The more I explore the opus, the more I realize how much it is not just a conceptual and visual encyclopedia, but also an encyclopedic experiment in all sorts of different image-making techniques.  Printing on everything from creamy handmade paper to phone book pages, using everything from offset printing to wood-type letterpress, the books use overprinting, negative image printing, collage, digital image manipulation, text-as-image, and more to create the wide-ranging stylistic interpretations that makes up the Encyclopedia.

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Second Encyclopedia of Tlön

Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön 

Atlas volume from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön

Rouge volume from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön

The ability to charm and amuse without descending into empty frivolity or clever cynicism is an enviable talent. It requires a unexpected turn of mind coupled with a serious intelligence. And it takes just such a mind to undertake a project like the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön. A collaboration of german artists Peter Malutzki and Ines von Ketelhodt, The Encyclopedia, 10 years in the making and comprising 50 volumes, is a response to the Jorge Luis Borges short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. In Borges’s philosophically sophisticated story, Tlön is a fictional land (with no nouns in its language) which slowly over the course of the story begins to manifests actual artifacts in the real world (the real world of Borges’s fictional story that is…). Presented first as a mysterious land that exists only as an entry that appears to come and go in the Anglo-American Cyclopedia, the narrator begins an obsession with the place and eventually come across a single volume from an Encyclopedia of Tlön.  Malutzki and von Ketelhodt take up the challenge and create an entire encyclopedia of the fictional land and do so with great creativity and style. Using a keyword for each volume, Air, Flora, Labyrinth, Nacht, Rouge, etc. they artistically investigate a series of themes  (there are the element books, the color books, etc.) over the course of their encyclopedia.

Quiz volume from the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön

One of the remarkable aspects of the endeavor is the strong differences in graphic style, content, and layout of each volume, a difference that is more than just a difference between those volumes done by Malutzki and those done by von Ketelhodt. Each keyword engenders a unique work, some humorous, some contemplative, some cryptic, each a world unto themselves. Both artists engage seriously the philosophical, epistemological, and literary themes of Borges’s story, weaving their own selection of well-known authors into the texts of their volumes, but not without a measure of humor—the Leibniz volume which explores the philosopher’s De Arte Combinatoria has as its cover a silver-grey image of a Leibniz cookie and the Atlas volume reconceives the topographical lines of maps as outlines of hungry creatures eyeing each other, ready to pounce (see the 1st image above).

The Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön  is a true tour de force not only capturing a wide variety of ideas, but also using just about every reproductive and artistic technique you can think of: collage, linocut, letterpress, offset, each volume uses its own combination of techniques to embody its topic. For those of us not able to afford the well-justified price of the Encyclopaedia, a catalog of the work provides a good substitute.  A beautiful work itself, this multi-lingual catalog reproduces Borges’s story and provides commentary from librarians and curators on each of the volumes followed by a generous sampling of images from each volume. Borgesian in its layout, the book employs a color-coded notational system to link and cross-reference the 3 sections.

Die Luft ist Kühl und es Dunkelt : ein Rheinbuch

Die Luft ist Kühl und es Dunkelt : Ein Rheinbuch

As impressive as it is, the Encyclopaedia was not the only thing that has occupied these artists. Peter Malutzki, for instance, was showing a wonderful book, Die Luft ist Kühl und es Dunkelt : ein Rheinbuch .  Divided into three parts, the book explores the history, ambiance, and appeal of the legendary Rhine river. In the first section, the river literally runs through the pages, as Malutzki interprets each section of the river, playfully at times (he has castles on either side throwing rocks at each other in a notoriously narrow part of the river).

Ein Rheinbuch section 2

The central section of the book transforms the river into a stream of words in two colors, set mirroring each other, one representing the French and the other the German perspective (the river was a contentious boundary point between the two countries throughout history).

In the last part, reconciliation finally occurs, signaled by a typographical change that sees the river running at angles up and down the page with text and images crossing over it, the two side intertwining. It is in this third section that Malutzki most reveals his personal love of the river, recreating a sense of its beauty in the darkling light.

