Amy Ione Online

Article: Black Oak bookstore in closes in North Berkeley

Black Oak Books Moves Out

By Riya Bhattacharjee

After more than two decades in North Berkeley, Black Oak Books, one of the city’s best-loved bookstores, is moving out. 

New book Review Posted: The David Hockney and Robert Irwin books by Lawrence Weschler

 

In True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney , Lawrence Weschler notes that a Hockney comment, "You see with memory," runs diametrically counter to Robert Irwin's entire aesthetic. Irwin's creative starting point is concisely summed up in the title of Weschler's biography on Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.   For Irwin, to truly see something, one needs to forget everything about it, right down to its very name.   Yet, as Weschler points out, the seemingly divergent approaches of these two artists do have a fascinating meeting point:   Their most successful projects draw us into the artist's world.   

As we come to know their pieces, we are, in effect, in the work with the artist through this engagement. Their creative projects do not hold us as removed spectators, but ask us to step in and join their vision.   This relational aspect is most explicitly contextualized in the final essay of the Hockney book, which speaks of artist's return to painting in 2007. After Hockney mentioned that he had taken to thinking of these late landscape canvases as figure paintings, Weschler pointed out that there are no bodies in these works. Hockney replied that the viewer is the figure in the work.

Ann: June Leonardo Reviews posted

Leonardo Reviews is pleased to announce the new postings at:  http://leonardo.info/ldr.html
(ISSN:  1559-0429)

Article: Another bookstore closes

Morningside Bookshop, an independent store that operated for 50 years near its landlord, Columbia University, fell too far behind in its rent to remain open. Full article

Article Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital's OK, but Save Our Books!

May 13, 2009

About two dozen faculty members and students, clutching signs that read “Don’t Gut the Library” and “Keep our books on campus,” picketed the administration building at Ohio State University yesterday,

Ann: Leonardo Reviews - May 2009

Leonardo Reviews is pleased to announce the new postings at:  http://leonardo.info/ldr.html (ISSN:  1559-0429)

Book Review: Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science Reviewed by Amy Ione

I was drawn to Christine Hine’s Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science because the synopsis of the book suggested it was a study of the ways that biologists working in this field have engaged with new technologies as the field sustained its heritage and changed to accommodate new possibilities. Full review

Ann: Art and Electronic Media by Edward Shanken (Phaidon Press)

Art and Electronic Media by Edward Shanken is the freshest title in the Themes and Movements series published by Phaidon Press. This highly anticipated book demonstrates the formidable history of artistic uses of electronic media, a history that parallels the growing pervasiveness of technology in all facets of life. Over 200 artists and institutions from more than 30 countries are represented. The centrality of artists as theorists and critics is reflected in the focus on artists’ writings. The goal is to enable the rich genealogy of art and electronic media to be understood and seen – literally and figuratively – as central to the histories of art and visual culture.

Two Smithsonian Exhibitions: "Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration" and "Art of African Exploration"

“Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration” displays some wonderful illustrations from the Libraries’ collection of Rare books. This exhibition is on display until January 4 2010 at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries Gallery at the National Museum of American History.

“Art of African Exploration” will be on display until August 16 2010 in the Constitution Avenue Lobby of the National Museum of Natural History.

Article: More on the economic downturn and bookstores.

A Downturn Wraps Portland in Hesitance | By Peter S. Goodman/NY Times | The economic downturn has become a crisis of expectations in cities like Portland, Ore., where creditworthy households and businesses are choosing not to invest.