Catalogs launch ideas and can be an inspiration.  They can be a touchstone to which one returns.   They become personal possessions. When we think of our favorites, our memories are often couched in terms that might seem tangential to their intellectual import: the circumstances by which we came to acquire them, where or when we have read them, what they look and feel like.  Favorite catalogs are rooted in these physical, personal ways, and they can tell us as much about their owner-readers as what they contain.  As a curator and sometimes a maker of catalogs (in collaboration with artists, editors, and designers), I have come to know exhibition catalogs in tangible ways: pouring over manuscripts, reading the same text numerous times, comparing images and words, finding relationships and inconsistencies with each review.  Then, perhaps ironically, these books with which I have been so intimately involved in their making, become--once printed-- references on the shelf.  But from time-to-time I hear from other persons who have read them and reaffirm their continued life. I chose to take this occasion to converse via email with some friends in the field about their favorite catalogs—not ones they have made or that are about them but the exhibition catalogs that are important to them, that they look at or are just glad to know is on the shelf; that has been a thinking tool for them--and why.1 

“I go into a panic’” says Ann Hamilton of a Ree Morton catalog, “when it can't be found and I think it hasn't been returned.” And why is this small, paperbound catalog from the early years of The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York so vital?2   Hamilton recounts: “I was living in Canada in those several years between graduate and undergraduate school…..was in New York wandered into the exhibition totally by accident…..and had barely enough money to buy the catalog…..but had to have it and now it is one that is rag-tagged and dog eared…..why I love it…..well because I love the work firstly but equally important it is the excerpts from her diary and sketchbooks that reveal her process…..the things she read3…..the way a work came out of a life…..the many tributes from the people who knew Ree4…..I was inspired in every part of me…..and so the catalog sitting on my shelf…..is a reminder of that moment…..when anything seemed possible and I had in my hand a publication that was evidence of the route questions take…..the life questions make…..something about the way the catalog contained and made shareable the inner imaginings behind the objects/situations made…..”

While this publication is not a work of art and the artist’s hand is absent, Hamilton’s words convey an experience that is nearly that of art.  A catalog that makes the motivations of the artist and the creative process “shareable,” enables the art experience to extend from the realm of the artist’s interior to others. Such a catalog is more than a souvenir of a museum visit or a record of the images seen; it is the “evidence” that searching to make meaning is worth the journey.  Hamilton’s words are those of a maker—one who works with an enormous sense of materiality to move stuff into becoming articulated substance, who creates works that touch a place deeper than historical incident or personal biography.  In Ree Morton’s work—in the form of a modest catalog of her art—Hamilton feels and remembers why she makes art.

My own awakening as an art historian began with exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art during my middle and high school years.  I wasn’t buying catalogs then; it probably didn’t occur to me, maybe because of the cost, or maybe because, blessedly, in those days my experience with art was actual and took place in the galleries rather than in books, on the computer screen, in classrooms, conferences, and the other spaces in which we practice.  But when the subjects of these visits took on historical significance, I wanted to fill in that part exempted and acquire a few souvenirs.  It took me some decades to finally track down a copy of Pontus Hultén’s The Machine As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age 5 that had been so formative in my own ideas about exhibitions as active forces, engaging visitors in experiences.  But unlike the vitality of the show, the illustrations in this catalog proved to be dead: grayish back-and-white photographs, poor by today’s standards.  Yet the cover of pressed and riveted tin, made in the image of the show, was a tactile experience that transformed this book into an objet that anyone could own.  

Narelle Jubelin points to another, more recent catalogue-objet.  In her own work, this Australian-born artist combines the methodologies of design, architecture, and handicraft, along with a rigor of intellectual and visual thought, and cultural critique.  Thus, she is a keen observer of the stories books tell by the way they are composed, and she is meticulous and thoughtful in the way she approaches the making of her own catalogs.  The favorite she offered is the exhibition catalog for a 1992 show of Peter Fischli and David Weiss at the Walker Art Center.6  It is small and square-ish; its pages are not glossy like so many exhibition catalogs.  Rather the uncoated, matte stock makes an almost seamless transition from cover to pages, while it gives an overall gray tone to the black-and-whites images—one per page—that fill more than half the book until, arriving at page 72, it turns to a catalog listing of captions and then essays. An artist’s book and catalog in one, “it grapples with the nature of its own production...in terms of the artists’ participation,” in Jubelin’s estimation.

For Daniel J. Martinez, his favorite is the Information catalog from the landmark MoMA show of conceptual art.7  Pictureless and straight-forward, more like a “seed catalog” than an art catalog, it is the antithesis of today’s sumptuous and costly productions.  And like a seed catalog, Information doesn’t say too much; its words are spare and descriptive; it leaves open space for imagination, thought-space to make a new idea.  For this Los Angeles-based “trickster-artist,”8 whose art-provocations address our political and social blindness, this book provides a way to see the world: “it gives me both pleasure and complexity simultaneously. I can remind myself why I am an artist in the mist of a crisis of meaning.”

