Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press With rare clarity and restraint, Martínez Celaya explores loss, alienation, foreignness and beauty as well as new ways to think about the art object and the problems it raises. What emerges is a body of work radically concerned with meaning. Loss and its transcendence through consciousness is the pervasive theme in Unbroken Poetry: The Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya. Martínez Celaya's world is revealed through an introspective essay by San Francisco writer and curator, Anne Trueblood Brodzky. Drawing from the artist's sketchbooks, personal interviews with the artist and the works of Martínez Celaya, Brodzky describes his impetus and methods in a conceptual volume of exceptional beauty and voice. The artist's disciplined joint pursuit of physics and art fuels conversations with New York artist Donald Baechler and Caltech physicist, Amnon Yariv. In Unbroken Poetry, we are invited to stand close to the visions of Enrique Martínez Celaya, not only to observe and empathize with his world but also to acknowledge the images brought forth from our own.

Unbroken Poetry: The Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya

Arts & Photography

Brodzky, Anne Trueblood

History & Criticism

WHALE & STAR

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Enrique Martínez Celaya’s aesthetic project revives and reinterprets the classic Western metaphysical tradition relating aesthetics to ethics, the Beautiful to the Good and the True. His work embodies his belief that being a certain kind of artist means being a certain kind of person and that in and through art he gains clarity about himself and his relationship to the world. His project is thus profoundly ethical and, in important ways, spiritual. Through art Martínez Celaya reconciles himself to the world as he reconciles his past with his present and projects his future. This volume also participates in the process of reconciliation and projection by interpreting his work through the series, cycles, and projects, which include painting, sculpture, photographs, poetry, and prose that have defined it since the mid-1990s. Curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Daniel A. Siedell, has worked with Martínez Celaya on several projects and offers a radical commentary on his work, arguing that Martínez Celaya’s ambitious aesthetic project is best understood as an embodiment of a religious Weltanschauung and as a search for that most elusive of religious virtues: hope. The complex cohesion of Martínez Celaya’s work is further explored by other writers, who by placing it in different contexts reveal their own distinctive engagement with it. Art critic Thomas McEvilley, a philologist who writes about art, philosophy, and religion, explores how Martínez Celaya has combined Germanic feeling with a surrealist plastic vocabulary to “present a world.” Literary critic and Paul Celan scholar John Felstiner traces the contours of an aesthetic lineage that includes Goya, Eliot, Celan, and Beethoven. Former Washington Post journalist and Hollywood producer and writer Christian Williams adopts the conventional artist’s chronology to craft a powerful account of Martínez Celaya’s life, which has become intimately entwined with his own.

Martinez Celaya: Early Work

Siedell, Daniel A.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press For the Cowboy Junkies it all begins with a song: an acoustic guitar and a voice. But each song comes to each album with its own history, along its own strange path. Some are born and realized in a matter of minutes; others take years to finally find a place. Some pop out as perfect little gems; others mutate and transform themselves, stealing and pillaging from the unformed. XX celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the Cowboy Junkies, one of the most distinctive and influential rock bands in recent years. Starting with the seminal album The Trinity Session, the Canadian band's signature sound, based on traditional blues and post-punk rock, has garnered much critical acclaim and an uncommonly devoted international following. The Cowboy Junkies are guitarist and lyricist Michael Timmins, bassist Alan Anton, and Timmins's siblings Margo (lead vocals) and Peter (drums). This book, the first to focus on the Cowboy Junkies, offers an intimate look at the band through their own photographs and the poetic lyrics of Michael Timmins, who chose the selections. Each lyric is accompanied by a resonant illustration created by renowned artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, who is a friend and fan of the band.

XX: Lyrics and Photographs of the Cowboy Junkies, with watercolors by Enrique Martínez Celaya

Literature & Fiction

Cowboy Junkies

Poetry

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press In the mid-1990s philosopher and cultural critic Richard Whittaker founded the art journal Works and Conversations to fill a gap in the contemporary discourse. Conversations with important artists have played a central role in the magazine, where Whittaker’s understated but perceptive questions have allowed artists to comment on their work, their philosophies, their influences, the difficulty of creating art, and the failures that are part of the creative process. The result of Whittaker’s attentive dialogue has been a series of fascinating and highly personal interviews that frequently contradict what others have said elsewhere about these artists. The Conversations brings together what Whittaker considers the sixteen most relevant interviews, providing remarkable insight into the individual artist’s work, mistakes, and philosophies as well as the social and cultural values in which these artists work. The artists interviewed are Richard Berger, Jim Campbell, Squeak Carnwath, James Doolin, Viola Frey, James Hubbell, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Michael C. McMillen, Nathan Oliveira, David Parker, Judy Pfaff, Irene Pijoan, Jane Rosen, Katherine Sherwood, James Turrell, and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

The Conversations: Interviews with Sixteen Contemporary Artists (Working Books)

