The neat idea behind Afterall’s ‘One Work’ series, which promises to stretch to a hundred volumes, is of dedicating entire books to singular works of art, beginning with ‘Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous’ by Jan Verwoert and then ‘Richard Prince: Untitled (couple)’ by Michael Newman. These early instances tap into practices currently being reconsidered by young artists: the ‘conceptual take on the romantic’ (according to Jan Verwoert) of Bas Jan Ader, who died at sea while making ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, and the postmodernist appropriations (‘immaculate tombs ready to receive the viewer’, says Michael Newman) of Richard Prince’s ‘rephotography’.
Unsurprisingly, each writer ranges away from their chosen piece. Verwoert elegantly contextualises his chosen work’s themes through other Ader pieces, and offers capsule histories of the sublime, Greek tragic theory and melancholia. (One caveat: in arguing that the Dutch artist’s films of himself crying and falling actively evoke valuable emotions suppressed by rationalism, Verwoert fails to factor in any discussion of empathy and its potential failure.)
Discussing Prince, Newman eruditely condenses the Reagan-era context of linguistic theory and philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s popular ravings, stitching everything together with extracts from an unpublished interview with the artist. And he’s not too shy to say, at the outset, that he happens to own the work whose canonical value he then spends 147 pages pumping up.
