MITPressLog

Monday Eye Candy: Lucio Fontana

Happy Monday! Today's eye candy is from Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch by Anthony White, which features 101 illustrations. Click on each image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, The Moon in Venice, 1961.

 

 

 

Georges Mathieu, Capetians Everywhere, 1954.

 

 

 

 

 

Mauro Reggiani, Composition R 3, 1934.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lucio Fontana, Banana and Pear, 1938.

 

 

 

 

Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, Expectations, 1959.

Monday Eye Candy: Body Sweats

Happy Monday! Feast your eyes on a few images from Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Click on each image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thirty Percent-Off (and Poetry!) Friday: April

Like last month, we are excited to offer a 30% discount on an MIT Press title to our blog readers (when purchased through the MIT Press website). Today's 30 percent-off Friday pick also launches our National Poetry Month celebration--be sure to check back for a poem every Friday through the month of April!

Our April discount pick is I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation by Francis Picabia and translated by Marc Lowenthal. Francis Picabia (1879-1953), painter and poet, was a leading figure in the Dada movement.

Follow this link, which will automatically apply the discount, to get your copy of I Am a Beautiful Monster. *In the (unlikely) event that the discount doesn't appear when you click the link, have no fear--simply manually enter the discount code "IBMFRI12" in the shopping cart to get the discount.*

Without further ado, here's a poem from  I Am a Beautiful Monster. Check back on the first Friday of May (5/4) for our next "Thirty Percent-Off Friday" pick.

 

Anecdote

You see, I’m crazy to think it
I am a man with nimble fingers
Who wants to cut the threads of old sorrows
False folds of my worried brain
Stories in arabesque memories
I’m only happy on the open sea
Where you go farther
On anonymous waves.

 

Monday Eye Candy: Asylum

Today's eye candy is from Christopher Payne's Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buffalo State Hospital, Buffalo, New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unclaimed copper cremation urns, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon

 

 

Danvers State Hospital, Danvers, Massachusetts

 

 

 

Mid-March Give-Away Contest

Three cheers for Women's History Month! We're giving away a copy of Women Artists at the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, to celebrate. In Women Artists at the Millennium, artists including Martha Rosler and Yvonne Rainer reflect upon their own varied practices and art historians discuss the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Mona Hatoum, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Answer the question below for a chance to win a copy of the book. Submit your answers as a comment on this post, and you will be entered into a drawing to win. The deadline to enter the contest is March 22nd, and we will notify the lucky winner on March 23rd.

Which female artist most inspires you and why?

Monday Eye Candy: Enfoldment and Infinity

Happy Monday! This week's eye candy comes from Laura Marks' Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, which features 31 color illustrations and 140 black & white illustrations. Click on each image to enlarge. Check back on 2/27 for the next Monday Eye Candy pick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dome of the Friday Mosque at Yazd, Iran (1324-1328). Photograph by Laura Marks.

 

 

 

 

 

Detail of minbar (pulpit) for Sultan Qaitbay (1468-1496) of cedar with ivory and wood inlay. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photograph by Laura Marks.

 

 

 

 

 

Detail of mural showing 'Ali (veiled), nineteenth century, Mausoleum of Harun-i Vilayat, Isfahan. Photograph by Laura Marks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lionel Kearns, "The Birth of God/uniVerse," artist's book (1965). Photograph by Laura Marks.

 

 

 

 

Detail, vase carpet, Iran, sixteenth century. Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Photograph by Laura Marks.

“Eighteen Years in the Making”

Ellen Faran, Director of The MIT Press, reflects on last week’s PROSE Awards ceremony.

By coincidence, “eighteen years in the making” described each of the two books featured at the PROSE awards ceremony in Washington, DC last week. The PROSE awards recognize excellence in professional and scholarly publishing and are judged by distinguished industry experts. This year’s engaging ceremony provided, along with the chance to applaud several MIT Press category winners*, many good reminders about the things we value in scholarly publishing.        

