Two new DVDs from the Quay Brothers.
Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers ( Video Quay .P43 2007 DVD ) is a new two-disc set containing thirteen of their classic short films in brand-new, restored and remastered editions (personally supervised by the Quays), plus a collection of footnotes including new audio commentaries, extensive interviews, alternative versions, unrealized pilot projects and more.
Produced by Terry Gilliam, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes ( Video Quay .P53 2007 DVD ) is the breathtakingly beautiful and long-awaited second feature film from the Quay Brothers. On the eve of her wedding, the beautiful opera singer Malvina (Amira Casar) is mysteriously “killed” and abducted by the malevolent Dr. Droz (Gottfried John). Felisberto (Cesar Sarachu), an innocent piano tuner, is summoned to Droz’s secluded villa to service his strange musical automatons. Little by little Felisberto learns of the doctor’s plans to stage a “diabolical opera”—and of Malvina’s fate. He secretly conspires to rescue her, only to become trapped himself in the web of Droz’s perverse universe. You can watch the preview here.
“From its beginnings as a royal fortress to the magnificent structure we see today, the Louvre Museum embodies the concept of that of a universal institution. Dedicated to conservation, restoration and the development of artistic treasures from all over the world, the Louvre welcomes over 6 million visitors through its doors each year and houses 35,000 works of art.
From 
connection between post-impressionist master Paul Cézanne — credited by many as the father of modern art — and his native Provence, illuminating how the region and its history fostered the painter’s genius. Featuring footage of some of the same locales made timeless by Cézanne and his work, Cézanne in Provence was inspired by the major international exhibition of the same name.
From PBS’s 
Travelling around the country, Art City: Simplicity takes viewers on a revealing trip into the studios and lives of a group of singular artists. On a desert mesa outside Santa Fe, Richard Tuttle invents his mysterious and marvellously humble forms, made of wire, cardboard, wood. In Taos, Agnes Martin rhythmically repeats extremely simplified images. Near the Santa Monica surf, John Baldessari, aims for successful juxtapositions of photographs and text. In his North Hollywood living room, Robert Williams revels in surreal cartoon imagery. At a cabin in Woodstock, Joan Snyder refines her sensuous art amid a lush forest. Mike Bidlo salutes Duchamp in a SoHo Gallery, while on Sunset Boulevard, Amy Adler reclaims personal history through self-portraits. Through this group of memorable iconoclasts, the creative ìactî is there to see and study. Along with writer Dave Hickey, and others, Simplicity addresses artists’ relations with the press, feelings about showing oneís work, distilling concepts into an essence, and what it means to succeed in the artworld.
Many artists use the pain, exhilaration and resolution of private desires to express themselves. Art City: A Ruling Passion focuses on intense personalities who’ve used their art to explore the emotional impact of psychological truths. Everything that Louise Bourgeois creates – whether in marble, fabric or bronze – comes from memory. Michael Ray Charles investigates the marketing of black memorabilia, using early American advertising imagery. Elizabeth Peyton reinvents portraiture, using her friends as subjects, as well as pop culture royalty. Ed Ruscha’s literary landscapes burst from the physical world ìright outside the window.î The comic spirit of Lari Pittman contrasts with his graphic declarations. In a landmark house, Richmond Burton remembers his dreams to build “psychic fields” of abstraction. The arrays of featureless faces by David Deutsch are stimulated by sub-conscious sensations. Along with writer Dave Hickey and others, A Ruling Passion plumbs issues that affect artists – preoccupations of startling universality – like community, motivation and controversy, finding oneís audience, and just ìgetting it right.
This Tuesday at 6:30 pm, the 
Okwui Enwezor, Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute and past Artistic Director of Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002, the catalogue traces the formal and conceptual transformation of Campos-Pons’ work in relation to contemporary aesthetic practices and serves as a resource for specialists in the field of contemporary, African Diasporic, Caribbean, and African American art and culture. The hardcover catalogue is 184 pages in length and features 58 color and 7 black-and-white illustrations.
because I create my pictures with the remains and dead parts of other artists’ works.” So says the rising London painter, Glenn Brown, while essayist Tom Morton likens Brown’s canvases to a zombie comedy. Thus, “Theater” is a half-length portrait of a skeleton whose bones resemble a slimy organic mass of meat, paste and raspberry ice cream, while the sad mutant heads in “Asylums of Mars” and “The Hinterland” look as if they were bred in a mad geneticist’s laboratory. In this monograph, six recent works are presented on deluxe tipped-in color plates, each accompanied by a detail that reveals Brown’s technique: the artist fills his grounds with flowing whirlpools of shifting colors–but what initially look like thick brushstrokes are revealed upon closer examination to be very thin layers of paint that could almost be mistaken for photographs or digitally manipulated prints.”
show in Boston in 1964. The following year she was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and others, in the First International Girlie Exhibit, a survey of the influence of the “pinup girl” on contemporary art at the recently opened Pace Gallery in New York. I am the Beautiful Stranger reexamines the distinct contributions Drexler made as the Pop Art Movement was coalescing. As early as 1960, Drexler was using the icons of Pop Culture as the organizing subject matter of her work. Images of gangster B-movies, tabloid journalism, and pulp detective novels were collaged directly onto the canvases and then entirely “re-painted” to create the kind of graphically transformed and narratively intensified work associated with the great pioneers of art in the early sixties. Drexler went on to hone her technique to powerfully expose society’s raw nerves in her emotionally charged, ambiguous scenes of sex, violence and the isolation of man in the 20th century.
