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For seven years, photographer and artist Lena Herzog followed the
evolution of a new kinetic species. Intricate as insects but with
bursts of equine energy, the "Strandbeests," or "beach creatures,"
are the creation of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, who has been working
for nearly two decades to generate these new life-forms that move,
and even survive, on their own. Set to roam the beaches of Holland,
the Strandbeests pick up the wind in their gossamer wings and
spring, as if by metamorphosis, into action. As if it were blood,
not the breeze, running through their delicate forms, they quiver,
cavort, and trot against the sun and sea, pausing to change
direction if they sense loose sand or water that might destabilize
their movement. Coinciding with a traveling exhibition, Herzog's
photographic tribute captures Jansen's menagerie in a meditative
black and white, showcasing Jansen's imaginative vision, as well as
the compelling intersection of animate and inanimate in his
creatures. The result is a work of art in its own right and a
mesmerizing encounter not only with a very surrealist brand of
marvelous, but also with whole new ideas of existence.
Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science. Illustrations.
Federico Solmi: Escape Into The Metaverse examines the work of
Federico Solmi, a leading practitioner in the genre of new media
art. As a narrative and figurative artist, Solmi utilises lurid
colours and satire to portray a dystopian vision of contemporary
society, highlighting the contradictions and fallibilities that
characterise our time. Employing video, painting, drawing,
sculpture, sound and digital game design, he creates a
carnivalesque virtual reality with historical and present-day world
leaders - animated by computer script and motion capture
performance - in a critique of Western society's obsession with
power. Inspired by real events and fabricated myths, Solmi
explores, re-interprets and concocts celebrated moments in history.
As reconfigured narratives, these social and political commentaries
disrupt the mythologies that underpin Western society, revealing
its ties to nationalism, colonialism, religion and consumerism. The
book documents Solmi's unique process of melding traditional art
practices and digital technologies in a case study of his most
ambitious video-painting to date, The Bathhouse (2020). Pioneering
new modes of cultural production and art experience afforded by the
metaverse, Solmi's absurd rewriting of past and present merge dark
humor and a sense of the grotesque in a virtual world that indicts
our own reality. Solmi was born in 1973 to a working-class family
in Bologna, Italy. He is self-trained and self-educated. In 1999,
he moved to Brooklyn, New York, to pursue his career. His
perspective reflects his outlook as a cultural voyeur, questioning
the nationalistic and revisionist American mythologies that are
often presented as fact. In 2003, Solmi began to experiment with
the tools of video game design, fascinated by the parallel universe
made possible by 3D graphics, which he saw as a structure to create
narrative video sequences using drawings and paintings. Every
visual texture is painted and scanned on the computer up to three
times to achieve the intentional flickering effect. The art of
Paolo Uccello, Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio di Chirico serve as
references for his visual compositions, while the writings of
Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Oriana Fallaci serve as inspiration
for his social and political commentary.
Since its invention in c.100 BC, paper has been a cornerstone of
civilization and a key component of the human experience. Artist
Matthew Shlian has always recognized paper's significance as a
material for experimentation and understanding. In his hands,
engineering, science and geometry can all be expressed within the
medium of paper. Folded, tessellated, compressed, extrapolated -
two-dimensional paper becomes three-dimensional sculpture in
beautiful and unexpected ways. Unfolding is a complete overview of
Shlian's oeuvre over the past ten years, including small- and
large-scale works, unseen development sketchbooks, collaborations
with scientific researchers and scientists, three-dimension reliefs
and sculpture - all in paper. Printed in full colour on two paper
stocks, the book features an introduction by Diana Gaston, an
interview between Stuart Kestenbaum and the artist, and essays by
acclaimed writer Lawrence Weschler and Islamic design scholar Eric
Broug. In keeping with the geometric underpinning of Shlian's work,
the dimensions of the book are '16 cubed': 16cm squared by 16cm
squared by 16 signatures of 16 pages. Unfolding is a journey into
the new possibilities of folding technology, the intricate
complexities of Islamic patterns, and the sheer potential offered
by a simple sheet of paper. With 200 illustrations, 150 in colour
The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks
in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for
his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr.
Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings - the account of his
long-dormant patients' miraculous but troubling return to life in a
Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate
success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over
the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until,
for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the
profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained
close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just
as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once
again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets
Sacks's brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid
relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks's capacious
Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply;
composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife
for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days;
helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging
intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment
that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous
specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is
pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often
profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great
talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our
preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described "clinical
ontologist" whose entire practice revolved around the single
fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How
are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler,
with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.
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This Land (Hardcover)
Lawrence Weschler, David Opdyke
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R618
Discovery Miles 6 180
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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David Opdyke's massive collage This Land (as elucidated in this
book by award-winning author Lawrence Weschler) presents a
slow-burning satire of the American Dream as it blunders into the
reality of climate change. This Land is an epic mural fashioned by
New York artist David Opdyke out of vintage American postcards
which he then treated with disconcerting painted interventions.
What at first reads as a panoramic bird's-eye view of an idyllic
alpine valley reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be an
array of connected scenes and vignettes. Across more than five
hundred postcards, each one portraying a distinct slice of
idealized Americana (town squares, mountain highways, main streets
and county seats), Opdyke's acerbic, emotionally jarring
alterations gradually become evident. In this prophetic
refashioning, forests are aflame, tornadoes torque from one card
into the next, a steamboat gets swallowed up whole by some sort of
new megafauna, frogs fall like Biblical hail from the sky. The
human responses form a cacophony of desires and demands, panic and
denial. Biplanes trail banners urging Repent Now!, others insist
Legislative Action Would Be Premature, while still others advertise
seats on an actual Ark. The book This Land affords readers a closer
and closer viewing of Opdyke's devastatingly sardonic take on our
impending ecological future, one in turn enlivened by Lawrence
Weschler's vividly sly blend of artist profile and critical
interpretation. Featuring introductory essays providing background
on the artist and the project as a whole, This Land also divides
the sprawling mural into eight sections to allow for a more
intimate viewing. Interspersed among the detailed visual sections
are insightful thematic essays by Lawrence Weschler and an
afterword that serves as a stirring call to action by civil rights
attorney Maya Wiley. Additionally, the book's jacket is printed on
both sides, folding out to reveal the work in its full grandeur.
When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to
Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist 'who one day got hooked on his
own curiosity and decided to live it'. Now expanded to include six
additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, "Seeing
Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" chronicles three
decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and
space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned
projects - in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum
(the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect,
Richard Meier) and the design that transformed an abandoned Hudson
Valley factory into Dia's new Beacon campus - enhancing what many
had already considered the best book ever on an artist.
In this text, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J.S.G.
Boggs, a young artist with a certain panache, a certain flair, an
artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps, more
precisely, value. What Boggs likes to do is to draw money - actual
paper notes in the denominations of standard currencies from all
over the world - and then to go out and try to spend those
drawings. Instead of selling his money drawings outright to
interested collectors, Boggs looks for merchants who will accept
his drawings in lieu of cash payment for their wares or services as
part of elaborately choreographed transactions, complete with
receipts and even proper change - an artistic practice which
regularly lands him in trouble with treasury around the world. This
volume teases out these transactions and their sometimes dramatic
legal consequences, following Boggs on a larkish, though at the
same time disconcertingly profound, econo-philosophic chase. For in
a madcap Socratic fashion, Boggs is raising all sorts of truly
fundamental questions - what is it that we value in art, or, for
that matter, in money? Indeed, how do we place a value on anything
at all? And in particular, why do we, why should we, how can we
place such trust in anything as confoundingly insubstantial as
paper money? In passing, Weschler frames a concise, highly
entertaining history of money itself - from cowrie shells through
hedge funds.
