Book Review: The Documents of Contemporary Art Series

Anyone who knows me or has sat through almost any talk or workshop I’ve ever done has heard me say that "...commenting your Max patch is the act of writing a love note to your future self." Despite the playful formulation, I think it’s very good advice, but it also implies something else that I’d like to say a bit about.

It’s that notion of your future self – that idea that you’re engaged not only in making something in the present, but mindfully dealing with yourself over time. In addition, you’re not alone, either – you have the great good fortune to be surrounded by like-minded persons engaged in the same practice, who – together – create the emergent communities in which you work.

And finally, your community also links backwards across time – not only to who you were, but to communities of men and women who, in their own way, stood where you stand now. For me, that’s a succinct summary of why a history (beyond my own) matters – I have the chance to join a huge party already in progress, full of best friends I have yet to meet who have secrets and advice to share. Some of them are on the Forum or on social media for sure, but others of them have fled the occupied city of Paris in the 1940s to shelter with their Surrealist compatriots in Marseilles, where there’s a seat at a bistro, a deck of cards, an Absinthe glass, a spoon, and a sugar cube waiting for me, along with some good stories and great advice.

From time to time, we’ve taken the Book Review newsletter postings as an opportunity to spotlight texts that are great for orienteering – getting the lay of the land for the area you’ve chosen to work in, and picking up some tips on navigating that terrain from those who have travelled along similar paths. Those books have focused on histories of experimental music practice, overviews of art and electronic media, oral histories and first-person narratives, and geolocal histories of how the music you love came to be. There’s another category out there, too – discussions that center around areas of common interest. The Forum or newsletter you’re reading right now is an example of that, in a narrow and focused sense. I’d like to introduce you to a series of books that take that idea in another direction: focusing on larger areas of discussion in contemporary art.

In conjunction with MIT Press, London’s Whitechapel Gallery has assembled a fantastic collection of volumes that take as their subject a specific idea, area of work, or feature of contemporary art practice and created anthologies that seek to engage with it.

The list is huge, and extends in all kinds of interesting directions. While I can’t possibly guess which of these subjects might be your creative or critical (or even curatorial, I suppose) rabbit hole, I’d like to single out two volumes in the series that I suspect would be of interest to readers in the Max theme park.

You may recognize the name Edward Shanken – in a previous book review, I spoke highly of his Phaidon anthology on Electronic Arts as rising above the usual catalog of examples and trying to find connections, common themes, and approaches, and to engage in thought about those connections. For this book series, he’s taken on the task of putting together an anthology on the subject of systems art. I think it’s another winner – it takes you from some of the earliest mid-20th century work and thinking about Cybernetics and systems theory and AI through to Jack Burnham’s canonical late late sixties writing on the subject of systems and art for Artforum to the places we find ourselves working now, and connects the practice across media (architecture, music, sculpture), as well. I was particularly struck while working through the readings that the authors were, in their own time, talking to and about each other, and many of the later writers, in their turn, quoted and discussed those who came before. Instead of a listing of generative works and their interaction with contemporary culture, this book felt like sitting down at a family reunion with a photo album on my lap.

Caleb Kelly’s volume on sound provides a similarly diverse and rich look at the territory of “sound art,” and does so less from an explicitly “musical” approach than many approaches to the subject have done before – in a way, you could say that his approach as an editor follows what writers and critics around the turn of the century were calling the sonic turn - work and approaches that are often extramusical in the way they approach sound. Questions of the phenomenology of sound art are as likely to be a topical as musical form or a musical form. Indeed, this book sets a big table where Jacques Attali, Luigi Russolo and Michel Chion share table space with Ryoji Ikeda, Maryanne Amacher, and Carsten Nicolai. As such, the book’s broader approach might make it a more interesting approach to the field. If I were teaching, I’d be inclined to seriously consider using Caleb Kelly’s volume on Sound as the text for a sound art class – as an overview and introduction -the only other book on my list would be Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner's Audio Culture (I’ll be looking at the revised edition of that one in a coming review, so stay tuned….).

Just for fun, I thought I’d end this overview with a giant grid of book covers for the series (and it’s not the whole series, either). It should give you a look at the kinds of subject matter this series on contemporary art tries to stake out. As a worthy thought experiment, I’d take any two titles here that spark your curiosity and set yourself the task of reading both of them at the same time as interleaved sections – it’ll be bound to generate some interesting lines of thought.