Dans Mondrian's Dress, Nancy J. Troy et Ann Marguerite Tartsinis offrent un regard extraordinaire sur la façon dont le style des peintures abstraites de Piet Mondrian a été approprié à titre posthume par la mode, le pop art et la culture de consommation des années 1960. Portant tout particulièrement son attention sur l'évolution de la maison Saint Laurent, la publication aborde aussi le travail d'artistes tels que Andy Warhol et Tom Wesselmann et propose des évaluations critiques du dialogue de Saint Laurent avec l'art, de la remarquable collection d'art qu'il a constituée avec son partenaire Pierre Bergé et du rôle crucial que joue la photographie dans le marketing de la couture. Première étude de ce genre, Mondrian's Dress est une réévaluation provocatrice de la manière dont l'art, le commerce et la mode sont devenus fondamentalement liés dans la période d'après-guerre.
How a group of artist-mothers in postwar San Francisco refused the centuries-old belief that a woman could not make art while also raising children.
For most of modern history, to be an artist and a mother was to embody a contradiction in terms. This "awful dichotomy," as painter Alice Neel put it, pitted artmaking against caretaking and argued that the best art was made at the expense of family and futurity. But in San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s, a group of artists gathered around Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) began to reject this dominant narrative. In
A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms.
In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture--the first of its kind--Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms--the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials--Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries.
These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged--even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.
How architecture in Belgium, from its very beginnings, has epitomized modernity and singularity.
Since the foundation of the country in 1830, architecture in Belgium has been an expression of the key issues of modern Western societies. In Something Completely Different, Christophe Van Gerrewey uses this small European country as a case study to describe, interpret, and criticize more universal spatial problems and behaviors. In seven wide-ranging essays, he looks at the activities of architects from the past two centuries to better understand political evolutions, social gaps, aesthetic considerations, housing and planning, transport and infrastructure, order and chaos, and culture and ecology. The result is a literary text full of surprises and discoveries, showing both the shortcomings and the merits of what architects do.
Written as a kind of anti-guidebook, Something Completely Different appropriates certain clichés about Belgium (Baudelaire famously called Belgian monuments «counterfeits of France»), eschews the pragmatism of most guidebooks in favor of meditative, essayistic prose, and finally, cunningly, reveals that all along the subject has not been Belgium at all, but rather the nature of architecture.
A bold and timely collection that brings feminist theory and critical thinking to life through vital, approachable design methods and practices.
Feminist Designer brings together a constellation of voices and perspectives to examine the intersection of design and feminist theory. For decades, the feminist refrain within design has hinged on the representation and inclusion of women in the field. This collection, edited by Alison Place, however, is a call to move beyond this narrow application. Feminist design is not just about who does design-it is about how we do design and why. Feminist frameworks for design activism are now more relevant than ever, as they emphasize collaborative processes that aim to disrupt and dismantle power hierarchies while centering feminist ways of knowing and doing.
The first book in nearly three decades to address such practices in design, Feminist Designer contains essays, case studies, and dialogues by 43 contributors from 16 different countries. It engages a wide variety of design disciplines, from graphic design to disability design to algorithmic design, and explores key feminist themes, such as power, knowledge, care, plurality, liberation, and community. Through diverse, sometimes conflicting, intersectional perspectives, this book contributes new design methods informed by a multiplicity of feminisms that confront design's patriarchal origins while ushering in new pathways for making critical and meaningful change.
Contributors :
Jennifer Armbrust, Dina Benbrahim, Madeline Avram Blount, Elizabeth Byrd, Benedetta Crippa, Alexandra Crosby, Laura Devendorf, Rachael Dietkus, Ashley K. Eberhart, Griselda Flesler, Aimi Hamraie, Gaby Hernández, Alexis Hope, Jeff Kasper, Ellen Kellogg, Aasawari Kulkarni, Eden Laurin, Una Lee, Andrew Mallinson, Claudia Marina, Victor G. Martinez, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Margaret Middleton, Maryam Mustafa, Becky Nasadowski, Maya Ober, Nina Paim, Elizabeth Pérez, Heather Snyder Quinn, Cami Rincón, Jenn Roberts, Velvet A. Johnson Ross, In-ah Shin, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Ayako Takase, Attia Taylor, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Aggie Toppins, Ilaria Vanni, Joana Varon, Manon Vergerio, Mandy Harris Williams, Sarah Williams.
Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we might make them differently.
What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika's then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit-because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true.
With inspired pictures and prompts, Cities Made Differently asks what a city is, or could be, or once was. Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean? Buried in lava? What were those cities of long ago, and what will the cities of the future be? They might be virtual, ruled by AI, or islands of beautiful architecture afloat in seas of greenery. They might be utopian places of refuge or refugee camps as far as the eye can see. On land, underground or aloft, excavated or imagined, cities, this book tells us in provocative and funny ways, can be anything we want them to be-and what we want them to be can tell us something about who we are, what it is to be human, and what's possible when we make way for wonder.
Cities Made Differently exists in two versions, one for reading and thinking, the other, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.
The first anthology of texts on the luminary contemporary artist David Hammons.
David Hammons is a collection of essays on the one of the most important living Black artists of our time, David Hammons (b. 1943). Documenting five decades of visual practice from 1982 to the present, the book features contributions from scholars, artists, and cultural workers, and includes numerous images of the artist and his work that are not widely available. Contributions include essays from cultural critics including Guy Trebay and Greg Tate; artists Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon; and scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson, Alex Alberro, and Manthia Diawara.
A star of the West Coast Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and the winner of a Prix de Rome prize as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, David Hammons rose to fame in Los Angeles with his body prints, in which he used his entire body as a printing plate. His later work engaged with materials that he found in urban environments-from greasy brown paper bags, discarded hair from barber shops, and empty bottles of cheap wine-which he turned into things of wonder while also commenting on a country's neglect of its citizens. In this volume, a new generation of scholars, Tobias Wofford, Abbe Schriber, and Sampada Aranke, broaden the theoretical mapping of Hammons's career and its impact, challenging viewers to imagine, in the words of Aranke, «how to see like Hammons.»
The first exhibition catalogue of the acclaimed queer, feminist curatorial initiative Ridykeulous, marking the occasion of their first institutional presentation in Europe at Nottingham Contemporary.
Founded in 2005, Ridykeulous mounts exhibitions and events primarily concerned with queer and feminist art. This publication will be the first exhibition catalogue by Ridykeulous, joined by Sam Roeck, and will accompany the fall 2023 exhibition Ridykes' Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos at Nottingham Contemporary. With newly commissioned texts by writer and performer Laurie Weeks and Alexandro Segade of the artist collective My Barbarian, the catalogue will be complemented by a conversation between Ridykeulous members Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner, providing insights into the collective's thinking, politics, behind-the-scenes notations, and methods of exploration, as well as an introduction by Nottingham Contemporary's Chief Curator Nicole Yip.
Using humor to critique the art world and heteropatriarchal culture at-large, Ridykeulous often reinvents language to reflect their sensibilities and concerns-composing communiqués, screeds, and diatribes across various media. The exhibition features an intergenerational mix of 30 contemporary visual artists working across film, video installation, sculpture, and performance. Playfully proposing queer fabulosity as a critical intervention in the capitalist spectacle, the exhibition seeks to erode the secondary positioning of LGBTQ+ art and artists as «alternative.» Designed by the Zürich-based Studio Marie Lusa, the publication will evoke the textual feeling of a zine, with over 100 full-color and black-and-white image plates.
An exploration of walking and mapping as both form and content in art projects using old and new technologies, shoe leather and GPS.
From Guy Debord in the early 1950s to Richard Long, Janet Cardiff, and Esther Polak more recently, contemporary artists have returned again and again to the walking motif. Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with a resurgence of interest in walking as an art form. In Walking and Mapping, Karen O'Rourke explores a series of walking/mapping projects by contemporary artists. She offers close readings of these projects--many of which she was able to experience firsthand--and situates them in relation to landmark works from the past half-century. Together, they form a new entity, a dynamic whole greater than the sum of its parts. By alternating close study of selected projects with a broader view of their place in a bigger picture, Walking and Mapping itself maps a complex phenomenon.
Une célébration de la baignade - piscines, saunas, plages, bains rituels, huttes de sudation, etc. - à travers le prisme de l'architecture et du paysage.
A new interpretation of the work of Bramante, suggesting an agenda for contemporary architectural practice.
