Rip Tales: Jay Defeo's Estocada and Other Pieces - by Jordan Stein (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

On the life and afterlives of Jay DeFeo's Estocada, a work created in the shadow of The Rose

In 1965, Jay DeFeo (1929-89) was evicted from her San Francisco apartment, along with the 2,000-pound colossus of a painting for which she would become legendary, The Rose. The morning after it was 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 pieces and reanimated years later in her studio through photography, photocopy, collage and relief.
Drawing from largely unpublished archival material, Rip Tales traces for the first time Estocada's material history, interweaving it with stories about other Bay Area artists--Zarouhie Abdalian, April Dawn Alison, Ruth Asawa, Lutz Bacher, Bruce Conner, Dewey Crumpler, Trisha Donnelly and Vincent Fecteau--that likewise evoke themes of transformation, intuition and process. Foregrounding a Bay Area ethos that could be defined by its resistance to definition, Rip Tales explores the unpredictable edges of artworks and ideas.

Review Quotes

Nothing short of a remarkable account of what it is to make and write about art in the magical world of the Bay Area. Stein listens closely, looks slowly, and writes clearly and with feeling not only about DeFeo, but on the other artists he attaches to her orbit.--Elizabeth Sussman

Rip Tales breathes a sense of ferment: Jay DeFeo and others taking in the Bay Area air and breathing out not just pieces of art, but ideas, fragments, throwaways--stuff for which there was no market. That some of it is here in this book is a lucky break.--Griel Marcus

Rip Tales offers an intimate look back at significant works by San Francisco artists of recent decades.--Patrick James Dunagan "Rain Taxi Review of Books"

Offers an insider's view of an art scene that is storied yet often ignored... Stein presents a template for how documentation and analysis can be used to honor the region's idiosyncratic art-making practices and artists.--Maymanah Farhat "Brooklyn Rail"

Stein's achievement lies less in having discovered or reconstructed an unknown artwork, but rather in so successfully piecing together its scattered representations, found among and within obscure artworks and DeFeo's countless photographs of her studio.--Chris Murtha "Art Agenda"

Rip Tales is a refreshing, necessary reminder that art can be "always on its way," unclear and uncategorizable even to its maker.--Sarah Hotchkiss "KQED"

Stein's slim, provocative book presents DeFeo in a format almost as revelatory as the artist's body of work.--Lou Fancher "East Bay Express"

Rip Tales is so self-assured, heartfelt, and consistently touching, funny, and brilliant, that its various intimacies and ideas feel like a gift. And they are. A deeply moving debut.--Hilton Als "author of White Girls"

An ode to San Francisco and its artistic ecologies, Rip Tales provides a hugely compelling treatise on art as pursuit (one that often comes to naught) and conversation (balm passed between fellow believers that assuages that knot).--Bruce Hainley "author of Under the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant's Volte-Face"