FANNY HOWE ~

Fanny Howe
Second Childhood
Graywolf, 2014

POSTCARD 48 ~

Logging diesel truck western style

 hauling logs on mountain roads

Eastman studios, Susanville, CA

KURT SCHWITTERS ~

352 pages | 22 color plates, 98 halftones | 7 x 10 | Chicago © 2013

German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile.

Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.

Michael White, University of York

“A surprising and penetrating account of ‘Merz,’ this book gives Schwitters his rightful place at the very heart of the theorization of modernism and offers one of the most illuminating accounts I have come across of the implications of his practice for the intersections of art and identity.”

Nancy J. Troy, Stanford University

“This is a powerful and exceptionally articulate treatment of a complex and fascinating artist whose work is diverse and often eccentric, but also important and extraordinarily influential in its time and after. No other scholar has granted Schwitters’s late work the depth of appreciation and importance that Luke accords the output of this period. She brings to this project a keen sensitivity to the formal issues that lie at the heart of Schwitters’s work and ideas across his entire career. Her book makes a significant contribution to the literature on Schwitters and should be read by scholars and students of both modern and postmodern art.”

Ralph Ubl, University of Basel

“This book joins rigorous scholarship and rich close readings, providing readers with a compelling and comprehensive new interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’s artistic, literary, and theoretical work. But it does much more than that. Questioning the art-historical preference for beginnings, it looks at Dada, constructivism, and other crucial moments of avant-garde art from the viewpoint of the aging and exiled artist. This change of perspective offers a lesson of far-reaching significance for our increasingly dis- tant take on twentieth-century art: that modernism itself persevered and thrived thanks to engaging deeply with its own increasingly remote past.”

http://vimeo.com/35864477

THE DRAWINGS OF LAURIE LIPTON ~

The Drawings of Laurie Lipton

Last Gasp, 2013
 

http://www.laurielipton.com/

POSTCARD 47 ~

"Old Cabin"

Red Rock Country

Sedona, Arizona

oil painting by
 William Mewhinney

ANA MENDIETA'S TRACES ~

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985)

Traces

edited by Stephanie Rosenthal

Hayward Publishing, 2013


http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/ana-mendieta/

IVAN ALBRIGHT ~

Once upon a time, between train rides, we caught this show in Chicago. I wouldn't find the catalog to the show until many years later, on the bottom of a slush pile, a little damp worn, all intact. I'm having a little trouble shooting this short film since I'm holding the camera in one hand and moving the book around with the other. The river is spring gorged and rainy outdoors rushing by. The very first time I saw an Albright painting was again passing through a northern town, maybe Hanover, New Hampshire that time, and the paintings were up on display and they were thickly gaudy wonders of immense power. Daring. Meant to be neglected. Coming forth after a long time of neglect. Albright could have been someone Rembrandt would have talked to. Here's a bit of his world passing by the camera.

once in vermont films 2014 © bob arnold

 

 

 

FRANK O'HARA'S LUNCH ~

The great book. Now re-issued in its original format by its original publisher but for the first time in hardback with all its glory orange shining off the bookshelf. John Ashbery offers a short introduction which somehow could have done better. Beside the poems, still fresh as bananas, is the facsimile correspondence between publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Frank O' Hara at the back of the book, which includes O'Hara's polite request for Ferlinghetti to reconsider putting the gem poem "Personal Poem" back into the final manuscript. He did. 

Frank O'Hara

Lunch Poems

City Lights 2014

Personal Poem

Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I’m happy for a time and interested

I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I’d like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so

1959

JOHN ASHBERY ~

edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie

Farrar, 2014

THE DAY JACK KEROUAC DIED ~

https://ia600304.us.archive.org/34/items/JeanShepherd1969/1969_10_28_Jack_Kerouac.mp3

KYOTO ~

KYOTO
the forest within the gate
Heian-Kyo Media / White Pine Press
2013

Edith Shiffert, poems
John Einarsen, photographs

LEE MORGAN ~

Here's Lee Morgan (1938-1972), already a veteran jazz trumpeter at age 21, joined on his eighth album with a stellar cast in this 1960 recording on the Vee-Jay label. Clifford Jordan on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly flowing on piano, Paul Chambers holding bass and the genius Art Blakey making drums. Morgan was shot to death by his common-law wife Helen More in 1972. The ambulance was reluctant to go into the neighborhood of New York's East Village where Morgan lay wounded and would bleed to death from one shot, in the jazz club called "Slug's Saloon."

Scott Heiser (1949-1993)

Fashion    Circus    Spectacle

photographs

edited by Heather Campbell Coyle

Delaware Art Museum, 2014

http://www.delart.org/exhibits/fashion-circus-spectacle-photographs-by-scott-heiser/

cover: two couples, new york (1985)

GO JOHNNY GO ~

Johnny Winter

(1944 ~ 2014)

40 ACRES AND A BEE ~

BURT SHAVITZ

Burt Shavitz, a founder of Burt’s Bees and the subject of the documentary “Burt’s Buzz,” enjoys a life of seclusion on his property in northern Maine. Credit Jody Shapiro 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/garden/burt-shavitz-the-worlds-most-famous-retired-beekeeper.html?src=dayp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-above-moth-fixed-region&region=c-column-above-moth-fixed-region&WT.nav=c-column-above-moth-fixed-region 

 

 

 

 

DAISY ZAMORA ~

Daisy Zamora (with Jack Hirschman)

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28227935

TSCHIFFELY'S RIDE ~

Aime Tschiffeley

Tschiffeley's Ride

Ten Thousand Miles in the Saddle

From Southern Cross to Pole Star

Skyhorse 2013

MOUNTAINS and RIVERS WITHOUT END ~

Counterpoint, 2013

Gary Snyder

with 3 CDS

over 3 hours of

the poet reading

THE PLACE OF SCRAPS ~

The Place of Scraps

Jordan Abel

Talonbooks, 2013

www.talonbooks.com

FROSTS / ROTH ~

Just finished one of the more interesting Frost documents: Robert and Elinor's correspondence with their children, but mainly Leslie, the prettiest one and the one that best survived. Then I started in on Dieter Roth's DIARIES. I doubt there is a bigger leap between books. Not intentional, it's just the way things came about and no doubt the way I am feeling in the extremes of summer between construction work, or planting flowers. Bee balm is a month ahead. Daylilies aren't as magnificent as last year (what and who is?), the deer have munched down the hosta plants from here to Hanover. They know a second growth comes with the plant and they'll be back to actually munch down the rebirth. Survival of the fittest. Robert Frost. Dieter Roth. 

 

Roth was a mischief-maker at making his own handmade books, as few as 10 per title and he made these like Fruitmarket Gallery has chosen to go to great lengths to make this heavenly volume: grey boards with gauze to strengthen the spine. Simple is best.

Family Letters 

of Robert

 and Elinor Frost

edited by Arnold Grade

State University of New York, 1972

~

Diaries

Dieter Roth

Fiona Bradley, Sarah Lowndes,

Jan Voss, Andrea Buttner, Bjorn Roth 

 Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2012 
Yale University