While it’s true that any class of mundane object grows creepy when amassed in sufficient quantity (remember Imelda Marcos’ shoes?), the collections represented in this book are unequivocally strange, such as Peter the Great’s “Cabinet of Wonders,” which contains giant skeletons, two-headed sheep, and healthy teeth pulled from Russian soldiers by Peter himself. The essays by the naturalist Gould and color photographs by Purcell illustrate and collude with the excesses of decadent taxonomy.
Here is Gould describing the artwork of Peter’s personal embalmer, Frederik Reusch: “He might sever the arm of a dead child, surround it ‘so prettily and naturally’ (his own words) with a sleeve and lace cuff expertly sewn by his young daughter Rachel, and then suspend from the fingers, by an organic thread made of yet another body part, some exquisitely preserved and injected organ—perhaps an eye, or a bit of genital anatomy… “
“The world is messy; the world is multifarious,” writes Gould, in reference to biologist Eugen Dubois’ collection of brain casts of tigers, squirrels, chickens and polar bears, nested in antique cigar boxes. Indeed. HJ

Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Hardback: 160 pages
Illustrated

Writing about music is acknowledged to be hard. Writing a general history of atonal and aleatoric avant-garde music this full of passion and excitement would seem to be damn near impossible. This modest volume is a superb introduction to all the “serious” music and composers that have followed Wagner’s sublime Romantic bombastics. From Debussy’s impressionistic exoticism to the pioneering tape collage experiments of musique concrète, from the occult ecstasies of Scriabin to the Zen minimalism of John Cage, from the invention of the Theremin to the academic acceptance of the electronic compositions of Stockhausen, author Paul Griffiths’ contagious enthusiasm for his often-intimidating subject matter sweeps the reader into this 20th-century stream of sound. SS

Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Paperback: 216 pages
Illustrated

A useful, compact and, except for a number of omissions, comprehensive reference guide to what has been Western classicism’s most musically explosive century-and it’s not over yet.
This deceptively tiny book contains basic information on: 500 composers from 30 countries (not all the greats but a whole lot of them including Mauricio Kagel, Steve Reich, Claude Debussy, John Cage, Pierre Schaefer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Alvin Lucier, Oliver Messiaen, LaMonte Young, Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penderecki, Edgard Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Harry Partch, Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Henry); their major works (Hymnen and almost any other Stockhausen composition you can name, Varèse’s Poeme Electronique, Ligeti’s Atmospheres); important musical techniques and styles (Futurism, chance operations, dada, intuitive music, serialism, musique concrete, Fluxus, minimalism); elements and definitions (noise, organized sound, envelopes, resonance); performers (Aloys Kontarsky, AMM, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Musica Eletronica Viva); instruments (Russolo’s intonarumori, the theremin, ring modulator, trautonium); institutions (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center); and “other people” (Jean Cocteau, Robert Moog). DB

Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Paperback: 207 pages
Illustrated

“WE, ON THE LAST STAGE OF THE PATH TO SUPREMATISM BLASTED ASIDE THE OLD WORK OF ART LIKE A BEING OF FLESH AND BLOOD AND TURNED IT INTO A WORLD FLOATING IN SPACE. WE CARRIED BOTH PICTURE AND VIEWER OUT BEYOND THE CONFINES OF THIS SPHERE AND IN ORDER TO COMPREHEND IT FULLY THE VIEWER MUST CIRCLE LIKE A PLANET ROUND THE PICTURE WHICH REMAINS IMMOBILE IN THE CENTER.”—El Lissitzky, 1920
Having moved in the radical Russian art spheres of Constructivism and Suprematism from before the Russian Revolution all the way through the Stalin years until his death in 1941, El Lissitzky forged his utopian strivings into such aesthetically demanding examples of pragmatic Soviet mass expression as exhibition design, wartime propaganda, book illustration, photomontage posters and architecture. Fluent in German and English, Lissitzky was an important bridge between the German Dadaists of the ‘20s and ‘30s and their contemporaries in the idealistic Soviet art organizations. Compiled by his wife and sometime collaborator, Sophie, and originally published in East Germany in 1967, this book includes a comprehensive collection of his writings and manifestoes, a biographical sketch based on his letters, and hundreds of examples of how Lissitzky help to define the revolutionary modernist aesthetic. SS

Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Hardback: 410 pages
Illustrated

Amazingly, Fluxus managed to put into practice what so many artists—whether individual, collective or institutionalized—continue to harp on, though mainly in theory: a program of exemplary openness, versatility and continual surprise. Spearheaded by the suitably charismatic George Maciunas, this was a (very) loose consortium of creative oddballs which included painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, poets, musicians, dancers and even the occasional designer, all of whom had agreed to periodically forsake some of their autonomy in order to join together in fluid, collaborative ensembles, to disband and recombine at the drop of a hat, and to explore to the fullest the possibilities that different configurations afford. Variety was Fluxus’ operational principle; variety of medium and technique complemented by that of the membership, which was evenly, yet unsystematically, distributed across still daunting divides of gender, race, nationality. Even the present enthusiasm for P.C. multi-media product cannot begin to approach the sheer breadth and range of these interdisciplinary endeavors.
This being so, it should come as no surprise that the numerous catalogs and publications which have emerged around Fluxus are likewise varied in the particular focus of their essays and documentation. This book happens to be a very good one—including a surprisingly moving account of the short, weird life of the late Maciunas; a more than adequate selection of the various posters, handbills and other printed ephemera which showcase a graphic sensibility that grows more elegant with each passing year; and a bunch of photographs of a bunch of objects and performances that together define just what it is that has all been done before. JT

Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Paperback: 142 pages
Illustrated

A survey of Burroughs’ extensive body of visual work (collages, photomontages, sculptural assemblages, shotgun paintings and text-image works) published in conjunction with the eponymously titled exhibit organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July 1995. A writer of intensely cinematic, nonlinear prose, Burroughs’ accomplishments outside the realm of his novels are rightfully assessed in terms of “logical step” as opposed to pedestrian aberration. Indeed, the cracker-barrel anarchism that informs his fiction-signature themes of control, addiction, sex and transcendence—is equally alive in his art. While the hype that has surrounded him for the past decade can often be annoying (Portrait of the Artist as Iconoclast Badge of Postmodern Hipness displayed by every purveyor of fashionable cool from Robert Wilson to Sonic Youth to Saturday Night Live to Nike), Burroughs’ influence on both American and world culture is enormous—a contention, in its visual-art implications, Sobieszek discusses at some length. With an informative text augmented by over 200 illustrations (many in color), Ports of Entry is an exciting look into the pictorial world of the writer whom Kerouac once dubbed “the most intelligent man in America.” MDG

Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Paperback: 192 pages
Illustrated

A critical survey of the major issues and values that define the Primitivist world view, focusing on the modern artists most closely associated with it. Beginning with the art of Gauguin in the 1890s and moving through to the American Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s, Rhodes cites the ways in which Western artists felt impelled to look outside the conventions of their own culture and appropriate the primitive (i.e., the mystical, the mythic, the pre-rational) as a means to forge new ways of seeing and challenge established beliefs. Drawing not only from the tribal peoples of Africa, Oceania and North America but also from those groups considered ‘primitive’ within Western culture itself (peasants, children, the insane and even women!), Primitivism becomes as diverse a term as the artists and movements it inspired: Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Ernst, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Rothko; Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism. While it is true that this survey is somewhat dry and academic in tone, coalescing the enormity of Primitivism’s impact on modern art into a cogent overview format is no easy feat. Replete with illustrations (some in color) and bibliography, Primitivism and Modern Art is an informative, scholarly read MDG

Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Paperback: 216 pages
Illustrated