Search results for ""soberscove press""

On the life and afterlives of Jay DeFeo’s Estocada, a work created in the shadow of The Rose In 1965, Jay DeFeo (1929–89) was evicted from her San Francisco apartment, along with the 2,000-pound colossus of a painting for which she would become legendary, The Rose. The morning after it was carried out the front window, DeFeo was forced to destroy the only other artwork she’d started in six years, an enormous painting on paper stapled directly to her hallway wall. The unfinished Estocada—a kind of shadow Rose—was ripped down in unruly pieces and reanimated years later in her studio through photography, photocopy, collage and relief. Drawing from largely unpublished archival material, Rip Tales traces for the first time Estocada’s material history, interweaving it with stories about other Bay Area artists—Zarouhie Abdalian, April Dawn Alison, Ruth Asawa, Lutz Bacher, Bruce Conner, Dewey Crumpler, Trisha Donnelly and Vincent Fecteau—that likewise evoke themes of transformation, intuition and process. Foregrounding a Bay Area ethos that could be defined by its resistance to definition, Rip Tales explores the unpredictable edges of artworks and ideas.

Read more less

A revelatory trove of Gustavo Ojeda’s previously unseen 1980s drawings of New Yorkers in motion Cuban American painter Gustavo Ojeda (1958-89) was known primarily for his lush and meditative urban nightscapes, which brought him notoriety in the 1980s downtown New York art scene. He exhibited alongside artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, before dying from AIDS-related complications in 1989, just two weeks shy of his 31st birthday. Ojeda's paintings were notably unpopulated; in his private sketches, however, Ojeda fixated on the people of New York, filling thousands of pages with disembodied faces, the bodies of sleeping people riding public transportation and on the street. In the margins of his sketchbooks, Ojeda often wrote that he felt anxious about his productivity, shaming himself for not being able to paint more. An Excess of Quiet answers Ojeda’s worries with the recovery of what was always right in front of him, his most obsessive and tender practice.

Read more less

Before gaining widespread recognition for sculptural work that sought to dissolve aesthetic boundaries, most notably between sculpture and furniture, Scott Burton produced a substantial body of art writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An eclectic and wide-ranging critic, he wrote such important texts as the introduction to the groundbreaking exhibition "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form" and served as an editor for both ARTnews and Art in America. In these same years, Burton became known as a performance artist, developing themes he pursued in his writing. Yet, his role as an artist-critic has rarely been discussed. Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 brings together for the first time Burton's essays and unpublished manuscripts from these years, tracing his work as an art critic as well as his early statements on performance. In his writing, Burton championed positions that others held as mutually exclusive and antagonistic. He advocated for reductive abstract art while defending figuration, and he argued for the urgency of time-based and ephemeral art practices in the same years that he curated exhibitions of realist painting. Distinct in these diverse texts are Burton's increasing concerns with art's appeal to affects, empathies, and subjective responses; the early formulation of his desire to make art public and demotic; and his critical grasp on the implications and exclusions of mainstream narratives of art. This collection offers rich new context for Burton's sculpture and public art and reveals him as an important voice in the rapidly changing art world of the 1960s and 1970s.

Read more less

On October 5, 2007, Kristin Lucas became the most current version of herself when she succeeded in legally changing her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas in a Superior Court of California courtroom. Refresh presents transcripts of courtroom discussions between Lucas and the presiding judge that enter into philosophical territory as they debate change, its perceived meaning, and its relation to law.

Read more less

At a time of ubiquitous crisis, this multidisciplinary anthology explores “breath” as an allegory and expression of the need for social transformation Collecting interviews, critical essays and artist portfolios, Lastgaspism considers matters of life and death in relation to breath, both allegorical and literal. Bringing into mutual proximity the ecological, political, public health and spiritual crises of our time, this book considers the compounding nature of these events and their impact upon one another, illuminating how the act of gasping for breath is starkly exposing the either/or that stands before us: either we breathe or we die. Through aesthetic and socially engaged strategies of all kinds, cultural workers are responding to the most urgent issues in contemporary life. Lastgaspism offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.

