
The Miraculous
Raphael Rubinstein(Author)
Paper Monument (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 13. November 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-0-9797575-7-0 (ISBN)
Description
A collection of vignettes on contemporary art from critic and poet Raphael Rubenstein.
The first single-author book to be published by Paper Monument, Raphael Rubinstein's The Miraculous presents the artistic avant-gardes of the last five decades as a tapestry of incidents as fascinating and unlikely as any collection of myths or legends.
Thinking more of Kafka's Parables than Vasari's Lives of the Artists, Rubinstein composes a series of micro-narratives celebrating the mystery and ingeniousness of these human activities which, for lack of a better term, we call "contemporary art."
Featuring writing on fifty artists, including as Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Lee Lozano, Tseng Kwong Chi, Cindy Sherman, David Hammons, and R.H. Quaytman.
The Miraculous is a singular, refreshing trip through contemporary avant-garde art.
The first single-author book to be published by Paper Monument, Raphael Rubinstein's The Miraculous presents the artistic avant-gardes of the last five decades as a tapestry of incidents as fascinating and unlikely as any collection of myths or legends.
Thinking more of Kafka's Parables than Vasari's Lives of the Artists, Rubinstein composes a series of micro-narratives celebrating the mystery and ingeniousness of these human activities which, for lack of a better term, we call "contemporary art."
Featuring writing on fifty artists, including as Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Lee Lozano, Tseng Kwong Chi, Cindy Sherman, David Hammons, and R.H. Quaytman.
The Miraculous is a singular, refreshing trip through contemporary avant-garde art.
Reviews / Votes
"Once an artist becomes a name, the very fact of his or her fame can obscure a clear-sighted view of actual works, past or present. This isn t necessarily a problem, since an acclaimed artist s renown itself contributes to the context in which an emerging body of work will be seen and considered. And, of course, it is often productive to assess an artist's new efforts in light of previous accomplishments. But the fantasy of the innocent eye is compelling because, in our information-glut age, becoming over-informed is always just a few clicks away.In The Miraculous, published by Paper Monument, poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein describes 50 artworks realized in the last few decades. The texts in this beautiful little book range from a sentence or two to a couple of pages. Many of the works in question which are often conceptual and/or performative in nature were in some way creative watersheds: they located the artist s voice, pointed the way forward, raised the stakes of the ongoing imaginative investigation or (in one case) brought it to an end. And with each description, the name of the artist is nowhere to be found.
In its entirety, one of the shorter entries runs:
A successful German painter who enjoys provoking outrage buys an out-of-the-way service station in Brazil and renames it in honor of a notorious Nazi long rumored to have escaped to South America. Soon, photographs begin to circulate of a forlorn building on the facade of which have been emblazoned the words Tankstelle Martin Bormann; (Martin Bormann Gas Station).
An index reveals all the artists identities; some of their stories are quite familiar, others not so much. But withholding names in this manner drives home the point: our perception of a work is distorted when we know who made it, whether that person is celebrated or obscure. Uninformed of authorship, the reader of The Miraculous confronts (through Rubinstein s pellucid prose) the works themselves in all their wondrous weirdness, far from both the blinding glare of acclaim and the shadows of the market and its machinations."-Stephen Maine, artcritical.com
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
NY
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
181 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-9797575-7-0 (9780979757570)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Raphael Rubinstein is Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston, USA. He is a New York based art critic and poet and in 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014, The Silo was given a Best Blog Award of Excellence by the International Association of Art Critics. In April 2017, The Miraculous: Houston, a public-art installation by artist and wife Heather Bause Rubinstein, based on his book The Miraculous, debuted as part of the CounterCurrent Festival.