’Tis the season for award announcements and prize citations, and we're delighted to announced several recent winners and acknowledge their achievements.

We begin with an award close to home: the Gordon J. Laing Prize, which is awarded annually by the University of Chicago Press (since 1963) to the faculty author, editor, or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction. This year, we honor Robert J. Richards for The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.

Continue reading "Awards, fellowships, and recent accolades" »

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"Strange indeed are the places that give birth to the ideas that later, for better or worse, find physical form as books. I first encountered my subject lying on my back in a dentist's chair. In an effort to distract the minds of those undergoing treatment, the dentist in question had attached a large photographic poster to the ceiling depicting the earth at night, seen from space. It is to the distant yet familiar world that his patients cast their eyes, sometimes blurred by tears, sometimes pre-naturally sharpened by the effort of ignoring their discomfort. What they learn is that much of the planet we inhabit no longer experiences 'night' as it was once understood."

So James Attlee begins Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, his meditation on the sublunar landscape and all things lux illuminata. Praised by Dominique Browning in the New York Times Book Review as "an inspiration," Nocturne left our critic commenting, "It makes you want to pull a chair out into the garden and bathe in the moonlight. No questions asked."

Jonathan Messinger, of Time Out Chicago, championed Attlee's occasionally gruff yet wildly wondering prose as that of "our kind of codger," while the Sunday Telegraph was struck by how much pleasure Attlee takes "from simply looking."

In addition to reviews of the book, Attlee has been gracing international pages with commentaries and essays on lunar-lit concerns, from a piece on the moon in literature for the Independent and on the supermoon in the Telegraph to a consideration of darkness in the Observer. All of this, not at all unexpected, from someone whose touchstones shift with such ease from Goethe, Auden, and Basho, to black and white photography, copper mines, and True Detective Magazine.

Piqued your interest?

Listen to Attlee reading excerpts from the book (in streaming format) here, taped during a recent Press trip to Oxford, UK. And, as ever, for additional information about Nocturne, pay a visit to the book's University of Chicago Press webpage.

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Elizabeth Taylor was the twentieth century's White Diamond—in an age that saw the decline of the Hollywood icon, her violet-eyed takes on high society Angela Vickers, hard-drinking Martha, and unhinged Maggie the Cat channeled pure lady power. It's not surprising that so many felt touched both publicly and privately by the the much-married screen siren, humanitarian, perfume impresario, and perpetual tabloid cover model. Perhaps one of the more interesting elements to explore in the wake of Taylor's death is the outpouring of public grief, from shrines set up at iconic gay bars to violet-hued flowers left on the actress's Hollywood star. We asked Notre Dame professor of American studies Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America to share her thoughts on what might be behind contemporary culture's memorial obsessions:

Elizabeth Taylor died this past Wednesday (March 23rd), and within hours the public grief industry kicked into full production. Fans gathered around her star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame, leaving bouquets of flowers dyed to match her violet-colored eyes. Reporters mobbed them with questions about what Taylor "meant" to them; responses ranged from her "eternal movie star beauty" to her "multiple marriages" (eight in total, twice to Richard Burton) and activism on behalf of AIDS research. Other mourners flocked to the Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood where Taylor regularly downed watermelon martinis. A temporary shrine featuring floral wreaths, votive candles, film stills, and other tokens of remembrance was set up in the bar's VIP room; on a nearby table, staffers set aside a Blue Velvet Martini (vodka and blueberry schnapps) in tribute to Taylor's 1944 movie National Velvet. In terms of specific places to grieve, there really wasn't anywhere else for fans to congregate: no Graceland or traumatic death site. The seventy-nine-year-old actress died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and in accordance with personal wishes and Jewish tradition, was buried twenty-four hours later in Forest Lawn Cemetery in a private ceremony attended by her closest friends and family.

Many fans turned to online grief support groups. Internet memorial outfits like "The Eternal Portal," "Respectance," "Valley of Life," "Gone Too Soon," and "Memorial Matters," which offer services ranging from building memorial websites ("simple to create, remember anywhere," fourteen-day no obligation) to selling commemorative products (armbands, candles, balloons, and awareness ribbons personalized with the name of the deceased), saw a flurry of quickly made Elizabeth Taylor tributes. Other stars and celebs paid tribute on Twitter: Elton John, "We have just lost a Hollywood giant. More importantly, we have lost an incredible human being"; Russell Crowe, "R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor, Goddess"; Kirstie Alley, "Elizabeth . . . thank u for the lessons u taught me about life . . . suffering and Joy . . . you are the BRIGHTEST STAR in the universe. . . Eternal love"; Joan Rivers, "Sad to hear of Elizabeth Taylor's death. She was the 1st major celebrity to join me in the fight against AIDS when it wasn't a popular cause." By Wednesday night, hundreds of thousands of Tweets, Facebook messages, and blog diaries featured the shared sentiment: "R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor."

Temporary memorials, online shrines, and social networking practices all point to changed understandings—and expectations—of public mourning in America today. The more tragic and traumatic the death, or the more sudden and surprising, the more effusive the public display of grief. When Taylor's good friend Michael Jackson died in July 2009, for example, thousands descended upon the teeny white house in Gary, Indiana where Jackson and his siblings were raised. Dozens of TV crews and reporters set up camp while a steady stream of mourners added teddy bears, condolence cards, and hand-painted pictures of the King of Pop to a sprawling shrine that took up most of the front yard. Fans held candlelight vigils in the street and practiced Moonwalking; neighborhood kids hawked tshirts, CDs, and bottles of water.

For her part, Dame Elizabeth Taylor shrugged off such carnivalesque performances of grief. "I can't be part of the public whoopla," she told one reporter after Jackson died. "I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us, not a public event." She might have been amused by the very public dimensions of her own passing.

For more of Doss's thoughts on the culture of commemoration and our obsession with issues of memory and history, have a look at Memorial Mania's UCP page here.

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Sad news from New York about the passing of Leo Steinberg, one of the twentieth century's most acclaimed art historians, whose critical insights, eloquent writings, and articulate ideas about art from Renaissance to modern, sharpened the minds of several generations of scholars, critics, and artists.

Born in Moscow, educated in Berlin and London, Steinberg earned his doctorate from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in 1960. Steinberg later taught at the City University of New York, Hunter College, and Harvard University, and was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held for sixteen years (1975-91).

Steinberg pioneered a now much more common approach to art and letters: as his own body of work moved from criticism into art history, he continued to write articles for the most influential journals and magazines of his day, from Partisan Review and Harper's to ArtNews and Art, many of which are collected in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art.

A maverick scholar of Rauschenberg (Encounters with Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture) and the Renaissance noted for his thoughtful integration of works, both internally and externally, Steinberg formed an infamously imagined triad with Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, celebrated by Thomas Wolfe in The Painted Word (1975) as the "kings of Cultureburg." Coiner of the "flatbed picture plan," Steinberg levied criticisms against formalism, the dominant mid-century critical methodology, and encouraged scholars to look beyond the content of a painting and aspire to find meaning in more visual choices, like color and shape. This merging of representation and subject matter paved the way for radical critical understanding—and openness—toward the works of the Abstract Expressionists. As Steinberg said of painter Jasper Johns: "The formalist (a)esthetic, designed to champion the new abstract trend, was largely based on a misunderstanding and an underestimation of the art it set out to defend."

Later work saw Steinberg address the as-yet-unsuspected eroticism of the iconographies devoted to Christ and Mary, the subject of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, and the cause of much controversy throughout Steinberg's career. An extensive museum lecturer, Steinberg also was the first art critic to receive the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, in 1983.

We remember Steinberg for those three works published by the University of Chicago Press, for his prodigious talents as a writer and iconoclastic thinker, and for his reverent approach to painting and what it might offer us, as students of our own humanity.

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John Martin (1789-1854), English Romantic painter, was born the same week that the Bastille was stormed—an event whose sturm und drang might be said to eerily echo the grandiose theatrical visions of Martin's work in oils. Martin's large-scale paintings bore the influence of contemporary diorama culture—indeed, Martin even claimed that D. W. Griffith was aware of his work and many see his panoramic, imaginative works as precursors to epic cinema. During the last four years of his life, in particular, Martin furthered his scenes of apocalyptic destruction and disaster by engaging with a triptych of biblical subjects: The Great Day of His Wrath, The Last Judgment, and The Plains of Heaven.

This week, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle opened a major new exhibition of Martin's work, which will run through the end of April before traveling to the Tate Museum later this year. This is the largest public exhibition of Martin's work since his death and the first exhibition devoted to the painter in more than thirty years, and it will include both previously unseen and newly restored paintings. Paying particular attention to how Martin's populism fits within the larger narrative of British art, the exhibition also connects to larger questions of showmanship, science, epic morality, and today's charged social and political culture.

In The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856, Ralph O'Connor demonstrates how Martin's art helped to give birth to the modern geological imagination. The story of the nineteenth-century geological writers—James Parkinson, John Playfair, William Buckland, James Rennie, and others—is a saga on par with the theatricality of Martin's paintings. Backed by other men of science, clergymen, and hacks who borrowed freely from the Bible, poetry, and the panorama industry, these pioneering scientists piqued the public imagination by recasting the story of creation with uncouth mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and serpentine sea dragons in lieu of Adam and Eve. Just as Martin's paintings circulated through a public sphere half charged by fear of a coming moral apocalypse and half enthralled by new theatrical opportunities, so too did Victorian geological writing enter into the discourse of the wider Bible-reading public.

The Earth on Show garnered several prizes, including the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the Best Book Award from the British Society for Literature and Science—with Martin's retrospective as impetus, it's as good a time as any to revisit its enthusiasm for the days when paleontological wonders first went public.

The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-53), John Martin. Courtesy of the Tate, London, 2010.

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David Antin, champion of avant-garde sensibility, performance poet, critic, and peerless conversationalist was once David Antin, small press magazine editor. As an excerpt—from Antin's Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005—recently published by Design Observer recalls, Antin's days editing some/thing with his friend Jerome Rothenberg were not without their difficulties.

Without giving everything away, we'll quickly make mention that the excerpt is taken from the book's Introduction, in which Antin charts his course from linguistics doctoral student to critic of art and literature. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters that reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century cultural life: Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, John Ashbery, LeRoi Jones, John Baldessari, Frank O'Hara, Stan Brakhage, Allen Ginsberg, and paintings by Klee, Kandinsky, and Kirchner, among others. Zoning in on one particular episode that featured Andy Warhol designing the cover of some/thing's Vietnam issue, Antin remembered:

When I went to see Andy I showed him our previous issues and told him about the Vietnam issue we were planning, he said, "Great!" What he'd really like to do was a Vietcong flag. But I said, "What we'd like you to do is take a prowar slogan like 'BOMB HANOI!' put it on the cover as a button, and fuck it up any way you like." So Andy said, "Great!" and I thought it was settled. But over the next two weeks I ran into Gerard Malanga twice in the Eighth Street Bookshop, and he told me Andy would really like to do a Vietcong flag. Finally I said, "Look Gerard, I don't know too much about the Vietcong, and neither do you or Andy. But what we do know about are the American warmongers. So what I want is for Andy to take one of their idiot slogans and fuck it up any way he likes for our cover. That way any member of the American Legion could pick up a copy on a news stand and maybe read it." Andy finally did it with the image of the BOMB HANOI button repeated over and over gain on a cover that functioned as a page of grungy looking stamps you could tear apart along the perforations and if you felt like it glue on a wall. When I gave Allen Ginsberg his copy, Allen's jaw dropped and he said "What's this?" Then he turned it over, saw his name on the back and said, "It's all right, I'm in it."

some/thing Vol. 2, No.1, Winter 1966
(image and caption courtesy of David Antin)

"The cover Warhol finally approved for the Bomb Hanoi issue. The cover was a sheet of real glue-backed stamps, made convenient for tearing out and pasting on telephone poles or subway walls by real perforations. It carried the deteriorated pro-war image Warhol was trying to show in all its pro-war shabbiness. It rhymed with the collage of war-promoting propaganda of the American and South Vietnamese Generals and the 'Best and the Brightest'—the Rusks, the McNamaras, the Rostows and the still servile American press that surrounded a hapless LBJ in which we embedded the poetry and prose of the American avant garde."

For additional images from some/thing's Vietnam issue, including the cover's first take and the issue's table of contents, visit the Observatory archive at Design Observer; for more information on Radical Coherency, visit the book's UCP page here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature
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In 1919, the (literally) round table at New York's Algonquin Hotel first became fodder for the goings-about-town sections of literary journals and New York City dailies, as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and others (shoutout to Edna Ferber!) barbed wits while whittling their way through Prohibition, personal failures and successes ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and other trappings of the times. In April 1974, in tribute to those well-quoted luminaries, three contemporary critics (John Leonard, Nona Balakian, and Ivan Sandrof) decided to extend their conversation about contemporary literature to the national level and thus, the National Book Critics Circle was formed.

Now, our foray, thirty-seven years after the fact:

Hearty congrats to Susie Linfield, author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism! In a banner year (Two university presses with nominees in the Criticism category! Independent publishers spread throughout the list!) for the NBCC, we couldn't be more delighted to celebrate what Artforum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Nation, and many others have already acknowledged: Linfield's book is a tour-de-force polemic on the often intimate and always complex relationship between photography and political violence. Stay tuned, as this year's award winners will be announced on March 10th. Until then we, arm-in-arm with all of those critical commentators that comprise the NBCC, encourage you to celebrate Linfield and the other nominees the best way we know how—by urging you to read their praiseworthy tomes.

If you haven't yet found the time to check out this impassioned critical take on the history of violence and its bearings on modern photojournalism, excerpts from The Cruel Radiance are available online at Tablet and Guernica, in addition to on the book's University of Chicago Press site here.

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We try to start off on the positive side of the street: with congrats to Press authors Matthew Jesse Jackson and Tom Vanderbilt for their Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers grants, which will spear a variety of projects, from art-curio blogging to short-form cultural criticism.

And then we cross—

A combination of sources broke the news yesterday about the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," which opened on October 30th at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The exhibit, the first at a major museum to focus on "sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture," drew some gnarling critique from the Catholic League and conservative politicians, aimed at the late artist David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly. Wojnarowicz, a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and activist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, is known for work that mixed death and longing, simplicity and pathos. The work in question includes video footage of ants crawling on a crucifix, an image representative of the AIDS crisis. Soon to be Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner issued a statement that reads, in part, "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds."

The Smithsonian took down the work.

Back to the middle: the explanation. Critic and theorist Wendy Steiner wrote The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism in 1995, less than a decade after a fatwa was issue for Salman Rushdie's death and twenty-five years after Robert Mapplethorpe began snapping his first polaroids. In it, she surveys a wealth of cultural controversies, demonstrating that the fear and outrage they inspire is really the result of an imperiled misunderstanding about the complicated relationship between art and life.

Steiner has always been compelled by these issues and her most recent book The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art is no different. Here she situates our contemporary culture, simultaneously fixated on artifice and the real thing, caught in a media-saturated, real-virtual divide that relies on the arts to etch out a new ethical potential: through the "figure" of the model-protagonist.

In part, it seems like that's what the Smithsonian curators wanted to do: to draw attention to the difference—imperceptible or obvious—that is all too real. In an excerpt from The Real Real Thing, available on the book's UCP site here, Steiner describes the changing mores of an almost contemporary society on the cusp of media saturation and anticipates recent events:

A realm of mirrors, of fantasy and feint, the arts have always presented a conundrum in terms of their real-world efficacy. 'Poetry makes nothing happen,' declares W. H. Auden in a poem that simultaneously derides that claim. True and not true, the assertion of artistic impotence has been a valid defense against the censor, the bowdlerizer, the book-burner. Do not worry, we assure them: aesthetics and ethics are separate spheres. What 'happens' in art is not happening in reality, and so it is quite safe to let anything 'happen' there. The changes that take place through art are changes of mind, and democracies recognize the value of entertaining any and all such virtual revolutions.

This position we abandon at our peril, Steiner finishes, before situating modeling—in all of its facets and well, faces—as our best exemplar between reality and representation.

Back to the other side—

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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"If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." Oh, bless ye, former President Truman, and your reaction to Abstract Expressionism. We've been nursing this line for a few days, as for reasons unknown, we've seen a 1995 article by the Independent making the rounds of various Facebook pages and internet listservs. The gist of the reportage? That, amongst other wild revelations, modern art was a "weapon" knowingly used in our cold cultural war with the Soviet Union; that the CIA backed Stephen Spender's influential journal Encounter; and that a strange beast going by the name the Propaganda Assets Inventory subsidized everything from the 1958 touring exhibition "New American Painting" (featuring de Kooning, Motherwell, and Pollock, in an all-star cast) to the board of directors at MOMA. The rationale of the CIA was, of course, communist-combatant. Up in arms about the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists, the government agency sought to portray Socialist Realism as an outdated art movement, and as the article mentions, they moved boldly forward with that plan:

[A]t its peak [the CIA] could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

But the pressing question remains: if we couldn't convince a president of the integrity and value of modern avant-garde movements, did we really convince the rest of the world? And how did the rest of America come to embrace Sunday afternoon trips to a certain midtown Museum or Ed Harris's later star turn in a related biopic?

Television, duh.

Media art historian Lynn Spiegel penned TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television in order to address the surprising links between the urbane world of modern art and the commercials and network programming that helped define 1950s and '60s America. From trendy products advertised in between episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to the works of Richard Avedon, Ben Shahn, and Ero Saarinen that graced corporate headquarters, company cufflinks, and staged living rooms, Spiegel demonstrates how art, television, and commerce merged in dynamic—and surprising—ways. To read a fascinating excerpt from the book—which tells the story of fine-arts photographer Paul Strand's experience designing a sponsorship ad for CBS, pay a visit to the book's UCP website here. Are you listening, Conan? Time to reconsider your sofa.

And what about that Socialist Realism? Did Soviet art movements willingly collapse, eyes a-goggle at Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)? Yes and no, well, not really—art historian, critic, and Our Literal Speed participant Matthew Jesse Jackson tells the most comprehensive story of unofficial postwar Soviet art yet to appear in any language in The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes. Kabakov's art—installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts—rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate and through the work of Kabakov and his Moscow Conceptual Circle peers, Jackson suggests that what emerged in the wake of Stalin is now inextricably part of a transnational art world for which the Soviet Union is largely a memory, fading fast.

Art is what you make it—and both of these books reveal vital contributions to neglected chapters in the history of twentieth-century art. With that in mind, we offer yet another perspective: check out Andy Rooney's assessment of contemporary public art below. The buck really should stop here:

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
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This weekend marks the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair (though things technically got underway last night) at MOMA's PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. Sponsored by Printed Matter, the non-profit institution dedicated to the promotion of artists' books and material ephemera, the Fair features cutting-edge art organizations, journals, scholars (Boris Groys), and contemporary artists (Paul Chan and Kristin Lucas, among them), alongside over 200 exhibitors, including native Chicagoans Soberscove Press and Temporary Services. In celebration of the conference, we'd like to point you toward some events and exhibitions organized around the work of one of our own purveyors of that soon-to-be discussed art-book hybrid, Press author Josiah McElheny.

McElheny's The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia" has already enjoyed a profile in ARTnews, a centenary party cohosted by Cabinet, and mention in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A recent editor's choice review in BOMB engages the book in sum:

The slim volume The Light Club reveals McElheny's passion for modernity's early days, its promises, its failures, and its forgotten stories. The book offers the first English translation of Der Lichtklub von Batavia, a futuristic satire from 1912 by German novelist and theorist Paul Scheerbart, who argued for colored-glass architecture as it may 'overcome cultural stagnation.' The somewhat bizarre anecdote has its protagonists, who are 'hungry for light, for understanding, and a new certainty,' rally around the idea of creating an underground spa in an abandoned mine—not for bathing in water but for bathing in electrical light. McElheny surrounds this vision of 'ironic utopia' with metanarratives, which he commissioned from other artists and writers, or authored himself. In a play, a reminiscence, a male/female dialogue, and a critique, Scheerbart's century-old original gets re-narrated—its bold creative idealism is highlighted while its discriminating and, in hindsight, alarming aspirations are exposed. McElheny's delightful and eye-opening introduction ponders 'Utopia Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, or Never.'

