In his third book, Strauss delves into the mysterious process whereby an idea is born in the mind and materialized through the hand in the expression of an artwork. How exactly does this happen? It's a question so basic, an act so fundamental to art-making, that it has rarely received attention. It makes an ideal topic for Strauss, a writer with an exceptional ability to animate art's philosophical dimensions in a clear, persuasive manner. During this time when craft and the direct manipulation of materials by the artist appear to be in eclipse, Strauss comes to their defense in a spirited cri de coeur. Featuring over 35 illustrations, the book examines a wide variety of media and individual examples. It explores the works of sculptors Martin Puryear, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Donald Lipski; painters Leon Golub and Ron Gorchov; and writers Robert Duncan, Robert Kelly, Guy Davenport, John Berger, and Leo Steinberg. In addition, there are essays on Joseph Beuys's 7000 Oaks in Ireland, contemporary Haida carvers Reg Davidson and Jim Hart, Cecilia Vicu�a's "memory of the fingers," and the influence of curators Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps on the staging of contemporary art exhibitions. Known primarily for his writings on photography and politics, Strauss here focuses on the least mediated arts--painting, sculpture, and writing. His claims are supported by a series of close readings which succeed in recovering the immediacy of the hand and revitalizing contemporary art's connection to the past.

From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual

Arts & Photography

Strauss, David Levi.

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Reports from America's political crisis, exposing a new “iconopolitics,” in which words and images lose their connection to reality.
The political crisis that sneaked up on America―the rise of Trump and Trumpism―has revealed the rot at the core of American exceptionalism. Recent changes in the way words and images are produced and received have made the current surreality possible; communication through social media, by design, maximizes attention and minimizes scrutiny. In Co-Illusion, the noted writer on art, photography, and politics David Levi Strauss bears witness to the new “iconopolitics” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The collusion that fueled Trump's rise was the secret agreement of voters and media consumers―their “co-illusion”―to set aside the social contract. 
Strauss offers dispatches from the epicenter of our constitutional earthquake, writing first from the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions and then from the campaign. After the election, he switches gears, writing in the voices of the regime and of those complicit in its actions―from the thoughts of the President himself (“I am not a mistake. I am not a fluke, or a bug in the system. I am the System”) to the reflections of a nameless billionaire tech CEO whose initials may or may not be M. Z. Finally, Strauss shows us how we might repair the damage to the public imaginary after Trump exits the scene. Photographs by celebrated documentary photographers Susan Meiselas and Peter van Agtmael accompany the texts.

Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (Mit Press)

The MIT Press

The long-awaited first retrospective of the Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco. The deep, succulent color of Miguel Rio Branco's images reflects the richness and complexities of contemporary Latin America; Rio Branco has received wide acclaim for his projects on boxers, Brazilian children, and Cuba. Through his mastery of layering with both color and light, Rio Branco reveals hidden and forbidden segments of his surroundings, illuminating the unspoken and the instinctual. By focusing on the textures of fur and feathers, the flesh of slaughtered animals, or languid human bodies, he captures the cultural layers around him and provides a provocative vision of Latin America. Drawn from thirty years of work, these photographs display the talent for visual construction that Rio Branco utilized in his direction of more than twenty films. His remarkable conception of installation is a skill attributed to his formal training as a painter. The author, poet, and art commentator David Levi Strauss notes that "Rio Branco's colors seep out of their borders like bodily fluids, staining and contaminating everything around them. Bodies, bindings, wounds, and walls are wet with color. Even his mirrors bleed. Rio Branco's is an art of contamination, contagion, and corrosion, but also of resistance and transcendence."

