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PUBLISHER
After 8 Books

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 4.75 x 7.25 in. / 272 pgs / 60 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2020 p. 60   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9782955948651 TRADE
List Price: $24.95 CAD $34.95

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
NA LA ASIA AU/NZ

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AFTER 8 BOOKS

Amy Sillman: Faux Pas

Selected Writings and Drawings

Edited by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau, Benjamin Thorel. Foreword by Lynne Tillman.

Amy Sillman: Faux Pas

Essays on art-making, abstraction, humor, not-knowing, awkwardness and more, from one of New York’s most influential and popular painters and teachers

Since 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 REVIEWS

Rindon 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.

Amy Sillman: Faux Pas

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/19/2021

192 Books presents Amy Sillman and Eileen Myles in Conversation

192 Books presents Amy Sillman and Eileen Myles in Conversation

Thursday, January 21 at 6PM ET, Paula Cooper Gallery and 192 Books present Amy Sillman and Eileen Myles discussing Sillman’s new book, Faux Pas: Selected Writing and Drawings. The conversation will be live-streamed on PCG Studio. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CHEEYEON PARK | DATE 10/21/2020

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents Amy Sillman and Lynne Tillman in conversation for the virtual launch of 'Amy Sillman: Faux Pas, Selected Writings and Drawings'

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents Amy Sillman and Lynne Tillman in conversation for the virtual launch of 'Amy Sillman: Faux Pas, Selected Writings and Drawings'

Sunday, October 25 at 3PM EST, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 and After 8 Books invite you to a special online book launch, discussion, and signing for Amy Sillman: Faux Pas, Selected Writings and Drawings. The artist Amy Sillman will be in discussion with writer Lynne Tillman, who contributes the foreword. Please register here and email booksmomaps1@artbook.com to pre-order a signed copy.
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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/9/2021

Amy Sillman's 'Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings' is Back in Stock!

Amy Sillman's 'Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings' is Back in Stock!

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


AMY SILLMAN MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Amy Sillman: Faux Pas

AMY SILLMAN: FAUX PAS

After 8 Books

ISBN: 9782492650048
USD $24.95
| CAD $34.95

Pub Date: 1/3/2023
Active | In stock