Richard Deacon.

David Carrier

What has changed in the past 30 years much more radically than contemporary art itself is its publishing support system. Jessica Stockholder may trope on Robert Rauschenberg's 1960s themes, and Jimmie Durham may take up concerns of Conceptual artists of that decade, but in 1965 startlingly good books like these were not devoted to midcareer artists. Each volume has a lucid survey essay, a well-edited artist interview a discussion of a single work, and the artist's selection of a text relevant to his or her work. Erudite and well-informed about concerns coming from art history, cultural studies, philosophy, and political history, with illuminating visual comparisons, these texts, clear enough to be accessible to students, will also engage readers already familiar with these artists. Luxurious and amazingly low priced, they are destined to be great teaching tools.

Phaidon editor Iwona Blazwick has explained that her goal is not "to use a single narrative," but to bring multiple perspectives to one artist's work, "using different critical voices, reflecting the genealogies of critical discourse as they have developed." So Richard Deacon selects a remarkably relevant text by Mary Douglas; Jimmie Durham provides a revelatory interview about his life experience as a writer and artist of Cherokee descent; Lynne Tillman conducts a very profitable debate about conflict of interpretations with Jessica Stockholder; and Sir Ernst Gombrich, who too often has been called hostile to contemporary art, engages in an empathetic and revealing dialogue with Antony Gormley. When the traditional master narrative is replaced by such diverse, perhaps incommensurable perspectives, our historical sense of the recent past cannot but be greatly enriched.

Focused on artists who came to public attention in the '80s - volumes on Nancy Spero, Jeff Wall, and a handful of others are forthcoming - this publishing format is particularly sympathetic to installations. No single retrospective could display the work of Gormley as effectively as these photographs of sculptures sited in Charleston, South Carolina; Death Valley; Dublin; the Great Australian Desert; and Norway; nor would it be easy to grasp the references by the sculptor. and his commentators to the work of William Blake, Jacob Epstein, Donald Judd, Richard Long, Richard Serra, and Charles Ray without the abundant visual evidence provided.

In 1920, when Henri Matisse was 50, Marcel Sembat published the first monograph on him, a book containing only ten pages of text and small enough to be grasped in one hand. In the 1930s it was joined by fatter volumes, one cowritten by Albert Barnes and Violette de Mazia, the other Aleksandr Romm's Marxist tract, both with dismal black and white plates. Today's artists will fare better, thanks to these lavish volumes designed by Stuart Smith. Their large full-color reproductions, many of them two-page spreads, dramatically tilt the balance between words and image in favor of the latter. The boldest, best-executed, and most far-reaching publishing project devoted to contemporary art I have had the good fortune to encounter, these books will revolutionize the way contemporary art is presented and written about.