What's new with our man of translucent infinities, you ask? McElheny, a MacArthur Fellowship-winning sculptor, performance artist, filmmaker, and writer, will debut his most recent film Island Universe this coming week (November 8th) at MOMA's Modern Monday series. Soon after, he'll take Chicago by storm with the opening of his solo exhibition at Donald Young Gallery on November 12th (which runs through December 15th), and a talk and booksigning of The Light Club on November 15th, hosted by the University of Chicago's Department of Visual Art's Open Practice Committee.

For more information on the modernist themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness that animate McElheny's project, be sure to pick up a copy of The Light Club. In the meantime, here's an Art21 exclusive on "History and Orginality" that reveals a bit more of what fuels McElheny's striking practice:

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Susie Linfield is the director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she's an associate professor of journalism. Like many in her field, Linfield approaches the topic of her most recent University of Chicago Press book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence head-on, arguing that learning to see the people in politically violent photographs is an ethically necessary act in today's visually proliferated world. Surveying the work of photographers as varied as James Nachtwey, Gilles Peress, and Jack Birns, and ranging in scope from China's cultural revolution and the events surrounding 9/11 to the Nigerian-Biafran and Bosnian wars, The Cruel Radiance adroitly considers how photography has—and should—respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.

It should be unsurprising, to say the least, that the book has picked up steam in the weeks surrounding today's elections. You can check out several excerpts—this one at the UCP site on the history of photography, from Benjamin to Sontag; another at Guernica entitled "September 11th and the Democracy of Images"; and yet another at Tablet, which questions the right and wrong ways of looking at Holocaust-era photography.

Just yesterday, Artforum posted a 500 Words piece by Linfield, which included some important words on the book's immediate context:

[Robert] Capa's photos of the Spanish Civil War, or of China after the Japanese invasion, were very clear on political context. You knew what to do with your anger and your horror. Today, looking at images from Sierra Leone or the Congo, one can feel horror, disgust, and great sadness—but what to do in response is much less apparent. Which of the twelve militias now fighting in the Congo do you support? Visual atrocity is much clearer today, but we no longer have the political clarity to accompany it.

From there, it's a hop, skip, and jump over to the New York Times' story on Hilary Clinton's visit to Cambodia, where Clinton advocated for the nation to proceed with trials of the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, to understand the vital importance of the photojournalism Linfield discusses.

If you live in the NYC area, please consider attending Linfield's talk on Thursday, November 11th, at Book Culture. And, as ever, for more information about the book, be sure to check it out its University of Chicago Press page here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
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If you watch movies and read blogs about watching movies, or blog with movie-like aplomb and thus spend your days (sort of like I do) plaintively "watching" the Internet, then Jonathan Rosenbaum is a man who needs no introduction. He certainly deserves a better one, no? Preeminent critic, global film connoisseur, former bandmate of Chevy Chase, opiner of Dead Man and op-ed penner upon the death of Ingmar Begman, Rosenbaum has been one of the most important figures in American film journalism for more than a quarter of a century. His most recent book Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition collects fifty pieces of his astute criticism from the past four decades, each of which showcases his passion for the way we view movies, as well as how we write about them.

The book and its author have been receiving quite a bit of attention lately from outlets as varied as the films Rosenbaum engages, like the Onion's A.V. Club:

Ceaselessly prolific, frighteningly well-informed on seemingly every detail of film history, and well ahead of the technological curve, Jonathan Rosenbaum has championed and contextualized many films in his 40 years as a critic. When print film criticism flourished, he could write 1,800 words on Cliffhanger and make them all matter.

Recently, the Nation cited Rosenbaum and his work in a panel discussion (presented here in streaming audio format) entitled "The Future of Film Criticism," featuring the Nation's film critic Stuart Klawans, David Sterrit from the National Society of Film Critics, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, and Cinema Journal's Heather Hendershot.

And lest not we forget, the Criterion Collection's "Book Notes" blog reviewed Rosenbaum's "invaluable" collection at length, while linking to a recent Rosenbaum feature on the affinities between Carl Theodor Dryer's Gertrude and William Faulkner's Light in August.

How about GreenCine Daily? They're off and running with commentary on Rosenbaum's "Rediscovering Charlie Chaplin," one of the essays included in Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, noting:

Rosenbaum finds the need for education urgent: in a world where it's easy to scorn the Tramp as sentimental and outmoded, he insists 'one can't even begin to grasp Chaplin's importance without processing sizable chunks of the twentieth century.' He then does his best to lay out some of that historical space briefly, and by the end even a hardened Chaplin skeptic may well be convinced they're the ones at fault.

But perhaps the Globe and Mail says it best: "Rosenbaum . . . is one of the bellwether critics in film reviewing, reminding others of the tradition of serious cinema and keeping abreast of new movements."

We couldn't agree more. To fine-tune your own critical approach, check out this excerpt from the book and be sure to follow-up with a visit to Jonathan's ever-updated blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | Commentary
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With his much-anticipated new book, Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age, finally here, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin is making the rounds, in Chicago and beyond.

Kamin appeared on Fox Chicago News last night to talk about the book, which explores architecture both here in Chicago and throughout the world. You can watch that appearance at the Fox site. And Kamin will also be making a slew of public appearances in the coming weeks, speaking about the book and meeting readers. He's got full details on those events at his Cityscapes blog (which, if you're at all interested in architecture or Chicago, you should already be reading anyway!).

Come out and see him—find out what he thinks of green architecture, the housing boom and bust, the Trump Tower, the legacy of Daley, and much, much more.

Archived in Art and Architecture
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Contemporary architecture has undergone some radical transformations alongside advancements in technology that allow architects and engineers to design and construct buildings that were impossible just a few years ago. Viewing the finished works—works like Daniel Liebeskind's Fredrick C. Hamilton building, or Frank Gehry's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts—inevitably evokes questions about their construction. How were they built, and how do some of these precariously tilted structures remain standing? In his recent book Architecture Under Construction—a collection of eighty black and white images of some of our most unusual new buildings in the process of their construction—Guggenheim Award-winning photographer Stanley Greenberg explores the complex mystery and beauty of buildings before they receive their obscuring skin. Stephen Longmire writes for a recent article in the Chicago Reader:

By arriving before anyone else—except the builders, who are nowhere to be seen—Greenberg is able to study the guts of these iconic constructions. It's a matter of political principle for the New York-based photographer, whose two previous books, Invisible New York (1998) and Waterworks (2003), explore the seldom-seen infrastructure of his home town. "During the Bush years, everything was hidden," he told me in a recent interview. "I wanted to look beneath the surface."

Greenberg's photographs are a testament to the architect's craft, but they also show a world of vast computer-generated spaces for which the human body no longer appears to be a useful reference of scale. The buildings he explores resemble oversized architectural models, playthings for utopians and mad scientists. The roughness of the spaces reminds us that our civic life is always under construction, and more fragile than we may think. Consider what became of the boom that made these ambitious skeletons possible. "That was a moment in time," Greenberg says. "I couldn't make those pictures today."

Through September 6th you can also see some of Greenberg's original prints on display at in the new modern wing of the Art Institute, photographs of which, coincidentally, are also included in Greenberg's book. For a primer on Greenberg's work see this gallery of photographs from the book and read the complete Reader article online.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
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Fresh on the heels of the White House, the National Park Service announced this morning that Laura Bush and Michelle Obama will join together to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks at a memorial service in Shanksville, Pennsylvania—site of the United Flight 93 crash. The service will mark the first meeting of the two women since their informal tea at the White House during the Bush-Obama transition and will include them among the million plus visitors who have made a pilgrimage to the temporary memorial dedicated to the flight and its victims.

American studies professor Erika Doss examines the often spontaneous offerings that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death, like this one—as well as the powerful public feelings of loss and the politics of representation that often accompany them—in the recently published Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. The United 93 memorial site, which was moved across the street from its original location alongside the crash field in 2008, has been widely documented on the web, spawning sites that have become their own mini-memorials, dedicated to archiving the religious items, hand painted rocks, hat collections, flowers, memorial wall, and 40-foot chain fence that dot the surrounding area.

In her detailed exploration of memorial culture, Doss considers how the fixed and unyielding qualities of permanent terrorism memorials (often cast in granite, marble, and bronze) contrast the senses of disruption and loss these events often indicate in our own lives, while still echoing the experientiality and radical transformation of minimalist art. Shanksville's own permanent memorial is due to be completed by the end of next year—in time to mark the tenth anniversary of September 11th. And though often engaged with loss, recent news reports like those about the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground, encourage us to remember these sites also spring up as vigils to the living, as evidenced by the gathering of family members, photographs, flowers, and personal items near the mine entrance in San Jose.

And on a lighter note, what else engages the cultural, social, and political conditions behind today's urgent feelings about history and memory—and our frenzied obsession with commemoration? Could it be Rod Blagojevich's hair? In a fevered column in today's Chicago Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg tears through a summertime read of Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" and summarizes the former governor with this pithy, two-thousand year-old line: "Who of these would not rather have the state disordered than his hair?" Indeed. For fresh translations of "Shortness" and other gems from the Stoic philosopher, stay tuned to new releases from our series, the Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Edited by renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the series seeks to restore Seneca to his rightful place among those classical writers most studied in the humanities. Blago might spend his downtime awaiting next year's retrial taking a page from the series' most recent release, Anger, Mercy, Revenge.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Commentary
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H. Allen Brooks, architectural historian at the University of Toronto known for coining the name "Prairie School" and authoring a number of important books on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and pioneering architect and designer Le Corbusier, passed away last Monday at the age of 84.

In 1997 the Press published: Le Corbusier's Formative Years: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds. According to this entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia his comprehensive biographical account of Le Corbusier's early career—the culmination of over twenty years of research—was applauded for the challenge it posed to existing scholarship, "correcting the mistaken impression that Le Corbusier's work had begun in Paris," and "was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in biography and won a first prize from the Association of American Publishers for books in architecture and urban planning."

To find out more Brooks' fascinating life and groundbreaking studies on the history of modern architecture navigate to the Canadian Encyclopedia or read his obituary at the University of Toronto website. Or follow the link for more on Le Corbusier's Formative Years.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | History | Press Releases
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Yesterday you might have noticed that Google's search page was adorned with a Google Doodle inspired by the textile design of modernist architect, designer, and theorist, Josef Frank. Until Google's recognition of the artist on the event of what would be his 125th birthday, many were likely unfamiliar with his work, despite his status as one of Europe's leading modernists and co-founder of the Vienna School of Architecture. Thus for those wanting to find out more about this widely accomplished, yet obscure figure of twentieth century art, we offer Josef Frank: Life and Work—the first study to comprehensively explore Frank's life, ideas, and designs.

Educated in Vienna just after the turn of the century, Frank became the leader of the younger generation of architects in Austria after the First World War. But Frank fell from grace when he emerged as a forceful critic of the extremes of modern architecture and design during the early 1930s. Dismissing the demands for a unified modern style, Frank insisted that it was pluralism, not uniformity, that most characterized life in the new machine age. He called instead for a more humane modernism, one that responded to people's everyday needs and left room for sentimentality and historical influences. He was able to put these ideas into practice when, in 1933, he was forced to leave Vienna for Sweden. There his work came to define Swedish (or Scandinavian) modern design. For more than thirty years he was the chief designer for the Stockholm furnishings firm Svenskt Tenn, producing colorful, cozy, and eclectic designs that provided a refreshing alternative to the architectural mainstream of the day and presaged the coming revolt against modernism in the 1960s.

In this sensitive study of one of the twentieth century's seminal architects and designers, author Christopher Long offers new insight into Frank's work and ideas and provides an important contribution to the understanding of modernist culture and its history.

Pick up a copy of the book or check out Time Magazine's online article on the Frank Google Doodle.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News
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According to a Reuters article picked up in this morning's edition of the Guardian, Edith Shain, the nurse who was photographed being kissed by a sailor in Times Square on August 14, 1945, has died at age 91. Yet her VJ Day picture, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life magazine will no doubt live on as an icon of public culture. Widely recognized, historically significant, and emotionally resonant, such images are never out of the spotlight, appropriated and reappropriated by governments, commercial advertisers, journalists, grassroots advocates, bloggers, and artists, as a means of persuasion and critical reflection. But what makes them so powerful? How do they remain meaningful across generations? What do they expose—and what goes unsaid?

In No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism's vital contribution to public life.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News
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Photographer Stanley Greenberg, whose new book Architecture under Construction offers a fascinating collection of images of some of our most unusual new buildings in the process of being built, is currently exhibiting part of the collection featured in the book in the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing, Kurokawa Gallery. From a press release on the AIC's website:

While avant-garde architecture has frequently inspired today's art photographers and video artists, Stanley Greenberg is the first to focus a documentary-style lens on the subject. Greenberg's luminous large-scale black-and-white photographs explore avant-garde structures in the process of being built. Using highly cropped views, Greenberg captures moments in the assembly of architecture that are rarely evident in the final building, revealing the complexity of contemporary construction and the residual visual unfolding of spaces resulting from these feats of structural gymnastics.

Find out more about the exhibit, or, if a trip to downtown Chicago isn't on your agenda before the close in September, check out our gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events
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Longtime Chicagoans may recall the 1983 retrospective of the work of sculptor Louise Bourgeois that came to the Museum of Contemporary Art (back when the museum was on East Ontario Street). It was an exhibit best seen, perhaps, in the company of a psychotherapist: primal and dark, layered with pain, abuse, betrayal, and brutality. This retrospective left one looking forward—warily—to further work from this provocative sculptor.

There was more work, much more, all suffused with psychic confession. Bourgeois may be best known for her series of giant spiders, which she associated with her mother. The extensive installation Spider (1997) is the subject of a book by Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing, which comes into close engagement with the work and the issues of biography and autobiography which are never far away.

The New York Times has an obituary and a slideshow of some of her works.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News
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The Dedalus Foundation, founded by Robert Motherwell to promote understanding of modern art and modernism, recently announced the winner of the annual Robert Motherwell Book Award, Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense by R. Bruce Elder, published by the University of California Press.

The foundation also announced a special commendation award for the posthumously published book by Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity, which we released last year. In announcing the special commendation, the Dedalus Foundation said:

This study of the ‘monsters’ of the cathedral restored by Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century explores the complex position of these creatures between past and present. Narrating their conception and realization on the basis of impressive archival research, Camille proceeds to track their impact in shaping the modern imagination—not only in the arts but in science, politics, and popular culture as well—from Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet to Disney and the Internet. These are our monsters. The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is an expansive, interdisciplinary cultural analysis that questions defining assumptions of modern history and art history.

Michael Camille (1958–2002) was professor of art history at the University of Chicago and we were pleased to also publish his Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards
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The June edition of ARTnews magazine contains a piece on artist Josiah McElheny and his obsession with the work of German novelist, poet, and artist, Paul Scheerbart. Through his many writings and drawings Scheerbart envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass—a vision which had a profound influence on many of his contemporaries in the worlds of art and architecture, including Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius.

As the ARTnews article notes, after discovering Scheerbart's work for himself, McElheny's work has been similarly influenced by the ideas of this nineteenth century visionary—not only inspiring McElheny's recent book, The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia", but also a whole series of McElheny's other work, from film, to performances, to sculptures.

To find out more navigate to the article at the ARTnews magazine website .

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Literature | Reviews
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Modern technology allows architects and engineers to design and construct buildings that were impossible just a few years ago. At the same time, what lies underneath these surfaces is more mysterious than ever before. In Architecture under Construction, photographer Stanley Greenberg explores the anatomy and engineering of some of our most unusual new buildings, helping us to understand our own fascination with what makes buildings stand up, and what makes them fall down.

From a recent article on the book in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Shooting in black and white with a view camera, Greenberg approaches his subjects with what looks like naive—or architecturally unschooled—fascination. Part of his book's appeal lies in its recording of what must disappear to give buildings the structure and appearance they have.

Former San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator of architecture and design Joseph Rosa, now director of the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, provides a foreword. But Greenberg's pictures by themselves make a powerful argument for city dwellers to enjoy their privileged view of architecture as a process, not merely a product.

Read the review at SFGate.com or see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
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The University of Chicago Press's narration of the artistic life of German painter Gerhard Richter is now in video form as well. From YouTube and, for higher quality, in a Quicktime version. Enjoy.

Archived in Art and Architecture
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The latest installment of the Chicago Audio Works Podcast narrates the high points in the artistic life of German painter Gerhard Richter, adapted from the just-published Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting by Dietmar Elger. (Open in Quicktime to see an accompanying set of images from the book.)

Despite Richter's status as one of the most popular artists of the post-war era, Elger's book is the first biographical account of his life and work. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, Elger explores Richter's childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and '70s, when student protests, political strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond.

Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come.

To find out more about the book read this excerpt.

Also, don't miss these upcoming lectures by the author:

March 24, 2009, 7:00 pm
Dietmar Elger
at the Art Gallery of Ontario

March 26, 2010, 6:00 pm
Dietmar Elger
at The Art Institute of Chicago

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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In a recent essay in the journal Places (part of the Design Observer group), Nancy Levinson argues against the recent trend of globe-trotting architecture criticism and proposes instead a return to local expertise. Of the current criticism, she writes:

"You've got the editorial charge to be national and international, like the rest of the paper, and you've got the budget to roam. So you rack up the datelines: Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Moscow, Stuttgart, Basel, etc. etc. But the view from the tower is broad not sharp, panoramic but not particular. The inevitable result is that you are writing at the thin edge of scant knowledge: you are critiquing places you know only as a tourist, and buildings you know only from brief and usually tightly programmed visits, often in the company of the watchful designer. This is no way to gain meaningful experience or serious knowledge of a building or landscape or how it fits within its local setting and larger environs.

But of the future of criticism, she singles out several critics (including Michael Sorkin, whose Twenty Minutes in Manhattan we distribute for Reaktion Books) who are "[making the commitment to] somehow… deglamorize the global, to make it a measure of critical strength to commit to the local." And she reserves great praise, especially on this count, for the Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin and his Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago.

In the book, Kamin's subjects range from high-rises to highways, parks to public housing, Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry. First published in 2001, Why Architecture Matters collects the best of Kamin's acclaimed columns, offering both a look at America's foremost architectural city and a taste of Kamin's penetrating, witty style of critique.

This fall, Kamin will publish another book with the Press. Due in October, Terror and Wonder tells the story of a tumultuous decade in American architectural history. The more than fifty pieces included in the book cover the period stretching from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 through the onset of the Great Recession, the inauguration of would-be architect Barack Obama, and the completion of the last major projects of the decade-long building boom. In all, Kamin's book captures an era marked, paradoxically, by abiding fear, giddy excess, and growing concern for the environment, all of which were reflected in the buildings and public spaces designed and constructed during these years.

Check back here for more information on the forthcoming Terror and Wonder.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago
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Ronald Searle, the master of modern caricature who, since 1995, has plied his sardonic trade on the coveted op-ed pages of the French daily newspaper Le Monde, turned ninety last Wednesday. To mark the occasion Searle gave the Britain's Channel 4 News his first interview in over thirty years which you can view below. The interview offers a brief history of Searle's prolific career as well as an interesting look around the artist's studio. But for a fuller look at his work check out the press's 2002 publication, Ronald Searle in Le Monde—offering more than a hundred of his cartoons from Le Monde that range in topic across politics, the new Europe, the nature of the contemporary economy, social games, and more. Find out more about the book, or view this sampling of five cartoons.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Gerhard Richter has been known in the United States for some time, especially for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. But as demonstrated by the successful retrospective of his work on display at the MoMA in 2001, Richter's oeuvre incorporates a highly diverse stylistic range—from the muted tones of the "blurred figurative paintings" produced in the 60s, to the "seductive abstract paintings" of his later work—and has since attracted much attention from audiences and critics alike. Yet despite the artist's popularity there has been no definitive biographical account of his life, until now.

