The Poetry of Scotland

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the Art Guys with Todd Oldham

"The Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing) are Houston-based artists who have worked together since 1983. For some years now they have been making art (sculpture, performance, video, and sound) that uses humor as a springboard to address their observations about society. Their new project, Suits, is their most ambitious to date: it uses fashion as a way to explore how art intersects with media, marketing, and commerce. The Art Guys spent one year wearing two suits designed by Todd Oldham, which were embroidered with 62 advertisements from 56 companies who leased ad space on the surface of their suits. The Art Guys traveled from Alaska to Florida, from New York to Los Angeles, shaking hands, exhibiting artwork, golfing, and kissing babies all along the way."--BOOK JACKET.

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A.S. Byatt

These three stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling--about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority."Full of delight and humor...The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion."--San Francisco ChronicleFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

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(essay by Craig Owens

Since the late 1970s, Allan McCollum (b. 1944, Los Angeles, lives in New York) has addressed the production, distribution, acquisition, display, and reading of the artwork. His constant use of strategies of multiplication, his examination of the museum as a discursive agent, and his recurrent interest in notions of display, as well as his attempt to find a generic form for any purpose, were entirely reconfigured by this displacement of context. Working with regional museums, heterogeneous audiences, and references ranging from palaeontology to mineralogy, McCollum has built a very strong and intriguing body of works that has remained, in large part, unknown to (or at least unseen by) the art world.

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Chris Abani

Set against the uncompromising landscape of East Los Angeles, this novel follows a struggling artist named Black, whose life and friendships reveal a world far removed from the mainstream.