John Waters: Change Of Life
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
John Waters: Change Of Life Details
About the Author Marvin Heiferman is a curator and writer specializing in photographic and visual culture. Gary Indiana has published two collections of short stories and several novels. Lisa Phillips is the Henry Luce III Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Brenda Richardson is a curator and writer who has contributed to catalogues on Bruce Nauman, Gilbert and George, and Willem de Kooning, among many others. Todd Solondz has directed five critically acclaimed films, including Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling. Read more
Reviews
I'm a big fan of Waters' ongoing adventures in the highfalutin art world, so of course I went to his great spring 2004 show at the New Museum in NYC, which this book documents. I'm disappointed to say that it really doesn't do the show much justice and, in fact, is more like a promotional souvenir than an art book. Knowing how Waters abhors pretension, this is probably on purpose, but I can't say the book's designers have done his work any favors. The biggest problem is one of scale: an effort to show individual works in their entirety on the page means everything is reproduced way too small and the taken-off-the-TV effect is all but lost. And one work, "Slade 16", is cut off mid-image and continued on the next page, which I thought especially inexcusable--even Warhol wouldn't put up with that. The book's design has little of the the elegance or wit of Waters' earlier "Director's Cut". Everything about that book was intriguing, including how it smelled; the paper was so heavily varnished that it took on an amusing "Odorama" quality of its own. And the reproductions were impeccable. "Change of Life" is packed with "bonus" material, including one startling image: a b&w pic of a villianous Cyril Richard in full makeup as Captain Hook that, as far as I'm concerned, sums up Waters' entire oeuvre (crime IS beauty--check out that pre-Divine eye makeup!). But the book really is kind of a shambles. The exhibit in part was sponsored by Fine Line Features and, whenever I look for the book at Borders, it's in the Film stacks, not Art or Photography, which I guess tells the whole story. Whatever the case, Waters is the real deal and I now enjoy his photography even more than his movies. Interesting side note: in "Director's Cut", Waters pledged that he would never let the world see "Eat Your Makeup", one of his earliest movies. The exhibit and this book include it. I wonder what changed. Change of life?