LAYLAH ALI — Types, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2004

Offset printing in black-and-white and colour; illustrated card wrappers; sewn binding. 11 × 14 cm. 36 pages. Published by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2004. ISBN 0-9712195-6-7.

Published in conjunction with Laylah Ali: Paintings and Drawings, held at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from 3 December 2004 to 27 February 2005. Organised by curatorial assistant Andrea Green, the exhibition brought together rarely shown drawings and paintings on paper in two viewing rooms constructed specifically for their presentation.

Types contains fourteen new drawings arranged as a largely wordless sequence. Individual figures appear against empty grounds: masked, bandaged, multiplied, enclosed by uniforms or protective structures. Some resemble athletes or combatants; others suggest prisoners, ceremonial performers or specimens awaiting classification. The title proposes a typology, but the figures continually escape any settled category.

Ali’s controlled drawing style combines the directness of comics with references to folk art, diagrams and hieroglyphic forms. Beneath the apparent clarity of the images are unstable relations of authority, vulnerability and implied violence. Ali has described herself as being especially interested in what occurs before and after a violent act rather than in illustrating the act itself.

The publication appeared at an important moment in her practice. Ali had recently produced the artist’s book Untitled for MoMA’s Projects 75 in 2002, participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale and appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Types belongs to this concentrated period in which her small-scale figures moved between drawing, painting, institutional exhibition and printed sequence.

The book operates as more than a reduced record of the exhibition. Its compact scale converts the museum presentation into a handheld procession: one body, one page, one proposed category after another. The illustrated wrappers, black endpapers and alternating monochrome and coloured images give it the feeling of a field guide, dossier or incomplete system of identification.

Completeness note: bibliographic records indicate that some copies were issued with a separate inserted exhibition brochure containing an interview between Andrea Green and Laylah Ali and an exhibition checklist. No separate insert is present in this copy; it is described as the book only.

Condition: good used condition. Noticeable rubbing, surface marking and light scratching to the predominantly black wrappers; edge and corner wear, minor creasing and handling consistent with age. Original retail barcode label remains attached to the rear cover. Interior pages appear clean and the binding remains intact.