, her sculptures are thus understood cyclically, through their polarities, metamorphoses, and endless possibility rather than any fixed quality. She acknowledges that there is “no fixed equilibrium between man and his environment”—it’s the constant struggle to “maintain a balance between inner and outer reality,” man’s desire to define both himself and his environment as they change over time, that she seeks to redress in her sculptures.

In her public art and Land Art, Pepper carried over the social commitment first seen in her social-realist painting, setting up monumental works for the public, free from the exclusivity or limitations of works commissioned by wealthy patrons or institutions. Pepper noted that “cultural activity is no longer so restricted to the few.” Thus it is something of a contradiction that her accessible work is discussed in the book’s only essay in academic terminology only available to the few.

By Glenn Harper

“This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart.” – From the introduction of Art and fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking.

What makes being an artist so different from any other profession? Artists have a skill (or maybe even talent) and they strive to make a living using it – isn’t that what everybody does? But somehow, it is very different. Perhaps it’s the personal nature of artistic vision or the culture of celebrity. It turns out, according to David Bayles and Ted Orland in Art and fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, learning to survive as an artist has less to do with skill or talent than it does with our willingness to face our fears over and over again.

 
Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
David Bayles & Ted Orland
Image Continuum Press, 2001.

“What separates artists from ex-artists,” Says Bayles and Orland, “is those who challenge their fear, continue, those who do not, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.” (p. 14). Art and fear explores the very unique set of practical and, maybe more importantly, psychological circumstances of the aspiring artist with a smart and refreshing clarity. The unique contribution of this book is that it spans the gap between business advice and self help.

In the beginning of Art and fear, Bayles and Orland are careful to emphasize several assumptions about artmaking that immediately offer some relief to the aspiring artist: artmaking is a skill that can be learned, art is made by ordinary people, making and viewing art are different, and art making has been around a lot longer than the art establishment.

While we sometimes think artmaking is out of reach for the ordinary person, Art and fear reminds us that our fears are the only thing between us and making art. This book is inspiring, practical and a must read for emerging and established artists.

By Karin Jervert

Fernando Botero, recipient of the ISC’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award, is of course at least as well known for his work in two dimensions as three. In Circus, Botero uses drawing and painting to capture a theme that Modernists have addressed from Renoir to Picasso, Léger to Calder, collecting all 130 paintings and 50 works on paper that the artist has been assembling since encountering a traveling circus in Mexico, similar to those humble circuses he remembered from his youth in Medellin.

 
Circus: Paintings and Drawings252 pages, $125
New York and London: Glitterati Incorporated, 2013. ISBN: 978-0988174511

An interesting introduction by Curtis Bill Pepper is supplemented by timelines of the author’s life and exhibition history, as well as a bibliography and a list of the Circus works. Pepper elicits from Botero an explanation of what Pepper initially calls the “pneumatically inflated” men and women so typical of the artist’s work. Botero explains in simple aesthetic terms, as a painter: “Their exalted volume…allows me to apply more color with a sensuality, and exuberant profusion of form.” Botero also, plainly tired of his figures being called pneumatic, says that his figures are plainly fully fleshed rather than pumped full of air.

The whole carnivalesque cast of men, women, and animals is presented on-stage and off, mostly with somewhat impassive expressions that imply a sort of professional detachment, an aesthetic distance perhaps. The drawings are particularly interesting in showing the moment when these characters first come to life, in simple but assured lines and minimal colors, less saturated than the colors in the paintings. It’s a beautiful book, as solid and substantial as the large horses that appear throughout the images, and in fact one of the more interesting aspects of the paintings is that in contrast to the carefully observed horses, many of the more exotic animals have an expressive quality akin to naïve painting. Perhaps there’s a bit of Rousseau not just in these animals but in Botero’s human figures as well?

By Glenn Harper

 The idea of kinetic art is getting a bit of a workout at the moment. MIT Museum recently hosted  “year of kinetic art, including “5000 Moving Parts,” a kinetic art exhibiton featuring large-scale works by Arthur Ganson, Anne Lilly, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and John Douglas Powers. Plus the Kinetic Art Organization has published a digital “International Collection of Essays About Kinetic Art—2013—volume 1.” The two don’t overlap: The MIT show highlights a somewhat different segment of artists working with motion in sculpture, 4 names, some of whom owe more to Yves Tinguely and Calder’s Circus than Calder’s mobiles and George Rickey (the primary influences for many if not most of the artists in the KAO book.

 
Edited by Ralfonso Gschwend
16139 KB. 172 pages. Kinetic Art Organization (October 7, 2013) 
The Kindle edition is available from Amazon.com for $2.99, ASIN: B00FPJEWWS

The book is a sort of annual or catalogue, but covering more than a single exhibition, institution, or country (though this volume does have an emphasis on China, and there are Chinese and English editions of the book). There are 17 essays, an introduction, a description of the organization, and a page of links. Some of the essays deal with the field as a whole (particularly those by Michael Suh, Ralfonso Gschwend (also president of the KAO), and Angela Conner, and Guiyan He and others are personal statements by individual artists, from the U.S., China, India, the U.K., France, Switzerland, and Mexico, including Lin Emery and Rein Triefeldt, Le Ding and Yumin Jing, and a number of others. Debby Coles-Dobay also offers a public art administrator’s view of kinetic sculpture.

The book is an interesting window into the world of working kinetic artists as well as a glimpse of the importance of the organization. The diversity of the field is also evident, in wide ranging work linked only by the idea of motion, powered by water, wind, or interaction with the viewer (who may push the work literally or simply activate a change in light by moving past the work). The KAO  book represents also a valuable use of new resources for organizations and publishers: The preface recognizes that even without paper and printing, a book takes a lot of work and coordination, but a digital book offers the possibility of easily accessible links and even animation, resources that are valuable for three-dimensional art but particularly applicable to kinetic art. It will be interesting to see how the KAO will move, with a “volume 2” into different countries, different phases of kineticism, and more of the lively and important artists such as those highlighted in this first volume.

Glenn Harper

 
Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975
Edited by David J. Getsy
Soberscove Press (October 1, 2012)
264 pages, $17.10 paperback
ISBN-13: 978-0982409046

The first section of the book, “Beyond Minimalism,” opens with Burton’s first major article for ARTnews on Tony Smith (1966), an artist who influenced Burton greatly. Here, Burton also summarizes his antipathy toward Minimalism, noting that it “bears no traces of the hand,” is “removed from the maker’s psyche,” and invites no participation on the part of the viewer. He preempts the emergence of Post-Minimalist art in emphasizing the difference between Smith’s sculpture and Minimalist work—finality does not rest in the object itself but refers to something outside itself, to the viewer’s response to metaphorical and emotional content.

In this first article, Burton also touches on temporality and theatrics—two elements of great importance to him. Smith’s sculptures have the drama of “conflict, intensification, climax, and release”: Burton identifies temporality as a means to bridge the gap between artwork and viewer, between art and life—and as a factor essential in Post-Minimalist works, which use flux, chance, and unpredictability to move into the realm of the viewer, who can identify with their change, disintegration, and vulnerability.

The last section, “Sculpture as Theater: Performance Art Statements,” shows how Burton sought to exemplify the importance of temporality in his own performance works. The “Street Works” series, for instance, addressed madness, criminality, and the classic anxiety dream—walking nude in public, drugging himself to sleep on a cot during Street Works IV at the Architectural League—blurring boundaries not only between art and life, but between reality, dreams, and anxieties, thus further narrowing the gap between the artist’s psyche and that of the viewer. In 1970, Burton first presented Behavior Tableaux at the University of Iowa (later performed at the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and elsewhere). This series of stylized, slow-motion, everyday movements and gestures carefully framed the everyday as art. In Lecture on Self (1973), Burton explained the theoretical context of his performance work, that performance is essentially “sculpture as theater” in which the artist initiates a relationship with the viewer; the piece is affected both by temporality and theatrical elements (rising tension, climax, resolution).

Getsy—who offers astute commentary and guidance for the reader in the form of editor’s notes and an introduction—has collected a set of early writings that demonstrate Burton’s influential position as artist-critic. Burton was deeply immersed in the art world, and by advocating for various viewpoints and artists, he continually challenged presuppositions about art, serving to break down existing hierarchies and invite discussion about the nature of art and its personal and cultural impact. He then took it into his own hands to create the kind of art he thought was necessary. Part of the significance of this collection is that it demonstrates the importance of the artist-critic, who, by making art and situating it in the larger cultural climate, can advocate for and stimulate meaningful change. The other part lies in the subject of Burton’s advocacy—the convergence of art and life and equality of artist, work, and viewer.

—Amanda Hickok

 The Teaching Artist Handbook tackles a difficult question for which there is no single answer: How does one teach art? Written by teaching artists for teaching artists, the book addresses the problem of how to teach in a field in which methods of instruction are ambiguous and challenging to establish and in which effectiveness is often challenging to evaluate. 

 
Teaching Artist Handbook, Volume I: Tools, Techniques, and Ideas to Help Any Artist Teach 
by Nick Jaffe, Becca Barniskis,
and Barbara Hackett Cox, with a historical essay by G. James Daichendt. Edited by Nick Jaffe
Columbia College Chicago Press (June 15, 2013. 238 pages, $18.37, paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1935195382

Jaffe, Barniskis, and Hackett Cox have created guidelines and criteria to address these problems using their own experiences as a frame of reference for other teaching artists and those considering a career in the field. They tackle their subject from a variety of disciplines: Jaffe is a musician, Barniskis is a poet and freelance writer, and Hackett Cox is a visual artist with an interest in jazz; their experience comes from teaching mostly in public school systems. They introduce the core of their philosophy immediately—the work itself, and the love of art-making, should lie at the center of art instruction.

The handbook starts by defining the teaching artist and differentiating him or her from an “educator.” A teaching artist is a person who understands an art form in a deep and meaningful way, someone who is able to break it down and introduce it to those who seek to learn. In teaching, they are able to draw from their own experience in the medium, using their own art-making process to decide what is essential and important to convey. Unlike teaching in other disciplines, teaching art is not about transmitting facts that students will later be tested on—the curriculum is less straightforward, student growth and productivity less easy to measure. This is where the ability to think critically about one’s own artistic process becomes paramount, because the creation of a curriculum and structure, and their results, are very much tied to the artist’s personal experience and reflection.

A teaching artist must also find ways to make knowledge dynamic—to create the potential for a multiplicity of responses from students, who can choose to apply the information, inspiration, time, and materials that they receive in their own way. Likewise, student work can be evaluated and improved based on responses from the teaching artist and other students in the form of critiques. Critiques are about responding to and discussing work, in which the teacher has no more authority than the students and does not instruct; instead, the teacher initiates and guides a dialogue that can offer constructive feedback. The “effectiveness” of a teaching artist is thus contingent on the ability to foster a community based on equality and solidarity, breaking down the hierarchical teacher-student dynamic as students relate to each other and to the teacher as artists, unified in their passion and drive to create meaning, deeply invested in their own work and that of their classmates and teacher.

The Teaching Art Handbook “teaches” artists how to teach in much the same way—the authors don’t assert their authority in the field or claim to know exactly how art can be taught or evaluated. Rather, they open up a dialogue on the subject, addressing the nuanced difficulties faced by teaching artists and the importance of art in our school systems, sharing their thoughts and experiences, and from this, creating a list of questions to consider and specific challenges.

This book provides comprehensive guidelines and helpful advice, but its significance lies in the fact that it situates the challenges of teaching art within larger cultural issues: How does one teach art in a culture that often doesn’t value art for art’s sake? Our school systems are primarily geared toward teaching students measurable and utilitarian facts and skills as a foundation for their future as part of the workforce—a producer who can help bolster the economy or contribute to our technological edge. The problem is frequently compounded by a school’s funding, which may dictate the curriculum, methods of evaluation, and standards to be met by students and teachers. This book advocates for an emphasis on art and art-making in itself, empowering teaching artists to stimulate slow change in the value assigned to art in our schools and in society.

—Amanda Hickok

 In The Paradoxical Object, published by London’s Black Dog Publishing, Joan Truckenbrod explores the paradoxes presented by her own artistic medium, the new and quickly expanding digital realm that fuses both video and sculpture, engaging the viewer in a multisensory, and often extrasensory, experience. Video and sculpture are inherently opposing forces—the former ephemeral and transitory, the latter fixed and tangible. In this emergent art form, the collision of these two mediums merges the physical and virtual worlds, imbuing the temporal and transient with durability and palpability, and injecting once static objects with life and fluidity. Layered onto these juxtaposing forces is the experience of viewers, who become part of the art itself, as they experience not only the three-dimensionality of the sculpture through space and time, but also the temporal narrative of the video, its aural elements and light and shadow interacting with their bodies. As the video and sculpture absorb and project, so does the imagination of the viewer, allowing the artwork to break through to the fourth dimension, dissolving the boundaries between space and time and between dreams and reality.

 
The Paradoxical Object: Video Film Sculpture
by Joan Truckenbrod
London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2012
192 pages, $45.00 paperback
ISBN: 978-1-907317-60-6

A recurring theme in Truckenbrod’s work—and one that may be used as a metaphor for video sculpture itself—is that of the estuary, particularly in its role as a transformative haven in the lifecycle of salmon. An estuary—a restless environment of opposing forces, as intermittent spurts of salt water rush in to mix with the fresh water, producing endlessly fluctuating water content and pulsating tidal rhythms—serves to transform the bodies of salmon and prepare them for their seaward transition. Similarly, Truckenbrod’s installations are dynamic spaces of transformation for the viewer. In Quantum Realities (2000), a virtual portal (a video projection) opens on the floor of the gallery, revealing the underwater world of salmon as they make their journey upstream—where they will spawn and die, the remains of their bodies then nourishing the new salmon—their vivid red bodies writhing against the current, the water seeming to splash the viewer. Swimming salmon appear again in Truckenbrod’s Against the Current (2004), projected this time onto a hospital bed, layering the lifecycle of salmon over an object associated with human sickness and death, thus reanimating the bed as an active participant in the human lifecycle.

In the section “The Hand Becomes the Lens,” Truckenbrod discusses the entangling of both haptic and scopic perception in both creating and experiencing video sculpture, as well as the role of the hand, through which we come to grasp the physicality of objects and realize the visions of the imagination. In Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Tijuana Projection (2001), audio of stories of loss and remorse from local residents and prisoners accompany projections of their hands on the St. Louis Public Library, making the heart-wrenching tales tangible as the library becomes almost anthropomorphic.

Tony Oursler also uses projections of the human body in his work The Influence Machine (2000–11). These projections form sculpture from light, as a face seems to emerge from a cloud of smoke or the leaves of trees—using technology as an extension of our own psychological states, as he plays on dreams and fear in this video-phantasmagoria. In Truckenbrod’s Elastic Solition (2010), light forms sculpture, but through shadow instead, as a group of seven-foot fiber figures intervene in the video projections of ocean tides, microscopic natural phenomena, and a nude body, creating an eerie and enclosed space around them through their cast shadows.

The body is paramount in both the creation and perception of video sculpture, a concept Ann Hamilton continuously underscores in her work. In aleph (1992–93), a video of her mouth trying to speak but impeded by pebbles is shown opposite a wall of books, from which body parts (sewn and stuffed with sawdust) hang. Viewers can almost feel the struggle to speak without swallowing the pebbles, as objects impede communication, contrasting with the body impeding communication on the opposing wall. Nam June Paik makes use of the body as well in his TV Cello (1971), a “cello” of video monitors to be played by Charlotte Moorman, each monitor showing video of the performance in real-time cut with video collage. The body is an integral part of the video sculpture in this piece and an agent of its realization.

Though it is somewhat strange to realize that Truckenbrod is, at times, speaking about her work in the third person—even quoting herself—this eccentricity is easily obscured by her extensive knowledge of video sculpture and genuine passion for the medium, and in the way she makes the textual content interesting and accessible. The text is an “estuary” of its own—a combination of the artist’s insights as well as art criticism, poetry, mythology, and music theory—exploring the paradoxes of video sculpture from multiple intersecting vantage points. Despite a few egregious proofreading errors (e.g., “Nan June Paik”) and a lot of repetition, this book successfully does what I have so rarely seen before—it bridges the gap between coffee-table book and meaningful criticism, proving useful and engaging for both the layman and the art expert, for casually exploring a new medium or delving deeply into its metaphysical implications. The division of the book into five subthemes—though each section discusses similar concepts and several of the same works—makes it easy to take one’s time with this book. The subject matter is complex and intoxicating, but it’s possible to read each section separately, out of order, and over time without missing or forgetting the central ideas. Though some of the images are intense and visually arresting (e.g., Wodiczko’s CECUT Project, the Orta’s Light of Stone) many works don’t translate well to print—nonetheless, the images are beautiful, dark, and mysterious, enticing the viewer to imagine the profundity of their realization.

By Amanda Hickok

 Following The New Earthwork: Art, Action, Agency, published last year by ISC Press, Artists Reclaim the Commons makes the case for art as a driving force behind efforts to reimagine human relationships and the built environment. Far from advocating any one genre of public art, this book features a range of project types, from innovative campus programs and biennials to participatory performances and political protests. Art can take to the streets in any number of ways—regardless of approach, the selected projects all share a willingness to work outside of and/or across discrete public art typologies, using institutional frameworks at will, for instance, or blending high-profile status with small-scale, local activism.

Artists Reclaim the Commons brings together a wide selection of public art projects from the U.S. and Europe to Argentina, Brazil, and India, featuring artists such as Jochen Gerz, Rick Lowe, Conflict Kitchen, Khoj, Thomas Hirschhorn, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Jeremy Deller. New essays devoted to questions of ethics and social engagement address current debates, while new interviews with curators Mary Jane Jacob, Julie Courtney, and Nato Thompson, among others, and artists Pope.L, Oliver Ressler, Santiago Sierra, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer offer unique insights into the creative/intellectual processes behind their public visions.

Artists Reclaim the Commons
Edited by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer
ISBN: 978-0-295-99339-3

 

Artists Reclaim the Commons demonstrates how art can effectively impact life beyond the confines of the gallery or museum. In many ways, this book continues the direction taken in The New Earthwork: Art, Action, Agency, but in this case, we have widened the focus to examine art in the public arena, beyond percent for art. As important as such government-sponsored commissions have been for the growth of public art over the last half century, percent-for-art programs are not, and should not be, the sole support structure for artists working in the public realm. Intended to instill and preserve civic norms, in addition to adding an aesthetic veneer to buildings, plazas, and government facilities, these projects represent only the official face of a field with the potential to contribute to public dialogue and public life in myriad other ways. As inhabitants of a world facing ever greater homogenization, privatization, and surveillance, we also need a public art of experimentation, questioning, and even dissent, one that challenges the public realm as usual and offers the promise of imaginative, if not always literal, liberation. This book features a selection of just those kinds of projects, across a wide spectrum of models and definitions of public art.

Discussions of public space, whether physical or virtual, presuppose a zone open to all and belonging to none‚ a place of social, intellectual, and political exchange characterized by freedom of movement and expression. More often than not, however, what passes for the public realm today is, in fact, cleverly disguised private property. Like the traditional commons, these are spaces bounded by behavioral codes (unwritten, but tacitly understood and rigorously enforced), with public use (by the right people) tolerated within limits, as long as it conforms to acceptable standards and as long as it pleases the owners to allow it. In recent years, we have witnessed an updated, 21st-century version of enclosure, with rights of assembly increasingly restricted, public libraries and support structures closed, public lands repurposed, and digital access closely monitored. Mitt Romney’s dismissal of 47% of the U.S. population is just the latest iteration of 18th-century social controls dividing “us and the poor who work for us.”

The works gathered here, initiated by nonprofits, independent curators, and individual artists and groups around the world, endeavor to assert the rights of liberty and creativity against the privatization of public life. Some projects take an overt approach, occupying neighborhoods, back streets, and vacant lots, even attempting to re-make entire towns; some function more implicitly by opening alternative spaces of imagination that subvert ordinary interactions and assumptions; some use the past as a tool for understanding the present and future; and others attempt to redress specific social inequities and political injustices.

Regardless of strategy or duration, these projects demonstrate an expanded role for art in the public sphere, creating a genuinely open, cultural commons where everyone

is welcome. By shaping new kinds of spaces and establishing new kinds of relationships (between individuals, between groups, and between people and their surroundings), they enable us to escape the world as received, shake off the familiar, try on different personas, and think through the minds of others. This is not the same as a utopian remaking of society: change can remain personal or it can spark from one individual to another. The goal is to destroy the collective delusion that the world we know—the world as presented to us through commercial, media, and economic interests—is the best of all possible worlds. By creating places where tensions converge in unexpected configurations, public art can help us see past the illusion. It may even offer solutions and improve lives, but ultimately, accountability lies beyond its scope. Public art is not going to relieve urban blight, eliminate violence, redistribute wealth, or curb the police state by itself, but it can insert doubt and defy rote expectations. It can inspire us all—viewers, direct participants, or casual passersby—to re-evaluate what we mean by quality of life, to reassess what we think we know, and to reconsider how we choose to live with ourselves and each other. In the world of art, critique, pleasure, and insight can come together to reimagine and forge new modes of public life.

By Twylene Moyer

Francesca Cigola’s new guide to Sculpture parks and gardens in the U.S. (scheduled for publication this June) overlaps a bit with the ISC’s own 2008 Landscapes for Art: Contemporary Sculpture Parks, but the content and strategy of the two books is very different. Art Parks is a genuine guidebook (with a portable but sturdy “flexibind” cover), though arranged thematically more than geographically, with generous photos and short descriptions of each park. Landscapes for Art was not intended to be a guidebook, but instead an exploration of the history and significance of the sculpture park “movement,” told in kaleidoscopic form in 48 short articles that focus on individual parks around the world or tendencies among the parks that emphasize modern and contemporary art.

Art Parks: A Tour of America’s Sculpture   Parks and Gardens  By Francesca Cigola  224 pages. $35 Princeton, NJ: Princeton   Architectural Press, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-   61689-129-9

So the two books complement one another and there’s no conflict for me (one of the editors of Landscapes for Art) reviewing and recommending Art Parks (and recommending it is indeed what I have in mind). The primary sections of the book are “Leisure Spaces,” “Learning Spaces,” “Collectors’ Spaces,” and a group of “Additional Parks” at the end. Each of the sections is divided into regions, with color-coded tabs. Some ofo the categories (especially the first two) overlap, but it’s particularly helpful to have the Collectors’ Spaces plainly identified, since their mission (and accessibility) can be quite different from the museums and arts organizations represented in the first two categories.

Fifty-seven locations are covered in the book (with 46 more covered in the Additional Parks section): 103 in all, a number that gives a hint of the growth of the field over the past quarter century (and these are just U.S. parks). Cigola’s introduction is helpful, and the short articles on each park are not just bullet-points: each is a small essay on the history and mission of the park, with a summary at the bottom of the page (in small type) of the address, contact, information, and artists represented. The format achieves a nice balance between a discussion, a list of information, and generous color photographs of representative work.

No single volume can be comprehensive about such a dynamic field, but Art Parks is a significant accomplishment.

—Glenn Harper

Constance Smith’s Art Marketing 101 is now in its 4th edition (just released in March). The book is structured like a workbook, walking the beginning artist through “Business Basics,” “Legal Issues,” “Strategies,” “Networking,” “Exposure,”  and “Strategic Planning,”  with spaces for the reader’s responses to specific questions and to broader planning suggestions. It leads directly to the same publisher’s Advanced Strategies for Marketing Art, dealing with the subject in more concrete terms, such as where to market.

Since this is a beginner’s guide, artists already established in their careers may find much of it too basic, though the chapters on Strategic Planning could be a good tool for artists at any stage of a career. Earlier sections contain advice on pricing, shipping, framing, and other straightforward aspects of the art world, but there is also advice on less obvious aspects of working as an artist, such as setting up a studio. And the “Exposure” section includes helpful sections on areas where artists might continue to pay attention, like artists’ statements and press releases.

 
Art Marketing 101: An Artist’s Guide to a Succesful Business Plan
192 pages, $19.95. Penn Valley, CA: ArtNetwork, 2013. ISBN: 978-0940899-80-3

Make no mistake, this is a guide to art as a business. The section on “Branding” may cause some gnashing of teeth among artists and art students who don’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs, small business owners, or willing participants in the capitalist neo-liberalism of today’s mainstream global economy. The aesthetic considerations that are dealt with under Branding and elsewhere are geared entirely toward a mercantile approach to making art, though some of the reading suggestions broaden the discussion into bigger subjects.

Beyond its helpful workbook approach to basic marketing ideas, the book might also serve as an antidote to an artist’s notion of his or her inevitable, instant stardom or the ability to devote oneself totally to aesthetic issues in one’s career. In that sense, the straightforwoard, outline layout is helpful: flipping quickly through the text might cause a young artist to fall back to earth, or perhaps hurl the book to the ground in dismay, but a moment’s consideration of the business of art, taken as a positive or a negative, could be a constructive step in confronting a fork in the road that might lead someone toward the kind of career success Smith has in mind or some other definition of what success might mean in art today.