 “All the catalogues that came to my mind,” art historian and critic Michael Brenson writes, “were unofficial and more personal and literary than scholarly.”  Brenson’s response, like Hamilton’s, is a biographical recollection and physical retracing: “When I was doing research in Paris in 1970-71, I treasured the catalogues that had been produced by the Galerie Maeght. They were large scale, 15 x 11 inches, and each number in the series was eloquently illustrated and thin…meaning the texts were never intimidatingly long. They matched prominent literary figures with prominent painters and sculptors…writers, poets or philosophers who knew well the artists and their cultures…[like Michel Leiris with Giacometti9] and presented beautifully written essays that often got to the heart of an artist's work. They never felt like an obligation, always felt they were made for the curious and passionate individual reader10…I have no feeling for Met, MOMA, Whitney, and Guggenheim catalogues since, with all the useful information in them, they are more about asserting the authority of the institutions and dictating notions of institutional seriousness and expertise than about encouraging an immediate and personal engagement. A special catalogue always has something unexpected and unpredictable about it.” 

I believe Brenson (who is a Giacometti scholar) chose this particular title from the Galerie Maeght series because of his affinity for the artist.   Those artists who are the reference points for our life’s work are embodied within catalogs.  For philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, the catalog he looks at most is “the one on the Andy Warhol show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.11 That doubtless is because Warhol continues to play a role in my own writing and thought.”12 

Artist’s monographs in the form of exhibition catalogs are critical to the education and growth of other artists.  For Christopher Sperandio, “I'd say my favorite catalog is the Mike Kelley exhibition catalogue from the show he had at the Renaissance Society in Chicago,”13 which was his first introduction to the artist’s work. “But I think I've lost my copy (as I'm buried beneath a ton of Grennan and Sperandio books and press),” referring to his own comic books created in collaboration with Simon Grennan that have become hallmarks of a kind of public art.  In the case of the Kelley monograph, Sperandio was attracted by a quality not unlike that which Brenson admired in the Giacometti publication, though the artists that were the subject of each could not have been more different: “It's clear [Kelley] took a personal interest in the book—very playful and straightforward…I didn't feel like I was being marketed to, rather the feeling was very warm.”

For Miran Mohar of the Slovenian collaborative Irwin, “the most important catalogue which I read from time to time is a tiny catalogue of Croatian artist Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos.”14 Because he rightly suspects I would not know this artist, he goes on to explain that in the post-war period Mangelos (1921-1987) worked in series [(“Paysages de la mort,” “Paysages de la guerre,” “Paysages,” and “Tabula Rasa” (black and white monochrome surfaces with text printed underneath)] which he used to express a state of oblivion and the setting for a new beginning.  “I consider him as one of the first conceptual artists who started to work in the late 1940s, but who is almost unknown—not only to international but also to the local audiences.15 His work inspired a large number of Croatian conceptual artists and his influence is still very vivid today. He is becoming now, in my opinion, an important artist of the post-second World War period. In the last ten years I had in my hands this catalogue many times (much more than any other).”

But books are not always easy to come by, and so those artists whose work gets published and disseminated, literally, constitutes the history of contemporary art.  For Ernesto Pujol, born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico: “I do realize that in many small countries suffering great poverty and little funding for the arts, catalogs (particularly through the essays in them) are the only way to record local art history's evolution, for artists and curators; thus, they are crucial as the only chapters in a locally unfolding postcolonial visual culture history book…I cannot say that I am a big catalog fan and buyer; I sometimes find catalogs to be too of the moment, without having had the time and distance to digest a new work of art or art project.”  Yet, growing up with no access to art museums, Pujol writes, “My only contact with art—historical, modern, and contemporary—was through art books…The most formative art book, and the first one I received, was titled The Story Behind the Painting: a large-format hardcover publication which consisted of European masterworks with short essays about their production background.”16 This is not an exhibition catalog but a catalog of a selection of works.  “I still remember holding the book as a child in my grandmother's home.  I still have this book and treasure it.”  Now living in the midst of the New York art scene, there are moments, such as, “unexpectedly, rushing into a museum bookstore and acquiring the soft-cover but nevertheless expensive catalogs of Robert Ryman's 1993 sublime exhibition and Cy Twombly's 1994 retrospective, both at MoMA… when shows moved me deeply and [I bought] the catalog as one holds on to an intense and perhaps even spiritual memory.”  The catalog becomes a way to remember the experience of the art.   

I am reminded of MoMA’s early publication series from which emerged such slim volumes cataloguing works of a period or movement, such as the 48-page, paperback book What is Modern Painting?17 My copy is from the fifth edition, which had a print run of 20,000, bringing the total printing to 75,000 copies—an extraordinary number even for today’s blockbusters.  This catalog (in MoMA style) primarily uses the museum’s collection to write canonical art history.  It constitutes a survey from 19th -century realism to Impressionism and right up to what was then present-day art: with Jackson Pollack and what is termed “mid-century abstraction.” Yet upon closer examination, I see that it concludes with a treatise on “Why do totalitarian dictators hate modern art?”  In the aftermath of World War II, this book claims truth as the territory for art, as it affirms that “the artist, perhaps more than any other member of society, stands for individual freedom….”18  So this publication, that I took to have the mission of spreading the word (and image) of modernism, in fact, linked the propaganda of modern art with the modern democratic state.  Now it seems more significant a vehicle for experiencing the psychology of the Cold War 1950s than for experiencing the art.   

Catalogs are an important way to remember many things: the art on view in a given exhibition, the times of its making or staging, our state of mind, our changes of mind.  All these can be read through a volume that is at once fixed and fluid.  So, maybe exhibition catalogs are books that lead us to places and experiences, and maybe they are, most profoundly, souvenirs.

Notes:
* This title recalls Christian Boltanski’s 1998 project in Chicago entitled Favorite Objects for which he engaged 264 schoolchildren in personal and unique ways.  The artists’ book/portfolio of the same title that emerged from this project is in the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection.

1. I would like to thank those artists and writers cited who generously shared their reflections.  

2. Allan Schwartzman and Kathleen Thomas, Ree Morton, Retrospective 1971-1977 (New York: The New Museum, 1980).

3. Hamilton is an avid reader, not just for information but for thinking beyond the page.  She has said of the creative process “reading is my way of waiting…part of the intentional and accidental things we do in the process of arriving at a work.” From a presentation by the artist at the consortium meeting of “Awake: Art, Buddhism, and The Dimensions of Consciousness,” June 27, 2002.  For more information, see: www.artandbuddhism.org

4. check cat to add: Morton died at the age of 1977? in a car accident in Chicago while a visiting artist at the SAIC?

5. K.G. Pontus Hultén’s The Machine As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1986; distributed by New York Graphic Society Ltd., Greenwich, Connecticut).

6. Peter Fischli and David Weiss: In a Restless World (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996; distributed by D.A.P., New York).

7. Kynaston L. McShine, ed.  Information. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970).         

8. Here I am referring to Lewis Hyde’s use of the concept of trickster for the artist as one who does “the work of rearticulation…changing the manner in which nature, community, and spirit are joined to one another…shifts patterns in relation to one another, and by that redefines the patterns themselves.”  See Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1998), p. 256-257.

9. Michel Leiris, Derrière le Miroir: Alberto Giacometti(no. 233, March 1979)Paris: Galerie Maeght, 1979).

10. Brenson also added to his list of favorite exhibition catalogs one on which we collaborated [Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audience and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998)], stating: “For some of these reasons, I love the Conversations at the Castle book, which has the same combination of personal voice and meditation, and hard thought, although the elements develop in different ways.”

11. Kynaston L. McShine ed., Andy Warhol: a Retrospective.  (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989).

12. One of Danto’s most well-known anthologies is entitled Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992), the title of which is indebted to Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) as well as the artist’s investigation of the expanding definition of what is art.  Danto writes in this book:  “Warhol’s thought that anything could be art was model, in a way, for the hope that human beings could be anything they chose, once the divisions that had defined culture were overthrown” (p.4). 

13.

14. Branka Stipancic, ed.  Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos (Zagreb: Galerije grada Zagreba [Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb], 1990).

15. Irwin is currently working on a complex project entitled East Art Map with 21 art historians, theoreticians, and artists from East Europe in order to write a history of contemporary art of East European region (over 20 countries) from 1945 to the present. “The aim is to accelerate the integration process in the Eastern Europe and to go beyond the local art mythologies,” writes Mohar. It takes the form of the magazine (October 2002), an on-line version, and CD-Rom. Also see: www.newmoment-irwin.com

16. Leo Rosten, The Story Behind The Painting. (New York: Cowles Magazines & Book Trade, 1962: distributed by Doubleday, Garden City, New York).

17. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Introductory Series to the Modern Arts: What Is Modern Painting? Revised Edition (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1952; distributed by Simon and Schuster, New York). 

18. Yet even then its author, museum director Alfred Barr, saw how the artist’s pursuit of freedom of expression can be threatened in our own country through the “ignorance of officials.”  Ibid, p. 45.  Interestingly, in a recent article (W.G. Sebald, “A Natural History of destruction,” The New Yorker, November 4, 2002, p. 76) the author, speaking of the German amnesia of the destruction of its own cities (particularly the Allied bombing of Hamburg), draws upon the power of non-fiction to tell the truth: “The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity, at least over long passages, proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction.”