As a recent review that ran in the February 11th edition of the Financial Times notes with his new book Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting Dietmar Elger offers for the first time insight into this fascinating artist's life and work. From the review:

Among the many triumphs of Dietmar Elger's landmark first biography of the artist, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, written with full access to his archives, is to show how Richter's apparently neutral tones are part of a long, complicated fight against traditional German emotionalism. Born in Dresden a year before the Nazis came to power, Richter had, by the time he fled west to Düsseldorf in 1961, lived under two totalitarian regimes and was passionate above all in his non-commitment to any ideals or absolutes. Hence his refusal to adhere to a single style, alternating figuration, gestural abstraction and geometric minimalism with equal virtuosity.

Yet Elger illustrates from the start that none of Richter's early subjects, picked from newspaper or family snapshots, was random or innocent: "Onkel Rudi" (killed in the war), "Tante Marianne" (exterminated by the Nazis), "Frau Marlow" (murdered with a poisoned praline), "Teresa Andeska" (a refugee from east to west Germany) are all sinisterly banal images carrying hidden narratives of trauma and tragedy.

Continue reading on the Financial Times website or read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Books for the News
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As a recent post on Amazon's book blog Omnivoracious points out, the volatile economic climate we've been living through the past few years makes it easy to question the real value of the dollar. When a financial crisis can put more Americans out of their homes than any of the major natural disasters that have hit the U.S. in the last decade, the nature of currency as an artificial construct is particularly obvious—and particularly ugly. But as it turns out, one contemporary artist, J.S.G. Boggs, has been using his craft to make a similar point in a somewhat more aesthetically pleasing, though highly controversial, way. As Omnivoracious blogger Tom Nissen writes:

J.S.G. Boggs is an artist, and in some minds, particularly those of the Bank of England and the U.S. Secret Service, a criminal. His crime is the reproduction of national currency. He draws money. But he doesn't just draw dollar bills and put them up in frames on gallery walls as a conceptual joke. He actually goes out and uses his drawings as money. When presented with a bill at a restaurant, say, he'll offer instead to pay with a Boggs bill… They are usually only drawn on one side of the paper, and with other idiosyncratic elements that make it clear that they are not legal tender. But yet they have value, at least when he can convince a restaurant owner, or a hotel manager, or someone else he owes money to, that they do.

We published the definitive text on this fascinating manipulator of money in Lawrence Weschler's 1999 book Boggs: A Comedy of Values. Weschler chronicles Boggs' exploits and the fundamental questions is work brings to bear on the value of art, and money. From his attempts to get those unfamiliar with his work to accept his art as currency (often worth much more than the dollar value it depicts), to his run-ins with the law for his artistic antics, as Nissley notes, Weschler's book paints a fascinating portrait of the artist and the challenges his unique brand of pop-art evokes.

For more read Nissen's article on Amazon's Omnivoracious blog.

The connection between art and money is also explored in Marc Shell's Art and Money, which ranges through the history of art including that of J. S. G. Boggs.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
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We are pleased to announce that Terry Smith, author of What Is Contemporary Art? has won the 2010 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. The award, given each year by the College Art Association, is considered one of the most important in art criticism and will be presented to Smith on the evening of Wednesday, February 10 at the CAA's annual conference in Chicago.

Terry Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh. His many books include The Architecture of Aftermath, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Navigate to the CAA website for more information about the CAA awards and to view the complete list of previous Frank Jewett Mather Award winners.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards
Posted by TXM at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bookslut contributor Guy Cunningham has recently posted a review of Dietmar Elger's biographical account of one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting.

In his review, Cunningham notes how Richter's work strikes a profoundly ambivalent note somewhere between literal representation and the abstraction of concern to most of his modernist contemporaries, and takes special note of Elger's biography for its ability to duplicate this aspect of Richter's work in the telling of the artist's life. As Cunningham writes: "The great accomplishment of Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting is the way it captures [the] ambivalence, which runs throughout much of the artist's work.

This detachment emerged early in Richter's career, beginning with his 'photo' paintings—paintings based on and evocative of particular photographs—in the 1960s. As Elger explains, 'Working from a photo eliminates the artifice of form, color, composition… The intention is to give paintings the most unartistic, impersonal, and distanced character possible.…'"

Accordingly, Cunningham continues, "any details [in Elger's biography] that could influence our view of Richter's work are intentionally played down… in keeping with Richter's stated belief that 'Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.'"

Offering readers a detailed yet disinterested look at Richter's artistic practice Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting promises to be the foundational portrait of this prolific artist for years to come.

Read the full text of the review on the Bookslut website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
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Beginning with a reception this Friday, December 11th at 4:30 pm at the Art Institute of Chicago's Sullivan Galleries and running through February 13, 2010, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago presents "Picturing the Studio"—an exhibition exploring "the richly complex politically- and psychologicaly-charged notion of the artist's studio today… with works by over 30 artists spanning the past two decades… including several specially designed installations undertaken by artists on site." Curated by Michelle Grabner, (SAIC), and Annika Marie, (Columbia College), featured artists include: Jan Bas Ader, Conrad Bakker, John Baldessari, Stephanie Brooks, Ivan Brunetti, Ann Craven, Julian Dashper, Dana DeGuilio, Susanne Doremus, Joe Fig, Dan Fischer, Julia Fish, Nicholas Frank, Alicia Frankovich, Judith Geichman, Rodney Graham, Karl Haendel, Shane Huffman, Barbara Kasten, Matt Keegan, Daniel Lavitt, Daniel; Adelheid Mers, Tom Moody, Bruce Nauman, Paul Nudd, Leland Rice, David Robbins, Kay Rosen, Amanda Ross-Ho, Carrie Schneider, Roman Signer, Amy Sillman, Frances Stark, Nicholas Steindorf, and James Welling.

In conjunction with the School of the Art Institute the University of Chicago press is also pleased to announce the forthcoming companion volume to the exhibition, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner. Like the exhibition The Studio Reader pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist's practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually—at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines. A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, The Studio Reader reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit. (Forthcoming in March of 2010.)

To find out more about the exhibition check the SAIC's website or online events calendar. The exhibition is also part of "Studio Chicago", a collaborative project exploring the artist's studio.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events
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Ever wondered about the techniques the pros use to produce such seemingly impossible images as the one above?
In a recent article for the Omaha World-Herald staff writer Rick Ruggles offers some insights into those used by Michael Forsberg, author of the new book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild—a fascinating photographic journey through some of the last remaining natural landscapes of the Great Plains.

In his new book, Forsberg—whose work has also appeared in such publications as Audubon, National Geographic, Natural History, and National Wildlife—has captured a number of amazing images of natural landscapes and wildlife. But as the World-Herald article reveals, the intimacy with which Forsberg is able to approach his subject matter is, perhaps ironically, due to the fact that much of the time, he's not even there when the shutter opens. As Ruggles writes:

Wildlife photographers like Michael Forsberg, who just published the book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild, now have the ability to capture close-ups of wary creatures that can hear or sniff out a person from hundreds of yards away.

Forsberg intended to deploy that strategy this bright-blue October day just west of the headquarters of the National Audubon Society's Rowe Sanctuary. The sanctuary is known as one of the finest spots from which to view the sandhill crane migration in March.

Forsberg, 43, looked for a place to assemble a "camera trap," which includes two small devices with an infrared beam running from one, the transmitter, to the other, the receiver. The photographer also sets out a camera and lights, or flashes.

A predator that steps through the invisible red beam triggers the camera, which in turn triggers the flashes. Forsberg can be far away, eating dinner with his wife and two daughters in Lincoln or photographing swans in the Sand Hills, when the image he covets is captured.

Continue reading about Forsberg's photographic techniques at the Omaha World-Herald or to preview some of its results, check out our online gallery of images from the book, and these sample pages in PDF format.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article in today's Omaha World-Herald begins by quoting photographer and author Michael Forsberg as he describes one one his initial experiences with the midwestern landscapes that inspired his newest book, Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild. The World-Herald's David Hendee writes:

Laid out prone in South Dakota's Badlands, wildlife photographer Michael Forsberg focused on burrowing owls in the prairie dog town far down the prairie.

During weeks spent hunkered in Dakota dirt, Forberg's aim shifted.

"I was amazed day after day at all the wildlife I saw," he said. "Not just the amount, but the diversity. Everything from dragon flies to pronghorn and a bunch in between. But I knew that people in cars screaming by off in the distance were looking over this landscape and thinking there wasn't anything there."

Forsberg set out to challenge the notion that the Great Plains is a place to drive through or fly over by revealing the region in ways rarely seen or thought about.

And with Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild Forsberg has accomplished just that. Revealing a midwestern landscape alien even to many of those who live in its midst, Forsberg's book demonstrates the surprisingly diverse natural communities that still exist on the Great Plains, despite their increasingly endangered status through several centuries of westward expansion and the rise of large scale industrial agricultural practices. Practices which continues to threaten some of the last strongholds of virgin prairie left in the U.S.

More than just pretty pictures, in his new book Forsberg has enlisted the help of former poet laureate Ted Kooser, writer-rancher Dan O'Brien, and geographer David Wishart to provide a foreword and essays complementing his stunning images of some of the last key habitats holding the plains ecosystem, and its arability, together. (For an interesting historical look at the consequences of human mismanagement of the Great Plains see Dorothea Lange's photographs of some of the first Dust Bowl migrants in Anne Whiston Spirn's recent book Daring to Look.) As Hendee writes:

Great Plains rivers have run dry. Aquifers have been mined. Wildlife populations have disappeared. Top soil has blown away. And native grassland continues to be turned under by plows.

"This is a working (farming) landscape and always will be," Forsberg said. "But we have choices to make about whether we want wildlife to have a seat at the table. If we don't value this natural heritage—and there will continue to be change if we don't value it—we could lose it altogether."

Read the full article on the Omaha World-Herald website. Also see a gallery of photographs and sample pages in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Driving through the Midwest without falling asleep at the wheel can be a test despite the ubiquitous presence of Starbucks at nearly every overpass from Nebraska to Chicago. Not that it wouldn't be rather, well, "plane" otherwise, but American industrial agriculture definitely has transformed much of the landscape of the North American interior into a monotonous, homogeneous grid. And the adverse impacts of these short-sighted agricultural practices go far beyond aesthetics, threatening public health, as well as the profitability of other industries that rely on the fragile ecosystems of the American heartland—ecosystems that have, over the last century, been all but obliterated. All the more reason why we should celebrate the hard work of folks like Michael Forsberg whose stunning photographic journey through some of the last remaining wild habitats in the Midwest has just hit the bookstore shelves in Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild.

In a recent article for the Nebraska based publication Prairie Fire, Forsberg himself details some of the trials and tribulations he endured to capture the rare images included in his new book, as well as some of the reasons he has for enduring. Toward the end of his piece Forsberg writes:

Will we as a culture also decide to find equal value and virtue in protecting and restoring our Plains' rich natural heritage, its amazing natural diversity and all the ecosystem services that its nature provides? In the long view, can the Great Plains function as working wilderness?

The contents of this book, and its … photographs, are not sufficient enough to answer these questions, but perhaps it is a sufficient start to a conversation. Time is short. Let's not waste it.

Read the rest on the Prairie Fire website and check out this recent review of the book in Lincoln's Journal Star.

Also see a gallery of photographs and sample pages in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
Posted by TXM at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spanning the area west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains once ranked among the most magnificent grasslands on the planet, second only to the Serengeti in sheer size, grandeur, and biodiversity. But today this broad expanse of prairie and steppe is among the most endangered ecosystems in the entire world. Here award-winning photographer Michael Forsberg—a frequent contributor to such publications as National Geographic, Audubon, National Wildlife, and Natural History—reveals the lingering wild that still survives on the Plains and whose diverse natural communities, landscapes, and native flora and fauna together create one extraordinary whole. Featuring contributions from novelist and wildlife biologist Dan O’Brien, noted geographer and environmentalist David Wishart, and American poet laureate Ted Kooser, Great Plains features 150 stunning full-color images along with literary, historical, and scientific passages that bring this extraordinary part of the country into more vivid focus than ever before.

Most Americans know little about the landscape, wildlife, and history of this vast part of our country. But here, the beauty and majesty of the Great Plains come alive in all their quiet glory.

Read the press release. Also see a gallery of photographs from the book, or these sample pages in PDF format.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Cartography and Geography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As fall beckons with changing leaves and shortening days, one thing is certain: NFL football is back, and Chicagoans everywhere are packing their coolers and grills for a trip to Soldier Field. For decades, the stadium’s signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for the Chicago Bears, but few realize that it has been much more than that. Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago.

Chicago Tribune staff writer Liam T. A. Ford led the reporting on the stadium’s 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago’s political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years, long before the arrival of Walter Payton and William “the Refrigerator” Perry.

Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District’s extensive collections, capture remarkable scenes of the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. This book will remind readers that Soldier Field hosted such luminaries as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as the Grateful Dead’s final show.

Now part of the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago’s stadium on the lake continues to make dramatic history. Soldier Field captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having produced some of the most powerful images of Depression-era rural America, including the now iconic Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange's documentary photography for the Farm Security Administration offers a profound (and timely) record of the devastating effects of the Depression, as well as American's resilience in the face of hardship. But surprisingly, many of Lange's photographs for the FSA, (and arguably some of her best) have remained hidden from the public eye, consigned to archives where they have languished for years, rarely seen. Now, in Anne Whiston Spirn's recent Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field Lange's never-before-published photos and captions from her fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939 can finally receive the exposure they merit.

Focusing on selections of photographs accompanied by field notes and citations strategically selected by Spirn, as a recent review in Bookforum notes, [Daring to Look] "presents a case study of Lange's artistic agility"—the juxtapositions of image and text allowing readers to experience a diversity of voices and points of view, dismissing what reviewer Jordan Bear calls the "maudlin sentimentality" sometimes ascribed to Lange's work.

And for a sampling of some of these images see this illustrated excerpt from the book. Read Jordan Bear's full review on the Bookforum website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend Nevada's Black Rock Desert once again played host to the annual alternative community / neo-pagan festival known as the Burning Man. And since 2005 Katherine K. Chen author of Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event has been there, helping to organize efforts to safely and successfully execute the festival—which can attract upwards of 40,000 people—and organize its participants into a temporary alternative community where (according to the official Burning Man website) "transactions of value take place without money, advertising, or hype…" and "care emerges in place of structural service."

In her book, she draws on her own first-hand experiences of the Burning Man event and its unique community, to offer some fascinating insights into how the event's organizers have managed to pull it off. And beginning this week, she will also be offering her insights on the event as a new guest blogger at orgtheory.net. In her first post she demonstrates how analysis of such "unusual" cases of civic organization such as the Burning Man can be used to understand larger phenomena.

Navigate over to orgtheory.net to read.

Also, visit the author's own Enabling Creative Chaos blog.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum offers a revealing look at the plundering of Iraq's cultural heritage during the Iraq war. Housing relics dating back to the dawn of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago, Iraq's National Museum as well as many important archeological sites were looted while, according to Rothfield, nearly everyone, including some of the highest ranking U.S. government officials, simply looked the other way. As Benjamin Moser writes his review for the September edition of Harper's magazine:

The destruction inevitable in wartime might have been mitigated if Iraq had not suffered the bad luck of being invaded by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. One of the many low points of their low endeavor came when Rumsfeld (whose boundless self-regard was untethered to any reckonable aptitude) said that "stuff happens" in reply to early reports of widespread looting. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over," Rumsfeld scoffed, "and its the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you think 'M y goodness, were there that many vases?'"

This attitude, Rothfield shows, … even placed Rummy and his "war president" in unfavorable contrast with Saddam Hussein, who, during his invasion of Kuwait, took precautions to prevent the looting of the Kuwait Museum.… After Rumsfeld ignored repeated pleas to prevent the entirely foreseeable looting, disaster came: a full-scale destruction of countless monuments in the birthplace of civilization.

A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

Pick up a copy of Harper's magazine to read the full review and in the meantime, read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a new review essay on protecting cultural artifacts, n+1's Alexander Bevilacqua singles out Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum as "an exposé that is all the more powerful for its calm tone.… His conclusion: Americans in positions of power and responsibility are collectively culpable for the destruction of the Iraqi cultural heritage, a 'pervasive policy failure.'"

Bevilacqua praises Rothfield for delving "deeper into the matter than simply blaming the Bush administration" for the April 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum, when more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the years since that then, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated. Bevilacqua writes that:

The US is a global power with no cultural ministry and was not a member of UNESCO from 1984 to late 2003. There were, therefore, structural causes for US negligence in Iraq: for one, "the absence of social networks between cultural heritage advocates and war planners." This, Rothfield notes, stands in contrast to the (otherwise regrettable) British occupation, in which political players had a lively interest in Mesopotamian archaeology and were connected by social networks to scholars. In the American case, within a generally hurried and often inefficient war planning process, protecting cultural sites received little attention. General Tommy Franks was most succinct: "I don't have time for this fucking bullshit." If war planners failed to think of Iraq's heritage, archaeologists and curators share the blame for what came to pass. Archaeologists did not focus on the problem of preserving Iraq's cultural heritage until the fall of 2002. Once they did, they found they had no access to important players in the State and Defense departments.

As a curator and collector tells Rothfield in this excerpt "nobody thought of culture."

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Publicity
Posted by at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1909, with the backing of the Commercial Club of Chicago, architects Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett published one of the most influential documents in the history of urban planning: The Plan of Chicago. Responsible for many of the city's most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier, the Plan (see a digitized scan of the original Plan at the Encyclopedia of Chicago website) reflected the city elite's response to the massive influx of inhabitants to urban centers during America's industrial age. Even today as the City of Chicago celebrates the centennial of the Plan's publication Burnham's influential document continues to spark debate over how urban planners can strike a balance between providing a livable habitat and one that can sustain industrial and economic growth.

For the centennial celebration, the city—along with the University of Chicago, the Press, the Chicago Public Library, and many other supporting organizations—is offering a chance for Chicagoans to engage that debate first-hand with a number of events and activities this summer and fall—from Zaha Hadid and the UNStudio's architectural exhibits in Millennium Park, "honoring the forward-looking spirit of the Plan of Chicago, to the CPL's One Book, One Chicago series which has, for it's Fall 2009 program, chosen author Carl Smith's fascinating examination of the Burnham Plan in, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City.

The One Book, One Chicago program will run throughout the months of September and October with a number of readings and talks, hosted by some of the city's most prominent architects and scholars among others, focusing on Smith's book and it's insightful examination of Burnham's Plan. But beginning today and running through the weekend, Carl Smith himself will be hosting daily lectures and guided tours highlighting some of the city's most prominent historic landmarks and their relationship to the Plan. Smith will also give a talk this Sunday at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library and another at the Harold Washington Public Library downtown on October 24th (become a fan of our Plan of Chicago Facebook page for updates on more activities and talks featuring Smith and other UCP authors during the centennial celebrations).

It's impossible to understand where our fair city is headed without understanding its past, so read up on the subject with a copy of Smith's The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City or one of our other fascinating books on Chicago's storied architectural history (scroll down the page a bit) and then get involved with some of the great events for the Plan of Chicago Centennial Celebration.

Read the introduction and first chapter to Smith's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A central issue for many photographers is the peculiar way in which the presence of a camera affects the phenomenon being observed—especially when human subjects are involved. Jed Fielding's new exposition of photographs in Look at me—a pictorial study of blind schoolchildren in Mexico, offers a fascinating exploration of this concept by documenting what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image. Capturing a rare sense of unmediated contact with his subjects Fielding has concentrated closely on these children's features and gestures, probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Confronting disability in a way that affirms life, Fielding's sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of self-consciousness to produce images that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our humanity.