By Glenn Harper

Silence, edited by Toby Kamps, curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection, accompanied an exhibition of the same name that explored the paradoxical nature of silence, a phenomenon which exists only in the vacuum of deep space. This means that, for us, true silence exists only in the imagination, since even in deafness we are plagued the incessant clamor of our own consciousness. The catalogue includes a forward by Josef Helfenstein, director of The Menil, and Lawrence Rider, director of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, as well as essays by Kamps, Jenny Sorkin (assistant professor of contemporary art and critical studies at the University of Houston), and Steve Seid (video curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive).

Though elusive, silence, and the struggle to unlock its mysteries, is a pervasive theme in art, considered in relation to the quest to overcome emptiness and isolation and challenge death and oblivion. Though, in the words of John Cage, there is “no such thing” as silence, it is manifested symbolically in art, evoked visually and sonically to represent an ideal harmony as well as an existential anxiety. Kamps, Sorkin, and Seid write extensively about Cage’s 4’33”, perhaps the most pivotal deployment of silence in the history of art. In its first performance in 1952, pianist David Tutor closed and opened the keyboard at various intervals before a perplexed audience. A watershed event, 4’33” opened the door for works addressing “silence”—what it is, why it has the power to both intrigue and disquiet, and how it precipitates altered levels of consciousness and awareness. Though the pianist played no notes, the room was filled with a different kind of music—ambient sound. The music of incidental human voices, accompanied by the blowing wind and falling rain outside the concert hall, proved that silence is purely conceptual.

 
Silence
Edited by Toby Kamps
The Menil Collection (August 20, 2012)
112 pages, $34.20 hardcover
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-17964-4

Kamps discusses two important influences on this work, including Cage’s visit to an anechoic chamber in 1951, during which he realized the impossibility of silence as he listened to his own breath and heartbeat amplified in the absence of any external noise. The second was Cage’s interest in Zen Buddhism, which Sorkin expands on in her essay. Many artists of the 1950s embraced Eastern philosophy in an effort to merge conscious experience and expression, inducing absorptive and almost meditative states in pursuit of greater awareness, mindfulness, and the dissolution of the ego. Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg, whose “White Paintings” provide an example of silence evoked synaesthetically, all merged experience and expression with an interest in transcending visual and aural language. As a form of tabula rasa, the White Paintings have, in Rauschenberg’s words, “the fullness of nothing,” yet they are “hypersensitive,” capturing, like 4’33”, what is experienced in their emptiness—shadows cast by viewers and, perhaps, projections of individual consciousness in the absence of any recognizable representation of the external world.

Though “silence” can facilitate transcendence, it is provokes anxiety and reminds us of our mortality. Contemporary artists, including Mark Manders and Doris Salcedo (both featured in the show), underscore these discomforting associations. As Kamps, quoting a Cistercian monk, notes, “Silence is a place for bumping into yourself.” It is the sound of our own inner monologues spouting forth from the nothingness, at once enlightening and terrifying. Silence can underscore our isolation in a world where language is ultimately useless as a tool to describe the nuanced abstractions of our thoughts. It can also be used as a punishment, as in solitary confinement, shunning, or self-inflicted hermitage. It is the alpha and omega of life, that great nothingness from which we emerge and return—the oblivion to which we are destined.

In discussing the paradox of silence—that it is only real in the imagination and can never be truly experienced—and its dual nature—transcendent and terrifying, everything and nothing—Silence speaks to today’s aurally cluttered and over-stimulated world. “Silence” is more elusive, feared, and desperately needed than ever. The catalogue draws attention to how silence is both a preoccupation and an unattainable goal in art and life, and how, in our continuing search for the “eternal sublime,” we echo the secrets of silence uncovered by past explorers. My only criticism is that the contributions by Sorkin and Seid read like footnotes to Kamps’s powerful and comprehensive essay.

By Amanda Hickok

Public art commissions always require justification—and that should tell us something. If traditional systems of representation are bankrupt and common values suspect, if committee-driven compromises can only dole out watered-down abstract “spaces” carefully formulated to offend no one and convey nothing, why do we bother? What is the purpose of public art? We say that it’s something we should have, but no one can convincingly explain why it’s necessary. “Uplift” and other vague intangibles get trotted out, but it’s hard to connect these “benefits” to projects that end in entertainment and strive for nothing loftier than increased tourist revenues. Until we can say that we need public art, nothing is going to change; and we won’t need it until it succeeds in touching and improving people’s lives in tangible ways.

 Public Art of the Sustainable City, which documents a selection of submissions to the Land Art Generator Initiative’s (LAGI) first international competition in 2010, offers a viable answer to the dilemma. Fifty-one projects—a diverse array of futuristic constructions, some more utopian than others—harness public art’s untapped potential, each one fusing cutting-edge design with renewable energy generation and additional public services. Regardless of design details, they all have learned the lessons of popular temporary public art events like Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls and applied them to permanent sites, allowing acreage and place-making to multi-task while putting eye-popping spectacle and technological pyrotechnics to work for the public good.

LAGI’s concerted effort to synthesize public art, urban design, and renewable energy has been a long time coming. The demand for energy continues to increase, CO2 levels continue to rise, oil reserves are dwindling, yet we can’t think of a better “solution” than to engineer ever more dangerous methods of extracting those same fuels that fired the cycle in the first place—never mind that remaining reserves are also finite. Attitudes to alternatives need to change now. As LAGI founders Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry point out, art can make renewable energy visible, desirable, and beautiful. The ideas are there; technologies are rapidly developing (despite funding cuts and obstructionist legislation in Canada, the U.K., the U.S., and the E.U., which recently rebranded gas as “green” energy)—the possibilities just need to reach public consciousness, and what better way than through public art. Change public opinion, prove that “sustainable” does not mean a lower standard of living, and we can shake off defeatist cynicism about an uncertain future and overcome the stubborn resistance of a self-interested, short-sighted status quo. The need to replace antiquated infrastructure becomes an opportunity once people realize the potential return on investment in research and development.

The first step is cultural, and it requires the ability to think beyond the immediate present. LAGI found the perfect partner for this competition in the most unlikely of places, the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi may be rich in oil for the foreseeable future, but its leaders aren’t content to simply milk profits until the reserves run dry; instead, they are channeling a significant portion of their revenues into renewable and alternative energy initiatives. Masdar City, a ground-breaking project currently under construction, is transforming the idea of a sustainable city into reality, with fully integrated planning and design, energy, water, and waste management, public transportation systems, and supply chains www.masdarcity.ae that combine time-tested traditional practices (construction methods and materials, building orientation) with the newest technological advances—all powered by renewable resources.

Within this brave new world of future energy, renewable, clean power production becomes part of the urban, suburban, and rural fabric. LAGI’s competition invited artists, architects, engineers, and scientists to reimagine the very idea of a power plant, shifting its conceptual status from a distanced, hidden evil to a desirable part of the neighborhood. Teams could choose one of three sites, one near a wildlife sanctuary in Dubai and two in Abu Dhabi (the first near Masdar City and the other between Saadiyat Island and Ys Island), targeting their approaches to local climate, geography, and cultural practices. Public Art of the Sustainable City presents the best of the entries, from the winning Lunar Cubit (nine monumental glass and amorphous silicon pyramids that generate 3,500 MWh per year) to the otherworldly landscape of Solar Dunes (thin film photovoltaic membranes whose forms interact with shifting desert sands and produce an annual 5,000 MWh) and the surreal flower of Desert Blooms (solar-tracking balloons that provide a playground and garden in addition to 20,000 MWh of solar energy per year). Other projects generate power from wind, water, electrostatic energy in sandstorms, and various combinations. Many provide much-needed shade, others filter water, and some feature habitat restoration; several wind-power projects at the wildlife reserve have developed avian-friendly forms. Every project is a destination site to explore by day and night, complete with recreational and educational experiences for locals and visitors, intended to become a valued part of everyday life.

So what do the numbers mean? LAGI uses the benchmark that an average household consumes 10 MWh per year (the number is from the U.S Energy Information Administration). Third-place Solaris, the highest generating project at 70,000 MWh would power 7,000 homes per year. Its undulating solar “tent” would be the “largest installation of concentrated solar power technology in the world,” but the project description (like many others) neglects to specify the exact number of acres it requires. Based on the scale renderings, it is massive. Like many of the proposals, this is land art on a colossal scale; other approaches, many of them airborne, have a much smaller and more adaptable footprint. Even the largest projects, however, can be adapted. Composed of multiple, repeated elements, they can be up- and down-sized as necessary; some can even be arrayed vertically or horizontally.

Obviously public art isn’t going to power the world, and land itself is a finite resource. But we can choose how we want to use available land, from small, empty lots to vast tracts, and decide what kind of public art will fill precious sites. As for naysayers who argue that renewables can never generate enough capacity, at the end of May, Germany’s solar plants produced a record 22 gigawatts of electricity through the mid-day hours of a Friday and Saturday—equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity—meeting 50 percent of the nation’s needs. LAGI’s Abu Dhabi competition introduced an exciting first generation of aesthetically adventurous possibilities, any one of which could become a reality (Lunar Cubit, for instance, would recoup construction costs in five years; LAGI is spearheading bids). The 2012 competition, now underway, addresses a completely different environment—New York City. Proposals for Freshkills Park are being accepted through July 1 http://landartgenerator.net/competition.html.  This is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to rethink the goals of public art and reimagine how we might live.

—Twylene Moyer

Book Information:
The Time is Now: Public Art of the Sustainable City
Land Art Generator Initiative; Essays by Beth Carruthers and Michiel Van Raaij
Singapore: Page One Publishing, 2012
240 pages, numerous illustrations, paperback
available from www.pageonegroup.com/1/LAGI.html
ISBN: 978-981-428-675-6

Michael Petry’s The Art of Not Making: The New Artist/Artisan Relationship explores the issue of authorship through works in various media not technically “made” by their nominal creators.Petry, director of MOCA London, suggests that there is a “new” artist/artisan relationship, precipitated by a growing taste for highly crafted, spectacular works and an increased emphasis on technical ambition. This relationship most notably characterizes the atelier systems of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami, who are notorious for employing hundreds of assistants. In their model of artistic production, the artist has the vision and the artisan brings it to life, placing the divide between artist and artisan in the space between conception and production, between artistic genius and technical know-how.

Petry provides a brief history of the artist/artisan relationship from the Renaissance to the present, pointing out that existing hierarchies of art and craft, artist and artisan, have been consistently challenged. Among the most remarkable challengers, he names Marcel Duchamp, who, by signing a urinal, both questioned and confirmed the artist’s role as creator and provocateur, removing the artist from technical production while affirming his importance in deciding what is art.

The Art of Making then divides into sections, providing an introduction to the artist/artisan relationship in various media: glass, metal, stone, textiles, ceramics, and wood. Each section features works by artists who carried out their ideas with the help of craftsmen or assistants, with information on the unique artist/artisan relationship behind the work and quotes from the artists on the subject of authorship.

 The issue I have with Not Making is that Petry’s “new” artist/artisan relationship, characterized by the artist as the visionary and the artisan as his technician, is anything but new. There are many historical examples of artists who delegated the more complex aspects of their work to those with superior or specialized skills or who intentionally removed themselves from the process of production. Petry skims over the most obvious predecessor to the studios of Koons and Hirst—Warhol’s factory. And he only briefly discusses the role played by society and the cultural perception of art, which have just as much a say in what art is and who’s responsible for it as the artists and artisans themselves. Of course, the deified artist is nothing without his worshippers, his patrons, his collectors and consumers.

I won’t say that the issue of authorship, though a rather exhausted, circular conversation, isn’t one that warrants re-examination in light of recent events. Just a few months ago, the Knoedler art frauds, extensively covered in the New York Times, called into question the value of art when detached from its alleged maker. The recent economic turmoil and the anti-bourgeois sentiment demonstrated by Occupy also bring into question the value that we place on art and authorship. The undeniably shaken hierarchies of our cultural value system have given a more sinister edge to the lucrative art assembly lines of artists like Koons and Hirst, though Petry fails to make a clear distinction between artists who exploit assistants to feed their mushrooming empires and artists who work to preserve dying forms of craftsmanship or who collaborate with acknowledged master craftsmen. In so doing, he misses an opportunity to locate the issues of authorship within the dynamics of the contemporary art world and the larger culture and gives up the chance to instigate meaningful and much-needed discussion.

He does, however, master the art of not making, producing little more than a beautifully designed coffee table book whose primary attractions rest on the work of others. Illustrations of famous and provocative creations by some of the best-known and influential artists of our time do most of the heavy lifting in this volume, substituting artistic celebrity and style for a lack of new critical insight.

—Amanda Hickok

Book Information:
The Art of Not Making: The New Artist/Artisan Relationship
by Michael Petry
New York: Thames & Hudson, Inc., 2012
208 pages, $34.95 paperback
ISBN: 978-0-500-29026-2

Presence: The Art of Portrait Sculpture, published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Holburne Museum through September 2, addresses an eerie quality shared by portraiture from antiquity to the present. What ties these three-dimensional works together is an undeniable presence—a strange, life-like quality beneath their stony (or waxy, or wooden, or bronze) surfaces. In this book, Sturgis manages to capture and articulate the uncanniness behind portrait sculpture. Whatever a portrait sculpture’s style (hyper-realistic or subtractive and archetypal), when we come face-to-face with one, we succumb to an almost uncomfortable sensation as we try to reconcile the sentient presence we feel with our knowledge that the work is, in fact, inanimate. This sense of presence, and fear of it, in inanimate objects has been a subject of great fascination throughout time. From Hoffman’s Olimpia in “The Sandman” to Blade Runner’s replicants, to the wax figures of Madame Tussauds, there are many examples of our obsession with the thin dividing line between animate and inanimate, real and unreal. This quality, this presence, this ambiguity, lies behind the powerful and endlessly captivating power of portrait sculpture, which Sturgis demonstrates in his comprehensive survey of three-dimensional portraits.

 Divided into chapters covering various elements and themes of portrait sculpture, Presence draws parallels between the sculpture of the past and present and between mediums—parallels united through the ability to emit a presence. Portrait sculpture maintains strong connections to the past, and it has always been reflective of cultural ideology and perhaps even human psychology. Sturgis discusses the roots of portrait sculpture in antiquity, noting, for example, the paradoxical nature of Greek and Roman portraiture, with their idealistic and “veristic” representations of the human form—a dichotomy that has carried over into contemporary sculpture. There is an undeniable connection between the pristine Westmacott Athlete (1st century CE) and Don Brown’s idealized likeness of his wife, Yoko XXI (2008). Similarly, the unforgiving realism of death masks—plaster casts of the deceased—find contemporary resonance in Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad (1958), his highly realistic silicone sculpture of his dead father. Our oscillation between the worlds of the real and unreal is quite like our oscillation between these extremes of representation—between the perfect and grotesque—a fact that makes these sculptures seem all the more familiar.

Sturgis pays considerable attention to the important ties between portrait sculpture and death. Even more than in the case of a painted portrait, sculpture is expected to outlast its model; in the case of the death mask, it offers a permanent form to a physical being already decaying. Portrait sculpture, with its “eternal” presence, serves as a constant reminder of mortality. Some of the most striking—even frightening—sculptures in this book appear in the chapters “Death mask, life cast” and “Death and the portrait.” Marc Quinn’s Self (1964)— a refrigerated sculpture of his head cast in nine pints of his own blood—is particularly chilling. The casting process has rendered his features so accurately that it looks as though Quinn himself is emerging from a pool of blood. As long as it is kept intact through refrigeration, the sculpture will permanently preserve one man’s features, at one point in time, rendered in the very substance so essential to his life; left to thaw, the blood will melt and the sculpture will dissolve—a reminder of the fragility and temporal limitations of life.

Presence, beautiful, dark, even grotesque at times, is an intriguing investigation of the uncanny presence in portrait sculptures, objects that, in their strange resemblance to the human form, seem to reflect our nature and mortal fears.

—Amanda Hickok

Book Information:
Presence: The Art of Portraiture
by Alexander Sturgis
Woodbridge, Suffolk,
UK: Antique Collectors’ Club Ltd
96 pages, $25 hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-85149-685-3

At the turn of the century, after the industrial revolution led people to cities in droves to find work, German philosopher Georg Simmel observed a change in human behavior. Over-stimulated by multitudes of people, advertisements, buildings, cars, and noise, city folk tended toward emotional detachment from one another, despite and because of living and working in such close proximity.

 Almost as soon as people arrived in the city, they tried to escape from it. Today, with more than half of the U.S. population living in major metropolitan areas, the search for calm and peaceful places has become ever more widespread. An earlier incarnation of the same desire led to the creation of Central Park in 1857, and contemporary public artists, architects, and city planners strive to create ever more peaceful and contemplative spaces, while city guides dedicate whole chapters, books, and series to “secret” places to escape the tourists and general urban hubbub.

The “Peaceful Places” series has devoted books to Chicago, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and most recently, Washington, DC. Published by a company whose repertoire mostly consists of hiking, camping, and rafting guides, Peaceful Places: Washington, D.C. covers different categories of “peaceful places,” including parks, woodlands, restaurants, coffee shops, and almost every major independent bookstore and museum in the city. Each site is rated according to its degree of “peacefulness,” and each entry also includes useful information on how to get there. Although the book is apparently written for residents, about half the places mentioned are either obvious, not really that peaceful, or past Baltimore or in West Virginia. There are, however, a few places that I had never heard of that sound rather intriguing. For example, the American Psychological Association building apparently has a public labyrinth on its roof.

So what does this book have to do with sculpture? Well, the mere fact that Peaceful Places mentions almost every major art museum and sculpture garden in the greater Washington, DC, area—along with a few select memorials and locally owned galleries—leads the reader to believe that there is something inherently peaceful in art, whether outdoors or in a gallery or museum. In fact, museums and art galleries are only outnumbered by parks, trails, gardens, and the like, which goes back to the idea that public artists, architects, and gallery owners working in metropolitan areas continually seek to create peaceful and contemplative places. Since the success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the trend toward tranquility in public art has overtaken even aesthetics. There is no denying the power of the silence encountered at the intersection of the two walls of the memorial, especially considering its tourist-ridden location. Many sculpture gardens strive for this same feeling of peace and isolation. After all, the arts have always served as a means of escapism. In the metropolis, this often entails an escape from the travails of daily life.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Information:
Peaceful Places: Washington, D.C.
by Judy Colbert and Denis Collins
Birmingham, AL: Menasha Ridge, 2012.
230 pages, $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-89732-554-8

Reading Louise Bourgeois’s journals is an intimate, visceral experience. Due to my eagerness to “read” Bourgeois, I skipped the texts by art historians and psychoanalysts and plunged into her writings, which is volume two. Philip Larratt-Smith’s concise editor’s note says that most original spellings, capitalizations, and spacings have been maintained and that the artist’s most intensive period of psychoanalysis was 1952-66 with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld. These journals give us glimpses of those years and writings up to 2008. 

 Larratt-Smith’s  six-page introduction informs us that Bourgeois’ psychoanalytical writings were found by the artist’s assistant Gerry Gorovoy only at the beginning of 2004 and in 2010 (the year Bourgeois died at age 98). The artist also kept letters, diaries, notebooks, and loose sheets of writings. This volume is an artful, chronological compilation from all of these sources, and footnotes identify topics, books, and people Bourgeois mentions. A wonderful feature is a clearly dated and labeled range of photographs of Bourgeois at almost every age – from her own childhood with her parents to the wedding photo upon her marriage to Robert Goldwater to Bourgeois alone and with her husband and three sons. The images, for the most part, show an outwardly composed, fashionably dressed girl and young to older woman. Some images seem pensive; however, they all contrast to the writings, which have a haunted quality, even a Goyaesque nightmare quality. Bourgeois seems obsessed with ideas about suicide and death. Clearly, we all live with death, but Bourgeois – like fellow Parisian Christian Boltanski – seems to have made death a frame for life even more than her art suggests. Boltanski — due in part to his childhood when his Jewish father hid from the Nazis and the aftermath of WWII when his family’s stories reinforced the trauma of the Holocaust — posited that death is something we all live with every minute.

In Bourgeois’ case, her upbringing in Paris and Europe with a fastidious, sickly mother and a dominant father whose mistress was her tutor (only a few years older than Bourgeois) angered her as a child; she was jealous of the affection her father showed toward the tutor and she identified as well with her sickly mother. Louise repressed her conflicting feelings and immersed herself in a range of studies, including drawing, calculus, geometry, and philosophy at top schools, including the Sorbonne, where she wrote a dissertation on Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant. After her marriage to American art historian Robert Goldwater, Louise and Robert lived in New York. Their 1938 wedding photo shows a well-dressed, somewhat old-fashioned couple (Louise was around 27); she wears a suit, heels, white gloves, hat, and fur cape, and his suit has a handkerchief in the lapel pocket. As both smile into the camera, they do not hold hands or show any closeness.

During the next ten years, Louise was busy first adopting a son, then birthing and raising two more boys. She also found time to make art and to observe the New York art scene in which her husband played an important role. Her first note, c. 1947, is on the back of an invitation to an exhibition of her paintings at Norlyst Gallery, New York. In reply to her Chilean friend Nemesio Antúnez’s essay on her work, she has written a text saying that her art communicates more than words:

I know you do not

see that I am talking to you …

but I know you will under-

stand my statue,

because it does not make

any noise… (excerpt from longer note on p. 23, V.2)

Some entries are dreams; some are lists, some are memories from childhood – sorry her mother did not take her to Switzerland the winters of 1926-27 and caring for her mother at the end of her life. Some are analyses of being sixteen: “Unable to blame a parent some children accept the guilt as their own…My father…was rewarded by both pleasure and standing” (p. 39, V.2, 1952). A 1955 2 a.m. dream ends “the gun is loaded and kills the mother” (p.45, V.2).  On a loose sheet dated January 25, 1958, Bourgeois records what seems to be a dream about 1925, “Papa takes me aside and announces sententiously that we are going to carry out a collective suicide; first the 2 women Maman and Henriette then Papa myself Georges & Pierre – everybody is in agreement, he tells me…” (p. 70, V.2). The dream ends with nothing bad happening. Rather than a death wish, the dream may be a subconscious wish to escape from ongoing analysis. On April 15, 1958, Bourgeois writes about a series of dreams — her fear and guilt toward her husband and his fear of her and “the mother who is castrating the daughter” (p. 78, V.2). Clearly, the past and her dreams affect her present relationships; she notes that the dream provokes an 8-day crisis. One 1958 list calls analysis a “jip,” a trap, a job, a privilege, a bad dream, “makes me into a cop,” “is more than I can manage” (excerpt from p.7, V.2).

By  the1960s, Bourgeois seems more in control; a photo shows her making a large, looping plaster Life Flower, and a November, 1966 note asserts, “the shame comes from the super ego/ but the aggression comes from the preconscious/ these differences have to be clear” (p. 158, V.2). By 1990, Bourgeois seems more confident: “You learn for yourself not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down/ learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. nobody can take it away…” (p. 177, V.2).

 Volume I contains expert insider views of Bourgeois and an outstanding selection of art, including an art poem written on a pink ground: “ART is a guaranty of Sanity.” Clearly, the artist used art to articulate varied interpersonal and inner conflicts and discoveries, from her 1947 Femme Maison drawings making women into dwellings and her untitled “family” constructions to the bulbous The Destruction of the Father, 1974, and the multi-breasted Mamelles, 1991. The body and the politics of bodies in family situations was a life-long theme.

 In Volume 1, Larratt-Smith does not mince words when he describes Bourgeois’ “descent into severe depression in the 1950s, agoraphobia [Wikipedia says this fear of public places develops as a complication of panic attacks.] being merely one of the most obvious symptoms (p. 8). Juliet Mitchell proposes that Bourgeois suffered from “sublime jealousy” of her English tutor Sadie and that her husband Robert infuriated her by “constantly ‘disappearing into complete silence’”(p. 49). Paul Verhaeghe and Julie De Ganck posit that Bourgeois may have had a  “textbook Oedipal complex” along with a “lifelong fear of abandonment” (p. 116), but that the best part of her art, especially that done between 1960 and 1980, was beyond interpretation and chthonic – pertaining to earth or subterranean (pp. 117-123).

These art critics and psychoanalysts do not delve much into gender issues – such as the fact that Louise was named after and took after her father Louis and was favored over her two siblings, nor into gender issues related to her severe depression following her father’s death in 1951.  The reasons why Louise found herself at odds with her husband and three sons are hinted more in the artist’s writings but Louise veils this topic in general Freudian terms.

