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Aquarium
by
Diane Cook (Photographer), Len Jenshel (Photographer), Todd Newberry
(Contributor), Lawerence Weschler (Contributor)
From
Booklist
Cook and Jenshel, wife and husband, work together on large
projects, she in black and white, he in color. Turning to
water after a project about volcanoes, they settled on two
approaches, one concerned with ice, the other with immense
aquariums--hence, one with pure nature, the other with
nature humanly constrained. Their aquarium pictures are
gorgeous, thoughtful, and provocative. At first the
black-and-whites seem more artificial and abstract,
especially in the subtly turbulent image of a tiger plunging
after a pumpkin, which is virtually impossible to decipher
without a written explanation. But it is almost as hard to
"decode" the adjacent color image of a spotlighted shark
lunging toward the viewer. Other color pictures are
forthrightly painterly: illuminist (a redheaded woman
watches identically red jellyfish), magical realist (a baby
and a turtle in a seeming face-off), and, of course,
surrealist (the giant fish-nose "invading" a sunken
classical Greek city). Biologist Todd Newberry's essay and
the interview-afterword raise piquant questions about the
aquarium experience for inhabitants as well as spectators.
Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights
reserved
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The Art
Instinct
Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
by Denis Dutton (Author)
From the New Yorker
Dutton, an aesthetic philosopher best known as the curator of the
Web site Arts & Letters Daily, sets out to do for art what Steven
Pinker and others have done for psychology, language, and religion:
consider it from a Darwinian standpoint. Along the way, he gives an
engaging, if opinionated, survey of various currents in aesthetic
debate; it is perhaps unavoidable that he seems on more solid
foundations here than in the realm of science. When trying to assess
whether artistic impulses should be considered adaptive or merely
by-products of the evolutionary process, a crucial question raised
by his approach, he argues by analogy and tries to have it both
ways. But the book is ultimately animated less by its grand thesis
than by all the questions tossed up along the way why did no art
form develop to exploit smell, as music does hearing and by Dutton’s
infectious and wide-ranging love of art, a passion that clearly goes
beyond anything that could be considered an adaptive trait.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker.
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The Botany of Desire
A Plant's-Eye View of the World
by Michael
Pollan (Author)
From Publishers Weekly
Erudite, engaging and highly original, journalist Pollan's
fascinating account of four everyday plants and their coevolution
with human society challenges traditional views about humans and
nature. Using the histories of apples, tulips, potatoes and cannabis
to illustrate the complex, reciprocal relationship between humans
and the natural world, he shows how these species have successfully
exploited human desires to flourish. "It makes just as much sense to
think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way
to conquer the trees," Pollan writes as he seamlessly weaves
little-known facts, historical events and even a few amusing
personal anecdotes to tell each species' story. For instance, he
describes how the apple's sweetness and the appeal of hard cider
enticed settlers to plant orchards throughout the American colonies,
vastly expanding the plant's range. He evokes the tulip craze of
17th-century Amsterdam, where the flower's beauty led to a frenzy of
speculative trading, and explores the intoxicating appeal of
marijuana by talking to scientists, perusing literature and even
visiting a modern marijuana garden in Amsterdam. Finally, he
considers how the potato plant demonstrates man's age-old desire to
control nature, leading to modern agribusiness's experiments with
biotechnology. Pollan's clear, elegant style enlivens even his most
scientific material, and his wide-ranging references and charming
manner do much to support his basic contention that man and nature
are and will always be "in this boat together."
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this
title.
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A Collaboration with
Nature
by Andy Goldsworthy (Author)
From Library Journal
A new generation of American and European sculptors is receiving
critical and commercial attention for rediscovering, in the spirit
of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913), the wealth of forms in everyday
life. Variously labeled "New Object," "Metaphoric Object,"
"Neo-Geo," or "Simulationist," this new sculpture mimics familiar
objects from industrial, domestic, and historical sources. Eight
such artists are features in OBJECTives: Robert Gober, Jeff Koons,
Annette Lemieux, and Haim Steinbach from New York; Grenville Davis
and Judith Opie from London; Katarina Fritsch from Cologne; and Juan
Munoz from Madrid. This exhibition catalog, which presents works
exhibited at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California from April
to June 1990, includes exhibition histories and a selected
bibliography for each artist. Goldsworthy is an extraordinarily
innovative British artist who employs a range of natural
materials--leaves, bark, twigs, petals, berries, rock, clay, stones,
feathers, snow, ice--to create outdoor sculpture that works
instinctively in nature. His range of scale is impressive, from
grasses and leaves to ice spires and slate stacks. Goldsworthy
records his works in the 120 full-color photographs that are the
subject of this book. The delicate tensions and balance of his
collaborations encourage a sharpened perception of the natural
world. Goldsworthy's introduction eloquently explains his working
methods and philosophy and convinces the reader that he's doing more
than playing the primitive.
- Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Passage
by Andy Goldsworthy (Author)
From Booklist
*Starred Review* "I don't know what will happen but look forward to
whatever changes occur," writes sculptor Goldsworthy, a statement
that can stand as his credo. An artist who works with nature in
nature, he creates astonishingly subtle, ephemeral, seemingly
impossible, and elegantly mysterious works out of stone, sticks,
leaves, stalks, ice, and sand, constructions vulnerable to sun,
wind, storms, tides, and time. Documentation is an integral aspect
of his art, and, consequently, Goldsworthy, the subject of the
gorgeously meditative, award-winning documentary Rivers and Tides
(2004), has created a number of beautiful books. His newest covers
many recent works--including Garden of Stones, a Holocaust
memorial in New York City and the subject of an essay by Simon
Schama--and tracks his ongoing involvement with an ancient
tradition, the building of cairns. His are not mere stacks of stones
marking a trail but rather elaborately constructed and gracefully
balanced egg-shaped forms that bring into focus the beauty of their
surroundings. Magical and exquisite, Goldsworthy's sculptures move
us to look more carefully at the world around us and consider more
deeply our place within the fine mesh of life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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