Tree Portraits by Melanie Mowinski

Tree Portraits - Alaska Series

An entirely different approach to a personally significant natural phenomenon, Melanie Mowinski’s Tree Portraits express her interest in bringing the outdoors into interior spaces. She has done several series of tree portraits, each from different areas where she has spent time. The Alaska Series was the one that I looked at, and it records trees residing in Denali National Park.  Each series is made up of a boxed set of pamphlets, one for each tree, the pages of which are rubbings from the tree’s trunk. A simple idea representing a simple phenomena, but rich in its visual variety.  The pages take on a mesmerizing progression of pattern  as each part of the tree (including graffiti carved into one of the trunks) is revealed through the subtle shadings that translate the tree’s bark onto a flat page.

East West by Leilei Guo

East West

The last book I want to mention is Leilei Guo’s East/West. The artist came all the way from Beijing to the book fair and her work juxtaposes cultural artifacts from both the east and the west.  Iconic images make their way through the book, as silk-screened silhouettes,  as cutouts,, and finally as photographic images where they reveal themselves to be copies in a storage yard of cheap imitations.

East West

The images alternate between eastern and western cultural artifacts and they invade each others pages with aplomb, a pink Venus de Milo looking coy as two Buddhas peek through a cutout window.  An intriguing structure, the book consists of stiff panels that move on hinged flanges, allowing the book a fair amount of movement despite its stiffness.

East West verso pages

Bright colored pages, silk-screened with an abstracted background pattern, the pages reverse to more somber colors. Scattered between the silk-screened pages are the outdoor storehouses of statuettes.

East West photo page

It is these images that have been echoed throughout the book, but here what had appeared as singular images, are now shown in the context from which they had been drawn – not museums or cultural sites but fields of  cultural icons reproduced out of scale and thrown together in a hodgepodge of cultural kitsch.

Hybrid Book Fair Awards

And to wrap things up, a list of the prizes awarded at the Fair:

JAB: 800,000 by Bill Snyder and Baghdad Times by Antonio Serna

Free Library of Philadelphia: The works of Bea Nettles

Wellesley: The Way to Empty by Sun Young Kang

Swarthmore: Typography of Home by Macey Chadwick

Yale: Cunning Chapters by Susan Johanknecht

University of Pennsylvania: A Guide to Higher Learning by Julie Chen

Columbia University: A Pink Story by Maureen McCallum

Philadelphia Center for the Book: The Way to Empty by Sun Young Kang

Jaffe Center for Book Arts: Handmade Vegetable Papyrus by Robert Lewis

Temple University: Good/Best by Else Wiener

University of the Arts: Catalog forthe Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön by Peter Malutzki and Ines von Ketelhodt

Bright Hill Press: Mimpish Squinnies by Lone Oak Press

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Even More Books from the Hybrid Book Fair

Margot Lovejoy’s The Book of Plagues is not a new work, but she was featuring it because it was printed here at the Borowsky Center.  The book is a montage of imagery and information about plagues – from the 1300s to the present day.  Mixing microscopic images of the AIDS virus with woodcuts of plague doctors in their beaked masks, the book unfolds in a complicated two-way structure.  A second book, Paradoxic Mutations, long and skinny and with an equally complicated strucutre, was something she made at the same time using the parts of the sheet of paper that were unused for the plague book.

In Cahoots Press

Macy Chadwick’s In Cahoots Press had some interesting new works.  Despite the differences in topics in her books  – everything from geometry to string alphabets for the blind,  there is a visually cohesive vocabulary that runs through her work.   Chadwick’s book, The Topography of Home, was one of the award winners at the show (it is the one pictured in the bottom left of the picture).

Half Life/Full Life

Perhaps Chip Schilling’s Half Life/Full Life especially intrigued me, because I’ve actually seen the Doomsday clock (it being housed on the Univ of Chicago campus in the offices of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), but it really is of interest to all of us who have lived through the political ups and downs that have caused its movement over the past six decades.  The book opens up into a freestanding circular structure, each opening of which includes an event that has precipitated the movement of the clock’s hands – from the fall of the Berlin Wall that set it 17 minutes away from midnight, to the thermonuclear device testing in the 50s that brought it as close as one minute to midnight.  To add some perspective, Schilling has paired these momentous events, with  popular culture going on at the time—top movies, songs, etc.—revealing the human ability to continue living in the face of near crisis, or the human inability to grapple with serious issues, depending on your perspective.

I also had an interesting conversation with Thomas Parker Williams who is mixing his own inks using transparent base and pigments from Kremer.   He was showing me the effects of differnt ratios of pigment to base and seeing as this is something I’ve been thinking about doing for some time, it was quite inspiring.

Time to head off to the conference again, so I will have more to report later.

