Best of
Visual-Art

1999

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency


Nan Goldin - 1999
    As Goldin writes: "Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life."

Paris Mon Amour


Jean-Claude Gautrand - 1999
    But not least it is the home and constant muse of a relatively young art: photography. Since the earliest days of the daguerreotype right up to our time, renowned photographers such as Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, and Jeanloup Sieff have lived and worked in the city of lights. Over the years a love affair developed between Paris and photography, giving rise to a remarkable record of the metropolis and a telling history of a new art form. This volume takes the reader on numerous walks, camera in hand, through the streets of Paris. Atmospheric black-and-white photos, shot by great photographers over two centuries, reveal the dramatic and the tranquil, the historic and the everyday—in the capitals parks and gardens, boulevards and backstreets, passages and arcades, bistros and nightclubs.

Ray Johnson: Correspondences


Donna De Salvo - 1999
    Drawing upon this vast trove, Donna De Salvo, the Wexner Center's Curator at Large, has organized Ray Johnson: Correspondences, the first comprehensive exhibition to be mounted (with the complete cooperation of the artist's estate).Like Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and later Andy Warhol and Jim Rosenquist, Johnson combined the signs and symbols of contemporary culture with the lessons of abstraction to develop a new lexicon of forms. A pioneer in the use of 'found' images and techniques of mechanical reproduction, Johnson created in 1955 what may have been the first informal happening.Johnson first created 'mail art' in the fifties. These were part collage, part manifesto, part parody; he often instructed recipients to 'add to', 'return to', or 'send to', spawning an interactive art form, a continuous happening, that pre-figured electronic mail. Johnson was the nerve center of this pre-digital netscape that spread around the nation and, eventually, the world, which continues to flourish today.By the eighties, Johnson was a legend in the artistic community. Ray Johnson: correspondences, offers the first opportunity for in-depth examination of the work of an artist who reflected and dissected many of the aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical preoccupations of the last forty years; a figure whose impact and influence will finally be made known.

Pre-Raphaelite Cats


Susan Herbert - 1999
    Here, she brings her charming illustrations of cats to the subject of Pre-Raphaelite painting.Well-known works by such artists as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Holman Hunt can be viewed in a new and entrancing way when their protagonists are endearing cats. The Beggar Maid takes on a particularly touching relationship with King Cophetua, while Medea gives new meaning to the word enchantress as she prepares the ingredients for a spell. Were ever two creatures so frightened and so abandoned as the poor cat princes wickedly imprisoned in the tower or two lovers as sad and stoical as the young officer cat and his fiancée on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo? With black-and-white reproductions of the original paintings that inspired these illustrations, the book offers irresistibly delightful comparisons to a great period in art history.

Basquiat


Jean-Michel Basquiat - 1999
    Providing a serious and generous overview of Basquiat's career, this monograph will please novice and fan alike, with its high-quality illustrations, including 50 works on canvas, 40 works on paper, two sculptures and 18 collaborations (15 with Andy Warhol).

Thinking of You


Barbara Kruger - 1999
    Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces.

Couples and Loneliness


Nan Goldin - 1999
    Whether disheveled, erotically entangled, contemplative or boisterous, the individuals in Nan Goldin's compelling portraits come to life. Arranged with the vibrant, haphazard energy of a scrapbook, these works have a cumulative effect that suggests the line between love and loneliness is often blurred. Couples and Loneliness brings together photographs that span Goldin's career and reveals the social drama of alienation and the strange beauty that is at the heart of her vision.

John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes


John Esten - 1999
    and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999, "John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes" brings to light a fascinating portion of Sargent's work long hidden from the public eye. Beginning in his adolescence, and throughout his distinguished career, John Singer Sargent, the celebrated painter of patricians, produced a superbly rendered, uninhibited book of work that was rarely seen and never exhibited: the male nudes. Models were a significant aspect of the great painter's profession, whether they were commission-producing society "sitters" or professional models used as reference for his three Boston mural projects or works created for his private enjoyment--one young Italian model stayed in the artist's employ for nearly twenty-six years. Sargent's enduring subject was capturing the "human form divine" in portraits of the fashionable and famous and the absolute male. Over the last century, these little-known works have been dispersed to museum archives and private collections throughout the United States and Great Britain. John Esten has unearthed the most extraordinary of these images, ranging from vibrant watercolors and oil paintings to charcoal studies, published here for the first time in a single volume.

Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile


Jane Blocker - 1999
    In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities. As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist’s work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, and history of contemporary art.

2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II


Bruce Conner - 1999
    Conner had close ties with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance (particularly Michael McClure) as well as with artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, Jess and Jay DeFeo. Conner's use of nylon stockings in his assemblages quickly won him notoriety, and saw his work included in Peter Selz's classic 1961 "Art of Assemblage" show at MoMA. Around this time, Conner also turned to film-making, and produced in swift succession a number of short films that helped to pioneer the rapid edit and the use of pop music among independent film-makers. Conner's innovative editing techniques and decidedly dark vision of American culture laid the foundation for later Hollywood directors such as Dennis Hopper (a friend and collaborator of Conner's, who frequently acknowledged his influence) and David Lynch. A long overdue and significant addition to the understanding of twentieth-century American art and cinema, "2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II" represents the most comprehensive book to date on Conner's work from the 1950s to the present. The authors elucidate Conner's work in film, assemblage, drawing, printmaking, collage, and photograms, as well as his more ephemeral gestures, actions, protests and "escapes" from the art world. This beautifully designed clothbound monograph is a landmark publication for anyone interested in contemporary art, film, culture and the Beat era.

100 Boots


Eleanor Antin - 1999
    All 51 photographs are in black and white and each opposing page of the photos offers the title of the piece, the date and place it was taken and the date the card was mailed out.

Deep Blues: Bill Traylor, 1854-1949


Josef Helfenstein - 1999
    The contributors discuss his life and work, placing them in their social and historical background.

Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals


Rosamond Wolff Purcell - 1999
    They were killed by hunters or disappeared when their oak and beech habitats were destroyed. The last bird, named Martha (only the last of any species seems to merit a human name), died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1905." Here, in photographs and words, are stirring reminders of wild beauty that is no more, as well as profiles of species whose survival is in peril. Rosamond Purcell's seventy spectacular color photographs--taken primarily at the Natural History Museum in Leiden, Holland, which holds the world's most extensive collection of lost species--tell a haunting and foreboding tale.

Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays


Arthur C. Danto - 1999
    These essays explore this relationship through a number of concrete cases in which either artists are driven by philosophical agendas or their art is seen as solving philosophical problems in visual terms. The essays cover a varied terrain, with subjects including Giotto's use of olfactory data in The Raising of Lazarus; chairs in art and chairs as art; Mel Bochner's Wittgenstein drawings; the work of Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, and Robert Irwin; Louis Kahn as "Archai-Tekt"; and visual truth in film. Also featured are a meditation on the battle of Gettysburg; and a celebration of the Japanese artist Shiko Munakata, an essay that is partly autobiographical.Arthur C. Danto is one of the most original and multitalented philosophers writing today, a thinker whose interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of philosophy. Best known for his contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Danto is also esteemed for his work in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophical psychology, and action theory. These two volumes, each with an introduction by the author, contain essays spanning more than twenty-five years that have been selected to highlight the inseparability of philosophy and art in Danto's work. Together they present the thinking of Arthur C. Danto at his very best.