Readers are left with the most compelling messages of all: Bourgeois’ art. Each of the 123 illustrations is worth studying. For example, the red ink drawings in The Family, 2008 (plate 86) show nine images of a man and woman having  sex standing up. Some lines are blurred. The male’s profile and penis are erect, entering the woman, and the woman facing forward looks like a round piece of fruit on two legs. The fetus inside her moves and turns in the womb; five breasts hang around her neck like clubs or petals. Her head is dark red, possibly suggesting anger. This is my own interpretation. How amazing that, at around 96, the artist was still investigating primal mother + father + fetus relationships.

Anyone who knows Bourgeois’ art can make great use of these 500 pages of writings, biographical photos, and art, and they are invaluable for any library art collection. The two volume Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed was part of an exhibition at the Freud Museum, London, in Spring 2012. These are based on Philip Larratt-Smith’s years in New York as Bourgeois’ literary archivist. Everything about this collection – the artist, the images, the editors, the contributors, and the publisher – including the range of voices of the contributors and the wild, even violent enigmas posed by Bourgeois is deep and personal. The artist’s voice articulates for all women some hidden inner turmoils of interpersonal relations, and, in particular, moments of overarching anguish and recovery: a 1996 embroidery on what may have been one of her blue and white linen handkerchiefs reads: “I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.” (p.88, V.1).

Violette Editions will publish a larger selection of 1000 sheets of the artist’s private writings in a facsimile edition in a few years.

— Jan Garden Castro

Book Information:
Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed
Edited by Philip Larratt-Smith
London: Violette Editions, 2012.
₤ 49.95/ US$ 75.00. ISBN 987-1-900828-37-6

As part of a touring Miró retrospective, which started at Tate Modern last spring and is currently up at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (through August 2012), curators Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale have published Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, a monograph covering the entirety of the artist’s career. In contrast to your typical retrospective catalogue, The Ladder of Escape emphasizes how Miró and his work were affected by the political history of his native Catalonia, Franco’s Spain, and World War II.

Miró, probably the third most famous Catalan artist, was never as politically active as Picasso and Dalí. In fact, Miró often went out of his way to avoid political confrontation. He was never a fan of the Franco regime, but other than refusing to participate in an official exhibition in 1969, he didn’t take decisive action against it either. The Ladder of Escape argues that if one looks at Miró’s work, his underlying rebellion becomes clear. The ladders that appear in many of his paintings symbolize his attempt at escaping, both literally and figuratively, the incomprehensible cruelty of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Franco regime, as well as the pessimism so prevalent in European artistic and intellectual spheres at the time.

Whether or not his paintings contain subversive political messages, as Daniel and Gale would have us believe, Miró’s powerful three-dimensional works certainly did. As the artist himself once said, “It is in sculpture that I will create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters; what I do in painting is more conventional.” Unfortunately, the book has only one chapter dedicated to Miró’s sculpture, and the exhibition contains just one three-dimensional work, L’Objet du couchant. Kerryn Greenberg’s chapter addresses Miró’s “anti-monuments” to nature and the everyday, as well as his love of found materials, prehistoric influences, and personification of objects almost to the point of animism. Political concerns come out most clearly in his sculptures of the monarchical figures, which look to be painted pieces of driftwood.

Miró’s most political and, in my opinion, most creative work wasn’t created until after Franco’s death. In collaboration with the La Claca theater group, in the 1970s, Miró designed and created sets, masks, and large puppets for a production of Mori el Merma, a play whose main character was obviously based on Catalonia’s most hated former dictator. At around the same time, Miró made his “Burnt Canvases,” which he not only burned but also walked on, spilled paint over, cut, punched, and, in his own words, “improvised with rage.” When they were first shown in Paris, these sculptural works were hung in the middle of the gallery, so that viewers could contemplate the void and the changing scene on the other side of the objects, as well as the objects themselves (The National Gallery very disappointingly has these bashfully hung on walls).

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is a beautiful book, and its essays are both informative and thought-provoking, especially William Jeffett’s “From Miró otro to the Burnt Canvases.” I’m not entirely convinced of Miró’s dissidence through escapism in his paintings, and I find his later sculptural and public works to be much more profound. Perhaps, that’s where the focus of the exhibition and resulting catalogue should have been.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Information:
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape
edited by Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012
240 pages, 200 illustrations, $60 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-500-09367-2

Stuart Horodner’s new book, The Art Life, is not exactly an art book, not exactly career advice, not exactly a guide to creativity, and not exactly a dictionary of quotations: but it’s a combination of all those things. In 12 chapters and an introduction, Horodner’s preface lays out the trajectory of his own career (he’s now the Artistic Director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center), and in the introduction, he says that the “various opinions revealed within these pages might serve as a compass for orienting yourself as you deal with the practical and philosophical matters that shape every art life.” That is, not just artists but everyone involved in the various branches of the art world. He also states explicitly that this is not “a guide to professional practices. It will not tell you if or how to approach galleries or where to apply for funding.”

Instead, the book is an informative and entertaining tour of various aspects of the art profession (from Motivation through Community, Audience, and Success, to mention only four of the 12 topics) through the eyes and minds of various various famous and not-so-famous participants in the field. Some comments are short, some fairly long; some are about an artist’s or professional’s own experience, some about an influence, some about the daily or exceptional processes and events that characterize contemporary (and earlier) art (across all disciplines). Some contributors are sincerely offering advice and some are offering striking or humorous insights that are more about attitude or philosophy than career.

It’s tempting to start offering quotes from the book, but opening the book at random, there are quotable comments on every page. Perhaps a quote from artist Leon Golub sums everything up: “There are three things: your work, your livelihood, and your personal life. If any two are going well at the same time consider yourself lucky.”

—Glenn Harper

Book Information:
The Art Life: On Creativity and Career
by Stuart Horodner
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2012. 183 pages, 34 color and 6 black-and-white illustrations, $25
ISBN: 978-1450790659

In the three years since the High Line opened, it has become New York’s favorite park. Planted on the abandoned elevated railroad tracks that    cross more than 20 blocks of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen, the High Line is a unique public space, where people    can get away from the city for a moment and look down on the hustle and bustle from a calm garden space. In On the High Line, lifelong New      Yorker Annik La Farge thoroughly presents the park and its environs, providing histories of the railroad and its transformation over the years,        the  buildings around it, the changing nature of the neighborhoods it traverses, and its plants and wildlife.

The High Line’s originality springs from not only its situation as a park that provides panoramic urban views, but also from the fact that it has        been planted with grasses and flowers not usually found in a public park or garden. La Farge takes the reader through the many plant species    chosen by the High Line’s garden designer, Piet Oudolf, to complement the motif of “wildness” that runs through the park. Oudolf’s notion that      the plants must be interesting in all stages of life (including death) accounts for the High Line’s popularity throughout the year, even during cold    and windy winters.

What I found most intriguing about On the High Line was its vivid history of life in and around the raised tracks. The High Line was constructed in the 1930s so that trains coming into the city could bypass the increasing amount of street traffic. This was more than convenience for commuters. Keeping the trains out of the street also addressed safety issues. Pedestrian deaths had become such a huge problem that the city started hiring “West Side Cowboys,” men on horses who trotted in front of trains and warned people to get out of the way.

Raising the train tracks presented opportunities for above-ground loading docks at the factories along the High Line. These included what would later become the Nabisco cookie factory, the Otis Elevator Company, which built elevators for the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, and numerous meatpackers. Other buildings along the High Line later housed experiments relating to the Manhattan Project and hosted bohemian gatherings with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Andy Warhol. The docks to the west of the High Line once accommodated the Lusitania and served as a drop-off point for survivors of the Titanic. The history of the High Line is, in a sense, a microcosmic history of New York itself.

Consisting of a compilation of beautiful color images complemented by short paragraphs and essays describing the history, plants, and buildings of the High Line, On the High Line: Exploring America’s Most Original Urban Park reads as a guide book (it includes a pull-out map) as well as an in-depth introduction to the history of New York. The High Line’s public art displays and surrounding galleries only play a minor role in the narrative, which instead focuses on the High Line itself as the work of art. A mobile app of On the High Line will be available next month, providing visitors with individualized private tours to “the new generation’s Central Park.”

—Elena Goukassian

Book Information:
On the High Line: Exploring America’s Most Original Urban Park
by Annik La Farge
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012
218 pages, 400+ color illustrations, $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-500-29020-0

The exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious,” organized by the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) and shown at its gallery from January 20–June 1, 2012, features 30 works created between 1947 and 2009. One work that will remain in Qatar is the giant spider Maman (Mother), first shown at the Tate Modern’s giant Turbine Hall in 2000 with three monumental towers, I DO, I UNDO, I REDO.  I discussed these in Sculpture at that time. The towers were not shown in Qatar, but the current exhibition’s curator, Philip Larratt-Smith, gives these works new poignancy by discussing them explicitly in the catalogue in the context of Bourgeois’s other works and of the artist’s Freudian self-questionings of her life as a child and as a mother. Larratt-Smith links I Do to the good mother, I UNDO to the bad mother letting her milk drip as the baby goes hungry, and I REDO to the mother’s self-examination and redress of her state.

These towers each have different kinds of spiraling, precipitous stairs and various kinds of mirrors that reflect the viewer’s persona through different, distorted lenses; they are ingenious, well-crafted art works that demonstrate how subtly Bourgeois’s team has been able to realize her most ambitious constructions. I recall them as being 3–4 stories tall; they are listed as 6,000, 4,500, and 9,000 cm. tall respectively. Larrat-Smith calls Maman the fourth tower, stating that the artist was summoning her own mother, unconsciously linking her fear of abandonment with her fear of death, and creating, as in the towers, a mother who is both good and bad (the spider eats her young). Finally, for Larrat-Smith, Bourgeois herself becomes the master spider, creator, and tale-spinner. Larrat-Smith’s concise yet powerful essay contains fresh psychoanalytical insights into the artist’s work: “Entrenched psychic conflicts condemned the artist to a life of repetition…Thus art was at once an indication of her underlying psychic disorder and a means of making herself whole.  It was both symptom and cure.  In the place of Freud’s talking cure, which she rejected as inadequate, Bourgeois found another ‘royal road to the unconscious’ in the making of art, which she called her ‘form of psychoanalysis.’”

The catalog introduction by QMA Chairperson Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani states that Maman’s  new  (in 2011) home at the National Convention Center  Qatar Foundation “has already inspired writers, artists and members of the public here.” Her Excellency sees Bourgeois’s spiders as linked to her memories of her mother; she adds that the spider in the Holy Qur’an wove a web that protected the Prophet from his enemies.

The exhibition title “Conscious and Unconscious,” is related to a slender sculpture with two sorts of towers. A stack of sponge-like white fabric shapes that recall the spinal column stands for order and the conscious mind. Nearby, on a pole, a blue rubber pear shape is pierced with five needles, each holding a small spool of thread. “The thread represents the unspooling of time, the sewing of the mother-weaver, the spider’s web, the fragility of human relationships, and the tenuous linkage to memory…” according to Larrat-Smith.

The QMA catalog, in English and Arabic, is richly illustrated, and the cover image, a closeup of one pair of pink marble hands holding a second pair of hands, suggests closeness, warmth, and friendship between people and cultures. In the full untitled work, 33 x 91.4 x 38 cm., the four limbs stop below the elbow, forming an X. The hands are a symbol or sign of human interconnections.

Other works in the exhibition range from red gouache “flowers” created in 2009 to a womblike, bronze hanging piece Fée Couturiére, 1963 to fabric webs and a fabric head, and metal and marble sculpture, including Cell XV (for JMW Turner) (2000), a work in which water spirals together from two sources.

This exhibition catalogue seems important both for the intimacy of its theme and for its range of work focusing on layered psychoanalytical readings about relationships between children and their mothers. This universal subject deserves more attention worldwide; it’s refreshing to think that the exhibition has opened some minds to these women’s (and human rights) issues as well as to finely-crafted art that requires some thought.

In addition, Philip Larratt-Smith has edited a two-volume catalog in London, Louise Bourgeois Psychoanalytical Writings and The Return of the Repressed, and I plan to review these in the future.

— Jan Garden Castro

Book Information:
Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious
by Philip Larratt-Smith
Doha, Qatar, 2012: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing
112 pages; ISBN: 9789992194638

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 17, 2012

The Bourgeois Studio has informed me that while Philip Larratt-Smith’s essay for the Qatar catalog discusses I Do, I Undo, and I Redo — the three towers — in relation to Maman, the towers are in storage in New Jersey and were not in the Qatar exhibition.  Maman is a new permanent installation in Qatar. JGC

Running now through May 27, 2012, Nevin Aladağ’s exhibition “Sahne|Stage” populates ARTER’s Istanbul galleries with fantastical curtains of hair. In each composition, the brightly colored, artificial strands hang from a pole, alternately parted in the middle, pulled back, even braided or in loose pigtails. Elegant and evocative, these allusive works manage to convey specific hairstyles as well as functioning stage curtains. The larger works are interactive, and visitors can step into a recessed wall space behind the hair and perform as if on a stage or watch others doing so. This performative theatricality also extends to the works themselves—synthetic and often neon colored, they are  flamboyant costume wigs that don’t even try to look like real hair.

Born in Turkey and living in Berlin, Aladağ often incorporates participation and performance into her works as a way of playing with identity. In one piece, she brought an audience into an empty theater, where participants expected to watch a show, but nothing ever materialized on stage. Instead, as more people came into the theater, the house lights grew brighter and brighter, and the audience members themselves became inadvertent performers, especially as they started turning to each other to discuss their confusion.

Although the life-sized, interactive Stage works are the highlight of Aladağ’s current exhibition, her smaller wall pieces, fittingly dubbed “Rehearsals,” are just as intriguing. The Rehearsal works have much more varied hairstyles: one is crimped, another is curly with bangs, a third is parted using barrettes. The colors range from blonde to teal with white streaks. Probably because they’re not interactive in the same way as the Stage works, each Rehearsal has a more defined individual character. Each curtain of hair invites the viewer to give it an identity, as if it were a human being. Looking through the exhibition catalogue, I was taken back to childhood memories of humanizing inanimate objects. For example, I would always judge the “character” of a car by its “face”—mostly having to do with the positioning of the headlights and grille. I’d rarely notice the driver and attribute any movement to the car itself, as if it were alive. Aladağ’s Rehearsal works provoke this same kind of fascination and detachment from reality.

As Başak Doğa Temür and Gudrun Ankele point out in their essays for the accompanying catalogue, the playfulness of Aladağ’s hair curtains also has a more serious side. There is the ongoing question of identity, but more specifically, the Stage and Rehearsal works bring forth femininity as a social construct. The curtains all possess long hair, therefore they must all be women. But the hair isn’t even real, so how could someone possibly ascribe a gender to these fully manmade objects? And what does this tell us about ourselves and our societies?

At once amusing, interactive, and thought-provoking, Aladağ’s installations/sculptures are also aesthetically pleasing. For those of us unable to go to Istanbul to see them in person, the catalogue makes a worthy substitute. The images are all of high quality, with detail shots in which every individual strand of hair is apparent. Temür and Ankele’s short, yet thoughtful essays (included in both Turkish and English) only add to the reader’s insight into and appreciation of these highly original works.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Information:
Nevin Aladağ: Sahne |Stage
Edited by İlkay Baliç
Istanbul: ARTER, 2012
96 pages; $15 euro / $20 USD
ISBN: 978-975-6959-57-2

The foreword by Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum, explains the scope of this huge publication by the museum (in collaboration with Art Asia Pacific magazine and the Museum as Hub initiative) in connection with its recent “The Ungovernables” exhibition, for which Eungie Joo was the curator. The book contains essays by Victor Albarracin, Elaine W. Ng, Reem Fadda, Naiza H. Kahn, transit.org, and Catalina Lozano, and a conversation with Christine Tohme and Stefan Kalmár, but most importantly it includes single-page descriptions of 400 art spaces in 96 countries, arranged by regions. These art spaces are, as Phillips points out, “crucial venues to foster communities as well as platforms for younger artists.”

We haven’t seen anything like this directory since the demise of the National Association of Artists’ Organizations, whose directories this new Art Spaces Directory resembles in some ways. But the New Museum project is far broader in reach, and its depiction of the art spaces more thorough. Each page, laid out in a manner suggestive of a web page, brings together color photos, location info, opening hours, funding sources, and other information with a few short paragraphs (provided by the art spaces themselves) about the institution and very helpful caption info for the photos of the organizations and the works they’ve exhibited.

The book is so massive, one wouldn’t want to carry it on vacation, but the information in it is a guide to lively and important art institutions around the world. It’s possible to raise concerns about spaces that are left out, but it’s impossible to ignore the degree and value of the information contained in the book. To those familiar with what used to be called the “alternative space movement,” the essays will provide an update on what artist-initiated and alternative art spaces have become (some familiar stories and some not familiar). For those not already familiar with these kinds of art spaces, the book provides a window onto the most vibrant sector of the art world.

In an era dominated by art fairs, blockbuster biennials, the high-stakes art market, and the art stars who frequent those rarified zones, Art Spaces Directory demonstrates that there is indeed world-wide art activity that privileges the art over the hype and provides meeting points for the artists driving that activity and the audiences that they deserve.

— Glenn Harper

Book Information:
Art Spaces Directory
Edited by Eungie Joo and Ethan Swann
New Museum/Art Asia Pacific, 2012
$45 448 pages, paperback
ISBN: 978-0984562534

Oliver Herring, born in Germany and now living and working in Brooklyn, is one of the more innovative artists working in New York today. He is a person of both principle and experiment, and, perhaps most important, he remains interested in exploring the figure—through his early knit pieces, his vivid photo sculptures of people, his films and videos, and his performances. His wide profile of expression not only demonstrates Herring’s ease with many kinds of situations, it calls up the audience’s interest as well.  The book Oliver Herring: Me Us Them, published by the museum at Skidmore College, offers a somewhat brief but nonetheless sharp investigation into the motives and mechanics of Herring’s art. There is a long interview with author Ian Berry, and an essay by Lawrence Rinder, both of which offer ample insight into Herring and his work. Indeed, the interaction that occurs during the course of the conversation between Rinder and the artist allows Herring to do what he does best, namely, work out an intuitive interaction with another person that touches the social aspects of art and the art itself in highly interesting ways. (The scenario of Herring’s highly creative TASK, a communal art activity dependent on the participants’ ability to create something from inexpensive art materials, perfectly defines his progressive, democratic notion that everyone can and, most likely, should make art.)

The relatively modest production of the book does not get in the way of experiencing Herring’s work, albeit second hand. The images are excellent, even allowing for the fact that the dimensions of the book are relatively small. And the discussion between Herring and Bender really plays out over a broad expanse of notions, chief among them the notion of gender and the idea of piecing things together—a practice that is found in the remarkable knitted work early in Herring’s career and the recent photosculptures, in which Herring takes hundreds of color pictures of a person (usually but not always a man) and works up a three-dimensional, hyperrealist figure. The effect of the photographic shards of body parts is compelling even though seeing the different components’ line of contact make it clear that this is a made thing and not a perfect facsimile to be believed without doubt. More than anything else, it seems to me, Herring is interested in making contact—with his subjects as well as with his audience. This need for social transaction, evident even in the photos of two young men (including Herring) spitting at each other, can take positive or negative forms when experienced from a mainstream point of view. In actuality, however, we find that Herring is strongest when he presents work that ties into grief, as happens in his knit pieces commemorating the death of Ethyl Eichelberger, the noted gay performance artist; or offers art that concerns the figure, as we see in his remarkable photosculptures.

The book’s interview demonstrates a genuine affinity between Berry and Herring, who discuss personal issues such as Herring’s gay sensibility, which made him emotionally vulnerable to the death of Eichelberger in particular and the AIDS crisis in general, and the role of failure in his art, which Herring sees as an inevitable part of his process. Even so, the artist eloquently strikes a note of confidence and independence, which help him move on to whatever the next project may be. Rinder’s short essay details several projects by Herring, one of which took place in Artpace, San Antonio Texas in 2004; it consisted of asking a logger/artist and a Marine to spit food dye against a strong wind. The photos taken of the two men are found in the book and are notably powerful, although also a bit disturbing, in the sense that the color’s traces cover the faces and shirts of the participants. Herring is in many ways a conceptual artist, but he is hardly dry or overly didactic. He finds ways for people to engage with the environment, and encourages people from outside the art world to take part in his directed performances, which can involve the hardship of repetitive physical activity. In that sense, he is both a protagonist and a director of some of his performances, which are playful, experimental, and riveting all at once.

The variousness of Herring’s art shows us that he is someone who is as interested in the process of intervention as he is in the final product. Often, as happens in the knit pieces and the photosculptures, the process of their creation is evident in the actual pieces. This is, I think, a form of honesty on Herring’s part; he seeks a kind of transcendent transparency in the way he works. This candid approach is suggested in the book’s photos, but not necessarily in its written pages. Indeed, we can see the colored coat knit from plastic garbage bags and a singlet made from knit silver Mylar as the aftermath of an extended bout of knitting, which is a performance despite its private nature. A monograph such as the one discussed here doesn’t really have the space for a lot of analytical writing, and Berry wisely emphasized the images over excessive text. Still, it would have been useful for a writer to tie the different strands of Herring’s work together, so that we would have a better understanding of his art as a whole.

Things being what they are, it is very good to have an overview of Herring’s output at this point in his career. He is a genuine adventurer, someone who is open to the experimental but who is also tied, in some ways, to tradition. It is rare to see a figurative artist challenge himself in such basic ways, even when the results are close to spectacular: the two nude photosculptures, Wade 1 and Wade 2 (2006), stand out as remarkable—and openly erotic—in their verisimilitude. And the large 1991 sculpture, A Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger, has real pathos; its multipart blossom, two leaves, and stem possess an integrity that begins as the memorial for a deceased artist and continues to act as an elegy for a crisis in the gay community. The writing, particularly the interview, touches on some of the major points of Herring’s career, but we must be satisfied with the rather slim amount of written materials in the book. What is needed is an overview that would tie the disparate elements of Herring’s art together, a task that, given the strength and independence of his differing series, may be harder than it seems. But this is a quibble based upon the desire for a different kind of a book; Me Us Them develops an intelligent way of looking at Herring, a true artist of our times.

Jonathan Goodman

Book Description:
Oliver Herring: Me Us Them
Ian Berry with an essay by Lawrence Rinder
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum
and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2011
ISBN: 978-09-76572-38-1

In 2009, the European Commission began a two-year-long research program exploring the practices, outcomes, and influence of artist and curatorial residencies and assessing how such programs contribute to “artistic mobility.” The ultimate goal of the RE-tooling RESIDENCIES project was to compile an in-depth resource for artists and organizations involved—or thinking about getting involved—in the world of residencies, with a close eye cast specifically on Eastern Europe. The project culminated in a conference that brought together artists, curators, activists, managers, and theoreticians for a larger discussion of approaches to residencies. RE-tooling RESIDENCIES: A Closer Look at the Mobility of Art Professionals is a product of the project and conference.

The book itself is very creatively organized around the themes of Practices, Sites, and Networks. The first section is by far the most engaging. The opening essay, “Dream or Nightmare?” presents work commissioned from former resident artists at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, each piece pertaining to an individual artist’s ideas and experiences of “residency.” Varying in media and content, these works offer a wonderful introduction to the world of the residency from a first-hand, personal, and artistic perspective. The rest of Part I: Practices presents the inspiring work of various artists accomplished during residency periods. Both the writing and the works draw out a deeper philosophy of “residency” in general: “Residency programmes aim to provide what Jean-Baptiste Joly…called ‘time without quality’ (referring to Robert Musil’s novel). We could also define this as ‘unconditional time.’” Various types of residency styles are discussed in philosophical terms. These musings on the meaning of residency are interspersed with longer, creative writing/visual art pieces on the

same theme. The best of these was Yeb Wiersma’s “Accidental Pleasures,” which uses words, visuals, and cultural references of all sorts (from Robert Frost to Joni Mitchell) to describe her time as a resident at Ujazdowski Castle. Part I: Practices is a real gem—at once enjoyable and enlightening to read.

The rest of the book is more straightforward and less creatively presented. Part II: Sites collects historical descriptions of specific residencies in places such as Bulgaria, Poland, and Lithuania, with a section devoted to curatorial versus artist residencies. Part III: Networks focuses on the international and intercultural exchanges that take place within periods of residency, both for residents and the host organization and culture. RE-tooling RESIDENCIES also includes a number of interesting interviews and transcripts of group discussions from the conference, which were dominated by considerations of the philosophy behind residency programs.

Available for free download in pdf form, RE-tooling RESIDENCIES is certainly worth a read, especially the first section. The book’s concentration on Eastern Europe, and especially Poland, does not at all detract from its insight into the meaning of a residency anywhere in the world. My favorite idea to come out of this book (and there are many) is that the residency is the new alternative to institutional life. For the resources section of the April Insider newsletter, I wrote about the ongoing debate over the value of art school as costs climb ever higher. One argument in support of art school is that it provides a rare opportunity for artists to develop and form a community with people whom they would have never met otherwise. Maybe residencies are the new art school.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:
RE-tooling RESIDENCIES: A Closer Look at the Mobility of Art Professionals
Edited by Anna Ptak
Warsaw: CCA Ujazdowski Castle, 2011
259 pages, available free on-line (www.re-tooling-residencies.org)
ISBN: 978-83-61156-35-2

Historically, art-making has been associated with individual expression and artists have been seen as creative geniuses isolated from mainstream society, attempting to communicate creatively through visual means. In the aftermath of World War II, after having experienced the dire consequences of staunch individualism (i.e., nationalism), keeping the peace through cooperation arose in all spheres of human experience, including the arts. Rather than Dadaist (or other) approaches to the horrors of war, postwar art brought about a more forward-looking optimism. Artists became drawn to collaboration, and the collective was born.

Grant H. Kester’s new book, The One and the Many, explores the development of contemporary collaborative art and its influence on the larger art and sociopolitical worlds. Kester argues that in the last 15 years especially, socially engaged and collective art has really taken off. He sites examples from the U.S., Germany, Myanmar, and Argentina, proving that this is not just a Western trend, but a truly global phenomenon. Art for art’s sake has taken on a negative connotation, paving the way for art with a higher social purpose. The focus has shifted from the finished art object to the process of creation. As Kester points out, social art is often created with the help of NGOs and lo

cal activists, furthering its collaborative, and frequently cross-disciplinary, nature. He contends that artist projects are much “purer” (for lack of a better word) than government and NGO aid, in that there are no strings attached or propagation on behalf of a specific political entity or organization.

Although Kester treats an incredibly interesting and timely subject, his book reads a bit like anti-capitalist propaganda. He delves deep into the implied cultural superiority and corruption of aid organizations, including USAID, and sings the praises of art collectives that are able to fix, for example, the problem of access to clean drinking water in rural India. While it is certainly true that smaller, locally-based, and cooperative projects are more successful than those funded by large organizations proselytizing globalization and “development,” Kester paints the picture of artists and artist collectives as the messianic masterminds of all of these small-scale, grassroots projects, creating an ironic new cultural superiority of artists over everyone else. Despite its shortcomings, The One and the Many brings to the forefront an important and influential trend in the development of contemporary art—collaboration for the common good.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:
The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context
by Grant H. Kester
Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011
320 pages, 29 illustrations, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4987-7

The preface of Claes Oldenburg, published by the editors of the October journal, reads less like an introduction and more like a warning label, an Intellectually Explicit Advisory: prepare yourself, reader, for “a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained.” It comes as no surprise that the essays at hand require a seriously sophisticated, sustained effort to read. They were not compiled for the casual fan or the easily concussed. Rather, they are “intended as primers in signal practices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time.” While the intellectual intentions are clear, the subject, Claes Oldenburg, remains elusive. As Donald Judd admitted in a review in 1964, “I think Oldenburg’s work is profound. I think it’s very hard to explain how.” Without sacrificing the difficulty, Claes Oldenburg at least tries.

The essays, reviews, photos, sketches, manifestos, and interviews in Claes Oldenburg focus on Oldenburg’s work in New York City (with a bit of traveling to Chicago for a few Happenings) between 1960 and 1965. In 1960, he created the installation The Street in the Judson Gallery in Washington Square Park. As Joshua Shannon, the book’s first essayist, writes, “The Street was a visual cacophony of cardboard, paper, newsprint, wood fragments, and black paint.” As to what The Street meant—to art, New York City, or Oldenburg himself—you’re going to get a slightly different answer from every author in this book. That said, this much is clear: The Street made Oldenburg a player in the New York art world, a 33-year-old star to watch. In his next installation, The Store, he turned his studio into an old-fashioned general store; people shopped for his art while he worked. The objects that he sold resembled those available in any store, but they appeared handmade, grotesque, slightly off, and way more expensive (he once sold a loaf of bread for $99 dollars). The Store also hosted Oldenburg’s largely improvised, highly disorienting multimedia Ray Gun Theater. In an interview, Oldenburg said that he liked these primitive explorations of art and experience to be as “unpredictable as possible.” No doubt, for Oldenburg and New York’s artistic vanguard, these were exciting times.

Claes Oldenburg achieves its intended aim, providing a summation of critical thinking on Oldenburg’s work in the early ’60s; but for most readers, the most compelling and informative contributions come from the artist himself: an unpublished manifesto and two separate interviews from the time (followed, of course, by contemporary criticism). Such critical attention focused on Oldenburg is well deserved; his use of hard and soft materials and dark abstractions of quotidian objects (not to mention his performances) made him a pioneer and an icon. If you’re looking for a straightforward biography or color photographs, however, you’ll have to look elsewhere—try Claes Oldenburg: Early Work published by Zwirner & Wirth. And if you’re interested developing your own insights into the work, plan to visit “Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties,” which began its international tour back in February at Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst (on view through May 28) and makes stops at the Museum Ludwig, the Guggenheim Bilbao, MoMA, and the Walker Art Center.

—Josh Parkey

Book Information:
Claes Oldenburg (October Files)
Edited by Nadja Rottner
220 pages, 50 black and white illustrations, $18.95
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2012
ISBN: 978-0-262-51693-8

Francine Koslow Miller, regular contributor to Sculpture and alumna of Brandeis University, was shocked to hear a couple of years ago that her beloved Rose Art Museum was scheduled to be shut down due to the economic crisis. Following the events that transpired since Brandeis University’s then-president, Jehuda Reinharz, announced the museum’s demise in January 2009, Miller has come out with a new book, tracing the history of the museum, how it almost shut down, and the community backlash that ultimately saved it.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the Rose Art Museum is one of those rarities among university galleries. Rather than featuring shows that rotate between work coming out of university faculty and students and lesser-known up-and-coming artists, the Rose often lends its own permanent collection to major museums. Through generous donations over the years, the Rose has accumulated works by some of the greatest contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Willem de Kooning. Needless to say, selling off this artwork would be both incredibly profitable for an economically unstable university and devastating to the local community.

In a fateful letter to the university community, Reinharz stipulated that the museum’s artworks were to be sold to cover operations costs. Yet, as Miller points out, the president somehow overlooked his own salary (over $700,000 at the time) as a part of the problem. Furthermore, after initial protests against closing the museum, Reinharz used the university’s emergency funds to hire an expensive public relations firm to try to convince people that closing the Rose was the best way to save the university from having to cut funding for certain academic departments and student scholarships. It seems that Reinharz just thought he could make some easy money by selling the collection. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t realize that the museum played an important part in the university and local art community at large.

It was quite a debacle, involving yelling, protests, lawsuits, ironic art projects, and “Save the Rose” t-shirts and buttons. In the end, though, art museum supporters prevailed. Reinharz stepped down as president, and the Rose’s unique art collection was saved from the auction block. According to Miller, the Rose will never really be the same, but there’s an important lesson to all this. Her incredibly thorough rendering will, hopefully, serve as a warning to future academic institutions that try to render the arts unimportant.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description
Cashing in on Culture: Betraying the Trust at the Rose Art Museum
by Francine Koslow Miller
Tucson, AZ: Holart Books, 2012
240 pages, $17.50
ISBN: 978-1-936102-27-3

Emery is a long-standing member of the ISC and a former ISC Board Member. This gorgeous volume celebrates the work of New Orleans native Lin Emery’s sculpture from the 1950s to her current work on view in New York and an upcoming exhibition in her home city’s Contemporary Art Center. Philip Palmedo, who also wrote a recent article on Emery’s work for Sculpture magazine, thoroughly surveys the artists career and accomplishments.

The images of Emery’s work and that of artists who inspired her are reproduced exceptionally well, giving a visual counterpoint to Palmedo’s text. There is also extensive documentation of the artist’s career at the back of the book.

Once again, Hudson Hills Press has produced a beautiful and a much needed survey of an artist’s career.

—Glenn Harper

Book Information:
Lin Emery
By Philip F. Palmedo, with an introduction by John Berendt
164 pages, 122 color plates, $60
Hudson Hills Press, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55595-369-0

Challenged  by the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands to create a work in response to Rembrandt’s most famous painting, Night Watch, Anselm Kiefer (perhaps the most famous German artist of the past several decades) produced La Berceuse (for Van Gogh), a huge installation of glass and steel that interprets Rembrandt’s painting through a lens of Van Gogh’s admiration for his predecessor.

The small book (designed by graphic artist Irma Boom) that accompanies the installation is something like an artist’s book, though generated by the museum rather than the artist alone.  The images are printed on matte paper, without the high-gloss and precision of coffee-table-printing, and the rough quality of the printing suits Kiefer’s work admirably. There are multiple details of the installation, of the Rembrandt, and of Kiefer’s other work leading up to a single image of the full installation—an image that insists on the inadequacy of the photo (and book) medium to do justice to such a complex work.

Leading us to the text by famed Dutch art historian Rudi Fuchs, printed in German and English. The text is short, informative, and not overly academic. Fuchs points out that Kiefer’s installation “is a dreamt sort of work,” and the book embodies that dream quality as well. We don’t often enough have such small books focusing on complex single works—and books that let the work primarily speak for itself.

Book Description:
Kiefer, Rembrandt, Kiefer
by Rudi Fuchs
36 pages, 24 color plates, $14.95
University of Chicago Press/Hirmer Verlag, 2012
ISBN: 978-3-7774-3831-3

Art has always had an evasive relationship with self-definition. Artists have never liked being pigeonholed into a single art movement or category and, in an attempt to prove the critics wrong, they develop styles and ideas that continually push the boundaries of definition. Never has this been truer than in what we like to call “contemporary art,” a category that itself defies definition through a slippery vagueness of terms. Not only are all styles and media included in this classification, it doesn’t even set a temporal boundary. If we take “contemporary” to mean the present and recent past, as Phaidon did for its latest survey, 25 years seems about right, so since 1986. Taking into account this dilemma of definition and categorization, Defining Contemporary Art presents a history of recent art not in the traditional style of overarching trends but as specific moments in time and the pivotal artworks that resulted.

To determine the most important works of the past 25 years, Phaidon commissioned eight world-renowned curators, each of whom picked 25 pieces to write about. Each work is presented on a two-page spread—one page for the essay and the other for images of the work—arranged in chronological order. The authors also contributed short introductory essays for each of the 25 years in question, summarizing important events in the international art world.

Their choices are sometimes obvious, sometimes confusing. I was rather taken aback, for example, at the number of Jeff Koons pieces (three) included in the volume, while Cai Guo-Qiang and Takashi Murakami are left out. Furthermore, no mention is made of the resurgence of street art, made immensely popular by the mysterious Banksy, and its acceptance into the mainstream art world. Most likely because the book was written by traditional curators, Defining Contemporary Art fails to address work created beyond the confines of the mainstream gallery/market-driven art world, despite the fact that more and more artists have been inching in that direction since the early 2000s. I would be very interested to read a similar compilation of 200 pivotal works chosen not by curators, but by artists, and see if the works perceived as pivotal from an art historical standpoint are also the ones that have most inspired present-day artists.

Limitations and omissions aside, what I found most intriguing about Defining Contemporary Art was that, although its format stresses individual works over trends, the trends cannot help but reveal themselves. According to the authors, pivotal works of the 1980s tended to address gender, sexuality, and the AIDS epidemic, often using controversial and even sensationalist means. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, visual rhetoric turned toward race and identity politics, leading to the increased popularity of video and performance art in the late-’90s. In the 2000s, the remix culture was in full swing, with artists reusing and referencing iconic people, objects, and past histories. Later in the decade, new technologies, public art installations, interventions, and interactive sculpture increased in popularity, as did works referencing the capitalist art market. In the end, by presenting the last 25 years of art in individual works, the authors leave readers to notice and make decisions about the trends themselves. In other words, readers come to discover their own definitions of contemporary art—from a curatorial perspective, that is.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:
Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks
by Daniel Birnbaum, Cornelia Butler, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enzwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans
Ulrich Obrist, and Bob Nickas
New York: Phaidon, 2012
480 pages, 800 illustrations, $75
ISBN: 9780714862095

Heroic Africans is the book form of the catalogue for an exhibition of the same title that launched at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and will travel to the Retberg Museum in Zurich later this year. The book is an amazing window on an aspect of African sculpture that is too little recognized, portraiture (in particular, portraits of famous individuals). As such, author LaGamma uses the text to explore both the meaning of the fame or significance of individuals within African cultures and the sculpture itself as an art form.

It is to her credit that she does not collapse all African cultures into one pattern. The artists, genres and traditions of the sub-continent are distinct in fact and in the book. The work ranges from a weathered stone head from two million years BCE to

bronze and terracotta heads of amazing representational clarity. In between are stylized artistic statements of familiar and unfamiliar sorts. Across these styles and the many cultures represented, there are beautiful examples of the artistic impulse and sculptural achievement. The discussion of the works solidly grounds the work in art history, cultural research, and human nature.

For those who have not been privileged to see the exhibition on which this book is based, Heroic Africans gives a thorough overview of the work. And for even those who did (or will) see the show, the scholarly and very readable text gives an excellent context through which to think about this work’s substantial visual and intellectual import.

– Glenn Harper

Book Description:
Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures
By Alisa LaGamma
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011
312 pages, $60
ISBN 978-0300175844

This week, an unconventional book review. Culture Beyond Oil is really more like a compilation of short essays and manifestos, all addressing the fact that unethical oil companies should not be allowed to sponsor cultural institutions, with BP’s ongoing sponsorship of the Tate as the point of departure. The publication is a call to arms for artists and arts administrators to remove themselves from the grasp of Big Oil.

The publication includes a wide range of short articles by artists, writers, and curators, as well contributions by a fisherman, a Native American, and other people unaffiliated with the art world. In fact, I find these voices to be most powerful. The Louisiana fisherman, for example, admits that he knows nothing of art, but that he sees the art of God in nature. Having witnessed firsthand the decimation of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, he remarks, “To have BP pour oil all over our God’s country and decimate it, is overwhelming. And then to support manmade art. It’s just wrong.”

The main problem with Culture Beyond Oil is that it is overly optimistic in its attitude toward the “purity” of the art world and in its approach to the problem. How would banning oil company contributions to the arts affect the arts organizations themselves? But, first, why does Big Oil support art anyway? The answer, as the publication rightly points out, is positive publicity. It’s a kind of covert advertising. Although people may not realize it, the fact that a certain oil company sponsors their favorite arts programming somehow seeps into their subconscious. (I remember when I was little, my parents would consistently buy their gas from Chevron, because the company sponsored PBS.) So, in a way, BP is proving itself as the “better” oil company by giving money to the Tate. It’s a brilliant business maneuver, but a company’s philanthropic gestures do not erase unethical policies and actions.

“No money is completely pure, but some funding is dirtier than others.” I realize that there are differences between the U.K., where the idea of corporate funding is not ingrained from birth, and the U.S., where dedicated lottery funds for the arts are a pipe dream, but is BP money really that much worse than Carnegie or Rockefeller money? Although the tycoons have been dead for years, their legacies have been scrubbed clean by their respective foundations’ philanthropic work. For someone who hasn’t studied history, they just seem like wealthy people who liked to build libraries, universities, music halls, and skyscrapers. The horrific truths about the Carnegie Steel Company and Standard Oil (that’s right, another oil company) have been all but forgotten. I suppose this would be one of the strongest arguments for not allowing BP to fund the Tate, so that in 50 years, the evils of the company will not be masked by its philanthropic achievements.

On the other hand, how dirty does money have to be before it’s rejected? A few weeks ago, on the radio show This American Life, an episode was dedicated to the wrongs perpetrated against workers at Chinese factories making Apple computer products. The living and working conditions are apparently appalling; they reminded me of stories I’ve read about 1930s Chicago, from the cramped dormitories and long hours to the suicides and blocked access to labor unions. And yet, if Apple were to offer any arts sponsorship, there is no way its application would be rejected on grounds of unethical business practices. This in no way excuses BP’s behavior or justifies the Tate’s acceptance of money from the company. I use it merely to point out that that big businesses that can afford to fund expensive art projects and museums are big for a reason.

The solution, then, would be to completely disentangle the arts from corporate sponsorship. But this is also impossible for several reasons. Most importantly, public funding for the arts has been falling drastically over the years all over the world. At the end of the Cold War, arts funding lost its luster for politicians, who had previously used culture as a tool of diplomacy and propaganda. Having no political use for art anymore, public funding began to dwindle. And then the economic crisis hit. But, even if national governments were still willing and able to fund the arts, this would not solve the problems of “control” over art anyway. Culture Beyond Oil consistently points out that BP’s sponsorship of the Tate gets in the way of the Tate displaying art that criticizes its sponsor. But public funding comes with its own version of censorship. Just last year, I remember that the U.S. National Portrait Gallery refused to include a work by David Wojnarowicz in an exhibition because it was too sacrilegious for taxpayer funding.

In conclusion, yes, BP, and Big Oil in general, causes too much damage to the environment and the world’s people to have the luxury of laundering its money and its name through funding the arts. On the other hand, we are only kidding ourselves if we believe that the art world can ever be or has ever been “pure,” no matter where the money’s coming from.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:
Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil
Edited by Jo Clarke, Mel Evans, Hayley Newman, Kevin Smith, and Glen Tarman
London: Art Not Oil, Liberate Tate, and Platform, 2011
95 pages, available free on-line here
ISBN: 978-0-9567365-3-6

Brian Wall, published by Momentum in 2006, is a great retrospective on the artist’s 50-plus year career (a part of which was surveyed in an exhibition at Hacket/Mill in San Francisco last fall). The book includes extensive photography of Wall’s steel structures (as well as some drawings made by Wall in the 1990s and wooden Mondrian-like boxes constructed during the 1950s when he was in St Ives).

The book includes a foreword by Suzaan Boettger. Here, the writer immediately places Wall into a context of masculinity. According to Boettger, the artist’s name conjures up “brawny” and “solid,” as do his steel structures. But contradicting this Western posture (Wall emigrated to the USA in 1972) is also a clean, open aspect of his works that is more associated with British sculpture of the period. Duality is explored further throughout Boettger’s essay. A member of the International Sculpture Center’s Board of Trustees, George Neubert was mentioned in this essay for his curatorial selection of B-1 for the Oakland Museum’s outdoor sculpture collection in 1971.

The rest of the book is devoted to Wall’s extensive career as highlighted through photographic layouts and an extensive text by Chris Stephens. The writing by Stephens (a modern British art critic who specializes in the artists of St Ives) breaks down the artist’s progression through three formative periods, St Ives, London, and California.

It is always interesting to read about an artist’s beginnings. Wall was part of the Modernist school in St Ives that included the important figures Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Peter Lanyon. Stephens writes that Wall, while new in the area in the 1950s, approached Lanyon as a stranger on the street and asked for a studio. He quickly became part of the small artists community in St Ives before moving on six years later. Stephens notes that Wall was one of the first artists to construct abstract sculpture by welding steel.

Although this book is already a few years old, it is not dated. The continuity that runs through the book’s artworks remains until its end. As Stephens points out in his last page, “So we see Brian Wall working in the San Francisco East Bay area in 2006 much as he did in West Cornwall in 1956.” The book’s interesting layout and manageable size add to the appeal of this extensive retrospective on one of contemporary sculpture’s masters. It is also notable as, perplexingly, one of relatively few writings on Wall.

–Kara Kaczmarzyk

Book Description:
Brian Wall
by Chris Stephens and Brian Wall
228 pages, illustrated throughout
Momentum, 2006
ISBN: 1902945743

Everything looks good by the sea. There’s something about the colors and contours of the waves, the shore, and the sky that provide a fantastic backdrop to any object. Even Cor-ten steel—a material that I have always found unwelcoming—takes on a certain poetic quality when juxtaposed with sky, sea, and sand. This phenomenon has undoubtedly played no small part in the success of Sculpture by the Sea over the past 15 years.

An annual temporary exhibition of public artwork, Sculpture by the Sea brings sculptors from around the world to the Bondi and Cottlesloe beaches of Australia (and now to Aarhus in Jutland, Denmark), and their works attract thousands of

visitors every year. The sculptures themselves vary greatly in materials and message. While most sit on the shore, some take to the sea—a large ball floating in the water, a steel whale tail, and my favorite, a giant red-and-white drinking straw. Interpreting the term “sculpture” in its broadest sense, Sculpture by the Sea has also included aerial works created by airplane exhaust, knitted sweaters for trees, and a performance piece in which a couple of ladies have tea on the rocky shore, accompanied by slumping mannequin-like figures sitting in the chairs across from them.

One aspect of Sculpture by the Sea that sets it apart from similar projects is the interactive nature of the exhibitions. Viewers are permitted not only to touch many of the sculptures, but also to climb on them. In fact, Sculpture by the Sea has introduced a Kids’ Choice Award, which includes climbability as one of its most important criteria.

The catalogue Sculpture by the Sea: The First Fifteen Years covers the most notable contributions to this exhibition over the years. It includes quotations from artists and organizers, as well as a brief history of how it all came into being.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description
Sculpture by the Sea: The First Fifteen Years 1997–2011
Edited by David Handley
Sydney: 21 Media Publishing, 2011
232 pages, AUS $59.95
ISBN: 978-1876624-18-7

This book, based on a posthumous exhibition presented by the Public Art Fund in New York City, surveys the three-dimensional work of Sol LeWitt, better known for Conceptual works and wall paintings. There are essays by the primary contributor, Nicholas Baume, as well as Jonathan Flatley, Rachel Haidu Anna Lovatt, Joe Madura, and Kirsten Swenson, as well as an interview that Baume conducted with the artist in 2000.

The exhibition itself was held in City Hall Park in lower Manhattan, demonstrating the relevance of Lewitt’s geometries within an urban frame. But LeWitt’s aims were always conceptual, and this book negotiates the territory between the intentions of the artist and the presence of the works in a particularly effective way.

First, the photographs are amazing, both the numerous color plates of the exhibition and the smaller number of historical images (which provide an excellent context for the show itself). Secondly, the essays provide an intellectual context vital for the understanding of the work. And though it was clear all along that the monochromatic quality of the artist’s three-dimensional work was a dominant element in his work as a whole, the bright color of the “Splotch” works gives an additional life and vibrancy to the project as a whole.

For fans of LeWitt’s sculpture, this is an essential volume. For an art history, more broadly speaking, it’s a benchmark for the presentation of a sculptor’s life work, both in  the outdoor exhibition and in the visual and scholarly elements of the book itself.

—Glenn Harper

Book Description:

Sol LeWitt: Structures 1965–2006
by Nicholas Baume
New York and New Haven: Public Art Fund and Yale University Press, 2011
192 pages, numerous color illustrations
$50 ISBN: 978-0300178616

Simply put, Martin Puryear is a high-quality art historical review of the artist’s 30-year career. This extensive catalog has a significant image collection and informative scholarly texts, is well designed, and is expertly printed by the Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of Puryear’s retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 2007. The artist’s expert treatment of wood, a trait noteworthy throughout his career, is here evident. The diversity of construction, tone, texture, structure, personality, surface, and overall effect he gives to the wood medium are astounding. Although some of Puryear’s works are likened to Minimalism or Post-Minimalism, the artist’s wide range of styles and forms are evidenced. Each sculpture in the book (as well as some early woodcuts by the artist) is distinct, new, and refreshing, and helps to make this book utterly entrancing.

John Elderfield, a curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, reveals the thematic structure of the publication early on. The book seeks to address six topics that would provide an extensive review of any sculptor. Firstly, Elderfield’s essay “Martin Puryear: Ideas of Otherness” addresses the art historical question of how sculptures “belong in and refer to the external world as well as to the artist as a subjective imaginer in the external world.” This essay discusses Puryear’s evolution through three career periods. The first period is introduced as an exploration of the origins of sculpture, and also refers to Puryear’s interests in the most basic realization of sculptural materials (with works such as Sharpened Beam or Fir Beams [Spliced Stack]). The second section of Elderfield’s essay addresses a transformative time in Puryear’s career in the early 1980s. This phase compares Puryear’s works to influences such as Surrealism, Dadaism, and Pop Art. The essay closes on an artistic period beginning in the early 1990s, when Puryear’s public commissions were expanding and he and wife Jeanne Gordon relocated to a rural setting.

Puryear’s posing of the question of “How are sculptures made and how does that making contribute to their meaning?” is discussed in a text “Artisan” by Michael Auping. The essay “Jogs and Switchbacks” by Elizabeth Reede ponders how sculptures “draw upon other works of art and artifacts, and how and to what extend to these sources speak through the work.” A conversation with the artist, by Richard J. Powell, seeks to reveal what Puryear might and might not himself want to say about his practice. The selection of color plates in the book addresses an issue so relevant to any sculpture publication, “how can sculptures, intended to be seen in three dimensions, most accurately be illustrated on the flat pages of a book?” The chronological and striking sampling of the artist’s works do reflect three dimensions through these plates. Lastly, a chronology by Jennifer Field reflects what we know about the development of the sculptor’s career.