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Report from the Hybrid Book Fair

by Brad Freeman and Elisabeth Long

This leads me to our last book which is about different kind of historical absence, one not imposed by a political agenda and layers of ink, but rather the result of obsolescence and layer upon layer of time passing.   The Chicago Stock Yards Book was a collaboration between Brad Freeman and I on the subject of the Chicago Stockyards, an infamous area on the south side of Chicago that was finally closed down and razed back in the 1970s.  One of the themes of the book is this way in which things manage to persist even in their apparent absence – how hard it is to eradicate a vibrant past. We started by comparing two maps – one from the 19th century, an old birds-eye view engraving of the stockyards in its heyday, and one from the present day – a satellite view of the area as it looks now. What the maps showed us was that you could see the footprint of the old yards still evident in the modern statellite view. That as a place changes over time, the things that are apparently absent have actually left all sorts of patterns and traces.

Chicago Stock Yards Book: Opening spread

And as we explored, map in hand, the area that had once been the stockyards and was now an industrial park, we found that if we looked closely enough we could see these traces of the past.  But the looking required the right distance—different distances render different truths.  Our usual kind of looking, the one that simply shows us the present laid out before us, is a view of the middle distance. But if you pull back far enough (like the satellite)  or examine the details closely, that is where you find the flickerings of the absent still evident all around us.

Page spread. Left page: Brad taking pictures near an old packing plant; Right page: News photo of Bubbly Creek, 1913 overlaid on picture of the cattle pens

This artists’ book was an attempt to reintroduce the absent to the present.  Taking inspiration from rephotography projects, we searched for places that were on our maps—the hair drying fields, the manure pile, the packing factories, replaced now by overgrown rail tracks, a Chinese food packaging plant, a Tyson’s Foods warehouse. The book itself then reinterpreted the experience—printed on the back sides of our two maps it is filled with images both from our sojourn and from historical books on the stockyards, facts about the stockyard’s production and textual reflections on all the relationships therein.  The act of folding this map/pagelayout sheet into codex signatures resulted in an interspersing of old map, new map, text, modern photograph, historical image all mixed up together as they were in our minds and in the space around us.

Text and image expresses the vibrancy of the stockyards—a gruesome business that nonetheless was teaming with life—and contrasts it with the nondescript quiet of the current-day industrial park.  The layering of new on old (or old on new) was explored further through the collage of modern day and historical images and the repetition of image such that as you turn the pages and each spread appears to be a new set of subjects, ghosts of previous images still remain—a visual resonance used to express how our past is never quite absent from our present.  [No matter what Stalin may have thought he could do.]

These four very different books that were each about absence in one way or another show us just how complex and multi-faceted a theme can be.  What makes an artist’s book work well is that many facets of the book form are actively brought to play in the foreground of the work. (text, image, format, texture, the 3dimensional aspects, etc). None of these plays the crystal goblet in an artist’s book.  It is this complexity of foregrounded components that makes an artist’s book such a good vessel for expressing the complexity of our experience.  I hope this [talk] essay has give you a small taste of that.

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Figuring Absence, pt 4: Long & Freeman’s Chicago Stock Yards Book

Ten Years of Uzbekistan by Ken Campbell and David King

I’d like to turn now to a very different kind of absence. Ken Campbell and David King’s Ten Years of Uzbekistan takes up the disturbing issues of the absence of those who have been subject to political repression, and perhaps worse, the complicity required to effect such obliteration. Taking as a starting point, the book’s namesake – a work produced by the well-known Russian constructivist artist, Alexander Rodchenko, Campbell and King investigate and react to the history of Rodchenko’s book which saw the turning of the tides during Stalinist rule. The original Ten Years of Uzbekistan was Rodchenko’s celebration of the glory of the first ten years of soviet rule in the region. Published in 1934, it was a piece of propaganda, describing the advancements brought to the Uzbeki state, complete with portraits of politicians and other dignitaries of the area.  Not long passed, however, before Stalin’s purges began and many of these party dignitaries were declared enemies of the state to be reviled and sent to their deaths along with some million plus others during the 2-years of the purges.  But the Stalinist agenda was more thorough than just imprisonment and death. The purge had to happen at every level—books that pictured the newly-declared enemies were themselves banned and to be purged or destroyed.

