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links for 2007-05-29

• bristol city council webmail
  (tags: library webmail work mail)
• javascript 'magnifying glass' effect
  (tags: javascript magnify script image code)
• ajax fisheye menu
  (tags: ajax menu fisheye)

links for 2007-05-28

• ashes and snow
  travelling exhibition featuring photos/book/film/novel/the lot, and shown in the 'Nomadic Museum'- essentially a cathedrral built from shipping containers. "The Nomadic Museum restores the possibility of wonder to museums whose excesses of clarity and li
  (tags: photography art book BookArt installation exhibition novel film animals)

imaginal method

The use of allegory as a defense continues today in the interpretations of dreams and fantasies. When images no longer surprise us, when we can expect what they mean and know what they intend, it is because we have our 'symbologies' of established meanings. Dreams have been yoked to the systems which interpret them; they belong to schools – there are 'Freudian dreams,' 'Jungian dreams,' etc. If long things are penises for Freudians, dark things are shadows for Jungians. Images are turned into predefined concepts such as passivity, power, sexuality, anxiety, femininity, much like the conventions of allegorical poetry. Like such poetry, and using similar allegorical techniques, psychology too can become a defense against the psychic power of personified images.

If the mother in our dream, or the beloved, ar the wise counselor, says and does what one would expect, or if the analyst iterprets these figures conventionally, they have been deprived of their authority as mythic images and persons and reduced to mere allegorical conventions and moralistic stereotypes. They have become the personified conceits of an allegory, a simple means of persuasion that forces the dream or fantasy into doctrinal compliance. The image allegorized is now the image in service of a teaching.

In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights. Thus the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The 'worst' images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul.

James Hillman Re-Visioning, 8

Have we in book arts, come some way along the path of turning our field into an allegory, thus limiting its power to cross boundaries and do its work of transformation in culture? What would the remedy be? Where should we turn for palliative/transformational images of what the work is?

Technorati Tags: art, book, reading, review, studio log, writing

Remembrancer slideshow

One of my older books- here in slideshow form. an experiment in using this slideshow format. Seems a bit too slow for me.

Update: simply press the + and - buttons to speed up or slow down. Tooltips would've rocked here.

      

   

Ashes and Snow

www.ashesandsnow.org

An intriguing exhibition featuring photos/film/novel/bookart (the 'Ashes and Snow Codex'), travelling the world with its 'Nomadic Museum'.

The Nomadic Museum restores the possibility of wonder to museums whose excesses of clarity and light have banished the shadows. The power of the show and the power of the building are so reciprocal that it is difficult to separate the dancer from the dance. Colbert and Ban condition the senses of the visitors to facilitate their psychological entry into the space of the photographs, to deliver the message that man is not, and cannot be, separate from the nature within which he evolved.

Modern Painters

Gregory Colbert's photographs are the center of a huge undertaking. The site, intriguingly, doesn't show us much of these. Still, the ambition behind the work is to create something rather wonderful. I'd go to find out about this if I could. They're currently erecting it in Tokyo. It'd be great if it came to London.


Technorati Tags: ashes and snow, photography, art

Artists as Authors: authorial and readerly effectiveness.

While I was writing about my interpretations of Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book, I wrote about the effectiveness of the authorial mode in requiring readers to perform mimetic tasks of narrative imagery (using the tools Scarry sets forth, or otherwise: perhaps visual tools in the case of artists' books). I also wished for a similar way to discuss the effectiveness in creating the arena for such guided cogitation inaugurated by the book form (something Scarry does not attend to greatly, though she has opened up points of reference for me to look at the notion from).

Reading the introduction today of Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan, the subject of authorial effectiveness in contact with the reader/viewer came up again in Ryan's early coverage of the lineage of VR notions of interactivity versus immersion. How do book artists relate to this?

In the first place I feel that no matter how happy they are employing authorial modes to engage their readers more closely, more immersively, book artists will not happily accept the role of authorship that Barthes has told them must be killed off. Besides which artists are also busily and more or less consciously adopting roles as authors alongside that of publisher, printer, poet and so on, to activate different modes of creativity and access different modes of legitimation. They are hardly likely to accept a single identity.