During the past fifteen years, one of the most vexing issues facing
fledgling transitional democracies around the world--from South
Africa to Eastern Europe, from Cambodia to Bosnia--has been what to
do about the still-toxic security apparatuses left over from the
previous regime. In this now-classic and profoundly influential
study, the New Yorker's Lawrence Weschler probes these dilemmas
across two gripping narratives (set in Brazil and Uruguay, among
the first places to face such concerns), true-life thrillers in
which torture victims, faced with the paralysis of the new regime,
themselves band together to settle accounts with their former
tormentors. "Disturbing and often enthralling."--New York Times
Book Review "Extraordinarily moving...Weschler writes
brilliantly."--Newsday "Implausible, intricate and
dazzling."--Times Literary Supplement "As Weschler's interviewees
told their tales, I paced agitatedly, choked back tears...Weschler
narrates these two episodes with skill and tact...An inspiring
book."--George Scialabba, Los Angeles Weekly
Photographer Ed Hotchkiss traveled to neighborhoods from the north
Bronx to Rockaway; from the teeming center of Queens to the western
edge of midtown. This unexpected odyssey resulted in a group of
photographs that reveals the true humanity on the NYC subway.
There are writers who specialize in the strange and others whose
genius is to find the strangeness in the familiar, the unexpected
meanings in stories we thought we knew. Of that second category,
Lawrence Weschler is the master. Witness the pieces in this
splendidly disorienting collection, spanning twenty years of his
career and the full range of his concerns-which is to say,
practically everything.
Only Lawrence Weschler could reveal the connections between the
twentieth century's Yugoslav wars and the equally violent Holland
in which Vermeer created his luminously serene paintings. In his
profile of Roman Polanski, Weschler traces the filmmaker's symbolic
negotiations with his nightmarish childhood during the Holocaust.""
Here, too, are meditations on artists Ed Kienholz and David
Hockney, on the author's grandfather and daughter, and on the light
and earthquakes of his native Los Angeles. Haunting, elegant, and
intoxicating, Vermeer in Bosnia""awakens awe and wonder at the
world around us.
Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney
read Lawrence Weschler's "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the
Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin "and
invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series
of engrossing dialogues, gathered here for the first time. Weschler
chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including
his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his
exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting,
his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of
watercolor--and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around
2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside
of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of
what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an
exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself.
Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte's writings in a
chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, where one of
Malaparte's stories was retold to illustrate a point about
conditions shortly after the creation of the universe. Murch was so
taken by the strange, utterly captivating imagery he went to find
the book from which the story was taken. The book was Kaputt,
Malaparte's autobiographical novel about the frontlines of World
War II. Curzio Malaparte, an Italian born with a German heritage,
was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat. When he wrote a
book attacking totalitarianism and Hitler's reign, Mussolini, in no
position to support such a body of work, stripped him of his
National Fascist Party membership and sent him to internal exile on
the island of Lipari. In 1941, he was sent to cover the Eastern
Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, the Milano daily
newspaper. His dispatches from the next three years would be
largely suppressed by the Italian government, but reverberated
among readers as painfully real depictions of a landscape at war.
The film editor, fluent in translating the written word over to the
languages of sight and sound, began slowly translating Malaparte's
writings from World War II. The density and intricacy of his
stories compelled Murch to adapt many of them into prose or blank
verse poems. The result is a book of surprising insight and strange
beauty.
Among the most beloved sites at the Getty Center, the Central
Garden has aroused intense interest from the moment artist Robert
Irwin was awarded the commission. First published in 2002, 'Robert
Irwin Getty Garden' is comprised of a series of discussions between
noted author Lawrence Weschler and Irwin, providing a lively
account of what Irwin has playfully termed "a sculpture in the form
of a garden aspiring to be art." The text revolves around four
garden walks: extended conversations in which the artist explains
the critical choices he made - from plant materials to steel - in
the creation of a living work of art that has helped to redefine
what a modern garden can and should be. This updated edition
features new photography of the Central Garden in a smaller, more
accessible format.