Born in Washington, DC, Puryear joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art and Yale University. With his extensive background, Puryear incorporates themes of society, tradition, history, and identity into his works. His sculptures combine contemporary sculptural awareness with traditional techniques and unwavering skill.

—Kara Kaczmarzyk

Book Description:
Martin Puryear
By John Elderfield
216 pages, 165 illustrations
Museum of Modern Art, New York 2007
ISBN: 9780870707285

“The inexonerable, river-like forces of history have conspired to whirlpool into their own worst nightmare” says George Stolz in the catalogue Daniel Canogar: Vortices. This “nightmare,” the Great Pacific Garbage Vortex, is the subject of one of six installations by the Spanish artist for the exhibition “Vortices.” This exhibition was hosted by the Fundacion Canal, which is affiliated with Canal Isabel II, the company that manages the water supplies for Madrid.

The book includes an informative essay by Stolz, a writer and independent curator and recipient of the 2011 Arts Writers Grant through Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He expertly describes the environmental impact and historical context of the ocean’s Garbage Vortex, millions of tons of suspended plastic particulates that reach 100 feet in depth. The essay states the mass to be as large as France, or even as large as Europe. Vortex is a fitting opening to Canogar’s exhibition and catalogue, and shows humans trapped in a floating sea of plastic bottles and other garbage. All the installations in the book used repurposed materials that could easily have been floating and swirling permanently in the abyssal vortex of the Pacific Ocean.

The large, bright installations in this exhibition are recognizably Canogar’s style. Tide’s oversized perspective makes the viewer seem floating in it’s garbage-filled light box projection (in contrast to Vortex, in which we are removed onlookers). Canogar’s nod to the original found-object practitioner, artist Marcel Duchamp, is seen in the playful yet entrapping Flow. In Tajo, used plastic bottles radiate projections of the annual water consumption in the Comunidad de Madrid. Another repurposed work, Pressure, is a literal representation of hot and cold water pipes. Lastly, Drift returns to the original theme of humanity entrapped by water and waste. The exhibition and catalogue play on water’s natural force, which can sometimes be deadly. Here, mortality is trumped by human’s waste, which will survive indefinitely. Although we live in a disposable culture, moving from one technology to the next as quickly as the flow of water, Canogar reminds us that our waste does not vanish so quickly.

The brief text and manageable hardback size make this book a great addition for fans of Canogar. Stolz’s essay offers science and fact, and the book includes texts in both English and Spanish. The English texts had a few typos and clunky translations, but nothing to turn a reader away from the matter at hand.

Canogar is also the Artistic Director of VIDA, an international competition on art and artificial life. Recipient of many public art commissions, the artist was subject of a feature article by Dara Meyers-Kingsley in the June, 2011 issue of Sculpture. In January, Vortices opens at the Museum Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul.

—Kara Kaczmarzyk

Book Description:
Daniel Canogar: Vortices
(available on amazon.es)
By Daniel Canogar, George Stolz, and Cristina Ruiz Orfila
Fundacion Canal, 2011
ISBN: 9788493211981
83 pages with color photos throughout
Spanish and English text

The late Sally Hersh was a stone sculptor originally know for portrait heads but later for other forms of sculpture and for her teaching career in France and the U.K.  Her book,  finished shortly before her death, was her reaction to seeing many “how to” books on sculpture that left large gaps in the processes of carving and modeling.

The first half of the book deals specifically with carving techniques, covering a multitude of studio techniques from basic to sophisticated. The second half of the book deals specifically with modeling portrait heads (and working with the casting process once the head is modeled).

Every stage of each process is delineated carefully, with copious illustrations, and tools are described in detail. Particularly helpful in the portrait section are the illustrations showing the person whose portrait is being made, alongside the measuring and modeling of the sculpture. The carving section also includes a helpful survey of the history of stone and stone sculpture.

Though technically Practical Sculpture is only available in the U.K., there are copies being sold by Marketplace sellers on Amazon, for a price roughly equivalent in dollars to the U.K. price in pounds.

—Glenn Harper

Book Description:
Practical Sculpture: A Workshop Manual
by Sally Hersh
London: Robert Hale Limited, 2011
192 pages, over 200 illustrations
£35 – ISBN: 978-0-7090-8836-3

In Starting Your Career as an Artist: A Guide for Painters, Sculptors, Photographers, and Other Visual Artists, Parsons The New School for Design’s Angie Wojak and Stacy Miller provide advice for almost every conceivable subsection of the art world. From tips for finding good studio space to dealing with inevitable legal issues, Wojak and Miller combine their own advice with that of other professionals in the field—curators, art lawyers, gallery owners, and artists—many of them well-known and respected.

In the first chapter, an excerpt from “The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly” encourages artists to continue creating art no matter what. In fact, this is a central theme in the book as a whole: there is always a way to create art; artists should never give up and stop making things and should always be searching for worthy and rewarding alternatives to the mainstream art world. In other words, there are many different ways of being a “successful artist.” Success is not measured in money or fame, but in the feeling of personal fulfillment. Because Wojak and Miller are realists, they stress that the majority of artists will never be world-famous; a large number will have to work other jobs in order to support themselves. But all this is perfectly normal.

Wojak and Miller go out of their way to encourage the reader to seek alternatives to the mainstream art world, devoting a whole chapter to alternative spaces and stressing the positive aspects of non-traditional artistic endeavors throughout the book. They urge artists to think outside the gallery and get involved in street art and underground artist communities, even to create their own collectives. Unlike many advice publications for artists, Wojak and Miller’s book genuinely promotes such independent and unconventional artistic endeavors instead of just paying them lip service.

One of the major strengths of Starting Your Career as an Artist is its inspirational realism, something that is seldom easy to achieve. Another aspect of the book that deserves praise is its breadth—it draws attention to issues in rural as well as urban communities and addresses artists with families as well as those fresh out of art school. All in all, this is a good and practical reference book for artists to come to an understanding of the so-called “real world,” from which even the most creative individual can never truly escape.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:
Starting Your Career as an Artist:
A Guide for Painters, Sculptors, Photographers, and Other Visual Artists
by Angie Wojak and Stacy Miller
New York: Allworth Press, 2011
256 pages, $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-58115-853-3

It is a rare trait for an artwork to create an atmosphere of both whimsy and profound contemplation. Yet Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s work does just that, moving beyond generally accepted notions of “sculpture” and into what he calls “explorations of the potential of sculpture.” For instance, the One Minute Sculptures, Wurm’s best-known works, consist of people posing in odd or unusual positions (or just generally looking strange and awkward) and holding those poses for a minute, before returning to their normal routines. Some of the most famous of these mini-performance works involve sticking office supplies in a person’s nose, mouth, and ears, sitting perched atop a pole in the corner of an art gallery, and laying on top of someone on a sidewalk.

Erwin Wurm: Wear Me Out presents a number of the artist’s recent creations, including drawings and paintings, sweaters for ceilings and walls, and weird furniture created specifically for the purpose of drinking liquor. The ceiling and wall sweaters are very clever in that you can’t really tell what they are—the knit material covers the entirety of the ceiling or wall—until you notice a random sleeve hanging down or a neck hole in the corner. By far the most intriguing works, though, are the Drinking Sculptures.

The full title of these sculptures is Performative Sculptures: Drinking Sculptures, the public is invited to open the drawers, take the glasses and bottles out and drink. The piece is realized when the performer is drunk. No further explanation needed. The altered furniture pieces themselves are both clever and aesthetically pleasing. For example, a wooden 1970s desk or TV stand, turned on its side, acts as a chair, while a chest of drawers, laid flat on the floor, offers precarious accommodation (the drinker’s legs are confined within the piece up to the knees). By turning normal furniture into something else, something unexpected and sometimes deviant, Wurm plays with the dichotomies of function and dysfunction. “The reversal of functionality or the virtual 360-degree rotation, which makes the piece of furniture dysfunctional, and which then gets a function again as furniture, is like a circle which restores it. And I found this absurd rotation very amusing,” he notes in the book’s interview section. These works are not only comically interactive, but also fraught with socio-cultural connotations. Like all of Wurm’s work, they raise the question of what society perceives as “correct” and “incorrect” behavior. Sitting on or standing in upturned furniture (or sitting on artwork at a gallery) while getting drunk is incredibly taboo. In encouraging such behavior, Wurm draws attention to just how much society shapes the individual. In fact, in the interview, he refers to “so-called individuality,” implying that true individuality is impossible to achieve.

Interweaving the comically absurd with the philosophical, Wurm takes everyday life and turns it on its head. As he describes it, his work is “about the drama of the pettiness of existence.” Drawing attention to the absurdity of this pettiness, he forces us to consider our own ridiculous investment in it and in society in general.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description

Erwin Wurm: Wear Me Out
Edited by Middelheim Museum, Antwerp/Gemeentemuseum, The Hague
Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011
148 pages, 118 color illustrations, €39.80
ISBN: 978-3-7757-3218-5

Aimed generally at a high school audience, Greenwood Biographies cover a wide variety of famous figures, including Mother Theresa, Prince William, Stephen Hawking, Yo-Yo Ma, Osama bin Laden, and Paris Hilton. Needless to say, some subjects are more deserving of biographical recognition than others. Of the more than 100 published biographies, four are of visual artists: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Maya Lin.

One of the series’ newest additions, Donald Langmead’s Maya Lin: A Biography begins in 19th-century China, tracing the history of Lin’s ancestors through a convoluted and rushed political history of China. Although it is interesting to discover Lin’s roots—the ones her parents hid from her while she was growing up in Ohio—Langmead overdoes it. Lin isn’t even born until the book’s fifth chapter. Even subsequent chapters, presumably focused on the artist, seem to be much less about Lin’s life than discussions of Ohio history, Yale University, the Vietnam War, and other peripheral subjects. For a book supposedly dedicated to the life of an artist, there are astoundingly few images of Lin’s work. Even descriptions of her work are generally absent—with the exception of an almost excruciatingly detailed explanation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. According to this biography, Lin’s work appears to have reached its apex with this memorial designed while she was still in college.

In the press release for Maya Lin: A Biography, two subjects are listed under the publication information: “Primary Subject: Race and Ethnicity” and “Secondary Subject: Asian American Studies.” So the premise of the book is not to tell the story of Lin’s personal trials and tribulations and the work that resulted, but rather to use her as an example of the “Asian American experience,” or something along those lines. While this is all well and good and might make sense in the context of a teenage audience, I feel that calling the book a biography is rather misleading. “Explorations of Race and Ethnicity: Maya Lin” would have been a much more fitting title. But, even with a different title, the book still would fall short of expectations. It’s just not very well written—for a teenage audience or otherwise.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:

Maya Lin: A Biography
by Donald Langmead
Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2011
190 pages, $35
ISBN: 978-0-313-37853-9

Deborah Butterfield is a “horseygirl.” Over 100 sculptures and an explanation of “dressage” make this clear in the book Deborah Butterfield. The retrospective includes nearly 100 “self-portraits,” sculptures of horses from the artists’ career 1971-2003.

Only two sculptures in this large book show a (slightly) different subject. These, two ceramic saddles, were some of Butterfield’s earliest works, created while the artist was facing resistance from critics and peers who deemed horses as a frivolous subject matter unbefitting of fine sculpture. Butterfield’s earliest horses resemble those of the Tang Dynasty and reflect pride, freedom, and nobility.  In the book, you can watch her progression through the different materials used to compose each horse. Starting as a young artist, Butterfield first using mud, straw, and other natural materials, after which she pieced together industrial horses from found steel and aluminum. Her current technique references both methods. Since the 1990s, Butterfield has made horses first from driftwood, then by casting each piece in bronze, and finally recreating the final driftwood horse piece by piece from the cast sections. An afterword further explains the process. This afterword, which gives a basic overview of the lost wax casting process, is written in a much different tone than the rest of the book, perhaps written by someone from Walla Walla, the foundry used by Butterfield.

Robert Gordon, who has written books on such masters as Monet, Rodin, and Degas, introduces the book. Also included is an essay by “horsewoman” Jane Smiley, a formal analysis by poet and art historian John Yau, and poems by the late Vicki Hearne that “translate the world of horse-human dialogue.” Hearne passed away while working on original poems for the book, and the poems in this book were originally written by Hearne for a 1996 exhibit by the artist.

The book sticks to a consistent format – each horse gets its own page with one large, centered side-view picture. Although I would have liked to see some detail shots or alternate angles, the book’s simple, obvious layout asks the reader to look more closely at each horse. Doing so, one begins to notice subtle differences that could indicate unique characteristics, personalities, or breeds in each horse.

—Kara Kaczmarzyk

Book Description:
Deborah Butterfield
By Robert Gordon, Deborah Butterfield, and John Yau
180 pages, 75 color and 25 duotone black and white plates
Harry N. Abrams, 2003
ISBN: 0810946297

“A study of the architectural Benutzeroberfläche is an examination of people’s needs, of traditions and rituals, of the definition of spatial content, of the dimensions of space, and of those spatial elements most proximate to our bodies. It is an examination of the perception of materials, atmosphere, the visible and invisible parts of architecture; of materials, surfaces, textures, and ornament; of the light, the smell, the sound, the body of space, and its users.”

Touch Me: The Mystery of the Surface explores the Benutzeroberfläche, that curious relationship between living humans beings and the inanimate walls that we construct around us. In a conversation with architect Eberhard Tröger, professor Gregor Eichinger—who focused on the Benutzeroberfläche in architecture during his tenure at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich—explains the demands that we place on architecture and the demands that architecture places on us. Sections of the book are titled everything from “Surface and Depth” to the more unexpected “Architecture and Love” and move from subject to subject, supplying an exhaustive explanation of a very holistic ideal: “The surface tells you everything because nothing else could possibly speak to you.”

The book begins with its own surface. A bright red cloth cover with “Touch Me!” in royal blue stitching cleverly plays into the hands of its thesis. The opening quotation from The Picture of Dorian Gray, “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible,” acts as the bedrock of Eichinger’s philosophy. For Eichinger, Wilde’s quotation reminds us that “engaging with the all too familiar and with the supposedly superficial in fact reveals the whole.” Surfaces—floors, walls, furniture, and counter-tops—contain the world and that world, like any other vast and complex system, begs to be deciphered.

Eichinger is at his best, and in a way, most accessible, in the sections “The Craft, Machines, and Personality,” “Skin, Wounds, and Age,” and “Nerves, Cleanliness, and Atmosphere,” in which he talks about the now undervalued human impression on objects and buildings. Craft implies a personal rendering of energy and thought into a tangible object. The object reflects the personality of its creator. But now, as Eichinger explains, “We demand the same uniformity from craftwork that in principle only a machine can produce.” In doing so, what once represented the pinnacle of a crafter’s work—the mark of his apprized signature—is now seen as a flaw compared to the uniform anonymity of a machine-built object. Good architecture anticipates aging; it allows for surfaces—the skin—to wrinkle and mature with the experiences of time and thus produce atmosphere. Eichinger writes, “A really old bar, for example, is permeated with guests who have drank at it, who have celebrated, laughed, and wept at it. In a good bar these signs are lovingly preserved.” The tendency we have now to force such beauty marks on products from the “pre-washed” pair of jeans to the “pre-aged” dining room table to the “pre-bought” nostalgia lining the walls of a new Applebees might just reveal more about our disconnect with reality than we think.

If anything, Eichinger’s book begs us to take our surroundings seriously; he asks us to take surfaces and images quite literally for what we see them for, because that’s all there is, and it is only in recognizing them as such, that they become intelligible. At times his prose falls victim to the philosophical jargon that can befuddle most of us (“What one produces is actually the future past”), but it is relieved by the simplicity of last 70 or so pages—a collection of quotations from artists, authors, scientists, and philosophers preaching the importance and consequence of the known world, followed by photographs of the minutia of the surfaces around us: edges of tables, overhead lights, the shadows of a stairwell. The final quotation goes to Wolfgang Bauer, who writes, “How beautiful and simple is the world how joyous a life without metaphors.” Such a world of candor and wonder indeed sounds enchanting, I’m just afraid such a world might be missing this book.

—Josh Parkey

Book Description

Touch Me: The Mystery of the Surface
by Gregor Eichinger and Eberhard Tröger
Lars Müller Publishers, 2011
184 pages, 21 illustrations, $45
ISBN 978-3-03778-229-3

Victor M. Cassidy, who is a frequent contributor to Sculpture magazine, recently published a valuable series of interviews with working sculptors. The book’s subtitle aptly captures the focus of the book: conversations with working artists about their process (rather than market trends, theory, critics, lifestyle, or money).

It’s an impressive group of artists: from Chakaia Booker to Janet Echelman, Kenneth Snelson to the late Dennis Oppenheim, Lynda Benglis to Mary Miss, Willie Cole to Jene Highstein. A good number of the artists have, like the interviewer, a connection to Chicago (whether still living there or not): John Henry, Terrence Karpowicz, Anne Wilson, and others), and several (including John Henry and Chakaia Booker, as well as Jesus Moroles and Bruce Beasley) are present or former Board members of the ISC.

Cassidy set out to create this book from scratch, rather than reprinting already published interviews, and he selected artists from across the U.S. who can speak about the process of creation in lively ways.. He divides the book into 7 sections (though there’s considerable overlap in the interests of the artists across these sections): Monumental Sculptors, Indoor Sculptors, Exploring Materials, The Landscape, Clay, Community and Place, and The Last Word. Each artist is introduced by a few helpful paragraphs putting the work into context and setting up the discussion. There are also numerous black and white illustrations of the artists’ work, in addition to the small section of color photos in the middle of the book.

The focus on artists working today, and on a broad range of the many types and styles of sculpture today, gives the book a compelling presence among the books on the field. Sculptors at Work is a valuable addition to the dialogue on contemporary sculpture and is a substantial contribution to the understanding of the  processes, conditions, and perspectives of contemporary sculptors.

—Glenn Harper

Book Description:
Sculptors at Work: Interviews about the Creative Process
by Victor M. Cassidy
Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 2011
220 pages, 15 color illustrations, $40
ISBN: 978-0786463497

As I type on this keyboard, I am both amazed and dumbfounded by its inner mechanism. I use it every day yet have no idea how it works. Even if I were to take it apart, it still would not make any sense to me. We’ve reached the point where technology has exceeded the comprehension of probably about 99 percent of users. And it’s not just computers. Even the simplest of electrical appliances—say, a toaster—is apparently so difficult to fathom that it took British artist Thomas Thwaites nine months, 1,900 miles of travel, and £1,187.54 to make one “from scratch.”

At the beginning of The Toaster Project, Thwaites decides to build a toaster using only the most primitive of technologies, which means smelting his own metals and creating his own plastic casing. He buys the cheapest toaster he can find—thinking it will be the simplest to copy and reconstruct—and sets off on a wild goose chase for information and materials. On his journey, he meets an array of interesting characters (who help him with what they consider a rather strange if not ridiculous project), drags his best friend across the entirety of the U.K. looking for mines and mica deposits, and destroys a microwave in an attempt to turn it into a miniature foundry, among other things.

Over the course of the many months it takes him to gather materials and build the necessary components, Thwaites comes to the realization that there is no way he can possibly build a toaster “from scratch.” After failing—being completely unable to do things the old-fashioned way—he resorts to “cheating” by using modern technologies. Toward the end, because the toaster is for his MFA project and he is on deadline, because the nearest functioning nickel mine he can find is in a Siberian town “closed to foreigners,” and because he is quickly running out of money, he decides to melt down Canadian coins for their nickel. But this is only after he has exhausted all other possibilities, even the most naively optimistic ones.

Some of the best parts of Thwaites’s story surface in snippets of dialogue with the people to whom he turns for advice. At one point, he tries to get oil for making plastic, so naturally, he calls BP. BP: “Hello. BP press office. How can I help you?” Thwaites: “Hi , my name’s Thomas Thwaites. I’m a student at the Royal College of Art in London…I’m calling because I’m undertaking this project and I was hoping BP might be interested in getting involved. You see, I’m trying to make a toaster.” BP: “I see. And where exactly does BP fit into this?” Thwaites: “Well, the casing of a toaster is plastic…And plastic comes from oil, right?” “Err yes.” “And BP drills for oil, right?” “Yes.” “So I was wondering if I might be able to come and hop on one of your helicopters to one of your oil rigs and pick up maybe a jug of oil?” The conversation goes on like this until, finally, BP’s representative offers to check and call Thwaites back. Needless to say, BP does not provide Thwaites with any oil. He never gets a call back either.

In the end, Thwaites is able to build a toaster, but it’s too hot to touch, some of the plastic casing melts off, and it warms bread rather than toasting it. But, close enough. The toaster story is incredibly entertaining and well-written, but as Thwaites himself mentions in his conclusion, the entire project and resulting book were never about making toast: “My attempt to make a toaster has shown me just how reliant we all are on everyone else in the world. Though there’s romance in the idea of self-sufficiency and living off the land, there’s also absurdity. There is no turning back the clock to simpler times—not without mass starvation anyway. Besides, the majority of the world is still trying to turn the clock forward.”

Although I still find it strange and sometimes disturbing just how little I know about the objects I use every day, in a way it is comforting to know that we have to work together as a society. Thinking that earlier, simpler times were also better undermines the achievements of the present era. If we all had to make our own toasters, not only would we be broke, we’d also be spending precious time thinking about how to mine and smelt metals and create plastics rather than creating new things, philosophizing about life, or just enjoying some free time. Sharing new ideas and technological advances with each other in order to progress together is what sets us apart from the animal world. So even if I don’t have a clue as to how my keyboard works, I can take comfort in the knowledge that, should something go wrong with it, I can quickly find someone who does.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:
The Toaster Project or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch by Thomas Thwaites
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011
192 pages, 143 color illustrations, $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-56898-997-6

First an inventor and entrepreneur, Daniel A. Henderson has in the last four years produced a portfolio of contemporary sculpture.  His multi-ton marble sculptures depict technological advances through the ages. In doing so, Henderson explores technology’s impact on humanity. Henderson says, “Invention, like sculpture, is an artistic endeavor. Although the two disciplines utilize different mediums of expression, both share the ability to affect our perception and how we interact.”

The Art of Invention: Sculpture by Daniel A. Henderson accompanies an exhibition at Southern Oregon University’s Schneider Museum of Art that looks at the impact of the digital age through works by Henderson, Brett Phares, and Shaurya Kumar. The book’s familiar title places Henderson’s works within a broader design context and references publications including The Art of Invention: The Creative Process of Discovery and Design by Steven J. Paley and the older and comprehensive The Art of Invention: Patent Makers and Their Models. In 64 pages, Henderson’s The Art of Invention provides extensive information on each of the exhibition’s eight works. Every sculpture features up to seven pages of illustration and an accompanying text. These texts mention movies from the 1950s–60s to highlight the nostalgic aspects of Henderson’s creations.

The lavish materials used by Henderson do justice to their forms. In Fossil Fuel, Henderson makes an antique gasoline pump from Black Moroccan fossil marble  and French Rouge du Roi marble mimics a Bakelite radio in Marconi. The polished marble highlights the beauty and artistic design in functional instruments such as rotary phones and Viewmasters. By making these instruments oversized, nonoperational, and permanent, Henderson removes the object’s functionality so all that remains is the form.  Some sculptures in the book evoke nostalgia for an older era, while others weigh upon the mind as reminders of the undesired costs of technological advances. Brick, for example, looks to a physically unattractive beginning to the era of disposable, ever-changing cell phones. Henderson wants his works to spur conversation about technology. While new media art and digital art forms manipulate modern technology, Henderson manipulates classical materials such as marble and bronze to create silhouettes of modern technological forms. I think that juxtaposed with contemporary new media art, Henderson’s forms elicit the most reaction.

The artist has an extensive resume. He worked with Nobel Laureate Jack Kilby (inventor of the computer chip) and the late Japanese inventor Dr. Kazou Hashimoto (who held over 1,000 patents). Currently the president of Intellect Wireless and Pinpoint Incorporated, Henderson donated his prototype wireless picturephone and other components of a Portable Electronic Devices Documentary Collection to the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.

