Books by Lucy R. Lippard
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates
by Klaus Ottmann, Dan Mills, Lynn Gamwell, Timothy Morton, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Emma Enderby, Agnes Denes, Giampaolo Bianconi, Renee Gladman, Caroline Jones, Lucy R. Lippard
"Agnes Denes, the queen of land art, made one of New York’s greatest public art projects ever in 1982. Now, the world might be catching up with her." –Karrie Jacobs, New York Times
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates accompanies the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in New York to date, held at The Shed in fall 2019 as part of the arts space’s opening season. Presenting more than 130 works, this comprehensive publication, presented in an embossed slipcase, spans the 50-year career of the path-breaking artist dubbed “the queen of land art” by the New York Times, famed for her iconic Wheatfield―A Confrontation (1982), for which she planted a two-acre wheatfield in Lower Manhattan on the Battery Park Landfill, in the shadow of the then recently erected Twin Towers.
A major undertaking, this superb catalog includes a comprehensive text by the exhibition’s curator, Emma Enderby, an interview with Denes by Hans Ulrich Obrist, essays by prominent scholars and curators including Caroline A. Jones, Lucy R. Lippard and Timothy Morton that examine Denes’ multifaceted practice in new ways, writings by the artist and reflections by curators who have worked with Denes over the course of her career. New works by Denes commissioned by The Shed for the exhibition are presented in a special insert.
Budapest-born, New York–based artist Agnes Denes (born 1931) rose to international attention in the 1960s and 1970s as a leading figure in conceptual, environmental and ecological art. A pioneer of several art genres, she has created work in many mediums, utilizing various disciplines―such as science, philosophy, linguistics, ecology and psychology―to analyze, document and ultimately aid humanity.
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Sol LeWitt
by Lucy R. Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Susanna Singer, John Hogan
Magnificent in scope, design and scholarship, this essential volume is the first comprehensive LeWitt monograph published since the artist's death, and the first overview since 2000. Besides gathering visual documentation of LeWitt's wall drawings and his sculptures-or "structures" as he preferred-the publication also includes his complete writings; spreads from his artist's books; plus interviews and essays by virtually every artist and author closely associated with LeWitt, among them Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham and Robert Smithson. One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, LeWitt at last receives the definitive treatment of his work in this volume.
In his 1967 "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Sol LeWitt set out the fundamental principle of his artistic practice: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.... The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." From the first wall drawing in 1968 until his death in 2007, LeWitt never ceased to develop new "machines," conceiving some 1,200 wall drawings and laying down the foundations of Conceptual and Minimalist art. LeWitt's wall drawings, always installed by assistants, eliminated any intermediary object (such as a canvas) between the work and its support, thereby dovetailing a sensuous material immediacy with a powerful Platonic detachment. His sculptural variations on grids, cubes and pyramids likewise project this moving simplicity and clarity.
Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, where he took art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University he worked as a graphic designer in the office of architect I.M. Pei. In 1976, LeWitt cofounded the artists' book bookstore Printed Matter in New York, with Lucy Lippard. A retrospective of his wall drawings opened to the public in 2008 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where it will remain on view for 25 years.
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Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen
by Lucy R. Lippard, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Andrea Andersson
Vicuña makes art of gathered materials from the ocean, the river and the street
Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean, Chileanborn artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña's (born 1948) artist's book serves as both a lament and love letter to the sea. Vicuña collects the detritus that washes up on shore and assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas―little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire.
About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. In an era of increasing climate change and economic disparity, Vicuña’s nuanced visual poetics―operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile―transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.
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Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West
“A marvelous slim book [that] weaves . . . ideas, facts, images, and histories into a whole about . . . the ecology of the manmade world.” ―Rebecca Solnit
In Undermining, the award-winning author, art historian and social critic Lucy R. Lippard delivers “another trademark work” that combines text and full-color images to explore “the intersection of art, the environment, geography and politics” (Kirkus Reviews).
Working from her own experience of life in a New Mexico village, and inspired by the gravel pits in the surrounding landscape, Lippard addresses a number of fascinating themes―including fracking, mining, land art, adobe buildings, ruins, Indian land rights, the Old West, tourism, photography, and water. In her meditations, she illuminates the relationship between culture, industry, and the land. From threatened Native American sacred sites to the history of uranium mining, she offers a skeptical examination of the “subterranean economy.”
Featuring more than two hundred gorgeous color images, Undermining offers a provocative new perspective on the relationship between art and place in a rapidly shifting society.
“[Lippard’s] strength lies in the depth of [her] commitment―her dual loyalty to tradition and modernity and her effort to restore the broken connection between the two.” ―Suzi Gablik, The New York Times Book Review
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Michael Light: Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain
by Rebecca Solnit, Lucy R. Lippard
Until 2008 Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop in the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered. In this third Radius Books installment of noted photographer Michael Light's aerial survey of the inhabited West, the photographer eschews the glare of the Strip to hover intimately over the topography of America's most fevered residential dream: castles on the cheap, some half-built, some foreclosed, some hanging on surrounded by golf courses gone bankruptcy brown, some still waiting to spring from empty cul-de-sacs. Throughout, Light characteristically finds beauty and empathy amidst a visual vertigo of speculation, overreach, environmental delusion and ultimate geological grace. Janus-faced in design, one side of the book plumbs the surrealities of "Lake Las Vegas," a lifestyle resort comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities built around a former sewage swamp. The other side of the book dissects nearby Black Mountain and the city's most exclusive-and empty -future community where a quarter billion dollars was spent on moving earth that has lain dormant for the past six years. Following the boom and bust history of the West itself, Light's photographs terrifyingly and poignantly show the extraction and habitation industries as two sides of the same coin. Essays by two of the world's most celebrated cultural and landscape thinkers, Rebecca Solnit and Lucy Lippard, offer resonant counterpoint.
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Dadas on Art: Tzara, Arp, Duchamp and Others (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
A protest against the brutality of World War I and a rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics, the Dada movement proclaimed itself as anti-art. In the visual arts, literature, and graphic design, the Dadas shocked and scandalized audiences of the early 1900s with their expressions of disillusionment with politics and society. This select anthology reconstructs the movement's anarchic history and its harsh, vivid spirit by presenting the prose, poetry, and polemic of the artists themselves and their poet friends.
Focusing chiefly on visual artists, this collection ranges from Tristan Tzara's manifesto and Jean Arp's declaration of Dada principles to statements by Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. It features interviews with Hanna Höch and Marcel Duchamp, in addition to articles by Max Ernst, Richard Hülsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Hans Richter, George Grosz, and other prominent figures. Editor Lucy R. Lippard — a well-known feminist art critic, author, and theorist — provides brief biographies for each contributor. These absorbing and provocative insights into Dada philosophy illustrate the movement's enduring vitality and its continuing power to affect modern art.
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