University of California Press Blog

Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney's Digital Drawings

Lawrence Weschler, whose book True to Life collects 25 years of his conversations with the artist David Hockney, recently spoke to The New York Review of Books about Hockney's recent paintings, upcoming exhibit, and his newest artistic medium, the iPhone.

As Weschler notes, Hockney has been especially productive over the past few years, creating many large-scale paintings of the English countryside. He has also adopted the iPhone as a pocket-sized canvas, using the Brushes application to create hundreds of vibrant digital sketches of landscapes, sunrises and flowers, that he sends to friends. Comparing these sketches to haikus by an epic poet, Weschler recalls that Hockney has always been on the cutting edge of art and technology.

Listen to the New York Review of Books podcast with Lawrence Weschler, view an audio slide show of David Hockney's iPhone drawings, and read Weschler's New York Review of Books essay.

In 1985, Hockney tried the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program used to create television graphics. The BBC documentary Painting with Light follows Hockney as he creates a digital picture with the Paintbox. The first segment appears below (find parts 2-5 here).

Joan Mitchell Exhibits in Giverny and Paris

Joan Mitchell spent many years in her garden studio in Vétheuil, France, layering color across canvases to create vibrant, evocative works of art. She was one of the most influential and accomplished Abstract Expressionist painters, but received comparably little recognition during her life, and to many she remains an enigma. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell explores Mitchell's life through her work, tracing the ways her art captures and preserves long-ago landscapes, experiences, and emotions. Her paintings are windows into her world, and through them we can glimpse her radiant and compex inner life.

The Musée des Impressionismes in Giverny, France (near Vétheuil) will exhibit Joan Mitchell's paintings from August 23, 2009 until October 31, 2009. Her work is also currently on display through May 24, 2010 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as part of the museum’s elles@centrepompidou exhibition of 20th century women artists.

The Ethics and Aesthetics of Anonymous Photography

 

   
"Enthusiasm, patience and sunblock" is what Robert Flynn Johnson credits with keeping him going in the never-ending search for anonymous photographs. On June 24, the author of The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs talked with host Scott Shafer on KQED Radio about the aesthetics and ethics of said "accidental art".

Listen Now:

Often sifting through hundreds of images at flea markets and estate sales before coming across a striking image, Johnson belies a passion that transcends his position as Curator Emeritus for the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Over the years, he's collected a number of "friends in low places," to help him with his search.

Because these photos were taken by anonymous photographers of (mostly) anonymous subjects, they don't carry any inherent value. Rather, their attraction lies in their furnishing of "raw material for one's imagination," which allows the viewer to create a story befitting her personal whims.

Beyond a dispassionate viewer's initial attraction to an anonymous photo, there crouches a deeper ethical dilemma. Photographs are precious, meant to mark important moments: birth, death, marriage. And so Johnson reminds us that to find these mementos stuffed into boxes at a vintage shop indicates a rupture that lead to their abandon.

Johnson brings up an interesting dilemma.

While he is clearly dedicated to the art of photography and recognizes the power of accidental masterpieces by unidentified shutter-clickers, there remains the question of respect for the people who lost these photos.

In guise of mute response, the author includes a photo of his own mother, taken back in 1917 by a nameless photographer, in his book. In this manner, he puts his own family up for public viewing along with many unknowns.

Like slowing down to scrutinize a car crash, The Face in the Lens furnishes powerful imagery for the curious voyeur.

An exhibition of 50 photos from Robert Flynn Johnson's private collection is currently on display at Modernism, through late August, located at 685 Market Street.

Ivey wins NAMM's Lifetime Achievement Award

Last week Bill Ivey won the prestigious NAMM "Music for Life" award, the association's highest honor. Ivey, part of the Obama/Biden transition team, former head of the NEA, of Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy, and of the Country Music Foundation defies almost all stereotypes of a high-ranking arts administrator.

