books

Hedge fun. The logo topiary at the Party in the Garden, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art.

• A new Diane Arbus biography? A new Diane Arbus biography! Journalist Arthur Lubow has inked a deal with Ecco to publish A Secret About a Secret: The Life of Diane Arbus. Word on the street (and by “the street,” we mean the deal report at Publishers Marketplace) is that the book “reveals the extraordinary facts of her life and explores the way she used her gift for intimacy to probe complex ideas about identity in a manner revolutionary to both her art and her time.” Tide yourself over by reading “Arbus Reconsidered,” Lubow’s 2003 piece in The New York Times Magazine, which ignites thusly: “‘Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,’ Norman Mailer said after seeing how she had captured him, leaning back in a velvet armchair with his legs splayed cockily.”

• And speaking of colorful characters (monumental lips! glittering eyes!), the Cyclops Trannies are back. The colorful paint-marker portraits by assume vivid astro focus, exhibited earlier this year at New York gallery the Suzanne Geiss Company, are now available in book form. This evening (6-8 p.m.), Printed Matter hosts a reception and signing with the artists. Stop by the store anytime in the next week or so to check out two editioned neon works from avaf in the window. Next up, in June, is a window installation by book artist David Sandlin.

• Commencement season is in full swing, and the New York School of Interior Design celebrated its 175 graduates with the help of Amy Lau. The interior designer was the keynote speaker at Friday’s NYSID commencement ceremonies, where she received an honorary doctorate in fine arts along with Martha Stewart, Architectural Digest editor-in-chief Margaret Russell, and interior designer John Saladino.
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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

“At the Otsuka Museum of Art in Naruto City, [Japan], a committee of six art historians determined the most important works of art in the Western world. The Otsuka Pharmaceutical Group funded the ambitious project of photographically replicating more than 1,000 works on ceramic board, in the original size, orientation, and installation position. Museum directors, curators, and artists’ descendants authenticated the works as exceptional reproductions. The museum calls attention to the authentic nature of the works with words such as ‘real’ and ‘exact,’ and by making little distinction between copy and original, claiming that the image-replications allow visitors ‘to appreciate the true artistic value of the original works.’ The introductory text reassures guests that, if the original works eventually perish in a natural disaster or expire from conservation problems, the reproductions are guaranteed to keep their ‘shape and color’ for 2,000 years.”

-Rebekah Modrak, in Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice (Routledge)

Maurice Sendak, Caldecott-winning author of classic children’s books such as Where the Wild Things Are, died this morning due to complications from a stroke. He was 83. His most recent book was Bumble-Ardy (HarperCollins), the tale of a mischievous pig named Bumble who has reached the age of nine without ever having had a birthday party. He takes matters into his own hands (well, cloven hooves) and invites all of his friends to a masquerade bash that quickly gets out of hand. In discussing his widely beloved work, Brooklyn-born Sendak was always quick to credit his mentors, the late Ruth Krauss (The Carrot Seed) and her husband Crockett “Dave” Johnson, who wrote Harold and the Purple Crayon. The most valuable lesson they imparted to the budding children’s book author, whose big-headed kids were initially rejected by publishers for being “too foreign-looking”? Be truthful. “If there’s anything I’m proud of in my work—it’s not that I draw better; there’s so many better graphic artists than me—or that I write better, no. It’s—and I’m not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty,” Sendak said in a 2005 interview, “to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.”

Remember Gooey Huey or Leaky Lindsay? Wondering what became of Sewer Sue or the elusive Adam Bomb? Reunite with these and 202 other disgusting old friends in the pages of Garbage Pail Kids (Abrams ComicArts). The book celebrates the beloved sticker trading cards, produced by Topps in the 1980s with a creative team that included Art Spiegelman and John Pound, who have penned the introduction and afterword, respectively. “We all worked anonymously, since Topps didn’t want the work publicly credited, presumably so we could easily be replaced by other hands,” Spiegelman has said. “I was annoyed at the time, but my book publisher, Pantheon, was very relieved. The first volume of Maus was being prepared for publication while the GPKs were near the height of their popularity.” Along with a trove of rare GPK images, the book includes four previously unreleased bonus stickers. Just keep them away from Up Chuck and Heather Shredder.

Want to be the only designer on your block employed by a company founded by a 1534 royal charter? Well, here’s your ticket to legitimately name dropping Henry VIII at parties and more review copies than are prudent for an urban dweller. The New York City office of Cambridge University Press is searching for an art director to work their creative magic on some of the around 1,200 new books it produces each year (and that’s not even counting its historic Bibles list!). The Press is seeking candidates with “a recognized design qualification, proficiency in industry-standard design software, a background in ESL/Educational publishing, and over five years experience of designing for both digital and print.” And if you’ve spent any time in the Boston area, remember, that’s home to the “other” Cambridge.

Learn more about and apply for this Art Director, Cambridge University Press job or view all the current mediabistro.com design/art/photo jobs.

Call a somnambulance. The multimedia goodness of the Sleepwalkers box.

Doug Aitken is up to his old tricks: enveloping museums in high-definition video projections that illuminate their facades and mesmerize passersby, which in the case of his latest project may include President Obama. The Los Angeles-based artist has transformed the National Mall’s Gordon Bunshaft-designed concrete donut (also known as the Hirshhorn) into a 360-degree convex-screen cinema aglow nightly through May 13 with his “SONG 1.” Meanwhile, the Seattle Art Museum recently commissioned Aitken to wrap a corner—the northwest, bien sûr—of its downtown HQ in a jumbo LED display that will debut early next year. The months between these Washingtonian works provide ample time to savor the Sleepwalkers box, an ultra-covetable multimedia remix of the public artwork that took New York by nocturnal storm in 2007.

