For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. Diary/Landscape―the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist―set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans―a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling’s close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction. A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, Diary/Landscape reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. The book is published to accompany the first-ever complete exhibition of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Diary/Landscape

Arts & Photography

Welling, James

Individual Artists

University of Chicago Press

James Welling: Gelatin photographs 1-12, 1984

Photography & Video

CEPA

Michael Fried is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and luminaries of the art world have resulted in a canonized body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, Promesse du Bonheur. Fried’s passion, lyricism, and humor, which have been lauded by Allen Grossman and J. M. Coetzee, are on display as he explores the people and the objects that have moved him—great minds and great works of art. Along the way, Fried begins to reveal himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself; a young man, ambitious and in love; a committed champion of artists; a world-class intellectual among intellectual peers; and a poet, transmuting the world around him. Here we find the poet-critic at his most complete. Beyond presenting new works, Promesse du Bonheur breaks ground for Fried by combining the eighty poems—a mix of lyrical and prose poetry—with over thirty photographs, most of them made, all of them selected, by renowned American photographer James Welling. More often than not, the photographs stand in oblique relation to the poems, as complementary pieces of a mesmerizing whole. Written under the epigraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s urging in “Self-Reliance”—“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events”—the poems engage diverse subjects: from the high modernist art world of the 1960s to a major poet’s tragic loss of memory, from exemplary works such as Edgar Degas’s The Fallen Jockey, Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince of Homburg, and Adolf Menzel’s drawings, from the lives of figures such as Edouard Manet, Anna Akhmatova, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Ian Hamilton, and John Harbison, to erotic love, late fatherhood, the death of parents and friends, and the onset of age. Promesse du Bonheur is a uniquely vivid and compelling volume, at once a collection of wide-ranging yet intimately related poems and a brilliant photobook, that aims to hold the reader/viewer in its spell from first page to last.

Promesse du Bonheur

Fried, Michael

History & Criticism

David Zwirner Books

As ludic and nonauthoritarian as John Baldessari’s art, this new monograph on the “father of conceptual art” is dedicated to his practice as an artist and a teacher, and the many ways in which they intertwine. Having been trained as an arts educator, John Baldessari (born 1931) is renowned for his work as much as for his innovative class at CalArts, Los Angeles, where he has formed many generations of artists and helped shape the West Coast art scene. Organized alphabetically, Learning to Read with John Baldessari―which accompanies a retrospective at Museo Jumex, Mexico City―includes an essay on the artist’s approaches to art-making and teaching; a biography of the artist as a teacher; artworks reproduced thematically; and stories and anecdotes from former students such as Liz Craft, Ed Henderson, Matt Mullican, Tony Oursler and David Salle, about their years at CalArts.

Learning to Read with John Baldessari

Bickerton, Ashley

Salle, David

Cranston, Meg

Mullican, Matt

González, Julieta

Oursler, Tony

Hammonds, Kit

Craft, Liz

JRP|Ringier

Bringing together important experimental works and ephemera, this volume documents a watershed moment in James Welling’s photographic career. A seminal figure in the “Pictures Generation”―a group of artists working in 1980s New York―James Welling is best known for his pioneering use of photography and for engaging questions about art and the nature of representation. This book focuses on a particularly fecund period in Welling’s life, charting the works, influences, and shifting ideas he has been pursuing ever since. Chronologically arranged, it features works from the 1970s and 1980s interspersed with never-before-published watercolors, collages, notes, production stills, music, and other ephemera that provide insights into the working process of one of America’s most innovative and significant photographers.

James Welling: The Mind on Fire

Prestel

Over the past dozen years, Toronto-based artist Scott McFarland (born 1975) has become one of the most prominent artists working with photography. His subtle manipulations of the photograph and use of tableau scale offer the viewer a new perspective on the photograph as a single moment in time. McFarland has expanded the subjects of his works in recent years from the large-scale tableaux gardens in Vancouver, for which he is perhaps best known, to winter scenes, cottage country outside the city and the urban street. Scott McFarland: Snow, Shacks, Streets, Shrubs documents the artist's more recent work, much of which is previously unseen.

Scott McFarland: Snow, Shacks, Streets, Shrubs

Stahel, Urs

Scott, Kitty

McFarland, Scott

Walther König, Köln

Thomas Ruff (born 1958) and James Welling (born 1951) are two of the most well-known photographic artists of the present day. They explore in their works the conditions of visual perception, also in relation to our use of the photographic apparatus, and the conditioning of our view of the world through photographic images. The exhibition " Dark Matter. Thomas Ruff and James Welling" and the accompanying catalog of the same name focus on works that wrest new possibilities from the photographic image and expand our capacity for imagination. We perceive our environment subjectively; we see and feel it against the backdrop of what we can grasp and understand in images and words that have been handed to us. About eighty percent of the matter in the universe consists of a substance we know little about: Dark Matter. Does the same apply to the photographic image? Does it hide more than it shows?

Dark Matter. Thomas Ruff & James Welling: Cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld

Gronert, Stefan

Ruff, Thomas

Slifkin, Robert

Végh PhD, Christina

Snoeck Publishing Company

"Like much of Welling's work Light Sources taps into memories and emotions in the viewer, about darkness, strange places, and the wonder of that which attracts us for reasons unknown. It is a trope for the seductions of the quickly glimpsed, the half remembered, the partially understood, qualities that Welling wants to hold up, examine, and admire without piercing the fragile surface of their own fugitive grace." Carol Squiers, Artforum, 1998 American artist James Welling creates work which challenges the technical and conceptual bounds of photography. In his abstract photographs of the 1980s he usually employed simple materials, like crumpled aluminum foil, draped fabric and pastry dough. Then in 1992 he began the series Light Sources, an open-ended accumulation of diverse portraits, landscapes and interiors. All these photographs indirectly refer to the process of perception and while many of the objects literally transmit light, the series acknowledges that everything we see reflects light and is also a source of light.

James Welling: Light Sources, 1992-2005

SteidlMack

This survey of American photographer James Welling's images from the past 25 years offers the opportunity for an in-depth study of the complex and mutable priorities upon which this work builds its strength. The different series of works complement and contrast one another as a network of associations, rather than a linear chronology. For example, we see the on-going tension between the representational power of photography and its pictorial purity (or abstraction) when moving from the images of railroads to his pictures of crumpled fabric and foil imaginary landscapes. And most recently, the "Light Sources" pictures embrace a wide range of associations from the world observed or natural -- the sun shining through a thicket of trees -- to the world engineered or mediated -- a mosaic of ceiling lights. Essays by Michael Fried and Sarah Rogers focus on individual images from different series as well as varied preoccupations from the past three decades.

James Welling: Wolfsburg

Distributed Art Pub Inc

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