Book Review: Seven Days in the Art World

Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton is a great book for anyone interested in getting a backstage pass to a number of art world insider-only events. I especially enjoyed the chapter about the art school crit class–what a process! OCAC students, does this ring true for you?? The book is written in a very conversational tone, it’s easy stay interested, and it’s a ‘quick read’. I don’t envy the stress of the auction circuit, but a trip to the Biennale sounds pretty nice! –Elsa

From Goodreads.com: “In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie’s auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami’s studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale.”

Check out Seven Days in the Art World at the OCAC Library! You can find it in the stacks: N 8600 .T485 2009

Featured Periodical: JAB, The Journal of Artists’ Books

JAB35 | Spring 2014

We love this journal, both for the writing and for the artists’ books that are typically included in each issue. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure, spend a little time with JAB! From http://www.journalofartistsbooks.org/:

The Journal of Artists’ Books provides a platform for both theoretical and creative expression. As a forum for the study of artists’ books, JAB publishes critical and theoretical articles, reviews of artists’ books and exhibitions, and commentary on conferences and and other book art-related activities. JAB also regularly showcases creative work in the form of artists’ statements and artist-designed pages and covers.
As a book art project itself, each issue of JAB embodies an interest in all aspects of the production of the journal, incorporating different design elements for each issue and, whenever possible, JAB staff do all the printing of the journal. JAB also sometimes includes various artist-created inserts and booklets or has had the covers letterpress-printed by the designing artist. JAB is published twice a year in the spring and fall at The Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts.

Book Review: Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999 Catalogue Raisonne

This two-volume set is a catalogue for the Walker Art Center’s 1999 show of the same name. It provides one volume of images of Ruscha’s prints, books, and miscellany, and a second volume of essays, images, and information.

Ruscha’s first book Twentysix Gasoline Stations “was responsible for a significant shift in the practice” of bookmaking, according to Clive Phillpot in his essay “Sixteen Books and Then Some.” As a bookmaker I am particularly interested in Ruscha’s use of the book form, and this catalogue provides images of each book comprehensively; each book is represented completely as a series of little rectangles, page spread by page spread. I’m inspired both by the wealth of works and by the catalogue’s presentation of them, and these books provide a lot of Ruscha’s work to look at as well as a lot of analysis of them.

–Amanda

Friday’s post: What’s happening this weekend?

The Portland Art Museum is still hosting (they extended it!) the exhibition of Richard Mosse’s The Enclave. You can find out more about it here. We’ve been hearing a lot about this exhibition, and you still have the chance to head over to the Museum and check it out until April 12. From the PAM website:

“The Enclave was produced using a recently discontinued military film technology originally designed in World War II to reveal camouflaged installations hidden in the landscape. This film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink. On the threshold of the medium’s extinction, Mosse employed this film to document an ongoing conflict situation in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Have you visited this exhibition? Let us know what you thought in the “comments” section! Have a great weekend!

Featured Periodical: Cabinet

Come on down to the library, grab a cup of coffee, and check out our extensive periodical collection! Cabinet is just one of the many beautiful art magazines we would love to share with you.

“Cabinet is the secret best art magazine.”
Jerry Saltz, art critic, New York magazine

Issue No. 55: LOVE

From cabinetmagazine.org:

CABINET: WHAT IS IT?
Founded as a non-profit in 2000, Cabinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture based in New York that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Its hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal to create a sourcebook of ideas for an eclectic international audience of readers, from artists and designers to scientists, philosophers, and historians. Using essays, interviews, and artist projects to present a wide range of topics in language accessible to the non-specialist, Cabinetis designed to encourage a new culture of curiosity, one that forms the basis both for an ethical engagement with the world as it is and for imagining how it might be otherwise. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous traditions of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine designed for the intellectually curious reader of the future.

Staff Picks: St. Patrick’s Day Edition

A Drink with Shane MacGowan by Victoria Mary Clarke and Shane MacGowan is certainly a unique memoir, starring the charismatic and always interesting frontman of the legendary Irish band The Pogues. His stories are shared in a series of conversations with his girlfriend, and circle around his early life, his music career and all the various sorts of shenanigans he got up to in between. Includes his hand-drawn scribbles and prose. A very fun read–just in time for St. Paddy’s day, and Spring Break! Come check it out at the OCAC Library! –Elsa

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From Goodreads:

“Hell-raiser Shane MacGowan’s acclaimed and surprisingly lucid memoir. This bibulous, drug-indulgent and anarchic rock legend was born on a small farm in Tipperary, won a scholarship to Westminster, was rapidly expelled, became a rent boy, then a central figure of punk and the hugely influential star of The Pogues. MacGowan’s music, innovative and powerful, is as distinctive as his chaotic, breakdown-scarred, drug and alcohol-fuelled lifestyle. MacGowan has an enormous fan-base hungry for stories of his wild behaviour, but this is also a book that celebrates this unique and charming musician, and offers insight into his remarkable perspective on this world – and the next!” (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/257844.A_Drink_With_Shane_MacGowan)

Staff Picks

OCAC Library has an awesome selection of new books available for your perusal! Here’s a recent arrival that’s sure to inspire you: Artists’ Handmade Houses, by Michael Gotkin and Don Freeman.

Available now at WCCLS.org!

From booknews.com:

Thirteen homes are thoroughly showcased in full-page color photos (by Don Freeman, based in New York) and descriptive text (by Michael Gotkin, a landscape architect and city planner, also based in New York). The format is oversize: 10×11.5″, allowing for a generous visual tour of the unusual, highly individual interiors, primarily, with some photos of exteriors as well. The artists and featured houses are as follows: Henry Chapman Mercer’s home, called Fonthill, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; Paolo Soleri’s Coanti, Scottsdale, Arizona); Russel Wright’s Manitoga & Dragon Rock (Garrison, New York); Henry Varnum Poor’s Crow House, (New City, New York); Raoul Hague (Woodstock, NY); George Nakashima (New Hope, PA); Rallph Radcliffe Whitehead & Jane Byrd McCall’s White Pines, Byrdcliffe Art Colony (Woodstock, NY); Sam Maloof (Alta Loma CA); Frederic Edwin Church’s Olana (Hudson, NY); Constantino & Ruth Nivola (East Hampton, NY); Wharton Esherick (Paoli, PA); Ruth & Robert Hatch (Wellfleet, MA); and Michael Kahn & Leda Livant’s Eliphante (Cornville, AZ). Visitor information is included for those that are open to the public.

Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR