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]]> http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/the-symbol-of-the-archaic-by-guy-davenport/feed/ 0 impossibleobjects wasteland of a program Sarlat Petra Palmyra OmphalosDelphi vldordognelascaux1 Geography of the Imagination http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/ian-hamilton-finlay-a-selction-of-printed-works/ http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/ian-hamilton-finlay-a-selction-of-printed-works/#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:11:44 +0000 impossibleobjects http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/?p=465 ]]>

Currently installed at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery is an exhibition of printed works by Scottish poet and visual artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay.  The process of organizing this show began through collaboration with poet and critic Stephen Scobie, who generously loaned many of the works on view.  In conjunction with the physical exhibition of Finlay’s works, we published a small book of selected writings on Finlay’s printed works.  These writings come from some of the most interesting voices on poetry, visual art, and the avant-garde:

Alec Finlay

Anne Moeglin-Delcroix

Michael Charlesworth

Marjorie Perloff

Kenneth Goldsmith

Molly Schwartzburg

and

Stephen Scobie

To create this book we collaborated with visual artist and editor of Veneer Magazine, Flint Jamison.  In conversation with this collaborative process, Jamison created an exhibition at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery titled tongue/groove technology keeps safe these nodes, here:

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Printed and bound in Canada by Westcan Printing Group, the book can currently be purchased at the following locations:

Marfa Book Company, Marfa, Texas

Domy Books, Austin, Texas

Dexter Sinister’s Occasional Bookstore, New York, New York

and more locations soon.

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From the introduction to The Present Order:

With this book and exhibition, we hope to demonstrate the formal and conceptual diversity of Finlay’s printed works, most of which appeared through Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961.  Although attention to Finlay’s work predominantly concerns his garden, Little Sparta, located in Dunsyre, Scotland, we believe these printed works to be of equal interest.  For the exhibition, we selected works that demonstrate a concern for mobility, materiality and forms of contingency.  Included are examples of printed cards, booklets, prints, books, folding cards, and the international poetry journal he edited, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Finlay’s work is marked by a consistency of vision.  Both Stonypath-Little Sparta and his printed works demonstrate an engagement with political and art historical precedents, as well as his long relationship to collaboration.  In considering Finlay’s work, it is additionally necessary to recognize his interest in the nautical, the pastoral, the militaristic, the domestic, the revolutionary, and above all the transformative potential of all of these concepts through metaphor.  However, it is Finlay’s relationship to paper and publication that directed our thinking when organizing the exhibition and this book.

Finlay explored paper’s materiality—texture, fragility, frame, economy, ubiquity—acknowledging that paper is an object with six sides.  He also specifically addressed the temporal nature of books, which consist of multiple pages turned in time.  Finlay worked with the printed page as a material object in three key ways.  First, through his engagement with concrete poetry, Finlay was among those working to reveal the entirety of the page as an active and decidedly visible space.  Second, a number of Finlay’s printed works invite physical manipulation, often through folding, so that the paper object takes sculptural form to occupy actual space.  Third, Finlay combined the elements of concrete poetry, with the insistence of the materiality of the page and book to create artists’ books that uniquely embodied his relationship to the world.  Also, and importantly, many of these works address mobility, a fact that resonates when we consider how thoroughly the garden work concerns monumentality and place.   It is additionally resonant in relation to a man who suffered agoraphobia and who left the grounds of his house a mere handful of times during the last thirty years of his life.

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All Photographs of the installation courtesy of photographer Aurora Tang.

From Gleason's essay Porticus Pompeiana: a new perspective on the first public park of ancient Rome

Unidentified. Allegorie Dediée au Tiers État. From the Popular Imagery Collection of the Harry Ransom Center.

Classic reference on book terminology, description, and collecting, first published in 1952.

In addition, my partner (Tim Johnson) and I finished the installation of printed works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, currently on view at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery.  In conjunction with the exhibition, we published our first book titled The Present Order : Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Over the next few months I will be posting documentation of the show, the book, and our collaboration with Flint Jamison, designer of the Finlay book. 

In the village of Kapkater, Kenya in the early 1950′s, members of the Kipsigi tribe came across a few 78 records of Jimmie Rodgers music.  Convinced that the sounds could not have come from a human, the voice was attributed to a centaur-like spirit named the Chemirocha. This song is played on a pentonic wishbone lyre with vocals by some Kipsigis women.  More versions of Chemirocha, can be found through the South African Music Archive Project.

Listen: Chemirocha

You work in a variety of media, sound, painting, sculpture, artists’ books, how do you see these media as related or different, particularly in terms of practice?

