Brice Marden: Notebook Feb. 1968-
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Brice Marden: Notebook Feb. 1968- Details
"Mars black, lemon yellow, use muddy white. Don't forget the young blonde in La Dolce Vita. Scenes in country cafe and post orgy on the beach. She is the one Benno calls the 'Purity symbol.' Orange green grey." This and other reflections make up Brice Marden: Notebook Sept. 1964-Sept. 1967 and Brice Marden: Notebook Feb. 1968-, facsimiles of American artist Brice Marden's (born 1938) personal journals. On every page, a patchwork of clippings, drawings, renderings and handwritten notes reveal the painter's thought process and document the political and cultural events of the era. A prolific notetaker, Marden filled his journals with subject matter as familiar as references to Italian film director Federico Fellini and as esoteric as "looking at an object in nature and running lines around it." The constant throughout is the work--deliberate, studied rectangles of graphite and ballpoint pen allude to the monochrome paintings that earned the artist fame and are a precursor to the panel paintings to come. Each journal is a unique guide to Marden's artistic output from that period as well as a distinct reference to the city--at that time bustling with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns--where he painted.
Reviews
As an artifact, this set of books is pretty wonderful. I don't think many of us visual artists collect cultural ephemera is in this way any longer, so it's a good reminder of how this kind of life archive can function. The pages are perforated, which is a little mysterious as to why - are we supposed to pull them out and give them away? Are we to put them in our own fledgling journals? Perhaps I am a bit of a formalist, but I'd like to have/use this as a reference and not dismantle it. I suppose, though, if you are a person who doesn't value objects in this way, the book can have alternate functions.
