Seeing Is Forgetting The Name Of The Thing One Sees

Traces the life and career of the California artist, who currently works with pure light and the subtle modulation of empty space

"Robert Irwin, perhaps the most influential of the California artists, moved from his beginnings in abstract expressionism through successive shifts in style and sensibility, into a new aesthetic territory altogether, one where philosophical concepts of perception and the world interact. Weschler has charted the journey with exceptional clarity and cogency. He has also, in the process, provided what seems to me the best running history of postwar West Coast art that I have yet seen."—Calvin Tomkins

Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogues, gathered here for the first time. Weschler chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor—and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around 2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself.

'On its more radical fringes, modern art merges with modern philosophy, and this excellent, provocative profile...points up the extent to which the act of percepton, rather than any specific objects, has become the subject of the avant-garde California artist's work....Weschler has a knack for clarifying avstruse artistic and philosophical concepts.

From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, art historian and journalist Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge -- at least, it does through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art (both contemporary and Renaissance), his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays that are sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

In recent years as countries around the globe have begun to move from dictatorial to more democratic systems of governance, no more traumatic (or dramatic) ethical problem has arisen than what to do with the previous regime’s torturers. In most cases, the security and military apparatuses, responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-rights abuses, still retain tremendous power—and will not abide any settling of accounts. Now, New Yorker staff reporter Lawrence Weschler tells the extraordinary story of how, against tremendous odds, torture victims and human-rights activists in two Latin American countries—Brazil and Uruguay—tried to bring their torturers to justice and to rehabilitate their whole societies from harrowing periods of silence and repression. In this first of his two accounts, he tells how a tiny group of torture victims, clerics, and human-rights activists in Brazil launched an extremely risky, nonviolent plot to get even with the former torturers by publishing an indisputable account of their savage system of repression—indisputable because it is drawn from the regime’s own files. In the second, set in Uruguay, he tells how a more broadly-based movement attempted to bring to light the dark history of a military regime engaged in more political incarceration per capita than any other on earth at that time. In this illuminating and beautifully written book (portions of which appeared in five issues of The New Yorker), Weschler examines what a small number of individuals can do to retrieve history and truth from the hands of torturers.

A beautifully illustrated, accessible volume about one of the Getty Center’s best-loved sites. Among the most beloved sites at the Getty Center, the Central Garden has aroused intense interest from the moment artist Robert Irwin was awarded the commission. First published in 2002, Robert Irwin Getty Garden is comprised of a series of discussions between noted author Lawrence Weschler and Irwin, providing a lively account of what Irwin has playfully termed “a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art.” The text revolves around four garden walks: extended conversations in which the artist explains the critical choices he made—from plant materials to steel—in the creation of a living work of art that has helped to redefine what a modern garden can and should be. This updated edition features new photography of the Central Garden in a smaller, more accessible format.

Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia is the compelling story of artist Jack Goldstein and some of his classmates at CalArts, who in the early 1970s went to New York and led the transition from conceptualism to Pictures art, utilizing images from television and movies with which they had grown up. At the same time, they discovered an artworld increasingly consumed by the desire for fame, fortune and the perks of success. The book is anchored by Jack's narratives of the early days of CalArts and the last days of Chouinard; the New York art world of the 70s and 80s; the trials and tribulations of finding and maintaining success; his inter-personal relationships; and his disappearance from the art scene. Goldsteins's own recollections are complemented by the first person narratives of his friends, including John Baldessari, Troy Brauntuch, Rosetta Brooks, Jean Fisher, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican and James Welling. There are provocative portraits of many well known artworld personalities of the 80s, including Mary Boone, David Salle, and Helene Winer, all working in a time when "the competitive spirit was strong and often brutal, caring little about anything but oneself and making lots of money.": "a biting, controversial, contradictory, hilarious, and riveting read ...," Mariah Corrigan, caa.reviews:: "a first-rate contribution to the history of contemporary art," David Carrier, artUS

An unstinting memoir of the 1980s art scene as experienced by a leading American narrative painter traces his struggle to find his artistic way during a period when his style was contrary to fashion, his relationship with his alcoholic mother, his struggles with addiction and his interactions with such contemporaries as Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

Award-winning author Lawrence Weschler’s book on the young Mexican American artist Ramiro Gomez explores questions of social equity and the chasms between cultures and classes in America. Gomez, born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California, to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents, bridges the divide between the affluent wealthy and their usually invisible domestic help—the nannies, gardeners, housecleaners, and others who make their lifestyles possible—by inserting images of these workers into sly pastiches of iconic David Hockney paintings, subtly doctoring glossy magazine ads, and subversively slotting life-size painted cardboard cutouts into real-life situations. Domestic Scenes engages with Gomez and his work, offering an inspiring vision of the purposes and possibilities of art.