Read more less

"As a painter and as one interested in education in relation to painting and drawing, the writer has become personally interested in the problem of subject matter in art... Since there is controversy in regards to this tendency in painting, research directed toward the source of ideas involved in the work, it is felt, will help to make clear the intention of the artists. This research will deal with the attitudes of these artists toward their own work and their relation to tradition as they express it." —Robert Goodnough (1950). The absence of traditional subject matter was a primary issue for painters in mid-twentieth-century America whose imagery lacked representational references; it was also a problem for those struggling to understand modern art. Robert Goodnough (1917–2010), then a New York University graduate student and an artist deeply involved with these issues, responded to the situation in a 1950 research paper, "Subject Matter of the Artist: An Analysis of Contemporary Subject Matter in Painting as Derived from Interviews with Those Artists Referred to as the Intrasubjectivists." Goodnough's paper constitutes the first scholarly work on the artists who became known as the Abstract Expressionists and includes interviews with William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. This previously unpublished study is presented here for the first time alongside related writings by Goodnough.

Read more less

"Houses and interiors have played a huge role in my life. Though they've taken a lot of my time, working on them has been a vital part of my art work. They've taught me a great deal about space and light and color. And because I've never had any money, but have always wanted to have art, my houses have taught me about looking. My houses have been laboratories where I've had visual encounters that I wouldn't have had any other way. Henry comes out of that experience." —Nancy Shaver. Henry at Home presents photographs of objects from Henry—a shop in Hudson, NY, run by Nancy Shaver—as they appear in the homes of the people who purchased them. In addition to these photographs, taken by the objects' new owners, Henry at Home includes artwork by Nancy Shaver, an introduction by Lucy Raven, and an interview between Shaver and Steel Stillman.

Read more less

In April of 1950, about two dozen of the artists who came to be known as the Abstract Expressionists met for a series of discussions about their own work as well as about the modern scene. Nearly 60 years after the actual meetings took place, the transcript of "Artists Sessions at Studio 35 (1950)" still pulses with the heated discussions around basic artistic issues like titling, process, relationship to history, community, and professionalism. Often referenced, but rarely fleshed out, this series of closed meetings allows readers fly-on-the-wall access to the artists' discussions.

Read more less

A multidisciplinary reader on an acoustic phenomenon conventionally deemed undesirable When a bowed stringed instrument is played, the vibrations of certain notes can resonate at the same frequency as the vibrations of the instrument itself. The dissonant effect that results is referred to as a “wolf tone,” for its howl, and is almost universally characterized as an unpleasant deviance. For Maximilian Goldfarb, Nancy Shaver and Sterrett Smith, however, the wolf tone has come to serve as a productive analogy for describing forces at work in a visual field and a model for their ongoing collaboration, Wolf Tones. Here, the artists present an orchestrated cacophony of images from their individual and collaborative practices alongside texts by contributors from the realms of music and sound, art, poetry, art criticism and architecture. Referencing landscape, temporality, sonic surpluses, improvisation, Éliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak and more, this book addresses the artists' collaboration as well as the acoustic phenomenon itself, reimagining the wolf tone as something to be celebrated.

Read more less

In 1972, artist Garth Evans welcomed the opportunity to create a public sculpture in Cardiff, Wales, as part of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation's City Sculpture Project. Concerned that the increasing demand for his work served only to reinforce the political, social, and economic status quos, Evans hoped to unsettle this dynamic by making a sculpture that would connect with an audience outside of the art world. The morning after the installation of his sculpture, Evans recorded the responses of passersby. The Beckettian transcript of the Cardiff interviews is presented here, framed by Evans's introduction and reflection. Art historian Jon Wood contextualizes The Cardiff Tapes within contemporaneous debates about sculpture and public space. These writings explore ideas about the social responsibilities of art and artists, and make a cogent argument for the value of "difficulty" in sculpture.

Read more less

Beginning in 1968, the University of California, Irvine, was host to an experiment in intercultural exchange and artistic and social scientific learning through practice. Located on the edges of William Pereira's California Brutalist campus, the Farm was a space for craftspeople from Guatemala, Mexico, and Samoa to demonstrate their skills; a laboratory for new methods in education and research; and an unexpected countercultural gathering site. Learning by Doing at the Farm reflects upon this unusual experiment, which brought together Cold War politics, modern development, and indigenous peoples drawn into the strange intellectual and cultural circumstances of 1960s California. Through a critical introduction and previously unpublished archival documentation, this book offers a glimpse of various actors' dreams of what the Farm could become and the collaborations that actually unfolded there.