In On Bramante, architect Pier Paolo Tamburelli considers the work of the celebrated Italian Renaissance architect Donato Bramante and through this reappraisal suggests a possible agenda for current architectural practice. Bramante, Tamburelli argues, offers an excellent starting point to imagine a contemporary theory of space, to reflect on the relationship between architecture and politics, and to look back--with neither nostalgia nor contempt--at the tradition of Western classicism.
Starting from a discussion of the difference in the work of Bramante in Milan (1481-1499) and Rome (1499-1514), Tamburelli highlights the peculiarities of Bramante's architecture, especially in comparison to that of his predecessor Leon Battista Alberti and successor Andrea Palladio. This in turn opens up new possibilities for appreciating his spatial experiments, and to derive from Bramante's abstraction and disassociation of form from function a revised theory of space for contemporary architecture. Such a theory might even advance a newfound political understanding of classicism, and a model--perhaps more valid now than ever before--for a public architecture.
The text is bookended by a series of color photographic plates of Bramante's works by photographer Bas Princen.
Experiments in architectural education in the post-World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.
In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture's status quo.
The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of "unlearning" under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for "every body," including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture's role in the new century.
The complex appropriation of Piranesi by modern literature, photography, art, film, and architecture.
The etchings of the Italian printmaker, architect, and antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) have long mesmerized viewers. But, as Victor Plahte Tschudi shows, artists and writers of the modern era found in these works--Piranesi's visions of contradictory space, endless vistas, and self-perpetuating architecture--a formulation of the modern. In Piranesi and the Modern Age, Tschudi explores the complex appropriation and continual rediscoveries of Piranesi by modern literature, photography, art, film, and architecture. Tracing the ways that the modern age constructed itself and its origin through Piranesi across genres, he shows, for example, how Piranesi's work formulates the ideas of "contrast" in photography, "abstraction" in painting and "montage" in cinema.
Piranesi's modern-day comeback, Tschudi argues, relied on new dimensions found within his work that inspired attempts to inscribe within them a world that was very modern. For more than a century, these interpretations have helped legitimize new forms, theories, technologies, and movements. Tschudi examines, among other things, how Piranesi's disturbing prison interiors--the Carceri--became modern metaphors for the mind; how Alfred H. Barr and the Museum of Modern Art made the case for Piranesi's alleged abstraction in the 1930s; and how Sergei Eisenstein reinvented Piranesi as a progenitor of his own innovative filmmaking techniques. Tschudi's exploration of Piranesi's influence on modern architectural discourse includes interviews with such distinguished architects as Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Steven Holl, and Rem Koolhaas. Generously illustrated, Piranesi and the Modern Age offers an entirely new reading of Piranesi's work.
Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm''s work.
´i¸ek as comedian: jokes in the service of philosophy. "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."--Ludwig Wittgenstein The good news is that this book offers an entertaining but enlightening compilation of ´i¸ekisms. Unlike any other book by Slavoj ´i¸ek, this compact arrangement of jokes culled from his writings provides an index to certain philosophical, political, and sexual themes that preoccupy him. ´i¸ek''s Jokes contains the set-ups and punch lines--as well as the offenses and insults--that ´i¸ek is famous for, all in less than 200 pages. So what''s the bad news? There is no bad news. There''s just the inimitable Slavoj ´i¸ek, disguised as an impossibly erudite, politically incorrect uncle, beginning a sentence, "There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida..." For ´i¸ek, jokes are amusing stories that offer a shortcut to philosophical insight. He illustrates the logic of the Hegelian triad, for example, with three variations of the "Not tonight, dear, I have a headache" classic: first the wife claims a migraine; then the husband does; then the wife exclaims, "Darling, I have a terrible migraine, so let''s have some sex to refresh me!" A punch line about a beer bottle provides a Lacanian lesson about one signifier. And a "truly obscene" version of the famous "aristocrats" joke has the family offering a short course in Hegelian thought rather than a display of unspeakables. ´i¸ek''s Jokes contains every joke cited, paraphrased, or narrated in ´i¸ek''s work in English (including some in unpublished manuscripts), including different versions of the same joke that make different points in different contexts. The larger point being that comedy is central to ´i¸ek''s seriousness.
An illuminating study of the work of artist Martin Kippenberger, whose art expressed the enthusiasms and frustrations of the West German middle class.
