Jeffrey Fraenkel

Antoine de Beaupré

Art for music: the album cover as medium Art & Vinyl is an exhilarating new look into the history of the vinyl record as a medium for modern and contemporary visual art. This beautifully designed and printed publication is the first book to focus in-depth on works of art created specifically for an album, composer or musician. With reproductions of more than 200 LPs from the mid-20th century to the present, Art & Vinyl traces the trajectory of how the record album has been considered by artists as material for a work of art. The book begins with Pablo Picasso's 1949 depiction of the dove of peace, printed directly on an audio disc. Significantly, the recording was Paul Robeson's Chante Pour La Paix (Singing for Peace). Art & Vinyl also includes works by artists as disparate and wide-ranging as Ed Ruscha, Marlene Dumas, Cy Twombly, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, Sophie Calle and Andy Warhol. Highlights include Gerhard Richter's extraordinary oil painting made directly on a recording of Glenn Gould's Bach: The Goldberg Variations (1984), as well as Allan Kaprow's LP How to Make a Happening (1966). Also featured are albums of original recordings by Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Jean Dubuffet, Christian Marclay and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others. Some of the better-known artists' covers for rock, pop and jazz albums featured here are Jann Haworth and Peter Blake's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; Jim Dine's cover for The Best of Cream; Lee Friedlander's portrait of Miles Davis for In a Silent Way; Warhol's cover for Sticky Fingers and Robert Frank's Exile on Main Street; Mapplethorpe's classic Patti Smith portrait for Horses; Robert Longo's cover for Glenn Branca's The Ascension; Fischli/Weiss's Liliput; and Alec Soth's cover for Dolorean's The Unfazed. Art & Vinyl has been assembled over the course of nearly a decade by curator and collector Antoine de Beaupré, author of Total Records and founder of Librarie Galerie 213 in Paris.

A Visual Record

Art & Vinyl

Frish Brandt

"Humans, unlike other living creatures, want to make and look at pictures." So begins the introduction to the jaw-dropping array of photographs in Long Story Short, the latest in Fraenkel Gallery's idiosyncratic surveys of photography since the medium's invention 180 years ago. A surprising and unconventional slice of photography's history, Long Story Shortis also an abbreviated tour of Fraenkel Gallery's approach to photography. Published to mark the gallery's 40th (and still counting) year, this sumptuously designed and printed volume presents work by photography's masters alongside that of little-known artists and anonymous thrift shop finds. Among the images to be discovered here are Eadweard Muybridge's 1887 study of a contortionist performing extreme body movements; Man Ray's 1923 ghostlike rayograph of an irradiated banjo; and a female impersonator applying her lipstick backstage, as seen by Diane Arbus in 1959. Interwoven among these are anonymous photographs of a tornado touching ground near Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, in 1896; astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing beside an American flag on the moon in 1969; and a lawn mower flying inexplicably over a meadow in 1974. Presented in approximate chronological order, the unconventional flow of images conveys a profound sense of photography's infinite riches, and is a meditation on the inexhaustible possibilities of the medium itself.

Long Story Short

Sarah the Sensible, that's what Sarah's year 12 jersey said. Sarah's studying law, living at Galston College on a scholarship, and happy to have found Wil, the ideal boyfriend. So why is Sarah dreaming about the boy she met in the laundry? Paige Miss Popular, Paige's jersey said. She and Tallulah have been best friends forever. And thanks to Tallulah, they're the only freshmen to have been invited to the hottest party on campus. So why is Paige now a patient in a psychiatric ward? What happened to Paige between then and now that she's pretending she can't remember? The truth will illuminate the darkness - but what if Sarah and Paige don't want to hear it?

The Book of Shadows

Furthermore

Darius Himes

Celebrated and revered by artists, the work of Peter Hujar remains something of a public secret, but his photographs dealing with sex and eroticism, made between the years 1969 and 1986, have come to define a certain era in New York. Today they are widely considered to be his finest and most radical work. Hujar's view of the human body is uninhibited and uncompromising, but his poignant explorations of sexuality and desire also project a universal humanity; as Nan Goldin said of Hujar's nudes, "Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh." This monograph, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, is the first to deal specifically with Hujar's photographs of love and lust. Captured in deeply textured black and white, these photographs present a view of human relationships that encompasses both the tender and taboo. This volume also contains an interview with author Fran Lebowitz from 1989, and newly commissioned essays by Vince Aletti and Stephen Koch. Peter Hujar (1934-1987) was born in Trenton, New Jersey and moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising and fashion industries. He documented the vibrant cultural scene of downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976, he published "Portraits in Life and Death," with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987.

Jeffrey Fraenkel

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