“I always tell the paper engineers don’t throw anything in the garbage, just send it to me,” said Rubin, as she shifted the manuscripts so that I might see them better. There are arrows and thought bubbles in red pencil, notes to the manufacturers that Dudley had jotted down, all culminating in one message: this is how the pieces fit together.

These blueprints are what Rubin likes best of all, better than original artwork or a book in its final state. She thinks it might have to do with her past work as a physician’s assistant. There is something connecting bone marrow collection and the labor of gluing paper together, apparently. “Sometimes I say it’s the doll house I never had,” she says, casting for an origin story that justifies her collection of over 10,000 volumes of moveable books. Whatever the reason, it started with this: the Book of Trucks, and the Book of Dinosaurs, two pop-up books she bought for her sons in the 70s. They transfixed her then and now she is a foremost expert in the moveable book. She has put on multiple exhibitions at the Grolier Club, and has a show up now: “Animated Advertising: 200 Years of Premiums, Promos, and Pop-ups”, constructed from 200 moveable items including ephemera and books from her collection.

This great collection has recently made a big move. It was transported from her country home, which she recently sold, to a private library she made by retrofitting a one-bedroom apartment in her building with custom-made shelves and windows treated for ultraviolet light. The kitchen cabinets open up to reveal her reference materials, the living room is home to delicate displays, such as a fragile rice paper temple, and a cardboard ballroom with paper dancers hanging on strings. The bathroom is just a bathroom.

Rubin pulls out some samples for me in what used to be the bedroom. A great, unfolding piece by Salvador Dali, which meditates on the discovery of DNA and connects that important double helix to historical symbols such as the Tower of Babel and Jacob’s Ladder. It’s just a bit of folded paper but the effect is immediate, the suggestion of a landscape, an immersive, other world. It’s a sensation that again and again the pop-up gives. But the moveable and the pop-up are two different categories. The moveable she defines as a paper object that needs to be manipulated in order to understand its full contents, while a pop-up is a subset of this umbrella category. The braille edition of Playboy counts. The first moveable, she has discovered, is an encyclopedia manuscript that is held in the University of Ghent from 1140. It possessed a gatefold, that is, a flap. That counts. Before that, she had thought the Astronomicum Caesareum was the oldest example. Commissioned by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and Ferdinand II of Aragon and written by Petrus Apianus, the Astronomicum was initially published in 1540. Rubin had a copy on hand.

In a white box, she extracted this ancient thing, covers made of pig skin, and carefully leafed through it. Two-thirds of the way in was the object of her focus, a paper wheel that explained the movement of shadows that divide our hours into day and night. The Earth was placed at the center of the cosmos — represented by a circle the depicted a green land and a medieval city — that the sun and moon orbit.

When we took the elevator back to her other apartment, my ears popped. I asked her what her late husband had done, as a way of asking how she had all these things and never once mentioned their price. She waved a hand, saying “Finance, money manager.” She gave me my coat and I stole one more look out her window at the city unfolded.

Hoard is a monthly column on collectibles, collections, and collectors outside of the fine arts by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei.

Curiously, given that Richter is by all evidence Buchloh’s favorite artist (or at any rate, the one who sustains the biggest share of his attention), their relationship has been marked from the beginning by profound differences of approach. Buchloh acknowledges that his leftist Frankfurt School orientation doesn’t jibe very well with Richter’s rather consistent conservatism. There’s also the further issue that Richter is a painter, whereas Buchloh, since the ’80s, has been one of the most acerbic detractors of painting’s post-Conceptual resurgence. All this makes for a book that feels almost as difficult to read as it surely was to write.

Gerhard Richter does not lend itself to easy summary. This is due not only to its length and the complexity of its arguments but also to its piecemeal genesis. Because much of the text was written decades ago, parts of the book have an uncannily anachronistic effect: issues from the 1970s discussed as if they were current; literature of the 1990s cited as if it were the final word. There are many repetitions, plus a few moments when Buchloh seems to contradict himself. (And some factual errors: a puzzling assertion that fashion photography, tourism, and advertising were all forbidden in East Germany is easy to disprove, for example.) Yet there is a remarkably constant if not exactly straightforward through line from front to back.

It goes something like this. Having abandoned a fledgling career as a Socialist Realist painter in East Germany, Richter arrived in Düsseldorf in 1961, by which point there was literally nothing left of the tradition of painting that could lay claim to historical legitimacy: neither the representational aims of pre-modernist art (or its zombielike revival in the official culture of the Eastern Bloc), nor the utopianism of the pre–World War II avant-garde, nor even the most recent attempts at regrounding modernism in gestural expressivity, literalist reduction, aleatory procedures, or naive technophilia. Every one of these models had been either corrupted by fascist or Stalinist totalitarianism, or recuperated by capitalist spectacle. Worse still, as Theodor Adorno famously said, and as Buchloh likes to remind us, making art or poetry at all seemed to have become irredeemably barbaric after Auschwitz. 

In the German context with which Buchloh is preoccupied, however, all these impossibilities were swept under the rug of “collective conditions of daily anomie, amnesia, and repression.” This was necessary for ordinary people (and artists) to get on with their lives after having committed, or at least having failed to prevent, the worst crimes in human history. As Buchloh tells it, most German art of the 1950s and ’60s contributed to that amnesia instead of countering it, acting as if it were possible simply to jump back into an international modernist mainstream as though nothing of importance had happened since 1933—as if abstract painting, for example, could just pick up where it had left off, when all the utopian intensity that had once been abstraction’s raison d’être had gone up in smoke. This was not an option for an artist of Richter’s intelligence.

So, what to do? For Richter, the answer was not to stop painting, but rather to paint his way through painting’s death. Richter found himself caught in a catch-22 that existing modernist strategies could not resolve. As we’ve already seen, according to Buchloh, at least, everything that had once been utopian or even just plausible in avant-garde art had lost credibility by 1945 or, in some cases, much sooner. At the same time, any return to pre-modernist representational aims—such as capturing the individuality of a bourgeois sitter in a portrait, or finding adequate means by which to represent collective experience through history painting—was even less of a possibility. Modernism had wiped the slate clean.

Buchloh is enough of a modernist to despise any “return to order.” Yet, for him, the loss of painting’s old powers was a real loss. It was a loss of experience, of memory, of the possibility of representing oneself and others as historical subjects rather than mere pawns of economic and political forces. By the end of the war, then, advanced art would seem to have been stranded in an unenviable position. But by fully acknowledging “the subject’s inevitable and eternal submission to political, social, economic, and legal and administrative control,” as Buchloh puts it a bit melodramatically, art could at least stay honest about its own extremely limited field for maneuver: it could avoid serving this miserable world as an imaginary escape from the inescapable.

One gets the sinking feeling that, for Buchloh, refuting the illusion of freedom is more important or at least more adult than trying to achieve freedom. Maybe the latter just isn’t on the menu. Yet, if done just right, art’s “mimesis of the hardened and alienated,” as Adorno put it, can flicker up as a minimal kind of resistance in its own right, to the extent that artistic mimesis of domination—refusing oneself the consolations of beautiful color, fine draftsmanship, and everything else that we typically enjoy in art—can function as a critical allegory of the historical forces that made such ascesis unavoidable. That is, reduced, disillusioned art such as Richter’s might provide an impetus to reflect on domination from a zone of irony or withdrawal that, all the same, doesn’t mistake itself for real freedom. 

For Buchloh, determining exactly what keeps you from being an autonomous subject might be the first step toward becoming one again. The following (which is only the second half of a sentence that does an excellent job of conveying the flavor of his prose) is how Buchloh ends a chapter on Richter’s dreary digitized “strip” pictures from the 2010s: “the fact that they enunciate the very aesthetic options resulting from the advanced conditions of a total desublimation of the subject within a new technocratic universe is paradoxically their singularly radical assault and their sole gesture of resistance.” To paraphrase, the fact that these paintings look like hotel-lobby art is exactly what makes them radical, inasmuch as they don’t pretend to be better than they are.

There is an exquisitely fine line in most of Buchloh’s chapters between surrender and allegorical/mimetic critique. Sometimes he appears genuinely not to know which side Richter comes down on. Although the book is often positively didactic, Richter’s “simultaneity of conflicting impulses”—his seeming inability to decide, or at any rate to let the viewer know, whether he really believes in beauty, mimetic representation, and so forth—regularly leaves the author with few options but to note an aporia. A surprising number of chapters end with unanswered questions. But Richter throws a curveball into the melancholy dialectic of enlightenment that Buchloh has been explaining up to this point. The curveball is tradition.

Famously (or infamously), Richter’s work all but systematically revives the classical genres that dominated painting before the 20th century: landscape, still life, memento mori, history painting, portraiture. Buchloh asks himself several times if this isn’t just conservative. Does Richter really believe these genres still work as they’re supposed to? 

The answer, of course, is no: Richter approaches each of them as already and inevitably ruined. But that’s just the point. If portraiture, say, is obsolete, a residue of a type of well-rounded subjectivity that capitalist spectacle has done its best to eliminate, then continuing to make portraits after that subjectivity’s disappearance perhaps serves as a reminder that another world is possible—or at least was possible at some point in the past. As with portraiture, so with everything else: all of Richter’s work oscillates between a brutally secularizing destruction of aesthetic ideology and a Walter Benjamin-ish redemption of the obsolescent.

This endlessly repeated maneuver is indeed reminiscent of the Mechanical Turk in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”: “an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning move of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove.” As is often the case in dialectical thinking, the danger here is that of having your cake and eating it too. It feels as if Buchloh’s Richter can do no wrong. Either his art mimetically repeats and exacerbates (and thus “allegorically” criticizes) the total reification of the world, or it takes the Benjaminian tack of reviving obsolete forms as resistance against those same conditions. Buchloh has an ability to redeem even Richter’s most lugubrious projects as Germany’s quasi-official state artist (his giant German flag in the Reichstag; his window for Cologne Cathedral) as, precisely, redemptive—but not of the things they seem to be redeeming, namely German national identity and the Christian religion. This is thin gruel for a leftist art history.

The trouble is distinguishing between a good (dialectical) anachronism and a bad one (a “return to order”). The key idea is credibility. Buchloh often says that by 1912, or 1928, or 1945 (etc., etc.), a given kind of art had ceased to be credible or had lost its legitimacy. The task of responsible art, then, is to figure out exactly what has not become illegitimate and then pursue that as rigorously as possible. Richter does this in the medium of painting, according to Buchloh. If both modernist abstraction and premodern pictorial genres had become illegitimate after reaching their respective ends, the only way to keep doing versions of them would be under the cover of a deflating suspension of their former values (Jacques Derrida called this writing things sous rature): that is, an evacuation of old mythical content that nonetheless does not entirely let the redemptive flame go out from the heart of each canceled form. 

Richter’s famous paintings of his daughters are a good example of this (one of them is on the book’s cover). Buchloh obviously finds them grating in their surface-level sentimentality and vaguely Freudian hints of incestuous desire. At the same time, he argues that in the context of advanced capitalism, at least, the family itself—the most traditional of traditional institutions—might function as the “sole site of reconciliation and happiness” after any larger utopia has ceased to be imaginable. Accordingly, the family pictures might even function as a site of “critical resistance and countermemory.” All of this is hedged with question marks and scare quotes, to be sure—but the fact that Buchloh countenances the idea at all is extraordinary.

For Buchloh, the critical effect of such works is tied to the work of mourning that they perform. What they mourn is painting itself. But painting is on some level just a technology of a certain subject. And over the course of the book the subject that Buchloh has in mind is unmistakable: it’s the bourgeoisie. Although this is a disconcerting conclusion to find in a big, quasi-Marxist book, it follows logically from Buchloh’s macro-level perspective. The forms of experience that painting once mediated to its makers and viewers and that it lost in the 20th century are those of the 19th-century bourgeoisie. They’re the ones who kept portrait painting, still life, and all the rest alive. 

In a sense this is a tautology. Subjectivity for Buchloh is always bourgeois subjectivity,  because only the bourgeois were ever subjects; our very idea of what constitutes a subject is an ideology of this class. Richter looks back on painting’s bourgeois patrimony after “the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity (caused by World War II and the Holocaust as much as by the emerging powers of a universally controlling culture industry),” which is why his resurrection of bourgeois genres and representational ambitions retains some credibility, against all odds. If the bourgeois subject is dead, there can’t be much danger in recovering its cultural forms, the obsolescence of which might now provide some friction against the universal eradication of the “politically self-determining subject.”

For younger readers, especially, this may be the point where Buchloh becomes hard to take. The problem is right there in the book’s subtitle: “Painting after the Subject of History.” The subject? Might there be more than one? Even if 19th-century bourgeois consciousness, along with, say, the classical socialist movement, had been ground into dust over the 1930s and ’40s, does that mean there were no “politically self-determining subjects” in the decolonization struggles of the postwar era? What of the feminist movement a little later?  

Even bracketing these predictable objections, one might still ask why it’s so persistently the bourgeoisie for which Richter and Buchloh mourn, given that the “Subject of History” would also seem to be code for the Marxist collective revolutionary subject, the proletariat. For Buchloh, if ever there was a moment in which the proletariat was on the cusp of attaining world-historical subjectivity, it was over by 1921, with the advent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (a partial restoration of the capitalist economy in the USSR). So, Buchloh’s subject of history is not only a ghost, but a ghost with a split identity: Richter’s mourning for that subject has to encompass both a destroyed bourgeois subjectivity as well as a never-realized proletarian one.

Hence the almost unimaginable weight that Buchloh puts on Richter’s head. Richter’s job is nothing less than to pick up the pieces of the “common ruin of the contending classes” that Marx saw as one of the possible outcomes of any social struggle and which Buchloh seems to take for the real outcome of the 20th century’s murderous first half. (Though it’s reasonable to ask if rumors of the bourgeoisie’s death might be exaggerated.) Aside from being incredibly depressing, this begs the question whether it’s possible to conceive other projects of mourning, even within Buchloh’s Eurocentric perspective. For example: The Aesthetics of Resistance (1971–81), Peter Weiss’s extraordinary three-volume novel about the exiles of young German leftists on the cusp of World War II, is also a monumental work of mourning, but for a proletarian subjectivity that was in fact much more the victim of Europe’s disaster than was the bourgeoisie. Ridiculous as it would be to ask Richter to be Peter Weiss, it’s worth speculating whether such a thing would even be possible in Richter’s medium, or whether painting is locked in a Totentanz with bourgeois culture in a way that novels aren’t. In which case maybe Gerhard Richter is as good as it gets. And if so, 650 pages is not disproportionate at all.

But there are further reasons for the intensity of the author’s investment. It’s worth remembering that Buchloh is a disappointed member of West Germany’s 1968 generation. This factor is unmistakable both in his admirably frank introduction to the book as well as in crucial chapters such as the beautiful, concise essay on Richter’s October 18, 1977 painting cycle, which reflects on the deaths in prison (officially by suicide) of the leaders of West Germany’s militant Red Army Faction. Buchloh’s work is so deeply entwined with his own personal and political trajectory, with postwar Germany’s larger political history—indeed with what I am a bit frightened to call his Weltanschauung—that it makes little sense to evaluate his claims as if they were being made in a contextless eternal now. Every page of this book wrestles with the long process of postwar German memory-work, and for that reason every page is partisan. But it’s a partisanship on behalf of a missing collectivity: if the subject of history is dead, maybe all that’s left is to remember it, in hopes that it might one day be resurrected. 

Buchloh’s war is an old one, then. It’s unclear what this book might offer to younger scholars or artists for whom historical prohibitions rarely look very binding. No matter. Some loyalties transcend instrumental reason. We can be glad that Buchloh continues his work, delivering briefs to a court of historical reckoning that just isn’t there anymore. 

This article appears under the title “History’s Painter” in the September 2022 issue, pp. 38–42.

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

FICUS INTERFAITH

We love this book so much. Its streamlined layout and lucid, methodical style allow you to swim around inside it. Although we are not architects, we like to use this book as a lens to view ourselves as artists and to reimagine the function of art-making. Instead of viewing artists as isolated vehicles of their own genius, this book portrays them as conveying a collaborative energy for everyone and anyone. To us, making a good work of art is like building a world. This book offers us courage to pursue beauty and truth, creating a world that poetically contains what Alexander calls “the self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.”

Ficus Interfaith: The 59th Street Bridge Song, 2020, cementitious terrazzo, brass, zinc, walnut, 42 by 66 ¾ by 1 ¼ inches.

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)

JINA VALENTINE

A return to the endless summers of childhood, to frolicking with wild abandon, drunk on honeysuckle dew, heavy humid air, and the feeling that comes from freed reins.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is not that kind of coming-of-age story but a celebration of early 20th-century Black women who lived as if they were free. Saidiya Hartman, a cultural historian, weaves together intimate fictional portraits of “surplus women of no significance” who were largely unremarked upon by history. Gathering the few archived traces scrawled by debt collectors, parole officers, and psychologists, she illustrates these women’s lived realities as evidence of the social upheaval that transformed Black life in that period. Adrift, shiftless, and wanted, too slippery for definition, these wayward women remain apparitions, invisible givers and shapers of Black life and dreams.

Last year, I co-taught a class with scholar Lisa Vinebaum and artist Ebony Patterson called “Making in the Aftermath.” Sharing Hartman’s text with our students catalyzed candid and compassionate reflections on their own families’ histories, both recounted and unaccounted. Wayward Lives is timeless and timely.

Jina Valentine: gouache-and-ink-on-paper drawing from the exhibition “Exhibit of American Negroes, Revisited,” 2021, at Columbia College, Chicago, 28 by 22 inches.

Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017)

OHAN BREIDING

In Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis considers how water connects us to other humans and to other species, as well as to bodies of water that surround all of us. She calls these shared relationships to water our “hydrocommons.” Bodies are made up of this substance, which existed before bodies existed. Your water is the same as mine inside, but we’re very different people. Skin both links us to the outside world and separates us from it. In my own work, I’m using water as material and poetics and politics to question conventional modes of representation—thinking about the queer and trans body, or the fluid body, in relation to the containers of the bathtub, the swimming pool, the lake, the ocean. I’m interested in how science coins terms for what or who belongs where, and what makes up the borders of a body or a body of water, and who differentiates between inside and out.

Ohan Breiding: Imago and Crown, both 2020, C-print, 11 by 14 inches each.

Aleshea Harris, Is God Is (2016)

STEFFANI JEMISON

I often get stuck when I think about how impoverished the glyph, the line, and the page feel in the face of speech. And then something comes along to loosen me up: this year, it was the work of poet-playwright Aleshea Harris, whose scripts Is God Is (2016), What to Send Up When It Goes Down (2018), and On Sugarland (2022) are precise and generous. As a student, Harris studied with brilliant poet, librettist, and performer Douglas Kearney, who often uses innovative typography in his knotty, dense, visual poems. Harris lets letters stumble and drip from one line to the next, like a fountain or a sundae or a chandelier. Words crescendo and bulge, overlapping and colliding and sparking and making heat. In Is God Is, “I don’t rem / mem / ber” appears in a font so diminished, I myself shrink. “Every piece of the / p u z z l e? / What other pieces are there?” The sass! So much action compressed into so little. This spring, at New York Theater Workshop, I saw On Sugarland, in loose conversation with Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Epic and inspiring. I can’t wait to see it in print.

Steffani Jemison: WLD (content aware), 2018, UV curable inkjet print on glass, acrylic, paper, polyester film, 10 by 21 ½ inches.

Ilyse Hogue, The Lie That Binds (2020)

BANG GEUL HAN

I picked up The Lie That Binds in the aftermath of Amy Coney Barrett’s hasty confirmation to the Supreme Court, with the uncertain fate of Roe v. Wade looming. I’d been researching abortion rights for a new body of work, and I turned to this book, among others, expecting an informative but possibly rather dry survey of the fights for and against abortion rights in recent United States history. Instead, I found myself completely engrossed in one of the most coherent and compelling analyses I’ve yet read on the intersection of sexual and reproductive-health rights, and questions of race and class. Looking at many facets of the Civil Rights movement, including school desegregation, tax policies, and the Voting Rights Act, the book charts the shifting cultural and political fault lines that helped turn opposition to abortion into a signifier of fervid conservative orthodoxy.

Bang Geul Han: Warp and Weft, 2022, inkjet print, 16 by 11 inches.

Alice Walker, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010)

CAMILO GODOY

In the early morning hours of March 29, 2020, the sound of an ambulance woke me up. I made a post on my Instagram with a video recording of the street view from my window. The caption read, “It’s 6:30am. I haven’t been outside in a week. Birds sing and remind me of this question from a poem by Alice Walker, ‘What do birds/think/of/us?’” Walker’s book of poems Hard Times Require Furious Dancing is often with me. She encourages fierce healing to survive our catastrophic moment. Walker reminds us that “each of us is proof” of this requirement and advises, “What a waste/is any kind/of/grudge.” The truths and affirmations that I find in poetry are the seeds of inquiries in my practice.

Camilo Godoy: HIC HABITAT FELICITAS (Contacto), 2022, archival pigment print, 8 by 10 inches.

Hammer Museum, Stories of Almost Everyone (2018)

ELIZABETH ATTERBURY

Stories of Almost Everyone is a collection of twenty-nine short essays that consider the narratives that objects hold, and the failures of institutions and others speaking on objects’ behalf. The book was published alongside the eponymous exhibition at the Hammer Museum.

As an artist who spends considerable time thinking about objects, I appreciated the different ways contributors approached the conversation: philosophically, historically, critically, intimately. Poet CAConrad’s piece—about the unthinkable rape and murder of their boyfriend and the ritual they performed (using two quartz crystals) to save themselves from consuming grief—brought me to tears when I first read it, and it continues to haunt me. Beyond the horror of hate crimes and violence in our country, this particular text captures the timeless logic of an individual’s need for ritual (and a ritual’s need for objects).

Other texts—by Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, Chris Kraus, and Charles Ray—have also stuck with me, and I keep this book at my studio to reread when I need to.

Elizabeth Atterbury: Arrangement 3 (In September), 2021, mixed mediums, dimensions variable.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached,
ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (2020)

RAYYANE TABET

ʿAṣfūriyyeh was one of the first mental health hospitals in Lebanon. When it was founded in 1896, it was an emblem of the medical sector’s modernization. But it became stigmatized, and by the time I was born, in 1983, it had shut down. It existed for years in my imagination until my first year of college in Beirut, when I got to visit the site. It was a modern ruin, a time capsule on top of a hill overlooking the city.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached’s account of ʿAṣfūriyyeh balances a clinical approach to history and a subjective desire to analyze this place in order to understand Lebanon’s past and present conditions. I am interested in such places because of their potential for not only investigation but reinterpretation. You can insert yourself within their history, affect the way they are remembered. I now realize how much this place has informed my practice. I find myself in between the imagination and reality, and with both of those, I can actually make something.

Rayyane Tabet: Three Logos, 2013, powder-coated steel.

John French, Ahriman: The Omnibus (2017)

JOSEPH BUCKLEY

Shame and guilt motivate Ahzek Ahriman, a 10,000-year-old sorcerer from Old Earth’s Iran, on his journey through deep space in the far future. John French’s Ahriman: The Omnibus would be a relatively standard Space Opera but for the stunning descriptions of metaphysical travel and violence.

Utterly ancient and completely immature, Ahriman surrounds himself with others of his kind: conjurers of demons, builders of artificial intelligences, preening swordsmen, mystic artillerymen, and hollow ghosts. These characters straddle the astral, psychic, and physical realms, waging ugly and humiliating battles with themselves, their brothers, and the psychic afterimages of their dead and eaten enemies, who live on in their brains.

It is fascinating to read a story about posthumans, irrevocably dehumanized living beings, attempting to use their tawdry magical practices to make themselves feel human and “normal” again, ways of being that they can barely remember.

Joseph Buckley, plagues, fires, floods, 2021, cast plastic, formica, mdf, 97 by 125 by 76 inches.

Maria Golia, Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure (2020)

JAMAL CYRUS

This book is a compelling portrait of the musician and composer Ornette Coleman told through the economic and sociopolitical history of his birthplace, Fort Worth, Texas. Though Coleman seems always to have been on the margins of the city’s music scene (he was kicked out of his high school band for improvising over Sousa’s “Washington Post”), it appears the city was supportive and inspiring enough to shape him and a string of local musicians who would make important contributions to the field of so-called jazz.

Apart from its historical content, this book has had a tremendous influence on my thinking about “sonic territory,” the sounds and music specific to a region or locale. It helped me formulate a group of works that acknowledge the Texas Trinity River basin as an important sonic territory in American music. It is the place of origin for many heavyweights—not only Coleman but also Blind Lemon Jefferson and Sly Stone. 

View of Jamal Cyrus’s 2022 exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth.

This article appears under the title “Reading Material” in the September 2022 issue, pp. 32–36.

Recently, though, the quest to interpret Kafka reached a point most decidedly un-Kafkaesque: a promising new development. Before he died, Kafka left his writings and drawings to his friend Max Brod with instructions to burn them. Brod refused, bless him, and arranged to publish the writings almost as soon as he could, but most of the drawings stayed in limbo, neither destroyed nor displayed, until Brod’s death in 1968, at which time they passed into the hands of his heir, Ilse Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe died in 2007, they became the subject of a legal scuffle between Hoffe’s descendants and the National Library of Israel (another of Brod’s heirs) that ended in 2019 with the Library acquiring 150 Kafka drawings only a handful of people had ever seen. (Here, one pauses to consider how much art lawsuits have kept from the public, and how many Kafka-level talents’ papers are currently feeding termites in somebody’s basement.)

Franz Kafka: The Drawings, edited by Andreas Kilcher, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2022; 368 pages, 240 color illustrations, $50 hardcover.

One thing I should say up-front about these drawings, the subject of a new monograph published by Yale University Press: they’re not great. This is not the same as saying that they’re not worth your time. Not-greatness can help you understand the raw material from which greatness is built; it’s like visiting the Great Wall of China and looking down at the rock under your shoe, then looking up again and realizing that both are made from the same stuff. In the case of a discussed-to-death, hidden-in-plain-sight writer like Kafka, it’s a worthwhile exercise. The better you understand what’s missing from the drawings, the more you appreciate what’s piquantly present in the stories.

When this book was first announced, I pictured something like the following: stick-men (not women) with long, flailing limbs and tiny heads, adrift on empty pages lacking either color or warmth. This, as it turns out, is pretty much how the drawings do look. Every dozen pages or so, the artist attempts a full-fledged face complete with eyes, mouth, expression, etc., but most of the figures in this book have dark featureless heads that are no more or less expressive than their shoes or arms. The figures that are evidently male tend to have thick eyebrows, gnashing mouths, and dark, pointy beards, while their few evidently female counterparts have big hairdos and swishy dresses, more fluff than flesh—a child’s baffled view of the grown-up world. Kafka didn’t draw many animals, but he made human beings look so inhuman that, in a way, he did.

Kafka: “Martha reading,” ca. 1901–ca. 1907; pencil on paper. The Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

Kafka didn’t draw scenery, either; most of the bodies in these pages just float there, neither inside nor outside. This corresponds neatly to Kafka’s fiction, in which there is almost no scene setting, no paragraphs about weather or buildings or family trees. In general his drawings are so of a piece with his writings in theme and tone that it’s tempting to treat the one as a version of the other. In their essays for the Yale monograph, the book’s editor, Andreas Kilcher, and theorist Judith Butler surrender to this temptation so fully that you could almost forget the writings are triumphs and the drawings are trifles.

Kafka: Man in tuxedo, ca. 1901–ca. 1907; pencil on paper. The Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

Kafka: Sketchbook, ca. 1901–ca. 1907; pencil, India ink, and ink on paper. The Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem

Forgetting this requires some curious mental contortions—reading Butler’s analysis in particular, you’d think Kafka sweated over each sketch for thirty years instead of thirty seconds. Of number 117, a man with a stick, she has this to say: “The feet balance the body with balletic precision—accompanied by a walking stick, a vertical line that does not reach the ground and, because it cannot possibly offer support, proclaims, as it were, its lack of utility.” Cannot possibly, proclaims, precision: if these keywords are any indication, the possibility of a coincidence doesn’t occur to Butler. Her hopes are too high. She wants Kafka’s drawings to be sites of resistance to “the laws of gravity” and “the laws of writing,” and perhaps they are—or perhaps Kafka was doodling one afternoon and his pen tip didn’t make it all the way to the bottom of the page.

And maybe it’s naive, with Bob Dylan’s matchbooks on display in a shiny new museum in Tulsa, to say that some ephemera is just ephemeral. But if you deny this, you’re ignoring one of the most important things about Kafka’s prose. The miracle of The Metamorphosis, the critic William Deresiewicz wrote, is that the author was able to commit wholeheartedly to his own ridiculous premise—if he’d lost his nerve for even one sentence, the whole thing would have fallen apart. There’s probably enough raw material in Kafka’s drawings to assemble into another Metamorphosis, but he doesn’t commit all the way: his lines shake or sputter out; he tries crosshatching here and reverts to stick-men there; he loses his nerve, or at least his interest. In short, he fails to convince us that each drawing couldn’t have looked any other way.

It strikes me that this sense of inevitability, missing from the drawings but unmissable in the writings, is as essential a part of the Kafkaesque as bureaucracy or giant bugs. Understood this way, Kafka’s gift wasn’t that he could imagine things the rest of us can’t (any jumpy eight-year-old can picture a giant bug). Once he’d imagined them, however, he believed in them so zealously he convinced the rest of us to believe, too. He never winked. This is why it’s worth being blunt about the mediocrity of his drawings, and why, mediocre or not, it was worth publishing them after all this time: they throw the brilliance of the stories into sharper relief. And if not even Kafka managed to be Kafkaesque all the time, there’s still hope for his imitators.

For this edition of our annual Summer Reading issue, we present you with a feast of approaches to the written word, from books by artists to artist biographies, from the book as a museum to reading performed in a museum. Jackson Arn takes stock of artist biographers, from Renaissance mythologizer Giorgio Vasari to Picasso chronicler John Richardson. The best of them wrestle with the tantalizing, ever-mysterious relationship between artworks and life stories. Photographer Dayanita Singh’s books take many forms. Her latest effort, she tells Tausif Noor in a lively “In the Studio” interview, includes DIY instructions for how to turn her books into exhibitions, and even turn yourself into the venue: “[B]uy a long jacket and cut pockets of a certain size, so that you can wear nine museums. You can walk into a room with them and invite everyone to a Dayanita Singh opening then and there. Pull out one of the books and hold it up: just like that, you’ve become the museum.”

There has been much talk over the past year of the prospect of a new sort of Roaring Twenties. In anticipation of our emergence from the pandemic, we were supposed to rush into a new golden age, comparable to that of the previous century, fueled by pent-up demand for sociability. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shadowed by war, fear, and recurring lockdowns, a stew of circumstances not dissimilar from those that led to Dada. And, as though on cue, we have our very own Dadaist in Nora Turato, whose performances, as writer Jameson Fitzpatrick puts it in a profile of the artist, “captur [e] the feeling of navigating the chaotic, confusing nonsense of the information age.” There is nothing passive about reading.  —Sarah Douglas, Editor in Chief 

Dayanita Singh’s Delhi studio, 2022.

DEPARTMENTS

FIRST LOOK

LaKela Brown by Hiji Nam

LaKela Brown’s “archaeological” relief plaques reference jewelry and small objects linked to Black heritage.

THE EXCHANGE

The Work of Worms by Alice Channer with Amy Stewart

An artist and a horticultural writer discuss the ecological contributions of earthworms.

HARD TRUTHS

by Chen & Lampert

Artist-curators Howie Chen and Andrew Lampert offer tongue-in-cheek takes on art world dilemmas.

CRITICAL EYE

House of Xtravaganza by Maria H. Loh

Since the Renaissance, masculinity has often been expressed through surprisingly florid attire.

BOOKS

Value and Its Sources by Caitlin Meehye Beach

A review of Henry Sayre’s Value in Art: Manet and the Slave Trade and Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World.

HANDS ON

Q&A with Daniel Tobin, cofounder and creative director of UAP (Urban Art Projects).

Nora Turato reading from pool 4, 2020, in Amsterdam.

FEATURES

FROM GOD TO 10,000 HOURS

by Jackson Arn

Whether it’s Vasari’s Lives or the latest tome on Warhol, artist biographies survey stories behind works we revere.

KID STUFF 

by Hannah Stamler

Children once inspired modernist artists—and now they’re a prime demographic for aspirational art books.

EPIC PITCH

by Jameson Fitzpatrick

Nora Turato’s spoken-word performance work and publishing projects meld the bardic tradition with contemporary sales patter. A pull-out print by the artist accompanies the article.

IN THE STUDIO: DAYANITA SINGH

with Tausif Noor

The veteran Delhi-based artist explains why her wildly inventive photobooks are vital to the future of the medium.

FIT TO PRINT

by Lucy Ives

Independent presses and self-publishing have liberated artists to experiment freely with images and texts.

PLUS: 

ON ENUNCIATION AND ESCAPE

by Nicole Kaack

REVIEWS

Khalil Rabah’s installation Untitled, All is well, 2017, from his project “The lowest point on earth memorial park,” mixed mediums, dimensions variable.

WHITNEY BIENNIAL
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Simon Wu

“MATERNAR”
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Gaby Cepeda

WALID RAAD
Paula Cooper, New York
Kaleem Hawa

DOROTHEA TANNING
Kasmin, New York
Jackson Arn

ANDRÉ CADERE
Ortuzar Projects, New York
David Ebony

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE
Iceberg Projects, Chicago
Jeremy Lybarger

RYAN PATRICK KRUEGER
MONACO, St. Louis
Jessica Baran

VICTORIA GITMAN
François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Annabel Osberg

SABRINA GSCHWANDTNER
Shoshana Wayne, Los Angeles
Leah Ollman

KHALIL RABAH
Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
Emily Watlington

Raicovich’s tumultuous experience at the Queens Museum can be directly related to what is described in her new book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso), which addresses Western museums’ long history with representing “neutrality” while protecting the political interests of those in power. In it, Raicovich diagnoses recent museum controversies as being proof of deeply embedded biases.

She writes about her own experiences while also looking at the protests against the Sackler family and Warren B. Kanders, as well as the response to works such as Dana Schutz’s controversial painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket (2016). But Raicovich doesn’t just provide an analysis of everything that’s gone wrong—she also details a refreshing look at a few cases where museums have stepped up and made changes, including at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which weathered protests from Indigenous communities after it exhibited Sam Durant’s sculpture Scaffold (2012) in 2017. The museum later dismantled the work, which was focused on the hanging of 38 Lakota men in 1838, and handed the remains over to Dakota elders, who buried it.

In a recent phone interview, Raicovich discussed her resignation from the Queens Museum, elitism in art institutions, and what it takes to really make amends.

Portrait of Laura Raicovich.

ARTnews: When did you decide to write Culture Strike?

Laura Raicovich: Right after I left the Queens Museum, I decided that I really wanted to think about this question of museums and neutrality, and I began interviewing some of my colleagues, artists, and friends about the subject. I thought maybe I would put together the interviews or something, but as I kept talking to folks, I realized that I actually had an enormous amount to say, and I thought that there also needed to be some discussion about how the museum emerged in the United States and what set up the conditions that made it possible—or even necessary—for museums to think that they were neutral spaces.

Was your own resignation as the director of the Queens Museum incited by a misunderstanding of what constitutes neutrality?

Yes. I think that’s what ultimately became the motivation for wanting to map those histories, because the reality is that the museum has never been a neutral space. It has always been constituted out of very particular positionality. If you look at the European models on which the U.S. model is based, those come out of the ideals and desires of the church or royalty. From a historical perspective, in the U.S., it’s a little bit different because the collections that started the earliest museums were mostly those of individual wealthy white men from a certain educational background. Those collections were profoundly personal based on what that person liked or what that small group of people liked, had access to, or were exposed to. The field from which those objects were drawn is pretty narrow. And it’s not just about taste. It’s also about a very particular set of foundational politics inside the museum such as its structure, its reason for being, and its ways of operating that are profoundly raced, classed, and politicized.

And people are more aware of that now.

Right, because I think what many of us face in our daily lives is that our perspective may not be aligned with the status quo and with those in power. Therefore, it’s viewed as politicized or in some way aggressive.

In the case of the museum and the people who are close to it, you’re actively communicating with people who help construct, maintain, and benefit from the system as it stands. There’s a certain amount of power that comes with that responsibility.

And meanwhile, the Queens Museum has worked with and collaborated with the immigrant populations around the museum for years and many of those people were in actual material risks given the rhetoric of the Trump campaign and the subsequent administration. This wasn’t just a philosophical argument about whether or not museums are political to begin with. But it wasn’t like they were Trump supporters—it was more subtle than that. They didn’t even object to doing the work they just objected to making visible. It was: “Keep doing the work, but do it more quietly.” And my position was that there comes a point where you cannot do this work quietly because of the extremity of the situation.

You discuss other museums, in particular the question of the Whitney Museum’s former vice chairman Warren Kanders’s ownership of the defense manufacturing company Safariland, which Hyperallergic reported was manufacturing tear-gas canisters that were being used against migrants along the American-Mexican border. Do you see a conflict between Kanders’s business dealings and his philanthropy?

This is where things get really interesting. What’s happening within the museum is an extreme replication of the conditions of the larger society. You have this mirroring of the wealth and inequity of what we see happening outside the museum occurring internally between staff, directors, board members, et cetera. This is why I think the museum is an extremely useful place to think about solutions because we also have to contend with these issues on a much larger scale in our communities.

In the wake of protests over works like Dana Schutz’s Open Casket and Sam Durant’s Scaffold, some have alleged that artists’ voices are being silenced. What did you make of the debate around censorship that followed?

If we’re attempting to “do the work” in some way, we’re going to mess up. We’re going to make mistakes. So, to me, the issue is: If you’re the person who’s made the mistake or caused the harm, then how do you then make amends? There are really important and significant differences in the ways that artists and institutions address those respective moments.

I don’t know if Schutz deciding to destroy the painting actually would have even done the work of making amends in the absence of a more vulnerable approach. In Durant’s case, I think the process that was created in consultation with the elders was open to allowing that [it] to go where it had to go at that moment. The [Walker] was criticized for allowing the work to be destroyed because, after all, one of the fundamental duties of a museum is to care for the works in its collection. But would this have happened if perhaps those constituencies and stakeholders had been involved earlier in the process? It would have been far less painful for everyone involved had they been. I am certain of that.

Museums often act defensively when they face protests such as the ones over those two works. Why is that?