In the second place, reading is a far more complex and subtle  activity than the mere following of instructions, as I have learned from diverse sources, (Ricoeur and Kearney and Brooks and Searle, for example). Artists' books play with this activity in a knowing way that echoes high modernist deconstruction of the realist style in literature. However, as Ryan points out, such literature ironically depended on the realist mode for its substrate material and as the source of the idioms, cliches and styles which it employed in various decontextualising ways. The same is true of artists' books. They use authorial techniques in ways that often 'draw attention to the canvas' as it were. (Though this is by no means a universally strong practice in book art, it is part of the artistic project that artists' books mount). Thirdly, artists's books are of course composed very often of word and picture. Artists' play with the shifting covalency of the images disposed in image and text to produce bivocal works that help to produce an alienation from the text and textual practices. (This while piling on lavish imagery. One cannot help but think that book artists want to have their cake and eat it too). Even when an artists' book contains no words, it is very often carrying on another dialogue with the book form, or with the artists' oeuvre. Which suggests my fourth point: artists' books can often be considered as nodes in the wider, more rhizomatic form of the artists' oeuvre. We often find book artists working in series and reprising themes. This is certainly important to my work in artists' books, and a recent comment on my work by Lindy Clark, that I was 'building a little world' between the stations my books held down, certainly rings true. It rings true for me also in the work of John Bently, Helen Douglas and Andi McGarry- all artists I want to interview. (This is a point I should try to discuss). These books are not simple authorial chunks (neither, really is a Barthesian response to authorship ever the whole story, in my opinion, despite the intellectual tool Barthes bequeathes us. Not authorial chunks: not dead language, either, to move things into a Ricoeurian sphere. The activity of meaning that artists' books embody is turbulent and lively.

links for 2007-05-27

• God Helmet, Masks, Books
  (tags: book artists god helmet holdstock)

Helen Douglas: Border Practice

These notes were made before I interviewed Helen Douglas in May 2007. I'll be working on material using the interview shortly,

Helen Douglas: Border Practice

In devising these notes I want to set out a number of the themes I have picked out in Douglas' work. Rather than looking at the visual aspect of her books exclusively, I have decided to quote extensively from the artist's writings on her practice, since they are unusually lucid and helpful. Since my research will bring me into contact with Douglas, I have looked on this case study as preparatory research to inform a critical position to her work which I can use in an interview situation.

I have set out my study under a number of related headings that express important themes in Douglas' work, proceeding very often from the ways in which the artists herself has described her practice.

On Inside and Outside

"Nature, landscape and the book surround me.

They are out there and they are all absolutely within me too.

Inside and out. I Live them." ¹

The subjects of Douglas' practice also inscribe points in her artistic hermenuetic. The inside and outside are part of her metaphorical gear for drawing material into her practice. The concepts of inside and outside are mediated by the book, which makes concrete the work of enclosure and release that Douglas’ investigation is involved with. The inside and outside involved here are very particular, though: “I live them” the artist tells us, so her involvement is not merely with space in an abstract sense, but with place. The relationship that her practice engineers is between her environment in the Scottish Borders, and the places poetically constituted in her books.

On Being Allowed To

This is the proposal I submitted for the Action/Interaction conference...

On Being Allowed To: What does the combination of different roles within book art practice enable?

Because book art incorporates numerous possible means of action it acts as a matrix for practice that seeks to slide between easily-recognisable forms. The practice of negotiating between the different possible roles we can adopt is characteristic of work across the book art spectrum. A critical discourse inspired by roles and practice rather than the identification of formal elements of value within artifacts would provide a framework to engage with issues not specifically limited to book art but of potential importance to the field.