A folklorist and ethnomusicologist by training, Ivey’s background is in popular and vernacular art, not the classical European high art tradition. He sees quilting, the blues, and gospel as expressions of cultural heritage as important when conceiving of American art as painting, symphonies, and the opera. When asked about this egalitarian definition of art in an interview with Charlie Rose, Ivey laughed and said “Being a folklorist is both a scholarly pursuit and something of an emotional commitment.”

Ivey is nothing if not committed to the ideal that in order to honor the many different cultures that make up the American landscape the artistic traditions associated with each of those traditions. Listening to him describe the role of art in culture, the lines between highbrow and lowbrow all but disappear.

Also surprising is Ivey’s portrayal of art in today’s economically beleagured landscape as a viable industry. He has made the case that adding arts funding to the economic stimulus plan is not a luxurious frivolity, but necessary for combating the growing unemployment amongst the nation’s 2 million working artists. He bristles at the suggestion “That an arts worker is not a real worker, and that a carpenter who pounds nails framing a set for an opera company is a less real carpenter than one who pounds nails framing a house.” Ivey points to the music and film industries as a prime example of arts that are significantly profitable industries. Much like FDR’s Works Progress Administration did during the Great Depression, Ivey want to make it a priority to put artists back to work.

But Ivey’s concept of arts is not wholly in terms of profitability. He sights the theater as a prime example of a field well balanced between a self-sustaining economic models, like Broadway, and a non-profit models, community theaters for example, that focus on fostering a thoughtful cultural heritage. The art that is profitable is not always that which pushes the envelope or preserves cultural values. But preservation and experimentation need not be exclusive of profitability. Miami’s expansive art fair, Art Basel, is a prime example of the meeting between cutting edge art and lucrative investments.

Ivey advocates the role of government in arts need to expand past being narrowly concerned with keeping up funding in the public, non-profit sector, to overseeing issues that seriously impact for profit art industries. Tax law, copyright law, media ownership deregulation, and the value of cultural diplomacy art at the top of his list of topics that need be addressed by the national government, if it is to play a vital role in culture.

 Perhaps it is not an overstatement to say that Ivey is exactly the national administrator and advocate American culture needs right now; pragmatic, inclusive, incisive, and diplomatic.

 

To read more about Ivey’s views on art and culture in America, order his book "Arts, Inc." today on ucpress.edu and save 20%.  Use code 09W6936 in the shopping cart at checkout.

The Living Legacy of West Virginia Coal Mining

Ever since companies began extracting coal from the West Virginia hills, coal mining has been a way of life in many parts of the state. Generation after generation of miners descended into the earth in the morning and emerged again at twilight, covered with coal dust. This work fueled the American economy for many decades, but it also inflicted deep wounds on the region. Protesters have campaigned against the environmental costs of mining methods like mountaintop removal, including a recent high-profile protest during which actress Daryl Hannah and others were arrested, putting West Virginia coal mining in the international spotlight.

There are human costs as well, and according to West Virginia University’s Dr. Michael Hendryx, these costs far outweigh the economic benefits to the region. On June 26, Steve Curwood, host of the Public Radio International program Living on Earth interviewed Hendryx, the author of a new study that assesses the economic toll of coal mining on a community. Hendryx's research in West Virginia shows that 10,000 excess deaths occur per year in mining areas than in non-mining areas. He estimates that the actual dollar value per year of those lost lives is between $42 and $80 billion, while the coal industry brings only about $8 billion yearly to the region. The study attributes these excess deaths to higher rates of poverty, environmental exposures, and pollution in mining communities. Listen to the interview and read a transcript at the Living on Earth website.

