« Art Critics' Reading List
LARA TAUBMAN
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Lara Taubman is a freelance international curator and art critic. She is a correspondent for internationally renowned art journals such as Artnews, Contemporary, Modern Painters and Sculpture Magazine and has written for numerous others. She has curated exhibits at the Heard Museum for Native American Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and also creates exhibits worldwide. She recently closed a three-year exhibit of Abstract Expressionist Art curated through the Art in Embassies Program at the United States Embassy residence in Bucharest, Romania. Although based in and from the United States, Taubman has been actively involved with Romanian contemporary visual art for several years.
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Glenn Adamson. Thinking Through Craft. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007. Glenn Adamson has always approached contemporary visual art from the perspective of medium and craft, as a way to engage those tenuous dialogues between craft and “fine” arts. Thinking Through Craft describes a history of Modernist art that elevates the topic of craft from a practice or a style to a succinct discussion of craft as a concept necessitated in the production of cutting-edge visual art. Adamson carefully broaches taboo questions like: What is the role of craft in the production of contemporary art and what is its inextricable significance at every level of the way that art is created both as a craft object and as a unique “fine” art object? In typical fashion, Adamson handles these difficult, touchy topics with strategically designed kid gloves, structuring his arguments gently and with intelligence. This has been one of the most impressive books on art history and theory I have read in awhile, and I think in historical hindsight, it will go on to occupy an important place in the canons of visual arts writing.
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Lawrence Wechsler. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. By capturing a young, terse Robert Irwin of the nineteen-sixties, Lawrence Weschsler also captures a generation of Los Angeles artists and the environment that inspired them. Invariably, I always re-read this book, or parts of this book at least once a year, recently using it for research on an interview I conducted with Los Angeles artist Edgar Arcenaux. My favorite parts of the book are Wechsler’s descriptions of Irwin’s uniquely bizarre Minimalist installation/performances in the California desert. His secondhand documentation of Irwin’s work continues to relevantly describe the crucial impact of the Los Angeles desert on American art.
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Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
The seminal tomes of Black American literature from the twentieth century have become fascinating critiques on relevance in the Obama era. Ellison’s painful and beautiful book expresses, with frightening reality, the plight of a young black man in the nineteen thirties and forties. Ellison’s insight into his character’s experience through the intricate double world of racism exemplifies what it feels like to be invisible and to go unnoticed in the world. It continues to speak poignantly on behalf of the millions all over the world who continue to fall between the cracks of society.
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