Bookmobile
Christopher
Philips
Phillips: Thank
you Cheryl. It’s always a pleasure for me to haul in
some of the books that pile up in my office, or pile up in my apartment. I
should mention that in addition to working for the last few years
as a curator at ICP, I also teach at Tisch School of the Arts in
the Photography Department, and at SVA in the MFA Photo Program. I’m
always on the lookout for new publications that either tell me something
about what’s happening out in the world, or out in the world
of images, or books that I can use in teaching the classes that I
regularly teach. So what I brought in for you today is just
little sampling of some of the publications that have crossed my
desk in the last year. It’s always a little bit of a
surprise what I finally throw into the bag before I come to give
this talk, so I’m going to precede in a sort of rough order.
I’ll
start by saying that you can never tell from year to year exactly
what kind of books are going to be out there to catch your attention. Last
year, for example, there seemed to be some very strong themes in
the interesting publications that I was coming across. I think
that last year I presented books, several books, that all examined,
sometimes with great historical depth, the development in photography
in regions outside North America and Europe. From Africa, Latin
America or Asia. This year, unfortunately no big themes really
seemed to be pushing the publication programs of many presses. So
what I have is really much more of a mixed bag, a group of individual
publications that, as far as I can tell, don’t really fall
too much into any kind of coherent grouping. Nevertheless,
let me start with some of these. And at the point that I’m
finished, there will time for all of you to come up and examine the
books and ask questions, if you’re interested. I’ll
mention also that this year, for the first time, I’ve brought
in a few websites that I want to bring to your attention. In
my teaching, more and more of my students are wanting hard information
about digital culture, the history of video, etc., and I’ve
brought in a couple of interesting and very useful sites that I’ve
found extremely useful in my own classroom work, so I’ll pass
those along to you.
The first
book that I want to bring to your attention isn’t really a
photography book or a new media book per se, but it’s a publication
that I think really opens an extraordinary range of new perspectives
as we look forward and try to imagine what some of the central questions
of the 21st century are going to be. This is an
enormous tome called Project On The City. Some of you may
remember that back in the 1960s during the great cultural revolution
in China it seems like millions of Chinese all ran around with a
little red book of Chairman Mao’s sayings. This book
also has to do with China, but it’s a book from the Dutch architect,
Rem Koolhaas, and he very ironically has produced a big red book
that nobody is going to be able to fit into their pocket, but I have
a feeling lots of people will be obtaining this book for their home
study. This book is titled, again ironically, Great Leap
Forward: Project On The City, and it grows out of a multi-year
seminar that Rem Koolhaas who is one of the most provocative and
most productive architectural thinkers today, conducted with his
students at Harvard Design School. Rem Koolhaas as an architect
has been doing quite a lot of work in recent years in China, and
this book examines in enormous detail the development of a new urban
region in Southern China, the Pearl River Delta. This region
consists of what had been 5 modest sized cities, but this area is
being developed by the Chinese government, and it’s expected
that the population of this one very compact region will grow to
36 million by the year 2020. It will be one enormous metropolitan
stretch. What Rem Koolhaas and his students have done is to
visit this region. The book starts out with a timeline and
aerial views showing exactly what’s going on in the Pear River
Delta as seen by satellites and so on, so that you really get to
follow the course of this massive urbanization project over a multi-year
period. Then throughout the book there are a mixture of essays
and extended photographic sections that show the growth of skyscraper
cities, new skyscraper cities, literally springing out of rice fields. The
interesting part of the book is the analysis that Koolhaas brings
to this massive city-building project. Because what he’s
doing in a certain way, what I found most interesting about this
publication, is the way that he’s really questioning the notion
that we’ve left the age of modernity and modernization behind,
and have leaped into some post-modern era. Koolhaas in this
book is very skeptical about that. He thinks that modernization
is still continuing a pace, and he’s really starting to ask
what kind of new cultures are going to arise out of this, what he
calls, a maelstrom of modernization, what he calls a creation of
an entirely new urban substance, literally over the course of a decade
in one region in Asia. The book represents an effort to create
a conceptual framework for understanding what’s going on in
this area in China, and to imagine how that differs from the kind
of urban culture that we are familiar with currently. Koolhaas
introduces a whole luster of new terms. There’s even
a glossary in the back of the book that I’ll read from in just
a second. He calls this new metropolitan sprawl in southern
China, “the city of exasperated differences.” He
says that in this case, the cities are growing without a detailed
plan, in a state of what he calls “permanent strategic panic.” He
looks at this ultimately in a very positive way, examining the relation
of key components like infrastructure, ideology, architecture, politics,
landscape and money. Ultimately, Koolhaas coins the term “bastard
metropolis” to describe this enormous 30 million inhabitant
zone, which he says is based on the premise of the systematic avoidance
of perfection. All of this ties into Koolhaas’ other
big current idea, the idea of junk space. The idea that what
we currently look down on in terms of suburban sprawl, in terms of
strip culture, in terms of airport shopping malls, for Koolhaas this
is the architecture of the future and we had better start looking
carefully at it and trying to understand its implications. So,
just for that extremely provocative view, I would strongly recommend
everyone take a look at Great Leap Forward. It’s
a typical backwards Koolhaas project. Designed to totally frustrate
you, but fascinate you at the same time. Let me just read a
couple entries in the glossary. “Bastard Metropolis,” and
each of these terms has a little copyright symbol next to it, but “Bastard
Metropolis: Wholeness and coherence can only be achieved at
the expense of editing, of control. The bastard Metropolis
does not even aspire to such status. It’s vitality is
guaranteed by the systematic avoidance of perfection.” Let’s
see what else we have here. “Dictatorship of the Eye: After
all other logic has been subordinated, the visual provides the dominant
system of organization in the contemporary city. Under the
Dictatorship of the Eye, objects co-exist and are understood or not
solely in terms of their visual relationships.” Let’s
see. One more. Oh, in distinction to the famous Bauhaus
adage, “Less is More,” Koolhaas says that in terms of
China’s new cities, the operative adage is “More is More.” He
says that 500 square kilometers of urban substance is built every
year of which 6.4 million square meters is found in the city of Chinzin
alone. Five international airports in one city, and so on and
so on. 720 golf courses under construction. “More
is more.” And there’s a whole other interesting
section on golf course culture and the architecture of golf courses,
which he thinks is culturally very symbolic in terms of China’s
development. So if you want a horrifying glimpse into the future
that lies ahead of us, I strongly recommend Rem Koolhaas. After
reading this book, New York looks like a renaissance city.
