Book Review: Asian Art Nowby Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio from The Monacelli Press

Of course I'm highly qualified to evaluate a book about Asian art, because of my rich Asian heritage and the many decades I've spent traveling and intensively studying the art of China, India, Japan and so forth.

cough! cough!

OK, I wanted to review this book because I am almost completely bereft of any knowledge or understanding of contemporary Asian art. Yeah, I've got that Murakami guy down cold. Yoshitomo Nara's little kid giving me the finger from a diving board still makes me chuckle. And that guy who works with incense ash and dresses up in a meat suit has made a big impact on my life. But if you want to know more from me -- well, right now I'm drawing a blank.

In my defense I'd suggest that attempting to define the category "Asian Art" makes almost as much sense as attempting to define the category "Art from Earth."

Why attempt to define art by continent? The cultures on any given hunk of land are likely to be so diverse as to demand a breakdown that recognizes their divisions.

But in this case I'd argue that it's justified because of the centuries we've spent focusing on Western Art -- a category defined by an entire friggin' hemisphere. If that ever made sense at all it could only have been in a very small, painfully isolated world.

Well, the boundaries are gone and the world keeps growing. All these categories are breaking down in an information slushpile that we're slowly picking through. It's like a gargantuan thrift store -- YAY!!! As I gaze into my crystal ball I see a future in which categories we once defined as Western Art, European Art, Asian Art, and even Abstract Art and Painting and Sculpture, are re-sorted according to rubrics we're only now beginning to glimpse.

With this in mind if you're like me you need to own a copy of Asian Art Now, and hope to whatever deities you worship that they keep publishing as Asian Art Now 2, Asian Art Now 3, and so forth, hopefully once a year. Because if they don't this will quickly become Asian Art Then.

The reason is that Asian Art Now will help you get up-to-speed on much of the art that hasn't crossed your eyes yet through the pages of Art in America, Art Forum, Modern Painters and whatever other trade papers you subscribe to. It's fairly up-to-the-minute, and those crazy Asian artists keep pumping it out.

Chiu and Genocchio have done a shrewd job of identifying key landmarks in a teeming landscape of creative effort, and then presenting their information in clear language that's to the point, not terribly indulgent in conjecture, and sets you up for further, more intensive study on the artists they present.

The authors wisely lead off with a historical chapter that will remind you of artists nobody bothered teaching us about in the '80's, back when the world was small. Sure, there's Yoko, but there's also Sekine Nobo, Lee Ufan, Tanaka Atsuko (subject of an article in Art in America some years back), Kazuo Shiraga, Shozo Shimamoto, Li Keran -- a continent of names that never made it into my understanding of art history.

Then it's off to the races with chapters titled Politics Society and the State, Asian Pop Consumerism and Stereotypes, and Urban Nature.

The pages of this mid-sized book are balanced fairly evenly between text and clear, bright full-color images, often two or three to the page. The occasional full-page image is sadly a bit scarce, but that's understandable in a volume of 255 pages that attempts to cover such a broad subject.

The authors wrap with A Glimpse into the Future, one which I hope holds many more editions in a series.

Asian Art Now earns three-and-a-half out of five Nara-Girls-Flipping-The-Bird for being a brisk, colorful overview of a universe of creative expression that seems poised to surround and absorb us in a world of evaporating boundaries and, let's hope, of increasing reconciliation.

This would be an obvious candidate as one of several text books rounding out a college overview course on Contemporary Asian Art.

Sphere: Related Content

Book Review: Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Daysby Wouter Van Der Veen and Peter Knapp -- Published by The Monacelli Press

My dear Theo,

In reply to your question about the greatest disadvantage to being dead and famous, I’d probably have to identify the frequent floggings as the answer. It seems that complete and total strangers can’t resist dragging me from the grave every few years and wailing away now that I’ve bit the big one. “Let’s see how much more gold we can squeeze from the old boy.”

I suppose I wouldn’t mind it so much if more people were truly interested in the real me. But as we’ve discussed, more often than not it’s some contrived caricature of Vincent they want to know more about, some sort of pathetic insane misunderstood genius. What is it about this cartoon character that people can’t resist? It’s like that worthless yellow sponge creature that lives in a pineapple at the bottom of the ocean, all outline and no substance. Even the outlines are without value.

