Brian Wallis

For the past fifteen years, Hans Haacke's work has been concerned with issues that are at the core of postmodern investigations - the nature of art as institution, the authorship of the artist, the social behavior of the art world, the network of cultural policies such as the role and function of the museum, the critic, and the public, and many other sociological problems.

This book is based on a major retrospective exhibition of Haacke's work, the first in an American museum. The works selected show the different ways in which he has addressed the social and political concerns affecting art production. By laying bare the explicit functioning and interconnectedness of systems of finance, social organization, and representations, Haacke demonstrates how these employ art and other forms of presentation and representation as formalized means of power and coercion. In this important respect, his work has set a precedent for that of many younger, social concerned artists.

A group of significant essays by Leo Steinberg, Fredric Jameson, Rosalyn Deutsche, and an introduction and overview by Brian Wallis place Haacke's work in a larger social and aesthetic context.

Hans Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1936 and, since 1967, has taught at the Cooper Union in New York. Earlier retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, the Tate Gallery, London, and museums in Berlin and Bern. His work has also been included in many major international group exhibitions, including the Tokyo Biennal, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta. Brian Wallis is Adjunct Curator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and editor of Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation and of the magazine Wedge. Hans Haacke is copublished with The New Museum of Contemporary Art and distributed by The MIT Press.… (altro)

Drawn from the International Center of Photography’s archives, this book highlights the incomparable style and fascinating career of Weegee, one of New York City’s quintessential press photographers. For a decade between 1935 and 1946, Weegee made a name for himself snapping crime scenes, victims, and perpetrators. Armed with a Speed Graphic camera and a police-band radio, Weegee often beat the cops to the story, determined to sell his pictures to the sensation-hungry tabloids. His stark black-and-white photos were often lurid and unsettling. Yet, as this beautifully produced volume shows, they were also brimming with humanity. Designed as a series of “dossiers,” this book follows Weegee’s transformation from a freelancer to a photo-detective. It explores his relationship with the tabloid press and gangster culture and reveals his intimate knowledge of New York’s darkest corners. It provides readers with a rich historical experience―a New York City “noir” shot through the lens of one of its most iconoclastic figures.… (altro)

This collection of both posed and candid shots of Marilyn was a quick read. I really like Wallis's detailed write-up of the photo-shoot assignment and the background details of Marilyn, her struggles with the heads of the Hollywood movies production houses and the extent to which DiMaggio went to to ensure that they were not seen as a couple. Some of the pictures are super cheesy - apparently LOOK wanted to get shots of Marilyn in a bathing suit with cast and crutches and a series of what can only be called "tourism" shots with Marylin posing in a canoe, with a RMCP officer and even lying fully clothed in a log cabin on a bearskin rug.

While the original assignment was to capture what it looks like when three major Hollywood movies, featuring some of the biggest stars, are being filmed simultaneously on location in the Canadian Rockies, it is the inclusion of Vacon's letters home to his wife while on location that really give the reader fabulous glimpses into the events of the shoot, the iconic Banff Springs Hotel of the 1950's and the personalities of the stars (Vachon liked Shelley Winters, found Robert Mitchum to be an arrogant ass and his first meeting with Alan Ladd left him thinking Ladd to be the worst person he has ever met).

A fabulous, quick read for Marilyn Monroe fans or anyone interested in Hollywood productions of the era and the Canadian Rocky Mountains.… (altro)