As a book, it stands on its own rather than merely evoking a larger wall display, reaching a much wider audience in the...
A monumental art project is transformed into wildly ambitious graphic literature.
In his introduction, artist Rand (Art/Brooklyn Coll., CUNY) invokes Lenny Bruce, Franz Kafka, and Robert Mapplethorpe as inspirations in his creative impulse to turn the 613 Jewish commandments from the Torah into a series of paintings that some might find transgressive, transcendent, or both. “Its effectiveness is factored by the degree of the viewers’ engagement or skepticism,” writes Rand. “Its sacred implications are formatted in a way that makes them seem impudent. Although comic, they are not ironic. Kafka said his art was his prayer.” Thus he takes the commandments seriously enough to make them the subject of art and takes his art seriously enough to infuse it with a spirit of playful subversion. Many of his full-color panels invoke pulp novels, comic-book heroes, and magazines of satire. It took five years for the Brooklyn-based artist to finish the project (in 2006), a series of 16-by-20-inch paintings that required “1,700 square feet of wall space.” Such a display must have been overwhelming for the viewer, a riot of images and color. Here, the work is more like the comic-book panels that also inspired it, inviting readers to savor each law, perhaps puzzling over the connection (or disconnect) between the words and the image. It opens with the startling image of an astronaut free-floating against a backdrop of stars, illustrating the commandment “To know there is a God.” The continuity of panels on purity of sacrifices or prohibiting sexual relations have a narrative pull on the page that they would not have on the wall, while images of cowboys and boxers, molls and floozies and hustlers, some verging on cartoon and others edging toward surrealism, create a visual universe in which time is out of joint, where edicts from the distant past receive interpretation from a more recent past or an imagined future.
As a book, it stands on its own rather than merely evoking a larger wall display, reaching a much wider audience in the process.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17376-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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