When I first started exhibiting work, actually even before that, during graduate school, I only painted.  I didn’t make drawings or works on paper,  as I felt like drawings were essentially cheaper paintings to sell.  Unless I could approach paper in a way that was different than the way that I could approach canvas or wood with paint, it just didn’t seem to me rigorous enough.  It’s a ridiculous thing to think now.  I think of an artist like Rodin, where the works he did on paper are more compelling to me in many ways than his sculpture.  Some of my favorite works, period, are paper and also I have always responded to small, delicate somewhat insignificant feeling things, which tend to be things on paper.  For whatever reason I felt like I could only really work on painting.  It was just a form of discipline.  At home, I would work with sound, but for a while I didn’t understand its relationship to my visual work.  I felt like I was a painter who sometimes made music, even though I can’t play an instrument or read music and I was using stones and weird tape recorders.  In a way the music was freer than painting because I didn’t go to school for music.  I had no baggage, my heroes I could never touch so I never felt overwhelmed by them.  With painting, the relationship to history through study and also through a lifetime of looking at things is overwhelming at times.  I’m not concerned with originality but just to feel like you’re at least treading your own water, creating your own small territory within something larger.  I think it’s a delicate balance to be influenced by someone or to be conversing with someone and a lot of my work is about conversing with someone.  I have this 8 mm camera that my parents gave me when I was maybe 11.  My father worked a bit in commercials and was a cameraman around the time I was born.  I wanted to use the camera because he had given it me when I was a child and he’s not alive so I thought, “I want to make a film,” and there was no hesitancy in that, which is hilarious because my relationship to film is very strong, but I didn’t feel like I was competing with a film director and I didn’t even feel like I was competing with someone like Brakhage because I was just a painter with a little super-8 camera.  It kind of became about permission, and  so I made a film.  I kept the camera every day with me for a year.  I shot ten seconds of sunlight or shadow, some kind of natural light phenomenon.  Certainly, there were days that I didn’t film, but the idea was that I would have to think about making work everyday, I would have to make work everyday and I would have to be looking attentively everyday.  These things are so funny to me because it was a ridiculous thing to do in so many ways, but when I finished that film I accepted film as part of my practice, because I committed to it and it offered something that sound and painting couldn’t offer me.  It was time-based but it was silent, it existed on the wall but it wasn’t static and it was abstract but not through anything other than looking.  I was in love with early Bauhaus and Surrealist films, so it certainly took cues from those things.  It’s a quite beautiful a film made up of images of things in the world; but it was also somewhat naïve, and I think it was more of a conversation than a realized work because it was the first I’d done in that medium.  I still think it’s a strong work, but I think it’s more of a question of being particularly aware of film daily, for a year. It was a first step.

Where does your text-based work fit in with these various mediums?

It’s the same kind of thing.  Literature has always been enormous for me and I was not a reader as a kid.  I took a class in art school, I mean we had to take an English class and the teacher was fantastic.  It was Bernard Cooper.  I mean, I didn’t know who Bernard Cooper was; he might have been anyone then, but he made us read and write and I was not much of a writer and I was not much of a reader.  He assigned us Calvino, Kafka, and some other things that I don’t remember liking that much, but he gave us totally wacky writing assignments.  It wasn’t that I didn’t read at all, but I was reading things that were connected to the visual arts.  Discovering Baudelaire through Manet.  Discovering Surrealists through painting I liked.  So I was interested in experimental fiction, but I had no context for it.  The year after that year in school, I did my third year as an undergraduate in Paris and I don’t speak French and I didn’t speak French then and I’m not the most social person in the world.  I’d go to school and work and then I would leave school, go to museums, and listen to music, mostly.  So on day I went to a bookstore and I bought Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin because I had watched the Fassbinder film when I was younger and it was one of the most profound experiences I had probably ever had up to that point with a piece of art.  So I decided to try to read the book and I loved it.  It opened up a whole world to me.  26 years later, I still love a lot of German and Austrian writing from 1880 to 1920, and by the time I got to grad school I was reading mostly that kind of stuff.  Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, Robert Walser and Rilke.  In grad school we were reading Baudrillard and talking about the simulacra and I was still reading for the 400^th time Letters to a Young Poet.  I was doing work based on Rimbaud, the poems about vowels.  And so, as much as my painting interests were Arthur Dove, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and contemporary folks like Brice Marden.  There was really no place for me in an institution that was rigorous about going to Disney Land to mock it as a simulated experience.  So when I had to write a thesis, it was supposed to be academic, researched and heavily critical, which I can be but I wasn’t interested in academic criticism at all.  I decided to write my thesis about the idea of walking and wandering.  There were a couple people who were sympathetic.  I got some Zen things and some John Dewey things and I was completely obsessed with this book of letters between Schoenberg and Kandinsky.  Schoenberg painted, and I think he and Strindberg are the two most underrated Sunday painters of all time.  Kandinsky really loved music and wrote about sound.  They conversed about each other’s mediums a lot.  So my thesis was a piece of fiction about two people coming down from different mountains and passing on this path.  Basically the walking part was Richard Long and the other sources and the conversation that they had was basically from this book of letters.  You know, I got my ass kicked, but that experience got me thinking about possibly trying to write.  Before that, writing had been this one thing that I could never think of approaching because of the writers I admired.  How do you deal with someone like Hesse or Thomas Mann?  But once I got out of grad school in 1989, I had this idea that I should try and write a novel, so I spent an hour every morning writing a novel.  Which was terrible.  But the activity was wonderful.  The discipline was incredible (and eventually led to the idea of making the film once a day for a year).  I also tried to write some poetry based on all the Spanish words I could remember from grammar school as my toolkit.  A couple months ago I found them and I realized that they were the beginning of the writing that I’m doing now. I didn’t have a Spanish dictionary.  I don’t really speak Spanish.  But there were a significant amount of words that I remembered.  So the systems that I now use to generate visual work, really evolved out this early attempt to write.  I had tried making paintings using systems as far back as graduate school, but the entire process was unresolved.  I did a series of paintings in school based on Rimbaud’s Ophelia poem, trying to make a painting for every word. But it didn’t work, and I was forcing things, which made the process and the work feel a bit artificial.  It felt too art-like and I was pretty anti the whole idea of feeling like I was making art.  I wanted to feel like I was making something I needed to make.  And that still carries through.  I was reading Agnes Martin’s writings at that time.  That was another thing in school that I was getting my butt kicked for.  And I was interested in Cage.  And Cage, until he was older never copped to the fact that personal taste was a big part of what he was doing.  And in a lot of ways the chance systems allowed him to work without intellectual discourse, but going through the material and pulling things intuitively.   Some people look at Albers paintings and think it’s just about control, but those paintings clearly come out of a love.  It’s this idea of rules equaling freedom.  If you limit yourself, how can you articulate something within that framework that doesn’t allow you your repetitive comfort zone.

