From the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile. "Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism. . . . Piercing and timely."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result is three gripping profiles of very...
From the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double C...
During the past fifteen years, one of the most vexing issues facing fledgling transitional democracies around the world--from South Africa to Eastern Europe, from Cambodia to Bosnia--has been what to do about the still-toxic security apparatuses left over from the previous regime. In this now-classic and profoundly influential study, the New Yorker's Lawrence Weschler probes these dilemmas across two gripping narratives (set in Brazil and Uruguay, among the first places to face such concerns), true-life thrillers in which torture victims, faced with the paralysis of the new regime,...
During the past fifteen years, one of the most vexing issues facing fledgling transitional democracies around the world--from South Africa to Eastern ...
In this highly entertaining book, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J. S. G. Boggs, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps more precisely, value. Boggs draws money-paper notes in standard currencies from all over the world-and tries to spend his drawings. It is a practice that regularly lands him in trouble with treasury police around the globe and provokes fundamental questions regarding the value of art and the value of money.
In this highly entertaining book, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J. S. G. Boggs, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps mo...
Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science.
Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Pronged ants, horned humans, ...
There are writers who specialize in the strange and others whose genius is to find the strangeness in the familiar, the unexpected meanings in stories we thought we knew. Of that second category, Lawrence Weschler is the master. Witness the pieces in this splendidly disorienting collection, spanning twenty years of his career and the full range of his concerns which is to say, practically everything. Only Lawrence Weschler could reveal the connections between the twentieth century s Yugoslav wars and the equally violent Holland in which Vermeer created his luminously serene paintings. In...
There are writers who specialize in the strange and others whose genius is to find the strangeness in the familiar, the unexpected meanings in stories...
When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist "who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it." Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned projects--in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum (the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect,...
When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist "who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and ...
Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte's writings in a chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, where one of Malaparte's stories was retold to illustrate a point about conditions shortly after the creation of the universe. Murch was so taken by the strange, utterly captivating imagery he went to find the book from which the story was taken. The book was Kaputt, Malaparte's autobiographical novel about the frontlines of World War II. Curzio Malaparte, an Italian born with a German heritage, was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat. When he wrote a book attacking...
Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte's writings in a chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, where one of Malaparte's stories wa...
In the past fifty years, contemporary artistic practice has witnessed a surge in phenomenological types of artistic intent and methodology, represented by divergent impulses sharing a desire to channel ephemeral elements, resist categorization, and defy the rarified museum experience. Time-based work is now widely accepted as primary exhibition matter, and in the past ten years, performance art has risen to the mainstream. Defining "experiential art" as work that is immersive, participatory, performative, and kinetic, Strange Pilgrims is an exhibition and accompanying catalogue...
In the past fifty years, contemporary artistic practice has witnessed a surge in phenomenological types of artistic intent and methodology, represe...
Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio Lauren Bon Lawrence Weschler
Led by artists Lauren Bon, Richard Nielsen, and Tristan Duke, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio is a team devoted to exploring and expanding the photographic medium. Working with the Liminal Camera, a massive, portable camera obscura fashioned from a shipping container, the Optics Division uses experimental technology in an ongoing effort to map and depict the American landscape. From the arid West to New York s waterways, the camera has captured dramatic scenes of regions in transition. As part of this project, "The Liminal Camera" presents newly commissioned photographs made...
Led by artists Lauren Bon, Richard Nielsen, and Tristan Duke, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio is a team devoted to exploring and expanding...