The Commisar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia by David King

David King in his research found Rodchenko’s own copy of his book with the names and faces unceremoniously blotted out with large swaths of black ink—obliteration by the designer of his own work at the direction of a leader who ten years earlier had called for the creation of the book in the first place.  Through careful research and as part of his much larger project, The Commisar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia,  to record the doctoring of pictures under Stalin’s reign, King recovered the identities of each obliterated figure.  Campbell then transformed these images into a commentary not just on political repression but also a bitter judgment on the complicity of an artist in the act of censorship.  Campbell and King’s artists’ book version of Ten Years of Uzbekistan re-presents 10 of these obliterated images, accompanied by information identifying who each is and telling his or her story.

Ten Years of Uzbekistan

The first thing you notice about Campbell and King’s book, (besides its rather monumental size—it is 20 inches tall), is the heaviness of the ink.  Layer after layer is built up until you cannot even sense the texture of the paper underneath. The ink and its polychromatic glory becomes a subject itself , as though Campbell is saying to Rodchenko, “I see your ink and I raise you 10 layers.”  The focus of this artists’ book is not simply the tragic and untimely deaths of these political functionaries branded enemies of the state by Stalin’s dysfunctional reign of terror, but rather it is the fact of death and gulag not being sufficient—the need for total annihilation of all traces of the person—that is Campbell and King’s main concern. This is absence in the extreme.  Absent in body. Absent in image. Absent in Text. Absent in Memory.

From the first page, the book emphasizes inkish obliteration and censorship.  The black bars of the censor are repeated page after colorful page before the images even start. If you stare for long enough you realize that in the chaos of color, the title is being repeated and then occluded in layer upon layer of ink.

Ten Years of Uzbekistan - detail

Then the images begin. Each person stamped bureaucratically with their number  in large graphic roman numerals.  The thick layers of ink are visually palpable.  Whatever ink he used is extremely shiny  (note the light reflection in many of my photographs) and it sits on the surface in such a way that each layer can be literally felt under those that come after it. [click the image to see a larger version which shows these layers more clearly.]

Each image appears multiple times. Once as it appeared in Rodchenko’s self-censored copy, and then again in many variations as part of Campbell’s on-the-press manipulations and experiments.  Plates are turned upside down and printed over each other, then overprinted again with the text of their stories.  Interestingly, what isn’t here are the unadulterated original images that David King had found through his research.  Again, I maintain this is because in some ways the people themselves are not the primary subject here, but rather the act of what was done to them.  It is hard for us to imagine the thoroughness of the Stalinist agenda—the ability to manipulate history to the point that people who were there were made absent, not to mention people who were absent being put there.  [A major part of the propaganda machine was not just airbrushing people out of photos, but also inserting Stalin into important historical communist scenes where he had not actually been present.]

Pages on Yan Rudzutak

So it is somewhat hard to pinpoint one single message in this book.  On the one hand, it could be said that Stalin’s obliteration agenda was a success.  For generations of soviets, these people did not exist.  Their absence was complete.  The difficulty we have with reading some of their stories because of Campbell’s inking techniques reflects, perhaps, a certain subdued acknowledgment of failure by the artist.  Is it too late to resurrect these men? Is this primarily an expression of the success of Stalin’s campaign and the horror at a fellow artist’s complicity in effecting it.

On the other hand, the obliteration didn’t succeed.  After all, King has rediscovered the identity of these people so long absent from history.  In the end, the propaganda machine failed to achieve its final goal, and perhaps this is what is symbolized by the defiantly lush, colorful abandon with which Campbell plays on the press achieving inky obliteration upon obliterations but, in the process, breathing a kind of life back into these men and their stories. It is as if through sufficient layers of ink laid down with this different purpose, that initial act of inked obliteration can be undone and the figures restored to history if not to life.

More information and images of the book are available on Ken Campbell’s website. [once there, click the image of the book to view the page images.]  In our next post we’ll look at the kind of historical absence that slowly occurs from innovation and change, as opposed to the directed and intentional absence enforced by political regimes.

I’d like to thank the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago for access to their copy of Campbell’s book.

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Figuring Absence, pt 3: Ken Campbell’s Ten Years in Uzbekistan

Exquisite Pain by Sophie Calle

So let us now turn to Sophie Calle’s book Exquisite Pain which takes up both of this idea of absence as it relates to belonging and also examines that process in which the emotional presence of the absence becomes less over time (but in this case, quite intentionally and to good effect).

