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A Look at the California Publishers in the 2015 LA Art Book Fair
LOS ANGELES — They said it would never work. They said Angelenos aren’t interested in art books. Then, two years ago, they were proven wrong.
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Letters of Woe and Curses Returned with Stolen Pieces of the Petrified Forest
The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park.
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Language as Maternal
George Oppen published his first book, Discrete Series, in 1934; his second, The Materials, emerged 28 years later, in 1962. But even Oppen and Bunting were raring to go in comparison to Wong May, whose third collection of poems, Superstitions, came out in 1978.
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Topless but Far From Helpless: Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Life
So-called revisionist art history has made room for numerous, formerly overlooked or ignored artists in Western Civ’s recognized canon, but what is that establishment narrative to make of a big-boned Southern gal who played avant-garde cello in the nude while submerged in a Plexiglas tank filled wit
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The Writings of a Passionate Painter
Pick up a survey of modern art, start scanning the 1930s, and you may come across a paragraph or two on the French painter Jean Hélion (1904–1987).
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An Out-of-Focus Look at Post-Photography
Tacking "post" onto a word is one of those art world tricks that's routinely wielded to great rhetorical effect, but has little denotative meaning. In much the same way, Robert Shore’s book featuring the term, Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera, jumps off the shelves with its punchy title bu
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Catching Subway Riders in the Act of Reading
For bibliophiles and generally nosy people, one of the worst things about the rise of e-books and e-readers is that they don't have distinct covers.
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Anselm Berrigan’s Ambivalence about Words
I am going to start with a “Note for poems” that Anselm Berrigan wrote about his most recent book, Pregrets.
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Language Lessons: The Poetry of Bob Brown
In his 1974 anthology Revolution of the World: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry 1914–1945, Jerome Rothenberg introduced American poet Bob Brown to those of us of a certain generation, hinting at the wealth of visual poems the man had created and describing his writing, based mostly on
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Best of 2014: Our Top 10 Art Books
There's never a shortage of art books, but it is often hard to find the best in a field flooded with vanity projects, sales tools, and books that promise so much more than they deliver.
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Photographing the Crossroads of Life and Death in South Africa
Beginning in the 1940s, South African photographer David Goldblatt documented the people and landscapes of his country in striking black and white. It was only after apartheid that he felt comfortable with color in his work.
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Fables from Artlandia: The Miraculous by Raphael Rubinstein
In a 1946 letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, poet Charles Olson articulated what has become a quietly influential conception of historiography in poetry circles. “There has been, is too much of everything, including knowledge,” he contended, quite presciently, “because it has not been winno