For a preview of his work navigate to Fielding's website where he has posted online a selection from Look at me. And if you're in the New York area, Fielding will be exhibiting his work from September 10 through October 17th at the Andrea Meislin Gallery. See the gallery website for more details or navigate to the press's website to find out more about the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary
Posted by TXM at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski posted a slide-show essay last week on the history and future of airport design. Airports, he begins, started out as grassy fields, but "by the late 1920s, as air travel became more widespread, larger buildings were required, with ticketing counters, waiting rooms, baggage handling, customs and immigration, and so on.… Architects have struggled with the problem of how to design airports ever since—and have produced a variety of different solutions."

Their architectural solutions, of course, did not exist in a vacuum, and in Naked Airport, Alistair Gordon does a brilliant job of evoking the cultures that influenced and were influenced by what he calls the world's most revolutionary structure. He does so by tracing their history from those grassy fields to their current position on the front lines in the struggle against international terrorism.

"Here is a book," one reviewer commented, "with more than enough quirky details to last a long layover." Which itself is a detail particularly worth noting if you're lucky enough to have a summer vacation ahead of you.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary
Posted by at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Freud, to Joyce, to Hilda Doolittle, and Robert Graves, many of the twentieth-century's most influential artists and intellectuals have, through their work, demonstrated an obsession with the roots of Western culture in ancient Minoan civilization. The source of this phenomenon, as Cathy Gere argues in her new book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, can be traced in large part to British archaeologist Arthur Evans' coetaneous discovery of the palace of Knossos on Crete.

Beginning in the Spring of 1900 Evans engaged in an unprecedented project to not only unearth the ancient Minoan civilization, but to recreate it, commissioning a cadre of artists and architects like Piet de Jong, and Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron to reconstruct the city's ancient buildings out of reinforced concrete, and piece together sparse fragments of Minoan frescoes with artwork of their own. The result, as Mary Beard notes in her review of Gere's book for the August New York Review of Books, was a "radical blurring of the boundary between authentic Minoan artifact" and modern fakes.

Yet despite its historical inaccuracies, as Gere shows, Evans' work gained intense popularity amongst modern interpreters who found in his fanciful reconstruction at Crete, the ancient pagan precedents for their own visions of Western civilization. In her review Beard praises Gere's work for its insightful demonstration that as much as "twentieth-century culture, from Evans on, projected its own concerns onto Minoan archaeology," Minoan archaeology conversely influenced twentieth-century culture. And with Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, we now have a fascinating chronicle of this unprecedented confluence between the ancient and modern worlds—one which continues to shape western culture to the present day.

You can read Beard's full review at the New York Review of Books website, or read the introduction to the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The City of Chicago is celebrating the five-year anniversary of Millennium Park this week with a series of free outdoor events hosted at the park.

The past five years, though, represent only a tiny fraction of the history of the landmark. And, in Millennium Park, Timothy Gilfoyle tells that story from the beginning, when the site of the park was part of Lake Michigan. To do so, he studied the history of downtown; spent years with the planners, artists, and public officials behind Millennium Park; documented it at every stage of its construction; and traced the skeins of financing through municipal government, global corporations, private foundations, and wealthy civic leaders. As the Chicago Sun-Times observed when the book appeared, "the creation of the $475 million park—which opened in July 2004 four years late and at more than twice its originally projected cost—was fraught with tension among its high-powered participants, including Mayor Richard M. Daley, fund-raiser John H. Bryan and his network of deep-pocket private donors, and architects Frank Gehry and Adrian Smith, among others.… This high-stakes game of push-and-pull forms the dramatic core of historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle's absorbing and lavishly illustrated Millennium Park."

The tribute this lovely book pays to the park will last for many, many birthdays. But our Trivia Quiz based on the book will only be fun before you read Millennium Park and learn all of the answers yourself!

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | Commentary | History
Posted by at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Public Library has just announced that Carl Smith's The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City has been selected for its One Book, One Chicago program starting this Fall. According to the CPL website the "One Book, One Chicago encourages all Chicagoans to read the same book at the same time, offering events, discussions, exhibits and more to enhance the experience." And what better topic to bring together our diverse city than the fascinating story of how it all began?

Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier. And as Carl Smith's fascinating history points out, the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment.

Beginning this August, we'll be blogging here, and at our Plan of Chicago Facebook page to keep you updated on all the forthcoming One Book, One Chicago events and discussions. You can also find out more about the program at the Chicago Public Library website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Bert Archer notes in his book review for Monday's Globe and Mail, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, "has spent decades studying and publishing on Chinese, Japanese, African, European, American, South American and Pacific island culture." And in his new book, Art Without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity, Scharfstein brings the full force of his arsenal of cultural knowledge to bear in a fascinating study of art as a universal part of human experience. Archer writes for the Globe:

[Scharfstein's encyclopedic erudition] has given him a fluency of reference that allows him to efficiently, easily and convincingly compare a 16th-century Chinese artist with Picasso, use Yanagi Sôetsu's take on art in the age of mechanical reproduction to add to the usual Benjamin version, and describe second millennium BC Egyptian art in ways that recall Andy Warhol films such as Blow Job.

Indeed, this breadth of references is an inherent part of the book's argument. When Scharfstein uses a Congolese proverb to remind us that history is written by the victors, Nigeria's Prince Twins Seven-Seven as an example of a surreal artist, or the 11th-century Chinese forger Mi Fu to discuss the nature of authenticity, he is reinforcing the point that art's big issues are universal and at the same time expanding our own comparatively anemic cultural frames of reference and highlighting the fact that art crosses historical and cultural borders rather easily.

…

"Art everywhere has aesthetic values that are available to persons everywhere else," he says, and we believe him because he has shown us.

A profound and personal meditation on the human hunger for art, Art Without Borders unearths those essential elements that make artistic production a global endeavor, and articulates a common framework for cross-cultural artistic appreciation.

To find out more read the review online or see this excerpt.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Any fan of the public radio show This American Life will remember the classic episode in which host Ira Glass takes Michael Camille, renowned scholar of the Middle Ages, to Medieval Times—the chain of “castles” that offer such attractions as jousting shows and meals served by “wenches.” Glass was “wondering what this academic is going to think,” one of Camille’s colleagues later recalled. “But Michael’s attentive, delighted response captures so much of his pleasure in discovery.” The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, the last work Camille completed before his passing in 2002, reflects not only that trademark joie de vivre but also the intellectual heft he embodied just as fully.

Constructed in the 1800s, the famous gargoyles represent a later era’s notion of the Middle Ages (not entirely unlike Medieval Times). In his sweeping, comprehensive history of these chimeras, Camille shows for the first time how they transformed an iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument. From the nineteenth-century reconstruction of Notre-Dame through the gargoyles’ twentieth-century afterlives, Camille tells a story that will delight anyone whose imagination has been sparked by the enigmatic creatures who gaze at Paris from one of the world’s most celebrated vantage points.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following up on SXH's recent post commemorating the anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday, another fascinating article on the life and career of the Midwest's iconic architect appeared last month in Newsweek. In her article, contributor Cathleen McGuigan writes on the two buildings bookending the great architect's life work. It is widely recognized that New York City's Guggenheim Museum, the last major work undertaken by Wright in his lifetime, provided the capstone to his career, but Buffalo's Larkin Building, "Wright's first large scale project," is too often forgotten. Why?

McGuigan writes:

[Opening in 1906 the building was] "revolutionary in the world of business, and within its mighty brick walls, it expressed the optimism of an era, and the excitement of a booming city." … Outside, the imposing building was a fortress against its grimy industrial neighborhood. But inside it was airy, planned around a skylit, sun-filled, five-story atrium. The executives sat there together at long desks, not in private offices, so the 1,800 clerical workers could overlook them from the upper-floor balconies along the sides—an arrangement that symbolized the openness of the Larkin corporate culture. On the building's exterior was inscribed the motto: HONEST LABOR NEEDS NO MASTER.

But Larkin's soap making business, which the building housed, proved not to be as stalwart as the walls which surrounded it, and folded during the Great Depression. Abandoned, the building was finally bulldozed in 1950, despite protests by preservationists. But while McGuigan's article laments the demise of Wright's first masterpiece, Jack Quinan's Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact brings it back to life with more than one hundred photographs, floor plans, maps, and diagrams. More than a historical record of the building's conception, construction, evaluation, and finally demolition, Quinan also examines the Larkin Building as a structure at the center of economic and personal relationships, providing the definitive take on this lost treasure of American architecture.

Read McGuigan's article online or find out more about Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary | History
Posted by TXM at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a contest based on the results of 8.6 million passenger surveys covering 190 airports, South Korea's Incheon International Airport emerged today as the winner of the World Airport Awards, which aim to evaluate traveler experiences in 39 different areas, from check-in and arrivals to departure at the gate.

The BBC reports, for example, that "Dubai had the best duty free shopping; Hong Kong the best dining; Helsinki the best baggage delivery, and Kansai in Japan the 'cleanest airport washrooms.'"

The stark practicality of such rankings underscores the difference between today's airports and their earlier cousins, which were once the backdrops for jet-setters who strutted, martinis in hand, through curvilinear terminals designed by Eero Saarinen. In Naked Airport, his cultural history of the airport, Alastair Gordon traces the institution's many incarnations from its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines to its role in the fight against international terrorism.

If you're unlucky enough to be stuck on your next trip in one of the many global airports not lauded for their quick check-in times or great duty-free shopping, a copy of Naked Airport is sure to offer a bit of solace—or at least a needed reminder that the place where you've been waiting for what seems like forever is itself an intriguing part of modern history that has profoundly changed our sense of time and space.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary
Posted by at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began an unprecedented project to reconstruct the palace of Knossos on Crete, but instead, as Cathy Gere demonstrates in her new book, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, created a complex of concrete buildings on the site owing at least as much to modernist architecture as to Bronze Age remains. As Tom Holland of the Times Literary Supplement writes: "the fabulously ancient palace of Knossos enjoys, as Gere points out in her arresting first sentence, 'the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island.'"

Gere shows how Evans' idiosyncratic reconstruction of the palace of Knossos was nevertheless successful at bringing ancient Greek legends to life and sparking the imaginations of a host of twentieth century artists and intellectuals. Influencing the likes of Joyce, Picasso, and Sigmund Freud to name a few, Evans' often fanciful vision of Cretan civilization, promulgated through the work of visionaries like these, had a profoundly transformative effect on the way Western culture viewed its past, as well as its future.

On Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 7:00 PM Gere is scheduled to make an appearance at Washington DC's Corcoran Gallery of Art to deliver a talk on the subject, examining how—based on Evans' work—European modernism reimagined ancient Cretean civilization in its own image, employing its creative reinterpretation of Cretan society as an early blueprint for twentieth century movements as disparate as fascism, pacifism, feminism and psychoanalysis.

For more about the book see Tom Holland's recent review for the TLS and another review from the May 14 edition of the Economist. For more details on Gere's lecture, navigate to Corcoran Gallery website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events | History | Literature
Posted by TXM at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Throughout human history, people have looked to the ancient world for lost knowledge and timeless wisdom—perhaps never more so than in the aftermath of World War I, whose swathe of devastation left millions dead and the Enlightenment dream in ruins. So when British archaeologist Arthur Evans began publishing breathless accounts of the ancient Minoan civilization he was uncovering on Crete—pagan, pacifistic, and matriarchal—it fired the imaginations of a whole generation of artists and intellectuals.

With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere tells the story of Evans’s excavations and their wide-ranging influence on the world of Western ideas. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, Evans’s fanciful depiction of Minoan society drew the fervent attention of writers, artists, and thinkers who were at the forefront of the burgeoning modernist movement, including Robert Graves, H.D., Girgio de Chirico, Sigmund Freud, and James Joyce. As Gere traces the unexpected paths of Evans’s ideas through the lives and works of these figures, what emerges is an unforgettable portrait of an age of wrenching change—and of those who responded to it with intellectual vigor and fervid innovation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whether we're waiting for the El, reading virtually any local publication, or—of course—walking along South Michigan Avenue, Chicagoans can't help but remember that the Art Institute of Chicago's much-anticipated Modern Wing opens this weekend.

But we are not, of course, the only ones paying attention. Joining the many stories that have already begun to appear about the event, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussof noted in his review Wednesday that "the addition manages to weave the various strands of Chicago's rich architectural history into a cohesive vision."

So what, exactly, are those strands? Whether you can talk about them endlessly or are still trying to sort them out, our deep list of architecture books will bring you up to speed on everything from our most iconic structures to alternative takes on the city's architectural history.

This weekend, for example, those lucky enough to try out the new bridgeway connecting the Modern Wing with Millennium Park might wonder about the history of this particular destination. Needless to say, we've got that covered.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary
Posted by at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas Bewick's (1753-1828) History of British Birds was the first field guide for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. In Nature's Engraver, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who became one of Britain's greatest and most popular engravers. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild—a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.

"A refined and engaging biography, as beautifully wrought, in its way, as Bewick's woodcuts." —New York Times

"Uglow's clear prose sparkles like Bewick's River Tyne." —Los Angeles Times

"This is a lovely book, not just in the quality and sympathy of the writing but in the care of its design and illustration. [Uglow] has turned a rich but undramatic life into a vignette as full of interest and details as one of Bewick's own woodcuts." —Sunday Telegraph

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Press Releases
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In 1926 a new magazine graced Chicago newsstands. With its pages filled with witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles, The Chicagoan was a hit, on par with its east coast counterpart The New Yorker, which it was clearly an attempt to emulate. Yet while the New Yorker would grow to achieve a national readership, after only nine years The Chicagoan was defunct and forgotten—that is, until its serendipitous re-discovery in the stacks of the Regenstein Library by University of Chicago Professor of History Neil Harris. Now, Harris has brought the magazine back into the spotlight with The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age—a collection of covers, cartoons, editorials, reviews, and features from the magazine.

Although the book overflows with a variety of historic material from one of the most fascinating eras in the city's history, perhaps the most interest has been generated by its lavish reproductions of the magazine's Art Deco covers and illustrations. We've received more than a few requests for poster-sized prints of the book's art, and recently the Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine even ran a feature article—written by one of the book's contributor's, Teri Edelstein—that focuses on the magazine from the perspective of Art Deco design. In her article Edelstein writes:

The Art Deco style permeated the entire magazine, not only for obvious subjects. Football players, dandies, golfers, and bathing beauties all succumbed to the colorful, abstracting, geometricizing treatments of Arthur Hugh Ruddy in a series of covers. The smoke from the cigarette of a blasé flapper bifurcates a black sky in Nightscape of September 24, 1927, by William Cotant, as she blankly regards a wall of buildings from the Blackstone Hotel to the tower of Montgomery Ward which stretch in orange and yellow cubes. Inflected by Parisian style, the angular Chicagoans of Mervin Gunderson vainly try to retain their hats as the wind even blows over a traffic signal in Boul.Mich from March 10, 1928.

You can check out a gallery of covers and illustrations that includes a few of those Edelstein cites on our website, as well as download these sample pages in PDF (7.0Mb), or read an interview with the author.

And no, we don't currently have any posters for sale, but it sounds like a great idea for any savvy Art Deco entrepreneurs out there!

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1993, Dave Hickey published a sharply opinionated book on art called The Invisible Dragon. It was a small volume, but the response was outsized—and, in many cases, outraged. While artists flocked to it, drawn by its forceful call for attention to beauty, huge numbers of more theoretically oriented professional critics absolutely savaged it, calling Hickey everything from naïve to reactionary.

Sixteen years later, Hickey’s back—and time hasn’t dulled his edge. With this new edition of The Invisible Dragon, Hickey has both revised and dramatically expanded his controversial book, addressing his critics and supporters both, while simultaneously placing the book—and the reactions it provoked—firmly in the context of larger cultural battles of the time. Bringing the works of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe to bear on the current situation of contemporary art, museum culture, and art criticism, Hickey argues powerfully for a renewed attention to the inherently democratic—and thus essential—concept of beauty. Writing with a liveliness and excitement rarely seen in serious criticism, Hickey invests The Invisible Dragon with the passion and drama that lie at the heart of great art.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Philosophy | Press Releases
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It has been widely reported recently that Illinois hasn't yet revealed any concrete plans for the cash allotted to it for highway, bridge and transit projects via the President's economic stimulus bill. And this morning, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued a warning that time is running out. Washington is required to distribute funds by the 10th. Combined with Illinois' recently bolstered reputation for political corruption and mismanagement, the report seems at once predictable and worrisome, bringing to the fore the central pitfall of Obama's attempts to jump-start the economy—the potential for local governments to simply squander billions of taxpayer dollars—a problem that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, busted Budgets, argues is compounded by a construction industry that "is just as broken as the infrastructure it's charged with building and repairing." In his article, "Five Points the Government MUST Consider Before Doling Out Billions to the Construction Industry" LePatner delivers a critical assessment of the construction industry and its inefficiencies, and outlines the steps a responsible government must take to ensure the money from one of the biggest spending programs in history is used wisely. Read the article on the American Surveyor website, or find out more about LePatner's book at www.brokenbuildings.com.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
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The latest issue of ArtForum magazine contains an interesting review of Lynn Spigel's new book, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. The review, which builds upon the positive assessment given by Andy Battaglia in his recent article for the magazine's sister publication BookForum, praises the work for "contradicting our peculiar amnesia" regarding TV's early links to the urbane world of modern art.

As Spigel aptly demonstrates, from the 1940's through the '60s TV served as an exciting new platform for the arts, inviting the participation of architects and designers like and Eero Saarinen and Saul Bass, to fine artists like Andy Warhol. Offering a stark contradiction to former FCC chairman Newton Minow's characterization of the medium as a "vast wasteland," Spigel's account even suggests that their work actually profited from their relationship with the "vulgar medium."

As ArtForum's Matthew Brannon writes, "since advertisers take it for granted that their job is to sell, they are denied that most dangerously available solipsistic avenue that fine art borders: I don't care what you think.…" Thus Brannon concludes that advertising offered these artists a lesson in visual communication: "how to say much with little [and] how to persuade someone without insulting them. I'm as interested in tact as I am in taste."

Pick up a copy of ArtForum to read the rest of Brannon's review, or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image? An in-depth pictorial study of blind school children in Mexico, Look at me draws attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form.

Combining elements of his earlier, acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding dwells closely on these children’s features and gestures, exploring the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Fielding’s work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. Look at me contains more than sixty arresting images from which we often want to look away, but into which we are nevertheless drawn by their deep humanity and palpable tenderness. This is a monograph of uncommon significance by an important American photographer.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
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The latest issue of Time magazine is running a noteworthy review of Sherry Buchanan's new book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975—a collection of works by ten artists recruited by the Viet Cong during the U.S. conflict to carry their sketchbooks, ink, and watercolors into combat. Buchanan traveled across Vietnam to gather some of this never-before-published material, and as the Time review notes, the resulting book is a fascinating departure from the "common American narrative," offering "extraordinary insight into Vietnamese hearts, military and civilian."

To find out more read the article on the Time magazine website or see these sample pages [PDF format] featuring a selection of artworks form the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
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TV by Design takes us back to the cold war years to witness the rise of two cultural superpowers: modern art and network television. Often mistakenly cast as polar opposites, television and fine art were intimately linked in this period as TV creators and producers drew inspiration from the latest trends in graphic design, avant-garde cinema, pop art, and modernist architecture. By broadcasting art’s cutting edge directly into America’s living rooms, TV gave modern art unprecedented national exposure. Lynn Spigel populates this fascinating history with the stories of the many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Duke Ellington, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Andy Warhol, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—that worked in or were influenced by television and illustrates it with an array of photos, ads, and stills from the period. A lively correction to the medium’s reputation as a vast wasteland, TV by Design reveals the dynamic history of the ways television brought entertainment and art into people’s everyday lives.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Press Releases
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This weekend marks the 41st anniversary of the beginning of the Tet Offensive, a major assault launched during the tacit lunar New Year ceasefire by the Viet Cong against the South Vietnamese and American armies. Though American forces quickly turned back the onslaught, the campaign was a political and psychological victory for the Communists and further eroded US support for the war.

