Lawrence Weschler

Robert Irwin

'On its more radical fringes, modern art merges with modern philosophy, and this excellent, provocative profile...points up the extent to which the act of percepton, rather than any specific objects, has become the subject of the avant-garde California artist's work....Weschler has a knack for clarifying avstruse artistic and philosophical concepts.

A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

The author takes readers on a tour of his personal museum of natural oddities and optical illusions as he explores the imaginative origins of art and science, in a work nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

More than twenty short works by the Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder include a profile of film director Roman Polanski, a furniture designer's struggles with Parkinson's disease, and David Hockney's unusual experiments with photography. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Selected Writings

Vermeer in Bosnia

Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogues, gathered here for the first time. Weschler chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor—and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around 2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself.

Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney

True to Life

The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patient The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings--the account of his long-dormant patients’ miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks’s capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.

A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?

David Hockney

A commentary by the "New Yorker" art critic accompanies 117 photographic collages by the celebrated and popular artist, whose work in this medium reflects a synthesis of observation, panorama, and impression

Cameraworks

From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, art historian and journalist Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge -- at least, it does through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art (both contemporary and Renaissance), his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays that are sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

A Book of Convergences

Everything that Rises

Boggs: A Comedy of Values teases out these transactions and their sometimes dramatic legal consequences, following Boggs on a larkish, though at the same time disconcertingly profound, econo-philosophic chase. For in a madcap Socratic fashion, Boggs is raising all sorts of truly fundamental questions - what is it that we value in art, or, for that matter, in money? Indeed, how do we place a value on anything at all? And in particular, why do we, why should we, how can we place such trust in anything as confoundingly insubstantial as paper money?

A Comedy of Values

Boggs

A Comedy of Values (Passions and Wonders Series)

Donna Rifkind

Salka Viertel

Kindness of Strangers

Robert Irwin Getty Garden

From Pulitzer Prize nominee Lawrence Weschler, a fascinating profile of Walter Murch, a film legend and amateur astrophysicist whose investigations could reshape our understanding of the universe. For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary--a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Though as a consummate outsider he's had a hard time attracting any sort of comprehensive hearing from professional astrophysicists, Murch has made advances that even some of them find intriguing, including a connection between Titius Bode and earlier notions--going back past Kepler and Pythagorus--of musical harmony in the heavens. Unfazed by rejection, ever probing, Murch perseveres in the highest traditions of outsider science. Lawrence Weschler brings Murch's quest alive in all its seemingly quixotic, yet still plausible, splendor, probing the basis for how we know what we know, and who gets to say. "The wholesale rejection of alternative theories has repeatedly held back the progress of vital science," Weschler observes, citing early twentieth-century German amateur Alfred Wegener, whose speculations about continental drift were ridiculed at first, only to be accepted as fact decades later. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says "It is controversy that brings science alive"--and Murch's quest does that in spades. His fascination with the way the planets and their moons are arranged opens up the field of celestial mechanics for general readers, sparking an awareness of the vast and (to us) invisible forces constantly at play in the universe.

Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists

Waves Passing in the Night

Robert Irwin, who is one of the most important artists of this era, was a seminal figure in "Light and Space" art. He began as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s, and was for some time (but is no longer) an artist who produced no art obejcts. Irwin's philosophical and aesthetic theories are so far-reaching that only now, some twenty years after they were first posited, has the art world begun to recognize that his questions about perception come to bear upon the definition of art itself. In the 1960s, his disc paintings succeeded in "breaking the edge of the canvas," with the resultant effect that the space surrounding the work became equally important. In the 1970s, Irwin created room-environment pieces of a phenomenal or non-object nature across the United States. Comprised solely of light, string, or nylon scrim, these works placed the responsibility upon the viewer in order to bring him to a position where he could "perceive himself perceiving" - "The Mondrian was no longer on the wall - the viewer was in the Mondrian." In the last ten years, Irwin's sculptural aesthetic and his philosophical theories have merged to provide the impetus behind a major body of sculpture created in response to a specific site, situation, or locale. Irwin's importance as an artist lies not only in the beauty and clarity of his precendent-setting work, but in his theoretical contribtion, which provides a framework by which all phenomenal works can be examined. This book, written by the artist, lays out his theoretical position and documents the working processes behind seventeen major sculpture projects created over the past decade. -- from dust jacket.

Notes Toward a Conditional Art

Being and Circumstance

Settling Accounts with Torturers

A Miracle, A Universe

The untold story of Dr. Oliver Sacks, his own most singular patient "[An] engrossing biographical memoir. This is Sacks at full blast: on endless ward rounds, observing his post-encephalitic patients . . . exulting over horseshoe crabs and chunks of Iceland spar." —Barbara Kiser, Nature The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings—the account of his long-dormant patients’ miraculous but troubling return to life in a Bronx hospital ward. But the book had hardly been an immediate success, and the rumpled clinician was still largely unknown. Over the ensuing four years, the two men worked closely together until, for wracking personal reasons, Sacks asked Weschler to abandon the profile, a request to which Weschler acceded. The two remained close friends, however, across the next thirty years and then, just as Sacks was dying, he urged Weschler to take up the project once again. This book is the result of that entreaty. Weschler sets Sacks’s brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks’s capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul. And all the while he is pouring out a stream of glorious, ribald, hilarious, and often profound conversation that establishes him as one of the great talkers of the age. Here is the definitive portrait of Sacks as our preeminent romantic scientist, a self-described “clinical ontologist” whose entire practice revolved around the single fundamental question he effectively asked each of his patients: How are you? Which is to say, How do you be? A question which Weschler, with this book, turns back on the good doctor himself.

Recent Paintings

Françoise Mouly

Whether whimsical, provocative, or laugh-out-loud funny, "The New Yorker"'s covers are always the talk of the town. This irresistible compendium presents not only the best of the magazine's covers--selected by art director Mouly--but also a behind-the-scenes peek at the sketches that lead up to them and a look at the controversy that sometimes follows in their wake. 370 illustrations, 350 in color.

Cutting-edge Covers from a Literary Institution

Covering the New Yorker

For the first time, New Yorker staff reporter Lawrence Weschler tells the courageous story of how against tremendous odds, torture victims and human rights activistsstice.

A Miracle, a Universe

David L. Ulin

Michael Light

The greater Los Angeles area covers 4,850 square miles--the size of a small country--and holds almost 18 million people. Perhaps America's largest human creation, it has been vilified and celebrated in equal measure since its inception. Is L.A. the face of the apocalypse, or an ultimate paradise at continent's edge--or both? With LA Day/LA Night, photographer Michael Light continues his aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double-volume set. LA Daystares directly into the sun, which blasts the metropolis in a relentless and specific light. LA Nightdrifts over the city as it grows darker, and begins to resemble the starry sky vaulted above. Referencing Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander, Julius Schulman and writers from Philip K. Dick to Raymond Chandler, LA Day/LA Nightcontinues Los Angeles's rich cultural legacy of examining its favorite schizophrenic subject--itself.

Lawrence Weschler

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