The Last Safe Abortion
By Carmen Winant
SPBH Editions / MACK
Spiral bound and laid out in horizontal grids, like an album, Carmen Winant’s collection of archival images is an exercise in understatement. Rejecting theatrics, the artist memorializes the era of Roe (1973–2022) and its community-based abortion-care clinics via unremarkable snapshots—of waiting rooms, reception desks, ultrasound exams, and staff meetings. Published for the occasion of this year’s Whitney Biennial, where the artist presented hundreds of such prints to form a wall-spanning mosaic of quotidian activity, this book is a careful edit, representing just a fraction of Winant’s amassed material. With it, she offers an invaluable visual record of the feminist labor that actualized a fleeting freedom, a radical keepsake contra the spectacularized imagery and rhetoric of such deceits as “post-birth abortion.”
—Johanna Fateman
Distinguishing Piss from Rain: Writings and Interviews
By Glenn Ligon, with an introduction by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax
Hauser & Wirth
Anyone who has paid attention to the conceptual artist—his writing, his interviews, and, especially, the artworks—knows there is a reason Glenn Ligon’s thinking is frequently in dialogue with literature, from the writing of James Baldwin to that of Egyptian-born Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. Ligon's essays, anthologized here, are elegantly constructed, while revealing what he's learned from the artists who have inspired him (such as David Hammons and Felix Gonzalez-Torres) as well as his eye for younger talent (he references Tourmaline's work on Marsha P. Johnson while writing on Warhol). The interviews are equally sharp, as in the conversation with curator Hamza Walker, where Ligon moves from discussing the music of Sun Ra to the date paintings of On Kawara. Together the texts form a hefty tome worthy of a capacious artist.
—John Vincler
Hilary Harkness: Everything for You
By Wendy Osloff, Lynne Tillman, Ashley Jackson, Ivy Haldeman
Black Dog Press and P.P.O.W.
The painter’s comprehensive monograph, which spans nearly 25 years, could not arrive soon enough for an audience primed by her knock-out show last year. At P.P.O.W., Hilary Harkness presented a suite of small canvases for which she took Winslow Homer’s 1866 Civil War scene Prisoners from the Front as a point of departure—her speculative series proposed an alternate history of Homer’s painting, inspired, in part, by her wife’s ancestry. Narratively scrambled, pictorially complex queer worlds have long been Harkness’s métier, the scope of her dazzling, detailed work shows. Strange, painstakingly rendered pictures, like transmissions from lesbian corners of the multiverse—cross-sections of battleships manned by women and imagined moments shared by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas—demand the kind of close study that, luckily, this beautiful volume affords.
—Johanna Fateman
The Sleepers
By Sophie Calle, translated from French by Emma Ramadan
Siglio Press
Sophie Calle is one of the great artist-anthropologists of our time. Siglio Press first published her work The Address Book in 2012, giving English-language readers access to her mischievous examinations of human behavior. In that project, an address book, found on the streets of Paris, was used to create a portrait of its owner; Calle interviewed everyone listed within, creating a hybrid photobook intercut with writing in a distinctive detective-like tone. Siglio’s latest Calle release employs a similar documentary mode. For The Sleepers, the artist invited participants willing to spend the night—and to be observed and photographed—in her own bed. The resulting text, beautifully translated, and accompanied by the 198 photographs that composed her 1979 installation of the same title, is both a literary achievement and a document of a seminal performance at the start of her singular career. The release coincided with Calle's first U.S. career survey, "Overshare," at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, on view through January 26, 2025.
—John Vincler
Clarity Haynes: Portals
By Leah DeVun, Harry Dodge, Clarity Haynes, Jeanne Vaccaro
New Discretions / ARTBOOK
Clarity Haynes’s "Portals" at the gallery New Discretions was one of the best exhibitions of 2024 that I didn't get to review. So, I’m grateful to have this catalogue to write about, which also shows the painter assertively leveling-up mid-career. Haynes is best known for her torso portrait series of women, trans masc, and non-binary figures, which depict her subjects nude, from waist to neck, in a manner that subverts objectifying gazes and celebrates queer, mastectomized, aging, post-breastfeeding, and post-top-surgery bodies. Another of her series, "Altars," is composed of collage-like trompe l’oeil compositions, still-lifes of varied personal, symbolic objects. These two established modes of her practice are joined, in the book's pages, by the titular "Portals"—scenes of birth, most of them depicting the moment of crowning, when the infant's head is emerging. It's a paradox that such an image is at once both taboo and commonplace, as it represents the routine function of vaginal birth. The paintings initiate a lively conversation about why this is so, which this book continues with an artist interview and elucidating essays.
—John Vincler
Contextures
By Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy S. Philips
Pacific / Primary Information
This new edition of the book, first published in 1978 by the gallery Just Above Midtown, takes the form of a facsimile of the original: a slender volume with black-and-white reproductions, a Senga Nengudi image on its otherwise orange cover. Only its tender afterword is new, written by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, curator of the fantastic 2022-2023 MoMA exhibition “Changing Spaces,” which focused on the historic exhibition space led by Goode Bryant. Expository, scholarly, and visionary, the authors’ vintage text on postwar Black abstraction, meant to be catalogue for a major survey that never came to pass, remains both a primer and a trenchant theorization of a movement and a moment, whether it’s called Contexturalist or not.
—Johanna Fateman
Van Gogh and the End of Nature
By Michael Lobel
Yale University Press
What a gift to see Van Gogh with fresh eyes, especially through the art historian’s revelatory reframing of the artist's work: More than a nature painter, Van Gogh should be understood, Lobel argues, as a prescient documenter of industrial transformation. He shows Van Gogh capturing factories and their smokestacks, trains and their coal-devouring steam engines—and even how air pollution and new industrial agricultural methods changed the landscape. The result is a major scholarly achievement, but don't hold that against the book, which manages to be a page-turner of a story too. And, it's coffee-table worthy—a pleasure to flip through for the reproductions alone. Van Gogh has never seemed more relevant. This stands as my favorite book of the year in any genre.
—John Vincler