Demonized by Americans as reds, gooks, and fanatical killers, the Viet Cong were said to have "committed the most unbelievable acts of terrorism the world has ever known," as Hubert Humphrey once declared. But a new book offers an entirely new perspective on these enemy fighters. Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975, by Sherry Buchanan, presents never-before-published drawings, poems, letters, and oral histories by ten of the most celebrated Viet Cong war artists.

These guerrilla artists—some military officers and some civilians—lived clandestinely with the fighters, moving camp alongside them, going on reconnaissance missions, and carrying their sketchbooks, ink, and watercolors into combat. Trained by professors from the Hanoi Institute of Fine Arts who journeyed down the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail to ensure a pictorial history of the war, they recorded battles and events from Operation Junction City to Khe Sanh to the Tet Offensive. They also sketched as the spirit moved them, rendering breathtaking landscapes, hut and bunker interiors, activities at base camps, troops on the move, portraits for the families of fallen soldiers, and the unimaginable devastation that the conflict left in its wake. The collective record of these supposedly savage soldiers is an extraordinary historical and artistic document of people at war.

See sample images from the interior here. And also check out Buchanan's Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973) to see more of the things they carried. The engravings gathered in this copiously illustrated volume are at once searing, caustic, and moving, running the full emotional spectrum with both sardonic reflections—I Love the Fucking Army and the Army Loves Fucking Me—and poignant maxims—When the Power of Love Overcomes the Love of Power, the World Will Know Peace. Part pop art and part military artifact, they collectively capture the large moods of the sixties and the darkest days of Vietnam—all through the world of the tiny Zippo.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
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Arts and culture blog truthdig.com posted a review last week of Sherry Buchanan's recent book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975—a collection of work by ten Vietnamese soldier-artists that, as truthdig contributor Christian G. Appy notes, offers the western world new insight into the experiences of those on the other side of the Vietnam War and the resilience of those soldiers in the face of the much better equipped U. S. military. Appy's article begins by quoting a Chicago novelist:

"We lost the war because the Vietnamese just flat out beat us. And we lost the war because we didn't understand that they were poets." I was offered this Delphic explanation of American defeat in Vietnam by Larry Heinemann, a novelist who survived some of the war's fiercest fighting in 1967 and 1968 as a soldier with the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border in Tay Ninh province.… But how could poetry, or any kind of art, help explain one of history's most astonishing victories? I think what Heinemann meant was that the Communist-led cause in Vietnam mobilized not just bodies, but souls.…

To maintain morale, the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) deployed hundreds of artists, writers, actors, singers, photographers, puppeteers and dancers. These members of the "Literature and Arts" section of the military (Van Nghe) did not just visit combat troops, or lecture to them; they lived with them, moved with them, camped with them, and sometimes fought along with them. They were military artists in residence, only the residence was a war zone, not a campus. When combat was imminent they might move to the rear, but, when necessary, they picked up arms and fought, and died.…

Sherry Buchanan's new book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings & Stories, 1964-1975, gives us a stunning look at some of the wartime art produced by the Vietnamese soldier-artists who served in the "American War" to drive out the U.S., topple the American-backed government in Saigon and reunite Vietnam. The book's title is a bit misleading. This is not a collection of diaries. There are a few scraps of moving wartime correspondence and some wartime poems by Nguyen Duy, but this is, primarily, a collection of watercolors and sketches created during the war by soldier-artists.

And you can preview a selection of these watercolors and sketches in PDF format here , or continue reading Christian Appy's article on Mekong Diaries on the truthdig blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a speech before the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, the then-chairman of the FCC Newton N. Minow famously dubbed TV a "vast wasteland." And as Andy Battaglia notes in his article for the February/March issue of Bookforum, "ambassadors of high culture voiced similar worries almost from the moment the first televised image was broadcast to a putatively unwitting and undereducated public." But in her new book TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television, author Lynn Spigel offers an alternative account of the medium's history that "upends talk of early television as an empty enterprise," by demonstrating a surprising partnership between television and the world of modern art that transformed the way Americans experienced the world visually. Battaglia writes:

Focusing on broadcasting's formative era, the '40s through the '70s, Lynn Spigel… looks at the ways in which the new medium got in bed with various disciplines—in the fine arts as well as more utilitarian modes of graphic design—thought to be of higher mind.…

Valuable chapters survey developments in visionary set design and avant-garde programming (including "silent" broadcasts by comic Ernie Kovacs and provocatively awkward ones by Andy Warhol), but the book mainly focuses on the more general task laid out in its epilogue's title, "Framing TV, Unframing Art." "Although broadcast historians aren't wrong," Spigel writes, "the singular focus on programs blinds us to the variety of visual experiences that early TV actually offered." Part of that variety involved simply watching shows in a decidedly modern zoned-out state, to be sure. But part of it helped prod the masses to contemplate what it meant to look, at art and at everything else. Just think of the recent scene in Mad Men in which a young ad exec stares up at a Rothko and says, "Maybe you're just supposed to experience it."

The January 13th edition of the Village Voice also ran a short review praising Spigel's work for its revelatory account of television's symbiotic relationship with fine art. And rumor has it that another review will be appearing in Bookforum's sister publication, Artforum soon.

Read an excerpt from chapter two of Spigel's book: "An Eye for Design: Corporate Modernism at CBS."

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Author Neil Harris, joined Eight Forty-Eight host Richard Steele on this morning's program to discuss how he stumbled upon several issues of the Chicagoan deep in the stacks at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library and his resurrection of the forgotten 1920's publication in his new coffee table book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.

Listen in on the conversation on the website for Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight.

Also read an interview with the author, see a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today the University of Chicago homepage features an article and video on Neil Harris's new book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. In the video, Harris discusses how he discovered issues of the Chicagoan in the Regenstein Library and his first impressions of the long-lost magazine. The article by Greg Borzo gives more details and notes how the magazine reflects the University's own prominence "in the city's cultural, political, and social life during the 1920s and '30s." Borzo quotes Harris as he explains:

"Back then, the University of Chicago was a bigger player, relatively speaking, than it is today because there was no University of Illinois-Chicago, and the Catholic universities were not as prominent. Plus, [former Chicago President Robert Maynard] Hutchins was the golden boy, and we had a football team."

As illuminating as the Chicagoan is about socialites and politicians, its deepest value is a record of its creators. "The significance and importance of this glorious publication lies in it contributors," Harris says.

There were a lot of contributors—468 people during one seven-month period, according to a magazine promotion. Harris tracked down the identity of scores of these contributors, and the book includes a chapter with short biographies of more than 80 of them. Most were quite young (and inexpensive) when they worked for the Chicagoan.

A surprising number attended the University, including Richard "Riq" Atwater, co-author of the award-winning Mr. Popper's Penguins; Meyer Levin, the best-selling novelist of the 1956 mystery Compulsion; Robert Pollak, drama and music critic; and Susan Wilbur, author and translator of literary works.…

"The Chicagoan carried within it the imprint of many aspiring talents," Harris wrote in his book. "It is hoped that this anthology will offer them not just a brief reprieve from oblivion but quite possibly a vestibule to new celebrity."

The feature also has a collection of cartoons from the magazine as well as links to our own interview with Harris and gallery of covers and illustrations.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | History
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William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing, was the featured guest for a call-in session this Monday on NPR's Talk of the Nation. In the show, Davies discusses his unusual passion for collecting, and what's even more unusual, his passion for collecting items that most would consider junk. Davies describes his habit as a way of coping with difficulties in his life and a profound meditation on how and why we value things the way we do—and listening to the callers describe their own peculiar collections, apparently he's not the only one. Listen to King's radio appearance, and read an excerpt from his book on the NPR website.

Also, read another excerpt and an essay by the author on the press's site.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Author Neil Harris appeared yesterday evening on WFMT's Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner for the first of two conversations about his new book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. You can catch the second part of the conversation on WFMT next Monday, December 22. But until then, listen to the archived audio from yesterday's show and after each broadcast from the Critical Thinking webpage.

The Windy City's lost counterpart to the New Yorker, the Chicagoan sought to transform the city's reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. But after nine years of publication that straddled the roaring 20s and the Great Depression, the magazine folded and was forgotten. Now, Harris's book, featuring a stunning collection of articles, illustrations, and covers, resurrects the magazine in all its brilliance offering a window into one of the most exciting chapters in the city's history.

Also, read an interview with the author, see a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With the publication of Sleeping Beauty: A One-Artist Dictionary, the University of Chicago Press is proud to announce Project Tango, a new series of experimental collaborations between artists and writers. Exploding the traditional dynamic of the artist's relationship with the critic, Sleeping Beauty inaugurates a genuine dialogue, in which the interlocutors have equal agency. This conversation tests the limits of creative collaboration, bringing new ideas to the process of making books and expanding the possibilities of the medium.

Here, for example, Mieke Bal contributes twenty-six essays—one for each letter of the alphabet—which borrow their organizing principle from the dictionary but reach far beyond the utilitarian purpose of a reference work. Each one enters deeply into John Sparagana's art, illuminating concepts from Abstract to Zestful that inform, underlie, and lend meaning to the exquisitely ruined images he creates by crinkling glossy images from fashion magazines until their sheen disappears and they become soft and elastic. The images, for their part, speak back through Sparagana's unique process of subtraction, which physically rubs away not only ink and material, but also transience and commercial usefulness. The result is an extraordinary first step in Project Tango's unchoreographed dance. We can't wait to see where it leads us.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cultural critic Julia Keller has written an interesting article about Lennard J. Davis's new book Obsession: A History for the lifestyle section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune. In her article, Keller notes how "obsessive" behavior has come to define our culture, though in a very polarized way. We admire those whose drive leads them to professional or athletic success. But we also might recommend someone who can't stop washing their hands every five minutes, or spends hours straightening the picture frames in their living room, to go find a good psychologist to help them with their OCD. In her article Keller quotes Davis:

"To be obsessive is to be American, to be modern."

Yet the term has never been a stable category. When does an eccentricity become an obsession? When does a quirk become a pathology? You can't understand obsession, the professor believes, without considering "the social, cultural, historical, anthropological and political" swirl in which it lives.

And in Obsession Davis does just that, tracing the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive sex and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis's graceful cultural analysis.

To find out more read Keller's article on the Tribune's website. Also read an interview with Davis or listen to his appearance on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Psychology | Reviews
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Last Sunday's New York Times Book Review closes with a noteworthy piece by Matt Weiland on Neil Harris's, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. Weiland praises the book for its handsome resurrection of one of Chicago's most stylish publications, offered here for a whole new age to enjoy:

[The Chicagoan] was founded in 1926 by a group of Chicagoans inflamed by the example and success of the New Yorker, which had begun the year before. It was published every two weeks, and before long Time magazine was heralding it for having the "finish and flair worthy of a national publication." But its readership began to decline as the Great Depression set in, its frequency was reduced to monthly, and in 1935 it died a quiet death. Somehow this vibrant magazine was completely forgotten until a few years ago, when the distinguished cultural historian Neil Harris came upon a set of the magazine's run in the library of the University of Chicago. It has now been brought back into print, if not to life, by the University of Chicago Press.

What a marvelous job they have done! This is a book you will want to own, a coffee-table book nicer and better than most coffee tables. The University of Chicago Press has swung for the fences, producing the book to the highest standards—a nearly 400-page oversize volume, designed with care and attentiveness, to period detail and featuring loads of full-color images. It's a pleasure to see the ball sail into the bleachers… Thanks to Neil Harris's serendipitous discovery and the University of Chicago Press's superb effort, The Chicagoan takes its rightful place on the top shelf.

Read the review on the NYT website. We have a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Reviews
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“In all the seven seas and the lands bordering thereon there is probably no name which more quickly calls up thoughts of crime, violence, and wickedness than does that of Chicago.” So wrote journalist R. L. Duffus at the height of the Jazz Age—and he was not alone in that opinion. During those heady days, writers and newspapers nationwide lamented Chicago's utter filth and brutality. For most, the Windy City conjured images of slums, squalor, and social pathology. An industrial Gomorrah that made heroes of corrupt politicians, mob bosses, and murderers, Chicago had a serious image problem.

Enter the Chicagoan. Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the first appearance of the New Yorker in 1925, the magazine sought passionately to redeem Chicago's unhappy reputation. In its own words, the popular biweekly claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs-Elysees.” The University of Chicago Press is proud to publish The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age by noted historian Neil Harris. The book brings this forgotten magazine back to brilliant and vivid life for a new generation of readers to enjoy.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We were pleased to note this morning that Lennard J. Davis's new book, Obsession: A History is the frontpage story in this week's Chicago Reader. The article by the Reader's Deanna Isaacs focuses both on Davis himself and on the way his book complicates the common notion of obsession as a medical disorder, demonstrating that it's actually much more prevalent in modern society than one might guess:

We live in an age of obsession, some of us sick with it and some of us wildly successful because of it. If you ran the appointed number of miles for your workout this morning, took all your supplements, read the papers, perused all the necessary Web sites, and are planning to put in a focused, 10- or 12-hour day on the job, you're headed down the culturally approved obsessive path to reward.

If, on the other hand, you're mopping your kitchen floor ten times a day or heading to the sink for your 80th hand-washing, hoarding every plastic bag you ever got at Jewel, and lying awake at night counting the lights in neighboring buildings, someone close to you is probably suggesting that you see a doctor, get a diagnosis, and take a pill to fix your obvious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Never mind that the guy writing the prescription is just as obsessed as you are. He's on the right side of our cultural fixation and you're not.

That's the argument in Obsession: A History, UIC professor Lennard J. Davis's study of the rise and bifurcated path of obsessive behavior as both an illness and an ideal in the modern world.… He says that in our culture it's not only common but highly desirable to be a little nuts, as long as the craziness takes the form of obsession—the "singular attention to a particular thing" that our highly specialized jobs, electronically connected environment, and extreme hobbies demand.

Pick up a copy of the Reader for the complete article or find it online here. Also read an interview with the author and listen to Davis on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Literature | Psychology
Posted by TXM at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the early part of the twentieth century H. G. Wells pronounced the city of Chicago "a great industrial desolation" and a "nineteenth century nightmare." Often noted by outsiders only for its slums, squalor, and stockyards, during the twenties and thirties Chicago fought hard to transform its image into one of a sophisticated urban center, struggling for cultural superiority with it's arch rival to the east, and the burgeoning megalopolis in the west. One of the city's weapons in this struggle was a new publication which, in its own words, claimed to represent "a cultural, civilized, and vibrant" city "which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees." Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, the Chicagoan sought passionately to redeem the Windy City's unhappy reputation by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. Nevertheless, for all it's elegance and flair the magazine had a life span of less than a decade, forgotten as the boom years of the Jazz age lapsed into the Great Depression.

Now, as Julia Keller notes in a recent review for the Chicago Tribune, "thanks to the archival detective work of Neil Harris, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, we can glide our way back to an era when elegance mattered—not only in dress and deportment, but also in sentence and image. In the The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age… a hefty, gorgeous hunk of a book that reproduces one entire issue as well as 149 covers and many articles, a vanished era returns. It comes back in all of its fussy glory, its daffy humor, its gentle insistence that even a city best known for gangsters and stockyards could yearn for beauty and glamor."

Keller continues:

Harris dug out the issues, tracked down the identities of the artists, writers and editors who created them and put the whole enterprise into historical context in the spirited essays that precede each section. With its vivid covers, its book and theater and concert reviews, its whimsical cartoons, and its cheeky profiles, The Chicagoan sought to convey "the personality of its namesake city," Harris writes, billing itself as "the only oracle of smart Chicago.…" It tried to suggest that a city's cultural life was key, that the Midwest wasn't just a holding pen for cows and crooked politicians. The place had style. The place had charm. The place was here to stay—even if The Chicagoan, sadly, wasn't.

See our online gallery for The Chicagoan, including two dozen covers and interior images from the magazine. Read Keller's review on the Chicago Tribune website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing was interviewed yesterday by Deborah Harper for the Psychjourney website podcast. King's book is an illuminating mediation on the author's own habit of amassing the most unusual collections—everything from cereal boxes to nondescript loops of wire—things which many people might regard as junk, but which King finds that by collecting, he can imbue with meaning, even value.

In the podcast, Harper engages King in a discussion about his book, his collections, and his fascinating insights on the impulse to accumulate. Navigate to the Psychjourney website to listen.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Both the Times Higher Education and the New Yorker's book blog, the Book Bench have recently published positive reviews of Anne Whiston Spirn's, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field. Book Bench contributor Eliza Honey writes:

Daring to Look is a collection of photographs, many of them previously unpublished, taken by Dorothea Lange, in 1939, for the Farm Security Administration. Though Lange's shots of Depression-era individuals and families are well known, many of her negatives of empty home interiors have spent the past decades in archives, until Anne Whiston Spirn, the editor of this volume, unearthed them. Like Lange's portraits, her interiors are gentle reflections of a quiet and stark way of life.

Though the book looks deceivingly like it's meant for a coffee table, Spirn's accompanying text reveals much more. It's so engrossing, in fact, that, had the book not been so heavy, I would have taken it to the park during my lunch break.

And from the THE:

This first presentation of Lange's 1939 photographs with their accompanying texts provides a very valuable scholarly resource. Spirn's personal contribution, for anyone interested in Lange, comes in the third and final section, which both brings us up to date and reflects upon history, as she photographs sites and descendants of Lange's 1939 subjects.

From her broad knowledge base and sympathetic understanding of the history of the locale, Spirn offers a rich study of past and present life and landscape.

Read the rest of the Book Bench review, or read the THE review.

Also see this illustrated excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Cartography and Geography | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Wednesday the New York Times' Papercuts blog posted a short article on the Kurds and their important role in the complicated culture and politics of the Middle East. In the post, Papercuts contributor Barry Gewen cites several useful books on the subject including Susan Meiselas' Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, Second Edition. Gewen writes:

The hour of the Kurds has come round again. They are the great success story of the Iraq war, what the Bush administration always hoped for across the entire country. They have a functioning, popularly supported regional government. Their economy is booming. Religion has little retrograde or divisive influence on their public institutions. Women are respected (there have been many important female leaders in Kurdish history) and Israel is viewed approvingly. Terrorism is generally unknown in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. What's more, the Kurds are ready to defend themselves and what they have achieved. Anyone who wants to understand the future of Iraq and the Middle East in general has to take them into account.

Two new books help us to do just that. Actually, one of them isn't new. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History by the photographer Susan Meiselas first appeared in 1998 and is now being reissued in an updated edition by the University of Chicago Press. It's an extraordinarily handsome volume. In a labor of love, Meiselas spent six years combing libraries, archives and family collections for old photographs, postcards, documents, newspaper clippings, whatever, to produce a visually stunning montage designed to prick the conscience of the world.

Read the posting on the NYT's Papercuts blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Popmatters website recently posted an interesting review of William Davies King's new book Collections of Nothing. In the review David Banash praises King for using an introspective meditation on his own habit of collecting to produce a revelatory look at the everyday objects that fill our lives. Banash writes:

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction… [Walter] Benjamin suggests that the power of the camera to bring our world into focus dramatically alters our perception of it, most often by slowing things down or getting us much closer to them, and King's fascinating habit of collecting does, I think, something much the same.…

King is one of the few people who have taken the time to really look at our world of disposable objects. His practice of collecting has slowed him down and shifted him into a new mode of consciousness, and he thus allows us something like a close-up, slow-motion pan across all the objects that we so quickly turn away from that they never really register with us as the things that they are. King's altered consciousness is not a gateway into some other world, but a blinding illumination of our everyday unconscious.

