« Art Critics' Reading List
NIELS VAN TOMME
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Niels Van Tomme is a New York-based curator, researcher and critic. He currently works at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore where his project Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen will open in the fall of 2013. Most recently, he curated the traveling exhibition “Where Do We Migrate To?” (Baltimore, New York, New Orleans, El Paso), as well as the group exhibitions “Melancholy is not enough…” (Bucharest) and “There is Nothing There” (New York). Van Tomme publishes internationally in journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues, and is the guest editor of a special issue of ART PAPERS (Jan/Feb 2013) devoted to the theme of temporality. |
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Svetlana Boym. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Whenever I am tired of all those essential but often exhausting theoretical texts, or those filled with the kinds of references only the art crowd gets, I turn to Svetlana Boym’s elegantly written and meticulously researched The Future of Nostalgia. In this book, Boym rejects the notion of restorative nostalgia, which is closely entwined with conspiracy and a return to origins, in favor of the more progressive notion of reflective nostalgia. The latter contains a critical dimension and is concerned with individual and cultural memory, and a kind of utopian longing. Writing from the position of loss and displacement instead of belonging, the study of nostalgia becomes for Boym potentially prospective in nature. It is the book I have recommended most often to artists and other wandering spirits, who can find in her notion of the off-modern new ways to think and act beyond the current cultural impasse defined by stifling retromania. |
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Werner Herzog. Of Walking in Ice. New York: Free Association, 2008. In November 1974, a friend calls Werner Herzog from Paris to tell him film critic Lotte Eisner is seriously ill and will probably die. As a protest to the approaching death of his ailing friend, Herzog embarks on a three-week long odyssey from Munich to Paris to “bring her back to health.” The book is the diary Herzog kept during his walk and is filled with delirious philosophical ramblings and poetic encounters with nothingness. There is a quality of haunting disquiet to the writing, which is, at times, so personal and obsessed that it becomes somewhat disconcerting to read. With his personal action, Herzog adds a sense of metaphysical urgency to a long line of literary and conceptual artistic practices concerned with ideas of walking, and the result is nothing less than transformative. When he finally arrives in Paris, Lotte Eisner is miraculously healed. The book was out of print for the longest time, and this 2008 edition by Free Association is a triumph in both design and substance.
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Branka Stipančić (editor). Mladen Stilinović, Artist’s Books 1972-2006. Istanbul: Platform Garanti, 2007. There are certain secret bonds between artists and curators, and one of them is that a major part of our work is born out of less elevated conditions such as “laziness” and idling. Croatian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinović’s seminal piece Artist at Work from 1978 shows this process: captured through a series of photographs, we see the artist lying in bed while doing nothing, at times sleeping. Of course, this piece, which was turned into one of his exquisitely handcrafted artist’s books gathered in this volume, is also much more than that. Presenting oneself as a parasite in a working society, the artist’s performance is a refusal to participate in socialist Yugoslavia’s conception of labor as a foremost propaganda tool. Mladen Stilinović remains a constant inspiration; not only through his many artists’ books but also through the small exhibitions he occasionally mounts in his apartment. For him, a “room” is not just an exhibition space, but also a search for new forms of creating and presenting art and for establishing new relationships with the audience.
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