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Among images in American civic and cultural life, the subject of the human face remains dominant, though not always used for upright purposes. Certain police departments, for instance, are reported to employ super powerful surveillance cameras in the vain hope to track and match blurry s­­treet close-ups of faces with mug shots in criminal suspect files. Or take the recent fuss about the ease with which commercial and political operatives can hack into media, thereby injecting their clandestine interests into TV reportage of talking heads.  Consider also the growing animus of fake news and disinformation, which have elevated public mistrust—a sense that we’re not getting things right because they could be compromised in their transmission or history. During the coronavirus pandemic, employers found ways to monitor lapses in employee productivity with the workforce confined to their homes. The integrity of privacy became an equivocal phenomenon, subject to infiltration and real snooping, as self-interest encourages, and as certain apps provide.

At least selfies offer transparency of performance, within their context. Their playfulness is diary-like, nominally composed for or from a social occasion and conveniently transmitted to an audience, warmed or not by their personal content. In their modes of address, selfies act as tokens or reminders of connection, sometimes soliciting reply. Except, that is, when people were actually seen outdoors, as they were during the time I was writing this review, wearing surgical masks. As we know, this spectacle was sponsored by a protective state agency during an epoch of plague. But though a genuine response to a public health crisis, it evokes an atmosphere suggestive of widespread repression, forced isolation, and a social leveling hostile to individualism.

Artists are, of course, known as avatars of individualism and subjectivity. It is a stance that disavows any requirement that they verify something.  This imaginative condition applies even to appropriated material, in collage as well as installation art. Within such modes, a mundane object—say a humble tube of lipstick—may attain emblematic status by virtue of its contribution to the fictive assumption of the whole.

Judith Henry is a contemporary artist who is aware of the invasive disturbances of our situation and chooses to engage poetically with some of them and contends with others., Based in Brooklyn, Henry has roughly a —40-year career of multimedia work to her credit. It developed along themes that embrace theatrical metaphors illuminating social artifice. On her website these are given titles such as “Makeover,” “Casting call,” “Masquerade,” “Me as her,” “Rebirth,” and “Archive.”  They refer to phases of her practice that reveal a fascination with identity shifts, questionable environments, and metamorphoses of human life forms. In one of her photo projects, notable women like Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf are shown at ease in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a place they probably never visited. This apparent testament to earlier heroines is titled ”Me as Her,” 2014. An indifference to their whereabouts runs through this artist’s world of characters –in the act of posing. They seem detached from any social milieu without knowing that they have been repositioned in one, other than the photo to which they originally consented. In Henry’s images, the standard protocols of portrait genres are at an enigmatic loss.

I’ve picked up these impressions from glimpses of her art over the past six or seven years (I have known her for much more of that time). My attention is now intriguingly drawn and focused on her latest project, an artist’s book titled “Beauty Masks Portraits.” It features scores of close-up color photographs of young, glamorous women’s faces, cut from fashion magazines into pages continuously suspended by the artist’s hands to cover her own face, the two of them acting as a pair of heads that almost reaches the nearby frame. Viewers are therefore asked to engage with a self-portrait matrix that conspicuously declares its intention to conceal its subject. (Though not completely, as Henry’s eyes are sometimes made visible through holes that resemble glasses.) This aspect of her theatre raises the question of how to regard a real, though very reticent human presence in these images, capable of staring back at you. In any case, the results are not beautiful, but they are certainly haunting.

When masquerades do their work, proposing alternate faces for the ones we know or might expect, their impersonations are not subtle. Rather, they actively reach out to signal that a charade is in order, and a role is being played. They can’t help but pull appraisal toward their own contrivance, as such. A viewer may then realize that the women’s faces of “Me as Her” were not “there” in Henry’s photos, but only their appearance, in someone else’s photos. And the artist’s hands, tremulous as they might be, are holding it up. This is not homage to women’s creative achievements so much as a statement skeptical of career status itself. Great care has been taken to conceal the actual masquerade, and this fact fosters the effect of seamless illusion that was originally intended. Underneath this iconography, the artist makes her debut but is nowhere to be found, except in the title of this project.

The new book with the word “beauty” in its title plays havoc with a notion of beauty by intermingling faces, such that they exist primarily as awkward physical components of each other—cheeks as dismembered chunks fitted in the wrong place. On one level, they take on the look of modernist grotesquery, familiar in museums. At the same time, I get another and more emotional input from the plenitude of media one offs, who display their improbable coiffures and toothy smiles. They consist of glamour pusses, cutie pies, high school seniors, and haute couture models—of different races. Henry’s elegant fingers everywhere get into the act with a stateliness that induces mirth or wonder, or sometimes both.  She seems to cooperate with the paper illustrations, as if she was of the same material existence as theirs. The spectacle of it inspires me to think of how Picasso would deal with photos of Audrey Hepburn.

More seriously, a survey of these faces generates a mood of longing, enacted by their maker, who functions simultaneously as partial subject and object. I’m thinking of multiple personality disorder, a condition in which individuals have lost their sense of self, and compensate by their pretension to be others. The thought of such ego transfers may infuse the beauty book, but mostly as a reckoning with a metaphor of a social thesis, rather than as a documentary on a psychic malaise. For my part, whether people are smiling or scowling under their half masks on the streets, this issue of public life contrasts with Henry’s delving into her private concerns.

Criticism has a habit of refining itself at short notice for purposes of isolating distinctions. We often use a device called the ‘’yes, but’’, as in: Are her young subjects coquettish?—Yes, but some are baffled or just vacant.  Is their moodiness a contribution to the narrative aspects of the project? Yes, but they are more pluralistic in psychic shading than you think.

I suggest that color has its own role to play in Judith  Henry’s outlook. The choreography of her palette includes movements into black and white, which contrast with flesh tones that dramatize her artifice. As  for the chromatic environment itself, how could it not reflect disparate sources from the cosmetic routines that fascinate her?

One may well ask: where did all these maneuvers come from; is there a pictorial tradition from which they stemmed? Though the answer is apparently negative, there does exist a scatter of previous self-portraitists who ventured into theatrical modes. Among them are Cindy Sherman, Lucas Samaras, Claude Cahun, and Hannah Höch. Judith Henry’s works are as disconcerting as theirs, as complicated psychologically, and of equally high artistic stature.

