Calling all book lovers! Art book recommendations?

I love this collection of work by Kali. Joan Archibald, who renamed herself Kali, walked out of her Long Island life in the 1960s and reinvented herself in California as a wildly experimental photographer. Working from a former Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee house in Palm Springs, she transformed her swimming pool into a massive finishing tank, experimtneting with prints through ink, dye, dirt, bugs, and chemicals until the images became something strange and alive. Long hidden away, her obsessive, visionary archive resurfaced after her death in 2019. It’s avalibe in a stunning edition from PowerHouse books called Kali LTD.

Not the typical art book, but Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains is so captivating. It’s a collection of handwritten diaries with sketches and illustrations, and reading it feels less like flipping pages and more like looking over someone’s shoulder. Pamuk the novelist and Pamuk the visual artist in the same notebook.

I would recommend Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) by Fontenelle with its fascinating texts (and engravings) for the time. Also, History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides’, which to me remains so contemporary! Closer to us, I am reading again the The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt, still quite enimatic to me.

And lastly, Kafka on the Shore by H. Murakami. Somehow I identify to all characters and I often heard this remark from people that read it.

‘Sculpting in the time’ - Andrei Tarkovsky

Such a long list to catch up on now that the uni year is over. I am traveling so the stack isn’t in front of me but I know I need to look more carefully at Natasha Chuk’s Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography; Paglen’s How to see like a machine; Roland Betancourt’s Disney and the Rise of Automation; Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts, 6th edition...more to come ;)

Ben Davis, Art in the after culture

Kyle Chaika, Filterworld

Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl ( less art , but pop culture in general )

A personal favorite, Die Kunst der Abstrakten Fotografie by Jager and lately loving to explore the historic comparisons within the art history focused David Hockney “Secret Knowledge”, the Tarot of Leonora Carrington, Luna Luna by Andre Heller, Buckminster Fuller pattern making, Hilma Af Klimt Paintings for the Future. A personal favorite, Die Kunst der Abstrakten Fotografie by Jager. I’ve been on an art book personal discovery kick the last year.

I loved Martha Schwendener’s book Society of the Screen. It’s about Vilem Flusser, who has become known as a media theorist, but focuses on his engagement with artists and art criticism. He was friends with and wrote about many artists who worked with computers and biological material--artists who aren’t part of the mainstream contemporary art canon, but are getting more attention now. It’s really interesting and has great background for anyone interested in digital art!

I was really into browsing this: Amy Sillman: Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings (Paperback)

Alenda Y. Chang’s Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games and Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape pair so well together, both are really about how we imagine and inhabit nonhuman worlds and the body-landscape relationship, but they come at it from opposite ends - Chang through a media studies angle in the context of digital games, and Wilk through a mix of literary criticism and essays that get quite personal and emotionally charged.

I’m really enjoying “A Companion to Digital Art”, Edited by Christiane Paul. It’s a compilation of texts with a lot of cool insights and history. There are also some really cool proposals. I would say one of my favorite parts would be “Aesthetics of the Digital”, by Sean Cubitt. Very interesting and rigorous reading!!