Considering Cage as an influence, was Ouilpo a literary influence?

I didn’t know much about that, but of course it’s in there.  It’s pulling from a lot of different things.  There are a lot of Fluxus scores and works that were influential, more towards the process than the outcome.  There is a lot of conceptual art— the Robert Morris’s blind drawings, Thomas Marioni’s drum brush drawings, these things where a score should yield action, not a poetic result, yet a poetic result is achieved in spite of the action.  That has always been difficult for people to grasp within my own work.  They want the work to relate to that history, yet I’m not making crisp minimal drawings, I’m making seriously wonky painter’s paintings.  Traditionally, this kind of conceptual work is much more connected to object that generate rigidity or sparseness.  There are times when I’d rather make a Tom Marioni drum brush drawing than my own work, but I can’t force the work to be a certain way simply because I feel sympathy with that work.  I’m basically setting up a performance system.  Even with the work I’ve been doing in Marfa, I looked at this text by Judd and I took the vowel structure of that text and I used the vowel structure as a score.  All of the work follows the same pattern but none of the works look the same.  Most of the work that I like from that time period, has a clear connection between what was done, how it was done, and what it looks like.  I have no interest in doing that myself because those works now exist in history the ideas behind them are as important as the objects, but I have no interest what-so-ever in anyone being interested in my ideas at the expense of being interested in the objects I make. Conceptual art’s history places the idea at the top of the ladder, and the object near the bottom, for me it is the opposite. I feel like good ideas are overrated.  I would like people to be able to ignore my ideas, to approach the things I make on their own terms.  I don’t want the work to have to fulfill my intentions. This is why I think someone like Agnes Martin is so interesting, because I want to get to a place where the things that I’m initially dealing with intellectually suddenly go away, so i can really be immersed in what I’m making. If we looked at a painting from four years ago I could have said, “every mark in this painting is connected to this score and I could show you where and how.” Now, I’m less interested in that, and it seems much more of a risk to allow the process of making to include moments when I break away from the score because the conversation should allow me to step into the visual field before me, as well as returning to the score – it should be a conversation more than a set of rules. If you had a metal frame and built a sculpture on top of it, that frame would still be there no matter what you placed upon it.  Even if you couldn’t see the form, it’s still the foundation of the thing that you’ve built.  A lot of people talk about painting as a discipline.  The only other thing people talk about in that way is probably sports or spiritual activity.  In all three, every time you sit down to do something you are trying to learn something new.  You are trying to go to a higher place than you were before.  To certain artists that means doing the same thing every time and still feeling like there is something new in it.  For me, it’s making something that seems unfamiliar and disconnected from the last one.

Do you use process throughout all of your works?

In the early 90′s, I showed a bit with a gallery for maybe six years and then left.   At that time my work was essentially paintings covered with letters.  I took a biography of Goethe and notated the first letter on every page and made a painting that used all of those letters on its surface as an image, and that’s how I was using systems at the time.  It was arbitrary.  It was mostly about taking things out of context.  And after two solo shows it seemed a good moment to leave the gallery even though I didn’t have any where else to go and I knew I wouldn’t have an exhibition for probably three or four years. But people were starting to know me as this guy who paints letters, and i realized that my relationship to my sources were not really deep enough.  I was spending time with them, and I pulled forms them and exploited them in a way, but i was only scratching the surface.  I ended up working on three projects for a year, but I didn’t paint.  One was a sculpture that was 490 objects based on all the known land formations on the moon circa 1900.  To determine the height and materials of each sculpture, I used the vowel structure of each name, taking cues from Rimbaud – if a vowel could equal a color, couldn’t it also equal a material or a measurement?  At the same time I was reading this book by Hesse called “Wandering” which is a series of poems and prose related to his walking through the Alps.  It’s not a great book, but there are about 4 or 5 pages about trees that I think are the best thing ever written about trees.  Earlier in my painting life I painted that entire text on a canvas.  I wanted to go back to it as I had used that text to generate several works.  I ended up buying 26 different green colored pencils, different brands, anything that was a variation so I could have 26.  Each pencil was a stand in for a letter of the alphabet.  I read the text slower than i was ever able to before. For the word “the” I would see the “t” and go through my colored pencils until i found the corresponding “t” pencil, and made a mark in that color on a piece of lined notebook paper. Each drawing follows the letter stream of one page of text.

The other important thing was this book of Swedish poetry by Par Lagerkvist.  I found it in a used bookstore and opened it up only to realize that it was only in Swedish.  I thought for a long time that I would use it for a painting, but  as these other activities were going on I realized that my connection to the object or source material was getting more developed.  On a whim I picked up the book one morning and started reading it out-loud.  I wondered what the Swedish words could be, but of course even though I was able to speak them, I had no idea what they meant. I had read all of Lagerkvist’s novels in English, so I knew the landscape of the work, so I didn’t want to create a dictionary for every word and then end up with non-sense poems.  I actually wanted the book to teach me to write.  So I started to play.  Some words like “valda” sounded like “fallen” and so I could just write that word down.  Some words I could never find a good equivalent for, and if I couldn’t find an intuitive word I would use the spelling of the word and an old dictionary to try and find an English word that started with the same three letters.

You would examine how that felt with the text and how you felt about it?

Yes and I was also trying to look at his rhyming structure.  Those three things are actually the three most significant things I did in terms of altering my entire practice.  In all these I was allowing something else to direct me.  When I had worked with systems before these three pieces, I was directing everything and I was interested in Cage and I was playing with chance, but it wasn’t rigorous enough and it wasn’t going anywhere.  All of these things seemed like seeds.  The writing in way was the most exciting because it was something I didn’t know how to approach.

Do you find it difficult to move through mediums over long periods of time?

I think moving through mediums provides some clarity for me.  I have friends who don’t understand why I spend time on sound; they think I should just be painting.  I know sound artists that think I should just focus on sound.  These practices are not connected on the surface, the drawings don’t look like the paintings, the sculpture doesn’t look the drawings or the paintings, the sound work is much more minimal than the other things I do, but there is a very strong conceptual umbrella over everything.  For me, painting is like the sun and all these other things are the planets that float around it.

So then, would you say that painting is therefore your primary practice?

I would say it’s what I’ve done the longest; it’s what I do consistently.  The funniest thing is that every time I’ve had a great shift in my painting it has come from stepping away from painting and working in another medium.

What is your ideal presentation for your works of translation?

In my dream world they would editioned objects.  That’s why I make CD’s as well.  I design every aspect of them.  To me they are a continuation of artists’ publications.  They come out of that history.  I started making records partially because Dubuffet made records as much as I’m interested in Cage and the whole history of experimental and avant-garde music.  The permission came to me from Dubuffet and people like Kaprow.  A lot of visual artists have made record objects, and that history is of great interest to me.

The poster for your show at the Locker Plant in Marfa, Texas as part of your residency with Chinati Foundation is a photograph of an opening to a notebook of yours.  On the notebook is notational structure that resembles a musical score.  Do you ever display objects like this?

In this instance, this is my work journal.  There are writings in there that I would consider publishing, but not as a facsimile.  I’m leery of pointing back to myself.  I don’t want to be the center.  I want to offer something to people where meaning can be built by their experience.

I would love to do a book of writings that are essentially related to my work.  I write constantly about my work.  Since I came to Marfa I have been writing a lot about the idea of site-specificity.  I’ve been struggling with the idea that in my own work, the video and sound works are the only aspects of my work that I really think about as being site-specific.  I didn’t want to come to Marfa and make paintings that I could have made at home.  When I left Los Angeles I was reading about Robert Irwin and then when I arrived in Marfa I received the Chinati packet with the Judd text.  I wanted to use what they were talking about not towards the final experience, but towards the idea of making.  How can site-specific be a term used towards the process of making something.  I’ve been writing a pretty long text about that.  Those things I hope I would get an opportunity to publish. When I write about the work, there is not only the ability to organize thoughts, but to have a kind of freedom to write things that would be more difficult to speak – and I can talk about the work in a more esoteric way.

What do you think is the ideal display for your work?   I’m sure this changes based on medium, but are there any general features of display that are very important to you?

My shows have become more complex in regards to medium.  Now a body of work could include paintings, sculpture, drawings, a sound work and maybe a film or video component.  My dealer in LA just moved to a new space with two huge rooms, where her last space was four smaller rooms.  The three shows I had in that space, were as follows: paintings were in the center room, drawings were in the back room, sculpture and sound were in different rooms. When my last show as reviewed, the writer was positive about the work, but did not like the arrangements of the work.  She thought I had done a disservice to the work by separating the pieces by medium.  I have always tried to protect the paintings.   If there is sound in the room with the paintings, the paintings become part of a soundtrack, etc.   A few months later I did an interview with the same reviewer and we talked for a long time about the installation of the work. Through the conversation I realized that I’d been stubborn about the display, and that the works could converse with each other towards something quite exciting.  So, the ideal presentation might be all of these things co-existing.  But, it depends on how much individuality the works need.  I would not want to compromise a single work’s voice just to make the whole arrangement of works more exciting.

