James Welling - Böcker

For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. Diary/Landscape was the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist, and it also set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans - a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling's close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction.A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, Diary/Landscape reintroduces history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. The book is published to accompany the first-ever complete exhibition of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist's studio. Examples are abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a 'factory', artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices. "The Studio Reader" pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist's practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually - at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines.A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, "The Studio Reader" reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit.