Rip Tales

Book excerpt: In the California winter of 1965, Jay DeFeo was evicted from the San Francisco apartment that had become a temple for her 2000-pound colossus of a painting, The Rose. The morning after it was safely carried out the front window, DeFeo was forced to destroy the only other artwork she'd started in six years, an enormous painting on paper stapled directly to her hallway wall. The unfinished Estocada-a kind of shadow Rose-was ripped down in unruly chunks, carried to her new home, and reanimated years later through photography, photocopy, collage, and relief. Drawing from largely unpublished archival material, Rip Tales traces Estocada's life and multiple afterlives, offering insight into DeFeo's evolution as an artist and her instinct for self-cataloguing. It's a study of process and processing, and of the contradictions that galvanized the artist's practice: fragment versus whole, subject versus object, and margin versus center.Rip Tales further includes the stories and voices of Bay Area artists whose practices similarly evoke themes of transformation and contingency, including April Dawn Alison, Ruth Asawa, Lutz Bacher, Dewey Crumpler, Vincent Fecteau.. Through essay, interview, eulogy, and recipe, author Jordan Stein interrogates and celebrates a Bay Area ethos that could be defined by its discomfort with definitions. Trading on the literal and metaphorical gravity of DeFeo's last-minute rip, this idiosyncratic book foregrounds the unpredictable edges of artworks, archives, and ideas.