New Books: April April 18 2007

1. Vija Celmins: Dessins/Drawings

Book Description:

Published to accompany the exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Galerie du Musée, 25 October 2006 - 8 January 2007; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 28 January - 22 April 2007.
Purchase from Ursus Books and Prints:

2. John Beech: Works, 1989-2004 by John Beech, Daniel Marzona and Gabriele Kubler

Book Description:

The book presents John Beech’s artworks of the last fifteen years, recently on a big one-man exhibition at the stiftung für konkrete kunst in Germany. John Beech's things do not work. The containers do not move anything, instead of being made of the required metal they consist of thin plywood, frail light blue acrylic glass, or fragile insulating board. Road bumpers are made of plaster rather than concrete, wheels do not turn, are suspended in air, or obstruct each other. Something that drives you mad in real life becomes rather appealing here, the pointlessness, the system error, some things' refusal to perform a task.

Purchase from Gallery: 3. The $64 Tomato: How One Man Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden by William Alexander

Book Description:

When the author of this hilarious horticultural memoir plants a large vegetable garden and a small orchard on his Hudson Valley farmstead, he finds himself at odds with almost all creation. Alexander's slightly poisoned paradise manages to impart an existential lesson on the interconnectedness of nature and the fine line between nurturing and killing.

Purchase from Amazon:

4. Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline by Lisa Margonelli

Book Description:

In the last few years, just about everyone has had "oil on the brain" at some point, as record gas prices and a disastrous war have called our dependency into question. But though the U.S. burns 10,000 gallons of gasoline a second, few of us know how oil is created and drilled, how gas stations compete or what actually goes on in a refinery—let alone what happens in the mysterious Strategic Petroleum Reserve, where the U.S. government stores roughly 700 million barrels of oil in underground salt caverns on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Purchase from Amazon:

5. Theo Van Doesburg: Maler, Architekt

Book Description:

The big monograph of the significant De-Stijl-Maler-Architekten. Theo van Doesburg was one of the most radical renovators of art and architecture after the First World War. In 1917 he founded together with Piet Mondrian and some like-minded people the artist's group and magazine de Stijl („ Take of the nature her forms and you will keep style left “). Their sign: The compositional restriction on diminished geometrical forms in colors harmonizing with each other.

Purchase from Alibris