Read the review on the Popmatters website.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Conventionally, people tend to thing of maps as useful tools with which to physically orient ourselves within a landscape, yet in their recent book, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, editors James A. Ackerman and Robert W. Karrow demonstrate that throughout the ages maps have had a much greater range of utility. The August edition of the The Art Book features a review of Maps that praises the editors for their insightful exploration of maps' varying purposes—from maps that orient us geographically, to those that orient us historically and even culturally. From the Art Book:

[In Maps] essays by distinguished contributors break the boundaries of chronology and the limitations of conventional Western geography to consider instead a cluster of maps' varying purposes.…

The extensive first essay, 'Finding our way' by Akerman (organiser of a splendid Newberry exhibition on American road maps), addresses most observers' experiences of maps, i.e. as instructions for directed travel.… Allegorical pathways, clearly charted for religious or fantasy realms, are reserved for a fine later essay, 'Imaginary worlds', by Ricardo Padron. Another fascinating essay, on the conceptual or thematic use of maps (including geological or astronomical maps), often with statistical graphs to convey data, is provided by Michael Friendly and Gilles Palsky.… More particular maps of cities or regions, including property or military maps, are surveyed by Matthew Edney, who links their spatial uses to 'expansive' societies with expansive economic activity and social stratification. He notes that 'social needs, power relations, and cultural conventions underpin the production and use of all maps'.…

Ultimately, Maps:Finding Our Place in the World shows clearly how interdisciplinary and visual the study of maps can be.

Read the article or see a collection of unusual maps from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Cartography and Geography | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The August 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal ran a short but positive review of Gail Fenske's new book, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York. Fenske's book uses an in-depth architectural analysis of New York's Woolworth building as a lens through which to view the city's distinctive urban culture. As WSJ reviewer Nicholas Desai writes: "The building's style, inside and out, is hybrid, almost a pastiche, offering Tudor, Byzantine and Gothic elements—modern but not modernist," and Fenske's book insightfully connects this unique eclecticism to the cultural contradictions that defined New York City's modernity.

Desai's review continues praising Fenske's prose as "academic but clear, enlivened by her interest in the cultural moment" and calls her work "a definitive take on a 20th-century classic."

Read it online at the WSJ website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The arts and culture website Trickhouse.com is currently featuring an online exhibition of the collages of William Davies King, professor of theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the recently released Collections of Nothing. King's book is a profound meditation on his habit of gathering miscellany—what many would consider junk. But through the careful organization and presentation of his collections, King demonstrates how even the most humble objects are able to accrue new, individualized value. And King's collages, accompanied by an insightful curatorial essay by David Banash, are a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Navigate to www.trickhouse.org and click on door #3 to visit the online exhibition.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Alford reviewed William Davies King's book, Collections of Nothing, in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. King, writes Alford, inspires a certain wariness in the reader:

We're talking about a man who once collected worn strips of masking tape that he pulled off the floor of a gymnasium, a man who collects the business cards of business card printers, even though he himself carries no business card.…

Part memoir and part disquisition on the psychological impulses behind the urge to accumulate, Collections of Nothing is a wonderfully frank and engaging look at one man's detritus-fueled pathology. King's honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him.

King believes that the impulse to collect comes "partly from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all societies." But he also considers other possibilities—"It finds order in things, virtue in preservation, knowledge in obscurity, and above all it discovers and even creates value." His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object. … What I like is the potency of the impotent thing, the renewed and adorable life I find in the dead and despised object." For him, there's "something in nothing." A lot of nothing

Read the rest of the review and read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A great review of Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West appeared in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Tom Vanderbilt has traveled some of the same Western highways as Hogan in his search for atomic bomb sites. He appreciates Hogan's candor about her quest to see the monuments of American land art—works like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field:

A prototypical urbanite, surrounded by friends and noise, Hogan says she was beset by an “early midlife crisis,” wondering if there wasn't more to life than meetings and e-mail. “I wanted to learn to enjoy being alone,” she writes. And as a “recovering art historian,” she longed to experience works she had only known refracted through art criticism and seminar slide shows.

So Hogan packed up her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west.…

I can attest to the anomie of motels that still advertise color TV, the dread of cracked roads with “No Services” signs, and the difficulties in being the only stranger in a bar. As a woman alone—Thelma sans Louise—Hogan faces this even more intensely. She tells a tale, by turns humorous and almost harrowing…

Vanderbilt concludes:

I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out—self-fulfillment or some new insights into what art is, or what it is for—or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In Spiral Jetta, an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn't magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing. As one guide tells Hogan while they look at art in Marfa, Tex., “You're supposed to draw your own conclusions.”

Read the rest of the review on the New York Times website. The Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times also ran a review of Spiral Jetta.

We have an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release. Also, read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Colin Marshall of the Santa Barbara Independent talked to of William Davies King last week about his new book, Collections of Nothing. From broken folding chairs to soup labels, as Marshall writes, "King's are collections of nothing, that is, things of no outward value." Yet through the act of gathering, organizing, and displaying these objects, King finds them imbued with a deeply personal significance:

"It comes out of a 20th-century vocabulary of art, going back to Dadaism, which was an art that believed in nothing" King said. "My own education led me to the Dadaist artists and their strange, often outsider art that was alert to the idea that emptiness of meaning might be as expressive and 'true' as art that purports to be full of meaning. I searched for artwork that would express my own anxiety in the face of the modern world's questionable values. I think anxiety takes the form of nothingness: it's this strange void within you that never seems to get filled up."

Read the article on the Santa Barbara Independent website. We have an excerpt from the book and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Sunday edition of NPR's All Things Considered included a segment on Anne Whiston Spirn and her book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field.

The NPR story begins where almost every mention of Lange begins, with the photograph titled "Migrant Mother." Spirn explains why Lange took that photograph and similar images that showed the destitute during the 1930s. Spirn also discusses her favorite Lange photograph, "Migratory Children Living in 'Rambler's Park,'" in which a roll of linoleum figures prominently.

We have an illustrated excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History
Posted by DB at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Twenty-nine houses could be added to the Frank Lloyd Wright catalog of built work. The houses in question are all in suburban Chicago and include two in Berwyn, one each in Wilmette and Glen Ellyn, and an incredible twenty-four houses in River Forest, all on the 700 block of William Street. A group of researchers led by William Allin Storrer has gone public with the claim that Wright designed these homes during a period of his life when attributing a design to him would have detracted from the salability of the house.

Chicago Tribune architectural critic Blair Kamin discussed the claims in a story in yesterday's edition. The houses have previously been attributed to other Prairie School architects, but examination of both interior and exterior details has led the research team to conclude that Wright designed them. The houses date from the 1910s; during this period Wright was a social outcast in the Chicago area because of the scandal of his affair with Mamah Cheney, wife of client Edwin Cheney.

Photos of all the houses and many more details are available on Storrer's website, the FLlW Update. We have published two books by Storrer, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog and The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion. The early twentieth-century period of Wright's professional life is examined in Anthony Alofsin's Frank Lloyd Wright—the Lost Years, 1910-1922. We have also published Meryle Secrest's biography, Frank Lloyd Wright and a volume of Blair Kamin's columns, Why Architecture Matters.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago
Posted by DB at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 7 edition of The New Yorker briefly but approvingly notes William Davies King's memoir of his lifelong obsession with ephemera, Collections of Nothing. The New Yorker praises the book for "the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one" and continues:

"I lost and found myself in remote topical aisles of scholarship-wreck," [King] says of his hours in Yale's library, reading the most obscure books he could find. His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all.

Read the rest at The New Yorker website. Also read an excerpt from the book and an essay by King, “Nothing to Speak About.”

Collections of Nothing was also an object of much affection on Omnivoracious and the cover is “Most Coveted Cover #181” over at Readerville.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yet another positive review of Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West appeared in last Saturday's Chicago Tribune. Spiral Jetta is part travel essay and part art critique, but it's the former that Tribune reviewer Ann Fabian focuses on. With her own daughter getting ready to head to Marfa, Texas, "to seek her fortune as an intern at the late Donald Judd's minimalist art mecca," Fabian found the autobiographical side of Hogan's book most useful:

Marfa was one of the sites that lured Erin Hogan out of Chicago and off on her auto pilgrimage to the big art of the West. It seems to draw folks (like Hogan and my daughter) worn down by city life. I had to read the book.…

We learn about Hogan. She has been working in Chicago too long. She needs to get out of town. She needs to learn to be alone. She heads west in her trusty Volkswagen Jetta, crosses the plains and lands in Utah. She spends the next week looking for art there and in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.… She talks to men in a bar, loses her wallet under a chair in a hotel lobby, pitches a tent in a windstorm, visits a roadside attraction, drinks beer with some guys and drives her Jetta on rutty dirt roads.…

Hogan's trip is more like what would happen to most of us if we drove around the West to look at art. Motels would be ordinary. Bar food would be lousy. But nothing awful would happen. We might take some notes and write them up. Someone like me might read them and reassure a daughter heading to Marfa that Donald Judd's polished aluminum boxes do not disappoint.

Check out the full review online at the Chicago Tribune website. Also read an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have posted about Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta several times already, but we won't apologize for posting about it again. It's a delightful book and it's provoking some interesting reflections on land art. The latest is a thoughtful discussion on Ian Brown's CBC radio program Talking Books, with panelists Lawrence Weschler (director of the New York Institute for the Humanities), Monica Tap (a Toronto artist), and Tom Jokinen (a writer in Ottawa). It's an entertaining and insightful discussion: recommended.

A description of the episode is on Words at Large, a CBC Radio site for book-related programs. A link to the audio is on that page; we couldn't get that link to work, but went direct to the mp3 file.

We also have an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News
Posted by DB at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we've been reminded by the recent outcry over the threat of destructive drilling near Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the monumental works of land art in the American West have a powerful hold on fans of contemporary art. To Erin Hogan, their very remoteness and precariousness is a crucial part of their appeal—and she knew that to fully understand and appreciate the questions about scale, permanence, and the limits of human activity raised by such works, she would have to actually go see them in person. So in the autumn of 2004, Hogan threw some sunscreen and some sketchy directions into her Volkswagen Jetta and hit the road, leaving the comforts of the city behind and plunging headlong into the vast expanse of the great American desert. Spiral Jetta is the story of that 3,000-mile journey.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" asked Jack Kerouac. Erin Hogan was going on a solitary tour of the monumental land art of the American West. She says in an interview Saturday in the Salt Lake Tribune that she re-read Kerouac and "definitely felt like I was involving myself in the Great American Road saga."

Reporter Julie Checkoway wonders: why visit land art?

Land art is this arena you walk into, and it changes your sense of space and time. The people who made it were trying to set up a different experience, giving us something. I wanted to experience that, a surprising built environment. But really, the book is mostly a road book. Yeah, I meditate on Michael Fried and the theatricality of landscape, but I'd like to think that someone who didn't study art history like I did would encounter something very beautiful in Spiral Jetty.

Update June 11: Erin Hogan is also interviewed today on ArtInfo.

We have an excerpt from the Spiral Jetty section of the book as well as our own interview with Hogan.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by DB at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in paperback—Although airports are now best known for interminable waits at check-in counters, liquid restrictions for carry-on luggage, and humiliating shoe-removal rituals at security, they were once the backdrops for jet-setters who strutted, martinis in hand, through curvilinear terminals designed by Eero Saarinen. In the critically acclaimed Naked Airport, Alastair Gordon traces the cultural history of this defining institution from its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines to its frontline position in the struggle against international terrorism.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday's Los Angeles Times ran a review of Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field. The Times online edition also includes a lovely portfolio of twenty Lange photographs from the book. Times reviewer Louis P. Masur explains what is different about Spirn's look at the Farm Security Administration work of Dorothea Lange:

Daring to Look is a hybrid work, part personal essay, part portfolio of photographs, part scholarly catalog of captions and negatives.… Spirn argues strenuously that Lange must be appreciated not solely for her portraits but for her landscapes as well, and that any consideration of Lange must take into account not only images but also words—the general notes and specific captions that the photographer wrote.

Spirn is right to refocus our attention on the landscape. Lange herself said she was trying in her work to tell the story "of a people in their relation to their institutions, to their fellowmen, and to the land." That landscape—of farms and signs, cut-overs and crossroads, buildings and shacks—traverses these photographs whether people are present or not. There are also the internal scenes of parlors and kitchens and stored goods. Many of Lange's photographs include doorways, the pathway between public and private, between physical and emotional landscapes.

Spirn will soon complete her own website for Daring to Look.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the ubiquity of Dorothea Lange's photographs, a surprisingly large number of them have languished in archives, more or less unseen, for decades. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn brings nearly 200 of those photos to light, revealing new facets of Lange's celebrated achievement.

Daring to Look is far more than just a book of photos, however. Spirn presents the images—taken in 1939 in California, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest—alongside Lange's own field notes and captions, which the photographer considered to be an essential component of her attempt to document the hardscrabble lives of her subjects. Spirn joins that work to an insightful account of Lange's life, as well as a fascinating look at the current state of many of the locations Lange shot. Spirn's own photographs of those towns and farms reflect the changes—and the surprising continuity—over decades, carrying Lange's documentary project into a new century.

Daring to Look brings to life a crucial moment in American history—and illuminates a missing period in the life of one of America's greatest artists.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Film and Media | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the current edition of the American Interest, reviewer James Rosen delivers a positive assessment of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' recent book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Praising the book for its thorough treatment of nine case studies involving some of the most influential images of the twentieth century, Rosen writes:

[No Caption Needed] is a penetrating and provocative analysis of the way certain popular photographs, whether produced by professionals or amateurs, acquire the power to change public policy and with it the course of history.… The author's analytical achievement is enabled by an extraordinary feat of research and reporting. They have unearthed hidden facts, from both the backstory and the aftermath, surrounding each of their nine chosen photographs.…

[But] almost as compelling… are the stories of their subsequent appropriation. No Caption Needed details the uses and abuses of these nine iconic photographs by propagandists and peddlers of all kinds, with results that prove alternately haunting, playful, predictable, mercenary, dishonest and sometimes just plain twisted.…

Pick up a copy of the American Interest to read the rest of the review.
Also see the authors' No Caption Needed blog and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Louis Lucaites, author of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy has posted an apropos commentary about the Earth Day themed cover image on today's Time Magazine to his No Caption Needed blog. Detailing a photoshopped version of Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph of WWII troops on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi raising a giant conifer in place of the flag, Lucaites makes the image an occasion to deliver some interesting commentary on the history of the original photograph's appropriation and the particularly fetishistic way that the Time Magazine editors have chosen to use it today. Lucaites writes:

By most accounts Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi is the most reproduced photograph of all time—ever!…

Such reproductions have occurred not just in traditional print media, but on stamps (twice), commemorative plates, woodcuts, silk screens, coins, key chains, cigarette lighters, matchbook covers, beer steins, lunchboxes, hats, t-shirts, ties, calendars, comic books, credit cards, trading cards, post cards, and human skin, and in advertisements for everything from car insurance to condoms and strip joints.…

All of this is to say that on the face of things there is nothing particularly noteworthy about Time's appropriation of the image this week to frame and promote its "green" agenda in a special issue on the "War on Global Warming," … but my interest here is in mapping out how the particular appropriation of the original photograph coaches an attitude that seems to rely on tired and clichéd conceptions of American exceptionalism. Put simply, it is not just an appeal to be "green" (although it is that), but it also functions to translate the meaning of being "green" into a symbolic register that both defines environmentalism in terms of U.S. nationalism—"green is the new red, white, and blue"—and, more, makes something of an imperialistic fetish out of it.

Read the rest of Lucaites piece on the No Caption Needed blog, or read an excerpt from Lucaite's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the New York Times, yesterday evening marked a significant checkpoint in the War in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded killing four more U.S. troops, bringing the total American death toll in Iraq to 4000. With no end in sight and casualties steadily rising, media outlets around the globe have used the 4,000th death as an opportunity to look back on the war and the many soldiers who have lost their lives there since 2003. But providing perhaps one of the most vivid and personal of these retrospectives, is NYT photojournalist and author Ashley Gilbertson's recent Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Documenting the conflict from the initial invasion, to Iraq's first national elections, Gilbertson's book tells candidly of his own experience photographing the war and of the lives of the soldiers fighting it.

To preview some of the images from the book navigate to the author's portfolio on the NYT website.

To hear more about the Gilbertson's experience in Iraq, you can navigate to the Press's special website for the book which features and exclusive half-hour interview with the author, or see this archived video from CSPAN's Book TV of Gilbertson's talk earlier this month at a Borders Books & Music in Vienna, Virginia.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Podularity.com, a literary blog based in the UK, is running an interesting podcast of an interview with author Martin Kemp on the topic of his recent book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. Interviewer George Miller engages Kemp in a discussion of the links between humans and animals embedded in Western culture to explore the question; where is the line between animal and human? And, does the line even exist at all? Navigate to Podularity.com to listen.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 03:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The April/May issue of Bookforum is running an early review of Erin Hogan's unconventional new travelogue, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West. (The book will release in mid-April.) Noting the author's willingness to trek off the beaten path to experience first-hand the unique blending of landscape and sculpture in American land art reviewer Nico Israel writes:

Earth art, that consummately American movement that sprang up during the high-Vietnam War era, combined a steely-eyed commitment to the truth of materials and to the power of basic geometric forms with a desire to get off the grid or at the very least "expand the field" of sculpture. Sometimes called environmental or land art, or Earthworks, depending on its practitioner, it demanded of its actual, physical viewers—"fit, though few," as John Milton might have said—a pilgrim's willingness to go on the road to remote places in order to see the works and experience the landscapes that they reframed and illuminated.…

Enter self-described "recovering art historian" Erin Hogan, whose book Spiral Jetta records her retrospective responses to a highway journey in her Volkswagen, in which, over the course of about three weeks, she visited Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, and Donald Judd's various Marfa projects.… Along the way, she offers compelling descriptions of the landscape of the American West, of the pilgrimage's contradictions—she is sharp when noting what expensive-eyeglass-wearing visitors to Sun Tunnels or Lightning Field must look like to the hardscrabble locals—and of getting lost (which seems an inevitable part of visiting Earth art).

Read the rest of the review on the Bookforum website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a review appearing in last Sunday's edition of the Toronto Star Christine Sisimondo begins:

In academia, generally, food writing is relegated to… 'the kind of thing you might find in a newspaper'—not in the hallowed halls of higher ed.… But of late, "that's been changing. Anthropology and environmental science departments are beginning to redefine the study of food, as not just about nutrition and shortages through the ages but as a serious cultural indicator.

Laszlo is a chemistry professor who is probably best known for his previous book, Salt: Grain of Life, and has now moved on to one of the next great essential staples, citrus.

Laszlo has a truly charming way of telling the story, weaving his personal biography into the tale of the migration of various fruits around the world.

He is careful, though (and tells us he is worried about overstepping his bounds), to never let the personal overshadow the story of lemons, limes, grapefruits, oranges and, of course, such exotics as ugli fruit, kumquats and yuzu.…

[And] while there's … plenty of great history in Laszlo's account, it's [also] interdisciplinary, adding to his personal tale and all that lore discussions on chemistry and three great chapters on the symbolic meanings of citrus and the image of these fruits in poetry and art.

Laszlo proves that citrus is a serious matter, worthy of real academic study.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website. Also read six citrus recipies from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Writing for this month's edition of Natural History magazine Laurence A. Marschall reviews two recent books in the history of science: Pierre Laszlo's exploration of the cultural and culinary phenomenon of citrus fruit in Citrus: A History, and Pascal Richet's historical account of the various ways humans have attempted to record the age of the earth in A Natural History of Time.

