A rather touching aspect of music after 1945 concerns the close relationship between composers and the musicians who premiere their works. This intimacy is heightened in avant-garde and experimental music, which forces performers to adopt new reading skills and special techniques for playing their instruments (and sometimes to invent new instruments). In an indeterminate composition, the performer acts as a kind of co-composer, supplying compositional elements (including any and all aspects of melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, and instrumentation) that the composer leaves free. The communication

The first thing to know about Herbie Popnecker is that he’s a good-for-nothing—a fat layabout who doesn’t say much. The other thing to know is that he’s feared and respected the world over. Occasionally. He’s also basically a god. Or at least that’s how Richard Hughes (writing under the name Shane O’Shea) and Ogden Whitney depict him. Herbie first appeared in 1958 in issue 73 of Forbidden Worlds, an anthology title released by the second-tier publishing outfit American Comics Group. It was an otherwise throwaway story called “Herbie’s Quiet Saturday Afternoon,” one not much different from the

Like a chapbook or a treatise, the collected writings of Agnes Denes are sheathed between plain and precisely designed manila covers. Yet The Human Argument is no arch Conceptualist tract. If Denes is recognized as one of the earliest concept-based artists, since the late ’60s her practice has nevertheless reveled in voluminously detailed drawings that are as lush as they are rigorous and in carefully tended yet plush, shimmering fields of wheat captured in deep-focus photographs, many of which are reproduced here. Similarly, her interest in linguistic codes began bare-bones but quickly veered

Liking the look of something is more than enough reason to use it.” This easy philosophy lies at the heart of the success of Hipgnosis, the graphic-design firm responsible for some of the most legendary album covers of the ’70s and early ’80s: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, with its iconic prism and rainbow; Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, with its naked blond sprites ascending toward a glowing orange sky; Styx’s Pieces of Eight, an anomaly even today with its severe, sharp close-ups of glamorous middle-aged women.

Hipgnosis founders Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell didn’t stray

In a drawing of Texas in which the state is superimposed on a cross, Austin is designated by a pentagram sunk into a vortex. A dog’s head severed from a monstrous humanoid form inaccurately observes, “CROSS ON TEXAS,” and a trepanned human head with sunken eyes interjects, “DEATH TO SUICIDE.” Such is the landscape of Daniel Johnston’s drawings—cartoonish collisions of perspective whose Magic Marker palette extends from bright to brighter. But the more than eighty works that make up this monograph, the most comprehensive of his artwork to date, retain too much emotional presence to be mistaken

Should anyone doubt that the visual aspect of the comics form is its dominant narrative mechanism and the source of its idiosyncrasies, I can hardly imagine a more potent corrective than the works of French cartoonist Chris Blain. His command of the image—his lines, colors, and layouts; the moments and actions sliced and crunched and smeared across wide perspectives—drives his storytelling, while dialogue and narration traverse the mutable terrain of his grander world, his pages.

Gus & His Gang translates some of Blain’s newest work into English. It’s a pastiche of American cowboy fiction

For all the glossy books that have appeared on contemporary Chinese art in the past few years, a basic overview—rather than an artist-by-artist glossary or a survey exhibition catalogue—has been slow to arrive. Art in America senior editor Richard Vine’s New China New Art goes a long way toward filling that void, offering a medium-based walk through the range of recent artistic production on the mainland. Five chapters devoted to painting, sculpture and installation, performance, photography, and video are accompanied by copious illustrations that get beyond the standard auction-catalogue fare.