Audience: You
said that in the end it’s ultimately an affirming vision though?
Phillips: Not
perversely affirming, yes. Essentially, Koolhaas is saying,
Here’s the future, get used to it, start looking at it carefully,
it’s no use to just turn up your nose and say “how
terrible.” He shows how there is in Asia a very strong
underlying economic and social logic that is producing this sort
of hypertrophy of new urban spaces. And as I mentioned, what
he’s really ultimately asking is, “what kind of new culture
can arise out of this very unusual mixture?”
The second
book that I’ll bring to your attention is something that really
ties into the headlines in the newspapers. It’s a book
by a very smart Israeli video maker and critical writer named Ariella
Azoulay. I came across her work in Germany a couple of years
ago, and started an email correspondence with her at about the same
time this book came out. It’s a book called, Death’s
Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy. It
really grows out of Ariella Azoulay’s experience of growing
up and being a committed intellectual in Israel over the past three
decades. It’s a book that examines the history of traumatic
mass-media imagery in Israel in recent decades, and it looks specifically
at three instances of violent actions being recorded and debated
in Israel’s mass media. The first of those examples is
the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the second is the killing
of Palestinian weapons’ expert by Israeli security forces,
and third, the killing of an abusive husband by his long-suffering
wife. In the book, Ariella Azoulay looks at the way these different
instances of violence were framed and discussed in Israeli mass media,
and she analyzes the implications of this kind of differential framing
of social violence. The book really breaks down into two sections. The
first half is brilliant philosophical examination of the question
of violence, instances of violence as they are recorded in photographic
film and video images. The second half of the book, which I
think is really the more engaging, consists of a series of interviews
with image specialists in Israel, ranging from photojournalists to
military specialists in the analysis of intelligence imagery. In
all of these interviews, both the interviewer, who is both the author
and the subjects of these interviews, shows themselves remarkably
articulate and aware of the many levels of significance of their
work with images. For all those reasons, and because, as I
say, the book really ties in directly to the headlines in the newspapers
today, I found this an extraordinarily provocative and useful book
in my own classroom teaching in the last semester.
Kiosk is
a historical look back at the way that photography has played an
extraordinary role in the printed media and the news media since
its inception. It’s the catalogue of an exhibition that
took place in Cologne at the Ludwig Museum last fall and winter. It’s
an exhibition that was organized by a retired photojournalist, Robert
Lebeck, who for the last 20 years has been tirelessly tracking down
and purchasing old magazines all over Europe and the United States. He
was in New York recently and he told me that he now has something
like 23,000 bound and unbound magazines that have taken over a whole
house. What’s interesting is the way that in the publication,
which is beautifully designed and the images beautifully reproduced,
you can trace the impact of photographic images as in the mid-19th century
they begin to become the basis of what is widely accepted to be the
very objective, accurate form of visual reporting. Even before
photographs could be reproduced on the printed page, along with type,
woodcut engravers were already using photographic source images as
the basis for their visual reports. What happens by the turn
of the century, around 1900, is that with the advent of the half-tone
process, weekly magazines are for the first time able to directly
reproduce photojournalist images on the printed page, causing an
extraordinary growth of interest in such periodicals, which by WWI
had grown in circulation to often over one million copies of each
magazine per week. In Kiosk, Lebeck presents probably
200 examples, from his collection. They seem fairly randomly
chosen, from Germany, France, England, some from the U.S., even though
I know that if you wanted you could find similar examples of publications
from almost every country in the world, from South America, from
Asia and so on. One thing that this book accomplishes is to
give you a sense of how photographs which have become famous as individual
images, say W. Eugene Smith’s photographs from his Spanish
Village photo essay in Life magazine, it gives you a very good sense
of how these images initially appeared to a mass public, very often
cropped and sequenced in ways that the photographer may have had
no hand in. So it helps to create a sense of photography as
a kind of collective endeavor--one in which many hands are evident
and in which the photographer is often just one part of a very large
media machine.
