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Martin Herbert, Tell Them I Said No, 2016, Sternberg Press, 128pp, pb, ?15.50, 978 3 956792 00 7.
How many great artists have there been that passed by totally unknown? It is a recurring idle pub question, but one which casually brings up some heavy stuff: of working processes, careers, visibility, networks and power. No matter what some like Dave Hickey might like to believe, I don't think talent just rises to the top like some genius double cream; recognition is a collusion of luck and lust, of determination and dollar signs. Martin Herbert's latest collection of essays, Tell Them I Said No, is premised on artists who had it, whatever it might be (talent, promise or a steady career), and turned their backs on it; artists who were known, seen, acknowledged and then - for whatever reasons - disappeared.
This collection of ten short, eminently readable essays is a set of case studies for such a disappearing act, whether self-exile (like Agnes Martin's hightailing it to New Mexico), a change of career (such as Charlotte Posenenske's pointed shift to sociology), deliberate occlusion (like the 'ghosting', as we might say, of Trisha Donnelly and David Hammons) or even giving up the ghost entirely (in the case of Christopher D'Arcangelo's suicide). Herbert's choices of artists to focus on are interesting - he points out early on that good studies of well-known dropouts like Marcel Duchamp and Lee Lozano already exist; his choices are mainly American...