Martin Kippenberger: Everything Is Everywhere is the first scholarly monograph in English on West German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997), one of the most prominent German artists of the 1980s. In this book, Chris Reitz shows that the condition of Kippenberger's art was an endless, enthusiastic searching, constrained by the impossibility of fulfillment. A child during West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, and a young adult during the economic recession and political tumult of the 1970s, Kippenberger belonged to the first truly postwar generation. But, largely uninterested in the legacy of National Socialism that had occupied his predecessors, Kippenberger instead pursued a hyperproductive artistic practice that reflected the dreams and fears of the ascendent 1980s West German middle class.
Kippenberger's ambitions took him everywhere: he founded a museum in Greece, invested in a fashion business and a restaurant, and even bought a gas station in Brazil. He made art in a dizzying range of genres, from paintings to poetry, from posters to stickers. He made art out of his appetites, too, producing art on the theme of his own alcoholism. Intensely entrepreneurial, Kippenberger carried out an artistic practice in which his diverse endeavors, and the people who joined him in them, were all connected in a sprawling network. Reitz deftly presents Kippenberger's career as an allegory of the neoliberal networks of capital, technology, and culture that spanned Europe and America in the 1980s.
A bold new spatial perspective on modern sculpture, with 800 color images of work by artists including Henry Moore, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, and Ana Mendieta.
This monumental, richly illustrated volume from ZKM Karlsruhe approaches modern sculpture from a spatial perspective, interpreting it though contour, emptiness, and levitation rather than the conventional categories of unbroken volume, mass, and gravity. It examines works by dozens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists, including Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Ana Mendieta, Fujiko Nakaya, Tomás Saraceno, and Alicja Kwade. The large-scale book contains over 800 color images.
Negative Space comes out of an epic exhibition at ZKM, and volume editor Peter Weibel (Chairman and CEO of ZKM) takes a curatorial approach to the topic. The last exhibition to deal comprehensively with the question "What is modern sculpture?" was at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1986. Weibel and ZKM pick up where the Pompidou left off, examining sculptures not as figurative, solid, and self-contained monoliths but in terms of open and hollow spaces; reflection, light, shadow; innovative materials; data; and the moving image. Weibel puts advances in science, architecture, and mathematics in the context of avant-garde sensibilities to show how modern sculpture significantly deviates from the work of the past. Texts in the volume include an introduction and twelve chapters written by Weibel with contributions by cocurators as well as facsimiles and reproductions of artist-authored manifestos.
A lavishly illustrated guide to the magnum opus of the great seventeenth-century anatomist, master embalmer, artist, and collector of specimens.
Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Thesaurus Anatomicus. This book offers the first English translation of Ruysch's guide to his collection, along with all the illustrations from the original volume, photographs of some his most imaginative extant specimens, and more.
Ruysch was at once a brilliant scientist, a preternaturally gifted technician, an esteemed physician, a religious moralizer, and an artist whose prime form of expression was the medium of human remains. His works were sometimes described as Rembrandts of anatomical preparation; today they seem so strange that we can hardly believe that they even existed, much less that they were so popular in their time. His combination of the religious and the scientific, the painstakingly accurate and the extravagantly fantastical, offers vivid testimony of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art. Essays accompanying Ruysch's text and images consider such topics as the historical context of Ruysch's work, the paradox of an artist of death whose work engenders the illusion of life, the conservation of Ruysch's specimens, and the shifting ascendancies of romanticism and rationality in the natural sciences.
Works by one of the most important artists working in America today--photographs, collaborative projects, ephemeral objects, and trenchant and witty institutional critique.
