Lawrence Weschler – författare

From the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile."Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism. . . . Piercing and timely."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review"Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result is three gripping profiles of very human but also extraordinary men."—Publishers Weekly"[Weschler's] thorough accounting of the men's covert operations, assumed identities and strained relationships with fathers, wives, and colleagues creates a disturbing triptych of the perils of totalitarianism."—Lance Gould, New York Times Book Review"Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust, concision and compassion."—Francis King, Spectator"Endlessly absorbing. . . . Breathtaking."—Jeri Laber, Los Angeles Times Book Review

During the past fifteen years, one of the most vexing issues facing fledgling transitional democracies around the world--from South Africa to Eastern Europe, from Cambodia to Bosnia--has been what to do about the still-toxic security apparatuses left over from the previous regime. In this now-classic and profoundly influential study, the New Yorker's Lawrence Weschler probes these dilemmas across two gripping narratives (set in Brazil and Uruguay, among the first places to face such concerns), true-life thrillers in which torture victims, faced with the paralysis of the new regime, themselves band together to settle accounts with their former tormentors. "Disturbing and often enthralling."--New York Times Book Review "Extraordinarily moving...Weschler writes brilliantly."--Newsday "Implausible, intricate and dazzling."--Times Literary Supplement "As Weschler's interviewees told their tales, I paced agitatedly, choked back tears...Weschler narrates these two episodes with skill and tact...An inspiring book."--George Scialabba, Los Angeles Weekly

In this text, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J.S.G. Boggs, a young artist with a certain panache, a certain flair, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps, more precisely, value. What Boggs likes to do is to draw money - actual paper notes in the denominations of standard currencies from all over the world - and then to go out and try to spend those drawings. Instead of selling his money drawings outright to interested collectors, Boggs looks for merchants who will accept his drawings in lieu of cash payment for their wares or services as part of elaborately choreographed transactions, complete with receipts and even proper change - an artistic practice which regularly lands him in trouble with treasury around the world. This volume teases out these transactions and their sometimes dramatic legal consequences, following Boggs on a larkish, though at the same time disconcertingly profound, econo-philosophic chase. For in a madcap Socratic fashion, Boggs is raising all sorts of truly fundamental questions - what is it that we value in art, or, for that matter, in money? Indeed, how do we place a value on anything at all?And in particular, why do we, why should we, how can we place such trust in anything as confoundingly insubstantial as paper money? In passing, Weschler frames a concise, highly entertaining history of money itself - from cowrie shells through hedge funds.

In recent years as countries around the globe have begun to move from dictatorial to more democratic systems of governance, no more traumatic (or dramatic) ethical problem has arisen than what to do with the previous regime’s torturers. In most cases, the security and military apparatuses, responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-rights abuses, still retain tremendous power—and will not abide any settling of accounts. Now, New Yorker staff reporter Lawrence Weschler tells the extraordinary story of how, against tremendous odds, torture victims and human-rights activists in two Latin American countries—Brazil and Uruguay—tried to bring their torturers to justice and to rehabilitate their whole societies from harrowing periods of silence and repression. In this first of his two accounts, he tells how a tiny group of torture victims, clerics, and human-rights activists in Brazil launched an extremely risky, nonviolent plot to get even with the former torturers by publishing an indisputable account of their savage system of repression—indisputable because it is drawn from the regime’s own files. In the second, set in Uruguay, he tells how a more broadly-based movement attempted to bring to light the dark history of a military regime engaged in more political incarceration per capita than any other on earth at that time. In this illuminating and beautifully written book (portions of which appeared in five issues of The New Yorker), Weschler examines what a small number of individuals can do to retrieve history and truth from the hands of torturers.

From the master chronicler of the marvelous and the confounding–author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder–here is a much-anticipated new collection of more than twenty pieces from the past two decades, the majority of which have never before been gathered together in book form.Lawrence Weschler is not simply a superb reporter, essayist, and cultural observer; he is also an uncanny collector and connector of wonders. In Vermeer in Bosnia, whether he is reporting on the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars (and noticing, for example, how centuries earlier Vermeer had had to invent the peace and serenity we so prize in his work today from a youth during which all of Europe had been as ravaged as Bosnia) or dissecting the special quality of light in his beloved hometown of Los Angeles, Weschler’s perceptions are often startling, his insights both fresh and profound.Included here is Weschler’s remarkable profile of Roman Polanski–written years before the release of The Pianist, yet all but predicting the director’s confrontation with the Holocaust in that film–alongside an equally celebrated portrait of Ed Weinberger, a young designer crushed and yet hardly bowed by an extreme form of Parkinson’s disease. Here is Weschler limning his own experience as the grandson of an eminent Weimar-era composer, and then as the befuddled father of an eminently fetching daughter. Here is Weschler on Art Spiegelman, David Hockney, Ed Kienholz, and Wislawa Szymborska.Here, in short, are some of the most dazzling pieces from Lawrence Weschler’s own brimming cabinet of marvels.

Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson''s Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science. Illustrations.

When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist 'who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it'. Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned projects - in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum (the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect, Richard Meier) and the design that transformed an abandoned Hudson Valley factory into Dia's new Beacon campus - enhancing what many had already considered the best book ever on an artist.

Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist" Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogs, gathered here for the first time. Weschler chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor - and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around 2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of 'the structure of seeing' itself.

Led by artists Lauren Bon, Richard Nielsen, and Tristan Duke, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio is a team devoted to exploring and expanding the photographic medium. Working with the Liminal Camera, a massive, portable camera obscura fashioned from a shipping container, the Optics Division uses experimental technology in an ongoing effort to map and depict the American landscape. From the arid West to New York's waterways, the camera has captured dramatic scenes of regions in transition. As part of this project, The Liminal Camera presents newly commissioned photographs made in and around Chicago. Though enormous in size, the camera, transported on a semi-trailer truck, was unobtrusive from an outsider's perspective, allowing the artists to work without drawing attention. Photographs could be developed from within the shipping container, blending the image's subject with the process of photography itself. The resulting large-scale prints not only highlight the evolving history of photographic imaging, but also locate the city within a complex global network of transportation systems, industry, and commerce.

The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings - the account of his long-dormant patients miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty.Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks’s capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.

In the past fifty years, contemporary artistic practice has witnessed a surge in phenomenological types of artistic intent and methodology, represented by divergent impulses sharing a desire to channel ephemeral elements, resist categorization, and defy the rarified museum experience. Time-based work is now widely accepted as primary exhibition matter, and in the past ten years, performance art has risen to the mainstream. Defining “experiential art” as work that is immersive, participatory, performative, and kinetic, Strange Pilgrims is an exhibition and accompanying catalogue organized by The Contemporary Austin, weaving fourteen artists into a loose collection of propositions occupying unconventional spaces and formats. The title comes from Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez’s collection of twelve short stories of the same name, riffing on the wandering protagonist as a metaphor for an open-ended journey through strange and unfamiliar spaces.Created in tandem with the exhibition on view in fall 2015 and winter 2016 at The Contemporary Austin’s two sites, as well as a third venue, the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin, this catalogue presents a parallel but stand-alone assemblage of ideas and concepts that respond to and resonate with one another under the broad umbrella of experience and perception. The book features an essay by the curator Heather Pesanti, a guest essay by the scholar Ann Reynolds, and an interview between author and critic Lawrence Weschler and the philosopher Alva NoË. All fourteen artists are represented through individual sections with color plates and explicatory text. In addition, Artist’s Voice sections have been contributed by Roger Hiorns, Trisha Baga and Jessie Stead, and Lakes Were Rivers.

David Opdyke's massive collage This Land (as elucidated in this book by award-winning author Lawrence Weschler) presents a slow-burning satire of the American Dream as it blunders into the reality of climate changeThis Land is an epic mural fashioned by New York artist David Opdyke out of vintage American postcards which he then treated with disconcerting painted interventions. What at first reads as a panoramic bird's-eye view of an idyllic alpine valley reveals itself, upon closer examination, to be an array of connected scenes and vignettes.Across more than five hundred postcards, each one portraying a distinct slice of idealized Americana (town squares, mountain highways, main streets and county seats), Opdyke's acerbic, emotionally jarring alterations gradually become evident.In this prophetic refashioning, forests are aflame, tornadoes torque from one card into the next, a steamboat gets swallowed up whole by some sort of new megafauna, frogs fall like Biblical hail from the sky.The human responses form a cacophony of desires and demands, panic and denial. Biplanes trail banners urging Repent Now!, others insist Legislative Action Would Be Premature, while still others advertise seats on an actual Ark.The book This Land affords readers a closer and closer viewing of Opdyke’s devastatingly sardonic take on our impending ecological future, one in turn enlivened by Lawrence Weschler's vividly sly blend of artist profile and critical interpretation.Featuring introductory essays providing background on the artist and the project as a whole, This Land also divides the sprawling mural into eight sections to allow for a more intimate viewing.Interspersed among the detailed visual sections are insightful thematic essays by Lawrence Weschler and an afterword that serves as a stirring call to action by civil rights attorney Maya Wiley. Additionally, the book's jacket is printed on both sides, folding out to reveal the work in its full grandeur.

