« Art Critics' Reading List
ANNE ELLEGOOD
 Photo Andre Vippolis |
Anne Ellegood is the Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she has organized Hammer Projects with Diana Al-Hadid, Eric Baudelaire, Keren Cytter, Shannon Ebner, Friedrich Kunath, Tom Marioni, My Barbarian and Sara VanDerBeek, among others. She recently co-organized “All of this and nothing,” which featured 14 artists, including Karla Black, Ian Kiaer, Fernando Ortega, Paul Sietsema, Frances Stark and Kerry Tribe. Ellegood was selected by the Australian Council for the Arts to curate Hany Armanious’ 2011 Australian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. She is currently co-organizing “Made in L.A.,” a large survey of artists living in Los Angeles. |
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Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Play It As It Lays grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. It is the story of a young woman who has settled into a state of indifference as her life falls apart. Didion’s style is fast-paced and lean, and while the sentences flow with an apparent spirited stream-of-consciousness, each word has been chosen with the utmost care. Littered with film industry characters, the book is often understood as an indictment of the superficiality and greed of Hollywood. But it’s so much more. It is an astute and bravely pointed contemplation of the history of westward expansion in America, how quickly hope can turn to disappointment, and the perils of living without a connection to the past. Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” I relate to this. I often think I cannot understand an artwork until I start writing about it. Writing is a space where the subconscious finds articulation articulation, and what comes out on the page is often surprising.
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Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. I know I am not alone in my admiration for Barthes’ final book, La Chambre Claire, a short investigation into the medium of photography. At the outset, the theorist states his intention to determine the ontology of photography—to locate the “essential feature” that sets it apart from other mediums—but a second operation begins to reveal itself and the book simultaneously becomes a eulogy to his deceased mother. I am completely enamored of the way that Barthes brings a subjective—indeed, a mournful and vulnerable—voice to theoretical writing. Who can resist the notion of the punctum? With its connotations to the body, the “prick” of the punctum introduces the visceral into a cerebral endeavor and serves as the catalyst for Barthes to encourage interpretation and the empowerment of the viewer, as is reflected in his conclusion once he locates a photograph that genuinely captures his mother, “It exists only for me.”
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Douglas Crimp. On the Museum’s Ruins. With Photographs by Louise Lawler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. This collection of essays by Crimp is critical to any study of postmodernism and its insistence that the analysis of art extend outside the object itself to take into account context. “The Art of Exhibition”—Crimp’s look at Rudi Fuchs’ 1982 Documenta 7 and another German exhibition, Zeitgeist, of the same year—was perhaps the first in-depth examination of an exhibition I had come across, and it made me more aware of the great gap in the discourse of art history for thoughtful and rigorous evaluations of exhibition and curatorial practice. Crimp’s assertion that the institutions of art have a responsibility to keep the specific history of an object’s origins alive suggests that the etymology of “curator” as the “caretaker” of works of art must reach beyond a connoisseurship of objects to account for and make apparent how the historical avant-garde has continually redefined the art object and challenged the limitations of the museum.
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