In a region long defined by the coal industry, mining work is increasingly hard to find, as new methods require fewer workers. In some areas, left economically crippled by the changing times, life is marked by chronic poverty, that passes through the generations like the mining jobs once did. Ken Light and Melanie Light, in the documentary tradition of James Agee and Walker Evans, visited West Virginia's forgotten towns and rambling hills, interviewing and photographing the people there. The Lights collected stories from retired miners, a city mayor and a coal industry employer, a snake handler, a grandmother who supported her family by restoring and reselling discarded items, and other remarkable residents of all perspectives and backgrounds. In their book Coal Hollow, the people of the West Virginia coal mining legacy tell their own stories, in their own voices, and together they paint a stark and moving living history. This video segment includes some of the striking images from the book, an interview with photographer Ken Light, and indigenous music and interview excerpts recorded by Melanie Light.

Pop L.A. Wins 2009 Eldredge Prize

Cécile Whiting's book Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (2006) is the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's 2009 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. The annual prize honors an American art book, published in the past three years, that exhibits outstanding research and craft and expands the realm of traditional art scholarship. Pop L.A. succeeds with "impeccable yet adventurous research, which invites a reconceptualization of pop art and opens a discussion about a region and a period that needed further exploration," the Smithsonian said.

In the sixties, Los Angeles was in the depths of awkward adolescence; it was a nebula of suburbs searching for an orbital center, aware that it was different but unsure exactly how. Critics dismissed L.A.'s art scene as the superficial sister of the New York art world, a sun-drenched haven of popular culture where artists went to waste time. Cécile Whiting shows how artists like David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Llyn Foulkes, Allan Kaprow, and Dennis Hopper defied these clichés and transformed the city from formless void into a distinct artistic and urban environment. Whiting examines "Pop" as a sense of place rather than an art style, and reveals how L.A. artists were connected not by the gallery but by their surroundings: the beach, the mountains, the highways, the dilapidated buildings and suburban sprawl, the sun glaring off a billboard, the scratch-the-surface world of Hollywood. By reimagining and representing the many faces of Los Angeles in their work, artists inked over the city's penciled outline and built its enduring urban identity.

The Eldredge Prize carries a $3,000 award, and the winner presents the annual Eldredge Prize Lecture. Whiting will deliver the 2009 lecture, titled "California War Babies: Picturing World War II in the 1960's," on December 3 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Previous Eldredge Prize winners from UC Press include Rebecca Zurier's Picturing the City, Elizabeth Johns's Winslow Homer, David M. Lubin's Shooting Kennedy, Anthony W. Lee's Picturing Chinatown, and The Great American Thing, by Wanda Corn.

New Book Trailer: Elephant Reflections

We invite you to watch our latest book trailer for Elephant Reflections (UC Press, April 2009). Please check back, as we continue to add more book trailers and videos! To view our video library, please visit our UC Press video page or our You Tube Channel. As always, Happy Viewing!

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

By: Alan C. Braddock

I am an Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University in Philadelphia (on leave, academic year 2008-09).  I teach a variety of courses in American art history from the colonial period to the present.  As a scholar, my work strives to produce new ways of seeing and understanding art through interdisciplinary exploration of its historical contexts.  Much of my research so far has focused on realism and the history of anthropology, as embodied in my book Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, just released by UC Press.  In addition, I am now branching into two new areas.  One is ecocriticism, a form of ethical inquiry into the relationship between art and environmental history.  For several years, I have taught an undergraduate course called "Art and Environment in America since 1800," for which I always struggled to find appropriate reading assignments.  Fortunately, that problem is about to be solved, because I've put together my own textbook for the course.  In December, the University of Alabama Press will release A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, a collection of essays by authors from various disciplines that I have co-edited with Christoph Irmscher, Professor of English at Indiana University.  Another new area of interest for me is the impact of modern warfare on American artists, particularly in altering their ways of seeing and addressing the beholder, from the Civil War to World War I.  With that in mind, I'm working on another book titled Gun Vision: The Ballistic Imagination in American Art from Homer to O'Keeffe, which I expect to complete later this year.