There’s a great deal of fear that cultural institutions have because of the levels of precarity in relation to funding and funders. That is a reality. And it’s scary as hell. But the ways in which we engage with the public and with the people who have been harmed as institutions really matters.

I’m not advocating for a European model where it’s all public funding, because I think that has its own issues, but some balance is required. But what if we could have a federal cultural ministry—like most other nations in the world—and have a very tiny percentage of funding allocations from the federal government? What if we had something that was far more effective in funding the arts than the National Endowment for the Arts?

Some claim that museums are too broken to fix because of their colonial legacies and the people who fund them. Do you think that’s the case?

That’s a tough question. I think that there will be some institutions that just become less and less relevant. The Laundromat Project and Recess are really different from the Met and MoMA. And I am certain that there are even in those storied institutions, including the Met and the MoMA, there are pockets of really incredible work that’s being done there. I’m not sure that I want to quite give up on them yet, although it’s increasingly more difficult to take that position these days. None of those places are ever going to be perfect. None of us are ever going to be perfect. But can you shift the starting point of your argumentation or presentation to own those histories, and to be honest about them, and to contend with them in a transparent way? It will require doing more than changing the representation of the work in the galleries.

Photography does come with certain challenges: it has always been embattled as an art form, prey to easy manipulation and co-option, and highly changeable, with habits of use adapting to shifts in technology. But in addressing these issues, writing about photography relies on a narrow grammar, squeezing itself into fixed patterns and terms. To anyone who reads about the medium with even light frequency, the repetitions and redundancies can be stifling.    

David Campany, On Photographs, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2020; 272 pages, 125 color illustrations, $35 hardcover.

David Campany’s On Photographs is guilty of these minor crimes, yet it shows one possible way of working the trap. It begins with some vague throat clearing: Photographs, he writes in the introduction, “confuse as much as fascinate, conceal as much as reveal, distract as much as compel . . . In each one there is a kind of madness.” He repeats the word “madness” (a few too many times) to suggest how unruly photographs are, how they resist being fixed with meaning, even though people have tried to steer them and constrain them with words since the early history of the medium. As Campany points out, Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, published in six parts between 1844 and 1846, was not only the first commercially sold book to include photographs; it also included texts, some of which described the images and the processes used to produce them, and others that were more tangent.  Following Talbot, Campany lays out the method for his own word-and-image book: “The images do not illustrate a written argument, and the writing is not a script for looking, but together they may bring you closer to the madness.”

Upon reading this, one might pause for a second: Are we about to sit through two hundred pages of free-associative prose-poetry that dances around photographs without saying much about them? Fortunately, no. 

Toshio Shibata, Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture, 2013

Campany’s book is a delightful jumble of particulars, and a corrective, in many ways, to theories of photography that concern themselves very little with actual photographs. He includes more than one hundred images, arranged nonchronologically, non-geographically, and non-thematically, each accompanied by a short text that blends description, theory, history, and biography. It’s a kind of madcap survey that makes no claims to being comprehensive but, incidentally, covers a lot of ground. 

There are photographs from the mid-nineteenth century as well as the twenty-first, from Paris and Mexico City as well as Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Port-au-Prince, Glasgow, and Tokyo. Some of the photographers discussed are famous, but others are barely known or completely anonymous. When he turns to well-trodden, canonical material—Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, for instance—Campany doesn’t offer up the familiar image of the horse galloping, or the man leaping, but instead a weird, late example: Chickens Scared by a Torpedo (1884–87). On the next page, there is a 1914 “cyclegraph” by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, showing the motions of a woman’s hands at work, as traced by beams of light. The text on Muybridge stays close to his biography—we learn about his seminal role in the history of photography and cinema, as well as the fact that he shot the man with whom his wife conceived a child, and decamped after the trial to South America—whereas the text on the Gilbreths blends a folksy meditation on the machine age with a gloss on the Gilbreths’ methods (light bulbs attached to the body) and their promotional attempts to catch the wave of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management.” A few pages later, there’s a blue sky and palm trees in John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), 1973; a few pages after that: a bold portrait of a young woman in London’s East End, in 1955, wearing tattered high-Edwardian dress, surrounded by the rubble of war. 

This kind of whiplash is one of the book’s key pleasures. It steps away from the linear history of photography and attunes the eye to hidden affinities across time and place, visual echoes and patterns—like the three balls in Baldessari’s photographs rhyming with the five bubbles in Helen Levitt’s New York, c. 1942, the strip of circles in Étienne-Jules Marey’s Vertical Ball Drop from 1890, and a circular photograph of George Eastman aboard the SS Gallia by Frederick S. Church, the shape of the photo echoing the portholes on the boat. (“Why are portholes circular?” Campany writes, in one of his factoidal asides. “Corners cause cracks and corrosion.”)

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled, c. 1966.

The book is also a trove of less-than-familiar photographers—names like Gérard Castello-Lopes, Marianne Wex, and Kwame Brathwaite—whose works easily grip. There are bodies flailing inscrutably, bodies isolated in their coded gestures, bodies configured for commercial purpose; in just a few seconds, we see how the lens has captured the body in so many of its aspects. One of the virtues of structuring a book around images, not just using them as examples or illustrations, is that it can ground history and theory in concreto, and provide a vivid argument for why certain photographers need more attention and study.

David Levi Strauss, Photography and Belief, New York, David Zwirner Books, 2020; 96 pages, $13 paperback.

David Levi Strauss’s book Photography and Belief, is, in many ways, the opposite of Campany’s. It can fit comfortably inside of a small coat pocket and reproduces only one image (a frontispiece depicting a relic of St. Thomas Apostle). The book is not about any one thing, per se, but hovers around the vague plot of land between “photography” and “belief.” What is the role of photography, and seeing more generally, Strauss wants to know, in luring us to believe something is true, factual, firm? He loosely strings together other people’s scholarship, with little in the way of exposition or a guiding argument, to circle this very old question.

The first chapter is a rangy mini-essay on the early relationship between seeing and belief in the Judeo-Christian tradition, namely through the figure of Doubting Thomas (who never actually touches the wounds of Christ in the Gospels, despite the countless paintings and drawings depicting him doing so). Strauss then looks at the debates around the Turin Shroud, in particular his “favorite branch of Turin Shroud literature”: those who have argued that the Shroud is a photograph, and potentially the first photograph ever made, and even better, a photographic self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci himself. The chapter ends with a familiar knee-jerk challenge to the origins of photography: “It might be said that by the time Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot made their breakthrough technical discoveries in the nineteenth century, belief in photography had already been around for millennia.”

This pre-origin origin theory of photography—that the invention happened long before the first photo was ever taken—has been made many times, memorably in Geoffrey Batchen’s 1997 book Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, in which he argued that the beginning of photography couldn’t be isolated to one moment, person, or technical innovation, but was traceable to a “desire” to photograph, a more diffuse discursive formation (Foucault haunts the scene here) that preceded photography itself. As interesting as the idea might be, how many more variations of it do we want or need? And how far back are we willing to go? Why not just start at the origin of language, or the evolution of the first humanoid eyeball? 

William Henry Fox Talbot, Lace 1845.

After the first chapter, the book, by a number of standards—academic rigor, critical vitality, inventiveness—starts to crumble. In fact, it crumbles quite literally; it is a book of pieces and fragments: five short chapters, each divided up into short jagged sections, each section cobbled together mostly with quotations. The second chapter summarizes Benjamin, Berger, and Barthes on photography, supposedly as their theories relate to “belief” (though the connections to belief are often unclear); the third does the same with Vilém Flusser. The fourth chapter, entitled “Three Sources,” sets out to “triangulate” the idea that photographs are “more fiction than fact” by stitching together Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (again), Ioan P. Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, and Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence, all in about one thousand words. The final chapter takes a more personal direction— “I love photographs. That means I believe them. It does not mean I am gullible about images, or that I am more susceptible to fakery and propaganda”—and then speculates about the post-photographic future, about the “streaming flow” of images today, which will potentially lead to the disappearance of the image as we know it (i.e., the image as “trace”). This chapter is such a shift in tone, and comes so late, that it seems to belong to a different project. Strauss concludes with “A Brief Anthology of Quotations on Photography and Belief,” as if much of the book itself hasn’t been such an anthology.

It could be said that Strauss’s selection of quotations is part of his argument, and that every summary of a canonical text is a rereading of that text (and thus evergreen), and that books do not need to be cleanly or neatly argued but can splay poetically into fragments to illuminate things otherwise invisible. These same points can also be used to explain away the problems of a book that hasn’t been sufficiently edited. 

Writers today, across genres, are using theorists like Benjamin and Barthes to justify writing scattered and fragmented books, as if the tendency toward fragmentation were enough to make a book interesting and worth publishing. New studies of photography, in particular, would benefit from more intentional plotting or strenuous criteria. They might indicate why, for instance, it’s worth working in fragments, or why it’s worth trotting out the familiar names, the same essays, the same “aura,” the same old studium and punctum—all the greatest hits—as opposed to bringing us alternative theories, different sources, a more varied and global sense of image-making. If the “photograph may ultimately become obsolete,” as Strauss says, then we should think about saving it. Campany’s book provides one possible way of doing so. It cuts into the medium’s history at a new angle and tethers his words to that elusive thing: photographs.

This grandiose view of the discipline is common. It’s often taught in schools, where students are prompted to propose housing complexes intended to ameliorate various real-world refugee crises. When they graduate and get jobs at firms, they are often disappointed to find that their wealthy clients are not interested in such altruistic projects, but instead want to commission luxury condos or, at best, a museum. Architecture without clients would be architecture without buildings—political and monetary support is necessary to realize any major proposal today. So while a select few projects represented in the book—which is laid out as a series of fifty individual entries sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion—could actually be engineered, that does not mean they are buildable. Architects certainly should not be forbidden to dream, but after reading nearly six hundred pages about unrealized and unrealizable structural projects that attempt to solve world-scale problems, one inevitably comes to feel that building is simply not the right medium for resolving such huge issues.

The authors are critical of the projects they survey. They note that many architects wind up “uncritically accepting or reinforcing . . . projects of domination,” but not that this fault seems inherent to world-scale ambitions. Nor do they say why, then, readers should study such projects, only that “taking architecture to its most ambitious extreme . . . becomes the most demanding form of interrogation,” and that this approach should “inform a critique of the methods of intervening in the world our discipline has endorsed.” Since they do not offer their own critique of the discipline, but rather endeavor to “inform” readers, here’s mine.

Le Corbusier’s Cité de Refuge in Paris, built in 1933 for the Salvation Army.

Architecture can indeed play a significant role in politics. For instance, colonizers, such as the British in India, have often borrowed local vernacular motifs in order to make their presence seem less jarring, more mundane. In such situations, the shape of a window has serious political implications. But many architects, in the book and in the world, seem to think the connection between architecture and politics means that the former can replace the latter altogether. Some are deliberately irreverent toward cultural or geographic styles, materials, and values, insisting that certain forms can and should be replicated anywhere, overriding or subordinating what was there before. The authors consider Zaha Hadid’s work global in nature simply because her biomorphic buildings show up worldwide. They describe Le Corbusier as part of a group of right-wing, antigovernment intellectuals who saw world-building through architecture as a means to supplant politicians. This unwavering faith in building is preposterous in the face of today’s extremely uneven wealth distribution, a condition exacerbated by the real estate market. Since there are more vacant homes than homeless people in the United States, clearly it’s not new buildings that we need, but new politics.

Georgii Krutikov: The City of the Future, 1928.

The most interesting projects in the book are the handful that express skepticism about what, exactly, buildings can do. While many of the architects believe they can build new worlds, a few hold the more modest view that buildings reflect the values of the cultures in which they are created—as the Italian collective Archizoom chose to demonstrate by negative example. Illustrating a familiar dystopia and providing a warning about the ways in which architects serve capitalism, their 1969–2001 No-Stop City project features a series of drawings, tableaux, and photomontages that include depictions of depressingly homogenous locales, like parking lots and shopping malls, surrounded by mirrors that make them look endlessly expansive. A few architects are skeptical that new construction could ever be justified during an ecological crisis. In 1928, Russian environmentalist architect Georgii Krutikov proposed creating “aerial settlements”—vertical apartment buildings stacked atop circular spacecraft—in hopes that nature might recover in the absence of Homo sapiens. The volume’s entry on Austrian architect Raimund Abraham quotes a passage from his “In Anticipation of Architecture: Fragmentary Notes,” in which he contemplates how construction always entails destruction: “while you build the wall / you shall destroy the stones / while your eyes long for the window / you shall destroy the wall.” In an effort to minimize the presence of architecture, Buckminster Fuller built what he called Dymaxion Houses (1933): round structures weighing only three tons (rather than the typical home’s one hundred). He held that architecture should “sublimate” itself, providing comfortable but simple shelter from rain and harsh climates, especially as telecommunications promised to alter our relationship to space and time. The pie-in-the-sky 1959–62 Air Architecture scheme by France’s Yves Klein and Claude Parent goes one step further: they proposed applying indoor climate-control technology outdoors, obviating the need for shelter entirely: the only infrastructure in their proposal is an elevated highway that also supports the machinery.

Yves Klein and Claude Parent: Air Architecture: Underground Area of a Climate-controlled City, ca. 1959.

This book makes it clear—abundantly, though inadvertently—that new construction is rarely the solution to society’s problems. But the authors avoid this discomforting fact by neglecting to come to much of a conclusion at all. Rather than spelling out lessons learned by comparing the projects that fill the volume, they wrap up their survey with a handful of vague wishes for the future of the discipline, loosely outlining principles like “non-anthropocentric architecture” and “sources of equity” in a mere seven pages. In the entry on Archizoom, the collective’s founder, Andrea Branzi, contends that “architecture has never confronted the theme of managing its own death while remaining alive, as all the other twentieth-century disciplines have.” He cites Mark Rothko’s paintings and John Cage’s music. This, Branzi argues, “is why [the field] has lagged behind.” Instead of helping the discipline to catch up, the authors comment that architecture is “condemned to optimism and seeks to construct positive worlds.” It’s not surprising that Sarkis and his collaborators stop short of confronting their subject’s death: all three are historians or curators who also maintain their own building practices, as is common in the field. Addressing architecture’s mortality would mean confronting their own limitations. But can architecture chart a middle ground between Le Corbusier’s modernist utopias and Archizoom’s doom and gloom? If so, it’s through projects humbler than those found in The World as an Architectural Project.

Cover of the book “The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader,” 2020, Siglio Press.

The Saddest Thing Is that I have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, out this week from Siglio Press, comprises a selection of poems and experimental prose that Gins (1941–2014) wrote between the 1960s and the mid-1990s, much of which was previously unpublished. Gins, an American artist, architect, and writer, is best known for the long-term project Reversible Destiny, a collaboration with her husband, Shūsaku Arakwa. Believing that they could create environments to stave off death, Gins and Arakawa designed structures featuring obstacles intended to keep users agile. Several of their proposals were realized, including  a series of lofts in Tokyo; a park in Yoro, Japan; and a house in East Hampton. This volume, edited by A.i.A. contributor Lucy Ives, highlights Gins’s lesser known written work. In the introduction, Ives compares Gins’s poetry to the work of artists like Dan Graham and Adrian Piper, exploring how each approached semantics. The excerpt focuses on Gins’s book WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), which was published in 1969, and Gins’s list-like poems from her “Transformatory Power” series of the 1960s and ’70s. —The Editors

Madeline Gins: Untitled, published in the Street Works edition of 0 TO 9, 1969.