Shuttling between cultural comedies and political tragedies, Lawrence Weschler’s articles have throughout his long career intrigued readers with his unique insight into everything he examines, from the ordinary to the extraordinary.Uncanny Valley continues the page-turning conversation as Weschler collects the best of his narrative nonfiction from the past fifteen years. The title piece surveys the hapless efforts of digital animators to fashion a credible human face, the endlessly elusive gold standard of the profession. Other highlights include profiles of novelist Mark Salzman, as he wrestles with a hilariously harrowing bout of writer’s block; the legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, as he is forced to revisit his work on Apocalypse Now in the context of the more recent Iraqi war film Jarhead; and the artist Vincent Desiderio, as he labors over an epic canvas portraying no less than a dozen sleeping figures.With his signature style and endless ability to wonder, Weschler proves yet again that the “world is strange, beautiful, and connected” (The Globe and Mail). Uncanny Valley demonstrates his matchless ability to analyze the marvels he finds in places and people and offers us a new, sublime way of seeing the world.

Among the most beloved sites at the Getty Center, the Central Garden has aroused intense interest from the moment artist Robert Irwin was awarded the commission. First published in 2002, 'Robert Irwin Getty Garden' is comprised of a series of discussions between noted author Lawrence Weschler and Irwin, providing a lively account of what Irwin has playfully termed "a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art." The text revolves around four garden walks: extended conversations in which the artist explains the critical choices he made - from plant materials to steel - in the creation of a living work of art that has helped to redefine what a modern garden can and should be. This updated edition features new photography of the Central Garden in a smaller, more accessible format.

From Pulitzer Prize nominee Lawrence Weschler, a fascinating profile of Walter Murch, a film legend and amateur astrophysicist whose investigations could reshape our understanding of the universe.For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary--a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Though as a consummate outsider he''s had a hard time attracting any sort of comprehensive hearing from professional astrophysicists, Murch has made advances that even some of them find intriguing, including a connection between Titius Bode and earlier notions--going back past Kepler and Pythagorus--of musical harmony in the heavens. Unfazed by rejection, ever probing, Murch perseveres in the highest traditions of outsider science.Lawrence Weschler brings Murch''s quest alive in all its seemingly quixotic, yet still plausible, splendor, probing the basis for how we know what we know, and who gets to say. "The wholesale rejection of alternative theories has repeatedly held back the progress of vital science," Weschler observes, citing early twentieth-century German amateur Alfred Wegener, whose speculations about continental drift were ridiculed at first, only to be accepted as fact decades later. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says "It is controversy that brings science alive"--and Murch''s quest does that in spades. His fascination with the way the planets and their moons are arranged opens up the field of celestial mechanics for general readers, sparking an awareness of the vast and (to us) invisible forces constantly at play in the universe.

For six decades, sculptor Bruce Beasley has worked in a range of media to build complex, resonant sculptures that communicate the primacy of form and express the emotional language of shape. Bruce Beasley: Sixty Year Retrospective is an elegant survey of his illustrious career: from early experiments in scrap iron during the 1960s; aluminum works of the 1970s; cast acrylic sculptures of the 1970s and 80s; and stone, stainless steel and bronze works of the 1990s to the present day. The catalogue also features Beasley’s latest venture into two-dimensional media.This richly illustrated book includes Beasley’s reflections on his career. In a conversation, Beasley and Lawrence Weschler discuss art and activism. Essays discussing his processes and appraising his impact are written by curator Tom Moran and Marlena Doktorczyk-Donohue, Director of the Bruce Beasley Foundation and Professor of Art History at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.

Er war ein großartiger Arzt und ein begnadeter Erzähler: Mit seinen Fallgeschichten hat Oliver Sacks Millionen Lesern ein neues, anderes Bild von Krankheit vermittelt. Voller Empathie und mit großer Fachkenntnis hat Sacks immer wieder Menschen beschrieben, deren Leben durch eine schwere Krankheit oder Behinderung geprägt wurde – und die unser Interesse und Mitgefühl verdienen.  Schon 1981, als Sacks noch weitgehend unbekannt war, beschloss der Journalist Lawrence Weschler, die Biographie von Oliver Sacks zu schreiben. Er konnte ihn bei seiner täglichen Arbeit als Arzt erleben, begleitete ihn auf Reisen und führte zahlreiche intensive Gespräche mit ihm. Auf dieser Grundlage entstand eine sehr persönliche Nahaufnahme. Weschler erzählt ausführlich von der Entstehung der ersten Sacks-Bücher, die zu Bestsellern wurden, und verfolgt den Weg des Autors Oliver Sacks bis zu dessen Tod im Jahre 2015. Das einzigartige Porträt eines empathischen Menschenfreundes und Seelenforschers, der unser Bild von Krankheit und Gesundheit nachhaltig verändert hat.