Beauty Masks, portraits, Judith Henry. Published by Small Editions (Brooklyn, 2020). All photographs were taken by Howard Saunders with an iPhone 8 Plus, indoors, with natural light. Introduction by Grace Graupe-Pillard. ISBN 978-0-578-64727-2. $40

Due to the pandemic, the book is not widely distributed. To order a copy, please visit the artist’s Paypal and be sure to include your mailing address with payment: http://paypal.me/beautymasks

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I first saw the paintings of Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) in 1983, when I flew down to Washington for his retrospective at the Hirshhorn organized by Charles Millard. I loved it. Back in New York, I started work on a major article about it for Arts Magazine, and (believe it or not, by coincidence) spoke with Clement Greenberg on the phone.  “He’s great,” Greenberg said, “But nobody knows it.”  Or maybe it was “knows about him.”  Anyway, I know he said “great.”

Still, Dzubas has never become as well-known as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis or Jules Olitski, three other painters admired by Greenberg, and associated with what in the 1960s was known as Color Field painting. or post-painterly abstraction. Moreover, Greenberg himself must bear some of the responsibility for Dzubas’s relative obscurity. The two had been close personal friends ever since 1948, when the critic placed an ad in Partisan Review, seeking a summer vacation home for himself and his son Danny, and the Berlin-born artist, recently arrived in New York, offered to sublet him rooms in a large Connecticut house that he himself had newly rented.

Throughout the 1950s, when Dzubas was painting gestural abstractions, and the ‘60s, when he took a more “post-painterly” turn, his work was exhibited in many of the same galleries that showed others Greenberg admired.  However, it was not until 1972, when the artist was teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, that he developed his first truly distinctive, original style, with solid, powerful bands of color feathering away into airy glows of paler hue. The front cover of the book under review shows one of his first canvases in this mode —Fan Tan (1972), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And It was not until 1977 that Greenberg wrote about him. Even then it was only a curiously ambivalent little essay in an exhibition catalogue for the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld, GermanyAnd by 1977 Greenberg was no longer the kingmaker.

Patricia L. Lewy, a Mozart scholar turned art historian, is particularly insistent that Dzubas should be seen not as a Color Field painter but as a true independent. This newly revised, mammoth, lavishly illustrated edition of her absorbing monograph corrects typos and off-color illustrations from the original edition; the only thing it still lacks is an index.  Lewy argues that as a native of Germany, Dzubas differs from this New York peers on both artistic and personal grounds.  Artistically, she sees him as inspired by different earlier art: German as opposed to French, ranging back from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the German palaces decorated in the 18th  Century with murals by Giambattista Tiepolo. More dramatically, she tells of his early experiences  in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a true horror story.

I had always believed that Dzubas was Catholic, because I’d heard of the mystical Catholicism he favored in later life and because of the long interview with him by Millard in the Hirshhorn catalogue.  Here Dzubas explained that he fled his birthplace in 1939 because he’d been a Communist and because he didn’t want to serve in Hitler’s army.  Thanks to Lewy’s impressive research, though, it turns out that the artist had a much more pressing need to emigrate: He was really a “Mischling,” or a child of mixed parentage, with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father.  The Nazis took a particularly grim view of Mischlings for defiling the Aryan race.

By the later 1930s, as a grim prelude to the Holocaust, Hitler and his Nazi government were already confiscating Jewish property and businesses, expelling Jews from jobs in the civil service and the universities, and barring the schools to Jewish children – not least, the Prussian Academy of Arts, where young Friedel had hoped to study. The Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938 confirmed him in his decision to emigrate.

He was enabled in this effort by two Jewish organizations trying to relocate German-Jewish youths outside of Hitler’s expanding sphere of influence. These organizations set up a farm in Silesia where Jewish boys and girls were taught farming techniques.  The hope was that by being able to offer an occupation in demand by other nations, these youngsters could creep through the loopholes in the immigration regulations then in force in the United States and elsewhere.

Thus the future artist spent two years of his adolescence tending crops and farm animals in Silesia.  After he’d arrived in the America, he spent some months on a farm in Virginia that had been set up by Jewish organizers to host the young émigrés. Then he headed north in search of his real ambition: to seek an artistic career. To Millard, he referred to the farm in Virginia as merely a place where he was visiting with “friends,” nor did he offer the slightest hint that either it or his immigration had been made possible by Jews.

Despite what seems to have been considerable personal charm, in Lewy’s telling Dzubas doesn’t emerge as an altogether sympathetic character.  Denying his Jewish heritage was only one of his evasions of, or embroideries on, the truth. He also claimed to have studied in German schools that he couldn’t have attended, and he married his second wife without getting a divorce from the first. However, in the 1940s, with anti-Semitism very much prevalent in this country, Dzubas was far from the only Jew to try and evade it, as many did, of course, by changing their names.  Even more to the point, art is one thing and personality another.  The art is what really matters and survives –triumphantly in the case of Friedel Dzubas.

Patricia L. Lewy. Friedel Dzubas (Milan: Skira, revised edition 2019) ISBN: 978-88-572-3280-5. 390 pages, 390 illustrations, $65.

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When RoseLee Goldberg first published Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, in 1979, she opened the doors for the scholarly study of this medium. Thirty-two years later, Performance Art was in its third edition, with a new chapter dealing with “The First Decade of the New Century 2001-2010.” Importantly, this decade included the advent of Goldberg’s groundbreaking performance biennial – Performa – which began in 2004, and which will see its eighth edition this year. Her latest publication, Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century (August 2018) is devoted exclusively to performance since 2000. Departing from her previous monograph, which ruminates on the processes and history of performance art, Performance Now dives into the political and social implications of its contemporary manifestations.

Performance Now is divided into six chapters: “Performance as Visual Art,” “Word Citizenship: Performance as a Global Language,” “Radical Action: On Performance and Politics,” “Dance After Choreography,” “Off stage: New Theatre,” and “Performing Architecture.” The table of contents which outlines these chapters features an image of Pussy Riot in Moscow in 2012 – a powerful, colorful image that sets the tone for the book. Goldberg’s mission is clear: she articulately and concisely investigates how performance “mak[es] us more alert” in a globalized, politicized, “endlessly shifting” society (11). After a brief introductory section, Goldberg follows the same structure in each chapter: an explanation of themes and trends related to its topic, followed by about 50 examples of artists illustrating those ideas, all from the past two decades. Because each section is distinctly separate from those before and after, and they are neither alphabetical nor chronological in their ordering, the sequence of the chapters seems primarily a matter of aesthetic. As almost every page of the book has at least one (usually color) illustration, it would seem to be an image-led arrangement.