Last year’s winner of the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, was Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Eltis et al., a comprehensive reference work published by Yale University Press. At this year’s awards ceremony, we saw a new short film about the making of the Atlas. I can’t report on the details of this process, of which I have only a fuzzy grasp, but my lasting impressions from the film are the large collaborative team involved (including funders, scholars, cartographers, and the Press); and that team’s clear vision of the book form as superbly effective in presenting this material (to accompany an openly-available database). These impressions call to mind MIT Press’ Atlas of Science by Katy Börner, another Atlas that featured collaborative effort and vision behind its making.

The 2012 Hawkins award went to The Diffusion Handbook: Applied Solutions for Engineers by Thambynayagam, published by McGraw Hill. My grasp of this highly complex, 2,000-page hardcover book is even fuzzier, but I was struck by its evident usefulness for its technical audience and by the author’s invention of a new visual icon system for organizing the solutions he presents (the book contains a 125-page table of contents using these icons!).

The Diffusion Handbook reminded me of several of our own completely unique works, books whose new concepts required custom editorial solutions and/or breathtakingly detailed production work. These include Shape by George Stiny, Color for the Sciences by Jan Koenderink, Aaaaw to Zzzzzd by John Bevis, and The Book of Michael of Rhodes, volumes 1-3, edited by David McGee, Alan Stahl, and Pamela Long. Likely some of these were eighteen years (or more) in the making, as well.

 

*MIT Press 2011 PROSE Award category winners are  Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes by Louise A. Mozingo (Architecture & Urban Planning); The Fate of Greenland:  Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change by Philip Conkling, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker and George Denton (Earth Sciences); and When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans by Paula J. Caplan (Psychology).

Honorable Mentions include Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story by Paul Shaw (Architecture & Urban Planning); Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art by Gwen Allen (Art History & Criticism); Unlocking Energy Innovation: How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System by Richard K. Lester and David M. Hart (Business, Finance & Management); and Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World by Olivier L. de Weck, Daniel Roos and Christopher L. Magee (Engineering & Technology).

 

Monday Eye Candy: Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art

Happy Chinese New Year! To celebrate the year of the dragon, today's eye candy comes from Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art by Gao Minglu, which contains 150 color illustrations and 173 black-and-white illustrations. Click on each image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 8.9

Wang Guangyi, Great Castigation Series: Coca-Cola, 1991.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7.33

Song Ling, Meaningless Choice No. 1, 1987.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7.24

Pool Society, The Travelers in a Green Space No. 2, 1986.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 5.7

Geng Jianyi, Two People under the Lamplight, 1985.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 5.4

Li Guijun, Studio, 1985.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 4.2

Gao Minglu, the principal curator, reading his declaration, "Protest," in front of the public in the plaza of the National Agricultural Exhibition Center, February 5, 2009. Photograph provided by Yang Zhilin.

Ai Weiwei: Person of the Year Runner-Up

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ai Weiwei was named a runner-up for TIME Person of the Year! Visit TIME for a Q&A with Ai Weiwei that touches on everything from his 81-day Beijing detention to details on how he used his blog as a platform for political activism--and to read Ai's posts, check out Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, culled from the blog that Chinese authorities shut down in 2009. Ai Weiwei's Blog offers a collection of Ai's online writings translated into English--the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language.

Monday Eye Candy

While it’s supposed to be unwise to judge a book by its cover, at The MIT Press, we believe that to acknowledge the visual and material appeal of books is not to diminish their content. In spirit of this belief, we're instituting "Monday Eye Candy" to celebrate the many MIT Press titles that we feel are beautiful, inside and out.

Today's eye candy is Kit White's 101 Things to Learn in Art School. The cover is a stamped case and each of the lessons in the book is accompanied by a black and white drawing that illustrates the point made by referring to an historical or contemporary work of art. The drawings, produced by the author, act both as referrals to well-known works that students should study, as well as demonstrations of the difficulty of successfully capturing the subtleties of art works when copying them in order to decipher their secrets. Feast your eyes on these spreads from the book (click on each image to enlarge):