Celebrating F-read-om with John Berger

“a cautionary tale… royalties go to the Harlem United Community AIDS Center…”

For Freedom to Read Week (February 24-March 2) (http://www.freedomtoread.ca/), I’d like to highlight a somewhat recently challenged book as opposed to a ‘repeat offender’ like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Thus, I recommend To the Wedding (Pantheon Books, 1995) by novelist and art critic John Berger (of Ways of Seeing renown). In fall 2011, some parents of high school juniors in Murrieta Valley, California objected to the book being assigned reading based on its mature content. If you research the controversy online, you’ll read about the use of the f-word to describe sexual relations. What is not mentioned, curiously, is the erection a husband has for his new wife while watching her at their wedding, or two loving sex scenes worthy of rereading for their passion. I have to wonder if the unstated real concern is the arguably mature content of SIDA (the main character became HIV positive after sex on the beach with an escaped convict).

As a librarian, I must, and want to, protect the freedom to read. In this particular case, this impulse is intensified by the usefulness of such a cautionary tale (prophylactics were not mentioned in the beach scene) and by the fact that the book’s royalties go to the Harlem United Community AIDS Center (http://www.harlemunited.org/).

The book opens with an old man named Tsobanakos selling metallic accessories for prayer at a Greek market. A father selects a tin one for his daughter, eschewing the gold one because her medical condition is hopeless. Tsobanakos encounters Jean, the father, one more time and overhears him talking excitedly about his daughter Ninon’s wedding plans. He then imagines how their story plays out, and how it came to be.  

To the Wedding can be disorienting, between moving backward and forward in time and juggling different points of view (Ninon’s, her fiancée Gino’s, and those of her parents and Gino’s father, Federico). Maybe it’s a fitting structure for conveying the lack of control that exists with incurable disease.

Berger doesn’t dwell on Ninon’s depressed reaction to her diagnosis. With rich images like love letter fragments floating in a toilet bowl and writing like, “All, all, all, all, all I had has been taken” (p. 79), embellishment is unnecessary.

The book focusses on random moments devoid of meaning and those infused with meaning as characters travel to Venice for the wedding. The local colour of Jean travelling by motorbike from Modena, Italy contrasts Zdena, Ninon’s mother, Zdena, arriving by bus and boat from Bratislava, Czech Republic.

The wedding is imagined as a future event, where the couple’s joy is interspersed with glimpses into an even farther future where Ninon is “slowly abandoned by life” (p. 89).

As much as Ninon is terribly unlucky, she is also very lucky. Her parents want desperately to comfort her. Her mother buys a whistle for Ninon to mimic the birds outside Zdena’s home, and her father almost steals an ancient necklace from a museum because he is drawn to its protective qualities. When he picks out perfume for her, the store clerk notes that her own father doesn’t love her like Jean loves Ninon. Then there’s Gino, who couldn’t be sweeter. Even though she doesn’t want to date him anymore, he convinces her to get in a boat and then steers her around a rough current to prove to her that they can face anything. She in turn, learns the very essence of emotionally focussed therapy that eludes so many people: one chapter begins and ends with the three words that are arguably more important than ‘I love you’: “Hold me tight.”

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/12357/to-the-wedding-by-john-berger/

Jane Mount at Jen Bekman Gallery

“...wonderfully whimsical.”

I have a bad habit of breezing through galleries, but I had to tear myself away from Jane Mount’s My Ideal Bookshelf at Jen Bekman Gallery in Soho (http://archive.jenbekman.com/shows/jane-mount-ideal-bookshelf/). It’s an interesting counterpoint to the last opening I attended in New York: at Art in General, Meric Algun Ringborg displays uncirculated books from a particular library in Library of Unwanted Books. Mount’s show, in contrast, features painstakingly painted reproductions of beloved books recommended by creative luminaries. The inclusion of books written by the likes of Herman Hesse and Naomi Klein make the project resemble a university reading list, but authors like Gary Larson (cartoonist for The Far Side) prevent it from coming off as pretentious. As for recommenders, a range of public personalities is covered, from comedy producer Judd Apatow to Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of former band, Sonic Youth, to Bekman herself.

