Ross Bleckner

American painter Ross Bleckner (born 1949) has long been an avid reader of The New York Times, with decades' worth of clippings from the paper to prove it. In this artist's book, Bleckner has now orchestrated his archive into a beautifully printed “homage to print media” (as he described it on The Martha Stewart Show, where this volume was prominently previewed). My Life in The New York Times constitutes a kind of collaged media commonplace book, compiling fragments of advice, wisdom and comment, sequenced into a loose narrative based on the cycle of life, from childhood and school to career and ultimately death, with attendant themes of ambition, success, disappointment and tenacity tackled en route. Details such as scotch tape bleeding through the paper are lovingly reproduced here, projecting a charming mortality of materials amid the poignancy of the thoughts Bleckner gathers.

Every day, on page three of The New York Times, section A, an advert for Tiffany jewelry appears in the upper right corner of the page. Because of its placement in the paper's first news section, the advert generally appears alongside a major news story, most frequently an international disaster or tragedy of some kind. The effect of these juxtapositions, for those alert and lateral-minded enough to spy them, are variously humorous, tragic, tragicomic, ironic or subversive. Examples: an advert for a pair of Tiffany earrings is titled "Gold Rush"; to its left sits a photograph of a line of Palestinians at a cash machine, after Israel had begun to release frozen Palestianian Authority funds. An advert for a Tiffany bracelet bears the tagline "A Charmed Existence," and across from it the headline goes "Despite Embargo, Haiti's Rich Seem to Get Richer." An advert for four Tiffany rings bears the title "The Masterpieces of Engagement," and to its left, below an image of the president, is the headline "Obama chastises Wall St. in Push to Tighten Rules." For nearly 20 years, artist Ross Bleckner (born 1949) has alert and lateral-minded enough to spy and collect these amazing conjunctions. A3: Our Lives in The New York Times reproduces a selection of 87 of Bleckner's finds in 1:1 scale. The bizarre synchronicities in this volume suggest a great deal about how we consciously and unconsciously process images every day.

Covering 30 years of groundbreaking work, spanning from 1976 to 2006, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner is the first major monograph on this important American artist, as well as the first publication devoted to his work since his 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Beginning with an analysis of Bleckner's much-overlooked Constructivist and Post-Constructivist paintings of the 1970s, it continues with chapter-by-chapter studies of all the critically-acclaimed series, from the Stripe, Weather, Chandelier and Memorial (or AIDS) paintings of the early to mid-1980s to the Specific and Anonymous, Inheritance, Protein and Meditation paintings of the new millennium. In addition to an intensive analysis of each of the artist's completed works, the book contains 250 black-and-white illustrations, 134 color plates of Bleckner's most seminal works, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions and a complete bibliography. In his monumental text study, author Richard Milazzo writes, "Bleckner's work has always been interested in bringing abstract painting closer to the realities of the external world, while endeavoring to plumb the depths of the subliminal realm of the psyche. Much lauded for the work he has done for ACRIA, the American Community Research Initiative on AIDS, and as an outspoken advocate of the fight against the disease since the late 1980s, his paintings are symbolic expressions of a larger humanity, and, as such, also comprise formal as well as social values."