Exquisite Pain turns a failed love affair into a timeline of before and after the point at which her lover leaves her. “Before unhappiness” and “after unhappiness,” as she puts it. The underlying story is of the time when she received a three-month travel grant that she used to go to Japan at the end of which she and her lover planned a reunion in New Dehli. During her absence he begins an affair with someone else but in an act of pure cowardice not only doesn’t tell her but calls her several hours before their rendezvous saying he is getting on the plane for New Dehli.  She then arrives, in her outfit bought specially for the occasion, to be greeted with a cryptic note full of lies about how he’d been in an accident and couldn’t come. After hours on the phone trying to get through to him she finally does and instantly knows it is over and that he’d never intended to be there.

Before Unhappiness

The book is visually divided between the before and after.  The “before” section chronicles her trip, which she made by taking a train from France, through Russia, then China, finally to end up in Japan. Each day is counted down with a large bordercrossing-like stamp declaring the number of days left till unhappiness. Each page spread in the “before” section is framed in red – Red for Russia, Red for China, Red for Japan. Red for love. Red for anger. The layout of “before” is somewhat haphazard – sometimes there is text on the left and an image on the right,  sometimes an image spreads across both pages. It is often hard to tell where the images were taken or how they piece together into any kind of story. (You’ll see later how this contrasts with the “after” section.)

Day 0

The interesting thing about this section is of course the countdown.  The simple presence of that stamp, changes how you experience the images and stories being presented. Things take on a certain foreboding. History is rewritten to contain a prescience it didn’t have at the time, though she does admit to a fair amount of trepidation throughout the trip because her lover had told her he does not take well to being left alone. The pain of that moment when she realized he would no longer be there by her side is ever-present in the book: before, during, and after it actually occurred. The book is telling her story not by telling the actual story, but by rewriting it to visually and conceptually express the overwhelming centrality of the pain that she felt in that one moment of realization he was no longer a part of her life, and for several months afterwards. It is shown here by the only full-page spread without any frame. The picture of a red telephone on an empty bed in a hotel room in New Dehli. It is the zero point on the timeline and everything radiates out from it. The arc of the book’s narrative thus shows, what we talked about before – the idea of belonging and intentionality that is so integral to the idea of absence. This unnamed lover is, after all, not present throughout the entire book. But it is the absence on the intended day. The day of the reunion. The day he was supposed to be there, that matters. That is the absence. The rest is separation.

After Unhappiness

The second half of the book, “After unhappiness,” takes on a very different visual form. The layout is extremely rigid.  The left page is black, the right is white. On the top left is the picture of the phone – repeated on each page, and below it a narrative of the story of her affair and how he left her. On the right side are stories told by Calle’s friends in response to her question “When did you suffer most?” accompanied by a picture illustrating the story. Some are far more wrenching that what she is experiencing, and serve as a kind of foil to her pain.  What we are seeing, though this is not obvious at first, is the cure for her pain. The telling and retelling of her story is a process to reach the point in which she can see him for the jerk he truly is and rid herself of her pain.

Day 95

One page after another the story gets shorter and the ink gets lighter as her pain fades.  What we are seeing is the opposite of what we saw in Meejin Yoon’s book. There the banality of sameness served to remind us of the inner conflict we may feel over our own forgetting of tragic events, not to mention the fleeting nature of the meaning in a memorial. Here, in Calle’s book, banality is used as a cure to the too little forgetting and as a memorial not to the object that was absent, but simply to the author’s past experience of that absence.

In the next installment we’ll take up political absence as explored in Ken Campbell’s lush letterpressed opus, Ten Years of Uzbekistan.

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Figuring Absence, pt 2: Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain

Figuring Absence, Part One

I want to talk with you today about the theme of absence as played out in several different artists’ books. We will be looking at works by Sophie Calle, Ken Campbell, J. Meejin Yoon, and a work of my own that was done in collaboration with Brad Freeman. Absence takes many forms—physical absence, emotional absence, political absence, historical absence—and each of the works looks at a different type of absence and they each express it in radically different way. In comparing these works I hope we can discover something about how artists’ books work by examining how a variety of artists, working in different book mediums, have approached a somewhat perplexing challenge—that of figuring absence. How, after all, does one visually represent absence—The non-being-thereness of something? It is a visual paradox, but each of these books draws strength from their visual components and utilize the form of the artists’ book to speak with more than just words.

