Art History Faculty

John O'Brian

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  More Los Angeles Apartments
  Collapse/VAFS, Vancouver
  2013

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Ed Ruscha created a series of small photo-conceptual books, amongst them Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, and Thirtyfour Parking Lots. Over the past twenty years, a number of other small books have been appropriated or paid homage to Ruscha's book. O'Brian's 1998 More Los Angeles Apartments is one of them. Various Small Books (MIT Press) brings the two groups of books together, and the Gagosian Gallery, New York, is exhibiting them in 2013.

   

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  John O’Brian - Keynote Remarks
  VIVA Awards/Audain Prize, Great Hall, Law Courts, Vancouver
  2012-05

  Jean Monnet, the French economist and principal architect of European unity, commented toward the end of his life that if he were to start over again he would begin with culture. His regret about not paying closer attention the significance of culture in his deliberations on the unification of Europe should give us pause. (It should also give pause to present-day European leaders, but that is a topic for another occasion.) Were he able to start again, Monnet was saying, he would be more attentive to art, music, film, language and other expressions of everyday life and the imagination, and he would be less attentive to rearranging trading zones, appeasing corporate desires and worrying about the agitations of the marketplace.

  http://ahva.ubc.ca/FacultyMisc/JOBrian_may9_12_VIVA_Audain_Awards.pdf

   

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  Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War
  Co-Authored with Jeremy Borsos
  2011

  Atomic postcards played an important role in disseminating a public image of nuclear power. Presenting small-scale images of test explosions, power plants, fallout shelters, and long-range missiles, the cards were produced for mass audiences in China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan and link the multilayered geographies of Atomic Age nationalism and tourism. From the unfailingly cheery slogans – ‘Greetings from Los Alamos’ – to blithe, handwritten notes and no-irony-intended ‘Pray for Peace’ postmarks, these postcards mailed from the edge of danger offer a fascinating representation of a time when the end of the world seemed close at hand.

   

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  Postcard to Moscow
  Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press
  2010

  http://ahva.ubc.ca/FacultyMisc/JOBrian_postcard_to_moscow.pdf

  In a very smart essay, John O'Brian launches from a postcard in a familiar photograph by Robert Frank ("Hoover Damn, Nevada, 1955") to a discussion of atomic explosion imagery on American postcards from the Cold War era. Like the other essays in the book, O'Brian's offering has implications for our understanding of topics far beyond postcards. Indeed, I can think of no writing we have on the subject of atomic explosion imagery that more succinctly and captivatingly argues for the disturbing ways that American culture has assimilated and suppressed the unthinkable.
  — Robin Kelsey, caa. reviews

   

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  The Nuclear Family of Man
  2008

  "The Nuclear Family of Man," Japan Focus: Asia Pacific Journal, July 2008.
  http://japanfocus.org/-John-O_Brian/2816

  Re-published on The History News Network, http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/52279.html

   

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  Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art
  2007

  Co-edited with Peter White

  In this book, John O’Brian and Peter White pick up where the Group of Seven left off. They demonstrate that since the 1960s both artists and a growing body of critical writing have looked “beyond wilderness” to re-imagine landscape in a world of vastly altered political, technological, and environmental circumstances. By emphasizing social relationships, changing identity politics, and issues of colonial power and dispossession contemporary artists have produced landscape art that explores what was absent in the work of their predecessors.

  "The most innovative and important book of the decade on contemporary Canadian art." – Nancy Tousley, Calgary Herald
  

   

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  Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse
  1999

  "In this important study, John O'Brian charts Matisse's evolving reputation among an impressively broad range of audiences, including journalists, dealers, collectors, museum curators and directors, and critics. Especially compelling is O'Brian's nuanced treatment of his subject, the way he has patiently teased out the complexities of Matisse's ever shifting position among various interpretive communities. Particularly impressive is the way O'Brian is able to integrate the history of individual objects by Matisse with larger institutional histories and trends."
  - Diane Dillon.

   

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  Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power and the State
  1996

  Co-edited with Bruce Barber and Serge Guilbaut

  "Visual art, especially abstract art, functions a little like a time bomb. It explodes under the pressure of changing social circumstances, scattering the old meanings that once defined it and reassembling new ones not imagined at the moment of production. These metaphoric detonations and reconstitutions of art, though unpredictable in the timing, occur with a certain inevtitability. This book draws on the case-study of a particularly notorious explosion in Canada."
  - Preface.

   

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  The Flat Side of the Landscape: The Emma Lake Artists' Workshops
  1989

  This catalogue was written to accompany an exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon. The Emma Lake Workshops in Saskatchewan attracted artists and critics from Canada, the United States and Europe, including Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, John Cage, Donald Judd, John Elderfield and Clement Greenberg. The catalogue won the inaugural Braide award for outstanding scholarship in the field of Canadian art history.

   

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  Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism
  1986

  "No American art critic has been more influential than Clement Greenberg. The high priest of 'formalism,' he set in motion an approach to art that has remained prevalent for half a century ... In much the same way that Jackson Pollock elevated American painting to international renown, Mr. Greenberg is the first American art critic whose work can be put on the library shelf next to Roger Fry, Charles Baudelaire and other great European critics." – Deborah Solomon, New York Times

   

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  David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting
  1983

  In this first comprehensive study of the sources of his art, David Milne is revealed to have been a rigorous and innovative intellectual and a writer of uncommon lucidity and grace as well as perhaps the finest Canadian artist of the twentieth century.

  "Provides welcome insight into one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive of Canadian painters." – Art News

   

Art History Faculty