book review
I had the pleasure of reading quite a few remarkable books this year. I had the additional pleasure of reviewing a number of them for Art Spiel.
I reviewed Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made the World, Dr. Todd Boyd’s sweeping and lushly illustrated account of hip hop history, published by Phaidon, back around its release date in February. You can read my full review here: “Even Greater Days: Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made the World”.
I reviewed nine more books in early October in a piece called “Fall Reads: Nine to Note”. Titles featured in that piece, encompassing a range of genres and disciplines including fiction, poetry, art, philosophy, sociology, and literary studies, many of them in translation, are Set My Heart on Fire, by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Helen O’Horan; Spatriati, by Mario Desiati, translated by Michael F. Moore; Faraway the Southern Sky, by Joseph Andras, translated by Simon Leser; Softly Undercover, by Hanae Jonas; Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art, Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by Evan Moffitt; The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques, by Gemma Padley; How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body, by Matthew Beaumont; Slow Narrative across Media, edited by Marco Caracciolo and Ella Mingazova; and Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip, by Alex Beringer.
Those two articles comprise many of the more noteworthy books I read in 2024. To provide a fuller account of my favorites among this year’s reads, I’ll top those off with brief reviews of several volumes I enjoyed in the past couple months, and on a couple others I read early this year that have remained firmly lodged in my mind. Fiction, sculpture, photography, philosophy, and critical theory are in the mix here. Common threads are transitions, transpositions, and transmissions. Enjoy.
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Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only and Miles Harvey’s The Registry of Forgotten Objects aren’t just two of the most outstanding volumes of fiction I read this year. They’re among the most exceptional I’ve read in years and years, not least because each book was my introduction to the author’s work. To say they both blew me away is wholly true in a figurative sense. But I’d have to qualify that by adding that they blew me away in very different ways by drawing me all the way in.
You’ll find yourself swept with the swiftness into the centripetal swirl of Vigdis Hjorth’s breathtaking and formidably focused novel in the opening pages of If Only, just as soon as protagonist Ida initiates – incidentally if not accidentally, and absolutely impetuously – an immediately obsessive love affair with Arnold, whom she happens to meet at an academic conference, then happens to invite up to her room. They make love, at least sort of, but sort of is enough. She’s married with kids. He’s married with kids. No matter. She lets her family dismantle quickly. He doesn’t. No matter. And so it all begins – from fling to tryst to recklessly obsessive love affair without either party paying much mind to the increasingly devastating nature of the consequences, or to the rocky turbulence of their destructive rapport fueled by the fluctuating forces of allure and fear, lust and loathing, love and hate. Yet did the real Ida initiate all this, or did she let some other form of herself initiate it in defiance of herself? Did she invite Arnold up to her room, or did she let him lure her into letting herself do so? Is their fraught relationship abusive, suffocating, and wrong? Or are the maddening swings between impassioned extremes just the true nature of consummate love? You’ll find yourself posing similarly exasperating rhetorical questions right alongside Ida as she does so incessantly. And yes, this is just the beginning. You’re already swept into the thrall of Ida’s cognitive tumult, and its feverish churn is relentless – and also, somehow, irresistible. If you’ve noted a certain march of mania in the present paragraph, then just wait until you step into If Only. Let it lure you into reading it with eyes wide open. Remind yourself to blink.
If you were to tell me you weren’t intrigued to read Miles Harvey’s short stories gathered into The Registry of Forgotten Objects on the strength of the title alone, I wouldn’t believe you. Yet I’d assure you all the same that Harvey’s book, the author’s impressive debut work of fiction, fully lives up to the sense of hazy reminiscence, soulful longing, moody nostalgia, and ambiguous mystique its title seems to suggest – from the opening story of scandal, mystery, love, and conspiracy in a small town, to the fantastical narrative that closes out the collection, which is the one that carries the book’s title and brings many of the other stories’ details, characters, and objects into ultimate yet not closed-circle confluence. Indeed, such confluence is among the book’s greatest charms, as characters and objects float freely, drift apart, then flow back together in subtle ways from one story to the next – albeit never in a forced or contrived manner, and not in a way that compromises the strength and autonomy of individual stories. Harvey’s touch is light, his prose is delightfully elegant, and his imagination is capacious – and his handling of various compositional styles and forms just always feels unwaveringly right. To read the interwoven narratives of The Registry of Forgotten Objects is to feel yourself, too, become gradually woven into their warp and weft. It all amounts to a very fine fabric to tease apart as the stories linger in your mind.