Miguel Rio Branco: An Aperture Monograph

Individual Artists

Aperture

Book by Stiles, Kristine, Cameron, Dan, Strauss, David Levi

Carolee Schneemann: Up to and Including Her Limits

Stiles, Kristine

Cameron, Dan

Distributed Art Pub Inc

Of the work and ideas of Daniel J. Martinez, Peter Sellars has said: "He is one of the most important and articulate artists of his generation." This monograph documents projects from 1979-1995, including his controversial and thought-provoking public artworks. His cross-media cultural production is conceptual in its use of language and approach to photography, video, film, sculpture, installations, and performance. Writings by David Levi Strauss, Coco Fusco, Mary Jane Jacob, and Susan Otto.

The Things You See When You Don't Have a Grenade!

Martinez, Daniel J.

Smart Art Pr

Outsiders/insiders, the center/the margin, institutions/communities-all of those terms are examined, contested, and frequently abandoned by six community-based public art projects carried out after year-long residencies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Ann Carlson, Group Material, Michelle Illuminato, Daniel J. Martinez and Fred Wilson. No apologies for the "artist as activist" here. Selected essays by Mary Jane Jacob, David Levi Strauss besides others. Organized by the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

Points of Entry - Three Rivers Arts Festival

Carlson, Ann

WILSON, FRED

Group Material

Illuminato, Michelle

Festival, Three Rivers Arts

Three Rivers Arts Festival

In these fierce and lyrical essays, David Levi Strauss calls for an art—and implicitly for an approach to art writing—that is passionately experiential, intellectually grounded, and politically fearless. He addresses the always conflicted relation between aesthetics and politics by concentrating on specific instances—from allopathic art to Desert Storm propaganda, from Columbus’s legacy to Robert Smithson’s prophesies, and from new art in post-Soviet Russia to public art in the United States—and by focusing on the work of artists as various as Grünewald, Jean Genet, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Carolee Schneemann, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Daniel Joseph Martinez.

Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics in the Twilight of the Millennium

Autonomedia

In an era of social confusion and visual pandemonium, David Levi Strauss tackles issues of photography and politics in a way that few critics today are courageous enough to attempt. The essays collected in "Between the Eyes" address topics ranging from propaganda and the imagery of dreams, to Sebastião Salgado's epic social documents and the deeply personal photographic revelations of Francesca Woodman. Other issues broached here include the legitimacy of photographic imagery and the media frenzy surrounding the events of September 11, as well as essays on the work of Ania Bien, Miguel Rio Branco, Alfredo Jaar, Joel-Peter Witkin and others, plus an interview with painter Leon Golub (who worked from photographs). Reviewing the first edition of "Between the Eyes," "Publisher's Weekly" wrote: "'Photography and Propaganda, ' a study of the work and deaths in '80s Central America of photojournalists Richard Cross and John Hoagland, should be required reading in the age of embeddedness, and 'Photography and Belief' is a terrific meditation on truth in the age of digital manipulation."

David Levi Strauss: Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics

Photography & Video

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that "seeing is believing." Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smartphones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust. In the first ekphrasis title on photography, Strauss challenges the aura of believability and highlights the potential dangers around this status. He examines how images produced on cameras gradually gained an inordinate power to influence public opinion, prompt action, comfort and assuage, and direct or even create desire. How and why do we believe technical images the way we do? Offering a poignant argument in the era of "deepfakes," Strauss draws attention to new changes in the technology of seeing. Some uses of "technical images" are causing the connection between images and belief (between seeing and believing) to fray and pull apart. How is this shifting our relationship to images? Will this crisis in what we can believe come to threaten our very purchase on the real? This book is an inquiry into the history and future of our belief in images.

Photography and Belief (ekphrasis)

David Zwirner Books

Francesca Woodman became interested in photography in her early teens. This volume, combining text by Woodman, and by those who knew her, with many of her unpublished images, shows her intense relation with the camera. In 1981, Francesca Woodman died at the age of 22. 90 duotone photos.

Francesca Woodman

SOLLERS, PHILIPPE

Woodman, Francesca

Janus, Elizabeth

Rankin, Sloan

Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain

Scalo Verlag Ac

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