Imaginative responses to art can be scarce during bleak times. Unmediated responses are even less likely, thanks to the internet. A lot of contemporary discourse hinges on art-market trends, (e.g. Zombie Formalism), cultural analysis, and too little of the imaginative attention that can make talking about and looking at art more enjoyable. This aspect of enjoyability is what charms me about Swiss-born writer Robert Walser’s art writings, collected in a new book titled Looking at Pictures. The book was translated by the redoubtable Susan Bernofsky along with Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton. Walser’s art writings are playfully subjective, absurd, and they reveal a writer more engaged with pictures than artists and their educations or backgrounds. These musings, often not “about” the paintings, render art historical genre distinctions useless — at least while in the whimsical nowhereland of Walser’s vernacular.

Marcel Duchamp said “there are two kinds of artists: the artist who deals with society; and the other artist, the completely freelance artist, who has nothing to do with it.” The latter is how I’d characterize Robert Walser. But unlike the dadaists, he celebrates aesthetic values, with a distinctive rigor of discernment and impassioned description, in place of frigid academicism or conventions engaged to meet expectations. Walser’s work is on his terms, ones that in contemporaneous eyes seem childish and strange. It’s a strangeness not for the sake of cuteness, but to point out the strangeness already built into things and situations.

In 1910, Walser wrote that the “imagination that counts is not the external sort, it’s an inward one.” This is a good way into his art writings, done from 1902 till the end of his career in 1930, a few of which were never published. In Looking at Pictures, context can be tenuous, but that’s OK: we don’t come to this kind of book for news or intellectual rightness, much less the truth. I don’t recommend a total lack of critical context, art historical or otherwise. Rather, I find that certain of our earlier belletrists remind us how to look in new ways. Like Giorgio Vasari’s writings about the artists of his times, Walser’s characterizations of people and the art of the past show a depth of feeling and a surprising poetic consciousness.

His takes on paintings by Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Éduoard Manet, and his brother Karl Walser, among others, are often entirely irrelative to an art historical canon and can seem critically nascent; as Bernofsky and Christine Burgin point out, in Walser’s review titled “The Van Gogh Picture,” his intentions to compose a clear review are dashed by his having realized “that art criticism is not possible.” Walser goes on to add that “Not only is it impossible to say anything about the work — it is impossible even to begin to ’see’ it.”

One of my favorite parts of Looking at Pictures that had me doubled over, crying with laughter is Walser’s take on a tragicomedy, “The Brueghel Picture.” There’s nothing all that funny about Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Parable of the Blind (1616) — six blind men in a line stumble over one another — but Walser’s turn of phrase, his oblique point of view and illogical descriptive methodology relative to the painting’s subject, make seeing it now a different experience — as if the painting has transmogrified. Suddenly, each man in procession appears to be simultaneously guiding and jostling one another into his demise. The pit into which the men fall is now inevitable, irresistible, spellbinding each of these nincompoops: “Blind men are quarreling … people blindly hacking away at each other’s worthy, respect-worthy heads.” Walser adds, quite dumbly, that, “in a certain sense, all of us are blind, even though we have eyes to see.”

Elsewhere, Walser makes imaginary tableaus. His “analysis” of Rembrandt’s Saul and David (II) (1655–60) begins with a critique of power, a send-up of the contradictory state of a man having everything but “assailed by melancholia.” Walser leaps into a two-page fantastical scene wherein David’s harp plays a quoteworthy, aphoristic spectacle. One statement that “anger lacks greatness” is followed by the observation that “those in power must not forget that they are powerless, because they’re human. A thousand times more beautiful than living life is living for others.” These are worthy of the timeless wisdom of someone like Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō. “When we all have made peace with ourselves, no one will be left with an adversary,” Walser writes, presumably still gazing back at Saul and David.

Walser is at his best when he writes about the paintings of his brother Karl, as in his review of Portrait of a Lady (1902), a painting of a young woman reading in a park: “The green of the meadow is rich and warm, and speaks a romantic and adventurous language, and the whole cloudless picture inspires observant, quiet contemplation.” This gives insight into why, given his wont for flights of fancy in other of his prose forms, writing about art finds Walser at home. He ends with the assertion that “every living thing in the world should be happy,” and in case he hadn’t been clear enough, he punctuates it: “No one should be unhappy.”

A proletariat, son of a shopkeeper, Walser spent his later years in a mental institution (willful to the vicissitudes of modern society; no doctor was able to diagnose Walser as having any illness). He’d vow never to write again, resolved to live out the rest of his days so-called “mad,” obstinate to the end. “Everything I have neglected to say can be given voice by others” he wrote in 1926. 30 years later, some kids found Walser frozen dead on Christmas Day; he’d escaped from the hospital to wander. It’s not hard to imagine Walser looking at his world, then Switzerland, sufficed to take it in and appreciate it without having to describe it. Just like an artist, “He feels it, that’s all,” as Walser wrote in 1921, “and that’s how he finds it.”

Walser, Robert. Looking at Pictures. Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton (trans.) (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2015). ISBN: 9780811224246. 128 pages. $24.95

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In early 2013, Liam Gillick gave a series of four lectures at Columbia University entitled “Creative Disruption in the Age of Soft Revolutions,” part of the school’s Bampton in America series. These lectures and other writings, released in different publications in the last seven years (including several essays originally published in the online periodical e-flux), constitute a new book by Gillick, called Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820, recently published by Columbia University Press.

While it goes unsaid, the book’s subject is the revolutionary potential of art, but this takes some unpacking. As he twists his way through the text, loosely bringing readers through a history of contemporaneity, Gillick muses recurrently on myriad topics, from the impact of cultural relativism on art, to what he refers to as “the discursive” but you might know as relational aesthetics, politics and economics, and many other digressions in many different directions. Generally, the book is Gillick’s opinion on what contemporary art is. To uncover more specifics we need to look at whom this book is for and why they might read it.

The book is intended for very serious artists with an intellectual bent. It also is important to be an artist who has made art for a while and spent much of that time considering the point and place of their work in our world. It takes a great deal of specialized knowledge to enjoy, like a car repair manual or theoretical astrobiology seminar; criticizing its limited audience would be like criticizing the astrobiologist for not attempting to communicate with mechanics. Gillick is not addressing a popular audience for his lectures: he was speaking to one of the most elite, exclusive graduate art programs in the world. His fundamental allegiance is to art and artists, and while he might fancy himself a writer, academic, and theorist, he reads best as none of the above.

Gillick starts the book with his attempt to define and frame the art of our time. He examines the trend of “super subjectivity,” art that focuses myopically on the artist who is making the work. This retreat to the self, he asserts, comes from cultural relativism, the prevalent idea that all values and prerogatives are relative, no one better than another, and the effective banishment of hierarchy. Thus, Gillick concludes, artists can only solipsistically focus their art making on themselves, in such a cultural climate, for fear of being wrong or imposing on others. This is one facet of what Gillick would like to start calling “current” art, instead of “contemporary” art. But he chronically refuses to make limpid, by providing any concrete examples, his descriptions of what he calls “current” art. He likely does this because giving examples and defining terms has come to be seen as totalizing and limiting, a tool of the powerful to maintain an advantageous status quo. It turns the book into a gymnastic exercise in obfuscation, and because it sacrifices readability is much like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But if the reader is willing, they might allow that they are the example he is talking about but not naming. This passage might describe, quite accurately, you or a contemporary artist you know:

[Contemporary artists are] marked by a displayed self-knowledge, a degree of social awareness, some tolerance, and a little bit of irony […] The attempt to work is the work itself […] In this case no single work is everything you would want to do […] Hierarchy is dysfunctional and evaded in the contemporary and, therefore, key political questions […] are supplemented by irony and coy relations to notions of quality.

This author found his descriptions (while dated in some ways) uncannily self-applicable, and if you don’t, or find the sentiment dull, you might consider sitting this book out.

The writing can be bad at times, and it seems like some of the lectures were not thoroughly enough translated into the written word. The book is riddled with paragraphs composed solely of subordinate clauses separated by periods, adjectives almost randomly used as nouns, a meandering, luxated argumentative structure, and an absence of metaphor or analogy. Warren Buffett is able to spin enlightening and evocative metaphors about the complexities of finance; the same should be possible for art. (Interestingly, these two disciplines share a similarity: they both have a lot of people who use endless wads of jargon merely to disguise their own lack of intelligence and to disenfranchise the uninitiated. Which is rude–but not entirely the case with Gillick.)

What this means is that to read and enjoy this book, one should have a casual familiarity with the writings and coded language of Marxism and Continental philosophy. An example of code it is very helpful to know: in the chapter “Projection and Parallelism,” he mentions that the labor battles of the “last 150 years saw the victory of speculation over planning” which refers indirectly to conflicts of capitalism and socialism. But, of course, because Gillick is well read and observant he tells us the reason for all this coded academic language: “by 1963 [education] was a locus for struggle […] This coincided with an emerging sense that artists should be part of an educational process through the production of objects that required understanding: art as an extension of advanced reading.” Maybe the book needs a disclaimer: ADVANCED READING REQUIRED.

But one purpose of advanced reading is to attempt to imagine and describe new and completely different modes of thinking, unconstrained by the pernicious rules of our contemporary world. This has to do with his most worthwhile concern: the revolutionary potential of art. Deep down, Gillick’s aim is to empower those who can understand what he is talking about and hope to, if even unknowingly, define the better tomorrow.

Artists often forget that there is a higher burden of proof for one’s speculations elsewhere in the university and routinely wander into the academy saying whatever comes to their mind, without challenge, much as they do in their practice. If in academia there is both “hard” science and “soft” science, most good art is neither, often unable to find conclusive citation outside of itself. But it is an important role for art to play, as a complement to the more rational seeming aspects of the Western world, articulating murkier realms of the humanity. I’m not being pejorative or crass when I say Gillick gets to a descriptive truth of our world by being opaque. While there are many barriers to entry, as his intended audience I found myself having real moments of revelation and identification with the book, Gillick giving form to something I had seen and felt on many occasions but never had the ability to articulate. In his prescient way he says, “The contemporary is always an internal thing expressed only partially in the external.” His writing is much the same: a rich internal thought process only partially expressed externally.

Gillick, Liam. Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0231170208. 208 pages, $35

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“The elements of a new life should already be in formation among us — in the realm of culture — and it’s up to us to draw on them to liven up the debate.” – Asger Jorn

Is Rob Pruitt an artist or a salesman — and if the latter, what is it that he’s selling? A new book from Italian publisher Bruno, Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market: Year 1, describes itself as Pruitt’s “unconventional autobiography.” Beyond being a catalog of cultural detritus cum-artist’s-book, this strange paperback might make one wonder, What about this is Art? And why would the publisher waste time and money to make this thing? It looks pretty crappy (seemingly on purpose), as it’s literally nothing more than an eBay item inventory in print, enfolded by a glossy cover bearing a blurry, incidental image. But a good sleuth will always search through the trash. You can find out a lot about somebody by looking there; and a flea market can also be a good place to learn about someone’s life, based on maybe what it was once like.

With this in mind — and eBay often being a lot like a kind of digital bazaar — Pruitt is selling a kind of story, one that has also been staged as an actual flea market installation or performance all over the place. In fact, that’s how this all started. Pruitt began his flea markets as his own sort of Happenings way back in 1999 in NYC. They’ve been held art galleries, art fairs, museums, and sometimes businesses. He and his friends began by exhibiting and selling pretty much whatever they wanted, from art to the stuff they had laying around their apartments. No wonder. His book is a jumble of quotidian personal objects in the most perplexing of situations: a confluence of consumer products, some of which are considered fine art or pop culture relics in the space of an online flea market. Funnily enough, the images of each object for sale are set against a generic cloud backdrop, either that or, for items sold during the months of November or December, one of that and falling snowflakes — to evoke what any merchant of consumer goods would, you guessed it, The Holidays.

As an autobiography, the book is unconventional; it says almost nothing strictly personal about Pruitt. It’s at first glance a mishmash of nonessentials: a “POWER Brass Paperweight CROWN *Pop *Art *Sculpture” is listed as having “plenty of mass to hold down ALL of your papers!” It comes with the caveat “*Warning this paperweight can be used as Brass Knuckles if things get a little dicey.” The book goes from Valentine’s Day tchotchkes to a MoMA toilet brush in a page or two. Really, what the hell am I even looking at here?

I haven’t seen a book like this since having been introduced to the once impossible-to-find An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Atlas Arkhive, 1966), by Daniel Spoerri. That book essentially documents (ad absurdum) a moment in time and all the things on or in the author’s desk in that moment. Like Spoerri’s insane book, Pruitt’s is so absurd — so mind-blowingly packed with surprising objects, their juxtapositions and descriptions and the misfit spirit that’s still somehow hard to come by — it’s laugh-out-loud funny and worthy of any well-made book to be found in the catalogues of DAP. That is also to say, with a backhanded compliment, that the book is a piece of junk. The aforementioned cover image, one of a little old smiling, wooden, armless doll with a mustache, is blurry and set on the backdrop of cloudy heavens, and the pages, sans-pagination, are no different from what can be found on Pruitt’s actual eBay page, making the book essentially just here for posterity, proof of life, or at best a gag (my bet).

What I know of Pruitt’s art is that it’s all this surprising and unconventional; he seems uninterested in art trends and has a great sense of humor. “Is this guy French?” someone asked me, going on to comment that past inventive French artists and writers seem to have been bent on scatology — from François Rabelais to Alfred Jarry to Marcel Duchamp — of the same lineage. He’s not writing about crap per se, just presenting things — crap and some higher art stuff — with no discernable hierarchical importance at all. Pruitt seems to be along this lineage, though he perhaps doesn’t exactly belong to it. To me, Pruitt and his sense of abandon may be in a similar trajectory as a thinker, or better, a prankster, is more Marx Brothers than those artists. Pruitt takes some of what he’s doing just a little further, perhaps the way that Andy Warhol did, with art embracing and involving itself in consumer culture and materialism in order to motivate or further a different kind of thinking.

Duchamp, Warhol, or even Tony Smith all realized that art is happening in time immemorial and with all things, and what they made and talked about had this in mind. That’s how I think one can appreciate this book. To these people, and now to Pruitt, there’s “a reality there,” as Smith said, “which had not had any expression in art.” What’s art? Anything. Pruitt’s own pants, sold for $.99 this month online; maybe, as his book evinces, almost anything with a panda bear or a heart on it. Pruitt presents, of all things, fuchsine grapes, which are poisonous if eaten — and a fake apple that he gives the hilarious appellation “Magritte-esque”!

The unbelievable effect of this book is that in its utter pointlessness and overwhelming cacophony it becomes something like a digital arcade, such as those within which Walter Benjamin found reason to both protest and to admire the contemporary. Beyond how strange the book is describing it outside of art historical and theoretical terms is surprisingly difficult. “It’s a catalogue, very spare in often ironic or witty description, with no other literature or even an introduction, made up of all this guy’s eBay items.” This kind of thing usually begs the question of why, what for? Or else the statement, like it or not, “how dumb.” The former of which isn’t far off at all, in the best way possible.

Pruitt, Rob. Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market: Year 1. Tommaso Speretta (ed.) (Venice, Italy: bruno, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-8899058098. 296 pages, $32

The post Art Sales 2.0 IRL: A Book of Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market appeared first on artcritical.

If numbers alone indicate success, Robert Miller is probably one of the greatest art dealers who ever lived. But there’s another assay of greatness among art dealers, and it has more to do with having an eye for the outlier, a talent for selecting the unlikely but strangely right work, the ability to simply recognize vision, but above all, to be a Connector. If you happened to monetize these factors, all the better, your gallery’s doors stayed open.

But art history, and art gallery history, is more than a matter of who cashed in. There are those who truly mediate culture — in today’s scene Matthew Higgs and Lia Gangitano come to mind as prime examples — who cudgel creativity and platform things we’ve not seen before. These figures are Connectors, and theirs is a subtle and alchemical art. Swirl together an essence of Barnum, an ounce of Ezra Pound (for this job description a degree of insanity is not a liability), a soupçon of David Ogilvy, and the visionary who-says-we-can’t? style of a Sergey Brin, and you begin to see the skill-set required. One of the hallmarks of these wizards is that they’re almost always impecunious, and seeking backers.

Their gift is having an eye, and an ear, that sees and hears what others don’t. Their contribution rests in being there at key cultural moments, and having whatever combination of spark and grit that is required to reveal something truly new.

Meet Richard “Dick” Bellamy. Director and founder of the Green Gallery, who, in 1960, landed in the eye in a hurricane: the seismic upheavals called Pop and Minimalism. The odds were against Bellamy because unlike most founders of New York art galleries, he had little if any family backing, little if any formal art education, and pretty much zero business acumen. Growing up in the Midwest, he briefly studied at the University of Cincinnati, and later Columbia, but spent more time in Manhattan’s cheap bars than in classroom lectures. Desultory wandering in a Beat fashion, by the late ‘50s he decamped to Mexico and Provincetown, places where a lack of ambition and a talent for bohemian blather were perfectly OK.

Exactly what made him stop spinning his wheels is not exactly known, and it is just one of a long list of undiscoverables that stand out in Judith Stein’s new biography of Bellamy, Eye Of The Sixties, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One thing is clear: Bellamy took pains to cover his tracks, stay a shadowy figure, operate on the margins of society. Showing what he accomplished, and the lives he helped, and hurt, is wonderfully documented here. But as a portrait of a man, the book falls short. It is likely that the real Richard Bellamy is and will remain unknowable.

Stein’s biography stunningly fills in several yawning gaps of art history circa the early 1960s. We meet, up close and personal, artists such as Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, James Rosenquist, Yayoi Kusama — artists who would certainly have found an audience eventually, though Mr. Bellamy brought them out into the light. More thrilling still are smell-the-smoke-and-sweat reports of Lee Lozano, James Lee Byars, Jo Baer, Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Ronald Bladen. They may lack the epoch-making stature of Bellamy’s big guns, but there is still a lot to be discovered about each. Stein’s research reveals many avenues for further scholarship, and future writers will follow the trails she blazes here.

Each page contains nuggets of original research that are pure gold. The problem is that there are great artist-biographies, and this book, despite its absolutely fascinating and voluminous cavalcade of facts, is not in that company. Stein allows herself here and there to speculate, which leaves the reader slightly distrusting of the whole. What is to be made of an observation like “Dick must have read Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese, poems Lydia (his Chinese mother) would have praised for their delicacy and economy”? What is such a string of assertions based on? in other places, sweeping generalizations needed further edits.

Bellamy’s business practices were a slow motion cliff-dive, and on this subject Stein is at her best. Though he managed to find an angel investor to support the gallery, taxi-magnate Robert Scull, it became apparent in short order that the business aspects of running a gallery bored him — which led to a fast-approaching expiration date. He could often be found rubber-legged drunk in the early afternoon, hiding away in the back office but still open for business. We see him stoned or buzzed, lying full-length on the gallery floor; what affluent Midtown gallery visitors made of this leave little to the imagination. Sometimes he would simply abandon the premises, and head to a bar, leaving the gallery doors wide open.

Bellamy blithely made his own rules and followed his own code of ethics; his record keeping was spotty, he sometimes paid artists haphazardly, and he was known to enrage them, even retitling works as he saw fit. Is it any wonder that Oldenburg jumped over to Sidney Janis after a year?

Simultaneously, Dick Bellamy’s son Miles has put together a personal selection of his father’s letters, which document the dissolution of a life — “bludgeoned by alcoholism” is how he self-describes — while inviting us into a world more exciting than most of us will ever know. And it’s a beautiful, strange, sad and arcane little book. Now in his mid-50s, Miles was his father’s gallery assistant for the final five years of Dick’s life. As a boy, Miles lived mostly with his mother, and knew his father on a weekends and vacations basis. The letters from father to son are some of the most revealing; one winces at a letter written to the eight-year-old Miles, which includes this lovely line, “I love you sweet baby Miles no good louse scum.” Dick should have known that irony and sarcasm as humor are lost on a child. Doubtless he was off on his own chemical planet when he composed that cringe-worthy missive. That Miles struggled with (and overcame) his own substance-abuse issues comes as no surprise; the fallout from drugs and alcohol is a theme that permeates both Bellamys’ life stories.

Like the letters of Jack Kerouac (another victim of the hard-drinking artist’s lifestyle) these documents both shed light on and cast enigmatic shadows over their author. While Miles has provided helpful endnotes, these letters would have benefitted from close annotation. For example, in a letter to a Peter Young, dated 1970, Dick refers to “Dan painting well.” Later in the letter he says “I thought Mike’s show at Marlborough in May-June good. […] Saw Rolf a few weeks ago […] he was visiting Mickey Ruskin.” I happen to know that Mickey Ruskin was the owner of Max’s Kansas City, New York’s iconic artists’ bar in 1960s and ‘70s; who the hell these other folks are I haven’t a clue. This book is keyed to art-world insiders only, those with access to the inside of the inside.

It is, however, worth the price of admission for a 1996 letter to Barbara Rose, the seminal historian of modern art, who was, apparently, a close friend of Dick. It begins “Dear Barbara, Long time no see or hear. I hope you are still fucking. I am unable to. I wish I had been able to do it better when I could.”

Stein, Judith E. Eye Of The Sixties: Richard Bellamy And The Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0374151324. 384 pages, $28

Bellamy, Richard. Serious Bidness: The Letters of Richard Bellamy. Miles Bellamy (ed.) (Brooklyn, NY: Near Fine Press; Printed by Small Editions, Red Hook, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0-692-51867-0. 72 pages, $40

The post Serious Eye: Two New Books About Richard Bellamy appeared first on artcritical.

“A surd is a radical whose meaning cannot be exactly ascertained.” – Lewis Carroll

One exciting thing about the creative act (in the parlance of Marcel Duchamp) is its way of bringing about, for actor and viewer, things that haven’t been experienced before. At least not in the same context. Some of what’s been made by the Belgian poet, filmmaker, and artist Marcel Broodthaers is a good example of this, and in a way that also allows the viewer to creatively complete the picture by way of imagining new meanings of what’s being shown. With this I’d like to bring up nonsense, or better another sense, which is what to my mind what Broodthaers was engaged in. In My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (Siglio, 2016), he tries on Lewis Carroll’s shoes and explores the partitions of reality and make-believe. In one edition of texts and images spanning a little more than a decade, the book collects three short works. The first of three parts, Mon livre d’ogre (My Ogre Book, 1957), is a tableau in a series of poems — with Midnight (1960) in similar fashion, and then the all-image collection Shadow Theater (1973-1974) between the two, made from one of Broodthaers’ Projection series.

Like in Carroll, the why of Broodthaers needn’t be put into words. The tale that Broodthaers weaves is often a fragmented one that is at times homely and always bewildering. These things are what make his poetry congenial, seeming from the wellsprings of consciousness. Consciousness, after all, as writer Harry Mathews has said, “does not produce a particular meaning — it produces no conclusions.” That seems a pretty apt description of this collection: Broodthaers isn’t concluding anything, and with that he makes an adventurer of his reader. For children first, this nonsense has always been a secret means of access to a more vibrant, harlequin world — one I’ve come to find belongs to poetry, in all of its guises.

When the first of the three books came out, it was 1957, a post-war world. The first US edition of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat appeared, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was printed in England and seized by customs officials that year. What is the significance of this? Maybe nothing. To liken Broodthaers’ writing to Carroll is, by the way, in no way to call it anachronistic — a word I’ll look askance at, not abiding by the notion that styles “belong” to specific eras. At the start of My Ogre Book, through the “present day mirror,” morning becomes a world unto itself, reminding one of Alice holding to her orange. Broodthaers also, while courting a familiar style, brings to the poems motifs and highly unusual turns all his own. There is otherworldly music where donkeys play the drums, and the bells of Easter Island, well, remain silent. Elsewhere goats knock on doors, fairies grind coffee, paper flowers fill with dew, and all the while everyday, clearly explained things happen too, making some of this fantasy material even more interesting. “The wind allies itself with the fire/ the rafts burn in the night” is one such line so lucid you can almost smell the smoke, and “The key is under the doormat” as ever.

In his writing and in the images within Shadow Theater, Broodthaers was able to summon the chance-originated play, conundrums, or (un)concerns that his later visual artworks hinge on physically. I’m thinking of Broodthaers’ La Pluie, a 1969 film wherein the artist tries to write as “rain” falls on him, washing away text even as he continues to write. A simple, strange tableau on astronomical situations, human effort and circumstance, all of Broodthaers’ work seems to engage the processes of being in the world and making things. But in his writings, the poet plays with meaning with an almost wholesale disregard for ordinary sense — no net as far as the game of reasoning and logic goes, he creates extra significances that endlessly drift in and out of new senses. In Midnight, surprising things take place: rain falls from the sun, a straw man guards the sea, a black cat constellation is made, centuries get lined up in a matchbox, and stars are turned to salt. This memorable nonsense impresses me just about as much as the regular phenomena it parodies.

Calling it an artist’s book is no stretch — at just over 150 pages, its layout has the look of a children’s book juxtaposed with the simple aesthetic appeal of Raymond Roussel and the artist Zo’s collaboration from 1929, New Impressions of Africa, where images and cantos are informed by one another throughout. The images in this book lie between the two short collections of poems but have no text on their pages.

Thumbing to Shadow Theater (Ombres chinoises) (1973-74) — a series of 80 slides of images taken from comic strips, books, and a photography manual, all of which were projected somewhere sometime — Broodthaers tells another story, again a provisionary one that unravels and winds up again by turns. A visual lexicon involving ordinary or comic incidents, objects, and figures, is reimagined in new juxtapositions that make the familiar baffling. In Shadow Theater, celestial bodies career through outer space and transform to erupting volcanoes, exploding perhaps through a kitchen window, to maybe cause the seasons to tear a man from limb-to-limb. Volcanoes, shadow puppets, and solid black rectangles are a few of this book’s recurrent motifs.

Broodthaers explained the effect of his work in 1965, saying, “The preference for eternity and the natural had ended up producing academicism, as we know. Its replacement by a preference for the ephemeral, for the artificial, for all that is false, aroused my enthusiasm as much as my poetic loyalty.” In Broodthaers, assumed logic is, for a moment, set aside or transmogrified. Be the truth “interstitial,” as Broodthaers calls it, or mere traces in the mind of the artist, the person experiencing the objects will always come away with something new when the imagination has a say.

Broodthaers, Marcel. My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (New York: Siglio, 2016). Trans. by Elizabeth Zuba with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers. ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-8. 160 pages. Edition of 1,000. $39.95

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Barry Schwabsky’s new anthology, The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), collects his columns for The Nation between 2006 and 2014, providing a clear record of a surprising variety of gallery and museum exhibitions. We get his response to shows of old masters and modernist heroes — Diego Velázquez, Gustave Courbet and Henri Matisse — and his often-critical views of famous senior contemporaries, such as Alighiero Boetti, Dan Graham and Ai Weiwei. We also get his sympathetic take on a number of lesser-known and emerging artists, including Laurel Nakadate, Zoe Strauss, Silke Otto-Knapp and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. And in the introduction, as well as in many of the reviews, readers get brief, instructive statements about the present-day role of art criticism, the contemporary art market, and about the role of art schools — three of the art world’s perpetual quandaries.

As art critic for The Nation, Schwabsky may be reasonably compared with the most famous holder of that post, Clement Greenberg. When Greenberg championed the Abstract Expressionists, calling them the only legitimate heirs to early French Modernist tradition, he appeared a prophet. By contrast, Schwabsky, modestly recognizing in his introduction that contemporary art critics have only a marginal practical role, aspires “to open up […] perspectives without, I hope, belaboring them.” While Greenberg provides a skeleton history of Modernism from Edouard Manet to Jackson Pollock, it’s abundantly clear that no such master narrative can conceivably extend into the present. But now, Schwabsky suggests, thanks to “an inner transformation in the nature of art itself,” it solicits “participants, collaborators, communities.” For this reason, the role of politics has also changed. Greenberg’s art writing, guided by Marxism, sententiously contrasts high art and kitsch. For Schwabsky, however, the goal is to “let the critical distance between art and politics — between my writing and its context — display itself.”

Schwabsky’s presentation of these important arguments is very elliptical, so I hope that elsewhere he will spell them out. Here is how I would place them: after art history became an academic subject, in the 1960s Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss (and her followers at the journal October) attempted also to turn art criticism into a discipline housed in the university. In pursuit of that goal, they introduced a methodology and technical vocabulary into writing about contemporary art. But this project failed. And so nowadays our best critics are poets (like Schwabsky), journalists, or perhaps moonlighting academics such as Schwabsky’s immediate predecessor at The Nation, Arthur Danto. And this means that Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire and even Adrian Stokes (the maverick 20th-century English writer who is repeatedly cited by Schwabsky) remain the most relevant role models for critics.

Schwabsky is an eloquent, compulsively quotable writer. His essays, he says, “aim to keep art unfinished.” Without ever seeming to try too hard, he is very effective at summarizing artists’ achievements in tightly coiled felicitous phrases. Kara Walker’s “instantly recognizable amalgamation of technique and content not previously associated with any other artist,” he nicely observes, is “the aesthetic equivalent of what the marketing gurus call a unique selling proposition.” Gauguin’s Polynesian women, he suggests, are “almost indecipherable. […] Something in them remained as mysterious to him as he was to himself.” I love it when he calls Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) an “immersive and synecdochical painting.” And I admire him when, in a surprising review linking the abstract paintings of Stanley Whitney and Jacqueline Humphries, he suggests that they both “aspire to grandeur — with a pictorial vocabulary that to some may seem painfully narrow.”

Critics, whose raison d’être is to scrutinize particular works, need to have a sensibility — which is to say that they are unavoidably more personal in their enthusiasms than art historians. But art historians deploy a method, and so generalize. Suppose, then, that an art historian devoted to contemporary art were to read The Perpetual Guest (as many no doubt will). What general view of the subtitle’s “art in the unfinished present” would she come away with? Schwabsky’s account of how Nancy Spero’s “effort to unmoor painting from the Western tradition finally did converge with Matisse’s earlier one” would show how our best critics link contemporary art with its antecedents. Reading in his discussion of Christopher Wool that “The price of things is crowding out the value of things” would reveal how skeptical our critics are about our overheated art market. And studying his account of Gordon Matta-Clark — “artist of fragments (who) left an oeuvre that feels whole” — could inspire the art historian to resist conventional critical clichés. Above all, I would hope that the contemporary art historian responded to his very dry sense of humor. His analysis linking the prospects of abstraction with Peggy Lee’s song “Is That All There Is?,” for example, is worth more than a lot of formalist or sociological analysis. “A dominant aesthetic,” says Schwabsky in his account of the 2009 Venice Biennale, “always undermines itself.” At this time — when older formalist and Marxist theorizing is no longer applicable, but has not, as yet, yielded to new approaches to art writing — he offers a reliable, necessarily unfinished guide to the dilemmas of the present.

Schwabsky, Barry. The Perpetual Guest. Art in the Unfinished Present (London & New York: Verso, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-324-2. 304 pages. $24.95

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You don’t need to know much about the life of artist Niki de Saint Phalle in order to sense traces of it throughout the breadth of her oeuvre. I’m looking through the new monograph, Niki de Saint Phalle (Museo Guggenheim Bilbao & La Fábrica, 2015), thinking of her memory and its constant influence — a cultural memory of women, bodies, the Judeo-Christian religious right, and what a work of art can be. All this seems to me to have conceptual impact on her paintings and sculptures, in a general sense and in the specific — you see it ranging from part to part. But a lot of it also looks ugly if you compare it aesthetically to that of her Modernist friends and the canonized pioneers of the 20th century. This is one reason her work is to me so exciting, in a world where appearances rule. A lot of what she made gives a sense of repulsion, and I like that.

The book is expansive, taking us from her beginnings with writer Harry Mathews, to happenings and the theater, to the end of her creatively fruitful life in 2002. It contains a marvelously detailed timeline, giving a sense of why a lot of her art looks the way it does — with a palpable rage, always a contemptuousness flirting with a kind of heartbreaking and joyous beauty.

She made interesting, weird stuff while a lot of her male contemporaries seemed to care more about career. When asked by Maurice Rheims if she considered herself a Pop artist, she replied, hilariously: “I don’t regard myself as having anything at all to do with Pop art. To begin with, as far as I’m concerned they’re Madison Avenue sellouts, poor publicity-drunk wretches who sit there and wait for Picasso to come out of their navels. As a poet, I have nothing to do with these pathetic people.”

Each thing eventually begins to look not like a solitary object but a fragment of her life’s work in total, something of a serial body of work. Various objects like shoes and other items of clothing, tools like hatchets and pipes, appear frequently. The things she made tastefully lend an impression of personal history or identity. There’s also an imaginative adventuring from or transformation of that specific identity. It’s refreshing, because since Modernism, artists of all kinds have done anything they can to remove the personal, and art in turn takes on the cold aspect of that remove. Les Trois Grâces (1995–2003), from her Nanas series, is a good example of the kind of exuberance that comes from the transformations that I think her creations both underwent and caused. Nanas are biomorphic sculptures of delightfully rotund dancing ladies, larger than life and composed of joie de vivre.

Three mosaic-tiled figures — made from black and white mosaic tiles and mirrored glass — in multihued swimsuits, are caught in three different positions of dance. The imaginative composition of the sculptures is a signature of de Saint Phalle. They don’t look “good” or conventionally sexy, but in their freewheeling, curvaceous absurdity they recall a Renaissance view of the female body to remind that roundness is quite lovely and that the prior view of perfection in said form isn’t real. The Nanas are celebratory, but they certainly don’t represent the celebrated paper-thin girl figure, and the artist knows this. Flipping the pages of Niki de Saint Phalle, female figures and various otherworldly forms congregate — forms which subvert the proposed feminine ideal (still coming after the physiognomy of ancient Venus statues of all things) that’s been around since what seems like forever.

Wonderful quotations are peppered throughout this book, in a script-like white typeface on cobalt pages, which mimics the charm of her handwriting, a recurring element in her work. In a viciously funny interview, called “Art and Guys,” Rheims asks her why, if she’s so anti-men, does she wear clothing only to attract them even more. She replies, “I have no grudge against men. Basically, I just think they’re rather pathetic types who are only good enough to decorate my bed and polish my boots. But for other things, I have no need of them.”

The many interesting textual examples we see throughout don’t undermine the rest of de Saint Phalle’s work. I mention this because contemporary artist statements tend to have the inverse of the intended effect. Looking at the more conceptual of our era’s art, there’s often an attempt to augment what we see, to make better sense of it through explanation; in the case of Niki de Saint Phalle, the text adds context and insight while confirming what we can already see at a glance.

De Saint Phalle’s later work is full of other femininities like necklaces, pendants, brooches, perfume bottles, and (you guessed it) more Nanas. Come to think of what I’d said of the serial aspect of her work, some of her late sculptures even take on their Nana form while replicating memorable celebrity figures like Louis Armstrong. In addition to these, though, are her very mystical totems, tarot cards, and whole sculptural gardens with which the artist and her viewers get to approach the present with a playful and imaginative advance.

Talking de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden (1978-1998) in Tuscany Italy, inspired by Antonio Gaudí’s Park Güell in Spain and based on the 22 major arcana of the Tarot card pack, de Saint Phalle describes “a place far from the crowd and the pressure of time,” showing how through the reimagining and exploration of figures and spaces, one is able to re-approach time. One of the figures in the Tarot Garden, the Hermit, is the representation of triumph. The figure “resembles an Amazon — very sexy and feminine, but strong. There’s no doubt she’s in control of the situation.” It’s an allusion to a continuous battle for the composure of her mind. Another representational figure arises in her sculptural works, the female hero archetype. But it’s the photograph of the artist herself poised with a rifle at the camera, Niki de Saint Phalle Taking Aim (1972), featured on this book’s cover, that seems heroic, especially considering that there’s paint inside the chamber. In the ‘60s, de Saint Phalle saw the television as a framework for artistic experimentation. She once used a TV news spot to shoot paint onto canvases with a rifle. What moxie. These performances were reactions to Modernist painters’ machismo, and are good examples of her ingenuity.

De Saint Phalle seems to come after, formally anyway, the stranger works from the milieus of Pop Art and Surrealism, and, like almost anyone making art in his wake, the paintings of Henri Matisse. That said, Matisse’s paintings are more stylized than much of de Saint Phalle’s art, and because of this I might even more readily liken her sculptural works and collages to someone like Alberto Giacometti, whose creations also seem more like physical embodiments of utterances from within, as opposed to aesthetically, or retinally, beautified stylings.

De Saint Phalle didn’t wait around for big things. In a 1985 TV interview, she said “I had this dream of building a huge sculpture garden; but there are no great patrons anymore. So I thought: ‘Why don’t I become my own patron?’” She then designed a perfume line that would be mass-produced and sold in order to finance her sculpture garden. The perfume bottle is a blue crystalline rectangle topped with a gold lid, upon which two entangled snakes face (perhaps to kiss); one is green, blue, yellow, red, and white, while the other snake is the same gold as the bottle’s lid.

De Saint Phalle defied conventions (and anything else in her way), in keeping with the Dada movement that preceded her. But she went beyond Dada in her ability to transcend the banal and the juvenile. Her buoyant figures and architectural forms are abstract but also go beyond, say, the proto-process abstract Nudes made by Matisse in the ‘50s, in both their expression and abstractions. They remind that exuberant figures and vibrant colors don’t preclude the occurrences of emotion or even despair. My absorption in her work’s visual dynamics was broken only by the realization that, having such optically vexing (read: pretty/ugly) aspects, she may have been one of our greatest masters of blending the conceptual with the physical.

Bloum Cardenas, Camille Morineau, Catherine Francblin, et al. Niki de Saint Phalle (Bilbao, ES: La Fábrica/Guggenheim Bilbao). ISBN: 9788415691983. 368 pages, $65

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From late Antiquity to the advent of modernism, the story of art in Europe was, mostly, the tale of Old and New Testament sacred art. Religion inspired the subjects for much of the most ambitious painting and sculpture—and churches, the sites for this art. Nowadays, however, the art world and religious people are only rarely in productive contact. Hardly any of the canonical modernists were religious. Indeed, the best-known exemplars of twentieth-century sacred art, Henri Matisse’s Vence Chapel and Mark Rothko’s Houston chapel paintings, were created by men who were not personally religious. And so it is singularly unfortunate that in the 1980s the ambitious project for an Italian chapel by Andy Warhol, who was a practicing Catholic, remained unexecuted. Given, then, this history, these publications of ambitious religious art by two well known mid-career artists are most welcome. A book-length commentary would be needed just to inaugurate a full account of the thirty-seven images from Genesis by Bell and the six hundred and fourteen (a cover illustration plus the 613) pictures of regulations of Jewish law by Rand. As it is, here we must be limited to describing just a very few.

Who, thinking of God’s creation of Adam, cannot almost involuntarily recollect Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image. How wonderful, then, that Bell creates a wholly original image, setting the naked, standing first man within a field of yellow containing the shapes of the animals and birds Adam is naming. And when we get to the Garden of Eden, another so much represented scene, how imaginative of Bell to show the serpent in the foreground, egging on Eve as Adam sleeps in the background. The scene of Noah’s ark is perhaps less familiar. (I recall a very fine, though much decayed Uccello fresco, depicting the flood, in Florence.) It depicts Noah in the foreground, carrying a stout plank to the construction-in-progress. Bell, it may seem, is a figurative artist with a rather traditional style. And yet, how imaginative, indeed how boldly original are his pictures, and how varied! A singularly dark picture shows Abraham with his knife raised over Isaac. And when he gets to the scene of Isaac blessing Jacob, he creates a fluttering field of light-and-darkness, a marvelous way of illustrating the frailty of Isaac’s eyesight. Bell’s subjects may be very traditional, but his figurative style is, so I believe, very much a product of late modernism. See his backgrounds, which sometimes derive from 1960s abstraction, and the ways that sometimes he flattens the images of his actors; and, as I have noted, in the dramatic way he foregrounds some of his human figures, not unlike Philip Pearlstein, with the frame cutting across their limbs.

In the Introduction to The 613 Rand tells the story of his youthful lessons in Hebrew and Jewish Scripture, and how, more than four-decades ago he invented an iconography for his painting of the entire interior of a Brooklyn synagogue. Why now six-hundred-and-thirteen commands? If you’re as “umvisndik” as me, you’ll find that Wikipedia answers that question:

these 613 mitzvot can be broken down into 248 positive mitzvot (one for each bone and organ of the male body) and 365 negative mitzvot (one for each day of the solar year).

Obviously Rand had a lot of work on his hands. His visual style owes a surprising debt to comic books, though minus the word bubbles. And the fully saturated colors perhaps derive from German expressionism. As for his visual sources—they are many. “27 Not to worship idols” riffs on Edouard Manet’s The Spanish Singer at the Met; “31 Not to make Gods of Silver or Gold” alludes to Henri Matisse’s early visually-luxurious paintings of textiles, in a nice comment on that commandment; “283 Not to systematically pick fruit in the seventh year” borrows Edgar Degas’ nubile ballerinas; “44 Not to prophesize falsely in God’s Name” tells the fairy tale of Humpty Dumpty’s Fall—its visual source eludes me. And the bird in “177 To be careful to eat only clean birds” seems to come from Pablo Picasso, as does the woman in “456 “To observe the laws of impurity caused by an irregular discharge.” Only, so far as I can see, he never alludes to Marc Chagall, perhaps because the latter’s images are by now clichéd.

But if there are such allusions for most of the rest of these images, I cannot identify them. Perhaps that is because many of the commands themselves are a little obscure—like “79 To wear phylactyeries so the laws will be a pendant on your forehead.” (Why is there a rocket ship in the background of the image of that mitzvah?) Or maybe the problem is that I cannot remember enough comic books, for they seem to be a fertile source of Rand’s art. “566 Judges must not accept testimony unless both parties are present” cites Andy Warhol’s Dick Tracy. Superman, as everyone surely knows, is Jewish, which helps explain, I am not kidding, “439 One who is cured of a skin disease must bring an offering after immersing in the ritual bath.” Often the images are funny—“91 To remember and sanctify the Sabbath by blessing wine and lighting the conclusionary candle,” for example, has to be seen to be believed. So too does “139 Not to have relations with your mother” in which a man is sawing through the tree limb on which he sits. Or look at “115 On that night to explain the meaning of Passover” which is aptly characterized by the blurb from Art Spiegelman on the cover of Rand’s book: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Wow!’” Many of the commands must have been real challenges. Who else would dare to illustrate “158 Not to have homosexual relations with your father,” a command which inspires a ‘fishy’ response from Rand? The horn of plenty, the shofar, is said to be notoriously difficult to play. Rand is a virtuoso instrumentalist—I am in awe of his inventiveness, essential good will and his sense of humor. I can’t believe that every reader of this review isn’t going to rush out and purchase The 613.

What’s the right visual style for presenting Christian or Jewish texts? Because there aren’t many recent artists offering answers to this question, Bell and Rand have had to innovate. Neither of them suffer from any anxiety of influence. Why should they, when no earlier artists have created such manically strange images? At the conclusion of his great, long art history survey Mirror of the World (2007), Bell writes: “What happens next in art is up to you.” Now, as if they were both responding upon that statement, he and Rand offer a challenging view of what will happen next: artists could turn to illustrating sacred texts.

Julian Bell, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings (Lewes: St Anne’s Galleries, 2015) ISBN 978-0-9934321-0-1, £45

Archie Rand, The 613 (New York: Blue Rider Press: Penguin/Random House, 2015) ISBN 9780399173769, 640 pp, $45

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The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Cuneiform, 2015) delves into collaboration between visual artists and writers, and the production and publishing of artists’ books. The complex relationships between writer, artist and audience are inseparable here, in compelling essays that bear charmingly anecdotal voices. The collection was occasioned by a 2011 symposium at the University of Caen in France entitled Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective. The book was edited by Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone.

Although many of the writers and artists speaking are American, the essays venture to other parts of the world to show a more diverse sampling of works from this and the last century. It seemed it was then that painters quit scribbling signatures on their paintings, and today, artists and writers suddenly have more interfaces than ever to co-create. The inherited illusion of medium-specificity is being forgotten; artists are working alongside one another, sharing materials, duties, and authorship. This collaborative attribute of contemporary artists and writers distinguishes them from many of their precursors. As the poet Bill Berkson has put it, “such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” It’s maybe in identifying with others through the work (often from totally different, sometimes opposing positions) that we find our current zeitgeist.

Most, if not all, of the contributors to the book are regular collaborators, whose collections are often peppered with idiosyncratic, rare, livres d’artistes. Many of the more hard-to-find artist’s books were and are still made in small print runs for small, even niche, audiences. Working to “reaffirm a sort of Renaissance of the ‘book object,’” and point out what is now often central to us as readers — collaboration in its many guises — we hear from Gervais Jassaud, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, and editor Kyle Schlesinger, to name a handful.

It should be said that poet-painter collaborations are nothing new; the Banquet Years for some of the featured American collaborators took shape a half-century ago in New York (surprise, surprise). This period constitutes the classical moment of artistic collaboration in the 20th century — with Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others providing a lasting effect on the poetry and art that has been written since these appearances. That all this is nothing new makes following generations’ collaborations, a great sampling of which is covered here, all the more thrilling. Collaborations by Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard, Berkson and Philip Guston, Ron Padgett and George Schneeman, sparked new and wilder joint works by artists who innovated with new technologies, and concomitant new opportunities. As Schlesinger notes, “Exquisite typography, printing, editing, binding, materials, etc. even when highly understated or reserved, are an equally important form of collaboration.”

Many of the essays do a good job of describing the nuances of collaboration outside of conventional norms, with a wide range of interactions between arts, and of considering how “visibility and new reading experiences contribute to the construction of figures of thought.” The book’s handsomely designed cover bears a photograph of one of the stranger works by Alex Katz: Edwin and Rudy, cutout (1968), a painting on cutout panel, of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. The job of working “to produce non-identical books in a world of increasingly mass-produced, look-alike consumable products,” Gervais Jassaud nails in his essay entitled “New Aspects in the Making of Artists’ Books.”

Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press’s publisher and a contributor to this volume, emerges from a rich lineage of creative practitioners who’ve opted for a more collaborative mode in their work, with figures from Black Mountain College (John Cage, Robert Creeley, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as a jumping off point. Schlesinger’s dictum, “Separate but equal. Together but not the same,” is worth repeating here or tacking up someplace at home. And his curious observation that “there are nearly as many horses in the United States today as there were one hundred years ago,” takes us by way of contextual analogy from the era of horseless carriages to one of new media. Despite certain traditional sensibilities, being a letterpress designer and a typewriter composer, Schlesinger wisely points out the necessity of adaptation to changing media forms. Collaboration is a “primal, and necessary survival instinct,” he says, “and as far as book arts is concerned, ‘here to stay.’” Schlesinger has published several collaborative books: one, composed mostly via text messages between he and James Yeary, called The Do How (Great Fainting Spells, 2014), and one between himself and Deborah Poe (GFS, 2015). He also co-edits Mimeo Mimeo, a journal that focuses on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph format.

Katz discusses artists’ books and the tradition, which Black Mountain College had a large part in, “taking control of the means of production” so that one would be “able to put one’s own work into the world very quickly, and in the way that one wanted to.” This perspective sheds light on artistic view that seems more utilitarian, in that product was not only beautiful, but was often also useful, too. Katz’s collaborations with Burckhardt in the book Boulevard Transportation (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1997) are shown here in a couple of black and white photographic spreads, one a quotidian cityscape, and the other depicting reeds in a glinting lake. The collaborators intended to describe or interpret scenes with their chosen mediums: for Burckhardt, the photograph, and for Katz, poems (which would also interpret Burckhardt’s photographs). “I often wonder if these poems could live apart from this book, because they are really so linked to the photographs,” Katz muses, and it’s clear by the samplings given here that the two were, as the best collaborations will evince, totally in tune.

Rubinstein’s essay reminds us that collaborations are often the best at their strangest. He gives the crazy anecdote of Jacques Derrida’s unlikely collaborator the Italian painter Valerio Adami, where the latter imitated former’s handwriting to offer friendship and spark cooperation. Can you imagine someone coming to you with a piece of art wherein they’ve imitated your handwriting? Nonetheless, the inspired “collaboration” turned out a success.

Looking at my favorite example of collaboration from this book, in Adami’s imitations and Derrida’s essay “+R into the bargain,” from the 1975 edition of Derrière le Miroir, Rubinstein comments “It’s hard to think of any other artist-writer encounter where the two participants have become so completely intertwined.” He goes on to mention collaborations and artist’s books of his own, which may be unfamiliar to some readers: with Enrico Baj, Shirley Jaffe, Fabian Marcaccio, and Jane Hammond. Rubinstein worked in a spirit that was “simultaneously collaborative and anonymous, which allowed us to surprise each other throughout the process.” His comment pins down what’s best about collaboration, and goes likewise for a reader.

Dick Higgins is quoted in an essay by Montefalcone, saying, “The hardest thing about the artist’s book is to find the right way to talk about it.” This is kind of a funny insight, because The Art of Collaboration goes to endless lengths to discuss the subject’s intricacies, but it manages to avoid sounding too scholarly or droning, to which we can credit the editors’ mutual eye for stellar contributors.

However easy it is to note the limitations of handling subjects like this, its authors present scenarios and constructions that were often hitherto unpublished, in an engaging, generous manner. The contributors are at their best when offering specific collaborative and artistic illustrations, and of course the examples are contagious. Like the memories of Marcel Proust or the inventions of Raymond Roussel, the coherent examples in The Art of Collaboration seem to produce like and better examples, to make for a read that’s pretty exciting.

Cristofovici, Anca and Barbara Montefalcone (eds.) The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0-9860040-5-6. 198 pages, $40

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Throughout her life, Agnes Martin repeated a reticence to, and even rejection of, biography. Her resistance puts Martin’s biographer in a difficult position. In her biography of Martin, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015), Nancy Princenthal masterfully meets the challenge with a sensitive, open and compassionate account. Princenthal presents the confusing and often-contradictory accounts of Martin’s life without judgment. Nonetheless, Princenthal is not ambiguous or dispassionate in her language, and she draws forceful conclusions and opens up rich avenues of inquiry and critical thought about Martin’s art. Martin’s mental illness and sexuality, two tropes that might have easily been sensationalized under less skilled hands, have been thoughtfully written about as a complement to Martin’s work, not a defining presence. Princenthal pulls from a haze of privacy and a smokescreen of mystery someone tangible: Agnes Martin.

Princenthal is upfront in her ever-increasing concerns at writing Martin’s biography, writing that she has “qualms about violating [Martin’s] privacy, which have grown in the writing of this volume.” Martin’s silence, exhorting close friends to guard the details of her life even after her death, was both personal and to protect her art from easy biographical interpretation. Princenthal elucidates: “Martin late in her life elicited pledges from friends that they wouldn’t talk about her after she was gone. Whether or not sworn to secrecy, many have honored her wish—a wish that is also plainly apparent in her deeply reticent work and even more explicit in her writing. Her paramount injunctions, against pride and ego, have continued to shape attempts to bring her life into focus.”

This hesitancy in undertaking the writing of Martin’s biography only increases the tenacity needed to write the book. The roadblocks Princenthal encounters are many and varied, not least is Martin’s injunction to her friends. Martin often and unsentimentally destroyed work that failed her exacting vision. During her first stay in Taos, New Mexico in the 1940s, there was a yearly bonfire: “At Taos I wasn’t satisfied with my paintings and at the end of every year I’d have a big fire and burn them all.” As a result, the evolution of Martin as an artist and painter is difficult, though Princenthal shows, not impossible, to trace.

Among the many forms of protest Martin used against biography, most challenging is her obfuscation of personal history while emphasizing her own mythos. Martin was born in 1912 in frontier Western Canada to Scottish emigrants, Malcolm and Margaret. There are specific confusions concerning Martin’s family, including the circumstances around the departure of Malcolm (when Martin was three years old). Princenthal carefully picks through the evidence of Malcolm Martin’s absence — variously suggested as death in the Boer War or syphilis, or just skipping town — by analyzing court records and Saskatchewan homestead records. Despite this diligence, the “particulars” remain murky.

In another example, the tantalizing yet baffling conflation between biography and myth is seen after Martin’s graduation from high school in Vancouver. For unclear reasons, Martin relocated to Bellingham, WA, arriving south of the border for the first time. Ostensibly, Martin said she had come to Bellingham to help her sister Maribel during a difficult pregnancy, though Princenthal is unconvinced by this reason: “It is an odd explanation, with conspicuous holes. (Where was Glen Sires, whom Maribel married in 1930? How precisely could Agnes, still a teenager, have been of help?)” Moreover, and this is where the story becomes stranger, while in Bellingham, Martin somehow ended up in California:

“At some point in 1930 or 1931, she took a job in Los Angeles offered by an employment agency—in another version of the story, she saw a sign offering a position while on a bus back to Vancouver—as household cook to a woman named Rhea Gore, and she wound up serving as a driver for Gore’s roughly 25-year-old son, John Huston. Soon to become a famous film director, Huston was then a budding screenwriter and miscreant (he’d been arrested for drunk driving a few times). Having been involved in a fatal car accident that was ‘something of a scandal,’ according to his son, Tony Huston—he’d struck a pedestrian—John Huston’s license was suspended, and during the trial that ensued, Martin drove him to court each day.”

Princenthal again and again makes clear discrepancies and ambiguities within Martin’s biography and the difficulties in writing that life. But the potential confusions nevertheless serve to sharpen Princenthal’s portrait. The “shape of myth,” a phrase Princenthal uses, provides scaffolding through which she builds Martin’s life.

Martin was a teacher in small towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and came to New York City to Teacher’s College (though she said Columbia) in 1941. She moved repeatedly during the next 15 years, including stints in Taos, the Pacific Northwest, Delaware and New York City. In 1957, she came back to New York City, and established a studio in Coenties Slip, with neighbors who “included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Jasper Johns…” Martin was in her 40s when she began to work with the grids she is so well known for and, more importantly, “that, she felt, represented her true vision.”

Through evocative and spare language, Princenthal skillfully evokes Martin’s paintings, particularly the dependence of the work “on the observer’s response.” Princenthal’s account of viewing The Tree (1964) is the lived experience of one of Martin’s paintings: a symbiotic and mercurial relationship. The Tree was the first Martin painting Princenthal saw, and “has stayed with [her] ever since.” However, when Princenthal returned to the painting as she wrote this biography, she was disappointed to find it “static and coldly white.” “It was a dismaying moment; I sat on a bench with pad and pen in hand and saw nothing but pencil lines and paint.” Princenthal felt she was “failing” the painting. During another visit, her response shifted again:

It was again an image of nature sublimated into the radiance of geometry. Like the majestic pump that a big tree is, sucking water from the earth and moving it toward sunlight, the painting once more seemed to breathe visibly, with its biaxial double-stroke of inspiration and exhalation. A painting can create an updraft and take you with it. It can also be a buffer for the kind of shattering, screaming beauty that may swallow you whole, as I believe Martin often felt her sensorium threatened to do. The business of response is a delicate, willed operation, a deep but unstable joy even when it succeeds.

Princenthal wrote to Martin when she was an undergraduate at Hunter College. Martin’s letter in response exhorts Princenthal to “Write your true response.” Princenthal does just that in her mutating responses to The Tree; a formal description would have been meaningless. Princenthal’s biography of Martin could have had the same tenor as a formal description of one of Martin’s paintings, and would have been as disposable. Instead, Princenthal writes a “true response” to the art and life of Agnes Martin: a whole yet tenuous biography with myths and obscurities, intimacies and challenges. Moreover, it is most crucially that Princenthal’s “true response” aids our own such observations of Martin’s work.

Princenthal, Nancy. Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art. (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0500093900, 320 pages, $39.95

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