Art Books
Conversations About Sculpture
By Phillip GriffithIn May 2008, as the Parisian daylight stretched into summer hours, Richard Serra’s set of five 56-foot-tall steel plates, Promenade, had taken over the city’s cavernous, glass-roofed Grand Palais. In the Tuileries Garden, Serra’s 1983 work Clara-Clara, with its paired, inverted semicircles (or more precisely, conical sections), had been reinstalled in its original location at the garden’s gate to accompany the new work.
We are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik
By Isabella BoormanWe Are in Open Circuits focuses on the writing practice of Korean American artist Nam June Paik (1932–2006), often referred to as the founder of video art. At over 400 pages, this book provides privileged access to Paik’s artwork plans, music scores, Fluxus instruction sheets, and handwritten and typewritten texts.
Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter
By Karen ChernickWhen painter Nell Blaine was just 37 years old, she was almost completely paralyzed from the neck down, after the start of a burgeoning career in the downtown New York City art scene. Yet that’s not the closing chapter of Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter, the recently published first biography of this lesser-known postwar American artist, which chronicles Blaine’s five-decade career.
Steven Leiber Catalogs
By Megan N. LibertyThe art of the 1960s and 1970s is characterized by its tendency to disintegrate—to take forms other than physical ones. As Lucy Lippard writes in the opening to her book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, “Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’”