Absence by J. Meejin Yoon

Let us begin with a book that takes as its name our very theme, Absence by the architect J. Meejin Yoon. This book is extremely simple. There is no text. Its pages are made of the thick white cardboard of an architect’s model and when closed it forms a rather solid cube. The front cover is die cut with the word absence, and as you open it up, all you see is the small black dot of a small hole missing from the first page. That continues, page after page, for awhile and then the hole transforms into two squares, which again continue on and on until the last page which is a die cut angled grid of streets familiar to any who followed the news at the time. Upon turning to that last page you suddenly realize that what you’ve been seeing (or not seeing to be more accurate) are the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the 110 pages you’ve just gone through represented each of the 110 floors of the now absent buildings.

Opening spread of Absence

Middle spread of Absence

The obvious thing to point out about this book is that it is about negative space. The architect’s traditional model has been inverted, and the usual negative space of air around an architectural model has been turned into the model itself so that now the negative space of this model represents the absent buildings.

Last page of Absence

But what makes this book interesting is more than just the simple use of negative space to represent loss. The book form brings something more to the equation. This is not, after all, just an architectural model of inverted space. When you stop to think of about it, you realize that you cannot actually see the negative space of the twin towers that the book has created. The absence of the buildings is locked up inside the white cube. From the end of the book, I can try to look up into the void, but I can only see so far, certainly not up to the antenna that those initial pages of small holes represented, and anyway, this is not the perspective from which we ever looked at the towers. Were this a solid model I would not be able to see its subject at all, but because it uses a book format, I know what is going on. I can see each slice of the negative space as I page through the book. So negative space, yes, but the real effect comes from the use of the book structure to both give us the understanding of the book’s subject, while at the same time preventing us from visually experiencing that content. Now that is a truth of absence—the thing is present in my mind, but I can never see it.

There are other things that are going on in this book as well, for instance the lack of any text to introduce the subject.  You don’t know anything about what the book is about until you reach the end. The impact of that is that the book is, in fact, quite boring when you first encounter it. Page after page of small diecut spaces. After awhile you think, “I get it—absence—missing squares. Clever. Are we done yet?” You get impatient. You flip through the pages quickly. You pay them no special regard. They all seem the same. And then when you’re done, and you finally realize what the book is about, and that each of those pages represented a floor, a unique floor with unique people,  you feel like you’ve violated something. You feel guilty for your disregard, your impatience. Like the guilt that is felt as tragedies slip into the past and survivors begin to go on with their lives and no longer feel the presence of the absence quite so strongly. Absence is not always painful, as painful as that may be to admit. The experience of this book reminds us of that.

Which leads to another interesting aspect of the lack of text. Not everyone will get the book, even at the end. That grid. Those shapes. They aren’t recognizable or meaningful to everyone. And if they aren’t meaningful to you, all the textual descriptions in the world won’t change that, or help you experience the book as it was meant to be experienced. 100 years form now, no one will experience this book in the way that some do now, because it is not the mere absence of the towers that is the point, but rather the feeling that they should be there. That they belong there. A feeling that comes from having known them when they were there.

To give a simple example, you could look to your left, and look to your right and say that I am absent from your side—except that you would never say that. Because I don’t belong there in the first place. Absence is not the random non-presence of something, but rather the non-presence of something that once was there, or should be there, or is desired to be there. There is intentionality in the idea of absence. The absent one or absent thing belongs. This leads to our next book, Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain which will be taken up in the next post.

I’d like to thank Laurie Whitehill Chong at the RISD library for access to their copy of Absence.

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Figuring Absence (CBAA Notes, pt.3)

“Photo-reportage,” Munari declares, “is a means of expressing oneself more through images than words. The images can be sculpted, drawn, or photographed, the medium isn’t important. The urgent needs of modern publication have turned the cameraman’s chisel into a camera. In the past, to see the story narrated on the Trajan Column, everyone had to go to  Rome. Nowadays that column has become a roll of negative of which the most distant reader can receive a copy at home.”

What are the important words in the above paragraph?

I maintain they are “more” in the first sentence, and “cameraman’s” in the third.

Let us begin with the latter. What can Munari possibly mean about turning the cameraman’s chisel into a camera?   When was the chisel ever the tool of the cameraman?  Why, when the cameraman was a Roman sculptor, of course!  With this simple description, Munari has positioned the photographer in a long lineage of art-makers, the term cameraman inter-changeable with the term artist.  It is 1944 and Munari has subtly and cleverly bypassed the strained, defensive whining of the underdog photographers vying for a place in art world, and simply written as though it is so (something the book art world could learn from). This is not a book defending photography as art, it is a book on how photographic images work their artist magic.