Read more less

Art writing, theory, poetry and more from a leading champion of “painting as a poetic act” This unprecedented collection compiles the writings of artist and poet Jesse Murry (1948–93), an extraordinary thinker who believed in the capacity of painting to hold the complexity of human meaning. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction brings together Murry’s published art criticism with previously unpublished philosophical writing and poetry from 1980 to his tragic death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44. The result is a portrait of an original mind who sought to unite the histories of Romantic landscape painting with the realities of Black experience through “a belief in the restorative and creative powers of the imagination.” No artist before occupied the exact intersections Murry created through his work, which aimed to reclaim “painting as a poetic act” amid the “death of painting” discourse of the 1980s. In addition to Murry’s writings, this volume also includes reproductions of selected paintings; excerpts from a a pair of panel discussions on art criticism and expressionism that took place in 1980; as well as transcriptions of two of the artist's notebooks, in which the spatialization of the words across the page approaches the condition of thought. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction presents Jesse Murry in his own words, offering intimate access to this remarkable figure.

Read more less

A bold investigation into the changing meaning of public sculpture across 50 years In 1972, British artist Garth Evans (born 1934) temporarily installed a public sculpture in Cardiff, Wales, as part of the UK-wide City Sculpture Project. The next morning, he made a recording of responses to the sculpture from passersby. In 2015, Evans set out on a mission to return the sculpture to the same location in order to make a second recording—how would people respond to it nearly 45 years later? What he discovered in 2019 was just how much had changed, from cultural understandings about public art to the site, the sculpture and himself. The Cardiff Tapes (2019) presents the transcript of Evans’ second recording along with the artist’s reflections on the experiment and art historian Ann Compton’s framing of it. A follow-up to Soberscove’s The Cardiff Tapes (1972), this book explores the stakes involved in artistic redisplays and the changing nature of public art.

Read more less

An intimate account of everyday life and art in 1970s New York from a pioneering feminist artist Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014) produced a vast body of work that includes sculptures, outdoor installations, drawings, illustrations, artist’s books, lyrical essays and art criticism. In 1971 she began to focus on the use of fabric as a primary medium for sculpture and to participate in a feminist consciousness-raising group which contributed to her involvement in A.I.R., the first cooperative gallery for women in the US. This was a pivotal period in Mayer’s life and career, and she documented it in remarkable detail in her 1971 journal, where her plans, enthusiasms, ambitions and insecurities, as well as her opinions about the art around her, are recorded with self-awareness and honesty, along with her concerns about friendship, money and love. This illustrated edition of Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer—previously published in a limited run of 300 copies—includes a new introduction and is expanded to twice the size of the first edition.

Read more less

The marble workers laboring on the decades-long restoration of the Acropolis are the invisible force rebuilding one of the world’s most storied monuments. Inheritors of a millennia-old tradition, few carvers exist today; fewer pass the Acropolis entrance exams. Their work is a highly technical, fascinating amalgam of past and present, yet what these master marble carvers do and how they do it was previously undocumented. As the Acropolis restoration enters its final phases in the midst of political and economic crises in Greece, this book of interviews (in English, with Greek translation) conducted by American artist Allyson Vieira presents the marble carvers’ stories in their own words. The workers describe their craft, techniques, training and their specific roles in the restoration; and consider how the Greek crisis has changed the way they think about their jobs and their citizenship.

Read more less

Butchering the classics through avant-garde amateurism: the Portsmouth Sinfonia embodied the joyous collectivism of 1970s British counterculture In 1970, galvanized in part by the musical experiments of avant-garde composers Gavin Bryars, John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, students at Portsmouth College of Art in England formed their own symphony orchestra. Christened the Portsmouth Sinfonia, its primary requirement for membership was that all players, regardless of skill, experience or musicianship, be unfamiliar with their chosen instruments. This restriction, coupled with the decision to play “only the familiar bits” of classical music, challenged the Sinfonia’s audience to reconsider the familiar, as the ensemble haplessly butchered the classics at venues ranging from avant-garde music festivals to the Royal Albert Hall. By the end of the decade, after three LPs of their anarchic renditions of classical and rock music and a revolving cast of over 100 musicians—including Michael Nyman and Brian Eno—the Sinfonia would cease performing, never officially retiring. The first book devoted to the ensemble, The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia examines the founding tenets, organizing principles and collective memories of the Sinfonia, whose historical position as “the world’s worst orchestra” underplays its unique accomplishment as a populist avant-garde project in which music, collectivity and humor all flourished. The unorthodox journey of the Sinfonia unfolds here through interviews with the orchestra’s original members and publicist/manager, magazine publications, photographs and unseen archival material, alongside an essay by Christopher M. Reeves.

Read more less

"My desire has been to indicate the most practical modes in which we can employ the noblest and the most refined of the plastic arts in the adornment of our streets and public buildings on the one hand, and of our private houses on the other." —Edmund Gosse. Author, translator, librarian, and scholar Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) was one of the most important art critics writing about sculpture in late-nineteenth century Britain. In 1895, he published the The Place of Sculpture in Daily Life, a quirky, four-part series of essays that ran in the Magazine of Art under the headings "Certain Fallacies," "Sculpture in the House," "Monuments," and "Decoration." Often cited but never before reprinted, Gosse's essays sought to demystify sculpture and to promote its patronage and appreciation. Martina Droth's introduction and commentary contextualize the essays within their era, providing insight into the world of late-Victorian sculpture. David J. Getsy's afterword connects the essays' themes to the present, offering a resonant perspective on the sculpture of today.

Read more less

"For as long as I can remember, I have depended on the U.S. Postal Service to bring new information and ideas into my world, and to help me share things with others." In 2010, Marc Fischer experienced postal trauma when he moved away from his beloved Nancy B. Jefferson Post Office on the Near West Side and became a customer of the Roberto Clemente Post Office in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood, which was just three blocks from his apartment. "Rather than forfeit the ability to mail things close to home, I did what any normal person with access to social media would do: I kept going back there and then complained about it on the internet." Gathered together for the first time, Deliverance presents all of Fischer's Facebook post office-related posts since 2011. Part archive and part therapeutic exercise, this collection documents Fischer's committed but fraught bond with Chicago's post offices.

Read more less

Published in relation to an exhibition of the same name at the Smart Museum of Art at The University of Chicago, The Hysterical Material is a book about feelings and emotion. Specifically, it is about how these twin registers are represented and produced in both the materiality of the body and in the objects we call art. Beginning with the premise that hysteria can be best understood phenomenologically rather than in pathological terms, this publication considers the possibilities of the body as an emotional instrument not always understood by the rational mind. This potential is investigated in the work of two leading artists of Western art history, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and Bruce Nauman (born 1941). The body is something used and depicted in the work of both of these artists; however, they employ it in radically different ways. While Rodin was a master of conflating representation and material, Nauman uses figurative representation to plumb the depths of the psychological body. Calling attention to the artists' mutual artistic concerns, this publication explores the multiple possibilities of a bodily and affective engagement with art.

Read more less

The first English-language translation of Oiticica’s "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) is widely considered one of Brazil’s most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar. Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled "Poética Secreta" (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica’s global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica’s art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory.

Read more less

A history of the women at the center of Chicago’s dynamic artist-run culture Collective projects are the lifeblood of Chicago’s art scene. Where the Future Came From expands upon previous research by refocusing the narrative around the work of women and women-identified makers from the late 19th century to the present. The book documents a 2018–19 open-source participatory exhibition, symposium and series of accompanying programs at Columbia College Chicago that explored the roles of feminism and intersectionality in approaching this history. In addition to a chronology, transcripts and essays, the book features personal and scholarly accounts of feminist cultural work. With contributions by TJ Boisseau, Estelle Carol, Daisy Yessenia Zamora Centeno, Carol Crandall, Mary Ellen Croteau, Jory Drew, Meg Duguid, Courtney Fink, Luz Magdaleno Flores, Jeffreen M. Hayes, Tempestt Hazel, Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Sam Kirk, Rana Liu, Sharmili Majmudar, Nicole Marroquin, Meida McNeal, Beate Minkovski, Lani Montreal, Neysa Page-Lieberman, Melissa Potter, Amina Ross, Jennifer Scott, Kate Sierzputowski, Jennifer Sova, Gloria Talamantes, Kate Hadley Toftness, Arlene Turner-Crawford and Lynne Warren.

Read more less

Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014) was a prolific artist, writer, and critic, who entered the New York art scene in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, she became known both for her large-scale fabric sculptures—inspired by the lives of historical women—and her involvement in the feminist art movement. As the decade progressed, Mayer gravitated away from sculpture as a fixed form and the gallery as the primary setting for experiencing art. In 1977, she began to create ephemeral outdoor installations using materials such as balloons, snow, paper, and fabric. Mayer called these projects "temporary monuments," and she intended for them to celebrate and memorialize individuals and communities through their connections to place, time, and nature. Temporary Monuments: Work by Rosemary Mayer, 1977­–1982 is the first comprehensive presentation of this body of work and includes Mayer's documentation of these impermanent artworks. Mayer created photographs, writings, artists' books, and drawings that expand the realm of these projects and reflect her interest in exploring ideas through a variety of media. An introductory essay by Gillian Sneed situates Mayer within the New York art world of the 1970s and ‘80s and argues that Mayer's public art anticipated more recent practices of site-specific and socially engaged art.

Read more less

Fifty years ago, Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) made a historic call: "One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities–which is where the racism exists–and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley…. Let them go to the suburbs and open up freedom schools for whites." Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements features new work by contemporary artists, poets, and writers that relates to the Black Power movement's mandate to "organize your own" community against racism. Exploring the question of what "your own" might mean, this book connects some of the concerns dealt with in the 1960s and '70s to the conversations and social movements around racial justice happening today. Far from an historical account, Organize Your Own documents and expands upon an exhibition and event series of the same name, curated by Daniel Tucker, that took place in Chicago and Philadelphia in early 2016. In addition to exhibition documentation and a series of commissioned texts, this book also includes transcripts from five panel discussions that were organized as part of the exhibition. Two of these discussions focus on the original Rainbow Coalition, a unique example of race and class negotiation in which organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots Organization joined forces. Other discussions and contributions explore poetry, performance, and socially engaged art—which, broadly speaking, finds its foundation in the histories and language of community organizing. What is the role of politics and poetics in complicating and clarifying these ongoing conversations—the ones that happen when people come together?

Read more less

"I did one of my most bizarre lectures up at the Rhode Island School of Design. It consisted of my trying to move a piano across a stage, and people kept coming up to ask if they could help, and I said, 'Certainly not! I mean the point is that I can't move this piano, and I'm struggling to move it, and it's obviously not going to get moved across the stage, and I'm putting out a great exertion of energy, and I'm on a public platform, and you are all viewing me, which is the whole point of this thing.' I said, 'You figure it out.'"–Ray Johnson Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a singular artist, for whom life and work were inextricably linked. Born in Detroit, Johnson attended Black Mountain College before moving to New York, where his work anticipated Pop art and he was active in early Fluxus circles. Best known for his collages and Mail art activities, including his New York Correspondence School, he operated fluidly in a wide range of modes. For Johnson, everything and everyone were potential material for his art—any form could become a space for artistic activity—and the form of the interview proved no exception. That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson brings together a selection of eleven interviews and conversations from 1963 to 1987 that offer unique access to Johnson’s distinctive thinking and working methods. These materials, which include exhibition ephemera, an oral history, radio transcripts, and magazine articles, are marked throughout by his humor and close attention to language. Gathering these exchanges for the first time, That Was the Answer serves as an exceptional introduction to Ray Johnson as well as a resource for those who are interested in gaining deeper insight into the artist and his kaleidoscopic body of work.

Read more less

In the Spring of 1965, dozens of New York artists met for the two-part, invitation-only Waldorf Panels on Sculpture. Organized by Phillip Pavia, the proceedings of The Waldorf Panels on Sculpture were published in issue #6 of his magazine, IT IS. The discussions touch on a wide range of sculptural issues ranging from the status of found objects to thoughts on spontaneity vs. design to the expanding definition of sculpture to perspectives on Surrealism and Pop Art. In addition to heavy audience participation in both panels, Panel 1 includes Herbert Ferber, Reuben Kadish, Ibram Lassaw, Phillip Pavia, James Rosati, Bernard Rosenthal, and David Slivka. Panel 2 includes Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Phillip Pavia, George Segal, George Sugarman, and James Wines. These transcripts, reprinted for the first time since their 1965 original publication, convey a strong sense of a genre—and an artworld—in transition.

Read more less