TIM HADFIELD

Tim Hadfield is a British artist, curator and writer who is a professor of media arts at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, where he was the founding head of the department. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Hadfield has lectured at many renowned institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Savannah College of Art & Design, and the University of the Arts and Royal College of Art, both in London. He has curated exhibitions across the U.S. and international projects in Australia, England, Hong Kong, China and Chile. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Great Britain, and in 2010 co-founded the nonprofit Sewickley Arts Initiative.

The Andy Warhol Diaries. Edited by Pat Hackett. First published in 1989 by Warner Books. Penguin Modern Classics, 2010.

It always amazes me how few people have read the Diaries. Covering just over 10 years, from November 1976 to February 1987 and ending only five days before he died, they remain insightful and spookily prescient. Warhol’s iconic quote about the 15 minutes of fame now perfectly fits a description of Twitter and social media. His obsession with fame and celebrity has morphed into ‘reality TV’ and TMZ, while the blurred sexuality and forays into transgender identity couldn’t be more current. Despite working his celebrity so successfully (who didn’t want to meet him?), he nevertheless remained private and enigmatic. His Diaries on the other hand tell all, and we can now untangle Warhol’s many personas; miser, workaholic, pious Catholic, Studio 54 party animal––through the lens of his own words. Dictated daily to his assistant Pat Hackett, frequent entries keep the narrative flowing, while Warhol entertains us with the machinations of the ‘blue chip’ art world, intercut with salacious, gossipy and celebrity-laden stories, in the most significant and informative of his ‘time capsules’.

Derek Jarman. Chroma: A Book of Color. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

British filmmaker Derek Jarman is best known for his independent film work from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and as a fierce, unwavering advocate for gay rights. Infatuated with color since his early training as a painter, Jarman’s Chroma is a dazzling, eccentric distillation of a lifetime’s observations and idiosyncratic musings on the mystery of color. Erudite, literary and witty, it is part confessional, part scholarly and frequently whimsical, interspersed with anecdotes, poetry and reminiscences. Held loosely together by teasingly titled chapters, such as ‘White Lies,’ Green Fingers, How Now Brown Cow, Translucence and Shadow is the Queen of Color, we sense an urgency in the unstructured form, no doubt because of Jarman’s failing health as a result of complications from AIDS. Undaunted, he wrestles this bright gem of optimism for us out of his decline, filling us with a joyous homage to color. When I read snippets from Chroma to my students, Jarman’s irreverent voice calls out from the text with such clarity it’s as if he is reading aloud to us all over my shoulder.

Kunst + Design. Donald Judd Preistrager der Stankowski-Stifung 1993. Berlin: Museum Wiesbaden & Cantz Verlag, 1993.

I’m a catalog freak, and this is the one I most covet, returning to it over and over again for inspiration as well as the purity and integrity of Judd’s exacting tenets. Art + Kunst was published after the artist received Germany’s Stankowski Prize, which comprised a touring exhibition accompanied by this wonderfully researched catalog. Although modest in size, the quality of the photography, layout and printing is superb, articulated with spare, bilingual German and English essays by Franz Meyer, Rudi Fuchs and Renata Petzinger. Published in 1993, it was exactly the right moment to examine how Judd’s frustrations with galleries and museums led to the more site-specific installations at his Spring Street building in New York. From the success of that model flowed the radical move to Marfa, facilitating the purchase of so many properties in which to finally control the precise relationship between site, architecture and installation he demanded for his work and curatorial practice. This catalog captures that extraordinarily influential period, documenting it meticulously well before the Spring Street house was open to the public, or Marfa an annual pilgrimage.