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Strange Pilgrims (Hardcover)
The Contemporary Austin, Heather Pesanti, Ann Reynolds, Lawrence Weschler, Alva Noe
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R1,470
Discovery Miles 14 700
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In the past fifty years, contemporary artistic practice has
witnessed a surge in phenomenological types of artistic intent and
methodology, represented by divergent impulses sharing a desire to
channel ephemeral elements, resist categorization, and defy the
rarified museum experience. Time-based work is now widely accepted
as primary exhibition matter, and in the past ten years,
performance art has risen to the mainstream. Defining "experiential
art" as work that is immersive, participatory, performative, and
kinetic, Strange Pilgrims is an exhibition and accompanying
catalogue organized by The Contemporary Austin, weaving fourteen
artists into a loose collection of propositions occupying
unconventional spaces and formats. The title comes from Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's collection of twelve short stories of the same
name, riffing on the wandering protagonist as a metaphor for an
open-ended journey through strange and unfamiliar spaces. Created
in tandem with the exhibition on view in fall 2015 and winter 2016
at The Contemporary Austin's two sites, as well as a third venue,
the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin, this
catalogue presents a parallel but stand-alone assemblage of ideas
and concepts that respond to and resonate with one another under
the broad umbrella of experience and perception. The book features
an essay by the curator Heather Pesanti, a guest essay by the
scholar Ann Reynolds, and an interview between author and critic
Lawrence Weschler and the philosopher Alva Noe. All fourteen
artists are represented through individual sections with color
plates and explicatory text. In addition, Artist's Voice sections
have been contributed by Roger Hiorns, Trisha Baga and Jessie
Stead, and Lakes Were Rivers.
From the author of "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder," "Calamities of
Exile" combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of
double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and
timeless exile.
"Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the
moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism.
. . . Piercing and timely."--"Kirkus Reviews," starred review
"Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the
objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result
is three gripping profiles of very human but also extraordinary
men."--"Publishers Weekly"
"[Weschler's] thorough accounting of the men's covert operations,
assumed identities and strained relationships with fathers, wives,
and colleagues creates a disturbing triptych of the perils of
totalitarianism."--Lance Gould, "New York Times Book Review"
"Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable
combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust,
concision and compassion."--Francis King, "Spectator"
"Endlessly absorbing. . . . Breathtaking."--Jeri Laber, "Los
Angeles Times Book Review"
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1990.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1990.
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Wonder (Hardcover)
Nicholas Bell; Foreword by Lawrence Weschler
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R1,211
R966
Discovery Miles 9 660
Save R245 (20%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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"Wonder" celebrates the reopening of the Smithsonian s Renwick
Gallery following a major renovation of its historic landmark
building, the first purpose-built art museum in the United States.
Nine major contemporary artists, including Maya Lin, Tara Donovan,
Leo Villareal, Patrick Dougherty, and Janet Echelman, were invited
to take over the Renwick s galleries, transforming the whole of the
museum into an immersive cabinet of wonders. Mundane materials such
as index cards, marbles, sticks, and thread are conjured into
strange new worlds that demonstrate the qualities uniting these
artists: a sensitivity to site and the ways we experience place, a
passion for making and materiality, and a desire to provoke awe.A
wide-ranging essay by Nicholas R. Bell connects these artworks to
wonder s role throughout Western culture, to the question of how
museums have evolved as places to encounter wondrous things, and to
the symbolic weight of the moment as this building is dedicated to
art for the third instance in three centuries. It is of no small
consequence, writes Bell, that we, as a public, commit to the
perpetuation of spaces that harbor the potential for subjective and
intensive encounters with art. That we maintain museums for this
purpose reveals wonder to be fundamental in our quest to establish
who we are, and to grasp the universe beyond."
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