Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Moonmilk by Ryan McGinley Moonmilk. We guarantee the condition of every book as it's described on the Abebooks web sites. If you're dissatisfied with your purchase (Incorrect Book/Not as Described/Damaged) or if the order hasn't arrived, you're eligible for a refund within 30 days of the estimated delivery date. If you've changed your mind about a book that you've ordered, please use the Ask bookseller a question link to contact us and we'll respond within 2 business days. Shipping costs are based on books weighing 2.2 LB, or 1 KG. If your book order is heavy or oversized, we may contact you to let you know extra shipping is required. Ryan McGinley. Moonmilk : Over a year, Ryan McGinley and his crew explored huge underground caves, venturing into unknown territory and seeking out spectacular natural spaces, -some previously undocumented. The title, Moonmilk, alludes to the crystalline deposits found on the walls of many caves; it was once believed that this substance was formed by light from celestial bodies passing through rock into darkened worlds below. The series, a departure from Ryan's iconic images of the past, firmly places Ryan as one of the most innovative and influential artists of a generation! Moonmilk was selected as photobook of the year (2009) by the New York Times Magazine! Fashion.Art.Books. New York based photographer Ryan McGinley exploded on to the art scene at the beginning of 2000 and quickly notched up a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2003 and numerous awards. His work has a free, uninhibited, hedonistic feeling to it, often taking quirky indie kids and photographing them nude in nature. His projects were often turned into handmade or limited run books which were snapped up and have become true collectors items. One of his most recent books, Moonmilk, published by Morel Books, takes his subjects into huge underground caves in the North American wilderness. In a departure from his usual style, his subjects in these ethereal images almost disappear in to the landscape, the rock formations and the other worldly lighting are almost the stars. McGinley said he was inspired by the novels of Jules Verne and Mark Twain and the title of the project references the crystalline deposits found on the walls of the caves; it was once believed that these crystals were formed by light from celestial bodies passing through rock into the dark world below. Moonmilk was New York Time’s photobook of the year in 2009 and both print runs quickly sold out. The book itself, as with all books by Morel, is expertly produced; due to it’s tight binding I have had to cheat and take the inside images from Morel’s and McGinley’s websites so as as not to damage my copy! RYAN McGINLEY. “Myth . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them a simplicity of essences . it organizes a world without contradictions . a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.” -Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Frequently lauded for capturing the essence of a generation, Ryan McGinley’s extraordinary images in fact do something more subtle and deft. Seamless and irony-free, they have created the myth of a generation for whom freedom and possibility consistently trump disillusion and doubt. Flesh may be temporarily bruised, but psyches remain unscarred. In McGinley’s world, the laws of gravity scarcely apply. Fantastic and ebullient, McGinley’s work enjoys an unusually widespread appeal among art-world insiders and lay fans alike. Today, McGinley is best known for dreamlike images of figures in natural landscapes, but his earliest work took place in the shabby apartments and dirty streets of downtown New York. His first major body of work, a series of photographs titled “The Kids Are Alright,” depicts moments from the lives of the artist and his friends on the Lower East Side. They come across as a diaristic chronicle of time spent spray painting graffiti, rolling joints, waking up in closet-sized rooms, having sex, swimming nude, and hanging out. First exhibited in 2000, in a self-produced show at 420 West Broadway, in SoHo—once the home of the Leo Castelli and Mary Boone galleries, the space was temporarily abandoned before the construction of luxury lofts—the photographs attracted widespread attention, leading to a solo exhibition of much of the same work at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art three years later. The images were hailed for their tantalizing similarity to the work of McGinley’s most obvious predecessors: Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, and Larry Clark. And yet, there were differences: As one critic wrote of the Whitney show, “[T]he tone is relaxed and playful, as if the world were on recess. The pictures have none of the after-hours