"Piss and Light Critical Essays of Baruch D. Kirschenbaum with Commentaries by Elizabeth G. Grossman"
Piss and Light Critical Essays of Baruch D. Kirschenbaum with Commentaries by Elizabeth G. Grossman (Gnat Books, 2024) is now available.
As the title indicates, the book brings together Baruch Kirschenbaum’s published articles—all but one of which was written over the course of his long teaching career at RISD. Commentaries by Elizabeth Grossman, Architectural History professor emeritus, trace common threads that run through these essays, analyze the style of his arguments, and provide cultural context and personal perspective for them.
The subjects Baruch took up shed light on a range of issues impacting art-making of their time—blasphemy, pornography, sacred and profane love, the power of images and of ideas, the dysfunction of art institutions. His directness, humor, skepticism of easy interpretations, his compassion for our flawed humanity, and his delight in human aspiration and creativity shine through his exemplary discussions of art. Taken together, the attitudes and convictions about art and design revealed in his essays help explain what made Baruch Kirschenbaum’s teaching at RISD so effective and memorable.
