Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories


Alan Licht - 2007
    Sound art’s roots can be found in the experimental work of Italian Futurism, Dada, and later the Fluxus group and the pioneering efforts of the American composer and artist John Cage. In the wake of this groundbreaking work, sound art began to mature into a movement, and artists explored the interactive possibilities of sound and in turn created entirely new modes of experiencing and engaging with art. In this volume, the complete story of sound art is told by one of the country’s leading critics and scholars. The author traces the history of this form of art–highlighting the convergence of the indie world bands such as Sonic Youth with the art world–looking at the critical cross-pollination that has led to some of the most important and challenging art being produced today, including work by Christian Marclay, LaMonte Young, Janet Cardiff, Rodney Graham, and Laurie Anderson, among many others.

On Street Photography and the Poetic Image


Alex Webb - 2014
    In this new and innovative series, Aperture works with the worlds top photographers, many of whom also teach, to publish their core thinking on photography making their experience, insight, and knowledge accessible to a wider audience, including students. Each title in the series will provide an essential primer on the photographers area of expertise and creative process. The key points of their practice are presented in the photographers own words, and will answer the questions they are asked most frequently. The commentary will accompany a selection of fifty photographs, iconic images by each featured photographer, as well as key images by others that have influenced their thinking and work.

John Prine Beyond Words


John Prine - 2017
    In this book, John Prine curates a selection of his best loved songs. Included are lyrics, guitar chords, commentary from John and over 100 photographs - may never before published - from his personal collection. John Prine has written songs that have become central to the American musical heritage. This former Maywood, Illinois mailman came to prominence with his debut record, 'John Prine' in 1971, which includes classics like, "Angel from Montgomery," "Sam Stone," "Paradise," and "Hello in There." His lyrics speak to the everyday experience of ordinary people, with a simple honesty and an extraordinary ability to connect with the heart.

Still Time


Sally Mann - 1994
    Now available in paperback, this volume celebrates an artist whose acute perceptions and imagination embrace not only the photographs of children for which she is renowned, but also earlier landscapes and some unexpected, compelling forays into color and abstract photography. The 60 images include abstract platinum prints, Cibachromes and Polaroids, landscapes, portraits of women and 12-year-olds and her celebrated family pictures. Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. Among her many awards are three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Corcoran Museum of Art, to name just a few. Her books of photographs include Immediate Family and At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women.

The Browns Blues: Two Decades of Utter Frustration: Why Everything Kept Going Wrong for the Cleveland Browns


Terry Pluto - 2018
    And their fans had ulcers. Now, veteran sports columnist Terry Pluto explains why everything kept going wrong. This detailed report on two decades of disappointment takes a behind-the-scenes look at upheaval in the front office, frustration on the field, and headaches and heartache in the stands. His earlier book False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail told how the NFL hamstrung the new franchise. Who could have predicted the limping would last 19 years? This book picks up the story. Season after season began with hope in spring for the NFL draft (“the Browns’ version of the Super Bowl,” a fan called it) . . . often a new coach or GM or quarterback (or all three) . . . then the losses . . . and back to rebuilding. Pluto reviews all the major moves—draft choices and deals, hiring and firing and reshuffling—and the results. If you’re a Browns fan who wants to understand what went wrong with your team, this is the place to start. Includes heartfelt and humorous opinions contributed by fans.

Seeds From a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and The Spiritual Journey


Clark Strand - 1997
    A Zen Buddhist monk explains the value of haiku, a three-line, seventeen-syllable poem, as a writing meditation and spiritual guide and provides exercises to help readers compose their own haiku.

Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir


Ezra Pound - 1916
    An enlarged edition, including thirty pages of illustrations (sculpture and drawings) as well as Pound's later pieces on Gaudier, was brought out in 1970, and is now re-issued as an ND Paperbook. The memoir is valuable both for the history of modern art and for what it shows us of Pound himself, his ability to recognize genius in others and then to publicize it effectively. Would there today be a Salle Gaudier-Brzeska in the Musée de L'Art Moderne in Paris if Pound had not championed him? Gaudier's talent was impressive and his Vorticist aesthetic important as theory, but he was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-three, leaving only a small body of work. Pound knew Gaudier in London, where the young artist had come with his companion, the Polish-born Sophie Brzeska. whose name he added to his own. They were living in poverty when Pound bought Gaudier the stone from which the famous "hieratic head" of the poet was made. Pound arranged exhibitions and for the publication of Gaudier's manifestoes in Blast and The Egoist. And he wrote and sent packages to him in the trenches, where Gaudier––a sculptor to the last––carved a madonna and child from the butt of a captured German rifle, just two days before he died.

Fear Stalks the Land!: A Commonplace Book


Thom Yorke - 2021
    In which the writings of the authors Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood are gathered together.This commonplace book includes faxes, notes, fledgling lyrics, sketches, lists of all kinds and scribblings towards nirvana, as were sent between the two authors during the period 1999 to 2000 during the creation of the Radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac.This is a document of the creative process and a mirror to the fears, portents and fantasies invoked by the world as its citizens faced a brave new millennium.

Bts


Katy Sprinkel
    

Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage


Kenneth Silverman - 2010
    He became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Now award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. We follow Cage from his Los Angeles childhood—his father was a successful inventor—through his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of creativity in him and, after his return to the States, into his studies with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg. We see Cage’s early experiments with sound and percussion instruments, and watch as he develops his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. We learn of his many friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers; of his early marriage and several lovers, both female and male; and of his long relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he would collaborate on radically unusual dances that continue to influence the worlds of both music and dance.Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century.

A Little Book of Love and Companionship


Ruskin Bond
    

Why Jazz Happened


Marc Myers - 2012
    It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz’s post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters, and others on the scene during the decades following World War II, this book views jazz’s evolution through the prism of technological advances, social transformations, changes in the law, economic trends, and much more.In an absorbing narrative enlivened by the commentary of key personalities, Marc Myers describes the myriad of events and trends that affected the music's evolution, among them, the American Federation of Musicians strike in the early 1940s, changes in radio and concert-promotion, the introduction of the long-playing record, the suburbanization of Los Angeles, the Civil Rights movement, the “British invasion” and the rise of electronic instruments. This groundbreaking book deepens our appreciation of this music by identifying many of the developments outside of jazz itself that contributed most to its texture, complexity, and growth.

Jenny Saville


Gagosian Gallery - 2005
    In 1992, the year she completed her studies at Glasgow School of Art, her graduation exhibition sold out. Most notably, one painting was bought by Charles Saatchi and, since then, her international reputation has grown at a rapid and steady pace.Jenny Saville is described as a "New Old Master" for the technical proficiency of her oversize nudes that have earned her comparisons to Rubens and Lucian Freud and universal praise from critics and art historians alike. For the conceptual underpinnings of her work, she has been hailed as one of the most interesting artists of the last decade. Her work has been shown alongside that of Damien Hirst and the other Young British Artists in the acclaimed and seminal survey of new British art Sensation at the Royal Academy (London, 1997) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York, 2000).This is the only monograph devoted to the critically acclaimed young artist and features all of Jenny Saville's paintings to date-including many previously unpublished. This volume is being published in association with the Gagosian Gallery in London. The power of her brilliant and relentless embodiment of our worst anxieties about our own corporeality and gender is what distinguishes Saville from other paint-obsessed representers of the naked human body. To my eye, no other artist in recent memory has combined empathy and distance with such visual and emotional impact. -Linda Nochlin, Art in America, March 2000

Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds


David Toop - 1995
    It travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to virtual Las Vegas; from David Lynch's dream house high in the Hollywood Hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo.Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. An ethereal culture developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications.Author of Rap Attack 3 and Exotica, David Toop has in Ocean of Sound written an exhilarating, path-breaking account of ambient sound.