Monday, August 29, 2016

What is Anastasia Aukeman reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Anastasia Aukeman, author of Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association.

Her entry begins:
Like most New Yorkers, July and August are the months that I catch up on back issues of the New Yorker. I turn first to anything Andy Borowitz has written, because he is hilarious. Then I look for anything written by my friends, so that I can feel jealous of their success in being published in my favorite magazine. Finally, I skim the shows, readings, and performances that I missed last spring.

I’ve been lazily preparing for a Bruce Conner symposium I’m participating in at the Museum of Modern Art in September by reading the essays in the excellent exhibition catalogue Bruce Conner: It’s All True. I love exhibition catalogues and am also reading Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, the companion to a great show at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

I tend to gravitate toward novels by female authors. I just finished...[read on]
About Welcome to Painterland, from the publisher:
The Rat Bastard Protective Association was an inflammatory, close-knit community of artists who lived and worked in a building they dubbed Painterland in the Fillmore neighborhood of midcentury San Francisco. The artists who counted themselves among the Rat Bastards—which included Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Michael McClure, and Manuel Neri—exhibited a unique fusion of radicalism, provocation, and community. Geographically isolated from a viable art market and refusing to conform to institutional expectations, they animated broader social and artistic discussions through their work and became a transformative part of American culture over time. Anastasia Aukeman presents new and little-known archival material in this authorized account of these artists and their circle, a colorful cultural milieu that intersected with the broader Beat scene.
Learn more about Welcome to Painterland at the University of California Press website.

Writers Read: Anastasia Aukeman.

--Marshal Zeringue