Goldberg’s text reads like a call to arms to consider performance in relation to institutions as much as to individuals. Once an outsider art form, Goldberg explains how post-2000 performance art became “increasingly dense with content, and demanded close attention on the part of viewers, [making] the argument that performance was difficult to incorporate into contemporary art history or into the collection of a museum because of its ephemeral nature… irrelevant” (17). With the book’s comprehensive chapter entries, Performance Now acts a record to legitimize performance – helped along not only by Goldberg’s status as an expert, but also from the thorough documentation of performance in the almost-two-hundred pages of example artists and performances (many of which are from various iterations of Performa).

Chapter three (“Radical Action”) stood out as particularly timely. Dealing with themes of war, social media, identity, and capitalism, Goldberg beautifully describes the importance of performance as a way to protest, process, and connect. Earlier in the book she describes performance as “both a way out and a way in,” a claim that fully comes to life as Goldberg describes the “urgent appeals to upend history, to change situations from negative to positive… to imagine reconciliation, to create poetic spaces for personal visions, cultures and rituals” (73, 112-113). Performance, this book says, can bridge outside and in, working from outside systems to make changes, and getting inside institutions to spread a message.

Despite the scope of this undertaking to show the immediate power of live art, Goldberg never lets it get away from her. In elegant, jargon-free prose, Performance Now remains accessible to anyone with a light background in performance wanting to know more, although with the absence of the history of the medium (covered so well in her earlier monograph) it should be admitted that readers with no background on the subject may feel a little lost at times. However, the energy of Goldberg’s text certainly comes across no matter what level of previous familiarity with the material.

My biggest surprise with this book was the lack of a conclusion. The same, however, is true in the earlier study, and it would seem in both instances to be a strategic commentary on the ever-shifting nature of performance as a medium, which remains responsive to its time and place. To write a conclusion would perhaps be reductive, boxing in a form which has always crossed boundaries. Thus, by giving us performance now, Goldberg leaves us tantalized, imagining the range of possibilities of what might come next.

RoseLee Goldberg. Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018) ISBN: 9780500021255. 272 pages, 260 illustrations, $45

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Brian O’Doherty is justly renowned for his short book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976). In any case, as a much-acclaimed artist and a veteran critic, he deserves this presentation of his writings. Collected Essays brings together substantial personal reminiscences of Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, who were his friends; accounts of travels to Las Vegas and Miami; discussions of medicine that are informed by his early experience as an MD; descriptions of the work Orson Wells and other filmmakers; and selections from his art criticism of the 1960s and ‘70s, dealing with Richard Chamberlain, George Segal, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. There’s a marvelous account of how he took Marcel Duchamp’s heartbeat to compose a portrait of that artist and the story of how, as a political gesture, he took the name Patrick Ireland (1972-2008). “As a young man in Dublin,” he writes in a brilliant introductory essay on masquerade, “I felt the need to assume a persona that stretched the borders of a culture where literature always flourished and the attitudes to visual art were warily provincial” (pp. 8-9). O’Doherty is a gifted writer whose Irish-honed literary skills are placed at the service of New York’s cosmopolitan visual culture.

As examples of his luminously lucid, jargon free analysis, I especially admired his highly instructive account of the role of windows in Hopper’s paintings, the problems with the dark paintings in Rothko’s Houston Chapel, discussion of neon signs in Las Vegas, and an analysis of Stella’s early reception. But because he doesn’t provide an overview on the very diverse themes of these essays, it’s left to the reader to tease out the unifying concerns. And it’s not clear who will read this book through – except a very patient reviewer. Perhaps Inside the White Cube provides the unifying perspective much needed in the present volume, with its appeal to the role of the spectator’s space. When O’Doherty describes the ways that Hopper’s “aim was to keep the spectator right there, looking” (p. 21), using his windows in his “mysterious realism” which “invites you in to test the logic of his space with reference to your everyday experience” (p. 39), his account is revelatory. And his claim that Rothko’s dark late paintings show “an urge to experiment in ways he had not previously allowed himself” (p. 83), extends that analysis in a surprising way. I regret, then, that O’Doherty doesn’t go out of his way to make this overriding concept, which points to surprising parallels between Hopper’s realism and Rothko’s abstractions, entirely accessible, nor indicate how it might bring together the concerns of the other essays in this volume.

What is the right format for republication of a famous critic’s writings? When Clement Greenberg collected his criticism in Art and Culture (1961) he provided a carefully edited selection of his essays; he was famous enough that no elaborate editorial discussion was needed. When Michael Fried collected his criticism in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), he offered an elaborate introduction describing the genesis and development of these writings. But although O’Doherty’s Collected Essays opens with respectful brief essays by Liam Kelly and Anne-Marie Bonnet, they don’t really tell enough to provide a full perspective on his career, much of which now is historically distant. I sought out this volume, I confess, because I wanted to know if how he had rethought his history of the commercial art gallery, in light of its recent development. But I was frustrated by the very condensed five-page account, whose title, I admit, is suggestive: “Boxes, cubes, installations, whiteness and money.” “Art and its reception,” he rightly says, “always intersected finance. Art is made to be coopted” (p. 331). What then follows? “The white cube I described over thirty years ago is no longer the same place. The stresses on it from within have increased” (p. 330). True enough – but surely there is much more to be said. Right now I can think of no more interesting challenge for anyone interested in contemporary art and its market than spelling out the implications of these claims.

Brian O’Doherty, Collected Essays. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.) Edited by Liam Kelly. Introduction by Anne-Maria Bonnet. ISBN 9780520286542, 342 pp. $85 hardback, $34.95 paperback

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Carol Rhodes depicts what have been called “edgelands,” the environmentalist Marion Shoard’s term for the kind of non-descript terrains given over to transit, storage, mineral extraction, reservoirs and landing strips. Landscapes never given back to nature, these are places defined by human exploitation rather than habitation. Rhodes is a “realist” in the sense of the acuteness of her politics and the unsentimental report of her gaze. But her compositions are also inventions, made up non-sites conjoining disparate details from the aerial photographs that are her source material.

