The Best Art Books of 2023
Word count: 1826
Paragraphs: 22
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s in the coherence, we weep
(KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Walther König, 2023 )
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s latest exhibition catalogue turned artists’ book will look familiar to those who have followed Rasheed’s previous publications, all of which blend a photocopier and collage aesthetic with colorful and detailed footnotes, references, and layered snippets of found text and images. Raheed’s books give the sense that we are glimpsing into her artistic research process, but rather than guide us in, we are dropped right into the middle, meeting her at whatever place in her ongoing “learning” that she has decided to share. In the coherence, we weep accompanies Rasheed’s exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the book includes a curatorial essay by Sofie Krogh Christensen as well as several “conversations” between Rasheed and other artists and writers. These conversations take unusual forms as screenshots of text messages, tweets, and instagram posts, each with various annotations. Rasheed’s work asks again and again, how do we research, gather, interrogate, and make knowledge in the onslaught of data and media today? And what impression does our active engagement leave? The blue designs on the cover of the book can be scratched off and worn away by our hands as we flip, read, and use this artists’ book, leaving the impression of our active engagement. This book, as with the rest of Rasheed’s work, requires this active reading, rewarding those who dig deeply and continue questioning.
Richard Shiff’s Writing After Art
(David Zwirner Books, 2023)
For many of us who are in the fields of looking and writing on and about art, we’re aware that chance has always favored those whose minds are perpetually prepared. For many of us who have followed Richard Shiff’s writing on art as long as I have, beginning with his classic Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (1984), Doubt (Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts) (2008), Between Sense and de Kooning (2011), Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul (2023), just to name a few, it is commonly accepted that Shiff is a writer of pragmatic leaning with cogency and fertility.
In this long-waited volume Richard Shiff: Writing After Art, his first-ever selected writings, as well as our ever-first time to have the pleasure in reading them, the consistency of his patience and acute observation has never failed, however differences in the physiognomy of works of art from different genres and medium specifics. As he wrote in the introduction of this essential volume “The title Writing after Art alludes to the principle that guides my response to any body of work: critical writing should attain its rhetorical form only after the writer has been immersed in the materiality of the art and the mentality of the artists.” I particularly treasure what follows, “To the extent that I’m able to control my prejudices and methodological habits, the soul of each of my essays belongs as much to the other–the art and the artist–as it does to me. This is my romantic notion: a practice of “writing after art” ends in texts that have become collaborative.”
This selection of writings, twenty-eight essays in total, for twenty-four were commissioned essays written either for the artists’ career retrospectives in museums or a selection of work in commercial gallery, includes (in alphabetical order) Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, Georges Braque, Jim Campbell, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Suzan Frecon, Lucian Freud, Ellen Gallagher, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Jack Whitten, and Zeng Fanzhi. Again, in every one of these essays, with enduring rigor and eloquence, Shiff’s writing is a true testament of having welded a relationship between scholarship and the working lives of artists, for their made objects deserve thoughtful meditation on the complex nature of how in each case “inner freedom” gets expressed differently. Being thoroughly trained in semiology, sociology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis with profound curiosity and humility, Shiff’s writing elevates the dignity of art as a fundamental form of human communication hence our survival. Elegantly designed as intended for broad readership, including art historians, art critics, artists, among other lovers of art, this volume is a must-read experience with pleasure and discovery.
Ivy Zheyu Chen’s More Alive
(UPON, 2023)
Ivy Zheyu Chen’s More Alive is a poetic testament and tribute to the beauty and pain of being sensitive. This eight-page risographed zine unfolds in chunky and expressive oil pastel emojis paired with aphoristic musings. The sparse text is wry and elusive—touching upon the false enthusiasms of the workplace, the pressures to post and pose on social media, and the space between feeling just enough and way too much. Each emoji has a slant relationship to its corresponding words. “Being” is paired with an alien head; “sensitive” is illustrated with a snail; “Eighty” and “percent” are respectively represented with an octopus and a slice of pizza. These playful pairings of image and text give the zine a fresh and dynamic tone. In its endnote, More Alive asks its readers, “Do you think or feel.”