In the gallery, each painting has the recommender’s name written on the wall underneath. In the catalogue (Little, Brown and Company, 2012), text written in the first person sheds light on some of the tomes that made the shortlists. These accounts reveal that books tended to be included in the individual’s ideal bookshelf in relation to their vocation or as a marker of personal development. It’s not all serious though: a chef includes the books from his restaurant bathroom and a writer admits to picking up The Little Sister for the “hot chick” on the cover. (Side note: this reminds me of a recent news story about Anne of Green Gables, Canada’s precocious literary heroine, who was represented on a reprint as a buxom blonde instead of as a gangly redhead. And this Lucy Maud Montgomery classic is one of the featured titles). There are certainly stories left untold. Patti Smith, for example, says nothing of the fact that Allan Ginsberg, whose book is central to her collection, was a personal friend (who initially hit on her, mistaking her for a man). 

The books are reproduced as if on a shelf, either upright or stacked. Resembling little cityscapes, the books look--quite reasonably--like bastions of civilization. The shelf is not represented so the books float on a white background, as if by magic. Only the occasional cover faces out so the aesthetic is heavy on fonts. Mount even teases the viewer with some spines that lack text. With a cheerful colour palette; text aligned imprecisely; and contours that quiver here and there, the exhibition is wonderfully whimsical. If you are the type of person who walks into someone's home and immediately peeks at the bookshelves out of curiosity rather than judgment, chances are you will enjoy this exhibition.

Image: Ideal Bookshelf: Marilyn Minter, archival pigment print. Reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://issuu.com/cheimread/docs/031314_ghada_amer_trif?mode=window&pageNumber=1

Feminist Art Gallery: Healing through Agitation

“…‘we’ is no longer a dirty word.”—Allyson Mitchell

North Bay felt noticeably cooler on Friday, not because we’ve been in a deep freeze (which is true), but because Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue paid a visit to Nipissing University to talk about Toronto’s acclaimed Feminist Art Gallery.

“Now we get to say FAG, FAG, FAG all the time,” says Logue, referring to their acronym. Reflecting a queer sensibility, their stance—as Mitchell puts it—is, “Why would we want to be a winner in this hierarchy?” Logue elaborates on the need for an alternative to an art system favouring straight white men: “As a generation of women in our very late forties…enough is enough.” Simply put in their crocheted banners exhibited last May at the Tate Modern, “We can’t compete,” “We won’t compete,” We can’t keep up,” “We won’t keep down.” Much like graffiti artists, Logue says, “We’re healing through agitation.” 

As much as the gallery emerged “out of this place of anger” (Mitchell), its co-founders have a cheerfulness about them. An example that comes to mind is Logue interjecting with, “Snip, snip” as Mitchell spoke about film censorship. It’s a winning combination that seems to have permeated their entire approach to the gallery. Logue notes that even the heart-shaped cookie with the FAG acronym on their Facebook profile photo has a tending element. The same goes for the pairing of crocheted granny squares and agitated statements at the Tate. Mitchell notes, “By using the model of ‘tending towards,’ people don’t try to run away as fast.” If anything, people are running towards.

400 people attended the first opening in the 450 square foot exhibition space within their garage. “We didn’t know if we had enough toilet paper or cheesies!” Logue recalled. Leading up to that big night, they adopted a radical business model. They chose to forgo a business plan, because as Mitchell says, “That perfect moment may never happen.” Instead, they got together with about 100 people and asked what they would like to see in a feminist gallery. Following the shift that other feminist centres like La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse (Montreal) are experiencing, they decided against having a women-only space, feeling that it would be restrictive. Mitchell points out that ‘we’ is no longer a dirty word. It can reference, say, the 99%. Drawing a connection to the Occupy movement, Logue later clarified, “We are not for capitalism.” Rather than relying on public funding, FAG accepts donations from the public. Through this ‘matronage program’, they pay artist fees and travel stipends.To cultivate a sense of belonging, they kick off openings by serving home-cooked meals and their house is a billeting hot spot.

Initially, they planned to have about 10 per cent of the programming they currently coordinate. Suffice it to say, the project snowballed and administration now accounts for at least four hours of each day. Their “feral curating” or “fairal curating” is guided by intuition. Although there are elements of artist-run centres to be found (which is not surprising given their professional backgrounds), they don’t have a programming committee and they don’t accept submissions. With one ear to the ground, FAG shows artists recommended by the couple’s friends and colleagues. They basically give the artist or curator carte blanche and support. “We don’t choose feminist work,” says Logue. “We try to create a feminist approach to what curation is.”

