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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 709.04
EAN num: 9780974364827
ISBN number: 0974364827
Label: Gregory R. Miller & Company
Manufacturer: Gregory R. Miller & Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 160
Printing Date: May 31, 2006
Publishing house: Gregory R. Miller & Company
Release Date: August 15, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 968439
Studio: Gregory R. Miller & Company
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Entertaining, lyrical, and informative, Art Life is a selection of essays by well-known contemporary art curator Lawrence Rinder, all written since 1991. Rinder's work is distinguished by a concern for art s role in reflecting and shaping daily life. Informed by history, philosophy, and popular culture, these essays provide keys to understanding a broad range of contemporary practices-from painting and drawing to net art and video installation. In each of these texts, Rinder muses on how the intersection of material, image, and idea creates meaning in some of the most compelling artworks of the past few decades. Among the many artists discussed are Luc Tuymans, Sophie Calle, Martin Creed, Ara Peterson, Jim Drain, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Lombardi, Jack Smith, and Irit Batsry. All of the essays in Art Life are unified by Rinder's clear writing style--seamlessly interspersed with a selection of images--and his consistent engagement with the experience of art and art s relevance to our daily lives. Ideal for scholars and students alike.
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Rated by buyers -
Lawrence Rinder is one of the essential art writers of our time and place, and I hope his burgeoning career as a novelist doesn't lead to a diminishing of his activities in this area. Indeed one might have predicted that his spinning gyres would eventually spin out over the cloud cuckoo land of fiction, for his gifts have always been true to the service of storytelling, and many of the reports and analyses collected in ART LIFE pack the punch of little novels. The hallmark of his writing is this narratological stamp, and often an essay will begin with an anecdote, or what seems like one until it's further unpacked. His piece about the Bay Area-based quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins thus takes into account of the suppositions of others that she doesn't exist. (Perhaps a made-up entity like Lonelygirl 15.) There's a whimsical, Finian's Rainbow touch to his prose, until the implications of Tompkins' putative invisibility kick in and a grave eloquence attends the remainder of the essay.
He has always been one to find the interesting object in a farflung field, and his essays have sometimes the ring of an art world Charles Kuralt turning one folksy byway after another. Something of his adventurous spirit animates his account of Fort Thunder, the artists' collective in Olneyville, on the west side of Providence (RI) that flourished from 1995 through 2002, when it produced a controversial installation for the 2002 Whitney Biennial (under Rinder's administration). As he paints it, in its heyday Fort Thunder was a genuinely democratic and messy space where anarchy played hay with conventional artmaking practice, attaining Gramscian status as a temporary autonomous zone of free creation (if an selfconsciously masculinist one). Then the New York art world came calling, tentatively at first, then with a flood and drowned the buzz, at any rate turning the individual artists into individuals (whose pieces might be sold for more money more often). Ever since Guinevere and Lancelot broke up the Knights of the Round Table, we've seen this scenario hundreds of times, but it will always have piquancy, and Rinder doesn't waste of drop of that precious stuff. Of course the situation is complicated by Rinder's own active part in creating the drama; rarely has a narrator been so implicated in the mechanics of a scene; it's like imagining OTHELLO as re-told from Iago's point of view--a golden-tongued and suave Iago--but of course that was Iago in the very first place; let us say, a genial, progressive Iago.
If regionalism has triumphed in recent years it is because writers and curators like Rinder have charted out new mapways, paying their dues in pastures new. Like Clark Gable, Rinder's got a weakness for the saucy French gamine immortalized in cinema by the late Claudette Colbert, so Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle are favored here with personal essays. Too bad Readers Digest isn't running their series any more, "The Most Unforgettable Frenchwoman I Have Known." I don't know what has been more exciting for me, as a colleague and friend of Rinder's for some years--experiencing all his discoveries in the very first place, in individual spurts, or seeing the way they all stack up in one book, the sheer weight of where he's been and the things he's allowed us to see. Some of his theories I've held back from endorsing, and I still can't see that Luc Tuysmans is better understood after application of Stephen King's how-to manual DANSE MACABRE. But whatever it took, Rinder deserves credit for making Tuysmans' painting better known here in the USA. So much of ART LIFE is now part of history that, as a corrective, may I gently suggest reading this book as one might a romance, perhaps a postmodern equivalent of something like Hawthorne's WONDER BOOK? Like romance, it is about the nostalgia for the lost object (as Jean Nouvel defines the whole practice of architecture), and like romance, it is about the return of that which one had believed dead, hidden, occluded, or stolen. Rinder remarks that "Most people think they have to choose between reality and fantasy." We do have to make a choice, but we can choose the notorious "D) all of the above."
Rated by buyers -
A spendidly illustrated critique written in sometimes overly barquo prose but always knowlagable.
Rated by buyers -
Lawrence Rinder's much-awaited collected essays are the brilliant harvest of an increasingly rare species: the art person that loves needs and cares for art and the artists, unaffected by trends, markets and powers. Absent of "Art Life" are Top 40's, artists-du-jour, untruthfulness and the usual suspects of present-day art criticism. Also out is the unattainable academic language, the snootiness and the footnotes-by-the-pound. Instead, the dive into Rinder's approachable, intelligent writings is one of discovery: of artists we never heard of, exhibitions we would have loved to see and a writer-curator whose prose and acuteness make us fall in love with contemporary art and criticism all over again, just when we thought we would never more. Lawrence Rinder writes about the art that touches his heart, and that alone makes "Art Life" a painfully needed collection of sincere words and straightforward thinking. Art and Life as they should ideally be.
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