The Lure of the Local

Hello everyone.

I just wanted to draw your attention to this book by Lucy Lippard entitled Lure of the Local available through The New Press, or at your favorite book retailer, I'm sure.

The book addresses many of the issues that we ourselves are exploring on this site and may provide a great springboard for conversations, etc. Lippard focuses on aspects of contemporary art, history, geography and cultural studies and how they relate to form a sense of or exploration of place. The book is broken up into five sections:

Part I Around Here
Part II Manipulating Memory
Part III Down to Earth: Land Use
Part IV The Last Frontiers: City and Suburbs
Part V Looking Around

Here's a little teaser from the first page:

Place for me is the locus of desire. Places have influenced my life as much as, perhaps more than, people. I fall for (or into) places much faster and less conditionally than I do for people. I can drive through a landscape and find myself in that disintegrated mining cabin, that saltwater farm, that little porched house in the barrio. ( My taste runs to humble dwellings nestled in cozy spaces or vulnerable in vast spaces.) I can walk through a neighborhood and picture interiors, unseen back yards. I can feel kinesthetically how it would be to hike for hours through a vast "empty" landscape that I'm dashing through in a car- the underfoot textures, the rising dust, the way muscles tighten on a hill, the rhythms of walking, the feel of sun or mist on the back of my neck.... Lucy Lippard, (Lure of the Local, The New Press; New York, 1997)

-cory