Henderson does not stress his extensive knowledge of mobile and communications technologies through his sculptures. Although his works are often exhibited with other digital artists in addressing the societal impacts of technology, Henderson’s fabrication techniques bring him into another category of “digital artists.” These artists use CAD (computer aided design) technologies in combination with traditional stone carving techniques. Artists Kenneth Snelson, Jon Isherwood, Robert Michael Smith, and Bruce Beasley were highlighted for these techniques in a recent exhibition that toured China entitled the “Digital Stone Exhibition.” These artists, Henderson, and others are also part of the Beijing Tomorrow Art Gallery, which promotes itself as “the first and only art gallery within China dedicated solely to the promotion of Western Digital Arts.” Within the broad and eclectic “digital arts” movement, Henderson’s simple forms are easily accessible.The Art of Invention is currently on view at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

– Kara Kaczmarzyk

Book Description:

The Art of Invention: Sculpture by Daniel A. Henderson
By Robert C. Morgan, Dominique Nahas
64 pages, 24 color illustrations
Schneider Museum of Art, 2010
ISBN: 0615388175

Hailing from Louisiana and now a resident New Yorker, Margaret Evangeline isn’t afraid to tackle an array of difficult subjects using “aesthetically resistant” materials. Her first monograph, Margaret Evangeline: Shooting Through the Looking Glass, demonstrates the breadth of her work and the various influences that inspired it. To create Gunshot Landscape, perhaps her most talked about work, she shot stainless steel panels with a rifle in New Mexico and then hung them in the forest in upstate New York (she also set them afloat in the River Thames and inside galleries and homes). She believes that the stainless steel surfaces “resemble extensive space (as opposed to deep space)” and that “the bullet hole opens on to deep space.” Indeed, the effect is startling: the forest is reflected, obscured, and somehow amplified by the punctured mirror. Evangeline saw Gunshot Landscape as cathartic art at a time when she most needed it—at an artist-in-residency program that housed New York artists after 9/11. Such expository details make Margaret Evangeline: Shooting Through the Looking Glass an insightful look into her life and work.

Other notable works by Evangeline include eXile, a video of a woman in stilettos stomping on bullet cases, and a site-specific, abandoned New Orleans shack that she painted blue, wrote “(AMERICA)” in a bold yellow across the front, and filled with river dirt from the 7th Ward. The stimuli that spark her colorful abstract works range from the Japanese tradition of mending porcelain to a Marie Tussaud wax figure of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV. As Edward Lucie-Smith writes in the introduction, “[Evangeline’s] work is essentially a continuous flow of associations and ideas. It combines great matters and small ones.” It also involves physical and conceptual play and a lawless—I can do anything—attitude from the artist. The conversation between Evangeline and art critic Dominique Nahas takes the reader further into Evangeline’s mind and personality—how her works revolve around her sense of place and her need to be close to a river. Such nuances are picked up throughout the book and reveal an artist deeply attuned to what’s around her, unafraid to use a variety of mediums. She puts it best when she says, “It’s all about what the body knows, not just logic. And that’s a point of view of mine, more like an act of faith.”

—Josh Parkey

Book Description:

Margaret Evangeline: Shooting Through the Looking Glass
Charta Books Ltd., New York City, 2011
160 pages, 161 color illustrations, 47.50$
ISBN: 978-88-8158-808-4

I remember first seeing Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune, Stage One at a party just after the opening of the newly remodeled Seattle Art Museum in 2007. I thought the flipped and rolled cars suspended from the museum’s ceiling and radiating flashing neon lights perfectly matched the atmosphere created by the buzz of chatter and the DJ’s continuous beats. At the time, I had no idea who the artist was or that these cars were meant to simulate a car bomb going off, yet I liked the installation for its eye-catching originality.

Cai would go on to a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2008. The same year, another Asian artist, Takashi Murakami, had his first solo show in New York at the Brooklyn Museum. According to the Asia Society Museum’s Melissa Chiu and art critic Benjamin Genocchio, these two exhibitions marked a turning point in the perception of “Asian art” in the West. Asian contemporary art in the West was finally on the same level as work created in Europe and the U.S. Or at least that’s what Chiu and Genocchio would have us believe.

Through a series of essays categorized both by theme and chronologically, Contemporary Art in Asia traces the historical discourse of Asian art since the 1990s. The breadth of topics, authors, regional studies, and viewpoints could not be better curated. Starting with the question of what “Asian” means and ending at the increasingly globalized notion of the avant-garde, discussions of politics and culture interweave those of contemporary art.

One essay that I found particularly interesting (and timely) was art critic Lee Weng Choy’s “Biennale Demand” (2008). Lee’s main contention is that biennales have historically been used to showcase non-Western contemporary art, often being the only prominent outlet for its presentation. Lee uses the word “demand” in both the sense of demand for more biennales and non-Western art in general and the demand which biennales as exhibitions and institutions make upon their audiences. In other words, what is the viewer supposed to take away from a biennale? Lee points out that because biennales are inevitably organized by nation, they create the problem of perceiving ethnicity as geography, or “ethnogeography.” (This should come as no surprise. After all, the first biennales roughly coincided with both the first world expos and the revival of the Olympics—all of which were manifestations of the rise of the nation-state in the late-1800s.)

I find the issue of “ethnogeography” a particularly interesting topic of discussion, as it is relevant not only to biennales and other international festivals and competitions, but also to the question of what the word “Asian” actually means. Is it a geographic connotation, and if so, is Russia “Asian”? What about New Zealand? If it’s more a historical category—as champions of postcolonial theory would argue—what of Thailand, a country that was never colonized by the European powers? Or China and Japan, historically colonial powers themselves? And in the art world, is “Asian contemporary art” that much different from other continents’ contemporary art, especially if one considers diaspora communities?

This brings me back to Cai and Murakami. How “Asian” are they really? If someone who had never heard of them were to see their art, would it be recognized as “Asian”? And, more importantly, does this really matter? I would argue that in Cai’s case, his artwork has more of an international or cosmopolitan feel to it and, although his culture and upbringing no doubt influence his work, it is not immediately recognizable as “Asian.” As for Murakami, because his work is inspired by manga and Edo (two styles instantly identifiable as Japanese), the viewer might assume the artist to also be Japanese. But the question remains, is Murakami’s art also “Asian” or just Japanese?

Now to the second question: Does all this really matter? In a sense, it only matters that finally non-Western contemporary artists are receiving a much-deserved recognition in the West, which is always positive. To what extent these artists are pandering to Western tastes is a more convoluted issue. After all, even Murakami’s unmistakable “Japaneseness” is also inspired by Andy Warhol and endorsed by Louis Vuitton and Kanye West. As for Cai, interviewers from the West are constantly pestering him with questions of dissidence and politics in contemporary China—questions he often leaves unanswered. In the end though, the concept of “Asia” seems to be a lot more important to those living outside than within its supposed boundaries. This, I would argue, is why Chiu and Genocchio are a bit overly optimistic when they imply that Asian art is now on the same level as European and American art in the West. As long as the West (including myself) continues to see contemporary art coming out of Asia as “Asian” and not just generally as contemporary art, the discrepancy will keep Asian artists in a separate-and-inherently-unequal category. We’re slowly getting there, and 2008 was a great year for contemporary artists from Asia, but we have quite a ways to go before we see the “Asian” naturally dissolve from the Western category of “Asian contemporary art.”

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description

Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader
edited by Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011
320 pages, 38 illustrations, $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-262-51623-5

Thomas Houseago, whose works draw reference to Star Wars, cartoons, rock album covers and numerous art movements including Futurism, Modernism, Cubism, and Minimalism, as well as the Renaissance, has quickly become a recognizable figure in contemporary art. The book What Went Down accompanies Houseago’s first major solo exhibition in a UK public gallery, at Modern Art Oxford.

What Went Down, Houseago’s first monograph, effectively confirms the artist’s public significance. Essays written by Rudi Fuchs, previous director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Lisa Le Feuvre, head of sculpture studies at the Henry Moore Institute, provide an art historical perspective on his works. A conversation between Houseago and Modern Art Oxford Director Michael Stanley gives some insight into the artist’s processes. The book’s images, some vibrantly extending to the edge of the large (over one-foot tall) heavy-stock pages, portray Houseago’s over-scaled plaster, wood, and bronze creations in larger-than-life splendor (or at least to the extent possible in a book recreation of his large-scale forms).

The layout of What Went Down is especially interesting. Pages of monotone crouching plaster figures (the vast majority of works in the book were created from 2007–2010) are intersected with frightening close-ups of the creatures that occupy Houseago’s powerful, fantastical world (the detail shot of Quake Mass, for example, is breath-taking). Many of the book’s standard frontal photographic images are complemented by a side or back view that reveals unfinished, exposed, or two-dimensional features unique in Houseago’s sculptures. Midway through the book is a section of artists’ drawings. Printed on a higher tooth, matte paper, these reproduced working sketches highlight the artistic process—which are a significant aspect of Houseago’s works—and are an intriguing addition to What Went Down.

Some reviews of Houseago’s works criticize the artist for being too referential to the history of modern art, and Fuchs’s essay addresses the tendency for the viewer to immediately look for a way to contextualize new, startling works in order to fit into an understood artistic landscape. Le Feuvre’s essay, “Problems of Things and Objects,” complements Fuchs’s nicely. At its close, she perfectly summarizes the humor and intrigue that resonate with sculptures that “force art history out of art history, leaving it dirty, awkward, and new.”

On October 23rd, the three-destination exhibition What Went Down will close at its final venue, the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière in France.

–Kara Kaczmarzyk

Book Description:

Thomas Houseago: What Went Down
by Thomas Houseago, Lisa Le Feuvre, Rudi Fuchs, and Michael Stanley
240 pages, illustrated throughout, $70
Modern Art Oxford/Lund Humphries, 2011
ISBN: 1901352501

Kevin O’Callaghan is a character, to say the least. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts with a degree in advertising in 1982, he showed up to his first job interview with a giant Oldenburg-esque sculpture of a portfolio on a trailer hitched to his car. When asked whether he had brought his portfolio with him, O’Callaghan drew the interviewer’s attention out the window and across the street, where he had parked his colossal briefcase. Driving around with a giant portfolio, O’Callaghan became a known oddity in New York City. People magazine even did a two-page spread on him.

After finding his calling, O’Callaghan—usually in collaboration with his 3-D design students at the School of Visual Arts—has gone on to created numerous large-scale sculptures and sculptural projects, both public and commercial. Oftentimes the art is functional and interactive. For example, in one assignment, O’Callaghan had his students adapt discarded Yugo cars into something more useful. Jude Dominique made his car into a shower, covering the outside with blue tiles, putting a towel rack on the bumper, turning the side mirror into a toothbrush holder, and cutting a hole through the roof to make room for a working shower. As O’Callaghan remembers, “Every day, Jude Dominique would take a shower in his car, and soon he became a Yugo celebrity. There was a sign that read ‘Jude will shower at 8:30 a.m.’ and people would come and talk with him about the car as he washed.” O’Callaghan’s most honorable quality is that he not only gives his students credit where it’s due, but he also remembers in great detail who did which project and even a few anecdotes about the process. He clearly sees his role as an artist as collaborative rather than self-interested—an attitude that distinguishes him from artists like Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, who reply on other people’s skills without acknowledging them.

The nature of O’Callaghan’s projects is also commendable. He and his students frequently re-use and transform throw-away, broken, and useless objects. Apart from the Yugos, he has also employed typewriters, phone booths, M16 assault rifles, gas masks, and my personal favorite, a monster truck, which became a living room-type space. The most amazing part of the monster truck project was student Joseph Pastor’s fully functional washer/dryer made from the truck’s roof. As acts of creative recycling, these projects fall into the category of green sculpture. Furthermore, the materials have their own inherent meaning, whether it be technology and nostalgia (phone booths, Yugos, and typewriters), the environment and machismo (the monster truck), or war and violence (M16s and gas masks). The use of pop-culture references and display in public venues allows O’Callaghan to reach a wider audience.

This brings me to the one flaw in all of these projects. They lack any relevance to the sites in which they are displayed. Often they tour train stations, where they are set up in a large hall with some sort of canvas backdrop behind each one, setting it in its “natural environment.” (For example, the backdrop behind a Yugo-turned-giant-accordion is an old photograph of accordion players.) Another problem with these works is that they are all fairly safe. Although they are interesting to look at, they are not the kind of works that inspire you to go home and ponder their meaning—with the possible exception of the M16s and gas masks. O’Callaghan’s more commercial projects, done for MTV, AMC, and Twisted Sister, have a complete lack of depth, and a couple are downright tasteless—for example, the MTV Latin music award designed as a shrine housing a votive candle.

In an attempt to cover as much of O’Callaghan’s work as possible, Monumental gives each individual project a short introduction by art writer/editor Deborah Hussey, followed by a series of images captioned by O’Callaghan. The captions are so descriptive and well written that I wonder whether the introductory paragraphs are needed at all. On an editorial note, there are a disproportionate number of typos for such a small amount of text. All in all, though, Monumental succeeds in presenting a large portion of O’Callaghan’s projects, his captions are informative and intriguing, an introduction written by one of his former students is illuminating, and the number and quality of images are great. If nothing else, Monumental is a great book to flip through and show your friends.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description
Monumental: The Reimagined World of Kevin O’Callaghan
by Deborah Hussey
New York: Abrams, 2010
240 pages, 300 full-color illustrations, $40
ISBN: 978-0-8109-8953-5

Edited by David Hurlston and published by Yale University Press, Ron Mueck offers the first exhaustive look into the life and work of the Australian artist who shocked the contemporary art world in 1997 with his all too real sculpture Dead Dad—a frail, shrunken, ghastly portrayal of his father lying supine and naked on the floor. Dead Dad, although just a small, solitary figure, evokes large, universal concerns; he looks like what someone (your father, his father, you) would look like naked and dead without the dramatics of splayed blood or the euphemism of funeral dress. He appears discarded and forgotten, his death banal. Remaining in his presence quickly becomes uncomfortable.

Then there’s Pregnant woman. Quite the opposite of Dead Dad, this woman is full of life. Her arms folded over her head, she looks down with her eyes closed and her mouth partly opened; she’s breathing. But much like Dead Dad, she’s naked, exposed, and out of context. At eight feet tall, her muscles and flesh tower over viewers. Still, Mueck didn’t forget the details that make her human, such as an armpit mole and clenched buttocks supporting newfound weight. But a pregnant woman shouldn’t be so isolated, amplified, and bare—it’s somehow inappropriate and too intimate.

David Hurlston calls this effect the “voyeuristic awkwardness” that viewers experience when confronting Mueck’s portraits. Take Man in a boat: a blanched, naked man with a tired pink flush around his eyelids, neck strained, face concerned and inquisitive as he sits in a raised wooden boat without oars. You look at him, and the embodiment of abandonment stares back. As Craig Raine writes in his essay, “This isn’t Everyman. He’s a particular bloke.” Indeed, the proliferating details in Mueck’s figures work in unity to convey a particular person experiencing a particular emotion at a particular time. It’s a powerful device, and it gives his sculptures life and thus agency to captivate—however disturbing that might be.

Mueck is an accomplished craftsman. Before he became an independent artist, he made puppets for an Australian children’s television program and later worked on a few Jim Henson productions. It was his mother-in-law, painter Paula Rego, who recognized his gift of instilling sculptures with life when she watched him create a realistic dragon on the beach using nothing but sand. She then requested that he construct a figure of Pinocchio for her in 1996. A year later, Mueck debuted at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in the controversial exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.” He’s been crafting sculpture for sculpture’s sake ever since.

In this volume, art experts and scholars respond to individual Mueck works. Some essays are more erudite than others. For example, Raine, in his short essay on Man in a boat, cites Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Pascal, T.S. Eliot, Borges, Moses, Rembrandt, and Leopold Bloom from Ulysses, as if he just finished studying for a humanities final. Ted Gott’s essay on Wild man summarizes the history of the bearded, libidinous Other. That said, all of the essays—even Raine’s and Gott’s, which are really meditations on reading—are deeply personal and help illuminate and, in some cases, ease the private thoughts and feelings evoked by Mueck’s works.

A generously illustrated book, Ron Mueck presents multiple views of every work discussed. The detailed photograph of Woman with sticks that wraps around the cover introduces readers to Mueck’s remarkably nuanced hyper-realism before they even open the book. Photographs of museum-goers confronting these uncanny sculptures demonstrate how Mueck plays with scale: a woman peers down across her shoulder at a larger-than-life newborn baby in A girl, and another looks up at a much smaller man wearing swim trunks and sunglasses like a middle-aged Ben Braddock in Drift. The book also offers a catalogue raisonné, which makes it a truly comprehensive and indispensable companion to one of contemporary sculpture’s most honest and ingenious artists.

—Josh Parkey

Book Description:

Ron Mueck
edited by David Hurlston
190 pages, illustrated throughout, $30
Yale University Press in association with the National Gallery of Victoria
ISBN: 978-0-300-17683-4

The first comprehensive survey of the artist, Gloria Kisch: Fusion of Opposites clearly chronicles Gloria Kisch’s works through four essays and images from her three major periods, divided by her time in Venice CA, SoHo, and the Hamptons. Titled from a review by late ARTnews critic Melinda Wortz, the publication highlights the opposite forces of primordial nature and urban life as present throughout the artist’s extensive career.

A foreword by Santa Barbara Museum of Art Chief Curator Ronald Andrew Kuchta situates Kisch within a naturalistic “spirit world” that is revisited during a pivotal 2002 move to 3Ponds, the artist’s current home, studio, and gallery space on a Long Island wildlife refuge. Recurring throughout the book’s essays are exotic influences gleaned through travels to foreign locations including Asia, the Amazon, and Africa, in addition to influences from the urban environments in which Kisch has spent the majority of her career. The second essay, “Upright… The Height and Depth of Gloria Kisch” by the late Arlene Raven, transports us to a cavernous basement in lower Manhattan that was the artists early studio during the 1960s. In Raven’s essay, the opposing forces already present in Kisch’s early career are likened to artists such as Robert Smithson and Nancy Graves, who used structured systems and sacramental sites to address contemporary life.

The sentiments reflected in each essay closely mirror the images in Gloria Kisch: Fusion of Opposites. The first section, “California 1967-1980,” opens with bold colors and striking geometries of an early tribal painting series. Following the black and white photographs of works from the other early paintings and sand sculpture, a colorful environments series begins the organic depictions that continue through Kisch’s more contemporary portfolio. The “SoHo New York” section opens with colorful sculptures created in the mid-1980s, followed by sculpture that is more typically in unpainted metal, up to 1996. A small sculpture series, from the period 1991–1995, and “Endangered Species 1993–1995” present us with animalistic, primeval depictions that are immediately contradicted by the following section, “Functional Sculpture 1989-2008,” which show sharp, architectural forms via benches, chairs, and other anthropomorphic creations. Fusing the two opposites are the following sections, showing her work of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

After the essay “Gloria Kisch in Six Dimensions,” by John Perreault, which boldly asserts Kisch as a unique sound sculptor, the final section, “3Ponds Riverhead,” includes views of Kisch’s outdoor sculpture, reminding the reader of Kuchta’s introductory foreword. Reading the next essay, “Onward and Upward: The Reeds of Gloria Kisch” by Suzanne Ramljak (former editor of Sculpture magazine), brings a greater understanding of the artists evolution, now informed by the book’s previous 150 pages. The last essayist in the book, Ramljak draws parallels between the series “Reeds” and the artist herself, both with an assertively determined underlying nature. Blatantly positive, “Reeds” assert bright expectations and a will to carry on.

Although there are later sections featuring several other related series, Ramljak’s consideration of the “Reeds” makes a natural conclusion to the publication, declaring Kisch as an artist who after an extensive career casts away contemporary trends in order to follow her own vision.

—Kara Kaczmarzyk

Book Description:
Gloria Kisch: Fusion of Opposites
by Gloria Kisch, Ronald Andrew Kuchta, Arlene Raven, John Perreault, and Suzanne Ramljak
216 pages, illustrated throughout, $50
American Image Books, 2009
ISBN: 1584181583

Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumè is best known for taking jerrycans—colorful containers used to transport gasoline—and transforming them into human likenesses reminiscent of African tribal masks. Romuald Hazoumè, a new exhibition catalogue published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, covers not only these “masks,” but also a good deal of the artist’s other projects. Because the catalogue documents the first solo exhibition of an African artist at IMMA, it covers the full breadth of Hazoumè’s work, including paintings and drawings, photography, sound installations, and video art.

The genius behind Hazoumè’s projects lies in his ability to imagine the humanization of inanimate objects. In one particularly memorable anecdote, he is said to have added a piece to one of his shows at the very last minute. While at the curator’s house ironing out the final details, he suddenly noticed a blue-and-yellow-striped watering can. He picked it up, turned it sideways, revealing its likeness to a human face, and declared that this would be the final piece in his show. Hazoumè fittingly named his new piece after the original owner of the watering can, curator Felix Valk.

Falling somewhere between readymade and found object sculpture, Hazoumè’s masks are not only incredibly imaginative but also deeply symbolic. The fact that most of them are made from jerrycans in and of itself makes a statement about the importance of oil in Benin (and around the world). Zemi (1997), one of the masks featured in the catalogue, clearly displays the Texaco symbol on its cheek, like an imprint or a brand. This ironic meeting of traditional mask-making and big oil represents the postcolonial realities of West Africa in general and of Benin specifically.

Hazoumè’s everyday life is as fascinating as his work. He lives in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city, but has his studio in the capital city of Porto-Novo, about an hour to the north. Between the two cities, he travels a route littered with vendors selling goods of all kinds on the side of the road—much of their merchandise the product of illegal smuggling. This artery passes close to the Nigerian border: Nigeria being an oil-rich country (and Benin not), there is an overwhelming prevalence of gasoline smuggling. People ride their bikes to Benin with at least 10 full jerrycans carefully strapped to every conceivable part of their bodies and their cycles, returning with empty cans the following day. Hazoumè takes his creative inspiration from sights like these on his daily commute.

Interpretations of Hazoumè’s jerrycan sculptures range from sending “rubbish” reconstructed as art back to the West, from whence it originally came, to the global dependence on oil. Of the contributors to this catalogue, Seán Kissane, senior curator at IMMA, has the most intriguing thoughts on the subject. Although his analogy to the Orwellian idea of “doublethink” is a little far-fetched, he keenly points out that oil’s rise to the rank of most consequential natural resource occurred in tandem with the development of European ideas of primitivism, making Hazoumè’s jerrycan tribal masks all the more relevant to Beninese as well as European, and even global, culture. Kissane’s leading argument is that the masks are “Janus-faced,” looking to the past while simultaneously projecting into the future.

He compares Hazoumè’s work to that of Yinka Shonibare, MBE, the British-Nigerian artist famous for his use of Dutch wax-printed fabrics. Like Shonibare, Hazoumè takes a Western product that has become somehow representative of West Africa and reconfigures it, turning its perceived significance completely on its head. At the same time, though, I am not entirely convinced of the artists’ similarities. While Shonibare is a darling of the West—most recently having created a sculpture for the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square—Hazoumè creates work that is much more raw and, in a certain sense, more personal. The similarities that Kissane points out seem to be based on little more than shared West African cultural histories. In fact, if one were to consider Hazoumè and Shonibare in concert with Jac Leirner, a Brazilian artist, the same parallels could be drawn. All three artists transform Western products. (Leirner’s strung-up, empty packs of Marlboros could be interpreted as projecting a similar significance as Hazoumè’s jerrycans and Shonibare’s Dutch wax.) The main problem here is that many art critics—especially those in the West—tend to over-generalize about work coming from the former colonies. Thinking of non-Western artists not as individuals, but instead as a somehow coherent postcolonial collective, is a hurdle we in the West must strive to overcome.

Perceptions of non-Western art aside, Romuald Hazoumè is a very complete and enlightening catalogue, whose greatest strength is its insightful examination of the intersections linking Beninese history, Hazoumè’s personal life and work, and the present-day realities in postcolonial states. There is no question as to the creativity of Hazoumè’s sculpture. As for its inherent meaning, the artist brilliantly leaves it up to us to decide.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description
Romuald Hazoumè
by Enrique Juncosa, Seán Kissane, Gerard Houghton, Yacouba Konatè, and André Magnin
Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2011
160 pages, illustrated throughout, $40.00
ISBN: 978-1-907020-52-0

 

Jac Leirner in Conversation with Adele Nelson marks the third installment of a series of bilingual conversations (Spanish/English) with prominent Latin American artists published by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC). The series aims to enhance appreciation of the exciting, albeit often over-looked, world of contemporary Latin American art through first-hand accounts of an artist’s life and work. Jac Leirner, who grew up in São Paulo, feels like a natural choice for this series, and the riveting conversation that ensues between her and art historian Adele Nelson does not disappoint.

In his introduction, Robert Storr, current Dean of the Yale School of Art, confesses that 20 or so years ago, before his first trip to Brazil, his “awareness of abstract art from South America was sketchy at best,” and his “ignorance of conceptual art on the continent was nearly total.” (Of course, he wasn’t alone; few American critics and art historians ventured into such unknown territory at the time.) That said, Storr returned to his post as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with Leirner’s Pulmão—a work composed of 1,200 empty packs of Marlboro Reds smoked by the artist, then disassembled, re-arranged, and strung together on a polyurethane cord. He also returned as a torchbearer for the mission and spirit behind this book series, spreading the word about the conceptual and technical sophistication of a rising Latin American artist.

Born into a family of artists, art critics, and dealers, Leirner didn’t care for collecting art, instead she focused on collecting things. As she says, “I don’t buy. I just search for language.” She has spent her life turning uninspiring “things” into iconic works: in addition to Pulmão’s cigarette packs, there are the business cards given to her throughout her life that form Fol um prazer (Nice to meet you) and the collected bumper stickers on glass of Adesivo 44 (Adhesive 44). 144 Museum Bags is exactly like it sounds— mounted and stuffed plastic bags from museum gift shops.

