The Brooklyn Rail

Celia Álvarez Muñoz’s art installations, artists’ books, and performances stretch back to the early 1980s. Yet, the recent monograph, Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding, which accompanied her retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, is the first to document her full career to date. Growing up in El Paso, Texas, Álvarez Muñoz’s work is very much about borders—or rather, in betweenness and dualism. Her art asks questions: What’s in between nations? What’s in between images and texts? Fittingly, this first comprehensive monograph is actually two books—bound in dos-à-dos binding that requires the books to share back cover boards, housed together in a bright yellow slipcase. One book is a more traditional exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays and installation images and the other is dedicated to her “Enlightenment” series (1980–85), published by her own press of the same title. Together, these volumes successfully make the case for Álvarez Muñoz’s work as “intertwined” conceptual art and storytelling, forms of artmaking often placed at odds.

The scholarly essays highlight this joining of conceptual and narrative strategy. Kate Green writes about one of Álvarez Muñoz’s earliest performances, a lecture she gave in graduate school that placed her own artwork as a mock Indigenous artifact: “Álvarez Muñoz’s audacious gesture in 1981 transformed the facts of an archeological find using the visual language of Conceptual art and the narrative power of storytelling.” A glyph related to this performance, which the artist created several years later, is the cover image for the slipcase. Green also cites another work, The Scream (1980), as “a compelling experiment in weaving together the tropes of storytelling with those of Conceptual art." This small black-and-white photobook combines photobooth self-portraits, typed texts, and scenic photographs to tell the story of a female artist showing up at a hotel in response to a newspaper ad for artists consignments. In this monograph, all the pages of The Scream are illustrated, first as a grid, followed by a few selected enlarged pages, giving the reader a chance to dive into Álvarez Muñoz’s texts in more detail.

The second volume focuses on her work in artists’ books and publishing, particularly the “Enlightenment” series. An essay by Isabel Casso explores “the multidimensional role of the book as both form and metaphor in the artist’s development of her conceptual and narrative art practice.” The ten books in the series are documented in full in this catalogue, front, back, and each page (legibly). This makes this volume a series of books within a book. The works showcase Álvarez Muñoz’s playful humor and innovative use of materials. Some include matches, most are encased in something—a wooden box or paper bag—and all feature image and text pairings that operate on multiple levels. It’s rare for a catalogue to dedicate such space to artists’ books, illustrating the importance of reading these works to Álvarez Muñoz’s practice.

While this catalogue does much to move beyond an exhibition catalogue in both design and content, I did miss one traditional aspect of an exhibition catalogue: a checklist. Artists’ books are especially hard to locate, especially ones that are unique, as many of Álvarez Muñoz’s are. A checklist with lenders and collections would have greatly added to this book’s already in-depth indexing of her work. Despite this omission, it stands as a valuable resource for reconsidering the narrative art of Celia Álvarez Muñoz’s work.