<p>What's missing from the American underground? Not publicity for funding, but vital links to the culture of poverty. Bruce Benderson, novelist and commentator, takes you on a philosophical and personal journey into new and old bohemia. His last stop is vanishing Times Square, where middle class thrill-seekers used to have contact with underclass dealers and hustlers. In this book-length essay, written in the tradition of the old-style manifesto, Benderson seeks to restore id to the creative act. His perverse yet courageous goal is to invent a "new degeneracy."</p>

Toward the New Degeneracy: An Essay

Politics & Social Sciences

Bruce Benderson

Philosophy

Edgewise Press, Inc.

Whether SAINT CLAIR CEMIN is pondering the definition of art or the role perception, language, experience, craft, and ideas play in it, we always get the feeling, in Fragments of a Mind: Stories and Comments on Art 1987-2004, that he is ultimately in dialogue with the diverse and legendary spirits of his homeland, or that he himself, as a sculptor of international repute, has simply become a gaucho from his own Brazilian South, carving a piece of wood while telling us a ghost story.  For, in the end, whether he is theorizing about the historical significance of statues or hypothesizing the existence of chimera in his essays, aphorisms, letters and reminiscences in Fragments of a Mind, he seems always to be encouraging in the most graceful way "a lack of manners as the part of the unconscious" and to foster the greatest possible pleasures in a guiltless playground of memory, iconography, and the most basic emotion.  Saint Clair Cemin was born in Cruz Alta, Brazil, in 1951.  He studied at the École Nationale Superiore des Beaux Arts in Paris, France, in 1975, and moved to New York in 1978, to live and work.  His sculptures have been exhibited worldwide in such museums and museum exhibitions as the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); the 1989 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (New York); Documenta IX (Kassel), 1992; Kunsthalle (Basel); the 22nd São Paulo Bienal, 1994; and The Menil Collection, 1999.  He has had one-person museum shows at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico; The Arts Club of Chicago; and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.   He is represented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City. Fragments of a Mind:  Stories and Comments on Art 1987-2004 is the artist's first book of writings.  A monograph on his work, Saint Clair Cemin:  Sculptor from Cruz Alta by Richard Milazzo, was published in 2005.

Fragments of a Mind: Stories and Comments on Art 1987-2004

Saint Clair Cemin

Arts & Photography

The author uses the novella form to suggest a conceptual framework through which to understand his new series of paintings.  Nadin shifts between prose and poetry in an attempt to illustrate the movement from convention ot the more organic mode of sensory experience that characterizes the 'first mark.'

The First Mark

PETER NADIN

Peter Halley's SELECTED ESSAYS 1981-2001 combines, in part, texts from Collected Essays 1981-1987, published originally by Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, Zurich, in 1988, and Sonnabend Gallery, New York, in 1991, and from Recent Essays 1990-1996, Edgewise Press, 1997.  SELECTED ESSAYS includes such seminal texts as "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave and Robert Smithson," "Against Postmodernism:  Reconsidering Ortega," "The Crisis in Geometry," "Frank Stella... and the Simulacrum," "Some Notes on the Computer Landscape," and several previously unpublished essays.  Halley writes:  "In retrospect, I feel that my essays of the 1980s delighted in the play of ideas; they were intended to be provocative, exaggerated and polemical.  For better or worse, this body of work created some small critical position for myself as a writer.  Throughout the '90s, I have wrestled with my writing to avoid the entrapment of defending this established position, a prospect that I would find both dull and fruitless."  Within the general arc of post-industrial, post-humanist development, Halley addresses the central issues of abstraction, not only in painting but in culture, formalism, modernity, communication and technology, architecture, language, and the role that human affect plays, if any, in society.  SELECTED ESSAYS 1981-2001 gives us a picture of art, culture, and history that is uniquely Halley's own - "preeminently analytical, perceptive, balanced, and visionary."

19 black and white illustrations

Selected Essays: 1981-2001

PETER HALLEY

American painter Ross Bleckner (born 1949) has long been an avid reader of The New York Times, with decades' worth of clippings from the paper to prove it. In this artist's book, Bleckner has now orchestrated his archive into a beautifully printed “homage to print media” (as he described it on The Martha Stewart Show, where this volume was prominently previewed). My Life in The New York Times constitutes a kind of collaged media commonplace book, compiling fragments of advice, wisdom and comment, sequenced into a loose narrative based on the cycle of life, from childhood and school to career and ultimately death, with attendant themes of ambition, success, disappointment and tenacity tackled en route. Details such as scotch tape bleeding through the paper are lovingly reproduced here, projecting a charming mortality of materials amid the poignancy of the thoughts Bleckner gathers.

Ross Bleckner: My Life in The New York Times

Individual Artists