Richard Tuttle: a Fair Sampling


Book Description

Richard Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line. His works span a range of media, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist's books to installation and furniture.




Out of Paper


Book Description

A dynamic look at how artists used paper to radically redefine the relationship between the body and its surroundings, and to propose new conceptions of ecology From sketches created inside pants pockets to paper-strewn performances that took cues from protests and riots, the work on paper in the 1960s acted as a mobile, flexible connective tissue between the body and the world around it. In this book, Katie Anania reveals how artists Carolee Schneemann, William Anastasi, Richard Tuttle, Robert Morris, and Charles White harnessed this historically intimate medium during a period in which Americans were becoming urgently concerned with identity, consumer culture, the overreach of state power, and the rapidly deteriorating natural world. Her reexamination of drawing shows how the omnipresence of paper facilitated artists' critiques of dominant systems, from modern throwaway culture to bureaucracy to colonial violence. Engaging a wide range of actions--such as recycling, recording, cutting, planning, and erasing--Anania offers fresh insights into paper's role not merely as a preparatory medium but one essential to the histories of performance, minimalist, conceptual, and land art. Out of Paper uses materiality studies, social history, and feminist art historical methods to situate paper as a major conduit for thought in the postwar United States.




Paul Klee 1939


Book Description

The year before he died, in what was one of the most difficult yet prolific periods of his life, Paul Klee created some of his most surprising and innovative works. In 1939, the year before his death from a long illness and against a backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil and the outbreak of World War II, Klee worked with a vigor and inventiveness that rivaled even the most productive periods of his youth. This book illuminates the artist’s response to his personal difficulties and the era’s broader realities through imagery that is tirelessly inventive—by turns political, solemn, playful, humorous, and poetic. The works featured testify to Klee’s restless drive to experiment with form and material. His use of adhesive, grease, oil, chalk, and watercolor, among other media, resulted in surfaces that are not only visually striking, but also highly tactile and original. Not unlike a diary, the drawings are often meditative reflections on the pains and pleasures of life—their titles, among them Monsters in readiness and Struggles with himself, signal Klee’s frame of mind. Renowned art historian Dawn Ades looks at this group of paintings and drawings in the context of their time and as indicative of a pivotal moment in art history. Moved by this late period of Klee’s oeuvre, American artist Richard Tuttle responds to specific works in the form of dialogical poems. This stunning publication highlights the novelty and ingenuity of Klee’s late works, which deeply affected the generation of artists—including Anni Albers, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, and Zao Wou-Ki—that emerged after World War II and continues to captivate artists and viewers alike today




One Place after Another


Book Description

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.




Understanding Painting: From Giotto to Warhol


Book Description

- Spans seven centuries of masterpiece paintings from major museum collections - Accessible and informative for general art lovers and those looking to learn, but interesting enough to be enjoyed by scholars and experts - More than 600 superb color reproductions accompanied by brief yet illuminating explanations - Includes paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Rembrandt, to Monet, Matisse, and Pollock Great paintings, filled with complex themes and symbols, can be intimidating. Here, Patrick De Rynck and Jon Thompson explore more than 300 famous works spanning the Middle Ages to the late 20th century, unlocking each work's meaning. Today's art lovers lack the intimate knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology, folklore, and Christian theology that was so well-known to medieval and Renaissance artists and their public. Likewise, modern and contemporary art can baffle even sophisticated viewers. With brief yet illuminating explanations and more than 600 color reproductions - including many close-up details - of works by artists from Giotto, Botticelli, El Greco, Rubens, and Vermeer to Bonnard, Degas, Whistler, Van Gogh, Picasso, Hopper, Warhol, and Basquiat, this book provides the means to interpret and better enjoy these and many other works of art.




The WEIRDest People in the World


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020 A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020 A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020 A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world. Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition—laying the foundation for the modern world. Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Includes black-and-white illustrations.







Brothers


Book Description

Blends history and memoir in an account that in alternating chapters explores the author's quest to understand the impact of his brothers on his life and the complex relationships between iconic brothers, including the Thoreaus, the Van Goghs, and the Marxes.




The Art of Richard Tuttle


Book Description

Over the past four decades, Richard Tuttle has thrown into question nearly every conceivable artistic convention and critical category to create an enormously inventive body of abstract work - one that embraces and intermingles drawing, painting, collage, book-making, sculpture, and design. From his spare yet enigmatic forms of the 1960s to his complex, multifaceted assemblages and installations of more recent years, Tuttle's primary impetus throughout has been to craft unique objects, using everyday, often ephemeral materials, that demand to be confronted on their own terms. The relentless individuality of his aesthetic vision has earned him standing as one of the most provocative and influential artists of his day. This richly illustrated and strikingly designed catalogue, the most authoritative volume ever published on this prolific artist, presents nearly four hundred reproductions of artworks from across his oeuvre and documentary photographs of his creative process. Essays by a distinguished group of writers trace the arc of Tuttle's career from its inception in the 1960s to the present day, addressing topics such as the philosophical underpinnings of his artistic method; his sensitive handling of diverse materials; his lifelong engagement with drawing and its expansion into three-dimensional space; his groundbreaking solo exhibitions and their critical reception in the United States and Europe; his complex play with the conventions of language; and his innovative artist's books, many of which are collaborations with poets.




All the Whiskey in Heaven


Book Description

All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together Charles Bernstein’s best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein’s characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark structural invention with buoyant soundplay, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry’s sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection. Long considered one of America’s most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer.