As an experiment to see if anyone indeed EVER reads my rarely updated Counterforces blog, I shall take this opportunity to suggest that the AJC's revisionary bet has paid off so far as visual art is concerned. I have had nothing to do with the Features section since last April so I'm entitled to my opinion.
The coverage of Shepard Barbash and Vicki Ragan (see the previous post) was excellent, and subsequent stories on artwork owned by Atlanta collectors has given those In the Know an insight into the scene that they (or I, at least) did not previously have: viz., that work subsequently available in Atlanta has often already been acquired by certain collectors (in the case of photographs) at the New York gallery. This is an improvement on the days when collectors would see work in Atlanta and then fly to New York to buy comparable pieces from the artist's gallery there.
Lisa Kurzner's review of Tina Barney contextualizes the work more in depth than I would have thought permissible in a review for the general public, and the return of formalist analysis to the pages of the AJC is, for me, a most welcome development. The articles intended to bring an audience up to speed on contemporary issues are, indeed, comparable to what is done for the sciences or world geopolitics, and visual art has long deserved the courtesy. Now it appears to be receiving it.
Yay.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Changing Dreams: Shepard Barbash and Vicki Ragan at Mingei
Shepard Barbash and Vicki Ragan are signing their new book at Mingei in Decatur on February 17, which is why I searched for the post that appears below, and discovered I never actually posted it (because I had been posting three and four times a day on joculum, as I have been lately).
This appears in somewhat more concealed form on joculum.livejournal.com, but it's there.
Here it is:
Changing Dreams: Oaxaca and the Barbash/Ragan Effect
or, a Tale of Woodcarvers, Photographers, Anthropologists, and Art Critics
One of the films that has stayed with me is The Perfumed Nightmare, an allegory about a Filipino woodcarver whose wooden saints are so admired by foreigners that he gets a commission to produce thousands upon thousands of mascot figures for the 1972 Munich Olympics. As in so many other small-business allegories, a low profit margin type of success ruins him physically, mentally, and if I recall rightly, ultimately economically as styles change and interest moves on.
Sometimes a sudden failure of interest is ultimately good for a community, as when the cancellation of special-order commercial contracts thirty-some years ago left the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama to their own isolated creative devices once more, abandoned by the programs meant to lift them out of poverty. Enter the art and museum worlds courtesy of the controversial Bill Arnett and his Tinwood Enterprises partners including Jane Fonda and filmmaker daughter Vanessa Vadim, and the now elderly women who were making quilts for Sears in the seventies are being escorted to museum openings of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” and taken to parts of the world they had scarcely so much as dreamed of.
More often, folk artists of all sorts have fulfilled one-off commissions for particular patrons, sometimes violating their usual styles and subject matter to produce pornography, rather as Courbet painted the now-famous The Origin of the World as an unusually well-imagined piece of erotica meant to hang in a patron’s private bedroom.
So I was pleased to learn in 1993 from Shepard Barbash and Vicki Ragan that the Oaxacan woodcarvers they were doing their best to publicize had come up with this strange, untraditional, by turns whimsical and disturbing imagery on their own, provoked only by the prospect of outdoing one another and finding visitors and others who would pay them to create these extravagant visions.
I was pleased to the point of trying to contextualize their Chronicle Books volume on the topic in terms of global art and greater issues of folk and ethnic arts (though I am not going to look up my review in Art Papers lest it prove less ambitious and scholarly than my retelling would have it be).
I was further pleased to see Oaxacan woodcarving become as popular as it subsequently became, to the point that eventually the oversupply was being marketed as a loss leader in curio shops all over the country (or at least the few parts of the country I tend to get to).
I learn from a story by Catherine Fox in the January 20 ’08 Atlanta Journal Constitution that economic anthropologist Michael Chibnik christened this upswell of interest “the Barbash/Ragan effect.” According to his analysis in Crafting a Tradition, it was their Smithsonian article in 1991 coupled with their Oaxacan Wood Carving two years later that sparked the explosion of popular interest and subsequent massive importation of the work of specific well-known carvers at first, and of vast quantities of Oaxacan work later.
I went on to other topics, including following Vicki Ragan’s separate photographic career, though I encountered the subject of Oaxacan carvers in other contexts.
