Christopher Phillips: Bookmobile

I work as an editor at Art in America magazine, and one of the benefits of my job there is that it gives me a chance to see the new publications that are coming out from all the publishers, in the U.S. and elsewhere. I try to make a list every year of what seem to me to be the most interesting, provocative new publications. I will talk about twelve or fifteen of those briefly this morning.

Over the last year, I've noticed two big differences between this year's books and books in previous years. First, there is a dramatic slowdown in the number of anthologies. For the last fifteen years there has been a major publishing industry in repackaging short articles and translating articles from other languages, and bringing them together by theme or subject. That torrent is slowing to a trickle. The second thing I have noticed is that the number of photographic picture books, instead of diminishing as I have been predicting for the last five or six years, is becoming even more torrential. By early in the next century, I fear we will see every photograph ever made collected somewhere in published form.

Since I know that you have been talking about public art projects, I have left out anything having to do with that subject. I will present the books in roughly chronological order, according to their subjects, from the nineteenth century to the present. After I finish talking, you can come up and take a look at the books. First, a very recent publication, called A Morning's Work: Medical Photographs from the Burns Archive and Collection. Dr. Stanley Burns is a New York doctor who began collecting photographs in the 1970s. Today he claims to have a collection in excess of 500,000 individual photographs, of which the core group consists of some 40,000 images of medical subjects, which is clearly his primary interest. Over the last fifteen years, Stanley Burns has presented this material in small exhibitions and publications here and there. Twin Palms Press, an art photography publishing house, has brought out this book of highlights from the Burns collection. The title comes from the caption given by a Civil War surgeon to a photograph of a pile of amputated feet. Some of the titles of the images in the book include "Gunshot Wound to the Back," "Child with Hydrocephalus," "Young Woman with One Elephantine Leg," "Man with a Huge Abdominal Tumor" and "Parts of a Cut Up Body Recovered After a Murder." Burns calls these bizarre pictures artifacts of cultural history. I find it remarkably interesting that this kind of imagery is surfacing now in a fine arts context. I think of Georges Bataille in the 1930s, when he said, "The desire to see ends in the desire to see horror." I also think of the late twentieth century obsession with the human body and its mortality as we head into an era of bioengineering. I find this book both problematic and extremely symptomatic of the current cultural moment.

Audience: In the history of photography, there have always been photographs of the spectacle of human oddity, in the guise of investigating the body. It seems to be in keeping with the need to photograph and record oddity.

Audience: I think, too, that much as at the beginning of the twentieth century, we had this fascination with new frontiers to be explored, now our frontiers are turning inward. I think the new frontiers are the inside of our own bodies, which we are not privileged to view, and toward the stars as well.

Phillips: This book by German historian Stephan Ottermann is called The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, and is a belated English translation of a book that came out in Germany in 1980. It treats a form of pictorial presentation that flourished in the nineteenth century, the large-scale painted panorama. The first panoramas were publicly presented in the British Isles at the end of the eighteenth century, and panoramas as a form continued until they were supplanted by the popularity of motion pictures in the early twentieth century. As Ottermann presents the panorama, it seems to be the answer to the widespread dream of a picture that fills the visual field with an image as real as life itself. He suggests that it responded to a nineteenth-century hunger for spectacular new visual experiences. In that sense, it anticipated the era of the motion picture and now virtual reality. This book is a wonderful compendium of technical information and cultural analysis, and helps to expand our knowledge in regard to the visual culture of the nineteenth century, in which photography first made its appearance.

