DISCOVERIES

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The Archive

Documents of Contemporary Art

Edited by Charles Merewether

Whitechapel/MIT Press: 208 pp., $22.95 paper

“THE ARCHIVE” is a collection of pivotal essays on the role of archives in modern art and history. Not to be confused with “the historical record,” archives provide fragments of testimony that serve, more often than not, to break it up. Charles Merewether, former collections curator at the Getty Research Institute, organized this provocative book into four sections: the first contains pieces (among them Freud’s “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad” and Michel Foucault’s “The Historical a priori and the Archive”) that distinguish between the archive and history. The second gathers essays on the archive as evidence of, say, the difference between daily life and its interpretation in art. In “Archive Fever,” Jacques Derrida considers the archive as politics: “Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” The last two sections consist of writings on post-1945 uses of the archive (especially in Japan) and its frequent fallibility as a tool of memory.

The book’s playful design employs pull quotes resembling children’s lettering, street-art manifestos or eye exams. One such is from Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Short History of Photography,” showing the inspirational potential of archival material: “Utrillo painted his fascinating views of Paris not from life but from picture postcards.”

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The Solitude of Thomas Cave

A Novel

Georgina Harding

Bloomsbury: 240 pp., $23.95

MAYBE it was winter, always elsewhere, calling out from the jacket illustration -- the lure of an expedition into (not away from) pure cold -- or the reverberations of the word “solitude” (and who’s this Thomas Cave; is he real or fictional?) promising both escape and revelation. In August 1616, the Heartsease is bound home from a whaling voyage in the North Atlantic when the crew challenges one among them, a gaunt and silent man named Thomas Cave, to make good on his assertion that a man could survive a winter on one of the uncharted Arctic islands they visit. Cave accepts the wager. The crew helps him build a cabin and leaves him with a year’s supplies. In the eight weeks before winter darkness, he sets up his home (a fiddle, an almanac, a plank bed, three muskets, a telescope, a prayer book) and hunts for meat to freeze and greens to dry.

Cave is soon beset by doubt: “He sees it suddenly with pity for himself, the crude windowless chamber and his attempts to make a home of it ... in so many details [mimicking] the other house even when he has not been conscious of doing so.” He recalls the recent death of his young wife in childbirth. He thinks of the son born and whisked away. He plays his fiddle, talks to the seals, kills a bear and makes it through the winter. When he comes home, he’s credited with special powers to lift others out of craziness and depression. In old age, he mourns the Arctic’s ruin: “[S]o much lived there.... In its cold way it was a paradise. No man there, no devils, nor even, I came to think, a God, or not any God that we know. Only itself. And then we came.”

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Stacked

A 32DDD Reports From the Front

Susan Seligson

Bloomsbury: 256 pp., $23.95

READ it as comedy and it’s fine; read it as commentary and it’s bound to make you mad. Seligson insists that her big breasts have leavened her life, despite the “havoc” and “wreckage” they’ve caused (an admirer drove into a lamppost), not to mention the longing they’ve inspired in men of all ages. Has it suddenly become OK again to objectify the female body? When Seligson (for journalistic purposes) agrees to pose topless in the streets of New York for a photographer (inspired by Janet Jackson) who will post it on his website, it becomes clear that this is not a book about a cultural phenomenon, it’s a book about Susan Seligson and her big, big breasts.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com