Most recently, as I may have written in joculum.livejournal or in counterforces.blogspot, I encountered a whole family of them in Mingei World Arts in Decatur, Georgia (I am spelling all these things out in case this piece migrates without my knowledge to worlds and websites yet unknown). They were celebrating the birthday of one of the children, and trying to locate suitable replacement wood for the Oaxacan product that couldn’t be imported at that moment because of the political troubles in Oaxaca.
That family, and sorry, I didn’t write down the names, eventually returned to Oaxaca, and were in metro Atlanta for reasons of their own.
This new tale of the wages of globalization has now been told by Barbash and Ragan in Changing Dreams, a photo book about the carver families that updates their lives as of 2004.
The story is not what you might expect. For all of the explosion of creativity, the carvers considered their art one more way of making a living, not a creative pursuit to be followed at all costs, and some of the most talented have gone back to truck driving or migrated north to the United States to earn money in unrelated occupations. Some few who were brought to the U.S. as celebrated folk artists have continued to be recognized as valued representatives of a creative tradition, but there is no guarantee of a sympathetic dealer or, as in the case of Mingei, a basically grassroots business interested in meeting émigré families as unique human beings.
Much the same can be said of art-school-educated artists in the United States, of course, of whom more can be found tending bar or making lattes than making etchings or installations.
Barbash and Ragan, though, have given us a version of a global story that is worthy of the attention of more than folk-art aficionados. One of its points is that a degree of prosperity did come to the Oaxacan villages; and, once there, it has made it impossible to lapse back into the assumptions of a few decades ago. The artists have dreamed larger dreams, and if their creative imaginations have led them in career directions that seem tragic to us, they may be less so to the individuals involved. (Again, it is possible to cite U.S.-artist parallels without making false assumptions about people being the same everywhere. Cultures and cultural pressures are different, but the underlying physical and psychological substrate makes for structurally similar solutions. He said, alliteratively.)
2007’s Changing Dreams is properly a book from a university press rather than a coffee-table-book publisher. Its more biographical focus won’t produce a second Barbash/Ragan effect. But its parallel portraits of Oaxacan woodcarvers from 1988 and 2004, combined with solidly thoughtful text, should have an impact on a completely different market for ideas about the world we live in. (Footnote: the 1993 publisher declined to use Ragan’s black-and-whtie documentation of the men and women who actually made the art; this was what led to the idea of updating the 1988 photography on a new extended visit.)
This appears in somewhat more concealed form on joculum.livejournal.com, but it's there.
Here it is:
Changing Dreams: Oaxaca and the Barbash/Ragan Effect
or, a Tale of Woodcarvers, Photographers, Anthropologists, and Art Critics
One of the films that has stayed with me is The Perfumed Nightmare, an allegory about a Filipino woodcarver whose wooden saints are so admired by foreigners that he gets a commission to produce thousands upon thousands of mascot figures for the 1972 Munich Olympics. As in so many other small-business allegories, a low profit margin type of success ruins him physically, mentally, and if I recall rightly, ultimately economically as styles change and interest moves on.
Sometimes a sudden failure of interest is ultimately good for a community, as when the cancellation of special-order commercial contracts thirty-some years ago left the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama to their own isolated creative devices once more, abandoned by the programs meant to lift them out of poverty. Enter the art and museum worlds courtesy of the controversial Bill Arnett and his Tinwood Enterprises partners including Jane Fonda and filmmaker daughter Vanessa Vadim, and the now elderly women who were making quilts for Sears in the seventies are being escorted to museum openings of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” and taken to parts of the world they had scarcely so much as dreamed of.
More often, folk artists of all sorts have fulfilled one-off commissions for particular patrons, sometimes violating their usual styles and subject matter to produce pornography, rather as Courbet painted the now-famous The Origin of the World as an unusually well-imagined piece of erotica meant to hang in a patron’s private bedroom.
So I was pleased to learn in 1993 from Shepard Barbash and Vicki Ragan that the Oaxacan woodcarvers they were doing their best to publicize had come up with this strange, untraditional, by turns whimsical and disturbing imagery on their own, provoked only by the prospect of outdoing one another and finding visitors and others who would pay them to create these extravagant visions.
I was pleased to the point of trying to contextualize their Chronicle Books volume on the topic in terms of global art and greater issues of folk and ethnic arts (though I am not going to look up my review in Art Papers lest it prove less ambitious and scholarly than my retelling would have it be).
