Ai Weiwei, Laurie Anderson, and Others Share Daydreams in New Book
The recently released title brings together poetry, drawings, photographs, and handwritten reflections
A new book from LongHouse Reserve invites 44 artists and creatives, including Ai Weiwei, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Kiki Smith, to share their private reveries. The volume, entitled Daydreams, also has contributions from Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, Michelle Oka Doner, Sean Scully, Ugo Rondinone, Vija Celmins, Maren Hassinger, Renée Cox, and Dustin Yellin, to name a few. The first edition is limited to just 400 copies.
“This makes the daydream the perfect subject for an art book, for it stands in relation to everyday life as art does to the rest of society. Alone among us, painters and poets are granted—they grant themselves—the right to explore their own awareness, with no predetermined end in mind,” writes LongHouse Curator at Large Glenn Adamson in the introduction, continuing, “Artists work just as hard, or harder, than anyone else, and almost invariably they do impose parameters on their creative practice, laying down a pathway through the vastness of what’s possible.”
What makes DayDreams special is that the voices involved each gave LongHouse something personal—a memory, fantasy or reverie rather than a conventional artist statement—and the results move freely among photographs, drawings, handwritten notes, and even music. That fanciful looseness is the point: the 116 pages feel like being allowed into the contributors’ private creative headspace.
