I was wondering what art books you guys think are an excellent read. And also, where to get good art books. Amazon does seem to produce a somewhat thorough list even if they don't sell the more obscure titles. Here are some books I've enjoyed;
Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky (Dover press) A dogma on non-objective art.
Seeing Out Loud by Jerry Saltz (The Figures press) A collection of art reviews from the Village Voice 1998-2003.
Techniques of the Great Masters of Art (Chartwell Books) A good historical reference spreading 1300-1980 and an incredible investigation and deconstruction of how great works were made. Here's a little excerpt about Cezanne's House of the Hanged Man (Cezanne's palette for this painting, which has been analyzed by the Louvre, included lead white, zinc white, yellow ochre, chrome yellow, and it goes on)
Right now, I am enjoying a compilation of essays edited by Amelia Jones called "A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945" (Blackwell Publishing).
ReplyDeleteThis is the most inclusive and wide ranging survey of contemporary art I have ever seen. The first few chapters follows the issue chronologically (50's abex- 2005),covering some really diverse viewpoints and not-so-typical artists. The second half deals with topics and theory such as Marxism,Postcolonialism, Feminism, mass culture, etc. I really recommend. If I ever taught a course on cont. art THIS would be the textbook for sure!
Another book I love is Chromophobia by David Batchelor. I read it right before going off to grad school and it changed my entire perspective on color. It follows a social history of color, the west's aversion to color (at least in upper classes) and even examines color usage in western literature and pop culture such as Melville, the wizard of Oz, and 60's psychedelica. very cool!!
Hey Zac I is gonna check out yer recommendations too! Cool topic!
ReplyDeleteI have been looking at
ReplyDelete"Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is". Its illustration. Pretty neato.
Not reading it now, but would highly suggest anyone who hasn't read it:
ReplyDeleteAir Guitar
by Dave Hickey
The best book on the art world I've ever read.
Cool. Great suggestions. Gonna check 'em out for sure. I wanted to add Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. It's not an art book, but McLuhan is a visionary comparable to Warhol.
ReplyDeleteAnd also, on a lighter side Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile. It's a witty play about a chance encounter of Picasso and Einstein. Really a fun read.
I'll be quick:
ReplyDeleteA good critical/historical reference book is the latest version of the Thames and Hudson World of Art series by Edward Lucie-Smith called Movements in Art Since 1945.
A great text about contemporary culture and politics is Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art by Carol Becker.
A very witty and spot-on book about modern and contemporary art mythologies and trends is This is Modern Art by Matthew Collings.
A hugely influential book (to me) is called Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde. In this book Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythologies (Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. A major work of modern cultural criticism. I also highly recommend his earlier book called The Gift.
And on a lighter note, I make The Cheese Monkeys by renowned graphic designer Chip Kidd required reading for my 2D Design students.
Really great suggestions everyome. I loved Air Guitar and have been a Hickey fan ever since. I love watching interviews of him - he is very erudite yet down to earth and fun!
ReplyDeleteGoogled the "Dear new Girl..." and I really want to check that out- it has some illustrations by some great artists.
James,that Trickster books sounds raaly great- I love books on mythology. Which reminds me that another seminal book for me as an undergrad was the Power of Myth, the interview between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell.
Some other important books for me was Nonsense by Susan Stewart, which examines folklore and literature usage of palindromes, children's rhymes, puns, and anagrams as historical and artistic antidotes to common sense. I think this book helped to open me up to humor and imagination in my work.
Also, my bible has always been Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. I found out artists were actually smart when I found this book. This book began my love of primary source material and artist interviews ( Press Play is a great one for interviews!)
Am i a nerd or am i a nerd?
Mark-
ReplyDeleteSure, Theories and Documents is my other fat book- right next to Art in Theory 1900-1990. I've actually opened both of them a few times in my day. I shared your revealation upon reading from it- that artists are intellectuals. Carol Becker's first article in Surpassing the Spectacle is all about the artist as a PUBLIC intellectual as opposed to a private one. A lot of our more macho modernist grandads were not very publicly intellectual.
Perhaps it was for the better...
We are nerds.