I think
it’s an important book because a hundred years from now the
magazines themselves are going to be crumbled to dust. Magazines,
as you know, are not meant to last. They’re printed on
the cheapest possible paper. I’ve done some research
in this area myself, and it’s often a little scary for me to
go to the New York Public Library and pull down a volume of a magazine
from the 20s or 30s; very often when you open it, the first page
you turn just crumbles to dust in your hand. It’s for
that reason that at ICP I’m trying to start a small collection
of this kind of material, and to do high-resolution scans of as much
as possible so that there will be some sort of lasting trace, even
after the physical platform crumbles away.
This is
the major flaw of the book, I think. The only extended text
which is in the very beginning is a long interview with Robert Lebeck
in which he simply talks about how he tracked down and traced all
of these rare publications, and it’s really just a sort of
collector’s adventure story without too much analysis. What’s
still awaiting to be done by photographic and cultural historians
is a real serious history of the development of photography as a
means of journalistic communication. There are lots of scattered,
isolated people who have been working on the subject for many years,
but no one has ever been able to pull it together. I’ve
tried and haven’t been able to get sufficient funding to really
do a book.
Probably
many of you have seen Andrew Roth’s remarkably beautiful Book
of 101 Books. This is a publication that accompanied beautiful
exhibition at Roth Horowitz Gallery here in New York. Essentially,
what Andrew Roth did was to invite a number of writers, including
May Castleberry, Shelley Rice, Neville Wakefield and others, to contribute
notes on individual photographic books published from the year 1900
up until 2000, I think. I think that’s where they drew
the line. As you would hope, the book itself is an extraordinarily
beautiful publication that gives you, in full-color reproductions,
the dust jackets, cover, sample pages and sample layouts for what’s
a pretty good list of 101 books that the author’s feel represent
some of the classics of 20th century publication, like
Bernice Abbott’s Changing New York, for example, or
Andre Kertesz’s Meudon, Paris. Everyone that goes
through the book will immediately start making their own mental list
of publications that they think were overlooked. Here’s
Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment. Nevertheless,
it’s a pretty strong selection, I think, of works coming up
pretty close to the present. Let’s see how far we get. I
know Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency makes
the cut. One of my favorite books, Richard Prince’s, Adult
Comedy Action Drama of the mid-90s, which was one of the most
influential design moves. That’s actually the last one. 1995. For
anyone who’s interested in photographs as a medium meant to
end up on the printed page, between covers, you should think about
obtaining this for your bookshelf right away. It’s a
great source of information, both visual and in terms of the ideas
that are very succinctly laid out by the essayists in the book.
Let me
take a look. I think primarily, yes, actually Shelly did write
what looks like a longish introductory overview of photography in
books in the 20th century. Where she finds the time
to do all this, I don’t know.
A recent
publication that might very well end up in a subsequent volume of
books of the 21st century, I’ll call to your attention,
because it’s just hitting the bookstores and I think it’s
really a very interesting little publication. It’s by
a Taiwanese photographer named Chien-Chi Chang who works for time
to time for Magnum, and it’s called The Chain. Is
anyone familiar with this? Okay. The story is that for
many years Chien-Chi Chang had been seeking to get access, as a photographer,
to a British monastery in Taiwan, a monastery that also doubled as
an insane asylum run according to Buddhist principals. After
five years of applying for permission to come in and photograph,
one day there was a new director who phoned and said, “You
can have access, but only for three hours on this day and that’s
it.” So, with this pressure, Chien-Chi Chang took his
camera to the monastery and set up and photographed, he said, for
one afternoon. The result is a fairly remarkable group of pictures
because as it turns out, the residents of the asylum, who were all
men, are chained together in pairs during daytime hours. This
seems like a very strange and almost barbaric custom to us, but the
interesting rationale that has been devised by the Buddhist monks
over the years is they select the pairs of men according to who can
help the other. In each pair, one is considered more stable
than the other, and that person is assigned to care for and guard
and bring along the less stable member of the pair. So in all
there are about 40 of these portraits. When they’re presented
as an exhibition as they were recently, they’re presented as
life-sized photographs that circle three walls of the gallery, so
you’re really in the center. In this book, however, maybe
you can help me with this, it’s put together so that you can
unfold the whole thing. If you could hold up the middle. Okay. It’s
put together so you can get a sense of the linkage of these individuals,
not only in the chain that connect them, but also in the layout and
fabrication of the book itself. Question?
Audience: Is
there text in there?
Phillips: No. Let’s
see. I think there is a little text somewhere, but it’s
designed primarily. . .
Younger: Yeah,
a couple of pages in the back. It comes detached from the cover,
huh?
Phillips: Yeah,
so that you can pull it out. Let’s see. What is
in the back? What is in the back is a short piece by a Taiwanese
journalist.
Younger: So
was this book done in Taiwan?
Phillips: Let
me take a quick look and I can tell you where it was produced. I
don’t think so. It was produced by a press I’ve
never heard of, and I’m not turning up the publication information. We
can take a closer look at the end.