Literally as well as metaphorically, she paints in no man’s land, an “edgeland” of categories that is at once documentary and fictional, idealized and anti-idealist. Despite the relentless quotidian drabness of the world she describes, her paintings are caprices of sorts, making her perhaps a latter-day Canaletto, one shot through with something of the ethos of Robert Smithson. At once delicate and diffident, composed and plain spoken, her paintings hover between the prosaic and the metaphysical.

Looking at a reproduction of Airport, 1995, one of two paintings by the artist in the Tate collection, there is a peculiar back and forth between empathetic, brushy, emotionally invested-in passages of scrubland or the delicately-insisted upon shadows of walkways, on the one hand, and the almost schematic monochrome of unusable lawns caught in the loops of runways and service roads and a uniformly dispatched stretch of tarmac, on the other, as if the distance and perhaps implied movement of the observation point has vision teetering between reduction and specificity.

Despite the composite, impersonal fictions that she generates, there is an oddly loving sense of the observed about these always handmade-feeling, modest sized, faux-plein-air oils on board. A better comparison than Canaletto, therefore, might be the 18th-century Welsh painter of Neapolitan backstreets, Thomas Jones. Like him, she delights in strange moments of tenderness and surprise in the relationships of form she uncovers, although where Jones homes in upon “pleasing states of decay” (in English painter John Piper’s felicitous phrase) Rhodes pulls back to the bland despondency of damage done on an industrial scale. Her bird’s eye perspective ought to be distant enough to reduce any details to near abstract alloverness, and yet there is often a dainty, toy like sense of the contained in the anonymous functional structures that populate her unpeopled vistas.

Born in Edinburgh in 1959 and raised in India where her parents were missionaries, Rhodes based herself in Glasgow. She was active in a burgeoning group of artists centered on Transmissions, the cooperative gallery of which she was a founder, and the Glasgow School of Art, where she taught for many years. Illness in the last several years has curtailed her output, and she was, in any event, a fastidious and notoriously slow producer, and yet, as Skira’s fulsome, handsomely produced monograph demonstrates, she is leaving the world a thoughtful, deeply original body of work, one that evolved over the course of a highly industrious career. In addition to a dialogue with the artist by her longstanding dealer, Andrew Mummery, who edited the volume, the book has essays by Moira Jeffrey, who places the oeuvre in art historical and political contexts, and Lynda Morris, who takes a biographical approach, considering the impact on the young artist of a screening at elementary school of a moon landing, for instance, and the social perspective engendered by her Indian childhood. The book includes a number of reproductions of preparatory cartoons, quite startling images in their own right that Rhodes has previously been reluctant to exhibit. All in all, this very welcome publication will enrich appreciation of a singularly remarkable artist.

Carol Rhodes. Published by Skira Editore (Lausanne, 2018). Edited by Andrew Mummery, with contributions by Carol Rhodes, Moira Jeffrey and Lynda Morris. 196pp. 116 color illustrations. ISBN 885723814. €41

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John Yau is a poet as well as a supremely prolific art and literary critic. A new collection of his prose, The Wild Children of William Blake (from Autonomedia, 2017), centers on oft-forgotten artists and under read writers, with the occult as the leitmotif that threads many of his connections. Leave it to a poet to consider the unseen, the enigmatic — and even the mystical — in critical writing today.

Yau’s apparent sense of constant genuine interest is what first attracted me to his art writing. He works tirelessly in efforts to tell his readers what they don’t already know — as opposed to constantly reminding of theoretical conventions, canonical standards, etc. As the painter Philip Guston said to Bill Berkson, quoted in these pages, “I got sick and tired of all that purity. I wanted to tell stories” (91). His manner of clear analysis is in the service of engaging the senses first and foremost, evident in prose that emerges from curiosity. The writing is sharp, never pedantic but exploratory, off-the-cuff. Like other poets who know how to write about art (from Apollinaire to a litany of modern successors who knew that someone could, and needed to, improve upon those efforts), he looks intently and thinks imaginatively on his subjects and their occasions, coming up with parallels and historical insights that are often strange, memorable. But unlike some poets whose art criticism focuses almost exclusively on formal qualities, Yau’s writing is invariably dedicated to telling stories.

Yau has been engaged with art criticism for the better part of three decades. Reading The Wild Children, one doesn’t get the sense that he sits at his desk, armed with art history textbooks to get it “right” in an anticipated scholarly way — despite the fact of his prolificness (96 articles at Hyperallergic, for instance, where he is a member of the editorial collective that produces the Weekend section, in 2017 alone) and the kind of frame of reference it might require. It really seems like Yau just takes simple notice of what tugs on his coat tails. He makes it a point to put aside time every day to look and ponder at art, and further, to remain in the daily practice of writing.

The chosen organizing theme in this book, the occult, gives way to novel approaches (as opposed to otherwise narrower views) to artists, their works and lives, and what to notice in art. As I understand it, the occult relates to and communes with the things in this world that we can maybe perceive but not necessarily see or define, and to consider it is to invoke new experiences that might perhaps bring surprise and new understandings. Its consideration involves, in short, “looking for what was hidden in plain sight, for the invisible within the visible” (35)—which in turn recalls, perhaps, Odilon Redon’s notion of “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” In his essay on the poet Robert Kelly, Yau observes that “whatever place we consciously or unconsciously inhabit — call it a house or reality — is in a state of flux” (49), that we are constantly dealing in uncertainty. This essay is strange, brilliantly peripatetic, and reveals a lot about Yau’s one-thing-follows-another mode of investigation, and many of his affinities. “Between its root and its obsolescence, the word (the author) wanders, meaning only one thing to him at a time,” (53) he writes.

Yau often turns his attention to painters, refuting the idea that painting is dead — seeing its value, its continual power to transport. In his essay on British artist William Tillyer, Yau asks important questions relative to anachronisms in painting that one might dismiss too quickly. In his analysis, he sides with sincerity, asking “how do you make an image laden with history fresh?” considering what it takes to re-frame an idyllic subject — in this case, a bucolic stone bridge as in the Bridge Paintings series (1982-83) — to bring it up to date, and make it “part of the present rather than an artifact of the past.” I get the sense that loaded subjects like this, tropes from Romanticism that carry over to today, are sometimes frowned upon in more rigorous circles, and yet Yau takes note of Tillyer’s being “critical of those who would approach this subject solely thought mechanical means or solely through an ironic use of paint” (108). The poet’s attention to what’s dialectically possible, worthy of another point of view, proves utterly worthwhile today.

