| | | | AFTER 8 BOOKSAmy Sillman: Faux PasSelected Writings and DrawingsEdited by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau, Benjamin Thorel. Foreword by Lynne Tillman.
 Essays on art-making, abstraction, humor, not-knowing, awkwardness and more, from one of New York’s most influential and popular painters and teachersSince the 1970s, Amy Sillman—a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene—has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas is the first book to gather a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.
Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman’s reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor. As Jason Farago notes in the New York Times, "Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings."
Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Amy Sillman: Faux Pas.'PRAISE AND REVIEWSRindon Johnson These essays together are a wonderful mental embrace. Sillman’s voice is cool, patient, incessant, vulnerable, nostalgic, hilarious; actually what's the word for when someone is kind, clear, sharp and opaque all at once? Someone who speaks straight from the shoulder? Or maybe the elbow: I think Sillman is speaking from the hand in that the ligaments joining feeling and action are lovingly prodded. She is explicit, she’s serious in that she isn’t always that serious, but she’s serious, she’s plain, direct, I mean, I hung on her words. Jutta Koether These dispatches from a decidedly un-straight thinker – a mind that IS an artist’s studio with a sustained curiosity as her main medium – is an exuberant, massively heterogeneous, exhilarating bundle of texts, diagrams, drawings, that document, activate and irritate. With a never-ending love for time space complications Amy Sillman insists on an informed openness, and shows us her tools. Eileen Myles Amy Sillman tells us that a tube of cadmium red has a different weight than say cobalt violet and that all painters know this and art historians mostly don’t. Sillman is shocked to think about someone who beholds paint but has never held it and she stands in the doorway of that thought, bleeding back and forth and she writes in it & it’s a rare rare place she’s standing in. Pick up her Faux Pas. You’ll be dazzled as I am by this knowledge, her rarity. Bookforum Bookforum Editors Brainy, gregarious, and often hilarious texts... Hilton Als Amy Sillman's richness of personality and world view shines so beautifully throughout "Faux Pas," that it becomes a kind of illumination, lighting the reader's way through a world of ideas and language and images no one but Sillman, in all her brilliance, could have produced. A generous triumph. New York Times Jason Farago Indeed Ms. Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in “Faux Pas,” a just-published collection — her fourth — of her writings that display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings. Art Agenda Rosanna McLaughlin Faux Pas comprises seventeen texts written for journals, zines, and lectures between 2009 and 2020 [...]The book asks, and often answers by example: How to talk about painting today? How to reckon with its politically unfashionable past—its entanglement with the market, the canon, the cult of male genius? Why paint at all? Financial Times Baya Simons Best known for her large-scale gestural paintings, Amy Sillman has her illustrations and essays foregrounded in this title. Cartoons, drawings and portraits sit alongside written pieces ranging from queer readings of abstract expressionism to the role of the body in making art. Says Sillman: it’s about that “moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what’s supposed to happen goes awry… That tension is what abstraction is partly about: the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot”. Paris Review Amy Sillman Whatever is incalculable, including the feeling of a mistake. I’d like to see the diagram of that. Failure and dread. That’s why I still loved abstraction, because we knew it didn’t work, that it was a failure, a paradox, a realm of both potential and unchartability [...]That’s what a good diagram indicates: that there are things beyond control. Frieze Tausif Noor Sillman’s writing is mordantly funny and precise. Faux Pas features passionate arguments on John Chamberlain, Eugène Delacroix, Rachel Harrison and Laura Owens – each a delight to read. Sillman doesn’t consider herself a critic so much as an appreciator of art, inserting herself only when she feels she can add to the conversation, overturning and examining the problems to which others have failed to pay sufficient attention. |
| | | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/9/2021 Featured spreads are from D.A.P. best-seller Amy Sillman: Faux Pas, Selected Writings and Drawings, back in stock from After 8 Books. This 272-page staff favorite essay collection is funny, insightful and honest—exactly what we want to read right now. "To writers, words are material, their matter, their only stuff," Lynne Tillman writes in her Introduction. "Words have value in themselves, tricky beasts, relished, debated, hated. Amy Sillman values words. Her essays are literary incitements, they’re exciting, and felt. Sillman confers untested, non-consensual, verbal experiments on art, to visual ideas and compositions, to locate newer meanings. Let’s say, Sillman seeks to describe the indescribable, which is all the more strange because she is primarily responding to visual forms and matters, there, supposedly, in plain sight. But they aren’t, not without examination and engagement. That is, with a desire to apprehend more. In a Sillman essay, words have their own weight, which is inestimable…" continue to blog | |  | AFTER 8 BOOKSISBN: 9782492650048
USD $24.95 | CAN $34.95Pub Date: 1/3/2023
Active | In stock
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|  | DANCING FOXES PRESS/PORTIKUS, FRANKFURTISBN: 9780998632629
USD $40.00 | CAN $54 UK £ 35Pub Date: 9/26/2017
Active | Out of stock
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