In a time when intellectual property is guarded, it is refreshing to hear them endorse the appropriation of their model. The audience cheered when they suggested North Bay establish a feminist gallery. Major institutions like the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and the Tate Modern have taken note of their generosity of spirit. Mitchell says that they are still doing the math about whether these partnerships are worthwhile, but either way, she’s alright with being co-opted because she feels that FAG can co-opt the bigger institutions even better. For instance, at the Tate, they brought along eight other artists to deliver their workshop. Logue compared the strategy to putting a brick in the back door. With content like cruising and misandry in the mix at the workshop, Mitchell says, “If they don’t know what’s coming, they can’t really keep you out.”

Image: Banner (“We can’t compete”). Reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://ago.ca/artist-in-residence/fag-feminist-art-gallery

Amy Stoker at White Box Gallery

“The flag don't mean nothing.”—Susan Shapiro (1984)


Last night, I stopped by White Box in the Lower East Side of New York eight hours into Amy Stoker’s durational performance, X. Somewhat reminiscent of Ai Weiwei’s Remembering (2009), which used 9,000 student backpacks to spell out 'Remembering' in Chinese on Munich's Haus der Kunst to memorialize well beyond 9,000 child deaths in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, Stoker cut a 600 square foot American flag into the same number of pieces as the projected number of casualties in the US-Iraq War.

In spite of precision weapons meant to minimize so-called collateral damage (Brewer, 2009), the death total—according to Iraqi Body Count—is currently considered to be over 120,000. Arguably contributing to the Western desensitization to this figure is the media portrayal of Middle Eastern people as “…violent, and fanatically religious” (p. 234, Brewer, 2009). This bias dates back to 1958, when President Eisenhower described the Middle Eastern “campaign of hatred against us, not by the government but by the people” (p. 240, qtd. by Chomsky, 2003). The censorship of media images also weakens the intensity of this number; Americans have been spared “armless children, crushed babies, [and] stunned mothers” (p. 256, Brewer, 2009) that figured prominently in local media. One photojournalist was asked by Time Magazine to stop submitting pictures of wounded civilians. To approach this issue visually, then, is fitting. Also fitting is Stoker’s use of a flag to protest war, considering this pairing emerged during the Civil War and peaked in the Vietnam War (Welch, 2000).

The gallery’s Facebook page billed the event as the dismantling of a flag. It’s a curious description that evokes bombs instead of flags and sidesteps the term ‘flag desecration’ that is used in state and federal law, not to mention the Library of Congress classification system. Was this word choice a strategy to avoid controversy? It would be reasonable, based on what the School of the Art Institute of Chicago experienced in 1989 when Dread Scott placed Old Glory on the floor (like Stoker) in What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? Interventions from offended veterans; 7,000 protestors in a single day; and prohibitive municipal legislation ensued. Stoker’s undertaking could be considered equally risky. One viewer wrote in the guest book, “…what if the popo shows up? oy.” Public understanding of the repurcussions is murky at best**, in part because of shifting laws and inconsistent rulings in court. When Vice President Joe Biden was a Senator, he noted that a jury would treat differently a veteran who placed a flag on the ground in front of a monument that an obscure artist like Dread Scott (Welch, 2000).

In the US, dissidents have been beaten, jailed, and executed for flag desecration. Still, it’s an issue artists have embraced. High profile artists like the now deceased couple, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, have supported flag desecrators. Memorable works have been exhibited, like Kate Millet’s The American Dream Goes to Pot (1996) in which a flag is stuffed in the toilet (Welch, 2000). Amazingly, despite being a recurring motif in art, the flag has not lost its resonance. Here’s why.

The double negative in a defensive comment by a high school senior in Randolph, Massachusetts says it all. Susan Shapiro refused to stand for the national anthem in 1984 and afterwards said, “The flag don’t mean nothing” (qtd. in Welch, 2000). Semantically, one can infer—correctly—that the flag means something. President George Bush concurs: “To the touch, this flag is merely fabric. But to the heart, the flag represents and reflects the fabric of our nation—our dreams, our destiny, our very fiber as a people” (p. 129, qtd. in Welch, 2000). Sylvester (1996) similarly notes, “Certainly the flag is a quasi-religious entity to many Americans and has a collective corporeal status beyond that of object. It represents the body politic, as did the king in pre-revolutionary France....Any attack on the flag constitutes an attack on the body politic” (p. 7). At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, the perspective on the right is, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” while the perspective on the left is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, referring to flag protection and free speech.