I was further pleased to see Oaxacan woodcarving become as popular as it subsequently became, to the point that eventually the oversupply was being marketed as a loss leader in curio shops all over the country (or at least the few parts of the country I tend to get to).
I learn from a story by Catherine Fox in the January 20 ’08 Atlanta Journal Constitution that economic anthropologist Michael Chibnik christened this upswell of interest “the Barbash/Ragan effect.” According to his analysis in Crafting a Tradition, it was their Smithsonian article in 1991 coupled with their Oaxacan Wood Carving two years later that sparked the explosion of popular interest and subsequent massive importation of the work of specific well-known carvers at first, and of vast quantities of Oaxacan work later.
I went on to other topics, including following Vicki Ragan’s separate photographic career, though I encountered the subject of Oaxacan carvers in other contexts.
Most recently, as I may have written in joculum.livejournal or in counterforces.blogspot, I encountered a whole family of them in Mingei World Arts in Decatur, Georgia (I am spelling all these things out in case this piece migrates without my knowledge to worlds and websites yet unknown). They were celebrating the birthday of one of the children, and trying to locate suitable replacement wood for the Oaxacan product that couldn’t be imported at that moment because of the political troubles in Oaxaca.
That family, and sorry, I didn’t write down the names, eventually returned to Oaxaca, and were in metro Atlanta for reasons of their own.
This new tale of the wages of globalization has now been told by Barbash and Ragan in Changing Dreams, a photo book about the carver families that updates their lives as of 2004.
The story is not what you might expect. For all of the explosion of creativity, the carvers considered their art one more way of making a living, not a creative pursuit to be followed at all costs, and some of the most talented have gone back to truck driving or migrated north to the United States to earn money in unrelated occupations. Some few who were brought to the U.S. as celebrated folk artists have continued to be recognized as valued representatives of a creative tradition, but there is no guarantee of a sympathetic dealer or, as in the case of Mingei, a basically grassroots business interested in meeting émigré families as unique human beings.
Much the same can be said of art-school-educated artists in the United States, of course, of whom more can be found tending bar or making lattes than making etchings or installations.
Barbash and Ragan, though, have given us a version of a global story that is worthy of the attention of more than folk-art aficionados. One of its points is that a degree of prosperity did come to the Oaxacan villages; and, once there, it has made it impossible to lapse back into the assumptions of a few decades ago. The artists have dreamed larger dreams, and if their creative imaginations have led them in career directions that seem tragic to us, they may be less so to the individuals involved. (Again, it is possible to cite U.S.-artist parallels without making false assumptions about people being the same everywhere. Cultures and cultural pressures are different, but the underlying physical and psychological substrate makes for structurally similar solutions. He said, alliteratively.)
2007’s Changing Dreams is properly a book from a university press rather than a coffee-table-book publisher. Its more biographical focus won’t produce a second Barbash/Ragan effect. But its parallel portraits of Oaxacan woodcarvers from 1988 and 2004, combined with solidly thoughtful text, should have an impact on a completely different market for ideas about the world we live in. (Footnote: the 1993 publisher declined to use Ragan’s black-and-whtie documentation of the men and women who actually made the art; this was what led to the idea of updating the 1988 photography on a new extended visit.)
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
hurrah for Whitney Stansell
Being as how nobody in this burg where I live ever gets around to reading the art magazines, I feel impelled to celebrate the appearance in the January issue of Art in America of Rebecca Dimling Cochran's review of Whitney Stansell's show at Tew Galleries, which show was writ up in this very blog back on July 12.
Nobody reads this blog either, but this way the name will show up on a Technorati search, if not a Google one.
Nobody reads this blog either, but this way the name will show up on a Technorati search, if not a Google one.
Friday, December 21, 2007
new and very, very old
I did not invent the Internet, and Al Gore never claimed to have done so, either, but three decades back I was hanging around a doctoral candidate at Emory who had arrived there full of the almost entirely untranslated work of a philosopher named Jacques Derrida, and determined to translate and annotate his most esoteric volume on Husserl as his dissertation (p.s.: he did).
Not all that many years later, the guy’s dissertation director (and mine) wrote to me about having been asked for yet another survey article on deconstruction, with the observation “When the nuns and the Republicans want you to explain it to them, you know it is over.”
