66 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 67PATRICK BERNATCHEZ: LES TEMPS
INACHEVÉS, Casino Luxembourg –
Forum d’art contemporain/Musée d’art
contemporain de Montréal, 204 pp, $60.00.
Mutation, contamination, transformation
and decay: these are the measures of time,
past, present and future, that rest at the
core of works by Montreal artist Patrick
Bernatchez. This large-scale monograph,
produced in conjunction with his recent
touring survey exhibition, is top notch,
with essays and an in-depth interview set
alongside a rich catalogue of images that
unwind the artist’s abiding chronological
fascinations and critical “protocols.” Time
is the subject and material in Bernatchez’s
work—it is also, as he proves, inescapable.25 WOMEN: ESSAYS ON THEIR ART,
Dave Hickey, University of Chicago
Press, 192 pp, $29.00.
Hickey claims that his book “does not set
out to colonize women’s art,” and yet: the
West Texas cowboy critic seems most at
ease conferring profundity onto those he
praises by sticking flags bearing canonical
male names into their bodies of work—
Bridget Riley, for instance, is the daughter
of Albers, squired by Reinhardt, sought out
by Dalí, supported by Newman, a devotee
of Veronese and Seurat (we can also thank
Rousseau, Matisse, Cézanne, Titian, Serra
and Nauman for her successes). Though
quickwitted, his breezy criticism can come
across as distant, like he is aware of being
an unwelcome foreigner in a strange land.Recent art books and catalogues
READINGS
What is happiness? It is,
I believe, a sustained sense
of well-being. But well-being
is something that artists
never feel, or only seldom.
They are not well acquainted
with this feeling, and do not
understand how to get to
know and value it. Why is it
that artists cannot find peace?
I know why, but I don’t know
how to say it.— Excerpt from “A Painter” in
Robert Walser: Looking at PicturesROBERT WALSER: LOOKING AT PICTURES, translated by
Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton,
Christine Burgin/New Directions, 144 pp, $29.95.
How to explain the idiosyncratic writings of Robert Walser? In
a 2002 introduction to a collection of his stories, Susan Son-
tag described him as “a Paul Klee in prose.” This suggestion
of the late Swiss’s affinity with the visual arts is later confirmed
by that book’s epigraph, taken from the author’s own Eine Art
Erzählung: “I am a kind of artisan novelist.” So it is that this
collection of Walser’s writing arrives from New Directions
press as a gift, long overdue. In their introduction, Susan
Bernofsky, the book’s principal translator, and Christine Burgin
point out that ekphrasis—the recasting of a work of art in a
medium in which it did not originate—“was a mode of writing
[Walser] came to love; he pursued it all his life.” Here, words
attempt to depict paintings; or rather, they consistently and
purposely fail at this, with the writing and the painting becom-
ing more hauntingly beautiful as a result. “I have perhaps not
yet said everything that could be said about this picture,”
writes Walser about a Ferdinand Hodler work. “But you can
certainly feel from what I’ve said here how greatly I admire it.”Readings_sp16_10TS.indd 66 02/04/16 7:30 PM