Although strategies like defecation have been used, burning is the most common form of desecration. (In fact, flag burning made headlines last fall when Abdullah Ismail died after inhaling fumes from the charring of an American flag. Although it was in protest of a film, the fact that American-Pakistani relations deteriorated after the killing of Osama bin Laden (Greenwood, 2012) links it to Stoker’s area of concern). In my research, I did not find any examples of cutting a flag. The closest I found was prominent hippie Abbie Hoffman painting the Vietnamese flag on his back and wearing a shirt with an image of the American flag that said, “I’m more American than you.” His plan, which worked, was that the police would rip it off, making them the culprits. To understand how deeply such an act of defiance affects the American psyche, consider one man’s comment in 1970 to a news reporter. He said that he would kill his own son “without compunction” if he were to rip an American flag (p. 103, qtd. in Welch, 2000).

Stoker’s performance relates to Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. Ono’s performance involved sitting on a stage on multiple occasions while members of the audience removed pieces of her clothing with scissors. Bryan-Wilson (2003) argues that Cut Piece was a war protest, citing as evidence photographs of Hiroshima survivors whose clothing was blasted into pieces. The pieces Stoker cut were initially as small as these smithereens. Laid in rows of alternating red and white to maintain the pattern of the flag, they became gradually larger over time, giving viewers an incentive to return to White Box because the end result could only be predicted to a degree.

While rich connections can be drawn between X and works like Cut Piece or What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? as well as to the history of flag desecration, what hardly passes for an artist statement on Stoker’s website suggests that these links are coincidental. Unlike more substantial statements (Canadian Scott Waters’ comes to mind because of the comparable subject matter), her site simply says that her work addresses “difficult topics surrounding war and the military” (http://www.amystoker.com/index.html/bio.html). It’s as brief as her Twitter self-description as “photographer, video performance artist of all things war and the military” (https://twitter.com/jokerstoker). Unfortunately, no statement was visible in the gallery. Perhaps I'm expecting too much: as Rubin (1994) noted, Jasper Johns ushered in the American flag as a viable subject in contemporary art and he was tight-lipped about his concept.

The two-day performance continues today, from noon to 8 pm.


**To the best of my understanding as a lay person without any legal expertise, statute 136d of General Business Law in New York State would prohibit the cutting of a flag for artistic protest, while the Constitution would defend it.

SOURCES:

Susan Ann Brewer, Why America Fights. Oxford University Press. 2009.

Julia Bryan-Wilson. “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Oxford Art Journal. 26(1), 99-123.

Noam Chomsky, Middle East Illusions. Rowman and Littlefiled Publishers, Inc. 2003.

Faine Greenwood, “Pakistani Protester Dies From Smoke Inhalation After Burning the US Flag.” The Global Post. Retrieved from http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/pakistan/120918/pakistani-protester-dies-smoke-inhalation-after-b, September 18, 2012

David S. Rubin, “Changing Perspectives on the American Flag.” In Old Glory, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. 1994.

David Sylvester. Jasper Johns Flags: 1955-1994. Anthony d'Offay Gallery. 1996.

Michael Welch, Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest. Aldine de Grutyter. 2000.

Image: reproduced 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: http://bpigs.com/diaries/what-did-i-miss/what-did-i-misswhat-did-i-not-miss-new-york-sunday-jan-27

When Women Were Birds

“…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…”—Terry Tempest Williams

The night I planned to attend a fundraiser for feminist bookstores in Canada and the US at the now defunct Toronto Women’s Bookstore, I gave up, which is a shame because I wanted to blog about the event. Once I heard the performer—already half an hour late—would be at least another half hour late, I walked to a different independent bookstore in frustration. Cheekily, I found myself drawn to a book there whose theme is the absence of content.

Terry Tempest Williams’ memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (Sarah Crichton Books, 2012) is the author’s heartfelt attempt to extract meaning from three shelves’ worth of empty journals bequeathed to her by her mother. Even more curious is the fact that on her deathbed, Diane Dixon Tempest made her daughter promise not to read them while Diane was alive.

At first, I wondered if the empty journals were too simple a metaphor for the female experience. The day I started reading When Women Were Birds, I caught the holiday classic, The Sound of Music, on television. My ears perked up when Rolf—the dashing but dastardly suitor of 16-year-old Liesl—sang, “Your life, little girl, is an empty page that men will want to write on.” I stand corrected: the metaphor is indeed apropos.

The premise is introduced immediately, with Diane dying right away, so the reader doesn’t get a chance to become attached to Diane or to feel Terry’s loss. It works because on the surface, the book is a tribute to her mother, but ultimately it is an autobiography, not a biography. Williams portrays her mother not as a solitary character but as a partner. Their bond is touching but arguably idealized with memories like her mother drawing a rose petal bath for Terry at the onset of menstruation.

A feminist memoir, When Women Were Birds is about finding a voice—as a Morman woman, as a near victim of a male strangler, and as a former teacher who was almost fired for being an environmentalist.

Art provides a backdrop for her musings, from having a meaningful conversation while walking along Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to contemplating the act of confession in an Italian church with Domenico Ghirlandaio paintings. Works like Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and Kazimir Malevich’s White on White function as a more direct vehicle for interpretation too. She concludes, “…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…” (p. 60).

The central motif is not art, but birds. As much as the book is a tribute to Terry’s mother, it is a tribute to ornithology. The characters in ancient Nushu (translated from Chinese as ‘women’s writing’) she describes, in which a bird’s head and a woman’s head share the same symbol, make Terry’s contemporary symbolism seem somehow predestined. In the book, birds take on a mystical role: Terry meets her husband at a bookstore because of their shared love of field guides, and she sees a hummingbird—her African friend’s favourite bird—when she learns of her death. When she quotes Jenny Holzer’s truism, “Myths make reality more intelligible,” it’s fitting.

It is beautifully written: the prose morphs into poetry and stream of consciousness with confidence. Its design is also noteworthy. The front and back inside cover feature an image of overlaid feathers in greyscale, with a mock label at the front that beckons the reader with, “THIS JOURNAL BELONGS TO ____________________.” Additionally, 12 empty pages follow the author’s discovery of the enigmatic journals totaling 54, the age at which her mother died.

With the New Year upon us, I’d like to close by quoting a friend of the author. Stephen Trimble co-published Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, a chapbook designed for Congress, with Terry. Not knowing Bill Clinton would single it out for its significance, a member of the press told Trimble that the book was a waste of time. He responded, “Writing is always an act of faith” (p. 143).

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250024114

Office Girl

“…two hipster wannabe artists in pre-millennial Chicago falling in like/love…”

On Monday, I chickened out. For the first time this winter, I left my car downtown and took the bus to campus up the big, imposing (at least to those of us driving standard) hill because I was shaking after driving 20 kilometres below the speed limit on packed snow. When I got home, I made a cup of tea and told my husband, “I just want to read my book and forget about winter.” But what was the first sentence in Joe Meno’s Office Girl (2012, Akashic Books), which I got through interlibrary loan that morning? “Anyway it’s snowing.” Sigh.

‘Sigh’ sums up my reaction to Office Girl. This is not to say the tale about two hipster wannabe artists in pre-millennial Chicago falling in like/love (depending on each character’s perspective) is not enjoyable, but it is a downer. Their lives are unenviable (they live in crummy apartments and meet in a small Muzak call centre) and their emotional states are unstable, so you just know there is not going to be a happy ending.

The first chapter follows Odile’s life and the second chapter follows Jack’s life. The urge for them to meet demonstrates how wired we are to want romance in books, films and real life, even when it is a bad idea. These two should not get together. Odile, who has been spurned by a married man, desperately avoids love because she’s a pessimist. Jack, meanwhile, should be a pessimist because he’s getting divorced at the young age of 25, but he’s desperately seeking love. Time could be on their side if they had a chance to heal and mature, but Odile is hell-bent on moving to New York.