My initial reaction to this book, titled Picasso and Photography, was that it would be just another repackaging of Picasso, but it is actually quite useful and stimulating. It is by Anne Baldessari, who is the curator of the photography archive at the Musee Picasso in Paris, which contains several thousand photographs that were gathered by Picasso during his lifetime. Some were photographs he used in making his paintings, others were portraits and self-portraits. Anne Baldessari takes these photographs as a starting point for a fascinating and intelligent exploration of the different kinds of connections that can be imagined between the artwork of Picasso and the photographic image. The collection she works with includes nineteenth-century photographic portraits, photo postcards, ethnic and colonial subjects, Picasso's self-portraits. There are also fascinating studio views of temporary arrangements of objects in his studio, anticipating the practice of many 1970s and 1980s photo artists. The book also considers Picasso's use of photo-related techniques, such as photographs, cliché verts, photocollages, and multiple exposures. In addition, the book is beautifully and intelligently laid out. Another realm of photography history that is opening rapidly is exemplified by this catalogue of the exhibition called The Photographic Avant Gardes in Spain: 1925-45, which was organized by curator Marta Gili in Barcelona last fall. This is the first serious examination of the manifestations in Spain of the kinds of experimental avant garde photography that flourished in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. One of the reasons for the delay of the exploration of this topic is that there are virtually no public photography collections in Spanish museums. The organizer of this show had to go to the families of various artists and photographers, and to the few private collectors who specialize in this imagery. Some of the names are well-known, such as Picasso and Dali, but most of the artists I have never encountered anywhere before. The essays trace the activities of a small, diverse group of people, most of whom were in regular contact with their counterparts elsewhere. There are some remarkable discoveries here, such as a large series of works by an actress named Maruha Malo, who did an extensive series of costumed self-portraits in the thirties. The other point of interest raised by this exhibition is that after the Spanish Civil War concluded, many artists and photographers who had been aligned with the Spanish Republic emigrated to other countries, especially Mexico. This catalogue provides a wealth of fascinating information that begins to trace the development of Latin American photography in this century. The essays are translated into English in the back.

For anyone who is interested in photography in New York, this is probably the must-have publication of the last year. Published in conjunction with a show at the Museum of the City of New York called "Berenice Abbott: Changing New York," the book of the same title is organized by Bonnie Yochelson, a New York-based photography historian. She reexamines the photographs that resulted from Berenice Abbott's photo project, "Changing New York," which Abbott carried out between 1930 and 1939. At that time, Abbott was working under the inspiration of Atget and the sponsorship of the Federal Art Project. The resulting images provide the definitive picture of Depression-era New York City. The book presents the photographs according to geographic locales, with detailed street maps. For me, the most fascinating section is the end, where Yochelson and her collaborators have furnished elaborate notes on each of the photographs, providing a sense of the significance of the architecture, what's happened to the buildings, and what has happened to the neighborhoods.

Over the last few years, I have come to realize the value of books like this one, which is the recently published catalogue of the photography collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This is an indispensable reference book for anyone who's interested in French or European photography in the first half of the twentieth century. The book covers 1905 to 1948 and presents over 1,100 illustrations and hundreds of biographical entries that provide an in-depth introduction to a collection that was just begun in 1977. It details works by many photographers whose names are very familiar, but also includes a host of less familiar names.

You are all probably aware that the Guggenheim Museum last year presented an enormous Robert Rauschenberg retrospective and published an equally oversized catalogue. This modest catalogue was published in Germany as part of an exhibition last year, titled Haywire: Robert Rauschenberg, Major Technological Works of the 1960s. This is the English language edition. Currently the topic of art and technology is all the rage. What is less discussed today is that the art/technology connection has happened once before, in the 1960s, but fizzled out by the early 1970s. Why was that so? One way to find out is to read the essays in this book, which outline both the possibilities and the obstacles that faced the artists in the sixties who were involved in trying to work with high tech equipment. Robert Rauschenberg is a key figure in that development because of his sponsorship of the group called EATæExperiments in Art and Technology. The essays in this book help you begin to understand the social, technical and artistic barriers that artists like Rauschenberg encountered. You can learn about Rauschenberg's efforts to work with electronic components, sound, hydraulic components and so on. The publisher is Hatje, a major German publisher; the book is distributed in the U.S. by DAP.

This is one of the most interesting publications of the last year. It is the catalogue of an exhibition that was organized by Paul Schimmel at LA MOCA, called Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979. The book provides visual documentation that is more extensive than anything I've seen of the development of happenings, performance, body art and so on, not only in the U.S. but throughout Europe, Japan and Latin America. In the last year, the British publisher Phaidon has published a lavish book on Mary Kelly, whose work is probably familiar to many of you. What I think is a more interesting publication is the catalogue of an exhibition that took place in Vancouver, called Social Process/Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970-1975. Mary Kelly is an American born artist who lived and worked in London from 1972 to 1987. She is probably best known for her multi-part work, "Postpartum Document," made from 1973 to 1975, which used her relationship with her newborn son as the focal point of a fascinating reflection on the formation of subjectivity. This catalogue is interesting because it goes back to the period before "Postpartum Document" and clarifies the intersection of conceptual art and psychoanalytic feminist criticism in the late sixties and early seventies. It examines Mary Kelly's work as an artist, practicing critic and exhibition organizer in the context of late sixties and early seventies Britain. The essays deal with questions of the relation of artists and the British labor movement, the emergence of feminist criticism, the critique of modernist art and arts education. I highly recommend it.