decadence of Warhol’s snapshots, nor the grit of Mr. Clark’s work, nor the noirish narcissism of Ms. Goldin’s.” 2 A narrative quickly emerged: Post-AIDS, post-9/11, the subjects of Kids were immersed in an underground lifestyle unclouded by imminent doom. While others lamented the corporate gentrification of the city’s once seedy locales, McGinley’s images seemed to prove that it might still be possible to be classless, artistic, and young and have fun in early twentyfirst-century corporate New York—margins of freedom were still there to be found. McGinley’s swift move from DIY exhibition to major museum show formed a parallel story of promise: A young artist no longer had to wait a decade or more to receive mainstream recognition. With little formal photographic training and no more than a graphic design BFA, McGinley, at age twentyfive, became the youngest artist to be given a solo show at the Whitney and was anointed an avatar of his generation. A decisive shift took place in McGinley’s work in the summer of 2003, when a collector loaned the artist a Vermont country house. McGinley installed a skate ramp and trampoline in the yard and began busing friends and acquaintances up from New York each week. Removing his subjects from their “natural” urban environment, he transported them to this bucolic setting, where he instigated large situations and setups that would trigger spontaneous actions and moments. The work became a matter of documenting “real life” as it occurred in highly constructed situations, and the resulting images are more deliberately cinematic. In 2005, McGinley embarked on a series of annual summer road trips that would result in new bodies of work, including “Sun and Health,” 2006; “I Know Where the Summer Goes,” 2008; and “Moonmilk,” 2009. He began formally casting models—not professional models but kids recruited from art schools and cities all over the world—and crew and staff numbers grew larger. Still, traveling around the US for three months, living mostly outdoors and naked, boundaries between McGinley’s subjects, the natural world, and each other seem to dissolve, evoking the halcyon 1970s when, unburdened by debt or career, countless young people simply traveled, and an “artistic life” could be lived without being professionalized. McGinley’s depiction of young and lithe nude subjects has been read as a celebration of youth, defined by rebellion, vitality, and positive energy. Yet youth—like the body’s unclothed, natural state—can also be read as an absence : a blank slate upon which psychic and physical qualities can be more clearly registered. The exhaustion of Ann (Sand), 2007; the expectantly wistful expressions of Ann (Windy Truck), 2007, Hanna (Blonde Meadow), 2008, and Brennan (Blue), 2007; the black eyes and bruises of Tim (Black Eye), 2005, and Olivia (Sparrow), 2010, would not be as apparent or striking were their subjects encumbered by age or identifiable clothing. McGinley’s subjects wear their bruises well, like tattoos. Aged bodies are marked by accretion, but Tim and Olivia are still young, and their bruised states are fleeting. Looking back, it becomes apparent that even the artist’s earliest images are not quite as “documentary” as theyfirst appeared. The artist has described his work as a “pseudofiction”—“because it did happen but it might not have happened if it weren’t going to become a photograph.” Instead of reality, he explains, “My photographs are really closer to a documentation of my fantasy life.” The images in “The Kids Are Alright” are iconic: Depicted while living within a familiar bohemian milieu, his subjects are clearly mobile and passing through time. Framed by a late twilit sky and the liquid halation of city lights, the figure in Dash Bombing, 2001, is captured mid-motion, spray painting the wall of a building—echoing later figures who catapult from ghostly buildings (Tom Fall Away, 2010) or gaze wonderstruck toward the sky through a barn door, surrounded by snowfall and Christmas-red lights (Jonas Barn Snow Disco, 2008). Cum, 1999, defies both its title and the 1980s East Village tradition of “transgressive” art by micro-framing smashed droplets that, if abstracted from soft, wrinkled pant folds, could be mistaken for milk. McGinley’s work can be seen as a series of mythic constructions that have become increasingly artful and conscious over the years. Myths are anomalies: Singular stories, personas, and things that appear to be emblematic, but only because they have paradoxically been abstracted from cause and effect; they appear to us as inevitable and eternal. In Mythologies, a 1957 collection of essays, Roland Barthes found a kind of euphoria in the image of Einstein’s brain—“at once magician and machine”—and in Omo detergent’s artful disguise of abrasive chemicals within delicious folds of white foam.