The sensual pleasure of ceramics, the broad scope of the Venice Biennale, and the sharp insights of two ground-breaking critics top this list of art books with smarts.
All the World’s Futures: 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
By Okwui Enwezor, 960 p., Marsilio, $130.
If the Venice Biennale wasn’t on your agenda this year, the paperback, two-volume catalogue for the sprawling exhibition makes for fascinating and relatively affordable armchair viewing. Since 1895, the biennial has functioned as an art Olympics of sorts, showcasing hundreds of artists from around the world in national pavilions as well as a central exhibition organized by a high-profile guest curator. Nigerian-born, Munich-based Okwui Enwezor — widely regarded as one of the world’s most politically engaged and astute curators — helmed this year’s installment. At nearly 1,000 pages, the catalogue is a bible-like guide to the artists included in Enwezor’s show, many of whom grapple with questions of social justice in spheres of race, gender, labor and rule of law, as well as those selected to represent specific countries — like video and performance artist Joan Jonas, who represented the United States in an exhibition organized by MIT. Along with glimpses into far-flung art worlds from Albania to Zimbabwe, not to mention Iraq, Iran and Syria, the catalogue offers insight into why Enwezor chose to make a book — a performative reading of Karl Marx’s treatise on capitalism and its discontents, Das Kapital — the centerpiece of his exhibition.
The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
By Edmund de Waal, 401 p., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.
De Waal is the unusual visual artist — a ceramic sculptor — who is as gifted a writer. His first book, The Hare with Amber Eyes, melded memoir and art by tracing how a collection of precious Japanese netsuke (miniature sculptures that function as kimono fobs) was passed down through five generations of his European Jewish family, even as Nazis confiscated their other possessions. The White Road is de Waal’s homage to porcelain, the medium of choice for his subtle installations of handmade ceramic vessels in shades of white. The book follows his journey through present-day travel and historical research, exploring the point of origin of Chinese porcelain production (Jingdezhen, China) and the cultural milieus where it became an obsession to simulate or collect the translucent, eggshell-like pottery, from the Middle East to Holland and Versailles. Along the way de Waal meditates, in richly descriptive passages, on the pleasures of sculpting wet porcelain clay, shaping forms out of the temperamental substance, and handling centuries-old ceramics. Anyone who has ever been gripped by the love of a foreign object, material or a place can relate.
Portraits: John Berger on Artists
544 p., Verso, $44.95.
At 89, British art critic, novelist and poet John Berger still turns out stories about visual art with the vivid descriptions and psychosocial insights that made his 1972 book and BBC television series Ways of Seeing a sensation. His latest collection of musing responses to art, Portraits, homes in on (mostly) individual artists and their contributions to visual art-making. As ever, underpinning Berger’s writing is a burning desire to capture in words the “work” that artworks perform on us as viewers, the patterns of thought they encourage or disrupt, the renewal of vision they engender, the state of personal or world affairs they poignantly encapsulate. Portraits weaves in and out of millennia, beginning with a bucolic descent into the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings and ending with Berger’s account of stumbling upon a politically charged installation by 32-year-old Palestinian artist Randa Mdah. Along the way, he alights on artistic sacred cows from Renaissance masters to Frida Kahlo and Jackson Pollock, whose self-destructive alcoholism and convention-busting abstraction Berger ties together in a reading of Pollock’s paintings as artistically “suicidal.” Agree or disagree, you’ll find yourself admiring Berger’s style.
The Argonauts By Maggie Nelson, 160 p., Graywolf Press, $23.
How would loving someone transgendered change your own perception of self and sexuality? The Argonauts, a memoir that fuses personal narrative with theory and art criticism, voyages through Nelson’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge, née Harriet. (The title alludes to the Argo, a famed ship of antiquity that underwent such harrowing adventures as to completely alter its original identity yet still be recognizable.) Nelson, who teaches creative writing at CalArts, is revered for her genre-bending books on aesthetic topics. The Argonauts is her most vulnerable, a deep dive into unexpected desire, semi-illicit pleasures (why women’s anal pleasure gets so little cultural airtime is a major thread) and, ultimately, the wondrousness and banality of conception, motherhood and married life. Nelson seamlessly interweaves snippets of theory on love, sexuality and selfhood with her reactions to works of art about similar concerns, made principally by artists whom Nelson knows. A memorable example is AL Steiner’s Puppies & Babies, a photo installation of unabashedly adorable snapshots of queer family life.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2015.