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)