By that standard, Tokion magazine is not over any more than Juxtapoz is, but when Abrams puts out a handsome anthology from the one (titled Revisionaries) and artists from the other are featured in museum retrospectives, one begins to wonder if the political conventions can be far after. On the other hand, it has taken forty years for Mike Huckabee to fantasize about having the Rolling Stones play at his inaugural ball, so perhaps Tokion is safe for another thirty.
Juxtapoz, though, comes out of an aesthetic that is as old as the emergence of deconstruction, and it is only its relentless pursuit of its codified aesthetic that keeps it outside the realms of respectability. It took fifty years for Jack Kerouac to appear in the same archival format as Walt Whitrman’s barbaric yawp, though it took less time for Howl to be read for class at the military academies, presumably with the prim asterisks still in place in the umpteenth City Lights edition.
But I was going to write about the Abrams volume of Tokion artists, including the biennial-worthy Marcel Dzama, the all grown up ex-Atlanta graffitist Jose Parla, and many, many more. And there is indeed a consistent aesthetic of transgression to gladden the heart of old Paul McCarthy.
Perhaps it was the recycled psychedelia tucked away here and there in the volume, but I suddenly remembered the aesthetic associated back in the day with the late great San Francisco Oracle…not that there is a blessed thing in common with the copulating couples in yab-yum postures and the Day-Glo evocations of Aubrey Beardsley, but rather the sense that the edge at any given historical moment contains a few visual seeds that will grow into lasting legacies and a lot of crap that will someday seem as embarrassing as paisley and patchouli. (Those of us who were ostentatiously searching for the incredibly rare Beat Generation artifacts of only ten years earlier already turned up our noses at patchouli and paisley. We wore a lot of black and talked about European movies, but both were very hard to come by in most places.)
The skat8punk aesthetic, and graffiti, and the assorted schools of hip-hop have shown greater staying power than psychedelia and acid rock ever did, or even (apart from niche markets) reggae. Hell, it looks like the longest-lived phenomenon of our time is death metal, which just goes on into the third and fourth generations. But skateboarding and graffiti, also, are now raising up the grandchildren of the first-generation founders.
And that sense of tradition is pretty impressive, given how in 1968 hardly anybody celebrated the hipsters of 1943, or remembered the Zoot Suit Riots. (Woody Guthrie was something else, of course, and there was a certain nostalgia for the Old School Authenticity of the Great Depression.)
I, as I say, was crossing the continent to find the tiny number of Tibetan sculptures to be seen in California museums, and modeling myself after the poets of the great Six Gallery reading about which almost nothing could be learned except from battered copies of Evergreen Review. And I still pride myself at being as out of step with the culture as possible; though it is hard to know what to look for these days, when reasonable replicas of zoot suits can be seen on the bods of trendy art dealers and collarless Greek wedding shirts are still best reserved for the anniversary celebrations of yesteryear’s Greek weddings.
I may have found a few things that just about everybody who is either hip or mainstream-tasteful considers embarrassingly awful, so watch this space for further developments.
Not all that many years later, the guy’s dissertation director (and mine) wrote to me about having been asked for yet another survey article on deconstruction, with the observation “When the nuns and the Republicans want you to explain it to them, you know it is over.”
By that standard, Tokion magazine is not over any more than Juxtapoz is, but when Abrams puts out a handsome anthology from the one (titled Revisionaries) and artists from the other are featured in museum retrospectives, one begins to wonder if the political conventions can be far after. On the other hand, it has taken forty years for Mike Huckabee to fantasize about having the Rolling Stones play at his inaugural ball, so perhaps Tokion is safe for another thirty.
Juxtapoz, though, comes out of an aesthetic that is as old as the emergence of deconstruction, and it is only its relentless pursuit of its codified aesthetic that keeps it outside the realms of respectability. It took fifty years for Jack Kerouac to appear in the same archival format as Walt Whitrman’s barbaric yawp, though it took less time for Howl to be read for class at the military academies, presumably with the prim asterisks still in place in the umpteenth City Lights edition.
But I was going to write about the Abrams volume of Tokion artists, including the biennial-worthy Marcel Dzama, the all grown up ex-Atlanta graffitist Jose Parla, and many, many more. And there is indeed a consistent aesthetic of transgression to gladden the heart of old Paul McCarthy.
