What We Read in 2008
Photo by Kristine Larsen
Published: December 1, 2008
Svetlana Alpers Art historian, Velázquez expert, sufferer of no fools
Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, & Rodin This is not, as the title might suggest, a vengeful account of long-suffering wives mistreated by their artist husbands, who, therefore, turn out not to be so great after all. Instead, it is an eye-opening book — as social history, as a proposal about the condition of the making of art — in which the model-wives (is a pun intended?) are treated with nuance as collaborators in their husbands' lives and works.
Clouds appear in art (think of Giovanni Bellini, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and, of course, Constable) and in nature, but often they literally pass us by. This oblong paperback — illustrated with wonderful color photographs of clouds informatively arranged according to the accepted classifications — got me to attend anew to clouds in the sky and also to the ways painters have painted them.
My taste for novels is admittedly a specialized one. This novel is memorable for its descriptions of places, particularly the streets, the lights, the offices, and the vacant lots turned into the playing fields of New York City. As I remarked to a photographer friend, if you are looking for motifs, read Netherland. 
David Levi Strauss
The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell Who else would have the chutzpah to call a book of selected works The ÜberReader? But Ronell is the überreader, and she will überraschen and überreden you, for real. She is the one writer who has brought Derrida's spirit to bear in an American context, whether analyzing television, Valerie Solanas, or Heidegger on Hölderlin. She's a medium of extraordinary powers, and luminous apparitions do attend, from cover to cover. Editor Diane Davis is right to describe this book as "a kind of gateway drug." Pick it up. It'll blow your mind.
Blaser is one of the great poets of the last half of the 20th century, and his critical prose is incandescent. The Fire ignites a thrilling conversation about poetics (the study of how things are made) and the contest for the real that is also, as editor Nichols writes, "an intense reading of the postmodern that winds its way through 50 years of cultural history to arrive at an alternative view of the arts."
Over the last year, I've seen this novel lying around in more painters' studios than any other book, and I take this as a good sign. "I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists," Bolaño writes. "I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way." His masterpiece is a page-turning tale of brilliant and alienated youth for the permanently brilliant and alienated.
Liam Gillick
The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art Accompanying a major exhibition at Bard College and containing texts by T .J. Demos, Maurizio Lazzarato, Jörg Heiser, and others, this book focuses on the rise of the documentary tendency within contemporary art and how it can offer a site of resistance and autonomy within the cultural field. A compelling read.
This exhibition at Sala Rekalde in Bilbao last year brought together Mathias Poledna, Martin Beck, Pia Rönicke, and others in an exhibition that deconstructed formalism, notions of the future, and how to archive the semiotics of the built world. While also concerned with documentary, the exhibition and accompanying book are unique for facing up to the formal qualities of presented information rather than focusing on the content alone.
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