The New York Times's Favorite Art Books Figure in Poetry

The New York Times has distinguished some magnificent poetry in their "Best Art Books of 2017" feature. For instance, Holland Cotter was wild about Chris Kraus's After Kathy Acker, and a new art book about William Blake:

‘AFTER KATHY ACKER’ By Chris Kraus (Semiotext(e)). Chris Kraus, one of our most innovative art critics, who is also one of our best fiction writers, now becomes one of our more adventurous biographers in this book on the perversely inventive and invented life of the punk fiction writer Kathy Acker (1947-1997). Although Ms. Kraus, author of “I Love Dick” (1997) and “Where Art Belongs” (2011), states at the outset that she has been influenced by Acker in her own work and life, the influence is one of difference as much as of affinity, and that push-pull gives the book an exploratory under-the-knife tension. The surgery is corrective rather than cosmetic, but surgery it is.

‘WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF AQUARIUS’ By Stephen F. Eisenman (Block Museum of Art and Princeton University Press). Blake (1757-1827) is in the air these days, as he has been in other culturally inflamed times. In 1948, in a Spanish Harlem apartment, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg had an auditory hallucination of Blake reciting “Ah Sun-flower!” and other mind-altering verses. That vision changed Ginsberg’s life, and Blake became a touchstone figure for many radical American artists of the 1950s and his destroy-all-tyrants radar continued to burn through the 1960s. It would certainly find appropriate targets today, as is confirmed by this excellent book, the catalog for an exhibition at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, through March 18.

Roberta Smith likes Adam Pendelton's Black Dada Reader:

‘BLACK DADA READER’ By Adam Pendleton (Koenig Books). In 2011 the artist Adam Pendleton began producing “Black Dada Reader,” a photocopied spiral-bound selection of essays, and circulated them among friends and interested parties a little like samizdat. Now a handsome, more permanent version has arrived, 16 essays, poems and artist’s statements, one interview and one screenplay, sandwiched between introductions by five writers and curators and two manifestoes by Mr. Pendleton. The writers are unlikely bookmates — Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Joan Jonas — who give the collection its own shape and urgency. The subtitle asks “what can black dada do for me?” It behooves the entire art world to find out.

Speaking of Dada, Jason Farago spent time with The Blind Man, an exciting box set of facsimiles of New York Dada magazines, edited by Marcel Duchamp (and newly edited by poet, translator, and performer Sophie Seita):

‘THE BLIND MAN: 100TH ANNIVERSARY FACSIMILE EDITION’ Edited by Sophie Seita (Ugly Duckling Presse). In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a new work to an open-call exhibition: a urinal, turned on one side and signed with a pseudonym. “Fountain” was rejected, but Alfred Stieglitz photographed it for this short-lived Dada magazine, which mixed nonsense verse with editorials that asked, “Where Art is concerned is New York satisfied to be like a provincial town?” This carefully crafted reproduction, an absolute must for fellow Duchamp geeks, includes all two issues of “The Blind Man”; an associated Dada publication, “Rongwrong”; and an invitation to a Dada party I’d have killed to go to.

More choice art books at the NYT.