Another
very interesting personal book project is this book by the American
artist, Aura Rosenberg. It’s called Berliner Kindheit, Berlin
Childhood. It just appeared in conjunction with an exhibition
here in New York. The story behind the book is quite interesting. In
the early 1990s, Aura Rosenberg and her husband, the artist John
Miller, and their baby daughter, Carmen, began traveling several
months a year to Berlin. Berlin is the city where all Rosenberg’s
family had originally come from. Her father was born in Berlin
around the year 1930, I think, and had immigrated with the family
to the U.S. in 1939 in order to escape the Nazi regime. But
Aura Rosenberg remained fascinated with Berlin and her father’s
stories of growing up in a magical city; magical to him as a child. So
since the early 1990s Aura and her family have lived for three to
six months a year in Berlin so that their daughter could grow up
speaking German, and having some relation to German culture. Now,
it didn’t take long for Aura Rosenberg to discover that the
celebrated critic, Walter Benjamin, as part of his many writings,
had written a kind of autobiographical essay called Berliner Kindheit,
Berlin Childhood, which was a series of poetic reflections on Benjamin’s
own childhood memories of growing up in Berlin around the year 1900. So
watching her own daughter grow up at the end of the 20th century,
Aura Rosenberg began to make photographs in present day Berlin, using
as her guide Walter Benjamin’s own childhood guide to his Berlin. Surprisingly,
Aura was able to find quite a lot of traces of Benjamin’s Berlin
in present-day Berlin, and she began to write her own commentaries
on the connections that she began to imagine between Walter Benjamin’s
childhood Berlin of 1900, her father’s childhood Berlin in
the 1930s, and her daughter’s childhood Berlin of the 1990s. It
makes for a really quite interesting and remarkable book in which
the child imaginative ability, to create a kind of realm of fantasy
and magic from just about anything comes through very clearly. It’s
actually a kind of artistic collaboration between a mother and a
very young daughter which I find lends it quite a lot of poignancy
and interest. What I think is also noteworthy is that Aura
Rosenberg in her writings, while she’s working in parallel
with Walter Benjamin, she doesn’t really fall into the kind
of Benjamin cult worship that informed so much critical writing today. I
think perhaps because Benjamin’s family in Berlin came from
the same upper-middle class background and actually lived in the
same neighborhood as Aura Rosenberg’s grandparents, she sort
of regards Walter Benjamin as kind of a smart neighbor kid that’s
found all the cool places to go, and she sort of follows his lead. So
it’s very casual and almost chatty. I find it a remarkably
successful book just because it so successfully avoids Benjamin worship
and turns him back into a writer that you can use and have a dialogue
with.
Now. Here’s
a quiz for you. How many of you have heard at all of a German
artist who has been working with photographs for many decades named
Hans Peter Feldman. Does that ring a bell with anyone? Couple
of people? Okay. Most Americans have never heard of Hans
Peter Feldman which is too bad, because he’s a very interesting
character who has been doing lots of work since the 1960s. Hans
Peter Feldman was born around 1940. He trained as a painter
in Dusseldorf in the 1960s. He was very early hanging out with
Bernton Hellibecher, with Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polka, all of the
rest of the artists who are now world famous. Hans Peter Feldman,
though, was determined not to be world famous, and he has so far
succeeded brilliants, although I think this book may change things. In
the late 1960s Hans Peter Feldman stopped painting and began collecting. He
really turned his artistic activity to putting together collections
of anonymous photographs or toys or advertisements and so on. Over
the years, he has been publishing the results of these collections
as small, inexpensively produced black and white books. For
example, these two little recent paperbacks titled, Voyeur, which
some of you may have seen. Hans Peter Feldman is probably the
worlds greatest champion of photography as an anonymous medium. He
only works with images that have no discernable, named maker. By
doing that it gives him the freedom to range between family album
photographs that he buys at flea markets, industrial products shots
that he buys from photography studios that are going out of business,
unidentified studio portrait photographs that he accumulates in various
ways. So what he does is to make books and sometimes little
printed posters that bring together these anonymous images in such
a way that you start to see that there’s a kind of visual logic,
not only to his thinking, but surprisingly visual connections among
anonymous images of many kinds. This book, which accompanies
a show in Barcelona from last year, is in English and is really the
first substantial English language treatment of the very strange
photograph collections of Hans Peter Feldman. Postcards. He’s
probably got millions of postcards. I would predict that within
the next three to four years there will probably be some very large
U.S. show devoted to this artist. Here’s an example of
one of his books, simply called Portrait. He met by
chance a woman while traveling and she mentioned that she had saved
all of her photographs made of her on vacations over her life, so
what he did was select 324 of these photographs and simply publish
them in a little book called Portrait. Not identifying
the woman, not offering any kind of critical commentary. Just
making a pure photographic book that shows over the course of the
year the changes in this woman’s appearance as she materializes
at different places around the world. Hans Peter Feldman. Very
interesting German artist whose name I think will become much more
familiar in years ahead.