Whittaker, Richard

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Modernist Archaist offers a comprehensive English-language selection of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, edited by Russian scholar Kevin M. F. Platt, who also contributes an illuminating essay. New translations by notable contemporary poets combined with an exceptional selection of previous translations are representative of the most up-to-date interpretation of Mandelstam’s work. Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), one of the most significant poets of twentieth-century Russian literature, also embodied more fully than any other its profound paradoxes. He was a Jew born in Poland who became a leading Russian poet. He was a committed Modernist who was nevertheless faithful to the great examples and strict forms of the past literary tradition. Most strikingly, he was a rebel and radical thinker who was ultimately hounded to death as an “enemy” of the revolutionary Soviet society. Yet while Mandelstam’s poetry bore witness to the convulsions of twentieth-century Russian culture and politics, it was by no means limited or defined by these historical contexts. In an early statement of his creative credo Mandelstam wrote: “for an artist, a worldview is a tool or a means, like a hammer in the hands of a mason, and the only reality is the work of art itself.” The poems offered in this volume, about half of them appearing in previously unpublished translations, present an overview of Mandelstam’s major works. Introductory materials include an essay on his life and poetry.

Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam (Artists and Writers)

Mandelstam, Osip

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press   Modeled after the famed TV sci-fi series The X-Files, The &-Files gathers together a covert body of documents following the long and often controversial career of Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism.  Perceived through the eyes and ears of its longtime publisher and editor Paul Foss, The &-Files is comprised of an open letter, a lengthy interview, two questionnaires, and other commentaries and bibliographies, offering a unique insider account of the extraordinary advantages and pitfalls of publishing an art magazine.

The &-Files: Art & Text 1981-2002

Butler, Rex

Rees,Simon

Chambers, Ross

Foss, Paul

McKenzie, Rob

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Enrique Martínez Celaya’s blog, Bad Time for Poetry, began on August 24, 2007, and ended on May 25, 2009. In the emergence of the literary genre of the blog, Bad Time for Poetry existed as an antiblog, showing how this literary genre can be used to cultivate and preserve cultural commentary that has lasting value and is mindful of the past and responsible to the future. His posts were intended to be read closely, contemplated, and assimilated into readers’ lives. Martínez Celaya’s blog is now preserved in this complete compilation of his posts.

The Blog: Bad Time for Poetry (Artists and Writers)

Martínez Celaya, Enrique

Literary

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was a skilled love poet who, through no choice of her own, became a witness to mass violence, a widely recognized exemplar of endurance and moral strength, and finally a symbol of Russian national resilience. At the start of her career, during the final years of the Russian Empire, Akhmatova was a cultural celebrity who fascinated a generation not only with her poetry but also with the drama that she created around herself. After the revolution of 1917, she was attacked as a decadent bourgeois author and driven into silence and obscurity. Living in relative poverty, with her family and friends repeatedly arrested and harassed, and she herself publicly cursed by the representatives of the state, Akhmatova survived the darkest decades of Soviet history. Near the end of her life, when timorous cultural bureaucrats allowed her to reemerge as a public figure, she revealed to readers that even if the “collective” had rejected her as an unworthy member she had continued to write poetry reflecting the trials and calamities of Soviet men and women with greater truth and moral authority than any official poet could attain.

Intimations: Selected Poetry by Anna Akhmatova (Artists and Writers)

Akhmatova, Anna

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Alchemy of Light offers an intimate look at the aesthetic world Mary Conover forms from the disparate influences of her life, the Jungian heritage, and the ineffable presence of the sea. The book explores the relationship between the wild and empty places where Conover works and her ideas about the world and her place in it. In palimpsest-like abstractions, she locates the search for self in the beauty and danger of untamed water and implacable desert. Alchemy of Light mirrors the artist’s alchemical process of acceptance and transmutation by presenting, without hierarchy, intricate personal notebooks, works in progress, influential writings, accomplished paintings in oil, collage, and digital photomontage. Conover tracks the seductions of risk in her peripatetic life. She describes how slowly acquiring the disciplines of yoga and meditation provided a structure for investigating consciousness in her work, with light as the primary metaphor. Collectively, the images and text in Alchemy of Light create a relevant portrait of an artist who transcends current trends in abstraction by the power of an internal vision.

Alchemy of Light

Conover, Mary

<div>Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for <a href="http://whaleandstarpress.com/" target="blank">Whale and Star Press</a></div> <div>Abstract expressionism is a historical narrative within which the bold and dynamic work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko acquire meaning and significance. The narrative was crafted in the 1940s and 1950s by bold and dynamic critics such as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro, who used the new art to deepen their work and strengthen their roles as cultural critics at a moment when the stakes for national art and culture on an international stage were unusually high.</div> <div> Daniel A. Siedell&rsquo;s essays in An Excavation of Tenth Street explore this complex relationship between the art and the criticism by focusing attention on the intentions of the critics themselves, particularly Greenberg and Rosenberg. These essays suggest that the failure of art historians to recognize their own intentions have distorted the relationship between art and criticism. It is only by engaging the art criticism, disentangling its often-divided loyalties, and understanding its complex relationship to the art it purports to interpret that the integrity and primacy of the art itself can be &ldquo;excavated,&rdquo; revealing it to transcend the fascinating and compelling discourse it generates.</div>

An Excavation of Tenth Street: Essays on the History of Abstract Expressionism

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