But that, in fact, is a misleading statement, which brings us back to the first important word in Munari’s paragraph: “more.”  I haven’t really yet explained what this book is about.  To read Munari’s preface, one would believe it to be all about images, but he then proceeds to create a book where the words are integrally intertwined with the image experience and critically important to their meaning.  Which is what makes this books so interesting for book artists.  “More.”  More about images, but not just about images.  The force of the “more” comes in large part from the way in which images come first in Munari’s story-telling. First in time, though not necessarily in importance.  Photo-reportage is all about telling stories based on pictures – stories which, despite the implications of the term “reportage,” are completely made up (Munari sprinkles the book with parenthetical comments that “its not true”).  These are fanciful imaginings, written as though they were factual descriptions. The truth lies not in fact but in the meaning that can be drawn out of the images. Munari appropriates pictures and finds in them not the obvious story but surprising non sequiturs; stories that come more from the artist’s internal thoughts than the pedantic world of everyday occurrences.

Photo-Reportage acts partly as a treatise on art, partly as an exposition of a way to think about images, as well as an interesting example of how to weave together multiple narratives though textual hooks.  Each story begins where the last left off, though never as simple sequential follower. There is much more to be said about it, but you can see for yourself since it has been reprinted again. Photo-Reportage: From the Island of Truffles to the Kingdom of Misunderstandings.

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Bruno Munari and Photo-Reportage

cover of Everyone Their Own Projector

But back to Kentridge’s recently published artist’s book. Though best known for his charcoal animations, Kentridge was a printmaker before venturing into film and he has continued his practice of etching and lithographic printing even while working on his animations.  I don’t know if this is his first foray into the codex book format but if so, his films have taught him well how to use the rhythms of the pages to draw out his story.

The book explores the human proclivity to shape the world through the lens of our perceptions, using collages of torn books to literally draw the ground for the images on the page.  The images alternate between a meta-dialog on the artistic agenda itself—reproducing  quick ink sketches of famous works of art (primarily depictions of females), a visual representation of written language with its characteristic patterns of words and sentences, and finally a riff on Gogol’s story of The Nose. These themes intertwine, visually crossing in and out of each other’s borders. The staccato lines of a text become lines on a face, become the spaces between a nude that has been cut apart in a venetian-blind-like collage. The historical procession of well-known paintings of women become the setting for the Nose as he makes his foray into the world independent from his face and owner.  Images appear and reappear transformed, creating visual echos as the book progresses.  This is book-making as it ought to be done.  Dense. Beautiful. Evocative. Intelligent. And all with an acute awareness of the construction – the book as a construction of a story, the story as a construction of life, life as a construction of our minds.  Everyone their own projector.

As one of the pages declares, “what lies in store/what lies in wait/what lies asleep,” the book explores themes of potency and foreshadowing. Kentridge uncovers unexpected meanings hidden within the torn up texts that ground the collages through juxtaposition and defamiliarization. Images appear without context, foreshadowing the fuller role they will eventually develop within the narrative as we come to understand their part. These are just a sampling of the ways in which literary devices are reinterpreted through a visual vocabulary.

The placement of images and their repetition, take advantage of the book’s codex structure.  Page spreads sometimes act as mirrors, each side reflecting a slightly different version of the reality of an image.  Or similar images reappear, situated on the same side of a page, using the same visual placement, triggering the brain to experience an instant recognition of the familiar, but always with some difference.  Sometimes these are done sequentially, one after another, providing a sense of progression, or variations on a theme.  Other times the reoccurence is spread out over time, appearing many pages later, calling on memory to draw the correspondence.

If you have never seen Kentridge’s work, try a little exploring on youtube which seems to have some low-quality versions of several of his films.  Better yet, get your hands on Drawing the Passing which is a documentary of his film-making practices and includes clips from his work. Or one of the new CDs/DVDs that David Krut Publishing makes available.  David Krut  is also the distributor for Everyone Their Own Projector as well as many books about Kentridge.  (p.s. don’t be surprised at the prices – they are in South African Rands!)

Post from: The Sign of the Owl

William Kentridge – Everyone Their Own Projector