Innate curiosity explains, I think, why Yau pays so much attention to biographical information in these reviews and essays. It’s not his one chosen methodological “lens” per se, and he’s not just paying due-diligence — it’s clear that Yau wants to know, to dig, and for the reader to find out. He’s not an evangelist, either, and his takes bear little air of sentimentality, nostalgia, or hyperbole — it’s more ‘take it or leave it’, and it’s all very user-friendly. The book is broken up into six chapters, with an interrelated parade of fascinating figures that goes from painter Hilma af Klint, in the book’s beginning, to figures like the sole “American Surrealist” poet Philip Lamantia, and the painter Katherine Bradford. Two very striking illustrations made it into print here. Jay Defeo’s The Eyes (1958) takes up an entire spread (befitting of its massive aspect) early on, and Brian Lucas’s rather psychedelic Afternoon’s Embryo (2016) helps to close the book’s eponymous essay. The Wild Children share 264 pages; not one of them is super famous, but all of them are congenial.

John Yau. The Wild Children of William Blake. (Brooklyn, 2017: Autonomedia) ISBN 1570273243. $15

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Thomas Nozkowski by John Yau

In the late 1970s, when Thomas Nozkowski entered the New York art world, painting (especially abstract painting) was in a difficult position. Many critics thought that art’s history had ended. There seemed to be no place for Nozkowski’s modest sized abstractions. And in the 1980s, when Neo-Expressionist painting became fashionable, the situation was no better: postmodern theorizing had nothing whatsoever to do with his art. What we can see, now, is that he has proved to be a great artist because he creates very varied, never clichéd paintings. With totally admirable persistence he has produced a consistently first-rate body of works, which are unlike those of any other artist. Nozkowski’s career thus shows the importance of going your own way, without paying attention to fashions. John Yau is the ideal writer for Nozkowski: Visually sensitive, lyrical, not given to hyperbole, he offers closely detailed, nicely sympathetic commentary. I especially admired the account of how early on Nozkowski learned to compose by repeating “a pre-existing, eccentric shape until it established the edge” (23). Presenting excellent close accounts of several pictures, Yau rightly concludes that Nozkowski’s great strength is his refusal to settle into a signature style. The discussion of what Nozkowski learnt from film is revelatory.

Since Nozkowski is accessible, it’s regrettable at some points that Yau didn’t press him harder. I would love to know why Nozkowski thinks that Rudolf Schindler is the greatest modern architect. Because Yau’s account of Nozkowski’s admiration for Pisanello’s The Vision of St Eustace (1438-42) is fascinating, indeed the book comes back to it five times, discussion of other art historical sources would be welcome. And it would be good to know if the artist’s long-time employment at Mad magazine had some effect on his art. Sometimes, also, it is not entirely clear whether Yau is presenting his own thoughts or Nozkowski’s. After narrating Nozkowski’s entry point into the art world by contrasting the hostile reception, in 1970, of Philip Guston’s figurative works with the euphoria that greeted Frank Stella’s first MoMA retrospective, Yau allows: “instead of being directly influenced by Guston, the more likely case is that Nozkowski based his decisions on his own experience” (15). Fair enough, but what then was the purpose of describing Guston’s situation? Similarly, when Yau suggests that Nozkowski’s ways of working owes something to William Wordsworth, it’s not clear how that can help explain the artist’s announced desire to “make anything and everything into a painting” (36), if only because the activities of 19th-century poets and contemporary painters are so obviously different. And, finally, the politics of Nozkowski’s art deserve more critical discussion. He was originally inspired to make small pictures, Yau reports, because he saw “large-scale work…as an extension of imperialism…it occupied whatever space it wanted to without regard for others” (16). But as Nozkowski’s paintings now appear in the same grand galleries and public collections as the large works of his contemporaries, surely this attachment to small-scale has become something of a (productive) myth.

These are minor quibbles about a first rate book. Nozkowski, an accessible painter, is oddly difficult to write about. Very well read, widely traveled, he does not make it easy to understand how his varied visual experiences are the sources for his art. That he almost always refuses to title his works reinforces this elusiveness. Although Yau identifies a few exceptions, Nozkowski generally doesn’t work in the manner familiar from early abstractionists like Kandinsky and Mondrian, of gradually abstracting from nature As Yau rightly says: “The point was to get to the bottom of the experience without representing it in some received or familiar way” (53). But in what way then, exactly, is experience of art, nature and the city the starting point for Nozkowski’s abstractions? That question is hard to answer except perhaps in a negative way: his paintings refuse figurative allusion.

John Yau, Thomas Nozkowski (London: Lund Humphries, 2017). $44.99. 113 color illustrations. 152 pages. Hardback. ISBN 978-1-84822-238-0

Read other artcritical writers on Thomas Nozkowski:

Roundtable: Joseph Masheck, David Brody, Alexander Ross, Marjorie Welish, Jennifer Riley and Raphael Rubinstein, 2015
Nora Griffin, 2013
David Brody, 2010
David Cohen, 2010
David Cohen, 2008
David Cohen, 2006
David Cohen, 2003
Sherman Sam, 2003
Joe Fyfe, 2003

The post Going His Own Way: A new monograph on Thomas Nozkowski by John Yau appeared first on artcritical.

David Lloyd, in his long-awaited book on Samuel Beckett and the visual arts, arrives, in his closing chapter, at this electrifying thought: “The political effect of Beckett’s work in general takes place not at the level of statement, but in its steady dismantling of the regime of representation.” (p. 222). Although Lloyd, here, is talking about the very late Beckett plays—Catastrophe, written for the dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, and What Where, in which a voice exhorts three characters to extract information from each other by force—it is clear, thanks to the argument he has built throughout the book, that the wellhead of Beckett’s literary aesthetic lay in his intense, life-long devotion to looking at what he called “pictures,” specifically those by painters who were mounting their own assaults on representation.