For example: How do notions of book art practice open up consideration of hybridity and intermedia? If we consider the roles we adopt in relation to these topics, rather than the book-artifacts alone, we have a richer set of attitudes, modes of engagement, and a wealth of ethnographic qualitative data which we can apply to the issue. Approaches such as this tend to break down the sense of essentialism of the field which a purely formal/aesthetic consideration endows it with. If we can consider the changing face of practice (characterised by me here as the changing relationships of artistic roles), then we can take snapshots of how practitioners deal with the potentials of the book form, informing our view of the artifacts themselves.

To give another example: How does book art engage with work-as-process, work where the artist’s action in engaging with the world is the artwork, rather than the artifact itself? How can a field which is seemingly clustered around the appearances of its artifacts engage with this notion? If we choose to look at book art as a field comprising practices rather than artifacts, then the possibility opens up. By admitting a discourse based around our interaction with book art roles, we create a template for examining how ‘new’ roles can slip into the matrix.

This view is open to a wide range of discussion, and touches on themes that help to engage book-art-specific discourse with wider cultural concerns. I will give a few examples in the form of potential‘conversational arcs’:

1: “Roles aren’t significant. We must base our critical view of the medium on the artistic output. Intentional fallacy, etc”

“But that can never tell us why we make books. It gives us just one version of what they are”

“How, then, do we decide what is good?”

“Good for art or good for the artist?”

2: “The scope of book art practice still depends on what I, the artist, define as book art. Duchamp, artistic intention, etc.”

“But when can your peers start to particularise intention so as to learn from it? How does your intention relate to books? Through the phenomenology of ‘bookness’? Reading? Printing? The book as a social phenomenon? What relation does your intention have to books? What role do you adopt to enact it? Just artist? Or not?

3: “For some of us here the process is more important than the outcome. What you propose about using roles as a platform for discourse isn’t nearly flexible enough to capture the range of processes, of strategies for engagement.”

“So invent new roles. The point of discussing roles is to see how we always interrupt them anyway. The point Drucker makes about books as the quintessential C20th art form discusses this formally and historically, but I think it’s because books incorporate so many possible practices (rather than outward forms) that they work this way.”

These ‘arcs’ aren’t intended as an exhaustive map of the possible outcomes, just the briefest trawl through some of the issues raised.

To reflect on the title of the conference, books as a site for action and interaction invoke both artist and reader in the interplay of intention and agency that books can create a platform for. The consideration of book art as a field of roles and practice allows us a way to examine the possibility for action that the book arts represent. The reception of books and the agency of readers/viewers/visitors in encountering them iterates the same staging of the book form as a matrix for intention and emplotment. Both action and interaction are informed by the roles we as artists and as audience will allow ourselves to play.

Andrew Eason

aeason@gmail.com

God Helmet, Masks, Books

I've been re-reading Robert Holdstock's fantasy novel Lavondyss recently. ( I find that something entertaining at night helps me relax when I've got a lot going on). In the book, the main character uses masks in a shamanic way, to view different aspects of a situation. Using different masks, she can see different aspects of the intersecting states of reality that she as shaman explores and makes use of.

Yesterday I was looking over Andy's shoulder at a web page he was viewing on psychological experiments and noticed the name of one of them: "God Helmet", where an artificial device stimulates the areas of the brain that are responsible for religious experiences (or so the experimenters theorise). I was struck by the similarity between this and a fictional device used in the Holdstock books to stimulate parts of the brain responsible for reaching back into primal memories. A kind of 'race memory helmet', if you will. The activity of these artificial, technological devices is paralleled by the shaman's masks. These are portrayed as a different and more effective technology in this novel.

Today I was thinking about the different roles we take on in artists' books to do different things, to present ourselves and our point of view in different ways, and to look at our subject in different ways. The parallel between this and the masks sprang up. In choosing the identity of our book as political, lyrical, epic, funny, fine-press-work, inquisitive,documentary, or a whole host of other adjectivally-described characterisations, we are choosing which mask the book represents. The book's outlook and the intention of the artist are pointed towards stimulating the reader's experience.

The book as 'god helmet', and as a track through the haunted woods in the care of a shaman.

Technorati Tags: book, artists book, god helmet, holdstock