Collections
Hirsch E.P. Rothko's Hirsch Rothko / Christopher K. Ho
Perfect bindings
FA.B72.1006
96 p.; 12 x 16 cm (4 3/4 x 6 1/4 inches)
2010
Perfect bound pocket paperback with black and white glossy wrappers; green newsprint leaves. CBA copy is accompanied by four offset printed postcards of deSwaan's photographs (unrelated to the book). "Hirsch E.P. Rothko by Hirsch E.P. Rothko, a memoir of a year spent in the mountains living and working in a license plate shed, is a dramatized account of a lived experience. The nine-chapter narrative also contains a polemic about regional painting's relevance in a world in which the United Sates might be a regional, rather than international power, and in an art world in which established methods of critical art- predicated on negation, subversion, parody and deconstruction-seem increasingly ineffective. Instead, it proposes a kind of creative critique based on invention and synthesis, the privileged form of which is fiction. In Rothko's own words, 'Regionalism is not a style, but a mode of and model for making. It not so much suspends the viewer's disbelief as it enables an artist to suspend his self consciousness. The respite from criticality opens a fictive space where a conceptual artist can be a painter,a painter a writer, an art dealer a publisher...Regionalism is the protective shell that allows us to be real artists again.' "--Statement from artist's website.