reading with mark

Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer

mark — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:19:56 +0000

By Liz Lerman (2011)
In this wide-ranging collection of essays and articles, Liz Lerman reflects on her life-long exploration of dance as a vehicle for human insight and understanding of the world around us. Lerman has been described by the Washington Post as “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art.” Here, she combines broad outlooks on culture and society with practical applications and accessible stories. Her expansive scope encompasses the craft, structure, and inspiration that bring theatrical works to life as well as the applications of art in fields as diverse as faith, aging, particle physics, and human rights law. Offering readers a gentle manifesto describing methods that bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world, this is the perfect book for anyone curious about the possible role for art in politics, science, community, motherhood, and the media.

Art Critiques: A Guide

mark — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:57:33 +0000

By James Elkins (2011)
This is a guidebook for art students at the college level (BA, BFA, MFA, PhD). “Elkins introduces refreshing commonsense in the tired and tiresome activity of the critique of art works by students. A dissection geared to avoid or delay a future autopsy of the field, the book uses case studies that teach as much about ‘how to’ as they do about ‘how not to.’ A nice and often funny exercise in debunking, Art Critiques: A Guide is also a fascinating analysis of the successes and failures in communication among people.” -Luis Camnitzer

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

mark — Wed, 30 May 2012 03:50:31 +0000

By Steven Johnson (2011)
How do we generate the groundbreaking ideas that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson’s answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out applicable approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality. What he finds gives us both an important new understanding of the roots of innovation and a set of useful strategies for cultivating our own creative breakthroughs.

Broken Screen

mark — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 02:18:35 +0000

Broken Screen is comprised of informal conversations between artist Doug Aitken and a roster of 26 carefully chosen artists, filmmakers, designers, and architects. Part guidebook and part manifesto, the book takes a fresh look at what it’s like to create work in a world that has become increasingly fragmentary. Through casual and direct discussions Broken Screen offers a detailed navigation through the ideas behind the important yet under-documented visual language of nonlinear narratives, split screens, and fragmentary visual planes that define the most progressive moving images today.

Expanded Cinema

mark — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:46:17 +0000

By Gene Youngblood (1970)
Author Gene Youngblood argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography. Forward by R. Buckminster Fuller. Also available for download at http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_ExpandedCinema/ExpandedCinema.html

Critical Response Process

mark — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:22:16 +0000

By Liz Lerman and John Borstel (2003)
Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is a multi-step, group system for giving and receiving useful feedback on creative processes and artistic works-in-progress. This book offers a detailed introduction to the Process, beginning with its three roles and four core steps.

The Real Real Thing

mark — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:41:34 +0000

By Wendy Steiner (2010)
In this bold view of contemporary culture, Wendy Steiner shows us the very meaning of the arts in the process of transformation. Her story begins at the turn of the last century, as the arts abandoned the representation of the world for a heady embrace of the abstract, the surreal, and the self-referential. Today though, this “separate sphere of the aesthetic” is indistinguishable from normal life. Media and images overwhelm us: we gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists, craving contact with what J. M. Coetzee has called “the real real thing.” As the World Wide Web renders the lower-case world in ever-higher definition, the reality-based genres of memoir and documentary are displacing fiction, and novels and films are depicting the contemporary condition through model-protagonists who are half-human, half-image. Steiner shows the arts searching out a new ethical potential through this figure: by stressing the independent existence of the model, they welcome in the audience in all its unpredictability, redefining aesthetic experience as a real-world interaction with the promise of empathy, reciprocity, and egalitarian connection.

Art and Electronic Media

mark — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 21:19:54 +0000

By Edward Shanken (2009)
Art and Electronic Media is the latest installment in the THEMES AND MOVEMENTS series, a collection of groundbreaking sourcebooks on the prevailing art tendencies of our times. This is the first book to explore mechanics, light, graphics, robotics, networks, virtual reality and the possibilities afforded by the web from an international perspective. It outlines the importance of figures previously neglected by art history, including engineers, technicians, and collaborators. Included are works by over 150 artists, both familiar – Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, Mario Merz – as well as emerging and recent pioneers, such as Robert Lazzarini, Blast Theory, Granular Synthesis, Simon Penny, Marcel.li Antunez Roca, Mikami Seiko, and Jonah Bruckner-Cohen. The book is divided into seven thematic sections arranged chronologically. Art and Electronic Media is a lucid, accessible, and authoritative evaluation of continually developing media.

Design Life Now: National Design Triennial

mark — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 03:22:09 +0000

By Barbara Bloemink, Brooke Hodge, Ellen Lupton and Matilda McQuaid (2006)
The exhibition catalog inaugurates Cooper-Hewitt’s new self-publishing venture. The publication includes a foreword by director Paul Warwick Thompson; original essays by co-curators Barbara Bloemink, Brooke Hodge, Ellen Lupton, and Matilda McQuaid; a designer profile of each of the 87 designers featured in the exhibition; and more than 300 images, most in full color. The book is designed by COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans), who are also featured in the exhibition.

Craft in America

mark — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:12:25 +0000

By Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton (2007)
The companion book to the PBS series of the same name, Craft in America highlights the work of America’s most interesting craft artists past and present. Illustrated with more than 200 commanding images and signature objects from furniture, wood, ceramics, and glass to fiber, quilts, jewelry, metal, and basketry, this definitive work shows how crafts, long admired for their marriage of functionality and creativity, also reflect our nation’s history and the remarkable people who passed on their traditions.