I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)
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I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
Faith, Hope, and Impossibility and On Morton Feldman are two essays I think every artist should read. Whereas the UCal book was a labor of love, some years in the making—the cassette and reel-to-reel recordings were transcribed, and the book edited, by Guston’s close friend, the poet Clark Coolidge—one suspects that I Paint was whipped up in a matter of minutes.
The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science? Get the Coolidge/U Cal edition instead, which is properly edited and includes so many great pieces that don't appear in this throwaway rip-off, like Guston's panel talk in Philadelphia and his conversation with Bill Berkson. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. If you love art, or if you are an artist, if you love Guston’s work or even if you don’t like it so much, you will enjoy this book.Figurative painting allowed him to do in art what he’d always loved about talking: to lurch from subject to subject, to butt up against contradictions, to make wisecracks, to repeat himself. Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Not a review—Guston’s writings and talks are wonderful—but a note to alert the interested reader to the fact that everything in I Paint What I Want to See can be found in Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, published by the University of California Press in 2010 (this latter book also includes additional material, the editor’s selection of accompanying images, and an Introduction by Dore Ashton). His declaration that ‘I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration’ is borne out in the works he was making at the time, many of which have matter-of-fact titles ( Table, Vessel, Branch, all 1960) that are worlds away from the highfalutin sublimity of those of his New York School peers.
Or, was the whole world and everything in it set into an us-or-them binary arrangement because of the Cold War? Whether the Guston myth (that he was quite so singular and in opposition to the art of his times) is entirely true, he definitely seems super-relevant to today. The editorial model adopted—allow someone else to do all the work, then conveniently “forget” the fact—no doubt helps to keep overheads low, but should we really be happy that the accountants have won again? No reader could finish the book with a sense of Guston as a painter with a singular and unwavering vision of his work and its place in the world.Got about halfway before losing interest due to it feeling repetitive caused by it being a collection of his interviews and talks.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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