Jason's Grey Cells

There is deep, continuous, immersive reading, and then there are interruptions - and the two are not necessarily inimical. Disruption can be an effective rhetorical strategy, not just a lapse. Modern thinking is used to interruptions; it thrives on them.

So too, I would argue, does our reading of an art book, whose defining feature is that you stop reading, and interrupt yourself, to look at the pictures. The very interruptedness of that reading brings its own pleasures.

Of all the varieties of books, museum publications must surely be among the most disrupted. The experience of reading a catalogue is broken up by many other elements competing with the continuous prose. Those competing elements include elaborate footnotes that often constitute a running schizoid subtext of their own, quarrelling with the main text; or detailed chronologies that give an alternative account of the artworks, in strict timeline form; or meticulous documentation of medium, support, dimensions, inscriptions, and so on; or donors; or provenance, sometimes with tantalizing, unexplained gaps; or exhibition histories, or publication references, or condition reports - all wrapped up in a graphic-design package that tries to make all this stuff look like a book, and not some insanely prodigal compendium of diverse information.