Marschall writes of Citrus:

Can one describe a work of nonfiction as being happy? Well, this one is. Pierre Laszlo, a retired chemistry professor turned science writer, has approached the lore of citrus fruit with the élan of a master chef (the man is French, after all), mixing history, economics, biology, and chemistry to produce a book that will bring a smile to readers of every taste. Until reading Citrus, in fact, I had not realized just how many tastes the title implied: lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit, of course, but also citron, tangerine, kumquat, calamondin, and the self-descriptive Ugli, not to mention such variants as bergamot, mandarin, Valencia, ortanique, and Honey Murcott. Laszlo's literary method is to present them as characters in an unfolding story. He begins with the domestication of the citron in Persia and the early history of citrus horticulture, then moves to the establishment and growth of the citrus industry in Florida, California, and Brazil, and finally, after many diversions and digressions, arrives at a final section that explores the place of citrus in literature, art, religion, and the culture of cuisine.

And the praise continues for Richet's A Natural History of Time:

Looking at the sandy New England pond outside our summer house, I can readily imagine the glacial remnant that lay there some 12,000 years ago, melting in the warming rays of the Holocene sun. I know, too, that a few hundred million years ago, before continental drift split us apart, Europe and this bit of North American real estate were joined. And I'm well aware that 5 billion years ago, this sand and this water, indeed the Earth itself and everything on it, were part of an interstellar cloud that was condensing into our solar system. Deep time is just one of those things I take for granted.

But as geophysicist Pascal Richet demonstrates in this readable popular history of chronology, the geologic calendar implicit in today's view of nature was not shared by earlier generations. Written accounts from ancient civilizations depict prehistory as a foggy dreamtime. Most authors made little attempt to assign dates or durations other than “in the beginning.…”

Only the fine details of the Earth's timeline are matters of contention any more.… Yet precisely because the current well-grounded chronology seems so natural to most scientifically literate people, Richet's authoritative review of Earth's history is particularly welcome. Rather than fret about polls that show how many citizens still hold to the chronology of the Holy Book, he invites us to marvel at the efforts of science to read the book of nature itself.

Read both reviews on the Natural History magazine website. Also navigate to our special Citrus web page featuring six tasty citrus recipes.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
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Just in time for the opening of his exhibition at Melbourne's Obscura Gallery, the Australian paper The Age ran an article last Sunday on Ashley Gilbertson and his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. As the article notes, Gilbertson is himself an Australian native and got his first taste of professional journalism "documenting the lives of Kosovar refugees seeking temporary protection in Australia." The article continues:

The project sparked an interest in the plight of displaced people that led him to West Papua, Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, where he has spent a total of 18 months since 2002.

His early trips to the country were a hand-to-mouth existence, selling stories as he went, often depending on the goodwill of colleagues and strangers.

Towards the end of a trip in 2003 he picked up work for the New York Times. Since he returned from that trip, his work has been exclusively for the US newspaper.

His work while embedded with US marines during the 2004 Fallujah offensive made his name, earning him the prestigious Robert Capa Award for courageous photography from the US Overseas Press Club.

But his experiences have left scars. He watched as Lance Corporal William Miller, a soldier who was escorting him up the stairwell of a minaret, was shot dead by an insurgent. Running out of the mosque under insurgent fire, he wished to die. "I ran out into the street with the marines, hoping I would take a slug," he said.

Read more about Gilbertson's harrowing experiences in Iraq at The Age. Also check out the Obscura Gallery's web page for more information on his exhibition. Finally, see the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website featuring a full half hour video interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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"The Art of Lee Miller" is a major retrospective of works by and about the artist curated by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The exhibition has now come stateside; it opened a week ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in July.

A lengthy critical essay by Judith Thurman was in the January 21 New Yorker, while a nicely illustrated article was in the February 4 issue of Newsweek. Like Carolyn Burke's biography Lee Miller: A Life which we recently released in paperback, the articles deliver a fascinating look at the life and artistry of Miller. She dominated the world of high fashion in the late 1920s, modeling for magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, and then became a respected photographer herself, leaving an indelible mark on the worlds of fine art photography and photojournalism. Writing for the New Yorker, Thurman details the pivotal turn in Miller's career from art object to artist:

If one is to believe the story, Condé Nast noticed her crossing the street just in time to pull her from the path of an oncoming vehicle, and this fortuitous collision led to an interview with Edna Chase, Vogue's editor in chief.… She was soon posing for Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Muray, the leading photographers of the day.…

In 1929, with several lovers fighting for the honor of seeing her off, and café society sad to lose its star playgirl, Miller sailed for Europe with the ambition "to enter photography by the back end.…" She planned to do some modeling for George Hoyningen-Huene at Paris Vogue while she apprenticed with Man Ray, a leader of the avant-garde and master of many genres—painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic art.…

Under Man Ray's tutelage, Miller mastered the use of the Graflex camera, with glass plates, and then the Rolleiflex; studio lighting setups; cropping and retouching, improvisation with the viewfinder; and his techniques for developing.

The article goes on to detail Miller's extraordinary, but tumultuous life, and speaks in detail about her groundbreaking work as one of the first female war correspondents during WWII. A theme which the Newsweek article picks up as well:

After she moved [to] London in 1939, she began her most important photography. The cockeyed perspective she'd absorbed from the surrealists served her well in the arresting, absurdist images she captured during the Blitz: a crushed Remington typewriter; a male mannequin standing incongruously in a heap of curbside rubble.… She rode into Germany with the U.S. Army, starkly documenting the corpses and the ovens of Buchenwald and Dachau—and zooming in, almost poetically, on a dead SS guard floating in a canal. She also shot Hitler's apartment in Munich—then got in his tub for her first bath in weeks, a moment caught on film by [Life photographer Dave] Scherman. Her combat boots on the bathmat are still caked with the mud of Dachau from earlier in the day.

The most thorough exploration of Miller's life and career can be found in Burke's 400-plus page biography Lee Miller: A Life. We have an extended excerpt from the book, dealing with Miller's experiences covering the War in France—from the Allied invasion of Normandy to the German surrender.

A slide show is online at the New Yorker.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Books for the News
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The California Literary Review, an online magazine, is running a great selection of photographs from Ashley Gilbertson's recently published Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. The photos are accompanied by a short essay by the author discussing how he wound up on assignment with the New York Times covering the battle of Falluja—one of the fiercest battles of the conflict:

In March 2004, four American contractors were ambushed in the center of Falluja, a city forty-three miles west of Baghdad. They were dragged from their cars, beaten, and their bodies burnt.… Back in Iraq, furious Marine generals who were supposedly in control of Falluja promised swift vengeance and on April 4 attacked the city with everything they had. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in a week of intense urban combat.…

My rotation had finished and I was at the bureau packing to leave the country when a scramble ensued to get someone from the paper to cover the battle from the frontlines. Times higher-ups contacted generals and politicians, and eventually we were given two… slots, one of them mine. I repacked my bags, this time including body armor and equipment I needed to file my photos under battle conditions. A few hours Later I boarded an aircraft bound for the dusty Camp Falluja five miles east of the city.

You can find the rest of the article and the accompanying photos online at the California Literary Review website. Also see the website for the book featuring a fascinating video interview with the author discussing his experiences as a war photographer in Iraq.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr.'s Maps: Finding Our Place in the World has been given quite a positive review in this month's issue of the British science and technology magazine, BBC Focus. Praising the book for its thoughtful exploration of maps and the many divergent purposes they have served throughout human history, reviewer Nick Smith writes:

If you though maps were merely aerial drawings of places that help us get from point A to B, you will be astonished by the depth and breadth of this book.

The editors have cleverly set out the book's structure in terms of what function maps perform, instead of ranging from continent to continent as with traditional atlases. There is macro-mapping throughout the ages and maps portraying land use, as well as those concerned with commerce, art, advertising, entertainment and national identity. There is plant distribution, cartographic analysis of the geology of the US and even the "distribution of the slave population of the Southern States.…" Fascinating stuff.

See a collection of unusual maps from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Last Thursday the Times Higher Education ran an enthusiastic review of Vanessa R. Schwartz's new book It's So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. In the review THE contributor and professor of film studies Ginette Vincendeau notes how the thesis of Schwartz's book makes a fascinating departure from conventional views about the relationship between the postwar French and American film industries. Vincendeau's review begins:

In this provocative and original book, the American cultural historian Vanessa Schwartz revisits the vexed question of Franco-American cinematic relations in the postwar period. Much has been written on the subject, but Schwartz has no time for clichés about French "protectionism" or American "imperialism". Instead, the central thesis of It's so French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture is that the French and the Americans were much more receptive (even affectionate) towards each other than Cold War-inspired rhetoric has made out. Furthermore, France as represented in American and French films of the 1950s and 1960s was key to the development of "cosmopolitan film culture".

Contrary to the common view that pits French art cinema against commercial Hollywood films, Schwartz claims that from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s American representations of Frenchness successfully merged high art and popular culture, and French cinema meant more than highbrow auteur films. This she demonstrates via a set of major French cultural icons, from belle époque Paris to Brigitte Bardot.

The review concludes:

It's so French!, based on impressive scholarship and superbly illustrated, builds a solid case for France's role in the growth of "cosmopolitan film culture".

The book is a stimulating corrective to entrenched views of Franco-American cinematic relations as necessarily conflictual.

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
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Bradford Edwards, the artist whose astonishing collection of Vietnam-era Zippo lighters is featured in Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973), was interviewed yesterday on All Things Considered by NPR's senior Asian correspondent Michael Sullivan. In the interview, which took place on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Sullivan explored Edwards unique fascination with these relics of war:

Edwards insists he's not a "Vietnam Zippohead."

"I'm not a Zippo collector. I'm not somebody into the Zippo, per se," he says.…

"I'm not into it because, really, of the war or because of memorabilia or because of any real, I would say, direct historical aspect. I'm in it for the artistic sensibility and the direct emotional expression that you see via text or images," he says.

Edwards calls the Zippos left behind "pure art without ambition"—personal narratives that capture the mixed emotions of a confusing time and place.

Navigate to the NPR website to view photographs of Edwards and displays of Zippos, plus the archived audio and transcript of the interview.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jessica Riskin's Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life was recently given a great review by science fiction writer Greg Bear in Nature. Riskin's book collects seventeen essays from a conference of distinguished scholars in several fields who bring a historical perspective to this most contemporary of scientific topics. And as Bear notes in his review, the result is a particularly comprehensive treatment of the history of artificial life. Bear writes:

The strength of Genesis Redux lies in its scholarship and range of topics. Clockworks, mechanical toys and their influence on biological concepts are presented in fascinating detail. Joan Landes introduces us to the Hoffmanesque works of Jacques de Vaucanson's feminine flautist and (excreting) duck, and to the flayed, preserved and posed cadavers, the écorchés, of Jean-Honoré Fragonard: there is a dancing fetus and a very naked man staring in horror, jawbone in hand. Landes delivers a lively analysis of our reactions to the abject and uncanny, the frisson so beloved by fans of Dr Frankenstein.

The review continues:

Genesis Redux takes the time to shed light on areas I would not naturally consider, and thus enlightens and expands the topic. Its cautious perspective—the enthusiasms of the past considered in the sober light of history—provides a useful counterpoint to [other books on the subject].

See the rest of the article on the Nature website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy | Reviews
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Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan's new book Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News seems to have caught the attention of the local papers recently. Already this month the book has received three separate reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times, Time Out Chicago, and the Chicago Suburban News. As Tom Cruze notes in the Sun-Times, in Chicago under Glass Jacob and Cahan have amassed a collection of the best photographs from the archives from the now defunct Chicago Daily News to document one of the most tumultuous and fascinating periods in Chicago history:

Chicago history circa 1901-30, with its triumphs, disasters and celebrities, comes alive through the lenses of Daily News photographers in this expansive treatment by former Sun-Timesmen Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan. The images, some 250 culled from more than 57000 recently put online (the original glass negatives reside at the Chicago History Museum), are bundled into themes easily explored by browsing history buffs. Probably the most fascinating photos here show familiar areas of Chicago that have changed throughout the years. Construction shots of Buckingham fountain and the Field Museum make the familiar seem fascinatingly strange.

And from the Chicago Suburban News.

The 250 photographs they chose for their resulting volume depict a gritty burg evolving through cultural upheavals and technological advances. Some of the buildings and vistas look vaguely familiar today, but the fashions and hairstyles surely don't. "We haven't been exposed to that many pictures from this era," Cahan said. "This is kind of an unknown period—I know that sounds funny—but also really the beginning of the modern age because of the car.

You can check out the rest of the Chicago Suburban News article online but you'll have to pick up a copy of the Sun-Times or the latest Time-Out magazine for the others. Also be sure to check out the Chicago History Museum's online archive of images from the Chicago Daily News.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Reviews
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The New York Times Book Review ran a piece about Sherry Buchanan's new book Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories in last Sunday's holiday books wrap up. Placing Buchanan's book on his list of new art and design books for the season, reviewer Steven Heller writes:

For grunts fighting the Vietnam War, statements of patriotism and protest found an outlet… on metal Zippo lighters. Vietnam Zippos, illustrated with objects from the collection of the artist Bradford Edwards, documents what the author, Sherry Buchanan, calls "amulets and talismans bringing the keeper invulnerability, good luck and protection against evil." Sadly, these personalized mementos also served as last testaments for many who were killed in action.

An extensive published record exists for documents and relics from the Vietnam War, yet this book, well designed and photographed by Misha Anikst, offers a rare personal dimension. The mottoes on these lighters, like "When I die I will go to heaven because I spent my time in hell," provide candid insight into what these soldiers thought of the war.

Read the rest of the review on the NYTBR website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
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Barry B. LePatner's Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry is featured in today's Wall Street Journal business section. Reviewer James R. Hagerty uses LePatner's book to cite one possible benefit of the otherwise gloomy housing market crisis—weeding out the weaklings in the contracting businesses. Hagerty writes:

Every now and then, a major construction project is completed on time and on budget. Everyone is amazed.

Barry LePatner, a New York lawyer specializing in construction cases, thinks this exception should become the rule. Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets outlines his proposals for making that possible.

Mr. LePatner's swift kick to the construction industry comes when it is already down. Commercial construction is slowing, and house building is in a severe slump, partly caused by a glut of new homes erected by overly optimistic builders even before the subprime crisis made it harder to find qualified buyers. The downturn will apply the wrecking ball to many of the weaker construction companies. But that won't be enough, according to Mr. LePatner. He argues that the industry will become efficient only when its customers become savvier and more demanding.

His solutions involve, among other things, hiring experts who can monitor builders and who have financial incentives to prevent needless overruns. Tougher contracts should enforce fixed costs or, at least, severely limit the scope for escalation. And thorough background checks—looking for lawsuits, public complaints and financial troubles—may lower the chance of hiring dodgy engineers and construction teams.

Such steps would force out of business weak firms that can't deliver on their promises. The survivors, Mr. LePatner thinks, would be larger firms that are less reliant on subcontractors and are better able to train employees and invest in technology.

To find out more see the WSJ article (available for seven days free to non-subscribers) or navigate to www.brokenbuildings.com.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two articles on Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites's No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy ran this month, both of which cite the book for its controversial look at some of the most influential images of the last century, and how such images have radically changed the political and social landscape of America. An article in the November 29 London Review of Books (only available to subscribers) begins with a critique of "one of the most reproduced photographs in American history"—Joe Rosenthal's image of U.S. troops struggling to raise an American flag on top of Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima. The LRB's David Simpson writes:

The Pulitzer-prize winning photo of the Suribachi Summit… was actually of a second flag-raising, staged with a larger flag after the fighting had died down. Literally speaking it was not so much a struggle against military odds as a struggle against gravity. This was known at the time, and was a sufficiently sensitive issue for both Time and Life to refrain from publishing it until it had become so ubiquitous as to be beyond complex questioning. That happened very fast. The photo became more or less instantly a leitmotif of American popular culture and a key item in the manufacture of consent by politicians and advertisers alike.…

Debates about the authenticity of photographs, especially war photographs, have been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed Robert Hariman and John Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of 'democratic citizenship' and 'civic identity.' Here original truths matter less than accumulated traditions or assumptions.… For these authors the Iwo Jima flag works because it is aesthetically compelling, … because it converts military into civic action, and because it effaces the personalities of the soldiers in the service of a common and anonymous effort. …

The review continues:

The authors think we have a 'need' for these iconic images, and often suggest that democracy is better for them. But it is a fine line (if there is a line) between the vigorous, deliberative debate conducted by empowered citizens… and the consumption of patriotic propaganda.

A feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education also focused on the author's take on the powerful yet complicated impact of iconic images on American culture. You can read the Chronicle piece online at their website, read an excerpt from the book, or navigate over to the authors' blog where they frequently post provocative critiques of notable images in contemporary photojournalism.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History has been featured in several articles this month, one in the November 22 issue of Nature and another in the November 25 issue of the UK's Sunday Times. Both articles praise Laszlo's book for its comprehensive historical account of the propagation of citrus fruits around the globe and both note that one of the most important reasons for its popularity is its medicinal value—an especially pertinent fact to keep in mind during these long winter months. From the Sunday Times:

[In Citrus] Laszlo, a retired French chemist, takes us on a journey from the orangeries of Versailles, via the limes of the Royal Navy to the citriculture of modern Florida. It was only in the 1920s, he tells us, that orange juice became "an integral part of the American breakfast", after the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Laszlo shows that the citrus fruit "is a treasure trove of chemicals that are highly useful to humankind"—which also happens to taste wonderful.

And on a similar note from Nature magazine:

Citrus provides a colorful background of the literature, poetry and art associated with citrus fruits, as well as their pharmaceutical effects. Apparently, an ingredient of grapefruit juice deactivates an enzyme in the small intestine that destroys some medications before they can enter the bloodstream. Alternatively, the citrus component boosts the activity of certain drugs, such as sildenafil (better known as Viagra) and inhibitors of HIV-1 proteases.

You can read the rest of both articles online, or navigate to our special Citrus website where you can find out more about the book as well as download six tasty—not to mention healthy—citrus recipes.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashley Gilbertson, author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War recently joined fellow photographer Nina Berman on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show to discuss their recent projects documenting the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and how they manage to cope with their experiences after they come home. As Lopate reveals in his interview, both books offer a candid look into the horrors of modern warfare soldiers are forced to endure and the toll it takes on them both physically and emotionally. Navigate to the WNYC website to listen to archived audio from the show as well as view two photo galleries featuring a small sampling of each photographer's work.

Gilbertson was also recently interviewed by Sandip Roy for NPR's UpFront radio to discuss Gilbertson's personal experiences as a photographer in Iraq. You can find a transcription as well as archived audio of their conversation online at the UpFront website.

Finally, don't miss the UCP's own Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website where you can read more about Gilbertson's book, place an order, and view our own video interview with Gilbertson.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Ashley Gilbertson arrived in Iraq at the beginning of the U.S. invasion he was only twenty five years old and had no affiliation with any newspaper. Nevertheless, he was among the first photojournalists to cover the conflict for American audiences. Soon picked up as a freelance photographer for the New York Times, Gilbertson has since established himself as one of the most adept chroniclers of the conflict in the middle east.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a special piece in the Arts and Leisure featuring a selection of Gilbertson's photographs of the war, all of which can be found in his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War. Dexter Filkins prefaces Gilbertson's photos in the NYT saying:

Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer for the New York Times, has followed the war in Iraq from its beginning through its most singular moments. In his new book… Gilbertson has compiled the best of those images, freezing the war's most intense and dramatic moments… The heart of the book, graphically and emotionally, is the battle of Falluja in November 2004, when 6,000 marines and soldiers went into what was then a contested jihadi stronghold. Those photos capture street-to-street fighting in all its manic ferocity.

But the most moving of these images are not of fighting and violence but of the moments in between: a group of soldiers sunning themselves during a pause in the battle, a child hurling himself down a slide at a Baghdad playground, an Iraqi man and son standing frozen before an American soldier. Moments like these remind us just how human the experience of war really is.

