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Review: Building Stories
Building Stories by Chris Ware My rating: 5 of 5 stars For some perverse reason I actually find comics hard to read, and Chris Wares’ — brilliant though they be — are among the hardest. Building Stories, despite its complicated and aggressively creative packaging, is a wonderful read. It displays Ware’s depth and sensitivity, and the main characters are compelling enough to pull you through the books’ disparate pieces despite Ware’s trademark twists and turns. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth
Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth by William Anderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars You’ve probably seen him even if you haven’t noticed. This book explores the historical, artistic, architectural and spiritual history of this pre-Christian image that has stubbornly hung on with something akin to ubiquity. The “foliate head” turns up in even the most religious of settings, from Gothic cathedrals to the title pages of Martin Luther’s writings. The book can veer a little toward the New Agey at times, but that hazard seems inherent in the subject matter. The profuse photography easily
Continue readingOldenburg’s Mouse Museum and Offensive Abstraction
Claus Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, now recreated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was hugely influential when I saw it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1978. His collection of commercial tchotchkes (salt-and-pepper shakers, Plasticville train set buildings, robot toys, product packaging), shown with pieces of his own art and models for works in progress, validated my own nascent fascination with pop culture objects, proving that they were interesting in and of themselves. I was just starting to collect kitsch items, commercial paraphernalia, handicrafts — prosaic stuff that seemed to resonate with some kind of
Continue readingReview: Signs of Life
Signs of Life by Peter Sekaer My rating: 5 of 5 stars I had not heard of Sekaer until I saw this book. He was a student of Berenice Abbott and a pal — and sometime photographing companion — of Walker Evans. If you like those two you’ll most likely find his work quite interesting. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Lost Chicago
Lost Chicago by John Paulett My rating: 4 of 5 stars Pictures of old buildings. Interesting historical tidbits. What’s not to like? View all my reviews
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Book Review: Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists
Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists, Charles Russell, Prestel, 256 pages, 180 color illustrations, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-7913-4490-4. Hardcover $65.00 Charles Russell’s Groundwaters has the look and feel of a conventional coffee table book, and it can indeed be appreciated simply for its many beautiful plates representing the work of important self-taught artists of the 20th Century. Start reading the text, however, and another kind of book emerges. Those pictures aren’t there just because they’re striking. Each one is referenced in the text to make or elucidate a point, and Russell has many to make. Their density
Continue readingBook Review: Accidental Genius, Art from the Anthony Petullo Collection
Accidental Genius, Art from the Anthony Petullo Collection, by Lisa Stone and Jane Kallir, Milwaukee Art Museum/DelMonico Books/Prestel, 240 pages, 250 color illustrations, 2012. ISBN 978-3-7913-5200-8. Hard cover $60
Continue readingGo cat go
Really obscure epiphany time: Listening to some early Carl Perkins tunes (best rockabilly ever), I realized that when he refers to “cats” he doesn’t mean guys, which is what I always assumed based on more recent usage, but to girls. That would include the famous “go cat go” line in Blue Suede Shoes.” Makes more sense.
Continue readingReview: public phenomena
public phenomena by Temporary Services My rating: 5 of 5 stars A cool little art book about the everyday, and mostly inadvertent, aesthetic experiences that turn up as people attempt to the adapt the urban environment to their needs (and occasionally as the urban environment adapts to people). Photos range around the world showing everything from post-snowstorm parking blockades in Chicago to makeshift barriers in Ljubjana to ghost houses all over. The book itself is a form of the adaptation it celebrates. Taking note of the aesthetic content hidden in plain view by the side of the road is a
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