Playful and slyly original, Earth Still tells the story of Patricia, a museum curator and the mother of a young son, who falls for a new neighbor, Rennie, in the aftermath of an alien spaceship's unexplained landing in present day Los Angeles. The presence of the ship, along with the apparent absence of a pilot, precipitates a social crisis, while Patricia's affair with the mysterious Rennie creates its own tensions. Referencing art house film directors Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, Italian Futurist writer F.T. Marinetti, and classic science fiction movies, Earth Still is a transfiguring love story, a meditation on the interrelationship of science fiction and visual art, and a riveting fantasy about our obsession with aliens.

Earth Still

Literature & Fiction

Leddy, Annette

United States

What Books Press

“Farewell to Surrealism” is the title of a 1943 essay by Austrian artist-critic Wolfgang Paalen published in the inaugural issue of the journal Dyn. The journal was founded by Paalen and an international group of writers and artists taking refuge in Mexico City during World War II. Several of them, including Paalen, British painter Gordon Onslow Ford, Peruvian writer César Moro, and French artist Alice Rahon, had been part of André Breton’s Parisian surrealist circle in the 1930s. When they arrived in Mexico, they were still proponents of surrealism. Two years later, however, this group had broken with Breton and set out to define a new direction for art, looking to pre-Columbian cultures on the one hand and social and physical sciences on the other. Their vision coalesced in the pages of Dyn. While recent scholarship has treated individual artists in the circle, this study is the first to examine the new aesthetic found in Dyn itself. Transformed by the mysterious pre-Columbian artifacts and monuments in Mexico, distressed by the failure of political ideology, and inspired by scientific discoveries of the day, these artists played a critical but under-recognized role in the transition from surrealism to abstract expressionism. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name on view at the Getty Research Institute from October 2, 2012, to February 17, 2013.

Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico

Arts & Photography

Conwell, Donna

History & Criticism

Getty Research Institute

Transformed by the mysterious pre-Columbian artifacts and monuments that suffused the Mexican landscape, distressed by the failure of political ideology, and inspired by discoveries of scientists of the day, the artists of the Dyn circle played a critical but under-recognised role in the transition from surrealism to abstract expressionism. The journal Dyn  -  their mouthpiece, travelling exhibition, family album and compendium of source material  -  offers a window onto their world. The essays in this volume show how the pages of Dyn reveal both the theory behind this new aesthetic and the process the painters and photographers engaged in as they integrated disparate imagery from disparate sources.

Farewell to Surreaslism : the DYN Circle in Mexico /anglais

Tate

A pioneer of Conceptual art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s, the painter, installation artist and theater director William Leavitt (born 1941) is above all an artist of narrative devices. Since 1969, his works in all the above media have employed abrupt fragments of popular and vernacular culture and depictions of modernist architecture to construct elusive narratives of cityscapes and environments. The culture and atmosphere of Los Angeles has played a significant role in Leavitt's handling of these themes; classic southern Californian motifs of ever-present artifice and almost washed-out brightness recur throughout his work. Surveying the artist's 40-year career, this volume includes sculptural tableaux, paintings, works on paper, photographs and performances from the late 1960s to the present. Leavitt has created a remarkable oeuvre that has influenced generations of artists, and this volume is both long overdue and highly anticipated.

William Leavitt: Theater Objects

Lawson, Thomas

Simpson, Bennett

Goldstein, Ann

Individual Artists

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

A decisive figure of the Los Angeles art scene, William Leavitt has developed a singular body of work participating, on the one hand, in Conceptual art--whose important representatives, such as Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, were also based in Los Angeles--and, on the other hand, resembling the "Narrative art" movement that emerged in the early 1970s. He is part of the same Californian artistic milieu as Allen Ruppersberg, Guy de Cointet, and Bas Jan Ader--with whom he edited the magazine Landslide in 1969-1970.Through his installations and videos, drawings and paintings, play and sound performances, Leavitt re-examines the production of the Western imaginary, as imposed, since the end of World War II, by the "Hollywood factory." Through a selection of parts of stage sets, the isolation and recombination of fragments coming from everyday culture, which often conceals a conservative social order and politics, he turns these representations inside out: he makes us see them as so many conceptual frameworks in which stories (fictional ones or from our own lives) can be set.Also at play in Leavitt's continuing exploration of "the theater of the ordinary" is the coexistence of nature and artifice, exemplified by such landmark works as Forest Sound (1970) and California Patio (1972). His presentations of vernacular culture are often infused with deadpan humour, achieved either through the seemingly random juxtapositions of figurative elements in his two-dimensional works or via the sly stories that unfold in his installations, plays, and videos.Introduced by MAMCO Director Lionel Bovier and featuring a key conversation with the artist by curator Annette Leddy, the publication offers a retrospective overview of Leavitt's practice from the early 1970s to his most recent works and installations. It highlights its thematic resonances, ranging from science-fiction to the notion of décor, and gives a prominent place to his writings and scripts, whether for plays or videos.Stemming from the first European retrospective of William Leavitt held at MAMCO in 2017, this volume is published with MAMCO Geneva.

William Leavitt: Installations, Plays, Video, 1970–2018

Bovier, Lionel

JRP|Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Leddy, Annette. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Leddy, Annette