Can you discuss some of the work that you’ve completed during your stay in Marfa?

What I’ve finished are some paintings, some drawings, some sculpture and a little sound piece.  With the paintings I used something visual in the Locker Plant to generate a large part of the overall composition.  For the sculpture I used wood that the last artist in residence had left behind, and gave to me.  There are five pieces of wood.  I was already going to use the vowel structure of Judd’s text when i realized the second longest piece of wood was already painted black.  The second largest amount of letters in the text is “A” corresponds to black in Rimbaud’s vowel color system, so I had to use it.  The drawings feel like I am working on experiments, willing to go wherever they take me.  Some of them I would frame and hang in my house and some of them I would be reluctant to show to anyone.  I’m going to hang them all in the space.  I think it’s important to be able to embrace as well as deviate from the source.

What do you mean by source?  The material?  Referential material?

It depends.  Usually whatever the system is built from.  The paintings are built from this Judd text, but that doesn’t mean there is an image of his sculpture in the center of the painting.  A number of things came together to determine the visual form and its process of making.  The ceiling is a grid, which is where a lot of the imagery came from, but  I didn’t sit down and think, “I want to make some geometric grid paintings and I will use this Judd text to generate them.”  It’s more like, you start to converse with this thing and suggests a building process and you try to let the source somehow influence your decisions and actions, as well as the forms that are being made.

When I got to Marfa I really wanted to think about the site, it’s history, the conversation around it.  I wanted all of these things to come into play.  Otherwise I could have just continues what I was working on at home.  This work is the next step.  There have been two major shifts in my work up to this point.  One of them was that time when I stopped painting for a year.  This clearly feels like the third big shift.  My last show was the most exciting body of work I’ve ever made, but a year and a half later, I see that show as the culmination of something that I worked on for eight or nine years and over the past year I’ve been trying to find a way to step into new territory.  My whole practice is built around denying myself any kind of comfort zone so that when something becomes familiar or routine, I pull the rug out from under myself. My time in Marfa has been an unbelievably important first step towards whatever the next step will be.

A VERY SMALL SELECTION OF IMAGES:

(all text about the work by Steve Roden)

the paintings were made using small sections of a 12 page classical music score. the letter equivalents of the musical notes determined numbers which then became a score for actions, images, marks, etc.

when rain is like sun and sun is like rain…
72″ x 72 “, oil and acrylic on linen, 2008

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fallen/spoken

2000- present

an “intuitive translation” of valda dikter by par lagerkvist

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For more information on Roden’s work please see his excellent website:

http://www.inbetweennoise.com/

Roden also keeps a blog called Airform Archives:

http://inbetweennoise.blogspot.com/

(some of my favorites are Roden’s posts on concrete poetry)

]]> http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/interview-steve-roden/feed/ 0 impossibleobjects sunlikerain fallenspoken1 http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/some-forms-of-availability-by-simon-cutts/ http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/some-forms-of-availability-by-simon-cutts/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:37:19 +0000 impossibleobjects http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/?p=418 ]]>

Before opening the book itself, the cover of some forms of availability provides the reader with information about what they should expect from the book.  Some of this information is straightforward, while other parts are my guesses or suppositions:

That this publication will include “Critical passages on The Book and Publication”
That these passages have been created by Simon Cutts
That this book will involve putting things into perspective.  Opening up things that appear closed.  Acknowledging different shades or hues of work, in a metaphorical way of speaking.

The sections of some forms of availability are generally arranged as follows:

1. Some Forms of Availability
2. Taraque, The Trent Bookshop/Coracle, workfortheeyetodo
3. The Process of the Book
4. Critical Publication
5. The Artist Publisher
6. Dislocated Paragraphs
7. Some Coracle Ephemera
8. Homage to Seurat
9. Polemical Postcards
10. A Partial Bibliography
11. Beyond Reading

To begin, I’d like to explore the last section “Beyond Reading” first and then return to the first section “Some Forms of Availability.”

“Beyond Reading”

“Beyond Reading” opens with an initially unattributed quotation that reads:

The pure work implies the elocutory disappearance of the poet, who abandons the initiative to words mobilized by the shock of their inequality; they light one another up with mutual reflections like a virtual trail of fire upon precious stones, replacing the breathing perceptible in the old lyrical blast of the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase.

The reader learns in a note at the end of the section that this is Stéphane Mallarmé from his essay Crise de Vers.

We then read Cutt’s argument:

(What follows is the transcribed text, below is a scan of the page spreads as they appear in the book.  Click on image for a larger view.  The structure of these words on the page is undoubtedly of importance to Cutts).

The unit of the work cannot be the sentence

or the phrase

or the line

the linear syntax structure causes

the line

the phrase

the sentence

to be systematic, sequential

the unit of the work is the

word

Following this tract, is a section called “notes.”  This short prose explanation by Cutts reiterates the thoughts described above and Mallarme’s sentiment in the opening quotation.  Cutts writes:

The work is its own continuous accumulative impression, varying and differing not only for each reader, but each time it is read.  For this continuous structure to be effective, it must to be the antithesis of a sequential reading…to have read the work in sequence is only one of several possibilities, as the supposed sequence exists in a condition of simultaneity.

What follows is an examination of the text through two categories that I feel are pertinent to this essay:

the unit

possibility

the unit

After much reading and thinking and re-reading and re-thinking I return to the thought that the “unit of work” can be reduced to a further degree.  Why not push further?  Why can’t the discussion extend to the letter as the unit?

It is in fact Mallarme who wrote in “Le livre, instrument sprituel” (1895) that letters are “gifted with infinity” and that “Everything [the totality of earthly existence] is caught up in their endless variations” (please see Gerald L. Brauns Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language for more information both on this topic and Mallarme’s relationship to Language in general).

I return to Mallarme’s thoughts here because his presence is very much felt throughout Beyond Reading, not only in beginning quotation, but also in Cutts’ gestures through typography and in his explanatory notes section.

While I do not share Mallarme’s mystical appreciation of the letter, I see tremendous beauty and interest in the “endless variations” that are at all times present in the combination of letters to make words, phrases, and sentences.

possibility

Returning generally to Cutts’ “Notes” section and specifically to the above-mentioned passage I want to reiterate the following passage:

to have read the work in sequence is only one of several possibilities, as the supposed sequence exists in a condition of simultaneity

While several possibilities of readings of any work involving multiple words exist, when thinking about an essay or a book of essays, the opportunity for exponentially more than just several possible readings exist.  If a reader were able to disregard linearity, sequential reading, learned reading, and traditional reading the possibilities would become as infinite as the amount of possible combinations of words in the text.  This argument is perhaps a side note. However what interests me here is the idea of possibilities.  I am struck by the potential relationship between possibilities and chance.

In thinking about chance I was recently struck by the short exploration of chance and the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce’s thoughts in relationship to the work of artist Donald Judd in Richard Shiff’s essay, “Donald Judd: Fast Thinking.”  As Shiff writes:

‘Everything which happens is infinitely improbable.’ This is one of Peirce’s characteristically odd statements…It’s validity lies in the realization that ‘everything which happens’ has an infinite number of opportunities to happen otherwise—in principle, not to happen at all.  Something of this sort may be what Judd was thinking when he wrote, ‘Things that exist exist and everything is on their side…Everything is equal, just existing, and the values and interests they have are only adventitious.’  By existing, the things that exist have already beaten the odds.

What I’m attempting to get at here is not an intensely philosophical position on the nature of chance, but instead to highlight the excitement of the fact that each thing that exists could have been otherwise and beyond that each thing that exists, be it a poem or an artwork, can be thought of and “read” in such multifarious ways that the possibilities for “reading” in all of its connotations are infinite.  One should not lose excitement when facing this multiplicity.

“Some Forms of Availability”

“Some Forms of Availability” does a number of things very succinctly.  I will try to be even more succinct without losing Cutt’s meaning, by bullet pointing what I think are some of his key points, in some instances using Cutt’s exact words, sometimes using my own:

1. The book is the most available of formats (this writing is from October 2006).
2. “The potentiality of publication as a form is inexhaustible.”
3. Making books is an action, akin to gardening and cooking, where one can learn many things about the abstract and natural, material world.
4. “The poem’s ideal manifestation is the book itself.”

From this writing, it seems that Cutt’s came to these conclusions through personal experience.  He describes encounters in his life that led him to form his own press, Coracle.  He also describes his reading interests throughout the 60s, beginning with Joyce’s Ulysses and continuing on with writing by Mallarme, Apollinaire, Pound, Eliot, and concrete poets.

One thing of interest to me is his insistence on describing his physical, active encounter with the materials used to create a book or printed publication.

He says:

…..we taught ourselves…the economics of formatting, about paper, sheet sizes and weights, the use of off-cuts, print, ink, and not least of all printers and the means of handling them.

Cutt’s begins this writing with a Rimbaud quotation from Momento d’expression anglais, which reads:

Do you please, as soon as possible

send to me in my box all things

which remain in the room again

This quotation strikes me as quite beautiful in relationship to language and the book.  In Rimbaud’s poem there is a box, a room, and all the things that can go in both the box and room.  Think about the box as a metaphor for a book, and language as a metaphor for all that which can be both put in the box and also remain in the room.  Therefore, language can exist simultaneously inside a book, but also outside of a book.  From this metaphor, I came to one possible and for me, quite beautiful interpretation of the poem:  that language is inexhaustible.

