So far, 2017 has been a year of reading for me. I’ve found myself somewhat unsettled and much of the past six months I’ve been travelling. It’s meant long hours spent in cars, trains, and planes. It’s meant that I’ve spent time tucked away alone in the mountains or off in the countryside. I’ve been in the heart of cities too, right in the hustle and bustle. I’ve been to (and thrown) some excellent parties.
Through it all, I’ve had a stack of books. Believe me when I tell you that my kindle has been working overtime. And if I was curled up by a fireplace, out in on a picnic blanket in a park, or spending a late weekend morning in bed with coffee, words and ideas have been an indispensable companion. I haven’t had as much time for gallery trips as I had last year, but books can come with you everywhere, can fit into the nooks and crannies of your life.
Anyways, now that we’re halfway through the year, I thought I’d just take a second to share some of the excellent arty books that I’ve been reading.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
This is an exquisite book. It’s a slim volume, but every line feels like a gift. I read Nelson’s most recent book first, The Argonauts, and I was immediately in love with her writing (for the record— i also highly recommend The Argonauts). I had been hearing about Bluets for ages, and as soon as I knew how spectacular her writing was, I knew I needed to seek it out.
It’s an exploration of Nelson’s relationship with the colour blue in all its facets. It’s about sorrow and art and music, about vision and love and suffering. It’s philosophical and personal in equal measure.
It may not be strictly ‘about art,’ but it is a beautiful lyrical essay about how we use and understand colour.
Memorable Quotes:
“7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? . . . You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.”
“156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.
157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”
Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting by Michael Jacobs
This book has been on my list for a long time, and I finally picked it up this year. I found myself with a few hours to kill in one of my favourite New Hampshire haunts, Gibson’s in Concord, and I walked away with both this and Bluets.
Everything is Happening is a book about Jacob’s relationship with Las Meninas. It’s sadly unfinished, as Jacbos died while writing it, but the chapters we have are a fantastic example of how we can develop a relationship with art overtime. As he takes us from his school days to his time studying at the Courthauld to his adulthood, Velasquez follows him. As he goes to Madrid, to research libraries, and to lectures, his relationship and understanding of Las Meninas changes and develops.
It’s reflective and engaging in equal measure. The sections he wrote about academia were hilarious, and it was fascinating to learn more about the painting’s installation history in the Prado.
Anyone who has ever loved a painting could find something to appreciate here.
Anyone who has ever loved a painting could find something to appreciate here.
Memorable Quotes:
“Looking back now to that incident in the Prado, I saw it as encapsulating a moment in my life when, for all my complexes and self-doubts, I was fired by an absolute, unembarrassed conviction in art’s spiritual, redemptive powers. Later, after going on to study art history at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, my views on art became more complex and sceptical, leading eventually to a gradual disillusionment with my chosen discipline, and with the academic world in general.”
“Looking back now to that incident in the Prado, I saw it as encapsulating a moment in my life when, for all my complexes and self-doubts, I was fired by an absolute, unembarrassed conviction in art’s spiritual, redemptive powers. Later, after going on to study art history at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, my views on art became more complex and sceptical, leading eventually to a gradual disillusionment with my chosen discipline, and with the academic world in general.”
Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
This is the first book I read this year, and as soon as I cracked the spine, I knew that 2017 was off to a good start. I read Open City at the end of 2016 and thoroughly enjoyed it, but I loved Cole’s non-fiction even more.
Throughout more than fifty essays, Cole explores photography, literature and travel, touching on politics and history. While I was reading the first essay, I started a small list of things Cole mentioned that I wanted to look into— poems, novels and works of art— and the list continued to grow as I read. It opened so many doors and led so many lovely discoveries.
Memorable Quotes:
“What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love, and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in this aggregate all this isn't enough, but that's where I am for now.”
“It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder. We live in inescapable surfeit. A number of artists are using this abundance as their starting point, setting their own cameras aside and turning to the horde—collecting and arranging photographs that they have found online. These artist-collectors, in placing one thing next to another, create a third thing—and this third thing, like a subatomic particle produced by a collision of two other particles, carries a charge.”
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women by Siri Hustvedt
More essays! As you might be able to tell, I’ve really been enjoying reading more non-fiction for fun now that I’m through my Master’s degree. I loved Hustvelt’s The Blazing World when I read it a few years ago (again, also highly recommend if you haven’t read it!), so when I spotted her new collection of essays in a bookshop, I couldn’t resist.
It’s more academic than most of the essays in Known and Strange Things, but it’s definitely still accessible. She elegantly weaves together feminism, philosophy, and neuroscience, exploring how we perceive things and how we understand our place in the world.
The first section, which shares a title with the book as a whole, is the most relevant for art lovers, including essays on gender bias and art world greats — Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Sontag. The second section is more philosophical, exploring the mind/body problem. The last section includes essays on the ‘human condition’ and frequently brings in aspects of scientific research.
She writes in a wonderful, winding way, bringing in unexpected elements but always coming back to her main topic, gathering the disparate strands together elegantly.
Memorable Quotes:
“If one day Balloon Dog’s value bursts and shrivels in a Koons crash, we can only hope that Anonymous has an ongoing relationship with his orange pooch that can sustain the inevitable inflations and deflations of all speculative markets. In fact, a balloon serves as a nice metaphor for the lessons of history: you blow and you blow and you blow, and the thing gets larger and larger and larger still, and in your excitement you forget the laws of physics, and you begin to believe that your balloon is like no other balloon in the world—there is no limit to its size. And then, it pops.”
“There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.”
“The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.”
Currently reading: Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue
Currently, I’m reading Sudden Death, another book that’s been on my list for a long time. I first spotted it on the ‘employee recommended’ shelf in the Oxford Blackwell’s and when I noticed that the guy who recommended it was also was a David Foster Wallace fan, I immediately made note.
Until I finally opened it, I didn’t even realise that the book began with a fictional tennis match between Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo. Right up my alley— that employee knew me well. I know that the novel is going to get more complex and confusing I read on, and I can’t wait.
If you’d like an update on how I ended up finding it, you can always find me over on Goodreads!
I hope you all got a little inspiration for your summer reading, and here’s to another excellent six months of reading.
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