story of Pinocchio written by Carlo Collodi, an author and journalist, first appeared in 1881 as a serial in an Italian newspaper. The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet became a book in 1883 and the celebrated Walt Disney film version premiered in 1941. Since he was six years old and saw the Disney adaptation, Dine has been fascinated with the subject. A little more than twenty years later the artist bought a figurine of the puppet and he has continually explored the subject in the decades since through photographs, drawing, sculpture, and painting. Jim Dine: Pinocchio is a culmination of this investigation. The new work represents Dine’s most physical exploration of the subject and perhaps his most radical treatment of material in a series.
politics, reclaiming ‘aesthetics’ from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, the relationship between history and fiction, utopias, the avant-garde and the three aesthetic regimes which constitute the ‘partitions of the sensible.’ Already translated into five languages, this English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics includes a new afterword by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere.”
context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the “affective” quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. 
Are viewers inured–or incited–to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In 
research and entertaining anecdotal material, Guffey unearths the roots of the term “retro” and chronicles its evolving manifestations in culture and art throughout the last century. Whether in art, design, fashion, or music, the idea of retro has often meant a reemergence of styles and sensibilities that evoke touchstones of memory from the not-so-distant past, ranging from the drug-induced surrealism of psychedelic art to the political expression of 1970s afros. Guffey examines how and why the past keeps coming back to haunt us in a variety of forms, from the campy comeback of art nouveau nearly fifty years after its original decline, to the infusion of art deco into the kitschy glamor of pop art, to the recent popularity of 1980s vogue. She also considers how advertisers and the media have employed the power of such cultural nostalgia, using recycled television jingles, familiar old advertising slogans, and famous art to sell a surprising range of products. 
English has no word for the visual counterpart to literacy, Heffernan argues that the capacity to interpret pictures must be cultivated and deserves a name: picturacy. Using examples such as the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, film versions of Frankenstein, the provocative photographs of Sally Mann, and the abstract canvases of Gerhard Richter, the volume illustrates how learning to decode the language of pictures resembles the process of learning to read. While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art. 
speculates on the allure of these and other iconic images of the Kennedys, using them to illuminate the entire American cultural landscape. He draws from a spectacularly varied intellectual and visual terrain–neoclassical painting, Victorian poetry, modern art, Hollywood films, TV sitcoms–to show how the public came to identify personally with the Kennedys and how, in so doing, they came to understand their place in the world. This heady mix of art history, cultural history, and popular culture offers an evocative, consistently entertaining look at twentieth-century America. 
shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions. Exploring these artists’ work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.
Drucker’s “sweet dream” is for a new and more positive approach to contemporary art. Calling for a revamping of the academic critical vocabulary used to discuss art into one more befitting current creative practices, Drucker argues that contemporary art is fully engaged with material culture—yet still struggling to escape the oppositional legacy of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation—all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism’s avant-garde. At the cutting edge of new media research, Drucker surveys a wide range of exciting contemporary artists, demonstrating their clear departure from the past and petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well. 
A Very Short Introduction to Poststructuralism (
A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism (
Jeff Wall’s ( 
The Museum of Modern Art and Creative Time, the New York-based public art organization, jointly commissioned Doug Aitken to create the artist’s first large-scale public artwork in the United States. The project (Sleepwalkers) was also the first to bring art to MoMA’s exterior walls, with continuous sequences of film scenes projected onto seven facades outside the museum, including those overlooking The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Inspired by the densely built environment of New York’s midtown, the artist will create a cinematic art experience that directly integrates with the architectural fabric of the city while simultaneously enhancing and challenging viewers’ perceptions of public space.
The book Sleepwalkers ( 
Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella
Gerhard Richter: Portraits
Heribert C. Ottersbach: Works 1995-2006
Idyll: Illusion and Delusion
Simply the most complete view to date of the work of this preeminent figure in the art of our time, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years ( 
than 80 medieval sculpted heads, half from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and half selected loans from American and European collections. Because historical events isolated these objects from their original settings, they became objects that could be collected, and objects whose lost histories curators and scholars would hope to recover. The exhibition considers several artistic and historic themes, including: the destruction of statues as an act of iconoclasm, the evolving notions of the “portrait,” the use of science in the search for provenance, and more. Created from materials as diverse as marble, limestone, polychromed wood, and silver gilt, the carved heads date from the third century A.D. through the early 1500s and represent French, German, Italian, Spanish, Byzantine, English, and other medieval sculptural traditions. The exhibition draws together science, connoisseurship, archaeology, and history to examine these stunning works from different points of reference. The Met’s webpage for this exhibition (including images and audiofiles) can be found 
The Radical Theatre of Alfred Leslie ( 
Organized by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), Vermillion Editions Limited: Prints, Multiples, Artist’s Books, 1977–1992 (
L’Odysee de Jim Dine — A Survey of Printed Works from 1985-2006 ( 
Contributors give context, analyze the national audience created by special exhibition programs, and offer case studies ranging from Canada’s printmaking program during World War I to prints of rural Southern women and the early lithographs of Yasuo Kumiyoshi. They cover precisionism in the 1920s and 1930s, the scene above and below the streets of New York, the Syracuse printmakers, and the memories of Herbert Pullinger, Abe Blashko, Mark Freeman and Charles Keller.