For those
of you who want ideas, I would recommend you might want to take a
look at this publication called Look: 100 years of Contemporary
Art. It’s by Thierry De Duve who is a Belgian art
historian and art critic. Very interesting and smart fellow. He
organized an exhibition in Brussels about a year ago with this title, Look:
100 years of Contemporary Art, and what he did . . . well, the
interest in the book is that he also shows himself very skeptical
at the idea that there’s some sort of dramatic break between
modernity and post-modernity and that we have left the age of modern
art behind altogether. Instead, what he does in this book and
in the exhibition, is to bring together art works from the last 150
years from Monet up to Jeff Wall and Jeff Koons and he wants to suggest
that there are just as many strong continuities to be found as there
are breaks and discontinuities. So he brings together for discussion
and in the exhibition works by Rodin and Kiki Smith. There’s
a long section, what I found to be the most interesting part of the
book, looking at the way that artists and photographers have used
the mirror in their work over the last 150 years. So, he brings
together discussion examples by Leif Relander, Florence Anre, Robert
Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Dan Graham and many others. There
are three longish essays in the book that sort of punctuate the illustrations
of the works that are in the show. The essays are dense and
fascinating. The essays have to do with artist strategies for
the presentation of work, the relation of artists, art work and audience,
and the idea of what kind of community does art create in its audience. These
are all extremely current issues. What I find most useful is
that there are plenty of installation shots, very good installation
shots, showing exactly how all these different works were brought
together in a gallery space so as to provoke different kinds of reactions
and discussions. So that’s Look by Thierry De
Duve.
Now there’s
a continuing controversy around the work of the German artist, Joseph
Beuys, but he’s an artist that refuses to go away. In
fact I’ve been visiting China regularly for the last couple
of years, working on an exhibition project, and I have found among
young Chinese artists probably a greater fascination with Beuys than
with any artist of the last 100 years. For any of you who are
interested in tracing the ongoing controversy over the work of Joseph
Beuys, and in reading some essays by younger critics and art historians
who have some very interesting reassessments of Beuys and his work,
I would strongly recommend this recent book called Joseph Beuys
Mapping the Legacy, which is edited by Gene Ray who teaches in
Florida. There is a very interesting piece by the imminent
critic, Benjamin Buchloh, who teaches here at Columbia called Reconsidering
Joseph Beuys in which he doesn’t quite get around to embracing
an artist that he has long despised, but offers some very interesting
reconsiderations of Beuys and his place in the art of the last 50
years. Probably what’s most interesting, I think, in
this book is an essay by the editor Gene Ray, called Joseph Beuys
and the After Auschwitz Sublime. In this, Gene Ray, in
an extraordinarily well-research and serious piece floats the idea
the Joseph Beuys, among all the artists working in Germany in the
1950s and 60s, is the one who at that time was most seriously engaged
with artistically working out the consequences of the horror of Auschwitz
and the extermination camps. I would never have imagined that
anyone could make a strong case for that argument, but after reading
the essay and the footnotes and seeing how really seriously the author
has gone about it, I think this will probably kick off a whole new
era of reevaluation of Joseph Beuys work. So, for that essay
alone, I think it’s very worth taking a look at the book because
that issue of the after Auschwitz is still so very much with us.
Now opening
in the coming months at the Metropolitan Museum here in New York
there will be a big retrospective of one of the Becher students,
Thomas Struth, whose photographs I’m sure all of you know. One
of the other Becher students, Thomas Ruff, also has a show that will
soon be traveling in the U.S., and I think the catalog is actually
pretty interesting. Thomas Ruff studied with the Becher’s
in the 1980s at the Dusseldorf Academy, and probably most of you
are most familiar with the enormous over-sized portraits that he
made in the 1980s of his fellow students at the Dusseldorf Academy. These
pictures have been shown in group exhibitions regularly for the last
almost 20 years now, and as I say, it’s the work that Thomas
Ruff is most associated with. Nevertheless, and what I think
makes him a little more interesting than Thomas Struth, is the fact
that he has not been satisfied just to continue and run signature
direction over the last couple of decades. He’s done
a lot of very different photographic projects; some successful, some
so unsuccessful it makes your hair stand on it. But it’s
that willingness to take chances and willingness to move out into
unexplored territory that I think makes this work pretty interesting. For
example, at one point Thomas Ruff did a lot of shooting at night
with a surveillance camera and made these enormous 8’ tall
prints of cityscapes and buildings and sometimes peering into windows
that sort of capture everything about the aesthetic of surveillance
ten years before it became really a sort of artistic trend. He’s
done many interior photographs, anticipating the work of Candida
Hoffer in some ways. Architectural photographs in the Becher
style. He’s done pieces of appropriated photographs from
the Nazi period, and probably some of you have seen the large pictures
that he exhibited just in the last year, reworked images from internet
porn sites. The publication is a remarkable well-done book
with lots of good historical and critical essays, and also what’s
useful about it is a total work inventory in the back. If you’re
a critic or historian, you start to salivate when you start to see
dozens of pages showing every picture that somebody has made in their
whole career because you know if you’ve got this one book,
you’ve got it all on your bookshelf.
Audience: What’s
it called?
Phillips: Just
Thomas Ruff. Photographs.
