Description
Reviews
Rip Tales offers an intimate look back at significant works by San Francisco artists of recent decades. -- Patrick James Dunagan * Rain Taxi Review of Books *
Offers an insider's view of an art scene that is storied yet often ignored... Stein presents a template for how documentation and analysis can be used to honor the region's idiosyncratic art-making practices and artists. -- Maymanah Farhat * Brooklyn Rail *
Stein's achievement lies less in having discovered or reconstructed an unknown artwork, but rather in so successfully piecing together its scattered representations, found among and within obscure artworks and DeFeo's countless photographs of her studio. -- Chris Murtha * Art Agenda *
Rip Tales is a refreshing, necessary reminder that art can be "always on its way," unclear and uncategorizable even to its maker. -- Sarah Hotchkiss * KQED *
Stein's slim, provocative book presents DeFeo in a format almost as revelatory as the artist's body of work. -- Lou Fancher * East Bay Express *
Rip Tales is so self-assured, heartfelt, and consistently touching, funny, and brilliant, that its various intimacies and ideas feel like a gift. And they are. A deeply moving debut. -- Hilton Als * author of White Girls *
An ode to San Francisco and its artistic ecologies, Rip Tales provides a hugely compelling treatise on art as pursuit (one that often comes to naught) and conversation (balm passed between fellow believers that assuages that knot). -- Bruce Hainley * author of Under the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant's Volte-Face *
Nothing short of a remarkable account of what it is to make and write about art in the magical world of the Bay Area. Stein listens closely, looks slowly, and writes clearly and with feeling not only about DeFeo, but on the other artists he attaches to her orbit. -- Elizabeth Sussman
Rip Tales breathes a sense of ferment: Jay DeFeo and others taking in the Bay Area air and breathing out not just pieces of art, but ideas, fragments, throwaways-stuff for which there was no market. That some of it is here in this book is a lucky break. -- Griel Marcus
Book Information
ISBN 9781940190297
Author Jordan Stein
Format Paperback
Page Count 160
Imprint Soberscove Press
Publisher Soberscove Press