If I weren’t an artist, this book would make me feel seriously irritated about art, because I would probably confuse art with self-involved artists. Reading sentences like “Odile announces that what they’re really missing is a manifesto” (p. 193) make me clench my teeth. The brazen Odile invites Jack to be part of a two-person art movement that does outrageous things in public like wearing ghost costumes. They are intoxicated by their nonsensical collaborations, probably because on their own, they were blocked. Jack, an art school graduate, has done nothing with a stack of tapes made over four years with a handheld recorder of everything from the sound of a tiger roaring at the zoo to the silence of a glove lying in the snow. Odile admits that in art school, when she made things like a penis-shaped lamp, her work felt useless. After dropping out, she graduates to defacing posters with x-rated graffiti. 

Although clearly interested in sex, Odile resists intimacy with Jack. The majority of their relationship is spent skirting romance, which makes for a rather charming friendship where creativity attempts to mask sexual tension. When they consummate their relationship, it’s the best four days of Jack’s life, but it’s the beginning of the end for Odile. Once Odile packs her bags, all Jack is left with is a sketchbook he bought at her garage sale and a dirty magazine they made with self-portraits. Its title, scrawled by Odile, is ALPHONSE F. IS IN LOVE. Alphonse F. is their shared alter ego (like the non-sound of a glove in the snow, it is a source of potential irritation to the reader), but it’s hard not to feel touched by her admission of love, however quirky and fleeting.

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/office-girl/

From Conceptualism to Feminism

 

“When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.”

Lucy R. Lippard may claim that being a library page at the MoMA is the only real job she’s ever had, but as a freelance writer, art critic, and curator, she has worked undeniably hard. It’s evident from her list of accomplishments, and in her comment that editing other people’s texts resembles being on vacation compared to writing herself. For anyone who thinks curators sit back and let other people do the heavy lifting, get this: for her so-called Numbers exhibitions—the subject of a new book—she did favours like source out and shoot 400 photographs of purposefully mundane Seattle horizons for artist Robert Smithson who couldn’t be there to do it himself. Curiously, each Numbers show was named for the host city’s population and Canada was lucky to have one. First came 557,087 (Seattle), then 955,000 (Vancouver), then an overlooked 2,972,453 (Buenos Aires), followed by a touring c. 7,500 (Valencia, California). The fact that the third show was so overlooked (Pip Day highlights the absence of press coverage and the shortage of archival material) demonstrates the importance of publishing books on the history of exhibitions.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 (Afterall Books, 2012) is the third title in the Exhibition Histories series published in association with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Van Abbemuseum. It looks not so much at her shift in focus from conceptualism to feminism as the blending of the two: her final Numbers show was still heavy on idea-based art but it included only women artists, some of whom made work with a feminist bent and others who didn’t.

Lippard’s activist impulse was rooted in time she spent in Argentina in 1968 before the Buenos Aires show to jury an art award. It’s hard to imagine being exposed to the type of art being produced there without being affected. For example, Tito Fernández confiscated gallery visitors’ belongings and banned conversation inside the venue to comment on the police state. Characterizing the ‘dematerialization’ of art was Graciela Carnevale’s Acción del encierro (Confinement Action), for which she invited people to a gallery and without forewarning them, locked them inside until someone on the street broke a window an hour later and they escaped. The artists worked in solidarity, at one point burning their works collectively to protest police censorship of a single artist’s (Roberto Plate’s) work and reading a manifesto-like statement at a conference after cutting the electricity. When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.

I almost didn’t review this book because Conceptual Art really isn’t my bag (so many ropes, so many mirrors!). Much of Conceptual Art is text-based (Nancy Wilson Kitchel said it best: “My work would be different if you couldn’t read”) and I find myself agreeing to a point with Peter Plagens’ scathing Artforum review of Conceptual Art’s writing quality. Ultimately, though, I was won over by coverage of the many thought-provoking pieces, like John Latham’s Still and Chew (1966/67). A part-time art instructor at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, Latham was frustrated by the scholarly high-fiving of critic Clement Greenberg, so he checked out the school library copy of Greenberg’s Art and Culture and proceeded to make a unique protest. He invited students, critics, and artists to chew a page from the book and spit it out in a flask. It was chemically treated, and when Latham received an urgent overdue book notice, he had the audacity to present the then liquid solution to the librarian, poker-faced. The next day he was fired.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 includes a main essay by Cornelia Butler, interviews with Lippard and several exhibiting artists, and reproductions of selected index cards that were used in place of traditional catalogues for the exhibitions.