Since
so many of my students at NYU and SVA are also working in video and
digital media, I’m always on the lookout for materials that
can help me catch up with what they’re doing. A very
good book that has just come out is by Lev Manovich who is a very
well-known writer and teacher at UC San Diego. He has a collection,
it’s really a collection of earlier writings, it’s called The
Language of New Media. I think it’s destined for
a lot of classroom use. Lev Manovich poses the question in
this book, what’s really new about new media? And to
answer that question, what he does is to go back and look very closely
at the way that new media stylistics have grown out of many earlier
and existing tendencies. For example, he has a whole early
section looking at the way that new media has inherited, without
much critical notice, conventions such as the use of the rectangular
frame, the use of the language of Hollywood film editing, and the
notion of the permanently mobile spectator’s eye. The
main point of comparison, in fact, for a lot of new media productions
in this book is the famous film by Dziga Vertov from the late 20s, Man
With a Movie Camera, which I’m happy to see because I use
that as a teaching film every year, in almost everything that I do. Having
started with that, Lev Manovich goes on to consider what he regards
as the truly new forms and practices that are arising out of digital
medial culture. He has a whole section examining the implications
of such notions as database, interface, windows, menus, filters,
plug-ins, and navigation, all of which he understands as sort of
metaphors for the artistic manipulation of digital material. He
has extremely good discussions about the whole aesthetic of digital
art, the relation of the viewer to the monitor screen. He explores
the notion of information space as a new area for artistic exploration,
he has a very funny section on the aesthetic implications of computer
games and computer animation. Very smart, serious book. That’s
my high recommendation.
Now what
I’ll do to close out, I want to show you, well, what do I need
to do in order to get the . . . . . Okay. As I mentioned, many
of my students are now starting to express a lot of interest in video
art, its history, and its current practitioners. I have found
a couple of website to be extremely useful in my own classroom use. Probably
the most useful and the most ambitious site is the new media encyclopedia
which is a joint product of three European museums, primarily the
Centre Pompidou in Paris. To find this out, you just go to www.newmedia-arts.org and
that will get you into the opening page. The site has a very,
very useful glossary of new media terms. It has a extensive
chronology of the development of new media art from the 1950s up
to the present, year by year, and it has a very useful and regularly
updated bibliography, so in a sense it really is an encyclopedia,
and I have found that I can send students to start off with this
website and they’re able to use the information that they find
to head to the library or head to the video section of NYU’s
library. For classroom use though, what I find most useful
is the section of the site called Artists in Works. You’ll
see the list of letters up at the top. What happens if you
go to, say, “A”, you find Marina Abramovic, and you see
a list of titles over here. Let’s go down just a little. Okay,
here’s Vito Acconci. Let’s see if this one is up. What’s
interesting is that there are one minute to three-minute excepts
of just about all of these tapes on the website. Let’s
see if we can find one or two. It took two years, I think,
just to get this up. Okay, let’s go to Gary Hill. “Why
Do Things Get in a Muddle?” So what Gary is doing here
is audio taping the dialogue normally first, then playing it backwards
and teaching the performers to say these sounds backwards and he
re-tapes it and shows it backward again. Let’s see if
we can go get one more, just to give you a sense of how this works. Okay. As
you can see these are tiny little excerpts, but for classroom use,
in order to show students, give them just a taste of what the work
of many different artists is about, it really can’t be improved
on. This is a excerpt from a short Jean-Luc Godard video having
to do with the idea of fashion, that he made in 1988, working with
two French fashion designers.
Now, let
me ask: Are you familiar with the site of electronic arts intermix? And
video databank? Okay, those are the two biggest distributors
of artists video based in New York and distributing globally. And
each of those sites, too, now has short excerpts from many of the
videos that they have available. I find, though, that the New
Media Encyclopedia site, because it has hundreds and hundreds of
excerpts, it’s really what I keep going back to for classroom
use, and I think if you explore it you will find some extremely useful
things too.
That brings
me to the end of what I had prepared to show you. Thank you
for your attention, and if you have any questions, if you would like
to take some time and thumb through some books, you’re welcome
to do it.
(Applause)
Audience: I
have a question. Thanks for the very view of what’s
been publicized this year, but a point that you came up against twice,
about people’s ideas that the modernists project has been completed
reminds me of the introduction to a book by Hal Foster. He
talks about how Habermas believes the same thing, that the modernist
project is incomplete because the enlightenment project has been
incomplete. So I’m wondering, part of the problem that
I have with that kind of argument is that (end of tape) . . . of
the exclusive ways of approaching publication, and what is actually
included by discussing what’s excluded. In a way, to
me, it re-circles back to the same idea of excluding things. I
guess, in some ways, when I look at a lot of these theoretical criticisms,
some of these pictorial books that extend from theoretical treatise
in attempts to supposedly get outside of them, I’m not sure
it’s accomplished. I’m wondering if you’ve
thought about that.
Phillips: I’m
not going to answer your question directly, but what you say immediately
made me see a little more clearly that I think one of the reasons
why I found the Koolhaas book just immediately so exciting has to
do with a point that you just mentioned. Over the last 25-30
years, so much of the critical writing and theorizing about modernity,
both artistic and it’s relation with cultural modernization,
almost all of that discussion has been carried out in terms, handed
down from Western philosophy and examples in the development of Western
artistic and urban culture. What I think is happening now,
and what leads to a kind of interesting tension between that critical
tradition and attempts to analyze what’s actually happening
in different parts of the world today, is the fact that for many
critical writers like Habermas, like Hal Foster, for them, the intellectual
project of modernity may have reached a point of stalemate of status,
but nevertheless, I think what Koolhaas is saying is that history
has not stopped--that there are developments taking place outside
of European and North American culture which are going unanalyzed
because they don’t readily fit into the critical framework
that we have. I think that the great interest in Koolhaas’ book
is to prod all of us to actually get back to some detailed observation
and critical thinking about questions that are arising out of the
practice of cultures in Asia, Africa, Latin America, which may initially
seem familiar to us, you know, the metropolis, big urbanization,
but Koolhaas points out that from a slightly different standpoint
you can see these as extraordinary extrapolations from the existing
culture in the West. So, again, just to underline again, for
me, the big excitement was Koolhaas’ implied question about
what kinds of violent twists in our thinking are going to necessary
in order to enable us to start to wrap our brains around processes
that aren’t so easy to map onto our existing critical framework.
