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MIT Press: Publishing the Eclectic and the Futuristic - Part 1
Something for every freak and geek on your list. MIT Press' Spring 2000 catalog is a veritable Pandora's Box of thought-provoking and visually stimulating titles.
When one thinks of MIT--the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--one thinks of computers, science, and geeks, geeks, geeks. When one looks at a typical MIT Press catalog of published titles, a different image comes to mind, one of freaks and geeks--or to put it more eloquently--one of artists, visionaries, inventors, and futurists.The Press' Spring 2000 catalog is a veritable Pandora's Box of thought-provoking and visually stimulating content. There's a history of shit, books on robotics, utopia, and global hunger, and a natural history of rape. The most complete book to date on the art of American visual artist Barbara Kruger, known for mixing words and images in her explorations of sexuality and power, leads off the list.
A number of MIT's art and photography books accompany exhibitions and are published in partnership with art museums. The Kruger book, for example, is co-published with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and accompanies an exhibit there through February 13th. Billboard: Art on the Road, was co-published with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA). Those traveling through the northern Berkshires this summer may have seen some of the billboards in the exhibit. About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits, was co-published with The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT in conjunction with a big Warhol show running through January 30th.
Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000 by Robert A. Sobieszek was published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that began last October and ends January 17th. This intriguing and beautiful book takes as its premise the idea that the outer person is a reflection of the inner. Tracing the modern photographic portrait over the past 150 years, it reveals the many ways the photographic arts have investigated, represented, interpreted, and subverted the human face and, consequently, the human spirit. The artists discussed include, among others, Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Curtis, Salvador Dali, Annie Leibowitz, and Edward Weston.
Can photographs capture the human soul? Artists have used the genre not only to convey familiar emotions such as fear, love, sadness, and anger, but also to explore complex subjective states such as passionate individuality and psychological withdrawal. "I am concerned with the very real corporeality and materiality of the human face, the mechanics by which our countenances articulate the inexpressible nature of the human spirit, and how this spirit has been and continues to be visually expressed through the camera arts," says author Sobieszek.
Another innovative and fascinating title on the MIT list is Exploring the Art and Science of Stopping Time: A CD-ROM Based on the Life and Work of Harold E. Edgerton, which was created to capture some of Edgerton's spirit and vision and transmit it to a new generation. Along with being chief developer of the strobe, he was an insightful scientist, ingenious inventor, and acclaimed artist. Users not only learn about his life and philosophy but enter his world-famous laboratory--Strobe Alley at MIT--and play with some of the experiments he created to "see the unseen," to observe events that happen at high speeds. Subject headings include Drops and Splashes, Bullets and Blasts, Athletics, Humans in Motion, and Creatures.
How does MIT Press keep producing such a unique list? We asked art and architecture editor Roger Conover... Roger Conover is the art and architecture editor at MIT Press and a former Golden Gloves champion.
Q: How it is that such consistently interesting offerings on art,
architecture, photography come to be on MIT's list?
A: There is a certain freedom in being MIT that allows us to do things that a Random House or an Abrams
cannot. For me the next book is always the most interesting, and the most
interesting authors are the ones I haven't yet read. If you
think our list is interesting, then we may have the same disease. Luckily there are enough others who have
it too, which allows us to go on. The books seem necessary to some few of us.
But we are custodians of snowflakes, and it would be an illusion to think
that the temperature of these books even registers on the cultural
thermometer of the world at large.
Q: How do you know when a proposed book belongs on your list?
A: The process by which these books wind up on the list is much too fluid to quantify, but I can
say this much: you read everything that crosses your desk, never knowing
what you might find. You don't find the cutting edge with your letter
opener. And you don't cultivate these books by watching other publishers.
On the other hand you are glad that Abrams is Abrams, that Thames & Hudson
does what it does, and that Monicelli is there. That sets you free.
Because they are there, you can be somewhere else. In fact you had better
be somewhere else, or you are dead. And if you get too comfortable where
you are, then you've stayed there too long. There is nothing mystical about
the process by which each book winds up on the list. But there is nothing
logical about it either. You read. You go to movies. You go to the gym. You
talk to your children. You buy groceries from people who don't know what
your job is. And between these quotidian events you listen to authors talk
about their books, and you ask questions, and you decide what's authentic
and where the voices are coming from. Not necessarily what's profound,
but what has a color and a taste.
Q: It sounds as if publishing interesting books is a metaphor for living an interesting life.
A: You try to get yourself into interesting places, and if they're well-lit places, you might not see anything. You
look at the margins of a field, and the corners of a room, and the
borderlands between disciplines. You look at America from South America,
and Europe from Eastern Europe, and photography from poetry, and
architecture from dance. If you're looking for emerging ideas in
architecture, you are as likely to find it in film studios as design
schools. And if you are seeking something unusual in photography, you are
as likely to find it talking to art students as curators. In other words,
you don't ever want to get too comfortable with authority, or to find your
next books in predictable places, or to see your authors' ideas accepted
too widely. The books on next season's list that I haven't published yet are the ones I'm most excited
about now.
Q: What's been exciting you lately?
A: Let's see; there's a cultural history of shit, by the late
French philosopher Dominique Laporte, and a study of phobic space and
spatially induced anxieties, by the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler.
At various times in the past my obsessions ran to a photography book on
manhole covers, a philosophy of Japanese lunchboxes, a biography of a
poet-boxer, a 15th century treatise on architectural erotics, and a
book on the aesthetics of the Sex Pistols.
Q: How will you determine whether or not these projects are a success?
A: You want your books in St. Marks Bookstore, but you don't look for them at Logan airport. You don't ever want to count on the same success twice, and you
don't want to forget how much more people know who are never asked their opinion than those who are paid to have opinions. You can't try to be all things to all
people. You hope that the books you publish emit a certain aroma, and that
a process of fertilization takes place between books and readers that is
reproductive. What happens after that is chemistry--or a miracle. You try
not to follow a mission statement or to issue pontifical statements about
what you are doing. You buy a lot of books and you read a lot of crap and
you make sure there is some pleasure in the objects you produce that you
expect readers to hold in their hands and stare at for some hours. Not only
as ideas, but as things. You believe in the ars accidentalis of publishing which also means you believe in mistakes and you don't completely believe your successes. You don't get hung up on being MIT because MIT is a work in progress whose best books have yet to be published but whose presence as a
publisher of art and architecture books is still a well-kept secret to the
world at large. You try to take advantage of being so visible and so
invisible at the same time. And you remember you are not building a monument, but printing sheets of paper with sentences on them.
Next issue: A conversation with William Mitchell, Dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, and author of e-topia, a new book that explores how urban architecture will be transformed by the Internet.