Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"O’Doherty shifts between active participant and detached speculative mind with a fluidity and stylistic grace that propels you forward, even as it tugs at your sleeve and asks you to stop, reread, and give it more thought. O’Doherty wants us to inhabit what we perceive, to be an acute looker while fully engaging in the conundrums and contradictions that art puts to us. It is not an easy task, but it is one that he has managed admirably these many years." * Art in America *
"O’Doherty is a gifted writer whose Irish-honed literary skills are placed at the service of New York’s cosmopolitan visual culture." * artcritical.com *
"The present volume of this polymath’s criticism is perhaps most notable for its collection of O’Doherty’s writings on Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, two painters whom the writer befriended and knew well. It also contains his latest word on the “white cube” (he coined the now-ubiquitous phrase) from 2009, an update to his influential 1976
Inside the White Cube, an early critique of institutional Modernism." * The New Criterion *
Table of ContentsPreface: Field Notes from the Crossroads, by Liam Kelly / vii
Introduction: A Ship’s Log of / to Modernism, by Anne-Marie Bonnet / 1
On the Nature of Masquerade, by Brian O’Doherty / 7
HOPPER / ROTHKO
Hopper’s Look / 13
Word and Image: A Reciprocal Arrangement / 28
Windows and Edward Hopper’s Gaze / 37
Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning / 49
Rothko’s Dark Paintings: Tragedy and Void / 55
The Rothko Chapel / 72
Rothko’s Endgame / 80
Chamber Music in the Next Room / 89
ART-LIKE
The Politics and Aesthetics of Heart Transplants / 99
The Microscopic Vision / 107
Highway to Las Vegas / 114
Las Vegas Revisited / 122
Miami and the Iconography of the Pompadour Style / 128
PHOTOGRAPHY / FILM / VIDEO
Kane’s Welles: The Phantom of the Opus / 139
Et in Arkadin Ego / 148
Barzyk: Electronic Visionary / 158
The Worlds of Nam June Paik / 168
Hans Richter / 172
FACEtime: Katharina Sieverding and (Maybe) Oscar Wilde / 184
Narcissus in Hades / 190
Development Errors: Michener’s Photographs / 193
James Coleman: What Waiting Can Do, Given Time / 196
Terrible Beauty: On Steve McQueen’s Hunger / 201
Nigel Rolfe: Two Drums / 204
DISPATCHES FROM THE SIXTIES AND BEYOND
Stella and Hesse: Dispatches from the Sixties / 211
Segal’s Metropolis / 222
Warhol: The Medium as Cultural Artifact / 233
Taking Duchamp’s Portrait / 241
Morton Feldman: The Burgacue Years / 250
Divesting the Self: A Striptease / 263
Rauschenberg / Counter-Rauschenberg / 274
Wesley’s Hip-Pop / 281
William Scharf: The Long and the Short Eye / 286
Chamberlain: Projective Sculpture / 292
Peter Hutchinson: A Green Thought in a Green Shade / 303
Joseph Cornell: Innocence and Experience / 317
WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX
Boxes, Cubes, Installations, Whiteness and Money / 327
List of Illustrations / 333