In thinking of Cutt’s statement, “The poem’s ideal manifestation is the book,” I am left with a sense of ambivalence.  This ambivalence has led to the following questions:

Instead, I will be getting back to the topic of artists’ books criticism through a discussion of a 2007 book by Simon Cutts titled some forms of availability, published by Granary Books and the RGAP (Research Group for Artists Publications).  RGAP is an independent, artist-led organization, and that publishes artists’ books and editions, and works with other centers in the UK and abroad, setting up collaborative projects, publications, exhibitions and events. This includes the organization of the Small Publishers Fair – an international event held annually in London.

Simon Cutts is a poet, artist, and editor, who has developed Coracle Press over the last thirty years in its many publicational forms. His own concern is with the book and its mechanisms as a manifestation of the poem itself.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Coming up will also be an interview with artist Steve Roden, whose works spans many mediums including, but not limited to, painting, sculpture, sound, and text.  I interviewed Steve in February 2010 while he was an artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.  Roden’s interview will be found in the “INTERVIEWS” section of Impossible Objects.

You can read more about Roden’s work by exploring the following links:

Roden’s residency at the Chinati Foundation

in be tween noise : Roden’s website

airform archives : Roden’s blog

About Nox:

Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus for his brother who died in the Troad. Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages.

Some of the things that will be explored:

the accordion fold

translation

loss

More on Anne Carson:

at the 92nd street Y

reading at the Geffen Playhouse

reading for the Lannan Foundation

]]> http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/coming-up-nox-by-anne-carson/feed/ 0 impossibleobjects 4100547537_a9f34ac3d5 accordion carson_b http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/the-collections-of-barbara-bloom/ http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/the-collections-of-barbara-bloom/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:36:56 +0000 impossibleobjects http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/?p=222 ]]>

ISBN: 9783865216212
FORMAT: Paperback, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 272 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHER: Steidl/ICP
PUBLICATION DATE: 2/1/2008

“It occurs to me that this project has been the opposite of research.” – Barbara Bloom, Acknowledgements

REGARDING THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

We begin with:

The pearl necklace.

The bird silhouettes.

Music sheets in Braille.

These are:

The objects.

Therein:

Relationships, connotations

With these objects comes categorization.  They are sorted into categories and the categories are then ordered, providing the following organizational structure:

Innuendo

Naming

Blushing

Doubles

Charms

Belief

Framing

Broken

Stand Ins

Reading In

Songs

With this categorization comes identification.  These unique numbers stand in for the object.  The pearl necklace becomes CH. 21, noting that this object falls into the section “Charms” and is the twenty-first object in the section.

With this identification comes description.  We learn this about the pearl necklace: “Each pearl from a different source.  Gift of Amie Brin.”  In this description we receive the provenance of the object.

This is the organizational system of Barbara Bloom’s Collection, objects as objects, first, and then as Bloom describes, they were, “sifted through…over and over in an attempt to find the underlying suppositions.”   Now published, we can begin this process of sifting through objects, categorization, identification, and description. We can investigate the system as system, object by object.

As Dave Hickey keenly notes in his introductory essay, we can perhaps think of Joyce’s Ulysses when embarking on this odyssey of objects.   Keeping in mind what it is to pay attention to objects, to sort, synthesize, remember and re-remember, to encounter and encounter again, we can re-read Joyce’s introduction of Leopold Bloom with awareness of the endless connotations and experiences of things and how they speak about and to a person:

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

TWO CATEGORIES: “INNUENDO” and “READING IN”

INNUENDO

In each chapter we begin with an introduction.  In “Innuendo” the introduction is a third-person account of how Barbara Bloom tells a story, and the way she makes sense of the world both verbally and through the use of objects.

In this text, with sections that are intentionally blurred to the point that they are only barely recognizable, we read the following:

Directness was obviously not her forte.  Obtuseness was more her style…Another good example [blurred section] is the way we strive to portray a life through the collection of objects someone has left behind, as if in the oddly shaped interstices between the chair and the mirror, the book and the tea cup, a shadow of a presence will take form as a longed-for face, a missed turn of phrase, a recognizable absence.

This text is a potential framework with which to view both this chapter and the book as a whole.

Exhibiting her willingness to overstep conventional book design practice, Bloom plays with the book by, for example, including five (presumably her own) fingerprints on the lower left hand corner of the page, in the margin of the book.  Here the hand, or the person whose hand it is, becomes part of the “Innuendo.”  This trace is what remains of them, this presence, lingering in their absence.

This chapter includes both small objects, such as watermark portrait teacups, and images from Bloom’s large-scale installations, such as Esprit de l’Escalier (1988) and The Reign of Narcissism (1989).  The works in this chapter deal with absence and presence (this being the title of a few of the works), what is seen and not seen, or felt but not seen, in some cases.   These works also either directly or indirectly deal with shadows, fragility, image and reality, what it is to experience an object or place, furniture, what one can say and what one does not say, among other things.