Audience: I
want to thank you, as a person going into education, this is very
helpful. Are there places in New York City, specifically, that
we can go. I think of the Idea Center--you can go there and
see a lot of artist books and possibly it would have this full range. Are
there other places in New York City, since we’re off next week,
where we can go see a lot of these great places.
Phillips: I
think the top book sites in Manhattan are first the Dia Center for
the Arts bookstore on West 22nd Street; second, the bookshop
on the lower level of the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Broadway,
just below Houston Street. The Whitney? The Whitney bookstore
at the Whitney Museum is pretty good. They actually have a
pretty good selection of artist’s video tapes. And finally,
I think luckily for you, probably the best general bookstore for
scholarly books, critical and theoretical books, is only a few blocks
from here, Labyrinth Bookshop on West 112th Street, just
on the other side of Broadway. You could easily spend a day
in there going through the shelves. So those are really the
places that I go to. Previously, the Museum of Modern Art book
shop was extremely good, but they just closed, so come back in three
years and you can see what they have.
Audience: .
. . magazines? Can you make any recommendations of something
new that just hit the market?
Phillips: There’s
something new every week, it depends on what you’re looking
for. Personally I was very interested to see that one old magazine
that I wrote for at one time, October, has just published
their 100th issue, and it’s an issue devoted to
the idea of obsolescence, which I guess is sort of a self-critical
look, and there’s some very good discussions about the contemporary
state of criticism and critical writing, in which a lot of younger
writers bemoan the state of art criticism today. I think it’s
a little overdone, but as a kind of window on the current thinking
of younger critics and art historians, it’s well worth a look.
I would
again just suggest go to Universal News. Anywhere in New York
you can find sections with different journals from different places. It’s
a very difficult time, as you know, for scholarly journals, because
the cost of producing print journals has gotten so high that many
university presses are trying to cut back on the number of journals
that they’re publishing. For university libraries, too,
the cost of subscriptions to scholarly journals has just become almost
unmanageable. One of the consequences is that many scholarly
journals are starting to drift into being almost totally on-line
publications. That has advantages and disadvantages, but I
would advise, if you’re interested in new publications, probably
searching the web is the best place to get started.
Audience: I
was wondering about recommendations for books on new media in terms
of the theoretical side as well, like recommendations beyond . .
.
Phillips: Well,
one other bookstore that I didn’t mention is St. Mark’s
Books on the lower east side. 9th Street and 3rd Avenue. They
have a pretty good section of books devoted to cyber culture and
digital culture and so on. There’s actually a large number
of new titles in this area because obviously teachers need it in
order to catch up with what they’re students already know. A
lot of those publications have been rushed into print and they’re
not really substantial or worth keeping on your own bookshelf. I
think that the Lev Manovich book is probably the one that seems to
have most thought and useful information combined in it. But
take a look around.
Audience: I
notice that the books you brought in are very much of your own Western
focus, even the Koolhaas books talk about China in the framework
of Western thinking and how to resolve some of these issues in Western
terms. I was wondering if you have any recommendations for
books that deal with more of the international issues of various
locations around the world, especially new media.
Phillips: As
I mentioned, last year I was able to find over a dozen titles that
all seemed to be directed to exactly the question that you asked. For
whatever reason, this year I just didn’t see those new publications
coming out that moved in the same way. It may very well be
that some of your colleagues here have recommendations. The
other limitation, I think, was that I was only dealing with English
language publications here. In France, especially, and Germany
to a less degree, Spain also, these are areas where I’m seeing
probably the most interesting, new writing and new publications appearing
today. As I said, because I limited this to English language
materials, I didn’t bring in any of that, but my overall impression
is that English language studies of both photography history, critical
issues devoted to photography, considerations of global image culture
and all its ramifications, that’s sort of underrepresented
in English language publications. I don’t know whether
after September 11 there’s been this turning in or what it
might be, but that’s definitely my assessment as I travel around
and look at recent publications.
Audience: Are
we waiting for translations?
Phillips: Well,
as you know, even translations are growing more and more minimal
in this country. I would suggest learning German or learning
French if you really want to keep up.
Audience: This
is a follow-up question, whether or not there’s a commentary
on American art, because we can think about the 50s and probably
all the books about art were being produced about American art versus
now they seem to be more European based. Do you have a mission
or an agenda as a curator and as a teacher, and do they intersect
in any way?