Simón Ramirez’s El libro que tiende a desaparecer
(Backbonebooks, 2023)
El libro que tiende a desaparecer, which translates to The Book That Tends To Disappear, by Simón Ramirez was published in January 2023 by Backbonebooks in an edition of 100. The elongated, delicate pages of thermal paper reveal a shoreline, frozen in time, yet continuous. Although the format evokes eternity, the thermal ink fades with exposure to light, eventually disappearing. The exceptionally thin, filmy paper slows down the pace at which a viewer can interact with the object itself, suggesting the book as a time-based work. Collected by institutions globally such as Mumok, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Joan Flasche Collection, El libro que tiende a desaparecer is also scheduled to be included at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City opening this winter.
Carla Williams’s Tender
(TBW, 2023)
Almost eighty self-portraits make up Tender, the result of fifteen years of self-exploration by Carla Williams. She was left to wonder where a likeness such as hers could be found, whether in popular culture or in the photographic history she was being taught in the 1980s, and in response to seeing it nowhere around her she endeavored to create one. Informed by the poses of Black women she saw in pornography magazines of the 1970s, along with the norms of the beauty industry and fashion photography, Williams experimented with, and exaggerated, this existing lexicon of representation for her own, intimate purposes. Brilliantly edited and sequenced by Paul Schiek and Catherine Symens-Bucher, Tender is a premier example of book design and production working to amplify the strength, clarity, and self-assurance of work that was, in this case, previously obscure.
New Ground: Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching
Esther Adler, Ed. (Museum of Modern Art, 2023)
After beginning his career as a master printer for Sam Francis, Jacob Samuel went on to collaborate with over 60 artists including Wangechi Mutu, Charline von Heyl, Jonas Wood, Barry McGee, Anish Kapoor, Josiah McElheny, and Marina Abramović. This catalogue stands separately from the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art as a comprehensive examination of Samuel’s deep collaborations with artists, the technical complexity of etching, and the status of the print portfolio as a physical and conceptual unit. A highlight of the volume is a selection of interviews with thirteen artists who have worked with Samuel, charting the sometimes-winding path between the birth of an idea and its execution in print. With its crisp images and concise text, this catalogue traces the collaborative process of printmaking with precision.
Thus Waves Come in Pairs: Thinking with the Mediterraneans
Barbara Casavecchia, Ed. (Sternberg, 2023)
Thus Waves Come in Pairs is an essay and poetry collection takes as its point of departure a conversation between artists Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal reflecting on their personal thinking on the Mediterranean Sea—from the land-locked Damascus to the sea-side Beirut. Extending from this conversation, the book touches on ways of situating knowledge within sea, with contributions by Jumana Emil Abboud, Omar Berrada, Barbara Casavecchia, Pietro Consolandi, Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano, Zeyn Joukhadar, Ibrahim Nehme, Giovanna Silva, and a foreword by Markus Reymann.
Individually and collectively, these texts resist holistic narratives of the sea, holding onto distinct, concentric conversations on its trans-locality, its resonances, and tempestuous discords from region to region, language to language. Centering the sea’s presence in Southwest Asia and North Africa, the book countervails narratives of European conquest, colonialism, and violence, not to obfuscate these histories but rather to reorient the conversation toward the human and non-human crises and interdisciplinary activism, research, creative practices unfolding in this vast space. At fewer than 200 pages, the book poignantly argues for the multiplicity of Mediterraneans, the fluidity of man-made borders as a sociopolitical construct, and how a borderless reality is possible.
Simone Leigh
Delmonico Books/Institute Of Contemporary Art (Boston, 2023)
Simone Leigh is the long-awaited first monograph of the American sculptor and multimedia artist. More than a catalogue, this aptly titled text spans Leigh’s 20-year career as an artist and interlocutor. Emulating the artist’s practice of gathering the voices of Black women, the 365 pages include the words of such scholars as Rizvana Bradley, Christina Sharpe, and Hortense Spillers, among many others. The monograph arrived shortly after Leigh’s paradigm shifting 2022 Venice presentation Sovereignty, in which she transformed the American pavilion with wood, clay, and raffia. In what is sure to be the first of many monographs, Simone Leigh reads much like a point along a continuum, or snapshot of a moving train. It is sure to be a definitive work of contemporary art historical scholarship, offering us insight into Leigh’s interdisciplinary artistic process, vivid images, and new ways to approach materiality.