It’s truly baffling how Leirner manages to uncover poetry in such banal objects. Poets tend to stretch upward for that one perfectly transcendent word, while Leirner reaches into the trash over and over again. She makes a year’s worth of empty envelopes (To and From) rise and fall like a wave, then open up in individual, dynamic shapes. She has a rare ability to see the tiniest spark of defiance, personality, and storytelling in the mundane—even in the graffiti on hundreds of banknotes in a time of hyperinflation (Os cem [The One-Hundreds]). Then she lets her formal skills take over so that, as Starr writes, the quotidian object’s “inherent absurdity or beauty becomes visible and its inherent meaning becomes apparent.” Nelson calls this trait in “discovering transgression,” but it’s a subtle transgression—the type of measured rebellion to be expected from an artist who played bass in a punk band in her early 20s while still holding on to a love of classical music. Leirner recognizes the latent power in crude forms but has the vision to transform them into something provocative, sophisticated, and stunning.

Her most recent works have been reimaginings of older works, as she keeps finding new ways of dealing with old materials. For instance, she’s returned to the plastic bags, this time cutting out their centers and removing their names. It’s her way to “keep thinking art.” While Leirner strives to avoid autobiographical representation, her materials—taking on a second life as art, once their functional duty is fulfilled—embody a sense of one person’s wasted time: cigarettes smoked, bags emptied, dollars spent. Each work comes with its own previous life, its own story. It’s this implied action that I find so fascinating; it’s as if Leirner can’t stop thinking art.

The Spanish half of Jac Leirner in Conversation with Adele Nelson reads just as clearly as the English side. The conversation—originally conducted in a mix of English and Portuguese—reads like an autobiography. Nelson, a specialist in modern and contemporary Brazilian art, knows Leirner and her work (as well as her influences) intimately; her lucid and concise questions gently lead from one work to the next, one artistic phase to another, without wandering off topic or aimlessly dipping into previously discussed subjects. With thick paper and detailed, full-color photographs, the craftsmanship of this volume cannot be overlooked. Nelson’s italicized expository sections, accompanied by helpful footnotes, further reinforce the CPPC’s mission to bring interesting, though-provoking Latin American artists to a broader, uninitiated audience. For that, we thank them.

—Josh Parkey

Book Description:

Jac Leirner in Conversation with/en Conversación con Adele Nelson
Series editor: Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, essay by Robert Storr
New York: Fundación Cisneros, 2011
200 pages, $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-9823544-4-5

I can’t think of a more suitable artist for a pop-up art book than M.C. Escher. In M.C. Escher Pop-Ups, Courtney Watson McCarthy, a graphic designer and “paper engineer” based in upstate New York, presents a handful of Escher’s most well-known pieces, transforming them—in as much as it’s possible—into three-dimensional objects. Because Escher himself based his work on a “dissatisfaction with the two dimensions of the flat paper,” this progression seems only natural.

While I was very excited at first about M.C. Escher Pop-Ups, as I looked more closely, I realized that something of the impossible perspectives and tessellations—those illusions that take form and escape from the drawings—is lost in the translation into three-dimensional pieces. I found myself searching for the originals on-line in order to get an idea of how exactly they appeared. The simple fact is that rendering Escher’s drawings into three dimensions dissolves the magic of their impossible reality. It’s almost as if, in order to preserve the spirit of the originals, the three-dimensional representations would have to somehow depict an unobtainable fourth dimension.

This is not at all to say that McCarthy fails to capture the essence of Escher’s works. In fact, she very creatively constructs the iconic brainteasers, using different pop-up techniques to fit individual pieces. Her rendering of Other World, for example, is very innovative, in that she creates a three-dimensional whole out of a drawing of views of an impossible whole. All in all, M.C. Escher Pop-Ups is a thoroughly enjoyable book. As far as three-dimensional renderings of Escher drawings are concerned, they are equally as impossible as the drawings themselves.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:

M.C. Escher Pop-Ups
by Courtney Watson McCarthy
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011
16 pages, 10 illustrations, $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-500-51590-7

According to Erika Doss, professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the U.S. has a historical obsession with monumentalizing and memorializing important events and people. Toward the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, this fixation focused on statues and monuments. Over time, with multiple viewpoints of the same history becoming more and more welcomed in the public eye, these monumental statues morphed into abstract or utilitarian memorials. Yet the cultural obsession with the physical actualization of official memory remains.

In Memorial Mania, Doss divides her in-depth analysis of the nature of public memory into the five emotional states that today’s memorials seek to address: grief, fear, gratitude, shame, and anger. For each emotional category, she chooses a handful of exemplary monuments, explaining their artistic and sociological relevance. Doss claims that grief is best represented in temporary memorials of teddy bears and cards left at sites of car crashes, explosions, and random acts of violence. Fear is best exemplified by several recent 9/11 memorials, in which victims are proclaimed martyrs and a nationalistic solidarity rises against an elusive or intangible enemy. Gratitude can be seen in the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC, with its emphasis on military apotheosis and victory over “the forces of evil.” Shame appears in memorials to Native Americans, African Americans, and other minority groups deeply wronged by society. Anger represents a smaller and more peripheral category, which includes vandalism to monuments and memorials considered inappropriate—like those to Conquistadors or Columbus, for example.

While Doss’s analysis of these categories and the memorials that fit into them is fascinating, I couldn’t help but notice that she is pushing a political agenda. Although she doesn’t say it explicitly, the reader is left with the impression that all American memorials (with the exception of the Vietnam Memorial and perhaps a handful of others) are not only nationalistic in nature, but just plain bad, both aesthetically and in the messages they seek to convey. In other words, it appears that Doss is almost against the building of memorials on principal. On a note of style, Doss’s ceaseless use of the word “affect” does more harm than good to her explanations. But the main problem with Doss’s argument is that she fails to explain why this obsession with memorials is somehow unique to the U.S. Although she does reference memorials in other places in the world (the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and Soviet realism in the USSR, for example), these comparisons are few and far between, and the reader is left to wonder whether or not the case for a specifically American obsession is truly substantiated.

Apart from these criticisms, Memorial Mania is very well researched and contains many interesting and original evaluations of some of the most well-known (and not so well-known) monuments. If nothing else, it serves as a good reference book for recent public art and memorials in the United States.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:

Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America
by Erika Doss
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010
488 pages, 161 halftones, $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-226-15938-6

With 535 pages, Cast in Bronze is not a standard exhibition catalogue. Created in conjunction with an exhibition that toured the Louvre, the Met, and the Getty in 2008–09, the book is the product of “an unprecedented in-depth study of French bronzes” and functions more like an encyclopedia than a catalogue. It is an exhaustive attempt to cull together the lesser-known work of French artists, which are frequently out-shown by bronzes from Italy and Northern Europe. The exhibition relied heavily on the Louvre’s collection, but also offered a chance to see works from private collections and other difficult-to-visit museums such as the Windsor Castle Royal Collection, Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the Dresden State Art Collection.

As stated in the Directors’ Note (written by the directors of the three participating museums), this is not the first attempt to bring focus to the French bronzes, but it is the most comprehensive. The directors believe that previous texts and exhibitions did not provide sufficient study, stating: “[N]umerous questions remain unanswered because of the lack of an overall perspective into the various aspects of the French production of bronzes, such as the authors of the models, their founders and chasers, techniques used, networks of commissioning, collectors, and stylistic influences.” To answer all of these questions is a large task—which may be why Cast in Bronze is such a large book.

The volume is divided into three sections and organized chronologically. Each section includes one or two critical essays and biographies of the French (and sometimes Italian) artists. The exhibition included works “created in France from the 16th to 18th centuries.” This detail allowed the curators to include works by many of the Italian artists working in France during those two centuries (Benvenuto Cellini the most prominent among them). Unlike most catalogues, Cast in Bronze devotes pages to each work featured in the exhibition. The texts are generously illustrated, though more details would have been helpful. There are 142 works, each accompanied by one to four pages of text describing the work and its history. The entries are not simple repetitions of museum signage; instead, they are richly detailed and include historical references and technical discussions that do give the reader “an overall perspective.”

Cast in Bronze is also an excellent resource on the history of the period, with discussions on techniques, patronage, and the relationship between founders and sculptors. Some of the essays on technique may be too basic for an experienced founder, but the diagrams and x-rays allow non-experts to understand the process. The essays depict an art world not that different from our own. The Founders’ Guild in France was recognized from the Middle Ages and later became a legal entity. Membership resembled current studios with elected jurors, membership dues, requirements for entry, and assistance for members in need. The book highlights the tenuous relationships between founders and sculptors as they fought over copyright and intellectual property. In order to understand a work, sometimes context helps. Cast in Bronze illustrates not only the artwork, but the world in which it was created.

—Beth Wilson

Book Description:

Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution
eds. Genviève Bresc-Bautier, Guilhem Scherf, and James David Draper
Chicago: Art Stock Books Ltd.
535 pages, 536 illustrations, $85.00 (On sale in the Met store for $42.50)
ISBN: 2757201832

With the 20th anniversary of the demise of apartheid in South Africa coming up in 2014, museums and publishers alike have been embracing a steady stream of South African artists, both black and white. Especially in Europe, I’ve noticed a rising number of exhibitions and books devoted to artists who lived and worked in South Africa during apartheid, with undertones of how and if life and racial relations have changed since then. Inevitably, these are explorations of the new post-apartheid South African identity.

Claudette Schreuders, a new book on the South African artist by Johannesburg curator Rory Bester, touches on all of these themes. Schreuders’s work is predominantly composed of human figures carved out of wood. Wood type represents race, so that any exposed skin remains unpainted. A white descendent of South African colonists, Schreuders creates sculptures that amalgamate a wide variety of African and European sculptural traditions. “Stories in sculptural form,” her figures are also often somewhat autobiographical.

One particularly enlightening example is Abba (2010), which depicts a black woman carrying a white baby on her back. In the section of the book titled “A Letter to Claudette,” poet Antjie Krog describes the African tradition of carrying babies in an abba kaross, a length of fabric tied around a woman’s mid-section. Serving as a rudimentary baby backpack, the abba gives the mother the mobility to do her work, while at the same time keeping her child close—in both senses of the word. When the European colonial powers arrived, this method of carrying babies continued to be used by black women working as nannies who applied it to their white charges. In addition to Krog’s poetic description, the “letter” includes photographs of Schreuders’s mother, aunt, and son all being carried by their black nannies. Like many of Schreuders’s sculptures, Abba invites the viewer into a deeply personal and human experience, one never permeated by racial politics.

Covering the artist’s best work since 1994—coincidentally, the year that apartheid came to an end—Claudette Schreuders provides excellent insight into the life and work of the artist as an individual, while setting out the connotations and significance of her sculptures. The book’s greatest achievement is that it raises these complex issues not through overt politicization but by letting Schreuders’s wooden figures speak for themselves.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Descritption:

Claudette Schreuders
by Rory Bester, Faye Hirsch, and Antjie Krog
New York: Prestel, 2011
240 pages, 150 illustrations, $49.99
ISBN: 978-3-7913-5110-0

In the past 20 years or so, an enormous surge of interest in the unlawful decoration of urban landscapes has changed how people perceive the notion of a “public” art form. What was once labeled “graffiti” or “vandalism,” attributed to thugs, degenerates, and juvenile delinquents is now street art. Although still on the margins of legality, street artists have slowly entered into the mainstream. For anyone who remembers the astounding success of Banksy’s “Barely Legal” exhibition in a Los Angeles warehouse in 2006, it should be obvious just how much the nature of graffiti, street art, and even public art have changed over the years.

Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art makes a bold attempt to trace the history of the graffiti and street art movements, strategically tossing out chronology in favor of a thematic history. The themes themselves often overlap and cut into each other, with a single street artist’s work dispersed into multiple categories. Take, for example, the chapter “Public Memory/Private Secrets,” which presents street art as a cooperative public art form in the face of exaggerated individualism. Art and pop culture critic Carlo McCormick stresses the collaborative aspect of street art , an undertaking that replaces the cutthroat competition of the gallery with a partnership of artists looking out for one another. These artists all form a community with a common history. On the other side of memory is street art as memorial—the most obvious example being the Ghost Bike Movement, in which bicycles are painted white and locked up at intersections where bicyclists have been killed or seriously injured. From Berlin to Seattle, the sheer size of this memorial movement in the form of street art/sculpture/public installation is astounding. (If I stick my head out my office window, I can see one on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and S Street.) And this is only one example.

Although a bit overly optimistic at times, McCormick’s descriptions of the various themes in graffiti and street art are quite inspiring. But those who most deserve praise for the success of Trespass are Wooster Collective founders Marc and Sara Schiller. (Founded in 2001, the Wooster Collective is a Web site dedicated to the global street art movement, woostercollective.com.) The Schillers not only curated the images, but also interviewed a large percentage of the featured artists, incorporating “artist notes” with many of the descriptions and captions, so that artists recount stories, describe their own work, or simply make comments. Texts by Banksy, Creative Time’s Anne Pasternak, and civil rights lawyer (and brother of Richard Serra) J. Tony Serra further add to the breadth of the study of graffiti and street art. Trespass is a great collection of graffiti and street art from the past 50-odd years, ranging from performances to installations, to stencils and beyond. It truly encompasses the range of previously outcast works that have slowly crept into the domain of public art.

—Elena Goukassian

Book Description:
Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art
Edited by Ethel Seno
by Carlo McCormick, in collaboration
with Wooster Collective’s Marc and Sara Schiller
Los Angeles: Taschen, 2010
320 pages, $39.99
ISBN: 978-3-8365-0964-0

Public Art Fund recently released a catalogue of its 2010 City Hall Park exhibition, “Statuesque” (now on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas through August 21). The original show featured 10 works by six artists—Pawel Althamer, Huma Bhabha, Aaron Curry, Thomas Houseago, Matthew Monahan, and Rebecca Warren. PAF installs sculpture in many locations around New York City, but the City Hall Park exhibitions are considered among their “major initiatives with established artists.” (“Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1996–2006” is on view there through December 3.)

“Statuesque” was Nicholas Baume’s first exhibition as PAF director and chief curator. By bringing together this group of artists, he wanted to show a range of approaches that challenge conventional views of the figure: “The language of sculpture since the 1960s has moved even further from the figurative tradition, primarily filtered through the radical ideas of minimalism, conceptualism, installation, site specificity, and post modernism. In a sculptural landscape broadly dominated by postminimalism, the figure has become a very rare species.” While figurative sculpture can be rare in the entire “sculptural landscape,” it still maintains a presence as public art. PAF is currently showing Rob Pruitt’s The Andy Monument in New York, and it included Robert Melee’s work in a 2009 City Hall Park exhibition. Both Steinnunn Thorarinsdottir and Jaume Plensa have public exhibitions on view this summer. Nor are “Statuesque” artists unknown or marginalized—though the exhibition did mark the first showing of their works together and in public.

In his essay, Baume argues that “the works attest to a number of important affinities that distinguish them from other artists associated with the human form.” He believes that one affinity can be found in process. This group eschews live models and “prefer[s] to reference the figure rather than replicate it.” Their works “tend toward abstraction rather than realism, assemblage rather than the readymade,” which separates them from their predecessors. Baume’s introductory essay explains his curatorial choices, but the book does not answer the question that he proposes from the start: “How might figurative sculpture, become once again, an influential form of public art?”

The individual artists are each introduced with essays by Miguel Morcuende González, and their own thoughts appear in the form of short interviews or excerpts from a lecture. (PAF sponsors a lecture series featuring talks by artists whose works are on display in the city.) In the interviews, Baume asks basic questions about process, media, and larger bodies of work. While it is always interesting to hear an artist’s perspective, the interviews seem like a missed opportunity. None of these artists have shown work in a public setting before, as Baume notes. The interviews could have provided a forum for a more in-depth conversation about how their sculptures might continue the evolution of the figurative tradition and its relationship to public art. The exhibition itself may have provided more answers to this question, but the catalogue skims the surface without delving into a deeper discussion.

Statuesque provides an introduction to the work of six artists who create evocative forms that should be seen by a wider audience. It also demonstrates PAF’s main success: taking established and emerging artists out the galleries and putting them on full view for a diverse New York public.

—Beth Wilson

Book Description:
Statuesque
by Nicholas Baume
New York: Public Art Fund, 2011
171 pages, 150 illustrations. $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-9608488-7-4

Most art reviews disappear when the magazine or newspaper in which they’re printed gets shelved, stacked up, or thrown out, causing the loss of both the reviewer’s critical essay and the record of the artist’s work in the exhibition. Rarely, the art critic’s work is preserved in book form, but usually it’s the longer-form essays rather than reviews, per se, that get published in the book.

Matthew Kangas’s new collection of reviews is the exception (and many of these reviews were first published in Sculpture magazine). In 113 chapters, Kangas arranges his reviews by artist (rather than in the strict chronology of publication), giving the reader a chance to survey the artist (and Kangas’s engagement with the artist) over time in many cases. There are shorter and longer reviews included, depending on the requirements of the publication in which they first appeared.

There are art-historical “stars” here, as well as artists primarily known in the Pacific Northwest (where Kangas has been most active) and artists who have “emerged” on the national scene only in the most recent few years. Return to the Viewer is valuable for preserving a record of these artists’ exhibitions, as well as the evidence of the critic’s voice.

Also particularly interesting is Kangas’s short introduction, which serves not only to give a sense of his own critical style but also a model for criticism that respects both the reader and the artist.

Book Information:

Return to the Viewer
By Matthew Kangas
New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2011
462 pages, $28.00
ISBN: 978-1-877675-80-5

You can see the work of Giny Vos everywhere—if you happen to live in the Netherlands. A prolific public artist, Vos has produced 11 works since 2005. Her new book, Singing in the Dark, spans her 25-year career, focusing primarily on public artworks completed in the last decade. For anyone unfamiliar with Vos’s work, including myself, Singing in the Dark is a successful introduction because it leaves you wanting to see more.

The large, sewn paperback is beautifully produced. Interspersed between six critical essays, many works are illustrated over multiple pages. Examples of inspiration—a film still from Nosferatu, an Arabian bathhouse, a still-life by Chardin—appear among sketches and installation photos. While most of Vos’s public works are more than adequately illustrated in the book, her LED and light works warrant a visit to her Web site , where the images can shine (or sing) more brilliantly.

All of the essays in Singing in the Dark discuss Vos’s work in relation to public space and the nature of public art. Each one focuses on a different aspect: the art (Christophe Van Gerrewey), the process (Sandra Smets), public space (Dirk van Weelden), the city (Jeroen Boomgaard), art and architecture (Daria Ricchi), and language (Ilse van Rijn). When reading the texts together, certain works seem over-discussed and others neglected. The authors clearly have favorites, but the repetition does succeed in showing how her work can elicit myriad interpretations.

Christophe Van Gerreway’s essay offers an astute reading. The subtitle of his essay, “The Work of Giny Vos as Solo Exhibition in the Netherlands,” aptly describes her career. She has produced projects for nonprofits, local governments, and corporate clients, while seemingly avoiding the compromises that can plague the public art process. Sandra Smets’s article provides a rare glimpse of this process. She gives a behind-the-scenes look at the production of White Noise (2009), a stunning light work that sits atop the KPN telecommunications tower in Amsterdam. Describing meetings with architects and corporate reps, discussions with collaborators, and test runs with assistants, Smets reveals the artist’s day-to-day operations, stating, “It’s a strange profession in which Vos engages.” Most notably, we see how Vos engages with high-profile clients in order to realize her vision: “Vos’s work has the glamour that is associated with money. All the same, White Noise seems to draw the Icarus moral: the hubris of big money that wants to conquer the world and the whole universe. Two years earlier, Vos had made the door of a safe for Shell that opens slightly every now and then to transmit the energy from which the company makes its money—solar energy, which actually belongs to us all. Clients like shell or KPN need Vos for their showpiece, vice versa Vos uses them to make her dreams comes true and to deliver implicit commentary.” It may be a strange profession, but it is one that she seems uniquely suited for.

Singing the Dark, which was printed in 2010, only includes work through 2009. It opens with White Noise, and the illustrations continue back to Vos’s first public work, Work to Do (1985). In the last year, Vos has completed two more public art installations, Seeing without being seen (Utrecht) and Glorious Experiment (Purmerend), created an installation for a solo exhibition, and started another public piece in Amsterdam. Vos is clearly at a very exciting point in her career, and Singing in the Dark declares that she has no intention of stopping.

— Beth Wilson

Book Description:
Singing in the Dark
by Giny Vos, et al.
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010
180 pages. € 29.50
ISBN: 978-90-78088-33-2

Holger Walter’s monumental stone sculptures are based on an elemental architectural vocabulary: asymmetrical leaning obelisks with a sliver of light between them; ovoid-shaped voids, their thick stone frames broken and open; deep-black zigzagging forms. The artist trained as a stone mason specializing in church restoration and has created altars for evangelical churches in Germany. His sculptures reside in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Ettlingen, as well as in Japan and Korea. One tall, vertical altar set on a circle of what appears to be crushed stone was erected before its surrounding chapel (a bell-like asymmetrical dome) was even designed. Walter prefers to work in lava, a raw, porous material; he mixes its strong textures with smoother, semi-geometric surfaces. He finds the lava in quarries in Vulkaneifer, a volcanic region in Germany.

Born in 1968, Walter began his sculpture studies in Karlsruhe. A one-year fellowship took him to Tama Art University in Tokyo in 1997–98. A two-month travel period in Egypt followed in 1990.

Walter’s book is hard to find, but his stone sculptures, drawings, prints, biography, and an essay on his work by Hans Gercke (“Discovering Hidden Space: On the Ex-cavations of Holger Walter”) are all on his Web site. Gercke’s essay discusses the artist’s respect for the histories and properties of stone and his intuitive process for forming sculpture. Other essays in the book are by Ursula Merkel, Thomas Erne, Helmut A. Müller, and Barbara Schmid.

—Jan Garden Castro

Book Information:
Holger Walter Aus _ Grabungen
Galerie Alfred Knecht, 80 pages
Karlsruhe, 2009

www.holger-walter-atelier.de

Though Bob Verschueren’s work may not be so familiar to American audiences, he has created outdoor installations across Canada and all over Europe for more than 30 years. Natura Humana, which was published on the occasion of his recent installations at the Centre d’arts et de nature (France) and Le Festival des 5 saisons (Belgium), offers the perfect introduction to this nature artist. The publication is short at 95 pages, but it is well-illustrated (documenting more than 30 installations) and features essays by John K. Grande (a contributing editor for Sculpture) and Vinciane Despret, a philosopher and psychologist.

After starting as a painter, Verschueren transitioned to sculpture with his “Wind Paintings” of the 1970s. Grande discusses a number of these works, noting that “the ‘Wind Paintings’ involved ‘painting the landscape’ of a flat and empty windswept place with crushed charcoal, iron oxide, chalk, terra verte, flour, yellow ochre, terre de Cassel, burnt, and natural umber…The variously colored pigments and materials distributed over the land usually only lasted a few hours, as nature theatre broadened the scope and scale of the effect.” From these “paintings,” Verschueren has continued to create (mostly) ephemeral sculpture out of natural materials. In a well-written essay, Despret examines Verschueren’s materials and process: “First, there was the wind,” a foundational fact that weaves through a discussion of dissemination, experimentation, and creation.

Natura Humana primarily serves as a reference book for Verschueren’s outdoor sculpture. Each photograph is accompanied by a description of the project written by the artist. Verschueren twists and arranges branches and vines into evocative shapes that belie their hardened materials. He is very clearly committed to working “in the land,” whether his installations appear outdoors or not. Though he seems primarily concerned with the forms that he can create from organic materials, some of his works, such as The Rising Waters, have a clearer message about present-day environmental concerns. Kept afloat by lifebuoys, 16 small plants drift in an expanse of water—survivors left after a deluge.

For those interested in the connection between art and nature, Verschueren is an artist to investigate. This small-scale picture book offers a welcome introduction to his work, especially for American readers who have not had the chance to experience his outdoor installations in person.

—Beth Wilson

Book Information:
Natura Humana: Outdoor Installations
by Bob Verschueren
Warve: Editions Mardaga/Façons de voir, 2010
95 pages €35.00
ISBN: 978-2-8047-0057-7
French Edition: Amazon, English Edition: Mardaga

In The Artist’s Guide to Grant Writing: How to Find Funds and Write Foolproof Proposals for the Visual, Literary, and Performing Artist, Gigi Rosenberg tutors artists in all fields through the complete process of writing applications for professional development and project grants, awards and fellowships, and residencies. In the preface, Rosenberg, a writer and theater artist with experience writing grants to support her work, describes the insight that followed her stint on a grant-making panel.  She saw the differences between the powerful, vivid proposals that would be funded and the wan, timid ones that wouldn’t. “It transformed me as an artist seeking funding,” she writes.

She began to look at grant-making organizations from the perspective of a funder, as she wisely advises artists to do. Many artists are reticent about explaining their work, but “the process of articulation can be useful,” and Rosenberg interviews artists whose successful grant proposals came from clear visions of the work they wanted to create. The book includes tips on beginning to write artist statements, resource lists to target appropriate donors, and practical advice on topics from budgeting correctly to ensuring high-quality work documentation.

Rosenberg writes with the pep of a motivational speaker, walking the line between can-do cheering and practical, thorough advice. The structure of the book can be a bit cumbersome—chapters like “Decipher the Applications,” “Stand Out From the Crowd,” and “Fundraise Strategically” contain great advice embedded in descriptive paragraphs, though each chapter ends with a helpful section called “Gigi’s Cheat Sheet” that succinctly captures its main points and hints. Artists who are only looking for a few pop-in—pop-out suggestions or bullet points to polish their grant writing might be frustrated, but the strength of The Artist’s Guide to Grant Writing lies in Rosenberg’s booster-y, in-depth narrative. In these difficult economic times, no one understands better than artists that funding is vital and scarce. Rosenberg’s book will reward artists who take the time to follow its advice with a stronger, more confident position from which to request that funding.

Book Information:

The Artist’s Guide to Grant Writing:
How to Find Funds and Write Foolproof Proposals for the Visual, Literary, and Performing Artist
By Gigi Rosenberg
Paperback, 224 pages, $16.99
Published by Watson Guptill
For additional information, visit www.gigirosenberg.com

In conjunction with the first European—and most comprehensive—retrospective of John McCracken’s (1934–2011) work, the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art has produced a catalogue that chronicles not only his artworks but also his place in the art world. The exhibition (on view through June 19) inaugurates a new series of retrospectives showcasing “artists who, for various reasons, have chosen to follow an independent approach but who, like [McCracken] are making waves in international contemporary art.” Although McCracken is frequently compared to such artists as Carl Andre and Donald Judd, the catalogue emphasizes his presence outside of Minimalism. With 232 illustrations, three essays, two interviews, and excerpts from 29 other authors, John McCracken is an extensive text describing a 50-year career.

Alex Farquharson discusses the progression of McCracken’s career and its relationship to Minimalism. Using texts by Judd, McCracken, and Robert Morris, Farquharson shows why the West Coast artist is included in what was primarily a New York-based movement, but he differentiates McCracken’s views—and, by extension, his work—from those of his contemporaries. Marc-Oliver Wahler’s essay seeks to establish a new language for discussing McCracken’s art. In order to avoid the “presupposed language” of the art world, he looks for a different lens, incorporating McCracken’s views on extraterrestrials and science fiction. The catalogue also contains two interviews—one between McCracken and Castello di Rivoli assistant curator Marianna Vecellio and another between John Armleder and curatorial advisor Daniel Baumann.

All of the essays address the question of how to classify McCracken. Seemingly indifferent to the question of classification and labels, McCracken never rejected the Minimalist label: “These are art terms and I wasn’t thinking about art terms. All I wanted to do was to reduce what I was doing, to pare it down to the essentials, which led me to finally consider the Planks at one point…I wanted them to be as simple as possible but also beautiful, and sort of captivating.”

Included among the 232 illustrations are some of McCracken’s sketches and a “chronology and anthology” with excerpts by Lucy Lippard, John Coplans, Kynaston McShrine, David Pagel, and many others. The sketches and artist’s notes provide valuable insight into McCracken’s process and artistic evolution. The illustrations span a 48-year period, from his earliest paintings to the un-Minimalist mandalas, from the geometric blocks to the famous Planks—including some of the rarely seen multicolored Planks. Moving beyond the most iconic McCracken sculptures, the catalogue strives to live up to the artist’s own words. “What I try to do is to form gestalts which are individualistic and also infinitely variable. While one could say that the elements used are form, color and surface, the sculptures cannot be fully described without also referring to the various changing environmental conditions.”

The museum’s upcoming retrospectives will elucidate its goals for the series, but the John McCracken catalogue documents a good first attempt. Ideally these retrospectives will allow us to consider artists as a whole, looking at the evolution of their careers rather than the cherry-picked works that supposedly define them.

—Beth Wilson

Book Information:
John McCracken
Edited by Andrea Bellini and Marianna Vecellio
Milan: Skira, 2011
264 pages, 232 illustrations € 49.00
ISBN: 978-885-7207766

One of the advantages of working in a magazine office is that we frequently receive announcements, catalogues, and books that show us important and interesting artists and sculptures that we hadn’t hitherto been aware of. One such book arrived recently on my desk, Martin Holman’s retrospective of British artist Richard Rome. Rome has been working outside the spotlights of the art world for nearly 50 years, though he’s hardly been obscure (there have been numerous exhibitions and commissions as well as international residencies).

Rome is a metal sculptor who has developed a recognized skill in the casting process (he’s written a book on the subject) and has used various materials in his studio work and in the final casting process, among them plaster, wax sheets, resin, steel, bronze, and more recently iron.

In the mid-1970s, there is a break in his work between early pieces that explore playful, sequential, and conceptual geometries, at human scale and often in site-specific outdoor settings (some of it with an influence from American artists like Tony Smith, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt) and work since the late 19702 that is more architectural (with transatlantic suggestions of Caro and David Smith and some affinities with Kirili). By mentioning these affinities, I do not mean to suggest that Rome’s work is derivative: he is in fact a very original artist, but working in a recognizable idiom or territory of the last half of the 20th century.

Holman describes a crisis in which the artist stops working and reconsiders his process. There are elements of literal and metaphorical collage in the later works, taking construction materials as an element of form, an embodiment of the artist’s architectural interests. There is also a frequent figural reference, abstracted and moving back and forth between a constructed and an organic character.

Rome’s best known work is probably the playful fountain-vessel installed in Cannizaro Park in Wimbledon in 2001, an elegantly deformed jar of modestly monumental scale. But his other recent work is more personal and abstract, more improvisational in both method and appearance. Sometimes the steel or iron seems liquefied, sometimes softened and manipulated like clay, and sometimes rigid. Though there is frequently a frontality to the work, there is always an attention to the space within and around the work, as well as to light (a point that Holman makes in explaining the relative simplicity of the works’ forms).

Holman’s text is thorough and informative, and the black and white illustrations throughout effectively portray the work (though some since of patina and materials is lost in the lack of color reproductions). Perhaps Holman and/or Rome, like Richard Serra, wants to deny the illusory transparency of photographic reproduction and send the viewer directly to the work.

—Glenn Harper

Book Information:

Richard Rome
By Martin Holman
Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, Vermont: Lund Humphries, 2011
96 pages, 80 b&w illustrations. $60. ISBN: 978-1848220812

Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, the first English translation of Ai Weiwei’s Chinese language blogs and micro-tweets, could not have appeared at a more timely moment, not least because Ai’s short-lived cyber postings have demonstrated the revolutionary potential of these rapid-fire, viral modes of communication (beyond the much-vaunted and exaggerated role of social media in the recent Middle East democratic uprisings). As a means of unleashing suppressed information and censored viewpoints and spreading impassioned calls for freedom, the blogosphere in China has had an undeniable effect—for good and bad.

The highest-profile victim of a harsh Chinese crackdown on dissidents and human rights activists in the wake of the “Jasmine Revolution” (itself largely an on-line phenomenon), Ai has been missing since April 3. Despite a large showing of international support (ranging from on-line petitions and street demonstrations to a heartfelt op-ed piece in the New York Times by Salman Rushdie and a flash graffiti campaign in Hong Kong that prompted warnings from the Chinese Army), no new information has emerged since a state-run newspaper reported on April 14 that Ai was “confessing.” While the major allegations against him are economic (an old ploy, since he had already been investigated, and cleared, on charges of fraud in 2009), slanders of bigamy and Internet pornography distribution were also insinuated (another common strategy, since tarnishing the morality of a culture “star” can deflect attention away from the real crimes, committed by the state, as in the 2008 case of director and photographer Zhang Yuan, who was dramatically, and illegally, arrested in his home and detained on drug charges).

Ai’s disappearance and detention took many observers by surprise. No matter how vocal he became, no matter what the government did to him—despite the fact that its harassment had rapidly escalated over the last two years from surveillance to beating to the demolition of his studio—everyone seemed to believe that his status as an international art world darling would insulate him from the harshest reprisals. But Ai knew better.

Beijing couldn’t care less about world opinion. (Ai would particularly appreciate the fact that a Foreign Ministry spokesperson denounced foreign support for a “criminal suspect” as an ignorant response that “baffled” the Chinese people and made them “unhappy.” His early blogs constantly expose the rhetorical veneration of this mythical entity—“the people”—whose will and desires are so perfectly satisfied by official government policies, while human individuals, the real Chinese people, suffer endless indignities.) In dealing with toothless international objections, Beijing knows how to daylight its opponent’s hypocrisy, pointing well-aimed counter-accusations at violence, racism, and torture. A two-day U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue (April 27–28) focusing specifically on recent forced disappearances, extra-legal detentions and arrests, and general issues of freedom of expression and rule of law predictably failed to make headway. Michael Posner, the State Department assistant secretary for democracy, did not receive a satisfactory answer or “sense of comfort” from Chinese officials in regard to Ai’s case.

In the West, we delight in the harmless antics of artists as “cultural pranksters” (to borrow Ben Davis’s phrase). We might also call them modern-day fools. No matter how strong their political commitment, how scathing and true their insights, it’s still “just” art. How much are they really laying on the line? Do their works or actions ever really reach beyond critique? That’s how many of us saw Ai’s activities, too—as cultural/political theater, savvy intellectual entertainment with no real consequences in the real world. Citizens of a country where right-wing bloggers continually libel the sitting President can’t possibly imagine how an individual—an artist—could be persecuted for demanding a full count of and recognition for thousands of school children killed in an earthquake. Perhaps to some extent, Ai allowed us to persist in this view, playing the “Chinese political artist” for the Western art world. Though his devotion to freedom and human rights predates his overtly political blog posts and controversial actions, we saw only certain aspects of it before 2007. (It’s also important to remember that the bulk of Ai’s writings, and all of the blogs, were in Chinese for a Chinese audience.) His early writings (pre-blog and from the first half of 2006) constrain his anti-government sentiments within a cultural purview, direct them at historical policies and legacies, or camouflage them in quasi-fictional form, as fables of daily life in “N Town,” for instance, or “the nation of C.” His meaning is clear, but the veil softens the picture just enough: you can say quite a lot about a country’s view of human rights and justice under the guise of discussing what makes for humane architecture and livable cities.

Things change in the second half of 2006 as Ai begins to test the blog as a true medium of expression and means to advance change (before the invitation from Sina.com, he said that the Internet was new to him). As he loosens up, the posts assume a voice of resistance, tackling the attempted Sars cover-up, Tibet, panda diplomacy, minor instances of misconduct, and major corruption—all of these set against official efforts to “paint and powder” the face of Beijing in preparation for the Olympics. Ideas now come out in the open, powered by irony and satire. “Familiar Curse Words” (August 20, 2006) screams with suppressed fury: “Human life is sovereign, and we are born into the rights and dignity that are inherent to it. These are superior to any power save of death, either spiritual or physical. The above statement is bullshit. Human beings have never been sovereign, they have always lived under oppression, and they must constantly remind each other of this, or there will be an even higher price to pay. This is the history of civilization.” The view may be bleak, but Ai never gives in to despair or defeatism.

The articulation of his ideas did not just complement his visual work, at times it seems to have advanced it. Fairytale (2007), for instance, may never have happened without the compulsive drive of the blog. That colossal undertaking and testament to the possibilities of freedom gave 1,001 anonymous, everyday individuals visibility, reaching beyond stereotypes of “the people” to introduce a group of ordinary Chinese men and women to the residents of Kassel and to life beyond the accepted patterns of their native land. As Ai pointed out in an interview (included in the book), Fairytale was not about artistic representation; nothing was scripted, nothing was planned—it required “art to be life, normalized” in order to create understanding: “You can only know what yellow people are like once you’ve seen white people or black people.”

As Fairytale demonstrates, writing for the blog and its audience of ordinary readers focused Ai’s thinking about what an artist can and should do. A post from August 1, 2006 lays out a neutral foundation: “If we say that artists must interpret their existence, and interpret their physical and spiritual state, this interpretation would unavoidably touch upon the era in which they exist, and upon the political and ideological state of that era…” The next question to ask is what responsibilities come with the job in this particular instance. By January 30, 2008 in “We Have Nothing,” Ai states his position plainly: creativity is defined by fantasy, suspicion, subversion, and criticism—“the fundamental requirements, or very substance, of life.” Creativity is power, specifically the “power to act. Only through our actions can our expectations for change turn into reality…”

Those skeptics who dismiss Ai as a Chinese version of Andy Warhol, a huckster playing the art world game for fun, fame, and profit need to pay attention to those words—they are not just idle diatribe. Several months after Ai posted his activist vision of the artist as an agent of change, events put him to the test. On May 12, a massive earthquake centered in Wenchuan county struck Sichuan province. Official figures (from 2009) confirm more than 69,000 dead, 374,000 injured, and almost 18,000 missing, making it the deadliest earthquake in Chinese history since the Tangshan earthquake of 1976. This is the game-changer for Ai, and its overriding issues found resonance in his thinking. In a post titled “Aftershocks” from July 28, 2006, the anniversary of the Tangshan quake, he had considered the nature of disaster, both the visible and quantifiable event and the immeasurable, invisible psychological aftershocks. He specifically notes how long it took to get an accurate death toll. The strange Chinese relationship to accounting, its reluctance to quantify accident or disaster, comes to the fore in “Some Abnormal Numbers” (December 22, 2007). Ai points out that no one knows the exact population of Beijing (“despite the world’s most severe household residency registration policy”), nor does anyone know the exact number of Chinese killed at the Nanking Massacre (1937). The last obfuscation is the most important: “The Chinese have never understood that the dead must also be accounted for…this is the misery of the slaughtered, to have been neither treasured nor remembered by those more fortunate than them. They never had any definite status, neither in life nor in death.”

The same lack of accounting and accountability, remembrance and respect abstractly addressed in “Some Abnormal Numbers” became personal after Wenchuan. Approximately 6,000 students died in the quake, buried in the bricks and concrete of their sub-par school buildings. The questions asked by Ai and the other activists were nothing more incendiary than: Who failed to reinforce the “tofu-dregs” concrete? Who pocketed the money? How many children were dead, and who were they? And yet, answers were not forthcoming, information was withheld, culpability denied. (Think back to the outrage in the U.S. in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and imagine what it would have been like to have had no recourse from lies, no legal outlet to challenge the official story, no means to remember the dead, and no protection from official retaliation for daring to ask such questions in the first place.) From this moment on, Ai’s life and art distilled into one mission. As he explained a year later in an on-line discussion of the work carried out by Citizen Investigation: “When you pursue the truth, you have already decided not to abandon everything…When a people reject truth, they have already chosen death.” Post-earthquake, the blogs explode, as rage overrides irony, satire, critique, and any semblance of caution. The horrors, denials, and cover-ups of Wenchuan (and tainted milk and CCTV) alternate with the whitewashed “pipe dreams” of the Olympics, with its feel-good slogans and logos: “A society lacking democracy is incapable of orchestrating true joy for its people. If we had diverted one-thousandth of [the Olympic resources] to Sichuan, those schools would never have collapsed.“

A well-known adage cautions the powerful to fear individuals who have only one idea because they will die for it. Muhammad Iqbal’s formulation takes the opposite approach: “If you wish to be heard in the noise of this world, let your soul be dominated by a single idea. It is the man with a single idea who creates political and social revolutions…” As long as Ai was playing the fool or following the conventional role of Confucian truth-teller, the powerless conscience to power, he was safe. But when he shifted his energy from abstracted commentary to focus on a single target with the goal of enacting change in the real world, swaying opinion, and possibly leading people to act, he crossed the line from intellectual critique (annoying but ultimately non-threatening) to potentially dangerous agent provocateur and enemy of the state.

The blogs, eloquently translated by Lee Ambrozy, allow us to witness Ai’s transformation, as that one idea—art is life, life is creativity, and creativity is the power to create change—gains mass and strength like a tiny pebble that starts an avalanche. In “Familiar Curse Words,” Ai had already thrown down the gauntlet: “As far as one’s life is concerned, the highest purpose would be to sacrifice yourself for integrity. Similarly there is no greater disgrace than being too weak to make such a sacrifice, or simply living for the sake of being alive.”

This is by no means an easy book. It is impossible to follow Ai’s outpourings dispassionately, without ingesting some of the bile, some of the pain and frustration. But this is essential reading for anyone who cares at all for art, ideas, and human life. Ambrozy’s insightful introduction, generous footnotes, and chronology, which place the artworks and activist undertakings in their full cultural and political Chinese context, open up a world that most of us in the West have yet to face squarely and with honesty. “Create change” is a common mantra, but again it means little for us. Ambrozy allows us to grasp what those two words mean in China (or under any other repressive regime on the planet) and what is at stake for those brave enough to act on their convictions.

For China, Ai is more than an “artist” now, and his “transgression” is about more than Western ideals of freedom of expression. That’s why international public opinion means so little, which is not to say that we shouldn’t protest, that Anish Kapoor shouldn’t dedicate his Monumenta installation to Ai, that the mayor of New York shouldn’t denounce Chinese policies at the opening of Ai’s Circle of Animals. We just shouldn’t expect the release of any political activist through words alone—and sterner support, as China well knows, is probably not forthcoming since the economic interests of “concerned” democracies always trump human rights . (For the fullest coverage of the Jasmine Revolution arrests see Sandra Schultz’s April 20 article in Der Spiegel.)

Ai chose to return to China after 10 years of freedom in New York. In addition to avant-garde shock tactics, he carried purpose with him, and as his single idea grew, he maintained hope in the younger generation, in those who now expect an ever-widening world, who evade and push back the bounds of censure, increasingly unwilling to stifle their voices and opinions. On June 1, 2009, Chinese officials shut down Ai’s Sina.com blog and purged its entire contents from cyberspace. The last entry in Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants dates from November 20, 2009. This “pirate” text was posted just a few months after Ai underwent life-saving surgery in Munich for head injuries sustained in a police beating related to his activities in Sichuan. Still cocky and hopeful of the ultimate outcome (even if it’s decades from now), he writes, “What can they do to me? Nothing more than to banish, kidnap, or imprison me. Perhaps they could fabricate my disappearance into thin air, but they don’t have any creativity or imagination, and they lack both joy and the ability to fly.”

—Twylene Moyer

Book Information:

Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009
by Ai Weiwei, edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press
320 pages, 58 illustrations. $24.95. ISBN: 978-0-262-01521-9

Sook Jin Jo’s current exhibition (through May 29) at West Virginia’s Huntington Museum of Art, which features both older works and a new site-specific installation, originated with her participation in the museum’s Walter Gropius Master Artist Workshop Series. In the catalogue foreword, Margaret Mary Lane, the museum’s executive director, writes that Jo is best known for her wood works, which are composed mainly of discarded materials. This generously illustrated volume allows readers to explore the details of these beautiful sculptures; color photographs of older works are supplemented with numerous images from the current show. Short articles in English, followed by Korean translations done by Liz Kwon, Dug Jin Cho, Hyun Kyung Sung, explore Jo’s main concerns: Assemblage, Installation, Public Art, and Collage and Drawing.

In “Sook Jin Jo: The Limits of Art, the Limits of Life,” Jonathan Goodman, a regular Sculpture contributor, discusses the spiritual aspects of Jo’s work, particularly the public artworks and installations. Donald Kuspit analyzes the artist’s use of discarded wood, concluding that her work is not “junk sculpture,” but that she takes a “formalist” approach to create her “expressionist constructions.” In “Sook Jin Jo’s Journey to the Heart of the Human Spirit,” Todd Siler shares his personal reflections on viewing Jo’s installations and briefly examines the influence of Kounellis, Pollock, and Rauschenberg on her work. Robert C. Morgan, another regular writer for Sculpture, looks at Taoism in relation to the Korean-born artist’s work in his essay, “The Spokes of the Wheel: Sook Jin Jo.” Finally, Simon Baur explores the legacies of Land Art, Minimalism, and Arte Povera in Jo’s work.

Sook Jin Jo: Complete Works 1985-2011 is by no means a comprehensive or perfect document—some of the formatting is unusual, particularly in the page numbering, and the brevity of the articles leaves the reader wanting a more in-depth exploration, but it is a useful introduction to Jo, as it succinctly examines her artistic mission of “giving new life to discarded materials” and her “reverence for the spiritual in all things.”

—Husna Kazmir

Book Information:

Sook Jin Jo: Complete Works 1985-2011
catalogue of an exhibition at the Huntington Museum of Art
with texts by Jonathan Goodman, Donald Kuspit, Todd Siler, Robert C. Morgan and Simon Baur. Gyeonggi-do: Maronie Books: 2011. Softcover; 196 pages. $30.00.
ISBN: 978-89-6053-204-5
To purchase please contact Huntington Museum of Art

There has not previously been a retrospective study of the work of major American artist Nancy Holt, so this new volume is an important addition to the history of contemporary art. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name (which originated at Columbia University and is traveling through 2013 to Karlsruhe, Chicago, Medford MA, Santa Fe, and Salt Lake City). Essays by some of the most important chroniclers of Minimal and Earth Art (Lucy Lippard, Matthew Coolidge, and others), as well as texts by the artist, the oversized book is in addition filled with color and black and white photographs that amplify our sense of Holt’s accomplishments.

Best known for Sun Tunnels (and perhaps Dark Star Park), as well (of course) for being married to Robert Smithson,  the broader range of Holt’s work is less recognized. This book should be a corrective. Her Land Art, sculpture, installations, film, and video are all represented. The illuminating interview of the artist by art historian James Meyer is particularly welcome.

The book (and the exhibition) are essential for anyone who wants to understand the art of the U.S. since the 1970s, the large-scale ambitions and constructions that grew out of that era, and the important work of one of contemporary art’s pioneers. (And as book prices go, it’s a bargain.)

— Jacques Figueras

Book Information:
Nancy Holt: Sightlines
edited by Alena Williams
University of California Press, 2011
Hardcover, 256 pages, $49.95

This new book on distinguished sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard offers something that few recent monographs have: a deep and intellectual engagement with the artist’s work by a critic, in this case Patricia C. Phillips, who is both a prominent writer and the Dean of Graduate Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. Phillips’s text is the most thorough and extensive analysis of a contemporary artist’s work that I’ve seen in a recent book based on an exhibition (in this case, the show originated by the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, NY, and traveling to DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, and the Frost Art Museum at Florida Atlantic University in Miami.

Phillips’s text deals with the biographical aspect (in terms of family history, cultural background, and artistic training and milieu) of von Rydingsvard’s work in much more detail and with much more critical subtlety than has typically been the case in considerations of her sculpture. The result is much broader than a strictly biographical approach. Phillips also delves into the poetics of the works themselves, but always in a non-academic, almost narrative style of writing.

The photographs through which the text winds throughout the book are a mixture of studio and process shots, portraits of the artist, large-scale views of the works, and detail photos. The photo documentation is carefully placed to illuminate the text and also to give a sense of the texture and scale of the work and the working process of the artist (an important aspect of any consideration of von Rydingsvard). The artist’s engagement with both cedar and, more recently, polyurethane resin, is richly evoked in the photos. The design of the book, in “landscape” format, also matches the scope and scale of the works and the photographs very well.

—Glenn Harper

Book Information:
Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working
by Patricia C. Phillips
Prestel: 2011
Hardcover, 224 pages, $65
ISBN: 978-3791350868

The republication of Dennis Kowal’s 1972 book on sculpture casting includes an interesting means of updating a technical book: on the title page, Kowal has printed a QR Code and a url referring to the software necessary for the code to work. A reader can then use his or her smart phone to scan the QR Code and go directly to updated information on casting.

Casting, though, is one of the oldest technologies for the creation of permanent artworks. The digital revolution of recent years provides new ways to make molds and to re-size works, but the basics of casting remain little changed.

Kowal offers information on the history of sculpture casting, various mold-making and casting techniques, materials, and finishes, and also includes a chapter on a student-built foundry. There are numerous black and white photos of cast sculpture and of the techniques discussed, as well as technical drawings by Lebbeus Woods.

The book is, as the title suggests, intended for the working artist. And though much is unchanged since 1972 (a chart of the melting points and pouring temperatures of various metals is surely as accurate nearly 40 years later), though the “sources for supplies” list seems not to have been updated (Kowal recommends checking the phone book, but nowadays probably best to start from scratch with a web search or asking around among sculptors for current suppliers). What the book does offer is a clear introduction, with a lot of detail, to the entire process of casting sculpture, in all its diverse forms.

—Glenn Harper

Book Information:
Sculpture Casting, Studio Edition: Mold Techniques and Materials:
Metals, Plastics, Concrete
by Dennis Kowal
CreateSpace 2010
Paperback 276 pages, $22.50
ISBN: 978-1453876176