Perhaps it was the recycled psychedelia tucked away here and there in the volume, but I suddenly remembered the aesthetic associated back in the day with the late great San Francisco Oracle…not that there is a blessed thing in common with the copulating couples in yab-yum postures and the Day-Glo evocations of Aubrey Beardsley, but rather the sense that the edge at any given historical moment contains a few visual seeds that will grow into lasting legacies and a lot of crap that will someday seem as embarrassing as paisley and patchouli. (Those of us who were ostentatiously searching for the incredibly rare Beat Generation artifacts of only ten years earlier already turned up our noses at patchouli and paisley. We wore a lot of black and talked about European movies, but both were very hard to come by in most places.)
The skat8punk aesthetic, and graffiti, and the assorted schools of hip-hop have shown greater staying power than psychedelia and acid rock ever did, or even (apart from niche markets) reggae. Hell, it looks like the longest-lived phenomenon of our time is death metal, which just goes on into the third and fourth generations. But skateboarding and graffiti, also, are now raising up the grandchildren of the first-generation founders.
And that sense of tradition is pretty impressive, given how in 1968 hardly anybody celebrated the hipsters of 1943, or remembered the Zoot Suit Riots. (Woody Guthrie was something else, of course, and there was a certain nostalgia for the Old School Authenticity of the Great Depression.)
I, as I say, was crossing the continent to find the tiny number of Tibetan sculptures to be seen in California museums, and modeling myself after the poets of the great Six Gallery reading about which almost nothing could be learned except from battered copies of Evergreen Review. And I still pride myself at being as out of step with the culture as possible; though it is hard to know what to look for these days, when reasonable replicas of zoot suits can be seen on the bods of trendy art dealers and collarless Greek wedding shirts are still best reserved for the anniversary celebrations of yesteryear’s Greek weddings.
I may have found a few things that just about everybody who is either hip or mainstream-tasteful considers embarrassingly awful, so watch this space for further developments.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
good news and more
apparently LiveJournal users can now use their LJ i.d.'s to comment on Counterforces. this may help confirm my suspicion that while a few people read joculum regularly, no one at all is reading this.
So I feel free to remark on Marcia Wood's relative gutsiness in presenting Monica Cook's new well-nigh photorealist paintings of nudes with unpleasant or ambiguously experienced physical substances. (Pumpkin scrapings and honey, in particular.) On the one hand, Atlanta is relentlessly literalist, but on the other hand, this is why people are disturbed. They feel that folks just shouldn't mess with stuff like that, even if they can't quite say why. Were we not in need of being brought up to date on the condition of the 21st century (which has displaced bodily sensation with splendidly replicated smoothnesses onscreen that also bear little enough resemblance to the gush and spill of the world's tactility), one would think a refresher course on Vienna 1900 would be in order.
Cook, a SCAD grad who made good in NY, is showing on Walker Street through...oh, look it up, will you? www.marciawoodgallery.com (and if you don't feel like looking it up...it's January 14)
So I feel free to remark on Marcia Wood's relative gutsiness in presenting Monica Cook's new well-nigh photorealist paintings of nudes with unpleasant or ambiguously experienced physical substances. (Pumpkin scrapings and honey, in particular.) On the one hand, Atlanta is relentlessly literalist, but on the other hand, this is why people are disturbed. They feel that folks just shouldn't mess with stuff like that, even if they can't quite say why. Were we not in need of being brought up to date on the condition of the 21st century (which has displaced bodily sensation with splendidly replicated smoothnesses onscreen that also bear little enough resemblance to the gush and spill of the world's tactility), one would think a refresher course on Vienna 1900 would be in order.
Cook, a SCAD grad who made good in NY, is showing on Walker Street through...oh, look it up, will you? www.marciawoodgallery.com (and if you don't feel like looking it up...it's January 14)
Monday, December 10, 2007
encyclopedic surreality
The politics of the image is a topic that has been often noted; the appropriationists of the 1980s selected details of already existing photographs, or replicated famous images in their entirety in a new context, to bring new implications and new emotional baggage to pictures already sedimented into history or into popular culture. (And Richard Prince is currently engaged in a major conflict with a commercial photographer who is horrified to realize the photo he took for anonymous publication in a Marlboro ad is now thought of as a Richard Prince photograph. As Prince remarked, "I've never really thought of advertising photographs as being by anybody," which of course is the point Prince should have been making all along.)