For the past two decades Louise Lawler has been taking photographs of art in situ, from small poignant black-and-white images of art in people's homes to large format glossy color pictures of art in museums and in auction houses. In addition she has produced a variety of objects--paperweights, etched drinking glasses, matchbooks, gallery announcements--all of which cleverly describe how art comes to accrue value as it moves through various systems of exchange. Lawler's oeuvre was essential in creating an expanded field for photography, it was crucial in postmodern debates over theories of representation, it remains indelible within the field of institutional critique, and it has always been trenchant and witty in its sustained commitment to a feminist vision of art, art history, and contemporary art practice. But Lawler is also an old-fashioned artist's artist, long overdue for the kind of serious reconsideration and recognition that this volume affords. The very self-effacing nature of Lawler's practice, however, her continual suspicion about notions of authorship--and her sly disregard for museological conventions--have meant that she has resisted precisely the usual mid-career retrospective. Twice Untitled and Other Pictures, published in conjunction with Lawler's first major museum exhibition in the United States, organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, eats away at the standard museum practices of chronology, linear development, and the presentation of masterpieces, opting instead to explore such dynamic themes and undercurrents in Lawler's practice as her relationship to sculpture, her long history of collaborative projects, her production of such ephemera as napkins, matchbooks, and announcement cards, and the steady political dimension of her work--which culminated most recently in works that are deeply critical of the American invasion of Iraq. With essays by art historian and political theorist Rosalyn Deutsche and curators Ann Goldstein and Helen Molesworth, Twice Untitled and Other Pictures promises to be an essential volume for anyone interested in late twentieth- and early twenty-first- century art.
A groundbreaking study about everyday antiblackness and its refusal in an officially raceblind France.
What does it mean to be racialized-as-black in France on a daily basis? #You Know You're Black in France When... responds to that question. Under the banner of universalism, France messages a powerful and seductive ideology of blindness to race that disappears blackened people and the antiblackness they experience. As Tricia Keaton notes, in everyday life, France is anything but raceblind.
In this interdisciplinary study, drawn from a range of critical scholarship including that of Philomena Essed and Frantz Fanon, Keaton illuminates how b/Black (racialized/politicized) French people distinctly expose and refuse what she calls "raceblind republicanism." By officially turning a blind eye to the specificity of antiblackness, the French state in fact perpetuates it, she argues, along with structural racism. Through daily life, public policies, visual culture, the private lives of individuals and families shattered by police violence, the French courts where many are fighting back, and her own experiences, Keaton charts the troubling dynamics and continuities of antiblackness in French society.
A meticulously created facsimile edition of a classic work on design by the progenitor of today's information design.
Long before the internet and its vast stores of information in digital form, information in analog form needed to be organized so that it was legible and accessible. One designer who revolutionized the presentation of printed information was modernist pioneer Ladislav Sutnar (1897-1976). In 1950, Sutnar and architect K. Lonberg-Holm published Catalog Design Progress, a guide to modernizing the design of printed materials through typographic simplicity, compositional ingenuity, and navigational devices that signal the logical flow of information. This meticulously created facsimile of the original book illustrates and enacts Sutnar's ideas, making clear their continuing influence on graphic design.
In the book, Sutnar contrasts his design style with the conglomeration of text and pictures that characterized earlier printed material. He identifies and illustrates visual features, including typography, pictures and charts, and covers, and shows how the arrangement and organization of visual units allows information to flow smoothly. For this edition, the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Art and Design at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic, has carefully recreated the original, with redrawn figures, retouched photos, re-typeset texts, five-color printing, and spiral binding. A separate reader's guide by celebrated design historian Steven Heller accompanies the book. Both book and guide are packaged in a slipcase.
The first full-career survey of the idiosyncratic life and work of Ray Johnson, a collagist, performance artist, and pioneer of mail art.
Ray Johnson (1927-1995), a.k.a. «New York's most famous unknown artist,» was notorious for the elaborate games he played with the institutions of the art world, soliciting their attention even as he rejected their invitations. In A Book about Ray, Ellen Levy offers a comprehensive study of the artist who turned the business of career-making into a tongue-in-cheek performance, tracing his artistic development from his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1945 to his death in 1995. Levy describes Johnson's practice as one that was constantly shifting-whether in tone, in its address to potential audiences, or among three primary artistic modes: collage, performance, and correspondence art.
A Book about Ray takes an elliptical path, circling around rather than trying to arrest in flight the elusive artist and his purposefully ephemeral art. By crafting the book in this way, Levy evokes Ray Johnson's art in the moment of its making and draws readers into the artist's world, while making them feel, from the beginning, that they somehow already know their way around that world. In exploring Johnson's scene, readers will also encounter the artists who influenced him, like Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, and his friends and peers like Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. The work of such figures will look forever different in light of Johnson's subversive take on their shared aesthetic.
Suitable for readers both new to Ray Johnson and those already familiar with his work, A Book about Ray is a complete and vital portrait of an American original.
