Totem - Jo Baring
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher.
One of my goals this year has been to read more non-fiction. It's actually one of my goals every year, and every year I fail at it, so I was grateful when the team at Canongate sent me a copy of Totem by Jo Baring. It's billed as an accessible, story-led journey into the heart of sculpture, and it's out now in the UK, with a US release following on November 3rd.
I should say up front that I don't really know how to review non-fiction. I don't read enough of it to know what I'm supposed to be assessing, or what "working" even looks like for a book like this. So take everything that follows with that caveat attached. I enjoyed reading Totem, but I didn't get quite as much out of it as I'd hoped, and I can't really tell you whether that's a flaw in the book or a flaw in my own expectations going in.
Baring says in the introduction that this isn't meant to be a history of sculpture. Instead it's a journey meant to "illuminate and inspire", and on those terms I think it does succeed. Each chapter opens with a specific sculpture that Baring has travelled to see in person, and from there she unpacks how it came to exist, what the artist was trying to do, and tries to thread all of that into a broader philosophy of sculpture as a form. That philosophy keeps circling back to the word "totem" itself, and Baring spends a fair amount of time digging into its origins and how quickly it became a near-universal term across languages once it entered the lexicon.
That's also the book's biggest weakness for me. The constant return to the word totem started to feel less like a motif the book naturally arrives at and more like a hindrance it's been dragging along the whole way. The chapters themselves are interesting and the writing is good, but every time Baring pulls it back to that word I got the distinct sense she'd gone into the project with the answer already decided, and was shaping the narrative to fit it rather than letting it emerge. The whole discussion never quite landed for me. It felt like it was reaching for a profundity that wasn't really there, as though there had to be something mystical about why this particular word caught on so widely, and the book almost undermines itself in that reach.
None of which stopped me enjoying it. I'm not sure I came away having learned a huge amount about sculpture as an art form, but I was exposed to a lot of work I'd never have encountered otherwise. I had no idea there's a sculpture park in Yorkshire I can just go and visit, for instance, and on that front the book more than did its job.
I do wish it had photographs. It's beautifully illustrated by Julia Ashe, full of pencil sketches and renderings of the pieces Baring discusses, but for me they never quite conveyed the actual impact of the artworks. I ended up Googling most of them as I read, just so I could see photos rather than sketches. I understand there are probably rights and licensing reasons behind going the illustrative route instead of photography, but it left the book feeling a little lacking in a place where I really wanted it to deliver. Good as the illustrations are, they can't quite stand in for something that's so physical and concrete in the real world.
The real success of the book, for me, is that it changed how I look at the handful of sculptures I already know. I kept thinking about Mary's Shell by Stephen Broadbent in Cleveleys, and about Jaume Plensa's Carmela in Barcelona, which I've seen more than once and always try to seek out when I'm there. I feel like I appreciate what both of those pieces are trying to do a little more now, and that alone made the book worth reading.
So I don't really know how to review non-fiction, but there are my thoughts on Totem. If the subject appeals to you at all, I'd say pick it up. It's also left me primed to want to read more on the subject, though that might just be the ADHD sniffing out a new special interest. If anyone knows of other good books on sculpture, send them my way.