NEW MATERIAL AS NEW MEDIA: The Fabric Workshop and Museum

With a fitting design—iridescent fabric covers (three different colors each for front, back and spine) with silver edged pages, silver endpapers and a translucent plastic jacket with silvery lettering—this book shows "fabric" to be a highly expansive medium. The book, which is the catalogue for a 25-year retrospective of Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum productions, includes everyone from Louise Bourgeois and Claes Oldenburg to younger phenoms like Doug Aitken and Rachel Whiteread, and documents works made of rubber, fiberglass, horsehair and hog intestine along with more conventional materials. The works—some of which are elaborate, fabric-based installations—shine sleekly in 270 (268 in color) photos. In Maria Fernanda Cardoso's Cardoso Flea Circus, which takes place within a tent of iridescent fabrics (taffeta, silk and polyester), the fleas actually walk a tightrope, do acrobatics, and are shot out of a cannon. Virgil Marti's bunches of fabric flowers seem hyper-real, and Lee Bul's Live Forever I presents three alien-like, fiberglass karaoke pods. More than 50 artists' multimedia projects are covered; essays include a salvo from former MoMA curator Robert Storr and Thelma Golden's interview of Glen Ligon. Explanatory texts and short biographies accompany each artist's work. As Stroud, the founder of the Fabric Workshop, notes in an interview, "the possibilities are endless." (Mar. 3)