For seven years, photographer and artist Lena Herzog followed the evolution of a new kinetic species. Intricate as insects but with bursts of equine energy, the “Strandbeests,” or “beach creatures,” are the creation of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, who has been working for nearly two decades to generate these new life-forms that move, and even survive, on their own. Set to roam the beaches of Holland, the Strandbeests pick up the wind in their gossamer wings and spring, as if by metamorphosis, into action. As if it were blood, not the breeze, running through their delicate forms, they quiver, cavort, and trot against the sun and sea, pausing to change direction if they sense loose sand or water that might destabilize their movement. Coinciding with a traveling exhibition, Herzog’s photographic tribute captures Jansen’s menagerie in a meditative black and white, showcasing Jansen’s imaginative vision, as well as the compelling intersection of animate and inanimate in his creatures. The result is a work of art in its own right and a mesmerizing encounter not only with a very surrealist brand of marvelous, but also with whole new ideas of existence.

Finalista del Premio Pulitzer y del National Book Critics Circle Award. Un artefacto literario sorprendente que celebra la tradición de lo maravilloso en nuestra cultura.

Hormigas hediondas de cuyo cerebro sale un hongo mortal, humanos cornudos, tostadas de ratón… Estas son algunas de las cosas que pueden encontrarse expuestas en el Museo de Tecnología Jurásica de David Wilson, un lugar escondido en el West Side de Los Ángeles que nos pone en contacto con nuestro innato sentido de la maravilla haciendo que nos preguntemos cuáles de los singulares artefactos allí exhibidos son reales y cuáles no. En «El Gabinete de las Maravillas de Mr. Wilson» Lawrence Weschler rebusca entre los ecos de las «Wunderkammern» del siglo XVI y nos guía, de la mano de Borges y de Calvino, a través de una sala de espejos que se mueve entre el rigor de la ciencia y la ficción del arte, yuxtaponiendo lo auténtico y lo fantástico, lo verdadero y lo imaginario que hay en todo museo.

CRÍTICAS

«Lawrence Weschler se ha aventurado en la extraña y turbia zona entre lo real y lo imaginario y demuestra ser un excelente guía, persuadiéndonos a seguirlo con la pura fuerza de su ingenio y un incansable sentido del asombro.» —Paul Auster

«Encuentro este libro apasionante. Weschler revela una manifestación del vasto movimiento de descubrimiento y prodigio que creó los primeros museos, así como ese impetuoso estado mental que constituyó el preludio de la ciencia moderna.» —Oliver Sacks

«Weschler es un grandioso observador de la vida, un erudito y un entusiasta.» —Los Angeles Times

«Una brillante reflexión sobre la creatividad humana.» —New York magazine

«Weschler es un tesoro nacional cuyas perspectivas e intereses profundamente descentrados aportan un nuevo significado a la idea del placer de la lectura.» —The Bloomsbury Review

«Weschler escribe tan bien que inspira envidia.» —The New York Observer

«No conozco escritor con un entusiasmo más crudo y contagioso por el mundo.» —LA Weekly

"There is something both marvelous and hilarious," writes Lawrence Weschler, "in watching the humdrum suddenly take flight. This is, in part, a collection of such launchings." Indeed, the eight essays collected in "A Wanderer in the Perfect City" do soar into the realm of passion as Weschler profiles people who "were just moseying down the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly and almost spontaneously, they caught fire, they became obsessed, they became intensely focused and intensely alive." With keen observations and graceful prose, Weschler carries us along as a teacher of rudimentary English from India decides that his destiny is to promote the paintings of an obscure American abstract expressionist; a gifted poker player invents a more exciting version of chess; an avant-garde Russian emigre conductor speaks Latin, exclusively, to his infant daughter; and Art Spiegelman composes Maus. But simple summaries can't do these stories justice: like music, they derive their character from digressions and details, cadence and tone. And like the upwelling of passion Weschler's characters feel, they are better experienced than explained.