Sisyphus and the Exhibition Catalogue
A few days ago I was cleaning my studio — I try to get rid of things that have inexplicably accumulated that I no longer need— when I encountered a small dilemma: a massive exhibition catalogue that I had been gifted recently by a friend. The subject matter of the exhibition was not without interest to me, and it contained essays by various individuals that I know, respect and even admire. But the monumental hard-cover volume, in its 10lb weight and vast size, does not fit anywhere in my bookshelves (I already own thousands of books and my problem generally is getting rid of books, not adding more). I had been using it on my desk to slightly elevate my laptop, which comes in handy for Zoom meetings. But this week I have received yet another exhibition catalogue —this one which features my work, so that one I definitely have to keep—which is more convenient in size and height for placing my laptop. What to do? Maybe gift it to another artist friend so that they can inherit the same dual joy and inconvenience?
I had a memory of my late aunt, Elsa Lizalde, a professional historian who for many years worked at the Banco de México in the numismatics department. She worked under the eminent historian Daniel Cosío Villegas who was counselor at the bank until his death in 1976, and she remained at the bank until her own retirement around 2004. Elsa did a lot of research on the history of money in Mexico, most of which led to the creation of today’s Museo de la Economía. One of her jobs was to produce historical essays for richly illustrated books for the bank. They were large and elegant, non-commercial publications that would be sent as Christmas gifts to members of the board of governors of the bank as well as important clients. The books usually traced the development of Mexican currency from pre-Columbian times to the colonial era and the 19th century, emphasizing the art and culture of the period as well as political events. My aunt produced erudite and well-written essays, which I highly doubt many people read: like most coffee table books, these were meant to be perused casually while on a living room or office. Private banks also produced “holiday” books of their own (and she often was hired as a side-gig to write for those as well).
Needless to say, like most of us in the visual arts I have a great interest in—and dependence on— exhibition catalogues as vital research tools. Many times I and my friends are desperately in search for the catalogue of a particular show that might contain a key essay or reproductions of works. And there are moments when getting our hands on a particular exhibition catalogue is absolutely essential and we are willing to pay whatever it takes to get it. What we don’t often talk about is the many inessential uses of these art books.
From my practical experience in museum programming I learned that the notion that “form follows function” is not just an old modernist aesthetic principle: when one forefronts the outcome of a thinking process before one even starts planning something, then the thinking process has to be forcibly shaped to fit the outcome. This was often the case where I would be often asked to organize a big symposium for an exhibition without knowing what it would be about, only that the symposium needed to be big (including, by the way, many of the speakers who had felt spurned by not having been invited to write for the exhibition catalogue, the participation in the symposium being some kind of consolation prize).
Exhibition catalogues tend to be used also as status symbols, to communicate the relevance or importance of the art: the bigger and nicer the catalogue, the more important the artist is.
And as any exhibition apparatus —including the exhibition space itself—the exhibition catalogue is not exempt from its vanity uses. This is why artists in the United States tend to be jealous of European artists (big and small) who seemingly have the ability to produce lots of beautiful catalogues of their work.
An example of an artist who is dedicated to producing exquisite books is the Spanish artist Paco Cao, who works in obsessive detail in whatever project he is working on.
I have known Paco since the late 90s ( and I remember reading about him in the early 90s when he created his first famous participatory performance project “Rent a Body”). We bonded on our shared interest with literary fiction as incorporated into conceptual art. His attention to detail (which is much superior to my own) makes each published work he produces quite unique. His ongoing recent project, Museum Beauty Contest, consists in inviting the public to serve as jury to decide on the physical beauty of portrayed individuals as selected by museum staff (turning art criticism and connoisseurship into a beauty pageant is, of course, a satirical gesture). He recently mailed me a copy of a recent (Italian) edition of his project, worthy of a prize of its own.
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While many examples (including Cao’s) are an exception, a garden variety of exhibition catalogues that I am much less fond of are those that are used as promotional mechanisms (similar to those fancy gift books of the Banco de México) and whose form rather fulfills the function of PR torpedoes. I recall in Brazil, during the years prior to the Great Recession, foundations, museums and corporation would produce enormous publications. One time that I was visiting one such foundation as part of a project, the director offered to give me a huge pile of catalogues they had produced. I told them that there was no way I could fit them in my suitcase, so maybe I could have them mailed to me. The secretary later contacted me to get my address and tell me that the shipping to New York would cost me $900 USD.
That same foundation had the tendency to mail a biennial exhibition catalogue to every teacher in the state (and Brazil has really large states), a fact of which they were very proud of. They would probably mail out 10,000 catalogues (albeit not charging them, like they did to me) to people like grammar school teachers in rural areas and who would not have much use for a richly illustrated contemporary art tome— other than, perhaps, for it being the proverbial door stop.
The conundrum with the exhibition catalogue is that because it is a status symbol (like a fancy car) and promotional currency and everyone else is using it that way, dispensing altogether with making it puts one at a disadvantage. Many times I was in situations where the organizers of an event would decide against making a physical book (due to financial or environmental concerns) and instead doing an online publication—which often amounted to making the project feel less important than those that did produce physical publications. It is the same disadvantage that process-based art faces in museums: because exhibitions are physical presentations, paintings and sculptures dominate the gallery and viewing space, while the experiential work is mainly reproduced in a grainy black and white video in the corner.
A similar issue happens, by the way, with artists whose work is catalogue-reproduction friendly, which can result in a bonanza for a museum gift shop. Impressionists top the list, with other artists like Klimt, Van Gogh, and Mondrian (who of course not only have beautifully illustrated catalogues but mugs, scarves, and so on). Then there are those artists who are more present in the gift shop that in top collections because their images make beautiful coffee-table books, like Andy Goldsworthy. Performance art is not gift-shop friendly.
The practical question for me is what is to be done with these proliferating bricks that are both large and cumbersome but also somewhat valuable and that I also need to keep for consultation (would they be not of interest at all, I would not have such a conundrum, as I could simply donate them to a library). As things stand, I already pay substantial storage costs in New York and have more books than I can possibly store both at home and the studio (plus, I run a 10,000 volume traveling bookstore for which I perennially need to keep finding a new home). And because I often receive a handful of free new art books every week, I often feel like a bibliographic version of Sisyphus, only that my load is of exhibition catalogues, and once I manage to let them roll down the mountain, a new load is put onto my shoulders and I need to climb up with them again. I feel like cynically paraphrasing Camus, who writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, “seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable”: we all truly want to be in a catalogue, but nobody desires to have all the catalogues everyone is in.
And most of those catalogues have been written by Narcissus.
Perhaps a public exhibition catalogue library is in order.