That Beckett appreciated painting is beyond question. As a young man, he haunted the National Gallery in Dublin and its fine collection of Dutch Masters and Renaissance works. The gallery’s purchase in 1931 of Pietro Perugino’s Pietà, as just one example remarked upon by Beckett (25 at the time), prompted repeated visits: “One is obliged to take cognizance of it, square inch by square inch.” Living in London in the mid-1930s, he continued to look closely at art—he even applied for a job at the National Gallery. Frequent trips to Germany—including a six-month, twenty-city tour in 1936-37, when Hitler and Goebbels were driving abstract art into basements, labeling artists as officially degenerate, and burning books and paintings in public squares—showed Beckett just what might be at stake in the war of representation. He filled six notebooks with his thoughts. And Beckett spent the last fifty years of his life in Paris, most of it as a revered celebrity. Still, he went to galleries and openings throughout.

Given how much art Beckett made it his business to see, Lloyd has made the wise choice to concentrate on three artists that Beckett not only wrote about but also liked personally very much. Although work remains to be done on Beckett’s view of several other artists—he has a fascinating understanding of Cézanne, for example, and a soft spot for the Northern European romantics—Lloyd’s tight focus on the Irishman Jack B. Yeats, the Dutchman Bram van Velde, and the Romanian-born, Paris-based Israeli Avigdor Arikha yields valuable insights into the work of these underappreciated artists and gold for those trying to get a greater grip on Beckett’s work, particularly his work for theater.

The “thing” in Lloyd’s title is not a vague placeholder. Beckett’s thing is the human subject glimpsed as a reducible but not expungable thing among other things, tirelessly pursued in virtually all of his work (p. 232). He never sought to privilege the self as subject and did not like art that did so. He understood Cézanne landscapes as “incommensurable with all human expression” and possessed of an “impassable immensity” between landscape and the gazing subject. He complained that there was “nothing of the kind” in painters like Constable and Turner, where he saw only nature “infected with spirit.” In the work of Yeats, the younger brother of the great Irish poet, Beckett saw an artist whose stormy, swirling landscapes all but subsumed the figure, maintaining, by problematizing, the relation of the medium to what is represented. As Beckett said in his well-known “Three Dialogues” with Georges Duthuit (the editor of Transitions and the son-in-law of Matisse), “It seems absurd to speak, as Kandinsky did, of a painting liberated from the object. For what remains of representation if the essence of the object is to abscond from representation?” Indeed, what does remain? As anyone familiar with Beckett’s prose and theater knows, this is the Beckett conundrum.

The embrace of Yeats’s painting, Lloyd reminds us, is distinguished by Beckett’s rejection of a popular view at the time—that Yeats was a “national painter,” as his good friend, the poet Thomas MacGreevy contended, his work representing “the life of the people.” For Beckett, an artist worthy of interest cannot be reduced to the politics of representation. As he wrote of Yeats in “Hommàge a Jack B. Yeats,” “the artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith.” (In this instance, apparently, he’s not even Irish.)

Lloyd’s close analysis of the surface and depths of several Yeats canvases is convincing, and alters this common view. In Yeats’s Above the Fair (1946), for example, a severely foreshortened view of a country fair, a dozen faces crowd the foreground in a rush. And yet,

[I]t is often extremely difficult to achieve a total image of the painting no matter where one stands before the canvas, and wherever one stands, one has the impression of seeing the work at a different depth of focus…. It is as if the represented of the painting continually dissolves back into the medium of the representation, resisting totalization and renewing the work of the gaze at every turn. (p. 54)

In the explosion of colors typical of Yeats’s work, Lloyd adduces, in painting after painting, that nothing is resolved into conventional outlines of what they might be taken to represent—travelers, horses, children, swimmers. The subject will not be brought into focus, which is what interested Beckett, as in all of his work, where the self is elusive if ever-present. In his hommàge to Yeats, Beckett wrote approvingly, in his inimitable style: “None of this great inner real where phantoms quick and dead, nature and void, all that ever and never will be, join in a single evidence for a single testimony.” No, none of that.

Beckett’s enthusiasm for the painting of Bram van Velde was intense. He deeply admired the courage of the destitute artist who was living in Paris. He gave him money, bought his work, and was constantly asking friends after van Velde’s well being. He wrote more about van Velde than any other artist. “I suggest,” he told Duthuit in the “Three Dialogues,” “that van Velde is the first whose painting is bereft, rid if you prefer, of occasion in every shape and form, ideal as well as material, and the first whose hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act.” But what is going on in a van Velde painting? In still lives and enjambments of masks, shards, and imperfect geometric shapes, what held Beckett’s eye, Lloyd proposes, is “the shifting borderland between figuration and abstraction, where… the viewer cannot help but be captivated by the possibility of discerning a vestigial figure, the figure, if you like, of figure itself… the prototype of all figuration.” Lloyd, in his closing chapter, “The Play’s the Thing,” cites many examples of the Beckett “painted stage,” as he calls it, in which such vestigial figures lurk and haunt. There is perhaps no greater example than Beckett’s play Not I, which features but a mouth and a torrent of language. And there are many others.

It is Lloyd’s considerable contribution to have discerned the importance, to Beckett, of the figure, or the figure of the figure, in van Velde, the astuteness of this insight amply supported by his discussion of the work of the third artist under review. Avigdor Arikha, nearly twenty-five years younger than Beckett, was a Jewish exile during World War II, deported from the Ukraine in 1941 to a labor camp, where he made “unsettling and unsentimental drawings” of the camp in charcoal on butcher paper. After studying at Betzalel, the Bauhaus-themed art academy in Jerusalem, he settled in Paris, where he lived until his death in 2010. Arikha was, by his own admission, an abstract painter—until 1965, when he saw a Caravaggio show at the Louvre that changed everything. Whereas Arikha had been committed to the “structure of content” and “hidden pictorial melodies” (p 156), after Caravaggio he turned to drawing from life, from observation. Arikha commenced a “process of unlearning,” driven by intense scrutiny and “a violent hunger in the eye.” Self-portraits, painting of his wife’s hands, his two daughters, and several portraits of Beckett followed. He set himself the task of completing works in one sitting. He painted, or drew, rapidly. To Beckett, who was a regular visitor to the Arikha flat for the last thirty years of his life, Arikha’s work was “Siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself” (“For Avigdor Arikha”). Arikha settled on the term “depiction” for what he was doing. Although his work could be seen as a mixture of abstraction and figuration, he was unhappy with either term. As Lloyd helpfully observes, for Arikha, “[d] epiction seeks to render the thing seen without reducing it to a reference to something else for which it may be taken to stand,” (p 164) which harmonizes with Beckett’s final line in Watt: “No symbols where none intended.”