Howdy everyone, and thanks for the invite Dr. King ;)
ReplyDeleteIt's a little uncanny this topic came up cuz the exact same question was asked among the San Francisco Art Institute alums (myself being one of them). I've pasted the list we came up with below:
ESSAYS:
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
Freud, The Uncanny
Fetishism
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood
Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes
(http://www.mrbauld. com/frostfig. html)
Clement Greenburg, Avant-garde and Kitsch
The Plight of Culture
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
SHORT STORIES:
J.D. Salinger De Daumier Smith’s Blue Period
BOOKS:
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Jaques Barzun, Use and Abuse of Art
Gregory Battcock, Minimalism
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear
Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings
(Vols. 1,2 &3)
The Arcades Project
Illumniations
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner Postmodern Theory
Yves-Alain Bois, Formless
Andrй Breton, Nadja
Mad Love
Bill Brewster, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
Bill Brown, Things
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter
Benjamin and the Arcades Project
The Origin of Negative Dialectics
Dreamworld and Catastrophe
Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory
in Visual Culture
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love
Jonathon Crary, Techniques of the Observer
Arthur Danto, After the End of Art
The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art
Jean-Franзois De Bastide, The Little House
Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle
Art and Otherness
Deleuze, The Fold
Marcel Duchamp. The catalog published by MOMA and The
Philadelphia Museum in 1973
David Edmonds & John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’ s Poker
Anton Ehrenzweig, The hidden Order of Art
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
Hal Foster's The Return of the Real
Suzi Gablic, The Re Enchantment of Art
Conversations Before the End of Time
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture
Keith Haring and Robert Ferris Thompson, Keith Haring
Journals
Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual
(http://www.sacred- texts.com/ cla/aar/index. htm)
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty
Robert Hughes, Nothing if not Critical
Culture of Complaint
Huysman, Against Nature
Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: The Idea that Solved
Music’s Greatest Riddle
Thurston James, The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting
Handbook
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual In Art
Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers,
Poets & Philosophers
Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy and After
Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture
The Optical Unconscious
Donald Kuspit, The End of Art
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art
Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces
David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory
(Penguin Reference Books)
Thomas McEvilley, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt
McLuhan, Understanding Media
Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art
Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel
Yositomo Nara, Lullaby Supermarket
Interviews With Bruce Nauman
Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw: A Working
Plan for Art Study
Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
Edgar Allen Poe, The Philosophy of Composition
Otto Rank, Art & Artist
Man Ray, Self Portrait
Gerhardt Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
Victor Schklovsky, Zoo or Letters Not About Love
Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Thinks You Can Think
Leonard Shlair, Art & Physics
Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the
American University
Robert Smithson’s Collected Writings
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Stewart, On Longing
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents
of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
David Sylvester, Interviews With Francis Baon
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Davis Thompkins, Art After 1945
Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and
Anxiety
Matthew von Unwerth. Freud’s Dream: Mourning, Memory,
and the History of a Summer Walk
Brian Wallis ed., Art After Modernism
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to
B & Back Again)
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, The Andy Warhol Diaries
Werne, Museum Inc. Inside the Global Art World
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting (Seeing Is
Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees A Life of
Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin)
Tom Wolf, The Painted Word
Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of
Redemption
Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory
---- WHEW!!!
On this list I suggested both After the End of Art and The End of Art by Danto and Kuspit as a nice duo. The two critics have radically different assessments of the contemporary art scene at the moment, with Duchamp and Warhol painted as patron saints (Danto) or the (unavoidable) devils incarnate.
Margaret Livingstone's Art and Vision is a great read for anyone interested in the biology of seeing -- color recognition/central/peripheral vision, etc.
Welcome r. dolphin.
ReplyDeleteYour list is intimidating.
I feel a little like Forest Gump here. I feel like saying.
"Jenne, I might not be a smart man, but I'm a good man."
Maybe I should start another blog for contemporary artists who don't read books? Man I feel stupid.
I do feel that the intellectual potential of the group we gathered here has the power to make real change in Jacksonville.
That if the handful of us that are participating on this could really pool our resources and make it happen.
I was thinking about all of the good work being made here in Jax. That there is little difference between the quality
of work being made here and the work in LA, San Fran, and New York.
What I think we need is an identity. Solidarity. Why would other cities be interested in the work coming out of Jax?
What's special about Jax? Why should other cities take notice? These are some questions we might need to answer.