A torment of follies

The Los Angeles-based artist and art writer Frances Stark has gathered an international cult following for her prolific prose and her smart, honest and intimate artwork. This engaging artist's book is conceived as a companion piece to Stark's "Collected Writings 1993-2003," fashioning itself as a graphic counterpart that draws from the artist's paintings, collaged work, drawings, videos, poetry and more, from 1993 to the present. Through provocative and diaristic text notes printed alongside Stark's sometimes humorous, often self-scrutinizing images, "Collected Works" addresses the paradox of reproducing visual art that is essentially non-photogenic by nature--because of its tactility, detail or scale. The book formally addresses how verbiage flows in and out of the work(s), and leaves no space for the legitimizing language of the critic or curator. Neither a typical catalogue nor monograph, it pushes for a third form, a new art work constructed from existing pieces.