While in common usage, innuendo is similar to insinuation and is often derogatory in nature, Bloom uses innuendo to signify things that are present in some ways but not necessarily present in a concrete form, thus rendering them simultaneously absent.  Her examples of this duality are ghosts, UFO’s, monsters, X-rays, the Titanic, and lost love ones.  The most moving of these works is an aluminum tag, engraved on both sides titled “B.B. de Appel memorial” (1993).  About the piece, Bloom writes in both third and first person:

In August 1983, friends of BB were killed in the crash of a small plane.  Ten years later, the director of de Appel, the Amsterdam art space that had been started by the two deceased, asked BB to create a memorial piece.  The text that accompanied the tag reads ‘Aanwezig’ (Present) on one side, and ‘Afwezig’ (Absent) on the other.   It was found at an airport for private planes in Holland in May of 1983.  These tags hung on books under the names of pilots who frequented that airport, indicating their presence or absence.  I was moved to take one, and have had it on my desk ever sense.

READING IN

In the opening text for “Reading In” Bloom, again in third-person, describes a book she saw once and fell in love with.  In this book, all punctuation is printed in green.  Bloom characterizes this “typographic” point of view” as “halfway between content and form,” a “subtle point.”  Indeed, as with “Innuendo,” what Bloom describes can be used as a lens with which to view her interests and intent in The Collections as a work.

In this chapter, Bloom explores books from her personal collection.  These books are photographed closed, open, in piles, on shelves and, notably, in a folding deck chair.  She chose these books for their titles, covers, spines, content, and provenance.  In some cases, these books reference areas of interest in previous chapters, for example she includes a playboy in Braille and the front and back covers of de Appel, both of which have relevance to chapter one, “Innuendo.”  “Reading In” also includes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s French Book, which sold for $42,500 (not to Barbara Bloom) at Sotheby’s auction in 1996, following her death.  It was the auction catalogue for this sale that would serve as a major inspiration to Bloom.  As Hickey writes in the introductory essay:

Here, she [Bloom] thought, was an occasion with provenance and consequence–as old as history itself–an occasion on the brink between celebration and dissolution, glory and oblivion.  The specificity and limitations of the catalogue were, if anything, more beguiling than its trenchancy.  The auction catalogue did not aspire to the “whole Jackie,” or even the “true Jackie”; it proclaimed the “residue of Jackie,” a resonant idea, with a provenance.

Bloom is actively pursuing an understanding of the “power of books” throughout this chapter.  In a work titled “Film stills of a couple with books from Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman is a Woman (1961), Bloom explores Godard’s use of books to describe characters and relationships, concluding that, “If you cannot judge a book by its cover, you can at least draw some conclusions about the person holding it.”

Throughout the chapter, more is learned about how Bloom collects and creates books.  In another descriptive entry for cardboard and paper dummy books, Bloom writes:

The romance of the book is thought to be a gentle and erudite thing, a lure for sensitive souls in search of subtle and piercing insights, but there is a more Machiavellian aspect to it.  Books promise knowledge, and knowledge promises power and control.

This sentiment is perhaps part of Bloom’s resistance to a retrospective catalogue, even though The Collections of Barbara Bloom is exactly that.  The specter of the power and control of knowledge generally, and the type of knowledge found in books specifically, looms heavy over this section.   To subvert this power structure, Bloom chooses playfulness and subtlety in her presentation.  The use of third-person allows a distancing between the artist as authoritative creator and viewer, who is beholden to the artists’ creation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SUPPOSITIONS

Closing the book with Bloom’s acknowledgments section, we are returned to her idea of beginning with objects, rather than suppositions.  With the acknowledgments on the verso of the page, the recto is an image of a person (presumably Bloom herself) in shadow.  From this photograph we cannot tell if the person is looking out at the viewer, or has her back turned to us.  Her shadow is in line with other shadows of objects from her piece Absence-Presence.  In this work shadows of objects such as a folding music stand, an easel, and a reflective light umbrella are projected on to the wall.  She describes this work as being “as much about slippage as it is about connection.”

In this photograph Bloom conveys her own objecthood and shadowy relationship with, not only the objects of the photograph, but also all of the objects in The Collections. As Jackie Kennedy’s possessions, sold posthumously, take on both her presence and absence, the same can be said of Bloom’s work, organized and described in this book.  We can again think of this quotation from the introduction to “Innuendo”:

Directness was obviously not her forte.  Obtuseness was more her style…Another good example [blurred section] is the way we strive to portray a life through the collection of objects someone has left behind, as if in the oddly shaped interstices between the chair and the mirror, the book and the tea cup, a shadow of a presence will take form as a longed-for face, a missed turn of phrase, a recognizable absence.

It is in the shadowy image that this slippage and connection becomes personified. Though speaking in third-person throughout, the reader is well aware that it is Bloom who is talking and Bloom who is attempting to connect not only the works to each other, but also us to those works, a process in which there will always be slippage and loss, and perhaps only shadows.

Possible things to think about when viewing-reading The Collections of Barbara Bloom (in alphabetical order):

Absence

Aanwezig

Barbara Bloom

Collecting

Death

Design

James Joyce

Language

Legacy

Memory

Narrative

Objects

Organization

Retrospectives

Voice

Others:

International Center of Photography Exhibition

NY Times review - where her exhibition for The Collections is described as “scattershot” and “regrettably obscured”

DIA web project Half Full-Half Empty