Vigdis Hjorth, If Only, translated by Charlotte Barslund, Verso Books
Miles Harvey, The Registry of Forgotten Objects, Mad Creek Books
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At a glance, Alice Connew’s Joyriders and Ron Tarver’s The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America might not seem to share much common ground. Yet both volumes of photography furnish similarly intimate glimpses into lesser-known cultural milieus. They’re both meticulously designed and strike celebratory tones. And they both happen to provide winsome, sympathetic visions of ostensibly anachronistic subcultures of riding.
Ron Tarver’s book is new, but his overall project of documenting Black cowboys and African-American cowboy culture in general, in the many and various urban and rural settings where they’ve long thrived, is not. As Tarver recounts in his opening essay, he first conceived of the project in the early 1980s while working as an editorial photographer in Philadelphia, one of a number of urban areas where Black cowboys have a long and rich heritage. Many of the images in the book were captured there: a young cowboy dunking a basketball in a back alley a few yards from his steed; a half dozen riders crossing a busy intersection on the city’s south side; a cowgirl in rodeo garb using the side-view mirror of a trailer-toting range truck to adjust an earring. The book’s dozens of other similarly arresting photographs, all hailing from early to mid-1990s, were taken in numerous other cities and towns around the U.S., including Oakland, New York, San Antonio, Houston, Stillwater, Okmulgee, Robbins, and Kankakee. An additional essay by historian Art T. Burton provides an expansive historical context for the legacy of Black cowboy culture in those settings and a number of others, as well as descriptions of the various social circles, rodeos, parades, and celebrations that have long endured there. Country western culture has seen a significant resurgence in recent years, in the U.S. as well as abroad. The greater visibility of Black cowboy culture has been part of that trend, thus making Tarver’s new book especially timely.
There are no horses in Alice Connew’s Joyriders, but roaring engines whose forces are measured in horsepower are certainly present. Connew’s sharply designed, sparely adorned yet beautifully assembled book is the result of the New Zealand-based photographer’s years-long project of documenting women motorcycle riders, primarily within the context of an international gathering of riders called Petrolettes, a European motorcycle festival for women, founded by Irene Kotnik in 2016. Connew’s tightly curated, almost audibly dynamic images are full of vigorousness and vitality, muscle and gusto, attitude and charm. Riders cruise along in parade-like processions and zip into blurs on open roads and in races. There’s also plenty of prideful posing astride trusty bikes. Of particular intrigue in a number of Connew’s cleverly composed photographs, all taken in and around Berlin, is their setting in an unnamed industrial wasteland, where the oxidized crusts, caked-up soots, taut cables, and hulking pulleys and gears on almost preposterously gargantuan, dilapidating, presumably long-since spent machines lend complementary palettes, and a certain analogousness of linearities, to the riders and their bikes. Connew’s book concludes with a compelling essay by Emma Jones, in which the writer underscores the sense of ‘radical presence’ as paramount to a philosophy of riding. It entails a sense of rebelliousness, too, and freedom and joy. And it’s indeed a joy to ride alongside Connew’s joyriders in Joyriders.
Ron Tarver, The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America, George F. Thompson Publishing
Alice Connew, Joyriders, GLORIA Books
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Great Women Sculptors and Luciano Fabro: Reinventing Sculpture are both beautifully designed, lushly illustrated, satisfyingly hulking volumes. They both also furnish ample material to fill in certain gaps in art history while laying groundwork for more research to come.
Compiled by the editors at Phaidon as the third volume in their esteemed The Art Book series, Great Women Sculptors is a wonderful follow-up to Great Women Painters and Great Women Artists. Like those books, this new one features hundreds of artists spanning several generations – from well-known historical figures to young artists working today – and provides images of emblematic works by each, accompanied by brief critical and biographical texts contributed by several dozen art writers. Also like those books, Great Women Sculptors is not intended to be definitive or comprehensive in any way. It’s more about providing platforms for inclusivity and springboards for further research so as to foster and inspire more outlets for the same in the future. As the editors note in their preface, this book “is a declaration of the long and rich history of women artists that honors sculpture’s invitation to imagine new possibilities of creating and experiencing the world.” That’s quite a mandate, but Great Women Sculptors responds to it quite well.
Luciano Fabro: Reinventing Sculpture, Margit Rowell’s exceptionally splendid monograph on the Italian artist, theorist, and widely beloved pioneer of the Arte Povera group of visionary creatives, is both comprehensive and not. Although to the extent that it’s not, that might be a good thing. In Rowell’s telling, Fabro’s stated wish a couple decades ago was for a volume about his work to feature all of his critical and theoretical writings on art, primarily, rather than a book of images and various types of texts by various contributors, even if his own texts were also among them. He also thought his desired volume should run about 1,000 pages. Rowell wasn’t convinced his plan was a very promising one, but the project was sidelined anyway for other reasons. And then, in 2007, Fabro passed away. As such, once Rowell got to work on this book, the idea was to merge his critical voice into the text as much as possible, while also providing ample outside critical context for readers to discover how crucial Fabro was to his generation of Italian artists – sculptors in particular, of course – and how foundational he was to the Arte Povera group, so that they could then come to understand how he also stood apart from, at times in resistance to, those very same milieus. And yes, Rowell went with the idea that plentiful images of Fabro, Fabro’s works, Fabro’s work spaces, and Fabro’s exhibitions would be a good thing. And rightly so. Luciano Fabro: Reinventing Sculpture might not be the allegedly comprehensive critical tome Fabro had in mind, but it is certainly a brilliant, beautifully crafted, and extensively researched one – and, not least, the most definitive book on his work to date. That’s no small feat. Rowell’s excellently conceived and elegantly composed monograph is a thoroughly engaging artwork in its own right.
Great Women Sculptors, Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by Lisa Le Feuvre, Phaidon Books
Margit Rowell, Luciano Fabro: Reinventing Sculpture, Monacelli
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I’ve reflected extensively on Legacy Russell’s Black Meme and Ben Ware’s On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End since reading them early this year. Nary a portion of a day ever passes without their subjects of examination thrusting to top of mind or front and center on a screen.
Legacy Russell’s deftly composed, intellectually stimulating, critically excoriating book upends and redefines today’s standard understandings of meme culture and meme technologies, and the inherent dangers, and latent when not blatant racist tropes, of mimetic transmissions. In Russell’s account, the copying and proliferation of images of Blackness, from films and postcards in the early 1900’s to social media posts today, can be seen as foundational to digital culture as we know it. Russell brings you to see that culture through more sharply focused lenses, leaving you incapable of encountering memes, or thinking about the paradigmatic historical events explored in each of the book’s chapters, in the same way ever again. The critical charge of Black Meme is that of a charged mission, and its censorial discharge is electric by definition.
Ben Ware’s On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End is similarly rooted in modes of resituating, recapitulating, and redefining, in this case with regard to the extent to which critical theory and philosophy might be more usefully, rationally, and actionably hospitable to discussions of climate change, catastrophic events, and the end of human existence by establishing a ‘dialectics of extinction’ – a way of addressing the realities of our catastrophic present by coming to terms with extinctions, and extinction-level anxieties, of the past. For Ware, rather than assuming we can postpone the end by looking first for solutions to the perilous problems that devastate us today, we should start by assuming that the end is already upon us, such that we have no choice but to deal directly with the here and now – while we’re here, that is, for now. It’s not necessarily hopeful or hopeless. Nor is it necessarily alarmist. It’s a necessary reading of the writing on the wall, on which the message is something to the tune of the following: The catastrophe in question isn’t the one on the horizon. It’s the catastrophe at hand in our immediate environs.
Legacy Russell, Black Meme, Verso Books
Ben Ware, On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End, Verso Books
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Speaking of endings and horizons, and highlighting again a certain sense of transitions, transpositions, and transmissions:
Happy New Year!
I wish you all a good plenty of good things, good times, good tidings, and good reads.
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About the writer: Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator. He is Writing and Thesis Advisor for the MFA program at The New York Studio School, and a regular visiting critic and instructor for several other institutions and residency programs. D’Agostino teaches writing workshops, is a translator and editor working in various languages, and writes about art, books, and film on a freelance basis. You can find him on Instagram and Threads @pauldagostinostudio