Shuttling between cultural comedies and political tragedies, Lawrence Weschler's articles have throughout his long career intrigued readers with his unique insight into everything he examines, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Uncanny Valley continues the page–turning conversation as Weschler collects the best of his narrative nonfiction from the past fifteen years. The title piece surveys the hapless efforts of digital animators to fashion a credible human face, the endlessly elusive gold standard of the profession. Other highlights include profiles of novelist Mark Salzman, as he wrestles with a hilariously harrowing bout of writer's block; the legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, as he is forced to revisit his work on Apocalypse Now in the context of the more recent Iraqi war film Jarhead; and the artist Vincent Desiderio, as he labors over an epic canvas portraying no less than a dozen sleeping figures. With his signature style and endless ability to wonder, Weschler proves yet again that the "world is strange, beautiful, and connected" (The Globe and Mail). Uncanny Valley demonstrates his matchless ability to analyze the marvels he finds in places and people and offers us a new, sublime way of seeing the world.

More than twenty short works by the Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder include a profile of film director Roman Polanski, a furniture designer's struggles with Parkinson's disease, and David Hockney's unusual experiments with photography. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Renowned American artist Tara Donovan (born 1969) creates sculptural objects of enigmatic beauty by utilizing and experimenting with simple, everyday objects such as Scotch tape, drinking straws, paper plates, needles, plastic rods, toothpicks, mylar and buttons. At first these abstract objects resemble enlarged cellular structures, or living organisms from the depths of the ocean. "What I'm striving for is to be an alchemist and transcend the material," Donovan says. "It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow." Her method is also allied to an American Minimalist sculptural tradition that includes artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin and James Turrell. This volume, with its handsome mirror-paper cover and debossing, presents eight works made between 2004 and 2012, as installed at the Arp Museum in Germany and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patient "[An] engrossing biographical memoir. This is Sacks at full blast: on endless ward rounds, observing his post-encephalitic patients . . . exulting over horseshoe crabs and chunks of Iceland spar." —Barbara Kiser, Nature The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings—the account of his long-dormant patients’ miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks’s capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.

Living in a "perfect" world without social ills, a boy approaches the time when he will receive a life assignment from the Elders, but his selection leads him to a mysterious man known as the Giver, who reveals the dark secrets behind the utopian facade.

I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. I, myself, delight in my obsessions.'Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This engaging autobiography tells the story of her life and extraordinary career in her own words, revealing her as a fascinating figure and maverick artist who channels her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes the decade she spent in New York, first as a poverty stricken artist and later as the doyenne of an alternative counter-cultural scene. She provides a frank and touching account of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom Kusama forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she resides to the present day, emerging to dedicate herself with seemingly endless vigour to her art and her writing. This remarkable autobiography provides a powerful insight into a unique artistic mind, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde. In addition to her artwork, Yayoi Kusama is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street, Manhattan Suicide Addict and Violet Obsession.

From Pulitzer Prize nominee Lawrence Weschler, a fascinating profile of Walter Murch, a film legend and amateur astrophysicist whose investigations could reshape our understanding of the universe. For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary--a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Though as a consummate outsider he's had a hard time attracting any sort of comprehensive hearing from professional astrophysicists, Murch has made advances that even some of them find intriguing, including a connection between Titius Bode and earlier notions--going back past Kepler and Pythagorus--of musical harmony in the heavens. Unfazed by rejection, ever probing, Murch perseveres in the highest traditions of outsider science. Lawrence Weschler brings Murch's quest alive in all its seemingly quixotic, yet still plausible, splendor, probing the basis for how we know what we know, and who gets to say. "The wholesale rejection of alternative theories has repeatedly held back the progress of vital science," Weschler observes, citing early twentieth-century German amateur Alfred Wegener, whose speculations about continental drift were ridiculed at first, only to be accepted as fact decades later. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says "It is controversy that brings science alive"--and Murch's quest does that in spades. His fascination with the way the planets and their moons are arranged opens up the field of celestial mechanics for general readers, sparking an awareness of the vast and (to us) invisible forces constantly at play in the universe.

In his most beloved and extraordinary book, Dr. Sacks recounts the case histories of patients inhabiting the compelling world of neurological disorders. Featuring a preface never before included. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. In Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, his patients are deeply human, and his tales are studies of struggles against incredible adversity. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject."

A beautiful book on the famed Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas