The diversity of sex and gender in the animal kingdom is totally overlooked when people use the argument “it’s not natural” to say that someone’s lifestyle goes against their personal moral constructs. What’s “natural” is actually incredibly complex, considering we have hermaphrodite leopard slugs, female Western Gulls that pair up for the long term, and asexual reproduction in Komodo dragons.
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The German fantasist Paul Scheerbart’s greatest novel, Lesabéndio, was first published in 1913, the year that Expressionism began to flower in Berlin. The novel, both deriving from and contributing to this Zeitgeist, opens with a highly Expressionist scene: “The sky was violet, and the stars were green. The sun was green too.”
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Today, one of my favorite books turns 200: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s brilliant novel of wit, manners, and love. The anniversary got me thinking broadly about the — genre? category? medium? — that seems to be forever expanding these days, book art, and more specifically, about the work of Jennie Ottinger.
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As book lovers mourn the dematerialization of the printed word, rare booksellers like Heather O’Donnell remain upbeat. She’s part of an ardent group of believers — a new generation flame tenders who are dedicated to keeping books safe in the electronic storm of Kindles and Nooks. For the upcoming Designers & Books Fair 2012 (October 26–28), she has curated an exhibit of stellar printing and binding design over the past three centuries. It makes an eloquent case for the notion that beauty will keep the printed book alive.
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Even though Hyperallergic is primarily a blog about art and visual culture, there’s no question that we’re also super nerds who read a lot. So I felt it would be remiss if we didn’t pay at least a short tribute to Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of books and literacy and the freedom for everyone to read whatever the hell he or she wants, which unfortunately is still more of an ideal than a universal practice.
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The City University of New York’s Feminist Press has announced that they will publish an e-book on the Russian punk protest band and performance art troupe Pussy Riot entitled “Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom.”
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Richard Baker is best known for his still-life paintings of tabletops, often tilted at impossible angles and covered with out-of-print art books and other bric-a-brac, such as ceramic pots, to-go food containers, candy bars, and tulips. Ranging from the lowbrow Learn to Draw by Jon Gnagy (Mr. “Learn-To-Draw”) to the hefty catalogue of the exhibition Paris-New York (1977) — the year the artist graduated from high school — Baker’s non-hierarchical representations form an inventory of the books that have, at different times, been central to his ongoing education, stretching from when he was a teenager until the present.
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Not only fragments and filaments, but also liturgies and litanies embed themselves in Joseph Donahue’s Terra Lucida, a chain of poetic assemblage that both embodies and breaks free of given notions of the long poem. While the formal designs of that thematic behemoth can be ascribed to his project, Donahue’s abrupt transitions, radical breaks, and vertiginous frames disrupt the cohesion and narrative continuity on which the genre depends. Rarely in contemporary poetry has the couplet served so astonishingly as a centrifugal mechanism, as bonding agent to the lines, serving to contain and unite its pressurized contents — “all those/tatters of the creation” mediated “in this aberrant rendition” — which seem at any moment threaten to break apart.
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LOS ANGELES — You should never judge a book by its cover, they say. But in a media rich world, often the book cover is the only way a book can stand in a chance against others in the bookstore or online.
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During last night’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write event, writer Salman Rushie talked about the fact that censorship exists to change the subject. When it is introduced in the realm of art, it becomes the subject; the attack onto the work becomes the work. As Rushdie said, “Assumptions of guilt replace assumptions of innocence.” The question redirects to, why are artists so troublesome?
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Creative Success vs. Personal Relationships — Who Wins?
Beer with a Painter: John Walker
Overheard in the Art World
Geometry Under Pressure: Don Voisine’s Paintings
Chimpanzee's Polaroids Expected to Fetch Big Money at Auction
Getting Punked: Protesting the Met's Decadent Appropriation
Artist Exchange: In Conversation with Peter Acheson
Flowers of Retrenchment: Anselm Kiefer's Alternate History
Historic Night at Christie's as 12 Post-War Artists Set Records, Biggest Sale in History
Why Won't the MTA Allow This Artist to Make Art?
The Death of Context at NADA New York
The Hannah Arendt Prize: Call for Submissions