Check out the photographs from the New York Times piece on their website, then navigate to our web site for the book to view a fascinating interview with the photographer and hear him speak about his personal experiences photographing war.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maps are universal forms of communication, easily understood and appreciated regardless of culture or language. This truly magisterial book introduces readers to the widest range of maps ever considered in one volume. A companion to the most ambitious exhibition on the history of maps ever mounted in North America, Maps will challenge readers to stretch conventional thought about what constitutes a map and how many different ways we can understand graphically the environment in which we live. Collectors, historians, mapmakers and users, and anyone who has ever "gotten lost" in the lines and symbols of a map will find much to love and learn from in this book.

Read the press release. Also see a special website for the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Cartography and Geography | History | Press Releases | Religion
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Sherry Buchanan's new book Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories has been receiving attention from some very different sources recently. This month both Playboy magazine and a magazine called The Armchair General are running reviews of the book. Yet despite the two magazine's obvious disparities, both seem to agree that Vietnam Zippos offers a unique medium of expression for the often marginalized voices of the American GI's that served in Vietnam. From Playboy magazine:

For American soldiers in Vietnam, the Zippo lighter was an essential talisman; its chrome casing was also a convenient canvas on which fighters expressed their anger and frustration. In Vietnam Zippos, edited by Sherry Buchanan, these unique artifacts tell the story of a war gone sour. Lyndon Johnson's observation that "ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and minds of the people" inspired the gleeful savagery of "Give me your hearts and minds or I will wreck your f—ing huts."… Later, as enthusiasm for the war ebbed, lighters feature such deep thoughts as "When the power of love is as strong as the love of power, then there will be peace."

Also be sure to check out the Armchair General article online here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marcia Lausen's new book Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design was recently featured in two articles this week. A review posted today on Newsweek's website and another yesterday on the Fast Company blog both focus on Lausen's book as an attempt to ensure that 2007 is not a repeat of the irregularities created by the poorly designed ballots used in Florida in 2000. Causing mass confusion and sparking the infamous recount, as Newsweek's Rolf Ebeling notes, there is no better example to demonstrate the importance of well designed election materials. Ebeling writes:

Graphic designers encounter a fair amount of eye-rolling—some of it deserved—when they champion the necessity of their work outside their professional choir. Passionately defending color palettes, rattling off obscure rules of proper typography—these things often come off as superficial and fussy to the unconverted.… But, but, but … intelligent application of type, line and color does provide a service beyond visual appeal. It can clarify complexity. And I can prove it.

Look no further than the new book Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, by Marcia Lausen, an elegant examination of how to improve the utility of our nation's varied—and, in some cases, shockingly bad—voter materials. In reaction to the problems brought to national attention in the 2000 elections—when Americans learned all about the troubles with "butterfly ballots" and "hanging chads"—a group of designers led by Lausen (a professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago) developed a comprehensive visual system for everything from voter registration pamphlets to instructions for setting up ballot-counting tables. The emphasis here is on a system: their work was not intended to set a national standard but to act as a guideline adaptable to the unique requirements of state and local elections. Working with election officials, they have, since 2000, already put some of their ideas to work in Illinois and Oregon elections.

Read the rest of the Newsweek article on their website. The Fast Company article is also online here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With his book tour now in full swing Ashley Gilbertson, author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War has been making so many appearances lately we can barely keep track of him. From prime time TV interviews, to high school classrooms, here's our attempt to catch up with Gilbertson's most recent events:

Last Tuesday Gilbertson was interviewed on Philadelphia NPR affiliate WHYY's Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane. Archived audio from the show is available on the WHYY website in real-audio format .

Wednesday saw Gilbertson appearing in Boston for a slightly surreal interview on local FOX TV morning news. They've also put the video online at their website.

Yesterday, however, Gilbertson took some time out to speak with a group of high school students from Millis, MA. The interview was recorded for the Millis Middle/High School's Studio 103, a student-run production facility for a local access TV channel, and should appear on their blog soon as well.

An interview and multimedia slide show with a sampling of the photo's from Gilbertson's book was also featured last Thursday on the online news magazine Alternet.

And tonight Gilbertson will be seen on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 in a rebroadcast of Cooper's show on the battle for Falluja, called "The Anvil of God"—Gilbertson was recently awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Falluja.

Finally, Gilbertson's talk and signing at the Washington DC area Borders was recently filmed by CSPAN-2's Book TV—who will broadcast it this Sunday night at 7:00 pm eastern time, 6:00 pm central.

But despite all these interviews with major media moguls, his recent interview with Press senior editor Alan Thomas of course offers by far the most interesting examination of Gilbertson's work. You can see footage from the interview online at the press's special website for the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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This week's Chicago Reader is running a front page story on Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan's new book Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News. The book is the result of years spent digging through the Chicago History Museum's archives to collect over 250 images from the Chicago Daily News—one of the major newspapers circulating in the Chicago area in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and one of the first newspapers to feature black and white photography. As Michael Miner notes in his Chicago Reader review, their time and effort has resulted in a fascinating photo journey into the city's history:

The Daily News went under in 1978, long before it could have created its own online archive. So the writing in this famously literary paper is largely lost, but the photography survives, and now an anonymous photographer's strange, wonderful picture of a group of blind children stroking a circus elephant deservedly finds a spotlight as the cover of Chicago Under Glass. It's a fitting introduction to the book, expressing the idea of reaching out to touch something most alive in the imagination.

The Reader article also points to the Chicago History Museum's online archive of thousands more photographs from the early days of the Chicago Daily News. Click on the link to check them out.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | History
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In an article appearing in the "Burning Questions" column in today's edition of Newsday Erica Marcus cites Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History to help her answer one reader's burning question about the origins of orange juice. From Newsday:

I can't drink cold orange juice first thing in the morning, but I am curious as to when and where this practice began. I don't think it's European. —Rhoda Greenberg, Islip

Drinking orange juice at breakfast is indeed a peculiarly American custom, one whose story recalls those quintessentially American values: marketing and technological innovation.

In his just-published book, Citrus: A History, retired chemistry professor Pierre Laszlo recounts the providential hook-up of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (an organization that was later to become Sunkist) with advertising copywriter Albert D. Lasker.

In the early years of the 20th century, oranges were consumed principally as fresh, whole fruit. In 1916, when California growers were stuck with an overabundance of oranges, Lasker came up with the slogan: "Drink an orange." This, according to Laszlo, was the moment at which juice consumption began to outstrip fruit consumption.

Read the rest of the article on the Newsday website. Also, see our special Citrus site that includes six tasty citrus recipes from Laszlo's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Books for the News | Economics | History
Posted by TXM at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So long, Chicago,“ read the headline when the Daily News ran its last edition on March 4, 1978. Winner of thirteen Pulitzers, the Chicago Daily News launched the careers of Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, and Mike Royko, just to name a few. It was also one of the first dailies to incorporate eye-catching illustrations, and soon thereafter, black-and-white photography.

Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News is the breathtaking collection of photographs from those early years, 1901 to 1930. During those three decades, Chicago and America witnessed the invention of the airplane, the repeal of prohibition, and the Great War. Photographers at the Daily News covered these scenes, and then went beyond, capturing news as it broke in front of them.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Press Releases
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Alex Chadwick interviewed Ashley Gilbertson a few days ago for the NPR radio program Day to Day. The interview is not only about Iraq and the photographs that Gilbertson took there, but also about the ways that events in Iraq changed him, aged him, matured him—especially when he "crossed the line" in Falluja.

The NPR site also has a brief gallery of Gilbertson's Iraq photos. More photos are available in a feature that recently ran in the New Statesman. Gilbertson's own website offers plenty of photos, too.

But what better way to experience these dramatic images than in person? An exhibit of his Iraq photographs opened two weeks ago in New York. For more Gilbertson events see our author events page.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War not only includes over two hundred photographs, but also is a searing memoir of a photographer's experiences documenting the military, political, and human dimensions of the conflict in Iraq.

For an extended conversation about all these issues, see our video interview with Gilbertson online at our Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website.

Update: Monday, Nov. 5: Julia Keller reviewed Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in the Chicago Tribune yesterday.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Tomorrow, November 2, as part of the three month long Festival of Maps, the Field Museum will open the exhibit, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. On display will be some of the most fascinating cartographic artifacts ever shown. And just in time for opening day, the Press has released a companion volume of the same name edited by exhibit curators James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. Like the exhibit, the book surveys a huge range of cartographic sources to explore the many ways that maps have changed our lives and helped us understand the environment in which we live. From a review in Discover magazine:

From religious pilgrimages and vacation road trips to depictions of the ocean floor and the magical landscapes of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, maps chart both physical and imaginary worlds. As geographer Denis Cosgrove explains, "world' is a social concept … a flexible term, stretching from physical environment to the world of ideas, microbes, of sin. Arguably, all these worlds can be mapped." And they are in this compelling and very readable companion volume to the current exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago.

To find out more about the book, see this special website where you can view a sampling of images organized by theme from just of few of the many fascinating maps in the book.

And if you're planning a day out tomorrow to go see some of these maps in person, you can check out the Field Museum's exhibition highlights online at their website which includes ticket sales, a list of special events, and a primer on what you can expect too see if you go.

In addition to the exhibit at the Field Museum many other Chicago institutions including the Newberry Library and the Chicago History Museum are participating in the Festival of Maps over its three month time span, making it one of the most ambitious celebrations of maps ever. For those looking for a more comprehensive rundown of the entire Festival, navigate to the Chicago Tribune's festival website which includes a guide to the Festival's various venues, video presentations by the Tribune's Patrick Reardon, and even a special blog with reviews and commentary on the Festival's many exhibits. The Tribune also links to the Festival's official website where you can find an indispensable map (of course) of the Festival of Maps and other online features.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Author Events | Cartography and Geography | History
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The media bombards us with images from Iraq on a daily basis, but as the New Yorker's George Packer notes in his blog Interesting Times, "Iraq has not been a photographer's war." The iconic images of the war have come from amateurs (Abu Ghraib, videos of beheadings) that have "turned documentary photography into a leering form of humiliation and a potent weapon in the information campaign that is the core strategy of contemporary insurgencies, based on the terrifying principle of can-you-top-this."

In Ashley Gilbertson's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, Packer finds photographs that have not been drained of humanity.

An Australian freelancer in his twenties, [Ashley Gilbertson] went to northern Iraq before the war and has been going back ever since, mostly on contract for the Times. His new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, just published by the University of Chicago, collects Gilbertson's four years of work from Iraq, with an introduction by his Times colleague Dexter Filkins, and a colloquial, self-revealing text beautifully written by the photographer himself. The pictures chart the descent of Iraq from the initial post-invasion euphoria into the extreme violence of the battles for Karbala, Samarra, and Falluja. They also show a young photojournalist, who "wasn't interested in covering combat," learning his craft, proving his mettle, forcing himself into situations that nearly destroy him morally as well as physically, and finally discovering, amid the inferno of Falluja in November, 2004, the strange tenderness that characterizes the very greatest war photography. Gilbertson's pictures from the battle of Falluja perform the opposite function of the war pornography that Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi gave the world: they give back to their subjects the humanity that the war is taking away.

See a special website for the book featuring a video interview with the author. Gilbertson has also recently been interviewed on CNN and on CBS News.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now available in paperback— Arguably the most influential document in the history of American urban planning, Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features. Carl Smith's fascinating history reveals the Plan's central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself and points out ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Cartography and Geography | Chicago | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sherry Buchanan's Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories received some prime time publicity Saturday on CBS's Evening News. Buchanan's book showcases a collection of Vietnam era Zippo lighters to tell the fascinating story of how the humble Zippo became a talisman and companion for American GIs during their tours of duty. CBS correspondent John Blackstone asks Vietnam vet Hap Desimone "if it seems strange to see the lighters depicted as art:"

"No," he says. "It doesn't seem strange at all."

In Vietnam, every soldier, it seemed, had a Zippo.

"I carried one," Desimone says. "I had it engraved."

With the engravings Zippos became the one place soldiers could express themselves.

"A lot of these sentiments I heard before, 'We're the unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful'," he says. "It rings a bell.…"

The piece continues quoting artist Bradford Edwards whose collection is featured in Vietnam Zippos:

"You had people who were discontent people who wanted to express heartfelt emotions," he says. "And here was a small canvas."

"They look like a collection of tombstones," Edwards says. "And they may be the last thing some of these guys had to say."

While some of the soldiers may never have made it home, now their Zippos are here illuminating the past.

Video of Blackstone's piece is online at the CBS website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week we mentioned that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry was going to be featured on Chris Gondek's business management podcast, The Invisible Hand. Well, while the podcast officially airs on Mr. Gondek's site this Saturday, he was kind enough to give us a link to the full audio from his talk with LePatner a couple of days in advance.

Listen to The Invisible Hand Podcast Episode 61 (mp3) as LePatner and Gondek engage in a fascinating discussion about how America's fractured construction industry is costing the nation billions of dollars, and what LePatner suggests can be done to fix it.

Also check out LePatner's special website for the book with excerpts and other resources.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Law
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Citrus: A History, the latest from chemist and author Pierre Laszlo, is a fascinating historical study of the culinary and cultural phenomenon of the citrus. Writing for the UK's Financial Times, Ian Irvine's recent review delivers a succinct and enthusiastic summary of Laszlo's new work:

Pierre Laszlo's short but brilliant book ranges over citrus's eventful history and describes its global importance in agriculture, industry, religion, painting, literature, nutrition and architecture. He also provides some excellent recipes.… Laszlo is a professor of chemistry and author of a fine history of salt. His scientific explanations—the fruit's importance as a source of vitamin C, for example—are excellent, but he is also equally lucid in other fields: the purpose of the orangery at the palace of Versailles; the role of the peeled lemon in Dutch still-lifes; and why the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles requires an etrog citron.

You can read the rest of Irvine's review online at the FT.com or check out six citrus recipes from Laszlo's book online at the UCP website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This essay by Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, is reprinted from the August 12 edition of the Boston Globe.

In April, a gasoline tanker overturned beneath a key stretch of highway in Oakland, Calif., erupting into flames that melted the steel of an overpass and brought a section of road crashing to the ground.

Repairs were projected to cost $5.2 million and snarl Bay Area traffic for months. The state solicited bids for the work, offering a set of bonuses for finishing early, and got a surprising offer: One company said it would take the job for $867,000.

The firm, C.C. Myers, set to work around the clock, working closely with suppliers and fabricators across the country. The repairs took just 18 days, earning the company a $5 million bonus, giving commuters a smooth drive home far sooner than anyone expected—and sending waves of surprise through the industry.

"I haven't encountered anything like this," one union official told the San Francisco Chronicle as he watched the project unfold.

American construction is the industry that time forgot. Over the last century, the nation's other great industries—oil, automobiles, even computers—have undergone waves of profound modernization, breeding competitive, innovative companies where on-time, under-budget projects are nothing unusual. But the construction industry, which at $1.2 trillion in annual revenues constitutes 5 percent of the nation's economic output, remains a bastion of waste and inefficiency.

Protected by a tradition of contracts that insulate them from the costs of their own mistakes, the nation's thousands of construction companies have resisted innovation and now survive as the last large mom-and-pop industry, where each project brings together a new assortment of subcontractors, and nobody—not the lead contractor, not the architect, not the person who is paying for it all—can say in advance how much a particular project will really cost.

This has always been deeply frustrating for anyone wrestling with the industry's unpredictable costs and timelines, but it is now becoming an urgent problem on a national scale. The deadly and dramatic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis—and the growing tally of troubled roads and bridges—has brought home just how much building must be done to make our infrastructure safe. In Massachusetts alone, the repair tab could be more than $17 billion, according to a recent Pioneer Institute study. Another national study found that by 2030, America faces some $25 trillion in new construction just to build houses, schools, and offices for our growing population. If the construction industry is not reformed, this will lead to waste on an almost unimaginable scale.

Construction touches every part of the economy. It creates the buildings where we live and work, our hospitals and schools, and the roads we use to reach them. Done right, it transforms our cities and towns for the better—but more often, its inefficiency inflates home prices and bogs down corporate growth, fattens our tax bills and delays civic improvements.

Making construction faster, less expensive, and more reliable will free up time and energy for society's higher priorities. Saving even 5 percent on a school project would translate into millions of dollars to spend on books and teacher salaries, or simply return to the taxpayer. It would make home ownership more accessible and make companies more nimble and competitive. And even more broadly, a genuine transformation would give birth to a new American export, a construction industry that can lead the world.

Continue reading "The industry that time forgot" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Author Richard Halpern was featured last Friday on NPR's On the Media to discuss the myth of American innocence, and the various cultural forces that contribute to its production. Halpern recently spoke at a New York University symposium on the subject—“Shocked! Shocked!! Just How Many Times Can a Country Lose Its Innocence?”—and is the author of a book on a man he claims is one of the most prolific manufacturers of American naïeveté, Norman Rockwell. In Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Halpern argues that Rockwell's art, even as it actively works to create a sentimental American style of innocence, in fact, frequently teems with perverse acts of voyeurism and desire. Listen in as Halpern debunks Rockwell and the American innocence industry online at the NPR website.

Read an excerpt from Halpern's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the last few decades Chicago has become progressively greener with parks, landscaping, and rooftop gardens becoming ubiquitous features of the cityscape. But as columnist Edward Keegan notes in a review for last Saturday's Chicago Tribune, these are features which have been ignored by those writing on Chicago's urban habitat, until now. Keegan cites Sally A. Kit Chappell's new book, Chicago's Urban Nature: A Guide to the City's Architecture + Landscape, as an "antidote to the overemphasis on bricks and mortar that have long dominated similar books on Chicago's built environment." Keegan's review continues, "This book should take its place with the ample assortment of guides most Chicago architecture aficionados have on their shelves. As the city becomes greener in the years to come, Chappell's guide will become ever more necessary to understand Chicago's development in its entirety."

To find out more, view this video portrait of the numerous new green spaces that have enlivened and rejuvenated our hometown, narrated by the Sally Chappell herself.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barry B. LePatner's new book, Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, was featured in an interesting article in Monday's edition of the Architectural Record. Writer James Murdock contrasts the opinions of Stephen Sandherr, chief executive of the Associated General Contractors of America, with LePatner's argument that the industry is in urgent need of reform. Murdock writes:

Barry LePatner, a Manhattan-based attorney who counts Frank Gehry and other big-name architects among his clients, sees a problem with the construction industry in the United States—clearly indicated by the title of his book Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, published today by the University of Chicago Press. "This is the industry that time has forgotten," he says. "Mom-and-pop shops, composed of 20 people or less, make up 92 percent of the industry. They are hugely inefficient, and they have no money to spend on improving performance and technology."

The result, LePatner continues, is tremendous waste in a $1.2-trillion-a-year business—nearly half of labor expenses on a project, according to some studies, are squandered due to schedule conflicts and late deliveries.… LePatner also says that the construction industry suffers from "the winner's curse": Contractors bid so low that the profit margin erodes and the only way to reclaim it is by filing change orders.

But Sandherr disagrees:

Few contractors abuse change orders to drive profits, he contends, and "to say that the construction industry has not embraced innovation or collaboration is naïtve. Just look at the innovations in the past 20 years: design-build, construction management at-risk, and value engineering. Look at building information modeling (BIM), which embraces new technology and allows for enhanced collaboration between designers, contractors, and suppliers.…"

LePatner welcomes such developments, but believes more systemic changes are needed. He recommends consolidation within the commercial construction industry, creating vertically integrated firms like Toll Brothers, Pulte, and other large residential builders.…

LePatner hopes that the business will redefine itself. "If we save only 10 percent in the construction industry, we put back $120 billion a year into the economy."

Read the rest of the article or find out more on the author's website for the book which features several excerpts and other resources.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Economics | Law | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Chicago Tribune is running an article today about the forthcoming Festival of Maps—a three month display of "rare and important" maps from around the world to be held at more than twenty participating venues throughout Chicagoland beginning later this fall. In conjunction with the exhibition the Press is set to release a companion volume in early November, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. Delivering a comprehensive account of the diverse ways maps have been used throughout the ages and across cultures, Maps covers much of th