It’s misleading that Nam June Paik has been named the grandfather of video art. Sure, he started the whole thing, but as an artist, Paik is no patriarch. He’s always been the wild child, making a mess at the dinner table and disrespecting his elders, less interested in laying the foundation than finding one to blast apart. NAM JUNE PAIK (DelMonico Books/Prestel, $50), the companion book to Tate Modern’s recent retrospective, makes sure to pay its respects but takes more pleasure in recounting the artist’s anarchic antics and Fluxus pranks. At times, it strains to put a new spin on Paik: The museum’s director calls him the “first truly global artist”; the show’s principal curator stresses that his transnationality gains relevance in today’s “digitally connected reality.” Perhaps. But to Paik, all boundaries—borders included—were made to be broken. He learned the rules of music, performance, and audiovisual technology in order to disobey them, bending their steel in ways that still feel cutting-edge. During Etude for Pianoforte in 1960, he sliced up an audience member’s suit and tie with a pair of scissors; the victim was John Cage, Paik’s greatest influence and artistic parent figure. Three years later, he strung up the severed head of an ox across the doors to his first solo exhibition, obliging visitors to cross a clear line. Applying for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in the ’70s, Paik proposed “to destroy national television,” and, in 1988, his satellite-TV broadcast Wrap Around the World was transmitted across the US, East Asia, Western Europe, and the USSR. Artists around the world provided footage, David Bowie performed live, and Paik appeared in traditional Korean dress. At the height of the Cold War, Paik managed to break through the Iron Curtain. The feat was a masterpiece of mischief: art that could truly move through walls. —JULIANA HALPERT
More pretext than text, FRENCH NEW WAVE: A REVOLUTION IN DESIGN (Reel Art Press, $60) is really just an excuse for editor Tony Nourmand to present his personal trove of Nouvelle Vague memorabilia. (And who could blame him—his collection is sensational.) The book is not an in-depth or comprehensive overview, but the headiness of the international posters on display makes up for that. The art-maudit tendencies of the Eastern European artists—most radically, Polish designers—evoke New Wave films in the oblique, allusive terms of a Mother Goose (née Courage) illustration. For Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7), both Andrzej Onegin-Dabrowski’s fading facescape and Jaroslav Fišer’s sketch of an abstract head severed at the neck, above falling playing cards, lyricize dread. Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville is viewed as a city of angles: Jean Mascii’s proto-photorealism, Andrzej Krajewski’s clenched Pop-art fist, Aage Martin Lundvald’s cartoon ridiculousness, Kiroku Higaki’s gumshoe Futurism, and Pino Milas’s glaring infrared view up the barrel of Lemmy Caution’s automatic. Guns are so pervasive that it’s as if Godard’s famous dictum “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” was taken as ironic gospel: sunglasses with triggers in Hans Hillmann’s one-sheet for Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us), 1961, or the memorably armed iterations of Truffaut’s La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) from ’68. René Ferracci, Kiyoshi Awazu, the team of Guy Jouineau and Guy Bourduge, Franciszek Starowieyski, and Hiroyoshi Ohshima, as well as less celebrated figures, created graphics worthy of their cinema sources: anarchic, dream-struck, recondite, and intoxicating. —HOWARD HAMPTON
The specter of a sanitized future haunts THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALVIN BALTROP (Skira, $50), a work of beauty and cultural atonement. Baltrop, a queer black man who served as a Navy medic during the Vietnam War, first began documenting the intimate lives of men while on deployment. Back in New York, he worked as a taxi driver, a street vendor, and a mover, and lived for a time in a van parked by the Hudson. Taking photographs of the West Side piers, he captured an underground queer culture that was thriving among the majestic ruins, sometimes using a makeshift window-cleaning harness to gain an angel’s-eye view. In this new catalogue, which accompanies a show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Baltrop’s work gets the respect it’s long deserved in astute critical essays by Douglas Crimp, Antonio Sergio Bessa, and Adrienne Edwards. Allen Frame’s remembrance and Mia Kang’s reflections on the Baltrop archives reveal a complex and tender man driven to create despite lifelong discrimination, erasure, and precarity. And, of course, the images are extraordinary: bodies emerging from darkness, shimmering in light; figures at once transgressive and childlike—exuberant, in nothing but tube socks, their tender skin nearly lost to the industrial landscape. There is both a prosaic coziness and a mythic quality to Baltrop’s work, in portraits of youth and sunbathers; men sleeping, lounging, fucking, loving amid cracked walls and exposed rebar; black water and ships and sexy sailors. No one will be surprised that Baltrop was ignored in his lifetime, even by his fellow artists—many of whom were white and fame-ready—but the details are heartrending and the injustice still burns. —CARA HOFFMAN
Annie-B Parson, choreographer and cofounder of Big Dance Theater, hates “the ephemerality of performance.” “When it’s over, it’s so gone,” she says. The illustrations and diagrams composing the bulk of her book DRAWING THE SURFACE OF DANCE: A BIOGRAPHY IN CHARTS (Wesleyan University Press, $26) are attempts to “draw the nouns” of finished dances, but in function they’re more scrapbook than Feuillet system. In 2011, Parson dived into her archive to inventory the material traces of her work since 1991. She found that drawing the very stuff of a supposedly expired performance can breed a choreography of its own: Residual dramas are made new on the page.
Scrappy taxonomies of props and costumes fill the first of four sections: sylph wings, “Satan’s dirty feet,” and all manner of hats. The pseudo-empiricism of the project dissolves in the froth of the misfit toys it catalogues in bold graphite and swooping ink. Borders are fudged to make room for electric roses and fake guns. Hand-drawn colored-pencil grids seem to exist only to be patched over with bits of literature (Parson has adapted stories by Flaubert, Mark Twain, Anne Carson), while the tiny round stickers that mark drawings wink at a color code I can’t crack. Or maybe they just wink. In the second section, similar objects from different works are corralled on their own terms—rectangular things fit into rectangles, circular things roll around. There are lots of sketchy miniatures here, by turns intricate and schematic, of sticks, aprons, and braids. It’s all very pioneer-chic. But Parson’s enduring charms amount to more than a signature look. Seeing these objects collected and collated, almost as a reference key, evidences how she generates new compositions. Siobhan Burke notes in an afterword that all Parson’s work comes from reworking: The shape of “Butterfly as a choreographic structure” recalls a set of baby-colored sylph wings proffered in pink and blue. In the photos from performances included here (presented in a slim third section), costumed dancers seem to originate from the preceding pages, despite the fact that the drawings were done afterward. In closing, the artist pairs a deck of Mexican lottery cards with elements of choreography, inviting us to chance upon further rearrangements. It’s easy to imagine Parson one day working from drawings from dances from drawings. I’d love to see more of the “4 Foot Wide Stick Bonnet,” which is exactly what it sounds like. In this sketch, twigs extend across the book binding onto the next page, the rest of which remains blank. How might this be adapted for the stage? —LIZZY HARDING
The title of this impressive book, PAULA REGO: THE ART OF STORY (Thames & Hudson, $115), is apt: The work of the Portuguese-British artist is densely narrative. Over the course of six decades and counting, Rego has created collages, oils, prints, and pastels in which human, animal, and hybrid figures act out dreamlike dramas of violence and betrayal. In this chronological overview of Rego’s career, Deryn Rees-Jones, a literary critic and poet, focuses on the narrative tensions of Rego’s staged tableaux, which push “us to operate in the space between what is seen and what might be known.”
Rego grew up in António Salazar’s totalitarian Portugal. Interrogation, painted in 1950, when she was only fifteen, depicts men torturing a woman, and state violence has long been one of her main concerns: This volume also includes Rego’s gripping 1998 paintings of women getting abortions, created to protest Portugal’s restrictive reproductive-health laws. But as Rees-Jones attests, the power dynamics in Rego’s art are far more complex. The victims and perpetrators constantly shift. As she has said, “I was being repressed and restrained by my mother, not Salazar. Maybe the authoritarian thing comes right through to the kid, who takes it out on the dog or the doll.” Amid the chaos of Rego’s scenes, we often glimpse recognizable stories. She draws from nursery rhymes, novels like Jane Eyre, Portuguese melodramas of seduction and infanticide, and the work of artists as disparate as Goya, Degas, and Walt Disney. The resulting images summon that odd pairing of enigma and inevitability that is the hallmark of myth. —FRAN BIGMAN
In Blue (Karma, $40), a collection of the late artist Matthew Wong’s recent paintings, he presents a sensitive meditation on the color’s melancholy cast, reminiscent of William Gass’s classic volume On Being Blue in its affecting intensity. The deep brooding blues that saturate Wong’s canvases depict night and wintry scenes in which trees, snow, sky, and houses are delineated in the color’s varying shades. His inventive way of seeing brings an eerie dynamism to placid landscapes: In Starry Night, no doubt an homage to van Gogh’s iconic work, we view a sleepy seaside village. Like the Dutch artist, Wong blurs the distinction between animate and inanimate. The sea, sky, and mountains are blue, yet the sky is rendered in woven arches dotted with yellow; the water, too, is brightly speckled, and the purple-white outline of the mountains activates their dominant presence. The natural elements pulse with life even as the houses appear almost sepulchral in their quiet self-containment. Indeed, humans are evidenced in these paintings chiefly by their traces—smoke rising from chimneys, portraits on a wall, a pair of glasses on a table. Tracks in the Blue Forest offers an uncertain narrative: Amid a forbidding stand of stark, blue-black trees proceeds a line of irregular dashes, footsteps moving from the glowing white snow into a ghostly blue region where the steps disappear and gloom pervades. So palpably chilly and solitary is this vista that the painting itself appears as though it would be cold to the touch. Wong committed suicide last October at the age of thirty-five, and it’s difficult not to read such images in light of this fact. Blue is filled with artistic choices that resound with the knowledge of Wong’s death—his name doesn’t appear anywhere in the text, and it’s not on the cover or spine. “Color,” Gass writes, “is consciousness itself, color is feeling.” The mental domain on vivid display in these works is rich in feeling, profound in its concentration. Wong understood and painted what Emily Dickinson called the “zero at the bone.” —ALBERT MOBILIO