A theme of interruption of the human organism by literature and philosophy, perhaps by Western culture writ large, perhaps by language itself, is present in the work of Madeline Gins, as well as two other artists who participated in the 1969 “Street Works” happenings with her in Manhattan, Adrian Piper and Hannah Weiner. Weiner was a friend of Gins’s, the author of clairvoyant poetry produced through the transcription of words she claimed appeared to her on various surfaces, including other people’s faces, as well as poems appropriating maritime code. Weiner was concerned with communication across vast distances, how, as she wrote in an essay published in summer of 1969 in 0 TO 9, people would “deal with” the overwhelming quantities of information postwar society was generating.¹ She explored the effects of the new ubiquity of communication technologies, recording devices, and data on physical gesture and interpersonal space in her writing and performances. Piper, meanwhile, was just embarking on a career as an analytic philosopher in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in 1971 created a series of photographs titled “Food for the Spirit”, which documents her experience reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), while fasting and practicing yoga in isolation in her downtown loft. Kant’s view of cognition’s relationship to categories, deeply and even performatively apprehended through Piper’s practice during this time, threatened to displace Piper’s sense of self and being. The photographs, made in various states of undress before a mirror, brought the artist back to the immediate presence of her body and, thus, her self, in the midst of her engagement with the magnum opus of one of Western modernity’s most influential authors.

Madeline Gins: Untitled, published in the Street Works edition of 0 TO 9, 1969.

Gins, like Piper and Weiner, was exploring states of extreme influence, even possession, by literary language. Her way of “deal[ing] with” the displacement of her self by an influx of words was to write in the very space of delay and estrangement that reading and writing produce, to continue this delay, this interruption. She seemed truly not to aspire to any sort of fixed meaning—or, rather, to aspire to unfixing meaning—even as she was quite insistent that she wrote in the novel form. Marshall McLuhan’s catch phrase (Understanding Media had appeared in 1964) might be inverted to useful effect where WORD RAIN is concerned. The message is the medium; in other words, the message is not purely or even actually semantic, “It comes with a room, light, a country, sky and weather,” as Gins writes of sentences encountered by WORD RAIN’s protagonist-reader. Given the ubiquity of computing in our own time, in the time in which I am writing this introduction, I think it is easier for a contemporary reader to grasp Gins’s relationship to writing, to script, as process. I see Gins’s composition in WORD RAIN as fundamentally cybernetic. As scholar Orit Halpern writes, “In cybernetic understandings, descriptions of processes always become sites for further production of new techniques of production rather than static descriptions; materiality, action, and concept are inseparable.”² Whereas modernist poetries tend to understand words as having thing-like qualities, Gins is engaged in imagining a message/word that behaves like a platform, receiver, or trampoline (all terms hers), a message that is in fact a medium, a conduit unstilled. Although it is, in some sense, sad to have to use words at all (and, in so doing, to delay the careening fluidity of sense), the act of reconfiguring the messaging capacity of words via “intimate philosophical investigations,” as WORD RAIN’s subtitle goes, offers more to the reader by way of agency than it ultimately disables, confines, or withholds. “The saddest thing is that I have had to use words,” Gins writes, as the titular “G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O.” The strange spelling of this pseudonym (a reference to the infamously melancholic star of Hollywood’s Golden Age) also indicates an acrostic set of “platforms,” as Gins notes in the novel’s third chapter. “G” is not merely a letter but, in Gins’s eccentric formulation, also indicates “grate or gas,” much as “E” is “energy,” and so on. These letters lead us not into meaning but into unstable materiality and process. Gins’s cybernetics is not instrumental, nor is her sadness lyrical. Rather, the melancholy of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O is “substantially insubstantial”; it is a description of a process, giving rise to further processes; a leave-taking and a gift—a sort of visionary cybernetics.

“You may look at everything. You will see only what I see. Look at this sentence. There is nothing on it. Now look at this sentence. I see a plate of desert ribbed with dunes held in place with drops of slime just above a layer of petrified tentacles. There is nothing in this sentence. I say I see a book in this sentence. Without me, it words the page; yet says nothing.

Words.”

Hannah Weiner: Pirates, from the series “Code Poems,” 1982.

THE LIST-LIKE POETIC texts I have selected from the archive seem to have existed as part of a longer work Gins titled “Transformatory Power,” or “Trans-P,” for short. In one of the most intriguing poems of the “Trans-P” series, “GHOSTING,” a narrative emerges by way of discrete parts (being “ON THE SUBWAY,” an “IMBROGLIO,” “TEA,” various actions and noises, concluding with a reflection on “LYING”). Yet this narrative, which seems to me to be at home in a sort of New Wave aesthetic, is inextricable from the work of arranging its items into a scenario, complete with actors. Note, too, that questions arise around the numbering system itself: The list begins not at “1.” but at “-1.,” and there are two numbers “17.,” the first of which has been left blank. Item “10.,” meanwhile, has been crossed out, and in item “21.,” the writer appears to attempt, halfheartedly, to bracket together a set of words typed out with a good deal of space between them. The very undertaking of establishing items within the form of the list is uncertain if not fraught, and the reader has a sense of the list-maker as an important character or narrator within the disjointed story of the poem/list. Nothing could be more Ginsian: for the act of writing is folded in to the ostensible content of the written work (i.e., the narrative “action”) in such a way that the two are hardly extricable.

Indeed, there are parallels between the poems of “Trans-P” and the schematic, recursive poems the artist Dan Graham was making around the same time, in the late 1960s, with the significant difference that while Graham was engaged in a sort of war of attrition with respect to meaning and context, Gins’s list poems invite infinite additions of meaning and context. Her writing here is schematic, yet requires that the reader not merely look at but also question the meanings of words; unlike Graham, Gins does not reduce words to their grammatical functions but rather encourages the reader to discover along with her what words will do, once they have been stripped bare of grammar. This is, after all, the affordance of a list: it provides structure and a kind of time, without resorting to the hierarchies of grammar-based sense. Lists are associative and sometimes freeing, playful. They also cannot help but evoke the deductive logic of a philosophical syllogism, an effect exploited by Gins to produce a sense of possibility and entailment in the poems of “Trans-P,” something along the lines of, if “-1. ON THE SUBWAY,” then, “1. IMBROGLIO.” In other words, the plot thickens and thickens, line by line, item by item.

Dan Graham: Poem Schema, 1966, from the series “Poem Schema,” 1966-69.

Gins’s refusal of strategies of linguistic evacuation employed by artists like Graham harkens back to the early rebus-based conceptualism of the poet Raymond Roussel (1877–1933), whose work had a profound influence on the Surrealists as well as Marcel Duchamp, particularly where Duchamp’s relationship to titles was concerned. As for Roussel, whose engagement with homophonic coincidences led him into lushly psychedelic fictional landscapes, Gins’s reaction to the arbitrary nature of the signifier is one of fascination, followed by a determination to explore this fascinating and slightly terrifying quality of words to its very limits.⁴ Gins’s interest in synesthetic effects and visions related to linguistic material is, thus, something she shares with Roussel. I believe this also has something to do with what I earlier termed her “visionary cybernetics,” an ardent desire to have signification carry on unfixed, via various media and means, in spite of words’ (sad) tendency to delay if not halt it. Gins seemed to experience language in an ecstatic way, as a series of energetic sites or platforms, but at the same time was a dedicated student, reader, and researcher. Although she followed paths of her own devising, she was largely systematic, after her own fashion, and understood her art as a process of learning, with roots in empiricist approaches.

¹ Hannah Weiner, “Trans-Space Communication,” 0 TO 9, vol. 6 (July 1969): 100. See also Patrick Durgin’s excellent Hannah Weiner’s Open House (Berkeley, CA: Kenning Editions, 2007).

² Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015), 57.

³ See Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My books and Other Writings, ed. Trevor Winkfield (Boston: Exact Change, 1995); John Tresch, “In a Solitary Place: Raymond Roussel’s Brain and the French Cult of Un-reason,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological & Biomedical Sciences, 35(2) 2004: 307-32.

Adapted from The Saddest Thing Is that I have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, by Lucy Ives.