« Art Critics' Reading List
ERIC CROSBY
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Eric Crosby is Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he has been on staff since 2009. He recently co-curated “Painter Painter” and “The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg,” which toured to the New Museum in New York and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He is currently working on a collections-based exhibition that surveys the “expanded arts” of the 1960s and 1970s. His curatorial projects for the Walker have also included “A Shot in the Dark” (2010), “Tacita Dean: Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS… (six performances, six films)” (2010), and “Artists’ Cinema” (ongoing). |
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Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, eds. The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. For this volume, Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner have assembled a range of contemporary perspectives on the space, function and practice of the studio. I keep coming back to this book, not because it provides a neat picture of this often romanticized notion in our post-studio context, but rather for its many contradictions and disagreements sparked by some 50 contributions by artists, historians and curators. More than a fixed, practiced space for making, the contemporary studio emerges here as a constructed space of self-presentation, a stage set and a site of display. Daniel Buren’s 1971 text “The Function of the Studio,” which is reprinted, takes on renewed salience, while other artists of a younger generation do much to push the conversation beyond dogma into more creative directions, revealing new frictions between their many spaces of making and art’s increasingly dispersed contexts.
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Suzanne P. Hudson. Robert Ryman: Used Paint. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2009. Suzanne Hudson’s much needed book-length study of Robert Ryman’s art focuses squarely on the practice of painting and in doing so illuminates a life’s work rooted in formal invention, pragmatism and doubt. With prose that weaves together biography, cultural history and keen formal analysis, Hudson persuasively characterizes Ryman’s work as a form of problem solving, which is a refreshing turn for an artist often wedged between opposing histories of postwar painting. Perhaps most interesting is Hudson’s assertion of MoMA’s institutional history and Deweyan pedagogy as formative for the artist. (Ryman was a gallery guard at the museum in the 1950s and availed himself to the occasional class.) Without overdetermining this aspect of his biography, Hudson goes on to offer a sustained reading of the work that is as sensitive to context and discourse as it is to form and process. Required reading for anyone trying to “do something” with paint.
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Tan Lin. Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2010. Wearing its Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data on its cover like a title, Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking is a book of poetry in search of a format—or perhaps more accurately, in search of an operating system. At first, much of its content seems random and distantly appropriated, with the look and feel of metadata and/or marginalia. It also has an environmental, even ambient, quality that is able to prompt very different kinds of reading, simultaneously spanning disparate genres and media. (The title page offers a telling subtitle: Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Theory Film Photo Landscape.) And in these different readings an inexhaustible book takes shape, one that offers an unexpected comfort in its wash of information and overlapping formats.
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