Art in America - Most Recent Books

Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

By Soojin Lee — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Yayoi Kusama reappeared on the international art scene in the early 1990s after two decades of relative obscurity. Ever since, she has seen her fame and critical acclaim grow as never before—along with speculations that her “mental illness” may be part of a lifelong publicity strategy.

Alighiero e Boetti

By Stephen Maine — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

In the forthcoming monograph Alighiero e Boetti (Yale University Press), Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey argues for the importance of the Italian polymath, who died in 1994 at the age of 53. Boetti's widely varied production and arcane processes has been a challenge to understand, and subsequently marginalized his output, although his colorful embroidered maps are well known. The book precedes, but is unrelated to, the July 1 opening of MoMA's, "Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan."

The Map and the Territory

By Brian Boucher — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Writing his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," Roland Barthes didn't imagine anything like the scene that comes two-thirds into Michel Houellebecq's fifth and latest novel, The Map and the Territory, which appeared in English last week. There we read in grisly detail about the murder and dismemberment of a character named and modeled after Houellebecq. Where Barthes wished to banish authorial biography and intention from literary criticism, Houellebecq's presence is unmistakable. Besides appearing as a character blessed with some of the book's best dialogue, the narrator's style is almost sarcastically flat, emphasizing words and phrases by simply putting them in italics, constantly reminding the reader of his authorial voice.

Untitled Photographs

By Stephen Maine — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Discontinuity is one of the few constants among the 78 images in Untitled Photographs by Tim Barber, recently published by OHWOW. The artist's first monograph includes black-and-white and color work spanning the past 15 years and varies—wildly and in every way imaginable—in subject matter, style, method and affect. The Canadian-born, New York-based Barber courts this apparent inconsistency so aggressively that it's a stance, although the implications of his position are ambiguous. It is unclear whether he figures his eye alone provides understated coherence to the assembled exposures, or if he considers the entire issue of authorial sensibility irrelevant-perhaps outmoded.

Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context

By Stephen Maine — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

After long production delays, the catalogue related to "Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context," a wide-ranging two-part exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in 2006, was finally published earlier this month. The interesting but odd volume raises a fundamental question: should it echo the intention and methods of the curatorial project, or build on its premise? To its detriment, Twice Drawn attempts to replicate the complexities of the exhibition.

MetaMaus

By John Reed — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Pantheon's MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic is a kind of "making of" Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical comic memoir, Maus. The 300-page full-color hardback and companion DVD abound with source materials—interviews with the author, photographs, letters, art—presented in parallel with a conversation between editor Hillary Chute and Spiegelman. The title transcends footnote: MetaMaus is a work of criticism in itself, providing not only notes on process and sources, but considering the entirety of a family, and the thinking of influences of an artist now and at the time the work was created.

Time Machines

By Stephen Maine — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Particle physicists' quest to replicate the hypothetical Higgs boson has never looked as promising as it does this week. And it probably has never looked as good as it does in Stanley Greenberg: Time Machines, just published by Hirmer. Having gained access to a variety of labs on five continents, the Brooklyn-based artist has taken ravishing, even intimate photographs of the objects they were built to house—the enormous, phenomenally complex machines used to study subatomic particles. Approaching his subject in the spirit of detailed research, Greenberg achieves a quirky but convincing reconciliation of the imperatives of artistic and scientific investigation.

Spine

By Stephen Maine — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The artist's voice is not a feature of the typical monograph or catalogue raisonné. Proxies are enlisted to elucidate intentions, to describe sources and processes, to contextualize, to assess—naturally, in laudatory terms. In the interview section, the artist's voice is directed, constrained by queries. While the monograph as a form is indispensable, its format is a routine and R. H. Quaytman's Spine (Sternberg Press/Sequence Press) is a welcome break.

Basso Profundo

By Peter Plagens — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Graphic designer Saul Bass was the first great artist I was ever a fan of. My father, who’d taken night-school art classes as a young man during the Depression, was a jack-of-all-trades in small advertising agencies and had an eye for the good stuff in commercial art.

Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman

By Sue Taylor — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

With studios in New York and Paris, a band of assistants, gold medals and other distinctions, sculptor Malvina Hoffman (1885[?]-1966) was at the height of her career when, at a dinner party in Chicago in 1929, she importuned Stanley Field for work. He was president of the city’s Field Museum of Natural History and grandson of department store mogul Marshall Field, the museum’s first major benefactor. Hoffman’s boldness paid off: within months, she had a contract to produce 147 sculptures for $109,000 to $125,000, a massive sum at the outset of the Great Depression.

Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s

By Richard Kalina — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100

A passion for self-invention has long marked the American psyche, and nowhere has it seemed more pronounced than in California and, in particular, Los Angeles.

The Trouble with Joan Mitchell

By Faye Hirsch — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Mitchell’s splendid works, daunting intellect, friendships with many preeminent artists and writers, and mind-bogglingly self-destructive behavior are legendary.

Seeing French

By Tom Huhn — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Debate over what precisely was at issue in French critical thought—and, indeed, in France itself—in the 1960s and ’70s continues to this day

Witnessing for Women

By Abigail Solomon-Godeau — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0100

If there is one central conclusion to be drawn from the recent array of books and catalogues on contemporary women artists, it is that there exists no such thing as women’s art, or even feminist art. Indeed, as many feminist scholars, critics and artists have long argued, possession of a uterus, or identification with feminism, in no way determines, much less defines, the nature of women’s artistic production.

Conceiving Counter-Soviet Art

By Margartia Tupitsyn — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

IN 1975, THE MOSCOW duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid collaborated on the performance Where Is the Line Between Us? with theAmerican conceptual artist and critic Douglas Davis. In a documentary montage, the Russian pair and Davis (photographed in their respectivecountries) stand divided by a thick black line, holding two square blackplanks inscribed with the question “where is the line between us?” in English (on Komar and Melamid’s) and Russian (on Davis’s). Created inthe year of the U.S.-Soviet linkup in space, this collaborative project implied that nonconformist artists of the 1970s generation believed in the translatability of their concepts and were seeking an active dialogue with Western colleagues.

Muralnomad The Paradox of Wall Painting Europe 1927-1957

By Michele C. Cone — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Romy Golan contends that European murals have not received due critical attention for the important part they played in the international “synthesis of the arts” movement that arose in the years straddling World War II.

An Object of Beauty

By Peter Plagens — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

A long time ago, I wanted to write a review of an artist nobody had heard of, whose work was on view at a gallery nobody was familiar with. Phil Leider, then the intimidating editor of Artforum, told me, “I’ll run a review of a known artist in an unknown place, or an unknown artist in a known place, but not an unknown artist in an unknown place.”

Leo Castelli

By Richard Kalina — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Leo Castelli (1907-1999) was famously charming and famously hard to really know. Arguably one of the three most influential 20th-century U.S. dealers (Alfred Stieglitz and Sidney Janis are the other two), he brought a European elegance and grace to a profession that is all too often home to the egotistical and sharp-elbowed.

The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography

By David Coggins — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Once elaborate maps were rare and precious—vital, often state-owned documents considered key to war and exploration. Now you can locate any address you like on Google Earth, and be continuously guided there by GPS. While maps have changed in precision and accessibility, they remain fraught with cultural and individual meaning. In her striking new book The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, freelance author Katharine Harmon brings together a wide selection of maps clearly meant to be more psychologically expressive than geographically correct.

The Warhol of Our Minds

By Eleanor Heartney — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Sotheby’s sale in November of Andy Warhol’s 1962 painting 200 One Dollar Bills, for $43.7 million, was a signal not only that the art market is roaring back but that fascination with Warhol has never gone away.