Very rarely does anyone ever get it right. Picasso understood me well, as did Matisse and some of the Fauves. Kirk Douglas had not a clue. As for Don McLean, let it be said that he doesn’t want to meet me in a dark alley anytime soon. My stomach churns to this day from all the grave-spinning caused by his worthless ballad.

Wouter Van Der Veen and Peter Knapp seem most assuredly to have a clue, if their book Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days is any indication. It’s one of the few times I’ve noticed the authors of a mainstream publication attempt to straighten accounts for me and set things right.

As an example allow me to submit these quotes from the introduction:

Van Gogh has often been presented to us as poor, sick, insane, depresssed, alcoholic, and hotheaded. He has usually been portrayed as an antisocial and isolated individual, as a violent misfit, filled with rage and easily carried away, who sold only one painting in his lifetime because his work was despised and misunderstood. He died a martyr, sacrificed at the altar of the ignorance of his contemporaries. ...

In reality, Vincent van Gogh was a complex, intelligent, and sophisticated artist...

He was a longtime student of the techniques of drawing, consulted texts on perspective, and kept himself abreast of the latest artistic developments of his time. He could afford to do all this because he was not in a position of financial difficulty...

This cultivated bourgeois was not mad, far from it. He was obstinate, uncompromising, drawn to the extreme in everything he undertook. He had an impossible character, an innate and stubborn sense of perseverence, and he was utterly indifferent to what other people might think or say...

Van Gogh was neither misunderstood nor ignored by his contemporaries. ...
...the privileged few who were able to view his work... were filled with enthusiasm for the dazzling work before their eyes...

Finally, (he) did not sell just one painting in his lifetime. ...

Theo, do you want to know what the greatest disgrace of a misleading caricature is? It doesn't smell. There’s no sweat, no anxiety. Those last days come back to me in memory as an aromatic melange, coffee, tobacco, liquors and sweats of all kinds: tobacco sweat, alcohol sweat, garlic sweat. The rancid alfalfa sweat of the stable man as distinct from the half-franc-perfume sweat of the Avenue Dimanche whore, as distinct from the hot summer morning old-laundry sweat steamed into overworn bed sheets. The clean glisten of exhilaration at a perfect creative moment, fresh as dew. The acrid drenching shivering perspiration just after trigger-pull.

Van Gogh in Auvers returns some of the sweat to those days as only a skilled and relentless historian’s best research and estimation could possibly perform. I can feel it in the writing, which seems to break down those weeks at times practically day by day. Its humidity steams in the section about you, Brother Theo, your tragic ending, and of your wife and son and their struggles and successes, all excellently documented with family photographs. I can also feel that sweat in the crisp, bright and sweeping photographs of my paintings that devour the generous pages of this intelligent volume. In many of these images I can feel every stroke again.

And where did the authors find this dizzying selection of artworks? Some of these paintings I’d almost forgotten about entirely. These two authors have done the work of an army of detectives to scrounge some truly obscure canvases out of collections from around the world. Had I not already known what I’d been up to, this book would have done a thorough job of informing me.

That being said, I don’t understand the presence of a little reproduction of one of my letters to you, Theo. It’s slipped into the pages almost as an afterthought, not up to the quality of the rest of the book. When I hold it to my ear I can almost hear a meeting in which some middle manager force-feeds this half-baked inclusion to the exhausted authors. Had it been Monacelli Press's intention to make a gimmicky coffee table book they’d have done better to use a rubber severed ear.

Not that I wouldn’t enjoy a truly gimmicky send-up. Maybe that’s where the Don McLean types get it wrong; they don’t carry their caricatures to bombastically entertaining extremes. I’d venture a few dozen francs for a book in which I wear a backwards baseball cap and low-slung trousers, and ride a skateboard through southern France spitting hip-hop rhymes while committing canvas crimes -- and that’s a cartoon that’s at least as good as the pathetic, insane, misunderstood genius. Wouldn’t you agree, Theo?

Thankfully, Van Gogh in Auvers is above all that, a rare book that for once adds to and clarifies the discourse rather than simply sitting on it or, worse yet, sending it even further astray. With that in mind, and fake letter notwithstanding, I hereby award the book Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days four and three-quarters out of five glasses of absinthe for outstanding research, spectacular photo-illustrations, excellent peripheral and contextual information, and, over all, for being a shining example of what a flogged-to-kingdom-come artist really wants to see in yet another book about himself.

That’s all from me, Theo. Time to begin resting up for the next flogging.

PEACE OUT -
Vincent

Sphere: Related Content