If indeed Beckett was intent on a “steady dismantling of the regime of representation,” it is helpful to understand the place of the figure—elusive, fugitive, often in shadow—in such an enterprise. In these three artists, Lloyd effectively posits, Beckett recognized projects that returned his attentions with material and ideas for his own work. If it did less than this, it was nothing less than providing true fellowship, whether with kith or kin no matter.

David Lloyd: Beckett’s Thing–Painting and Theatre. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 253 pp. 49 color illustrations, ISBN 9781474415729. $75.00).

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Last year, I attended a touring talk given by critic and curator Bob Nickas in which he showed slides of a hundred paintings, one from each year in the past century. A colleague of mine complained, “This guy is too cocky. What the hell does he know anyway?” I laughed: He was right, but only kind of. Nickas was a little arrogant as he blazed through a century of art in just over an hour. But an off-the-cuff, disaffected manner of talking and writing about art is energizing— it keeps you looking. He’s often called a misfit, and his work is seen as an antidote to stuffy art history and unintelligible critical theory. To me, having seen him draw large crowds of young artists and art history students, he’s not really a misfit. He does, though, seem keen on maintaining that conception: “The art world is such a haven for misfits … because it can be very forgiving of its talent.”

In Nickas’s latest book, The Department of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007-2015 (Karma), he does little to dispute his reputation as an art world maverick: After all, he wrote that “in art, if you’re allowed or encouraged to do something, I always opt out.” Covering his writings from a period of eight years in over 400 pages, he doesn’t drone on about what’s aesthetically worthy of attention or what’s fashionable at the moment. Neither is this book a sampling of his favorite artists: Nickas is just telling the reader about art ad hoc because it’s in our midst and it occurred to him to do it that way. Throughout his oeuvre, Nickas considers art just as we consider other things in life, without hierarchical assumptions of quality that get in the way of curiosity.

The book is organized into four theme-driven sections: Lost & Found; NYC; Repetition and the Politics of Time; Out of the Blue and into the Black; and Supply & Demand. The lattermost section is my favorite: It has a poem composed by Nickas, made up of phrases and lines from a piece of art criticism published in Artforum that engaged in what Nickas calls the old “See How Pretty, See How Smart,” or what he describes as “a foxy, linguistic blurting.” It’s a pretty good reminder to keep it simple. “Why are there prizes in art?” he asks in “Closing the Gap Between Art and Life,” adding “it doesn’t get more medieval than that.” Nickas often deals with the practical implications of producing art today, and he’s recommending that we pay attention right now — meaning that we ought to forget what we’ve been told, do things “the wrong way,” or piss some people off if that’s what it comes to. But at the same time, he’s not calling for some kind of idiotic, random art for the sake of itself, created just to produce more material waste. He can be deprecating and appreciative at the same time: “We really have to stop blaming Andy for the numbing commercialization of art. From the very beginning of his career, Warhol implicated himself within a system where not only is art for sale, but so too is the artist. And so he became the CEO.” I find his analyses of the art world to be necessary (and funny) in such a complex political and social period; they pull no punches about its problems. “Branding wasn’t just for cattle” he writes, “apparently it’s also for sheep,” complaining that the blasé look,of much contemporary art exhausts us all.

Nickas is critically aware of the flaws in collecting and art historicism, and writes that “history usually ends up being written by those who came into the world around the very same time that is subject to examination,” indicating that a close look at the infuriating circumstances of our time might be a good idea; although his comment that “the future is a thing of the past,” hints that maybe the past wasn’t exactly ideal either. That said, there’s an entire section dedicated to New York, a place where “art has always left traces behind, but like everything else in the city, those traces vanish a little more every passing day, until they are completely erased.” With the exception of the appearances of the ‘80s and a dedication to New York, there’s not too much sentimental nostalgia here.

Corrections rings true to free-association, but only in part. One thing of note here is a critical sense of what’s been given too much publicity (such as Jeff Koons) and who’s been left out of the conversation. In “Basquiat and the Collecting of History,” Nickas takes a popular Frank Stella line for a spin, changing it to “what you don’t see isn’t there,” adding that, despite Basquiat’s popularity in contemporary eyes, the MOMA has not yet acquired any of his paintings. He makes it a point to write about other important black artists like Kara Walker and David Hammons — with a notable sense of curiosity, making an example of how to approach contemporary art and culture with imagination and a critical mind. As Nickas has said, “it’s what’s in front of you that’s important.” His interest is in stories and in seeing things, and nothing is prescribed or necessary. Rather, for Nickas, art is about experience on a continuum.

Bob Nickas: The Dept. of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007-2015. (New York: Karma, 2016. 416 pp. ISBN 9781942607199. $25.00)

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A peculiar characteristic of contemporary art is that it is accompanied by an enormous amount of talk from artists, curators, and academics about its distinctive features, both what they are and what they should be. A widely shared assumption of such talk is that contemporary art is marked by the acceptance of Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade as an art-making strategy. A readymade is not so much made as chosen: the artist starts with an idea or concept, and then chooses some object to which the idea is attached. The artist’s creative activity is focused on articulating the idea and scanning the world for a suitable vehicle. How, then, could such a narrow conception of artistic activity give rise to the great range of practices in contemporary art?

In Art in the Making, Glen Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the readymade is the fundamental model in contemporary art. However, recent developments, particularly the widespread acceptance of collective art-making, have stressed the model to a near breaking-point. Much prominent contemporary art is ‘fabricated:’ one or more artists detail how the work should be made, and artisans and fabricators make the artifacts that comprise the material dimension of the work. Why should such collective authorship stress the model of the readymade? Adams and Bryan-Wilson point to conceptual and social factors that undermine its intelligibility. First, the acceptance of the readymade implies that ‘anybody is/can be an artist’, for after all who can’t point at an object and say ‘I hereby declare thee a work of art’? The problem with this, the authors suggest, is that the readymade is a late outgrowth of the Romantic-modern conception of the artist as a ‘genius’. The social function of the genius model is to secure the conception of the artist as the primary source of a work’s meaning, value, and significance. The social factor is that contemporary works of art are now part of what Rosalind Krauss termed an ‘expanded field’, which the authors also alternatively refer to as ‘the broader environment’ (p.73) or ‘wider cultural matters’ (p.94).

