Posts from the “Books” Category

Honoring the Legacy of Chinese Artist Ren Hang (1987-2017)

Posted on March 17, 2017

Photo: ©Ren Hang, courtesy of Taschen.

On February 24, Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang (1987-2017) killed himself in Beijing, jumping from one of the terrifyingly vertiginous buildings that appears in so many of his photographs. His sudden death shocked the world, as Hang had reached a new level of success with the simultaneous release of his first major monograph, Ren Hang (Taschen), along with exhibitions of work at Fotografiska, Stockholm, and Foam, Amsterdam.

Dian Hanson, who wrote the introduction to the book, described Hang as, “an unlikely rebel. Shy, lanky, prone to fits of depression, the 29-year-old Beijing-based photographer [was] nonetheless at the forefront Chinese artists’ battle for creative freedom. Controversial in his homeland, but wildly popular in the rest of the world he says, ‘I don’t really view my work as taboo, because I don’t think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don’t intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.’”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: ©Ren Hang, courtesy of Taschen.

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Digging in the Crates for the Best “Art Record Covers” Ever Made

Posted on March 14, 2017

art: Takashi Murakami / music: Kanye West / record: Graduation / year: 2007 / label: Roc-A-Fella Records / format: Album 2×12 ̋, CD / artwork: Digital compositing

Once upon a time, just a couple of decades ago, new albums used to be released on vinyl, which was carefully stored inside 12 x 12 inch record sleeves. In the days before video killed the radio star, all you’d have available was what you held in your hands. You’d pop the record on the turntable, drop the needle and then sit back, gazing upon the album cover searching for some sort of understanding.

There was something profound about the simplicity of it all, the single image becoming an icon all its own. Sight and sound complemented each other, like yin and yang, striking the perfect balance of substance and style. Then, everything began to change. The record gave way to the CD and the image scaled down tremendously. But that was nothing compared to the current lay of the land, where the album cover appears as a thumbnail image in the upper half of our smart phone.

If you missed it, c’est la vie. Times change, invariably. But if you miss it, and you want that good thing back, Taschen has just released Art Record Covers, a 448-page compendium of the finest collaborations between musicians and artists. Edited by Francesco Spampinato and Julius Wiedemann, the book is perfectly sized at 12 x 12 inches, capturing and recreating the visual impact each image once possessed.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

art: Andy Warhol / music: The Velvet Underground and Nico / record: The Velvet Underground and Nico / year: 1967 / label: Verve Records / format: Album 12 ̋ / artwork: Screen print / special: Vinyl released with three variations of front cover with banana sticker to peel off

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Music

The Rivington School: 80s New York Underground

Posted on March 9, 2017

Photo: The Rivington Garden as monument signalled the victorious end of art in the Lower East Side, 1987. Photo by Andre Laredo. ©2016 Black Dog Publishing Limited, the artist and authors. All rights reserved.

Back in the 1970s, the Lower East Side of New York City had been devastated by the government policy of “benign neglect,” which denied basic services to the community. Fires had destroyed buildings reducing them to rubble leaving vacant lots in their wake, while other buildings were abandoned and reclaimed by squatters, creating a new community born out of resilience and necessity.

By the 1980s, a subculture was finding its way through acts of outlaw art. “Cowboy” Ray Kelly, founder of the No Se No Social Club, cultivated a space where patrons could express themselves in any way they wished. It was a space unlike any other in the city that combined the performance art with bar life to spectacular effect.

From this world, the Rivington School came forth, an outdoor guerilla art gallery located across the street from No Se No, on the corner of Rivington and Forsyth Streets. The Rivington Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1985, began as a memorial to Geronimo, a homeless Puerto Rican man who died that year. It quickly developed into a space for exhibitions, concerts, performances, and festivals, taking the D.I.Y. approach to making art. Anyone could do anything they liked and they did, effectively sharpening the cutting-edge.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Manhattan, Photography

Mission Impossible! Daring Thieves Nab £2 Million Worth of Rare Books in London

Posted on February 21, 2017

Photo: Unique edition of the Codex Atlanticus as it was in the 1600. The book is a box made by Pompeo Leoni to collect all the pages. Made by Mario Taddei in the 2007. courtesy Wikimedia Commons, illustration unrelated to the theft.