On a related topic, there is a lot of work going on at the dissertation level today tracing the history of conceptual art. Many of those research projects focus on the relationship between the photographic medium and conceptual projects of the 1960s and early seventies. A little book that you can find in bookstores in New York looks specifically at that development in England. Edited by John Roberts, it is called The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976 and features essays and reproductions of works by familiar and less familiar artists. It provides much otherwise unavailable information in an accessible format.

I'll close with three relatively unusual publications, all of which are among my favorites of the last year. The first is the catalogue of a show called "Someone Else with My Fingerprints," curated by a German collector and photographer Wilhelm Schürmann. In the 1960s and 1970s, Schürmann was a new topographics-style photographer who also collected nineteenth-century photographs. He had the good fortune to sell his collection of historical photographs to the Getty Museum in the mid-1980s and used the proceeds to begin collecting contemporary art and photography. He's an unusual collector, because in addition to collecting works by the obvious people, like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin and others, he has also ventured out into areas such as historical press photos, movie set photos from the 1960s and 1970s and portrait images by local commercial portraitists from a number of European cities. These pictures are all brought together in this fascinating catalogue. All of the images have to do with reimaginings of the human body and individual identity. For example, on opposite pages are stills from the James Whale version of Frankenstein and fashion photographs by Norman Parkinson of beauty treatments. If you go through the book page by page and section by section, you quickly see that Schürmann has learned much from the photo books of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, as there is a sequential logic to the piece.

This is a book by filmmaker Chris Kraus, titled I Love Dick. Briefly, the filmmaker is married to a fellow who teaches at Columbia and is the publisher of a theory journal. Several years ago, the two of them had dinner in Los Angeles with Dick, who occupies a high profile position in the academic art world in Los Angeles. Chris Kraus found herself, you learn on the first pages, suddenly smitten with Dick. He paid no attention to her and rebuffed her advances. She wrote letters to Dick, to which he never responded and left messages on his answering machine. She presents this story in this book. It ends with a letter from Dick, which says, "I can only reiterate what I have said before whenever this topic has been raised, that I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of your talent." The book has divided readers into those who are the friends of Dick, who think that this is an outrageous invasion of privacy and an attention seeking gambit and friends of Chris Kraus, who find this a remarkable art project. If you read more than twenty pages into the book, you realize that she sets it up so that she is acting out the role of the obsessive woman who won't take no for an answer, but that only provides her with a pretext for a book-length journal in which she describes the day to day humiliations of a woman who is operating at the lower levels of the New York/Los Angeles art world. She describes, for example, her visits to film curators in New York who tell her why she is a failure and will never have an exhibition. In the end, it is a remarkable writing project and art project. Finally, here is an extremely hypertrophied publication, the most overproduced and funny book of the last year. It is Damien Hirst's lavish tribute to himself, in which you find everything from the baby picture of the artist to long accounts of all of his work. What is remarkable is that it is an artist's book, with every kind of nineteenth-century children's book design gambit that you can imagine: with fold-out pages, pop-up pages and so forth. It was published by the Monacelli Press, an art book press in London. If you know Damien Hirst's work, you know that he is dealing with the same sort of medical horror material that Stanley Burns is so engaged in. He has sliced dead calves in half and presented them floating in formaldehyde. In this book, the disturbing themes having to do with mortality are cycled through a children's book format, which softens the impact considerably. You begin to see Hirst as a child who never really grew up and remains fascinated by themes of human and animal death.

I do want to mention one last item. For any of you who are interested in out-of-print photography books there is a good new Internet source, an online book service called the Advanced Book Exchange, at www.abebooks.com. It probably has 10,000 out-of-print photography books available and I recommend it highly.