My book, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, is the first to examine a major American artist in relation to the pluralist concept of 'cultures,' which began to emerge consistently in the writings of anthropologist Franz Boas and his students after 1900.  It was only after Eakins died (in 1916) that the 'culture concept' acquired wide currency.  My book demonstrates that Eakins was "premodern" in the sense that he never encountered or comprehended that concept, meaning that recent scholarly claims about his 'cultural' perspective are imprecise and anachronistic.  Eakins understood human diversity in terms of race, nation, gender, class, and religion, not 'cultural' behavior.  Consequently, my book implicitly demands that we use the word 'cultural' more carefully and historically when describing other past artists.  With that in mind, given the focus of my book on one painter from Philadelphia (albeit a very important one), I would be interested to learn from readers of this blog what other artists - American or not - might provide interesting case studies along these lines.  Winslow Homer?  Mary Cassatt?  Paul Gauguin?  Aaron Douglas?

Q&A with author, Lawrence Weschler

On Tuesday, February 17, 2009, Kenneth Baker, a San Francisco Chronicle Art Critic, did a question and answer session with UC Press author, Lawrence Weschler. Below, is a re-posting of the session.

Special thanks to Kenneth Baker and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Most people probably still associate Lawrence Weschler with the New Yorker, where many of his most-read essays - including some collected in his two new books - first appeared. But Weschler quit the New Yorker eight years ago. He now directs the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, while serving as artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Weschler, who turned 57 on Friday, came to the Bay Area to talk about his two books of interviews, "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees," with light and space artist Robert Irwin, and "True to Life," with painter David Hockney. The University of California Press has just released both in paperback.

Q: Aside from their being great talkers, why did these two artists get such attention from you?

A: I was working at UCLA in the mid-'70s, and while editing an interview with Irwin ... I sent him a note asking if he had ever read Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "The Primacy of Perception." This happened to be the first time in his life that he wanted to read philosophy, so he was at my door the next day, and we had lunch together for the next three years. ...

Then the Irwin book came out, and I got a call from David Hockney, who said, "I read this book. I disagree with everything in it, but I can't stop thinking about it, so why don't you come up here and we'll talk about it?" He happened to be doing his Polaroid photo collages and invited me to write a text about them, republished in "True to Life," which is quite consciously a refutation of the Irwin book.

Irwin read that book and called me up and said, "Bull-." ... And this has been going on for 25 years without them ever talking with each other.

Q: Is there any subject you wouldn't take on?

A: There really isn't. Well ... who was that historian who was given exclusive access to Ronald Reagan for the official biography? I remember the day he got that job, I thought, "That poor guy; he's going to go insane." And he did; the book came out and it was completely insane. So I think to safeguard my sanity, I would not take on the exclusive authorized biography of George W. Bush.

Q: What's the last great book about art - not by you - that you've read?

A: It turns out that English lit professors write great books about art that don't get read by art historians. Edward Snow's book about Vermeer is a great book. His book about Brueghel is even better - 15 years of looking at one painting. It is so smart. And then Richard Halpern wrote a book on Norman Rockwell that takes Rockwell seriously, claiming that Rockwell's much more sophisticated than he's given credit for. I did a whole conference around the book at NYU, which was called "Shocked! Shocked! Just How Many Times Can This Country Lose Its Innocence?" It turned out to be about Abu Ghraib.

Q: Do you have another book about art under way?

A: I am going to be doing a book called "The Ones That Got Away," which will be a kind of anti-memoir of all the pieces I've meant to write but have never got around to writing, a kind of subjunctive case memoir.

UC Press Podcast Featuring, Lawrence Weschler and Aaron Glantz

We are pleased to announce that Episode 10 of the UC Press podcast series is now available. In January's episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews two journalists.

First, he interviews Lawrence Weschler, who is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Converations with Robert Irwin. Then he interviews independent journalist, Aaron Glantz, author of The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans.

You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at www.ucpress.edu/podcast or on the individual book pages using the embedded player.

Listen to an interview with Lawrence Weschler, author of True to Life and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.

Listen to an interview with Aaron Glantz, author of The War Comes Home.