Images become strange when their cultural context falls away; the surrealists not only juxtaposed strangely unrelated objects as per Lautréamont's chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, they delighted in the unexpected strangeness of the remnants of one historical epoch when encountered in another; the shop windows of the endangered arcades of Paris, full of outdated merchandise in arrangements left unaltered for decades, and the signage targeted at the respectable bourgeoisie of the Second Empire, sentimental and absurd fifty years later in the traumatized waning years of the Third Republic. All the mythologies of objects that were not apparent to those who took them at face value were laid bare when the images that supported them were recycled by the hip artist-technologists of France circa 1920.
Hence the value of a map detail of Portuguese Africa put next to the soldiers and fighter pilots of Eisenhower's America the year before the Marines landed in Lebanon and more or less peacefully defused the situation in 1958. Hence the intrinsic interest that lies within the act of disassembling the diagrams by which "young people" were meant to learn how the relations of the world worked.
Images become strange when their cultural context falls away; the surrealists not only juxtaposed strangely unrelated objects as per Lautréamont's chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, they delighted in the unexpected strangeness of the remnants of one historical epoch when encountered in another; the shop windows of the endangered arcades of Paris, full of outdated merchandise in arrangements left unaltered for decades, and the signage targeted at the respectable bourgeoisie of the Second Empire, sentimental and absurd fifty years later in the traumatized waning years of the Third Republic. All the mythologies of objects that were not apparent to those who took them at face value were laid bare when the images that supported them were recycled by the hip artist-technologists of France circa 1920.
Hence the value of a map detail of Portuguese Africa put next to the soldiers and fighter pilots of Eisenhower's America the year before the Marines landed in Lebanon and more or less peacefully defused the situation in 1958. Hence the intrinsic interest that lies within the act of disassembling the diagrams by which "young people" were meant to learn how the relations of the world worked.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
1957
"Encyclopedia Studies," the show currently at Atlanta's Beep Beep Gallery, consists of photographic overlays created from the illustrations beginning with "A" in the 1957 World Book encyclopedia.
That was a year when the 1957 Book of the Year published in 1958 would have been as important as the encyclopedia. Airplanes outweighed Africa, as has been observed, in part because the runup to decolonization was not amenable to encyclopedization. Ghana independence was as big a story as Sputnik. And the decolonizing floodgates were open; within a year, the French Community was formally free, with Guinea declining de Gaulle's offers of a sort of commonwealth, and going it alone.
So between the sudden birth of independent countries and the birth of the Space Age, the 1958 and 1959 editions of the World Book faced visual updating, big time. It would be interesting to compare entries and see if pictures kept pace with text, and if text kept pace with history.
1956 had seemingly solidified the postwar world with the failure of the East European revolutions. Sudan's path to independence, and Morocco's, would have been noted in the 1957 book, maybe. But with Tangier reverting in October '56 and Moroccan independence only happening in April '56, it's more likely that the text edited in 1955 and the pictures chosen even earlier would have stayed put.
Good to have images of how a world about to change beyond recognition was being presented. It would be intriguing to jump ahead to the entries for "French Indochina," which had ceased to exist in 1954 so the existence of North and South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia would have had to be dealt with on some visual level.
That was a year when the 1957 Book of the Year published in 1958 would have been as important as the encyclopedia. Airplanes outweighed Africa, as has been observed, in part because the runup to decolonization was not amenable to encyclopedization. Ghana independence was as big a story as Sputnik. And the decolonizing floodgates were open; within a year, the French Community was formally free, with Guinea declining de Gaulle's offers of a sort of commonwealth, and going it alone.
So between the sudden birth of independent countries and the birth of the Space Age, the 1958 and 1959 editions of the World Book faced visual updating, big time. It would be interesting to compare entries and see if pictures kept pace with text, and if text kept pace with history.
1956 had seemingly solidified the postwar world with the failure of the East European revolutions. Sudan's path to independence, and Morocco's, would have been noted in the 1957 book, maybe. But with Tangier reverting in October '56 and Moroccan independence only happening in April '56, it's more likely that the text edited in 1955 and the pictures chosen even earlier would have stayed put.
Good to have images of how a world about to change beyond recognition was being presented. It would be intriguing to jump ahead to the entries for "French Indochina," which had ceased to exist in 1954 so the existence of North and South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia would have had to be dealt with on some visual level.
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