Phillips: Well
I’ve been a teacher for almost 20 years now, and a curator
for two years, so there’s a big imbalance there. For
a long time I worked both as a teacher and as an editor at Art in
American and I was dealing primary with ideas, writings, writers
and so on. Now as a curator I find myself having to learn how
to deal with physical objects and think about questions of display
and presentation and interpretation, so I’m very . . . and
it’s more difficult than I would have imagined, to transpose
the kinds of critical ideas that come in from the writing side directly
on to museum exhibition displays. It’s a much harder
transposition than I would have imagined. It’s very easy
to be didactic in exhibition design, but that’s not necessarily
what makes for the most interesting and engaging and stimulating
and provocative display, so I’m very much back at square one
in that sense, and it’s actually very useful to throw yourself
into an area where you don’t really know what you’re
doing and you have to start over and really think very hard about
how to make things work. So that’s the situation I’m
currently in. Other questions?
Audience: Could
you just mention the books of last year really quickly? Do
you remember?
Phillips: Some
of the titles I looked at last year, I don’t see it here so
I’d have to reconstruct it, there’s an excellent book
accompanying an exhibition that was run called The Short Century,
which looks at African architecture and visual culture from around
1950 through the 1990s. It’s an exhibition that was curated
by Enwezor and the essays in that book provide a wealth of information,
at least to me it did, about the intricacies and subtleties of cultural
developments in Africa. The curator is Enwezor.
A second
book that I brought in last year is titled India Through The Lens by
Vidya Dehejia, and it’s a very large overview of the development
of photography on the Indian continent, bringing forward very precise
and detailed information about the chronology of that development,
and presenting portfolios of works by a number of Indian photographer
who had never come to my attention.
A third
book that I mentioned last year is about experimental art in China,
and the author is Wu Hung. Wu Hung is a professor or art history
at the University of Chicago, he was born in China, he has been regularly
traveling back and forth between Beijing and the U.S. organizing
contemporary exhibitions. He published a book last year called Exhibiting
Experimental Art in China, which is a fascinating book because
he examines about a dozen shows that were organized, installed, opened
their doors, and then were closed by the police immediately in China,
and he is interested in the mechanism that leads the authorities
in that country to feel like they have to close down a contemporary
art show because something in it is threatening. So he went
back and interviewed the curators and the artists, and sometimes
also interviewed the police officials.
One last
book that I mentioned last year that I’ll pass along to you
is a catalogue by a Venezuelan art historian named Monica Amor titled Beyond
the Document, and it’s about contemporary uses of photography
by artists in Latin America. It’s a catalog of an exhibition
that was at the Rena Sofia in Madrid two years ago. I’m
not sure if the book is available in bookstores here, but check the
internet and you can probably turn it up. So, last year I found
many books like that that I was happy to present which did really
form a coherent group of publications, but as I mentioned, looking
around this year at the stack of things that have come into my office
or I see on the bookshelves, I don’t see a continuing push
to bring to American readers kind of information and critical ideas
they need in order to understand what’s taking place in a big
world that’s changing very rapidly. So there’s
a certain sort of insularity and maybe self-satisfaction being reflected
there that is one of the current characteristics of American culture
that we should all be trying to change.
(Applause)
Phillips
Analysis
by Carla
Cioffi
Christopher
Phillips, former senior editor of Art in America and current curator
at the International Center of Photography, introduced eleven newly
published books he considered the years‚ most provocative books
within the field of photography and the visual arts. The selection
included Great Leap Forward: Project on the City by Rem Koolhaas, Death’s
Showcase: The Power of the Image in Contemporary Society by Ariella
Azoulay, Kiosk, The Book of 101 Books by Andrew Roth, The
Chain by Chin Chi Chang, Berlin Childhood by Aura Rosenberg, 272
Pages by Hans Peter Feldman, Look: 100 Years of Contemporary
Art by Thierry de Duve, Mapping the Legacy, a book on
Joseph Beuys, Thomas Ruff, and Lev Manovich’s The
Language of New Media.
Each year
there is usually a particular theme or coherent grouping to the books
he reviews, except for this year where the books seemed to be all
over the map. For instance, last year most of the books published
went into great historical depth in photography outside of the United
States. There were books published on African, Asian, and Latin
American photographic history and practice. This year‚ books
range in subject from artist monographs and history, to an architects
analysis of China’s new urban region, the Pearl River Delta,
to a book on new media. Three of the books were a historical
look back to contemporary art, photography books, and photography
in print media of the past one hundred years.
Phillips
also introduced a couple of websites dealing with video and electronic
arts. The New Media Encyclopedia, which can be found at http://www.newmedia-arts.org,
is a website specifically about video art, its history and its practitioners. He
also introduced two other websites of similar interest: the Electronic
Arts Intermix and the Video Data Bank.
It is
always interesting to note someone’s pick of the most provocative
books of the year, and although they seemed to be all over the map
in regards to content, I cannot help but think that what was excluded
from the mix might also be considered provocative. I think
it could be very interesting to analyze what is included in a publishers
list by what is excluded from that list. Phillips related that
there were no books on critical thinking this year that dealt with
issues outside of the West and North America. It is important
to consider why publishers would choose one year in which to publish
books on areas outside the West and feel it sufficient to cover these
issues. Of course, it may be a problem of not having translations
of texts outside of the West. But certain publishers are guilty
of towing a western-centric line, but photography and visual media
are so pervasive in the world today, that it is problematic to ignore
those issues outside of ones specific culture. In light of
this, it is important to question how publishers decide what to publish
and why. Is it simply market driven or is there a sense of
arrogance and/or ignorance on the part of publishers to recognize
the value of information outside of Western culture?