Mixed Forms in Visual Culture, Mary Anne Francis (2021)

This is a complex textbook addressing key examples of mixed form over the last 500 years in Western European and Anglo-American cultures. With 80 colour illustrations, it is extremely well referenced in historical and contemporary sources, yet of distinctly different parts, including two wholly visual chapters. This is a standard Bloomsbury hardback, with the paperback version published in June 2023 at considerably reduced cost. The economies of aesthetic forms, early publishing circulation, is one facet of the book’s narrative, and the contrast between mixed forms exclusively for the wealthy and popular mixed forms, is central to the book’s dramatic, and hence performative, structure. We are taken to some of the earliest European curatorial and authorial contexts in which mixed forms, whether opulent object collections or folded paper publications, constituted both a material type and a conceptual category for aristocrat and manual worker respectively. The narrative style features a broad vocabulary, inter-related arguments with cross-chapter questioning that is difficult to precis or gloss. Is there some operational logic to this type of a book? If my interpretation is valid that this project’s distinctiveness aligns visual practices with forms of material production and with modes of reading and writing employing multidisciplinary operational concepts, then this might best be understood if represented in a table. The ‘table’ therefore also stands in as a publishing convention, for a detachable, general overview of what any narrative cannot achieve in sufficient detail: a comprehensive summary. The table below (see Table 1) is a formal feature and type of paratext, which here represents a visual and conceptual overview of the book from which the review is drawn.