Chantal Akerman often said that she carried within her a deep sense of unbelonging. “But someone once told me that when you make films you put your whole self in,” she wrote near the end of her life. “I don’t know, I don’t know myself, certainly not all of myself.” For those wanting more of her, from her, CHANTAL AKERMAN: PASSAGES (Eye Filmmuseum / nai010 publishers, $40) brings to light her lesser-known work as a visual artist. This companion catalogue to a retrospective of eight film installations presented at Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) this summer includes essays that mark the translation of her sensibilities from screen to exhibition space, and collects related texts written by Akerman herself. Like their maker, her images could feel rootless, and their untethering was part of her process. For D’Est, au bord de la fiction, 1995, the first such project by the artist, she rearranged and re-presented footage from D’Est, her documentary film of 1993, across twenty-five monitors. Opening the space of cinema not only nudged life and film a little closer together, but enabled movement around and through her words and images, allowing an audience to behave more as a director, cameraperson, or editor would, looking, or looking away, as they like. The seven-channel video Woman Sitting after Killing, 2001, rearranges the final minutes of Akerman’s radical masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), freeing the iconic antiheroine from her long hours of domestic banality, instead looping her violent act and its aftermath. Far more tender are the family photographs from the filmmaker’s personal archives collaged inside the book, in which we glimpse a wee Chantal, before she blew up. Although the origin of a person’s genius is always unknowable, there will never be any doubt about Akerman’s rightful place in this world. —JENNIFER KRASINSKI
From 1987 to 1992, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced thirteen photostats—formally restrained prints listing a series of dates and events in white against a field of deep black. Each work is a collage of nouns—political events, fads, new technologies, public figures—punctuated with relevant dates and strung together to form a historical montage. Viewers are left to infer relationships between sometimes disparate and asynchronous events, probing for causality or explanation. When seen in person, the photostats are always framed behind glass, transforming their mute backgrounds into reflective surfaces, a literal reminder that the viewer completes these works. FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES: PHOTOSTATS (Siglio Press, $36) offers its own formal conceit, presenting the series in two symmetrical and mirrored halves, each with thirteen plates, an installation view, and an essay. From one side of the book, the works appear in detail, printed full-bleed on matte stock; from the other, they are shown framed and printed glossy. In lieu of art-historical exegesis, Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach extend the associative logic of the photostats into lyrical musings on the ever-compounding layers of history embedded and reflected in the work. Consistent with the artist’s approach, the volume avoids definitive representation, instead providing multiple ways into the artworks. In the middle of another pandemic fueled by government neglect, Gonzalez-Torres’s investigations into the contingencies and coincidences of history resound with urgency. —KYLE CROFT
THE LOOK OF THE BOOK: JACKETS, COVERS, AND ART AT THE EDGES OF LITERATURE (Ten Speed Press, $50), by designer Peter Mendelsund and critic David J. Alworth, focuses on the in-betweenness of book jackets—the “edge” as they define it—and the way words, images, and a book’s tactile qualities work together to introduce a writer’s work to the world. Early in this compendium, the authors write that a cover can be many things: “a safeguard, a frame, a bridge, a translation, an interpretation, a teaser . . . a handshake, and more.” The Look of the Book surveys this transitional form in chapters that constellate hundreds of examples of artwork, along with critical essays that focus on key subjects: what the book cover is, was, and does; why it matters; how it’s made; and what its future might be. Throughout, there are sketches for unreleased covers, many of them Mendelsund’s own, and anecdotes from noted writers. Mendelsund and Alworth make the case that the best covers are ones that hold something back, requiring you to finish reading before the jacket’s significance can be fully understood. For example, the title treatment of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking subtly spells “John”—the name of the author’s late husband—in teal-gray letters hiding in plain sight amid the black text. Books about graphic design tend to stay on the surface, but this book dives deep, illustrating the dialogue between design and writing, and proving that book covers will always carry more cultural nuance than first meets the eye. —MONICA NELSON
ANNI AND JOSEF ALBERS: EQUAL AND UNEQUAL (Phaidon, $150) fittingly borrows its subtitle from a Josef Albers painting that hung in the New Haven, Connecticut, home of the artist and his wife, Anni. A family album of sorts, this volume, assembled by art historian Nicholas Fox Weber, is a visual portrait of their domestic life and travels and includes dozens of snapshots of the couple and their famous friends. These photographs, along with documents and letters, chart the Alberses’ journey from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College and finally to Yale. A generous selection of both artists’ work accompanies each era of the story, along with short essays by Weber that explore the Alberses’ relationships with figures such as Marcel Breuer, Ray Johnson, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, as well as their interest in, for instance, clothing, psychoanalysis, and mathematical systems. In one picture from 1928, Josef captured Anni asleep on a couch during the halcyon days of the Bauhaus, when they met; later, there’s Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s letter to the Berlin Secret State Police regarding the closing of the art school, and the Alberses’ passport photos from when they fled Germany. Happier times at Black Mountain are represented by a series of nude-bathing images of Anni along with Ted and Bobbie Dreier. Photographs from the ’50s in New Haven show an older pair relaxing on the patio, Anni making coffee, and Josef observing her working at her loom. The book presents an appealing portrait of a gemütlich marriage of true minds, a union that may have required—as suggested by the title, Equal and Unequal, a painting that “fascinated” Anni—one partner being a bit less equal than the other. —ALBERT MOBILIO
In 1968, AfriCOBRA burst onto the national art stage in a whirl of ingenuity and activism. The Chicago-based collective, whose initials stand for African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, was founded by Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Gerald Williams, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Jae Jarrell. These visionaries, and a committed band of associated artists, helped develop the Black Arts Movement’s aesthetic with their outpouring of paintings, textiles, fashion design, sculptures, and posters. In the age that saw the Mississippi voting-rights “March Against Fear,” the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panthers’ publication of a ten-point manifesto demanding decent housing, education, and employment, the collective’s inventions produced, as bell hooks put it, “alternative ways to look at blackness.” AFRICOBRA: MESSAGES TO THE PEOPLE (Gregory R. Miller / Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, $50) documents the 2018–19 show, which was inspired by the collective’s groundbreaking 1970 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York) and also gathers materials crafted by its members in the ensuing decades. Among its many treasures is Jones-Hogu’s 1968 screen print Be Your Brother’s Keeper, a masterpiece of purples, oranges, and lime greens that responds to the brutal treatment of protesters by police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Keeper depicts an avidly listening Black crowd, cops with guns, and raised Black fists. A sidebar filled with curly, emphatic lettering reads “Resist Law and Order in a Sick Society,” a bracing message that still resonates. —YXTA MAYA MURRAY
Painter Elizabeth Murray and sculptor Jessi Reaves both took one look at the simplistic presumptions of twentieth-century art and then detonated them with the pullulating body. WILD LIFE: ELIZABETH MURRAY & JESSI REAVES (Dancing Foxes Press / Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, $30), which accompanies their joint 2021 show, demonstrates how these artists share a talent for twisting the work of male makers until it transforms into fertile and vulnerable biomorphs. Murray (1940–2007) commenced in 1967–68 with Night Empire, a priapic take on the Empire State Building, which she wrapped in pink fabric and pudendal tassels. Murray launched into corporeal-produced glories such as Heart and Mind, where a plump black-and-red figure reminiscent of Constantin Brâncuși’s abstractions gets penetrated by a companion’s spiky lightning. Fire Cup, from 1982, reveals a blue-swirled tadpole tucking into an ivory egg that bloats into a fallopian tube. The titular Wild Life discloses mitochondria that blossom into ghosts or sperm. Reaves updates Murray’s feminism by introducing the differently abled body into her upholstered structures. Cesca Leaves the Stack (Modified Chair) outfits Marcel Breuer’s sleek Cesca chair with orthopedic foam and drapes it with a chiffon nightie. Butter-egg-chair s a chrome throne bearing a stack of foam bulbs that looks like a damaged spine. Series 3 (Noguchi Fender Table) props up an Isamu Noguchi glass tabletop with crutchlike car fenders. In an interview with Johanna Fateman, Reaves nods to the shattered physicality and obstreperousness of her own, and Murray’s, oeuvre: “There was an aggression to [Murray’s] paintings that appealed to me. Some of them seem to peel off the wall like road kill.” In the creations of these artists, birth and destruction triumph over the glossy fantasies of the past. —Y. M. M.
