"Formidable art writer and cultural critic Mieke Bal rises to the new occasion of rising star John Sparagana to ignite a steadily illuminating interplay of image and text. For all the eloquence and pithiness of Bal's discourse, in the conversation this book sustains the pictures are always speaking back. Sparagana's images do not set out just to flay a skin-deep commercial culture. They layer it with a distancing webwork of mystery, opening it at times to its own unconscious enigmas and often netting the unexpected. Twenty-six times, Bal enters the space thus opened or implied. She has never been better. And it's hard to imagine Sparagana being better served." - Garrett Stewart, author of The Look of Reading"

The dictionary. The high-gloss fashion ad. The fraught relationship between artist and critic. "Sleeping Beauty" ties these disparate strands of our everyday lives together, only to strip away everything we thought we knew about each of them. A collaboration by the artist John Sparagana and the critic Mieke Bal, this truly cutting-edge work takes the shape of a conversation between his creations - distressed magazine pages - and her words, imagining anew the relationships of image to text and of art to those who write about it.Bal contributes twenty-six essays, one for each letter of the alphabet, which borrow their organizing principle from the dictionary but reach far beyond the utilitarian purpose of a reference volume. Each one enters deeply into Sparagana's art, illuminating concepts from Abstract to Zestful that inform, underlie, and lend meaning to the exquisitely ruined images he creates by crinkling glossy pictures from fashion magazines until their sheen disappears and they become soft and elastic. Unmooring the magazine page from its familiar context, Sparagana renders these beautiful rags poetic through his unique art of subtraction, which physically rubs away not only ink and material, but also transience and commercial usefulness.Just as Sparagana's work intervenes in existing images, so, too, do Bal's explorations qualify existing concepts. But together, in this inaugural volume in the new series "Project Tango: Artists and Writers Together", they have given rise to something wholly new: a prophetic one-artist dictionary that simultaneously reenvisions the untapped interactions of images with words and the potential forms of the book itself.
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A dictionary that simultaneously reenvisions the interactions of images with words and the potential forms of the book itself. It contains twenty-six essays that illuminate concepts from Abstract to Zestful.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780226035529
Publisert
2008-11-01
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Vekt
851 gr
Høyde
24 mm
Bredde
29 mm
Dybde
2 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
136

Om bidragsyterne

John Sparagana is associate professor of visual art at Rice University. He has recently presented solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, and Houston. Mieke Bal is academy professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her many books include Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past, also published by the University of Chicago Press.