In order to indicate the scope of artistic making in contemporary art, the authors introduce the term ‘production’. For them the term is extraordinarily capacious; it comprises what is traditionally called the ‘creative process’ (a phrase that does not occur in the book) of conceiving, designing, and fabricating a work, as well as any relevant social processes, such as seeking funding. The authors cite Karl Marx’s early characterization of production as “weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking” to show the level at which basic activities of ‘production’ occur, and to signal explicitly their “commitment to materialist approaches” (p.16). Most of the book is devoted to short descriptions of and reflections upon recent art works. The ten chapters range from ‘Painting’ through ‘Performance’ to the most recently emergent topics of ‘Digitizing’ and ‘Crowdsourcing’. The authors regularly note the points at which a work responds to the contemporary ‘expanded’ condition of the arts. For example, they claim that a characteristic of performance is ‘support’, the ways in which any isolated action of a single agent actually relies upon broad intersecting social networks (p.95).

The authors seem to have in mind such ‘material’ networks and practices as food production and distribution, cleaning, maintenance, and transportation. Once artworks are made in ways that acknowledge the contemporary ‘expanded’ condition, unnoticed or marginalized aspects of the work’s making can and sometimes do enter into the work’s content. The authors claim that there is a broad “problematic relationship between art and value” (p.15). Three kinds of value are explicitly noted. First, there is ‘material value’, the buying and selling price of the materials incorporated into a work. Material value has arisen as an issue due to the recent use of spectacularly expensive materials, most notoriously in Damien Hirst’s diamond-blanketed skull. Second there is the market price of the finished work, a value ultimately determined by the degree of social recognition of the artist’s alleged genius (p.141). The first two kinds of value are simply aspects of price, and so are conceptually distinct from a third kind that would usually be referred to as ‘artistic value’ (a phrase that does not occur in the book). The authors’ reference to this third kind are so brief and obscure that it’s unclear what conception of artistic value they hold, but some indications are given: it’s what gives a painting its potential to subvert the practice of painting conceived in terms of medium-specificity (p.34); it makes some works ‘compelling’ (p.208); when it is embodied in a work, the work becomes ‘potent’ (p.217).

The argument of the book, then, seems to be this: Contemporary art is constituted in part by the broad acceptance of the strategy of the readymade as the core model of art-making. This model is bound to the continued acceptance of the artist as genius, that it is social recognition of the imaginative powers of a particular individual that gives that individual’s works whatever meaning, value, and significance they have. The recent and growing prominence of multiple authorship, fabrication, and crowdsourcing serves to undermine the appeal to individual genius. So artistic value in contemporary art is uncertain, at least in orienting our understanding of multiply authored works and those that are seemingly individually authored (since individual authorship is in any case an illusion).

This summary of the argument is distant from the experience of reading the book which is dominated, as noted above, by brief discussions of individual works. Since the authors aim to present “the full spectrum of sites of production” in contemporary art, these discussions of particular works are necessarily so brief (usually a couple of paragraphs, and rarely more than three or four) that the accounts seem arbitrary. For example, in the two short paragraphs on the work of Josephine Meckseper, they note that some critics have characterized her works as “mind-numbingly obvious”. They immediately counter with the suggestion that “the mind-numbing effects of hyper-commodification are precisely what concern her.” No further evidence or argument is given in support of their interpretation other than noting that she does indeed recycle “the cliché [sic] tropes of luxury display” and that this somehow “strikes right at the heart of artistic authorship” (p.148). Perhaps the nadir of the book is their discussion of Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’. They ignore the volumes of literature on the piece, as well as Smithson’s own conceptualization of the work, to simply assert that despite the work’s great complexity, it “was at the most basic level a deployment of equipment normally used to clear a lot and lay a foundation” (p.74) It would be tedious to clarify the various conceptual obscurities here. The occasional citations of authors ranging from Karl Marx (p.16) to the anthropologist of art Alfred Gell (p.37) to the contemporary art historian Rosalind Krauss (p.12) are wholly perfunctory and at best play no role in the larger argument. This is particularly frustrating with regard to Gell, who had advanced a sophisticated and controversial anthropological account of art involving the consideration of networks of makers and users in his book Art and Agency (1998). In their concluding chapter the authors suddenly claim that the subject of ‘distributed authorship’ has been present throughout their book, and that this condition is pervasive in contemporary art (p.223); but, though they have earlier cited Gell, they do not so much as mention his attempt to demonstrate that this subject is also pervasive in, among other things, the arts of the Trobriand Islanders kula, famously studied by Bronislaw Malinowski. Is this condition, then, only pervasive in contemporary art?

Aside from hoping to gain a superficial familiarity with a broad range of recent art, one might read the book as a stimulus for reflection on the remaining force, if any, of the Duchampian model of the readymade in contemporary art. It seems to me, though, that the authors bungle this possibility because they lack any articulate conception of what one might call ‘the appreciative focus’, or what artists are offering for participation, perception, and/or reflection. A distinction of contemporary ‘visual’ art could be that the focus of appreciation is given less through a viewer’s visual perception and more through participation in tasks set by artists. Perhaps contemporary visual art is connecting with ‘wider cultural frames’ by becoming integrated or re-integrated with architecture, dance, and participatory spectacles.

Lacking anything equivalent to the notion of an appreciative focus, the authors cannot resolve the issues they set forth. A particularly damaging consequence of this is their inability to say what the content of a work is. Since on their account it is a consequence of the model of the readymade that the ‘pre-artistic’ processes out of which the artifact arises are part of the content of the work, they have no principled reason for not including in a painting the making of its frame, the cutting of the tree, the making of the saw to cut the tree, and so on infinitely. Put bluntly, the authors need to go back to school to learn the relevant basic conceptual points. But since they themselves are among the most sophisticated writers on contemporary art, and one is a prominent and high-level academic, who shall educate these educators?

Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson: Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from Studio to Crowdsourcing. (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2016. 256 pp. ISBN 9780500239339. $39.95)

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