In a scene befitting no less than Mission Impossible, a gang stole more than £2 million worth of antiquarian books from a warehouse in west London in a daring heist earlier this month, according to a report from The Mail on Sunday.

The three thieves broke into the warehouse by climbing up to the roof, boring holes through the reinforced glass-fiber skylights, then rappelling down 40 feet of rope while avoiding setting off motion-sensor alarms. Once inside, they took more than 160 rare books that were being held at a warehouse near Heathrow airport en route to the United States for the 50th California International Antiquarian Book Fair.

Experts suggest the thieves spent hours at the warehouse, amassing a collection of titles of tremendous historical value. The thieves could be seen on CCTV headed straight for the six sealed metal trunks containing the books, prying four open, checking the books against stock lists, and discarding any unwanted titles.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Books, Crave

Jim Jocoy: Order of Appearance

Posted on February 20, 2017

Photo: Jim Jocoy, Woman Reclining on Car, 1977, courtesy of Casemore Kirkby Gallery, San Francisco.

When punk hit San Francisco in the late 70s, it spawned a vibrant underground movement that embraced the Do-It-Yourself ethos of the era. Local bands like the Mutants, the Avengers, the Germs, the Sleepers, and the Cramps made their way on the scene alongside bigger bands from New York, London, and Los Angeles, attracting a fresh crop of rebels, artists, and creatures of the night.

Jim Jocoy was a student at UC Santa Cruz when punk came to town. He dropped out of school, got a job at a copy store, and hit the clubs at night with camera in hand. From 1977 to 1980, he created a body of work that was only shown twice at the time: once at San Francisco State University and later at William S. Burroughs’s 70th birthday party. His photos were kept in deep storage for decades until Thurston Moore brought the work to the public eye with the publication of We’re Desperate (powerHouse Books, 2002), a celebration of the style of the times.

Fifteen years later, Jocoy returns with his second book, Order of Appearance (TBW Books), a sumptuous monograph featuring 44 never-before-seen photos. The book unfolds as a film would, with kids getting ready then heading out, hitting the sweat-drenched clubs and stumbling through after hours until they’re back on the street and the sun comes up.

Ahead of the book release, we speak to Jocoy about his memories of the scene.

Read the Interview at Dazed Digital

Photo: Jim Jocoy, Guy Passed Out, 1979, courtesy of Casemore Kirkby Gallery, San Francisco.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Photography

The David Hockney Takeover!

Posted on February 16, 2017

Artwork: David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1971 Private Collection© David Hockney. Courtesy of Tate Britain.

Has there ever been a painter of modern life as celebrated as David Hockney? The British artist, who celebrates his 80th birthday this July, is being fêted with the largest retrospective of his career at the Tate Britain and a flurry of fabulous new art books celebrating his incredible body of work.

While a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney was included in the 1963 exhibition Young Contemporaries, which signaled the arrival of British Pop art. A year later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for four years, creating his seminal painting, A Bigger Splash (1967), which has been knocked off with reckless abandon.

Over a period of six decades, Hockney has transformed the nature of picture making through his relentless questioning of conventions, always seeking to go deeper to connect with art’s very essence. The exhibition at the Tate, simply titled David Hockney, starts with the Love paintings, early work made in 1960 and ’61, in which he subverted the macho language of abstract expressionism and subverted it into a vehicle to express homoerotic ideas and experiences.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: David Hockney. English 1937–. The group XI, 7-11 July 2014. acrylic on canvas. 122.0 x 183.0 cm. Collection of the artist. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt. rom David Hockney: Current (Thames & Hudson, May 2017).

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors

Posted on February 13, 2017

Artwork: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, acrylic balls, and water, 113 ¼ x 163 ½ x 163 ½ in. Courtesy of David Zwirner, N.Y. © Yayoi Kusama

“Art is like an endless ocean. I can feel a sense of infinity, the heaven and sky—all a sense of infinity that I can feel through the ocean,” Yayoi Kusama tells Melissa Chiu in a conversation in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the exhibition catalogue published by DelMonico Books/Prestel that accompanies an exhibition by the same name at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. this February. The Hirschhorn is the first stop on a two-year, five-city tour; a full list of venues and dates appears at the end of this story.

