book reviews
Letter from Berlin – Forgeries, pheromones and clones, ten questions for Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats has brought the cerebral into the art marketplace. Nearly 15 years ago he sat in a gallery for 24 hours looking at a nude model and selling his thoughts to art collectors. A few years later he copyrighted his mind as a sculpture. In 2004, he tried to genetically engineer God to get to the essence of the Divine. He’s enlisted string theory to purchase real estate in other dimensions, and created a silent four-minute and thirty-three second ring tone remixing John Cage’s composition 4’33” . And he even sold collectors the experience of spending money. Now in ... More » »
Sleuthing your way through the art world – Reba White Williams’ mystery novel Restrike gets it right
—Michael reviews the debut mystery novel of New York art world insider, Reba White Williams, and asks an interesting question.–the artblog editors——————————-What about a series of art world mystery novels? Restrike features amateur detectives Coleman Greene, editor of an art magazine, and her cousin Dinah Greene, director of a print gallery. The consigner of a Winslow Homer is brutally murdered. A reporter for Coleman’s magazine investigates; he too is murdered. Newly-found Durer prints are at auction. The Greenes discover they are mere restrikes. I have a restrike of a Rouault woodcut. An art dealer in Chicago purchased the original block, ... More » »
Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, a review of the catalog for the MoMa exhibit
—-Maeve Coudrelle told us about MoMa’s recent Inventing Abstraction exhibit. Here, Andrea presents the catalog for the much written-about and deconstructed show.–The artblog editors ——————————– Leah Dickerman’s re-telling of the beginnings of abstraction within European and American modernism emphasizes the increased communication and availability of travel in the early Twentieth Century and their impact upon the dissemination of artistic ideas. She suggests that rather than having a singular origin with one progenitor (Kandinsky, Kupka, Delauney – take your pick), abstraction was the product of a network of interconnections among artists on both sides of the Atlantic. These cross-fertilizations were among ... More » »
First-rate new book on Paul Klee – a review
Christine Hopfengart and Michael Baumgartner Paul Klee; Life and Work (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern:2012) ISBN 978-2-7757-3007-5 Paul Klee exhibited with the Blue Rider, taught for years at the Bauhaus in both Weimar and Dessau and had a major retrospective of his work at the National Gallery, Berlin, before he was fifty. Yet his work always stood apart from that of his colleagues. The authors of this first-rate monograph situate Klee’s art in terms of his musical interests, travels, study of other artists, contemporary art movements, and interest in the structure and growth of natural forms. Despite the artist’s avowedly non-political stance, ... More » »
Memories of buildings at NYU’s 80 WSE Gallery and Orhan Pamuk’s book The Innocence of Objects
Four Houses, Some Buildings and Other Spaces, an exhibition curated by Berta Sichel at NYU’s 80 WSE Gallery through March 16 brings together ten artists (or artists-collaborations) around the ideals and memories invested in buildings, other man-made structures, and their remains. They investigate the subjects of who determines the built environment, who establishes its meaning, who tells its history, and which of multiple histories are preserved. The story they tell is complex, nuanced and provocative, without being tendentious. The artists, from Europe, North and South America, are primarily interested in buildings as bearers of ideas – either those of their ... More » »
Spot Color and Books Not for Kindle at Nobrow Press, London – A Studio Visit
I learned of Nobrow Press when I saw one of their ‘books’ in the shop at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. I use quotes because the publication in question, Rise and Fall, by the American Artist, Micah Lindberg, was a text-less accordion fold (or leporello), printed on both sides. I wrote about it when discussing Holiday Books on November 6, 2012. I was struck by the quality of the printing, as well as the format, both of which were closer to a fine art print than to a traditional book. From an e-mail correspondence I learned that the press used ... More » »
Tom Uttech and James Prosek – Monumentalizing the magic and beauty of nature
Tom Uttech’s works are a kind of mystical realism. The woods, animals, birds, rocks and clouds in his oil paintings (recently closed at Swarthmore College’s List Gallery) look like the real thing, however, nature in Uttech’s works has been transported to some extraordinary realm, where birds don’t act bird-like and clouds and bears are not really like themselves either. Take the bear/man hybrid (a stand-in for the artist and viewer) that appears in many of Uttech’s works, for example. It looks out on the landscape, its back to you, a mysterious presence in a wondrous land. Sometimes the bear’s shape ... More » »
Catalog Reviews – Alina Szapocznikow, Made in L.A., Now Dig This!
Elena Filipovic, Joanna Mytkowska, et al. Alina Szapocznikow; Sculpture undone (Museum of Modern Art, New York and Mercatorfonds, Brussels: 2011) ISBN 978-0-87070-824-4 This catalog accompanies the first substantial exhibition of the Polish sculptor, Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) to be seen outside Poland, and is a thorough and considered introduction to her work. The exhibition was organized jointly by WEILS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and the Museum of Modern Art, NY (MOMA), where it is currently on view. I saw the exhibition in Los Angeles this winter. It is a stunner, and a reminder that the dominant theme in the history of ... More » »
Holiday Books 2012 Part 2
Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki Encyclopedia of Flowers (Lars Muller Publishers, Zurich: 2012) ISBN 978-3-03778=313-9 This extraordinary volume will certainly appeal to connoisseurs of flowers, but should be of equal interest to anyone susceptible to the seductions of color and form. Azuma is considered an haute-couture florist (whatever that may be), but the wonderous photographs, by Shiinoki, show no actual arrangements as they might exist in life. All are details in which groupings of flowers are freed from gravity and the need to be grounded in a vase or on a kenzan (flower frog). Some photographs are taken from surprising ... More » »
Books for Holiday Gifts, 2012, part I:
Micah Lidberg, Rise and Fall (Nobrow Press: London) ISBN 978-1-907704-30-7 This surprising and seductive publication tells the story of the prehistory of the natural world, from the rise and fall of the dinosaurs and a meteor falling into the ocean, to the development of mammals, and ultimately, primates. The narrative unfolds entirely visually, with no text at all, across both sides of a concertina fold. Lidberg’s style betrays his knowledge of Japanese print-making but is hardly derivative, and he has great sophistication about how the illustration will look in printed form. It is characterized as a book because of its ... More » »