Part deluxe commemorative edition, part DIY-spirited artist’s book, the Sleepwalkers box is a bold collaboration between Aitken, the Princeton Architectural Press, and DFA Records. The perforated cardboard cover reveals and conceals a fold-out poster of scenes from the five urban narratives (starring the likes of Donald Sutherland, Tilda Swinton, and Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power) that were projected onto the exterior of the Museum of Modern Art. Set that aside to discover a turntable-ready vinyl “picture disc,” which the strong-willed will manage to avoid framing as an art object. A book of “fragments, markings, and images” from the making of Sleepwalkers includes breathtaking full-bleed images as well as an interview in which Aitken discusses the installation with Jacques Herzog. “Your work needs an ideal architectural conservation to unfold its quality,” advises the architect.
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Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft ignited FUSE in 1991 as a “dynamic new forum for typography that [would] stimulate a new sensibility in visual expression, one grounded in ideas, not just image.” More than a decade since its last issue, the influential publication (which commissioned original, “experimental” fonts from type gods such as Erik Spiekermann, Peter Saville, and Tobias Frere-Jones, and provided them to readers on a disk) returns in FUSE 1-20, out this month from Taschen. The deluxe box set includes all 18 out-of-print issues compiled into a book designed by Brody as well as two never-before published issues, complete with posters and access to an online library of 24 fresh fonts, including eye-popping creations from Stefan Sagmeister, eBoy, and Lucienne Roberts. “The computer will encourage designers to create new ways of using the alphabet—but first we must clear the cobwebs that cover the type that has so quickly been digitized and dumped in the system folder,” wrote Wozencraft in his introduction to the debut issue. “Otherwise we will be left deeper in a digital nightmare, plundering as many hot metal typefaces as possible to compensate for our lack of imagination. We will pretend to be in command of our language, but will actually be locked in a museum.”

(Photos courtesy Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec)

It wouldn’t be the Milan International Furniture Fair without a slew of smashing new creations from Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. At this year’s mega-show, which kicks off next week with an eye-watering 1,400 exhibitors, the designing brothers will debut their glossy storage nooks for Vitra, a textured textile/shelving system hybrid created for Established & Sons, and assorted objects for Magis and Mattiazzi. Those who can’t make it to Milano can get their Bouroullec fix in the pages of Works, out next month from Phaidon. “Works is a comprehensive monograph featuring a wealth of images of our projects, models, drawings—that is to say all visual material we found interesting to dig out from the archives of our workshop,” said the brothers in an e-mail. “It documents what we do by proposing an intuitive understanding, a flowing journey from one project to another.” Organized thematically and designed by Sonia Dyakova, the book spotlights the Bouroullecs’ greatest hits—including collaborations with Vitra (Algue makes the cover), Flos, Alessi, Cappellini, and Kvadrat—and reveals previously unpublished images and drawings alongside text by Abitare alum Anniina Koivu. Also weighing in on the designers’ first dozen years of projects, which are all doumented in a catalogue section, are the likes of design critic Alice Rawsthorn, Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum, and Didier Krzentowski of Galerie Kreo.

“The only valuable class I took in art school was from a guy who taught display lettering which was literally like sign painting,” says cartoonist (and screenwriter) Daniel Clowes of his formative years at Pratt Intstitute. “Everybody else was like, ‘Aww man, I can’t believe I have to take this cornball class,’ where I was front and center every week. Still to this day I use everything I learned in that class.” Clowes’s irresistible handlettering, groundbreaking graphic novels, beloved New Yorker covers, and much more are the subject of a retrospective that opens next Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” is accompanied by a splendid monograph out this month from Abrams ComicArts. Designed by Jonathan Bennett, the book includes essays by the likes Chris Ware and Chip Kidd. And feast your eyes on a test sample animation by Nicholas de Monchaux, who is masterminding the design of the exhibition:

The imminent museum survey earned the cartoonist a Clowes-up—”Humanity’s Discomfort, Punctured with a Pen“—in Sunday’s New York Times, where he shared the front page of the Arts & Leisure section with a Smurfily dressed Nicki Minaj. Among the diverse Clowes admirers that writer Carol Kino rounded up for the profile: Alexander Payne, who is directing the film adaptation of Wilson; Art Spiegelman; and (would you believe?) Neo Rauch. “Dan’s work stands out because of its precision,” Rauch told Kino. The artist was also “fascinated by its underground, slightly creepy aspect,” and added, “Plus, he has a very dark humor that appeals to me immediately.”

“In a profound way, the museum experience is a critical one, which is to say it begins by seeing the object—in the case of art museums, the work of art—as in itself it really is and not as our predilections and prejudices think it to be. The opportunity to look hard and long at works of art, to have our first impressions changed and deepened, our expectations challenged and rearranged, reconciled to the works on display, is the promise of art museums. The works of art preceded us. Experiencing them, as they are, requires that we put aside our self-centeredness. And this is good, in the sense put forward by the English moral philosopher Iris Murdoch when she said, ‘Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be connected with virtue.’”

-James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, in his new book Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum (University of Chicago Press)