Infinity Mirrors is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of 2017, as it includes six of Kusama’s mindblowing Infinity Mirror Rooms. By now you’ve seen them in countless selfies taken by museum attendees around the world. Kusama has constructed magical spaces that capture the captivating expanse of vast, unknowable universe in rooms filled with multi-colored LED lights. All the surfaces are mirrors so that the result is a gloriously expansive sense of being launched into outer space.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks

Posted on February 9, 2017

Artwork: Untitled Notebook (front cover), 1980–81. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Mixed media on board; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 x ¼ in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

Like a prophet, Jean-Michel Basquiat was ahead of his time, alternately embraced and exploited by the art world. The artist, who first became known in the late 1970s, produced more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works before his death in 1988. He also kept an unknown number of notebooks, where he recorded his private thoughts and ideas, some of which would later be realized in his finished works.

It is into these notebooks that we can glimpse the artist’s mind at work, the process of working through ideas in images and words, of things that pass through the mind like “Higher Monkeys” “Spring Onions” and “The History Of The World” at the end of a list that began as “Rubber Monkey At A Buffet.” The pages of Basquiat’s notebooks string together like memories of a dream. Reading through these notebooks is like reading a diary of sorts. It’s a deeply private space that exists between the brain and the eyes. It is being inside and outside of your self at the exact same time.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Al Jolson, 1981. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Oilstick on paper; 24 x 18 in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Estelle Schwartz, 87.47. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum

Artwork: Jean Michel Basquiat in his Great Jones Street studio, New York, 1987. Tseng Kwong Chi (Chinese-Canadian-American, born Hong Kong, 1950–1990). Chromogenic print; 50 x 50 in. Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York & Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, New York. © 1987 Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. New York. www.tsengkwongchi.com

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Painting

Long Live Frederick Douglass, Man of the New Millennium

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: Frederick Douglass, circa 1960,s courtesy of Picture History/Wikimedia Commons.

On February 1, Donald Trump kicked off Black History Month with a breakfast meeting where he quixotically announced, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

The public quickly took note, wondering if the President was aware that Douglass had died in 1895 at the age of 77. Not to be missed amid the head scratching and jokes is the fact that Douglass continues to be one of the most prolific, influential Americans of our time. In recent months, his work has inspired the publication of two new books, a magazine, and an exhibition of photography and art.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing

Posted on January 31, 2017

Photo: (Triangle) “Pyramids” Courtesy of The Monacelli Press.

The human mind is a magical, mysterious place where things are (as much as they not) what they appear to be. Within the mind, layers are added to experience in the form of narration, translation, and interpretation in search of the great, vast overwhelming call for meaning in this majestic and monstrous world. There are so many questions we ask ourselves when we behold that which lays before our eyes. The desire to know can become a need, as our mind is inclined to require a structure upon which it can operate.

So we find ourselves in this curious space where we both seek and receive information that we do and do not understand. Most of us are disinclined to the rigors of critical thought, for it drains us of illusions and fantasies and replaces it with a state of ongoing doubt. It is far easier, and less unnerving, to skate along the surface of life–though invariably the ice is thin in places we may not foresee. Thus, the questions show themselves. Who the what now—and can someone tell please me why?

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Crave

Signs of Our Times

Posted on January 28, 2017

Farah Behbehani, Love rests on no foundation II. Courtesy of Merrell Publishers

We are witnessing acts of ignorance and arrogance so epic they are nothing short of crimes against humanity. When I wrote a review of Signs of Our Times: Calligraphy to Calligraffiti (Merrell) just a couple of days ago for Crave Online, I didn’t foresee the Muslim Ban figuring into things. I just wrote a few words about the beauty of a people that honored the Second Commandment to the letter of the law, one that was born of a grace and beauty that elegantly combines with the subversive eloquence of questioning the status quo–for it is the realm of artists to subvert assumptions that have grown stale and old. But here we are on the precipice, pushed to the edge by a psychopath who speaks for the descendants of Columbus. I don’t have answers but I am inclined to break free of the paradigm built on ignorance, arrogance, and the privilege that suggests the crimes of this country do not fall on my shoulders.

Read the Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave