The Lonely Life.

"Originally I thought I would model the series after Plato's Dialogues but then I thought that would be a bit much," Roni Horn said about her books. She chose Diderot's Encyclopaedia instead. Never mind; modesty is not a virtue in art, and the six publications that now constitute Horn's ongoing series, To Place, have defied it with progressive vigor.

The most recent, Haraldsdottir, is a wordless volume of similarly composed, full-bleed, tightly cropped head shots of an athletic-looking young blond named Margret. The photos are both black and white and, later in the hook, full color. Sometimes there are two to a spread, and when they appear one at a time, they jump from left to right in unpredictable rhythms. Margret is always wet, and sometimes visibly up to her chin in water. Her expression varies, subtly at first, from impassive to angry to quizzical to just barely off guard. When her tightly clamped mouth finally opens to show a bit of tooth - it's hardly a smile - the effect is almost comically erotic.

Haraldsdottir is the first book in To Place that constructs anything like a personal narrative (it is also the first to be preceded by an exhibition of its images). But in most important ways it is consistent with Horn's earlier books. Within same-format sober gray cloth covers, each volume of To Place is, first, a meditation on the distinctive landscape of Iceland, a largely barren lava island of meteorological extremes, where Horn has been spending time regularly for more than twenty years. More to the point, each book is also an essay on the sensory physics of place and position. In earlier books, and in Horn's sculpture as well, physical concentrations - pooled water, fenced sheepfolds,. buckled flows of lava - are often key.

In Haraldsdottir, concentration is registered not in the landscape but on Margret's face, which shifts, in response to changes of light and weather, with the subtlety of a hillside beneath an advancing storm. "Each time we worked, everything changed, immeasurably and sometimes imperceptibly," Horn says in a very brief afterword (she is an excellent writer, and formidably precise, as is clear in the longer texts of To Place: Pooling Waters). Wedging great chunks of perceptual experience between phenomena close enough to seem unitary is what she does best. Paired objects, for instance, form mismatched reciprocal reflections, as do repeated images of the same face. Similarly, word forms, as in "to place," are made to do two things at once because for Horn, Iceland is a verb as well as a noun.

So, too, of course, is "book" a verb. And "picture." If Horn exercises them with the rigor of a linguist, Jack Pierson approaches the picture book a shade more languidly, and sometimes downshifts to full swoon. The Lonely Life is a welter of ripe, disordered images, full color, glossy, and marginless. Some are original photographs, intact or altered; some are secondhand; and some are photographs of Pierson's own installations, including word pieces built from fragments of commercial signage, freehand drawings, and sculptural assemblages. Unlike All of a sudden, Pierson's most recent previous book, The Lonely Life includes three short texts (one each about photographs, drawings, and installations), and standard biographical backmatter. But in the main, the new publication is a freestanding artwork, and a good example of how well books serve Pierson - apart from the comfortable fit of his word works and the printed page, or the affinity between road pictures and the rhythms of page turning. In life, Pierson's installations have a kind of determined insolence; inside the covers of a book, things get much tighter, and more full. With The Lonely Life Pierson goes so far as to frame the book as if it were a linear narrative, making the opening shot a cup of coffee and a sunny window, and concluding with silver tinsel curtains.

That isn't to say his books completely rehabilitate a world-class visual slouch. Much of Pierson's material here is still technically and emotionally impoverished, in his signature manner. It's just that his classic approach/avoid, be eager/be cool ambivalence has a shorter turning radius in a book. On the one hand, a book places the artist pretty directly in your hands, and vice versa. On the other, books can he powerful distancing devices, since you're never there, where the balmy, woozy, sunstruck photographs were taken, or even where much of the work was shown. There is less malevolence in Pierson's books than in Richard Prince's (which they somewhat resemble), and more open longing. There is also a distinct sigh of relief for indulging, uninterrupted by clamorous white walls, an appetite for pictures.

No teasing exposure of libidinal urges for Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio - we never even get a proper look at their egos. Since 1998, this intercontinental duo (Grennan is British, Sperandio American) have been designing projects meant to give voice to the art world's silent majority. Art administrators and patrons, friends and family, audience, and, sometimes, innocent bystanders have been persuaded to express their material preferences, or share their spiritual secrets, or simply lend their faces to Grennan and Sperandio's enterprise. Lately, G and S have been soliciting stories, which they edit, storyboard, and publish as paperback comic books. Cartoon Hits retells real-life anecdotes lent by thirteen members of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts; Dirt replays stories told to the artists by unnamed sources about "the essence of celebrity." Most of the tales in the first have the ring of truth: they are wry, oddly shaped, and end without punchlines. Dirt, by contrast, clearly contains a few whoppers, and indeed G and S reveal at the end that only two of the four tales are true; "make your best guess," they say, an invitation with a ripple effect. Taunting theorists with work too visually lively (they are great cartoonists) and flat-out funny to make scholastic considerations of decentered authorship a viable option, they leave interpretation as open as creative priority.

Baffled identity is Ilya Kabakov's subject, too, though his focus is individual experience, not the social construction of visual expression. Auf dem Dach/On the Roof, the most recent of his rapidly proliferating, densely prolix books, accompanied a 1996 installation at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In a simulated rooftop warren, each of ten rooms contained a slide show of home photos, with voice-over narrative. The book begins with freehand drawings and architectural renderings of the installation, and also strangely stagy color photographs - they suggest the lightboxes of James Casebere, or the elaborately faked cardboard interiors created for photographs by Thomas Demand. Weathered black and white family photos follow, with captions (the installation's oral narrative) in German and English. The captions are in alternating voices, male and female, and provide numbingly - and then mesmerizingly - ordinary information: here I am at two, at four, here is my graduation, my wedding, the studio, the children. At the end, the text appears in Russian, along with a short biography of the artist (in German and English).

As with all of Kabakov's books (and installations), there is an inescapable sense of anxiety - to get the work out, at any cost, in whatever language (English, German, Russian, expressive, mechanical, professional, amateur) is at hand. Partly, this seems a habit of samizdat-style subversion, or at least irreverence. But it is also consistent with the culture of bureaucracy: as Kabakov's own work has vividly illustrated, state socialism abhors a vacuum. And it is simply murder on secure ego boundaries. These and other heartless jokes are, of course, among the dubious privileges of exile, and as Kabakov's work grows increasingly autobiographical, it also becomes less forgiving. A recent publication, My Mother's Album, ran Kabakov's mother's fairly horrifying account of her life story alongside an album of state-approved postcards of Soviet life. In On the Roof even that schematic. dialectic - their truth, our truth - is gone. Here, it is all simply personal, our truth, but nothing Kabakov has made before feels more unreal.

Nancy Princethal is a writer who lives in New York