adminicle

Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson

I've been battered with Robert Smithson recently. So far I haven't read a word of his, but that'll soon change. I just got a copy of his collected writings.

Smithson has repeatedly cropped up over the last 6 weeks or so, First off my good friend Andrew Atkinson has been reading Smithson alongside some work on the great American city planner Robert Moses as part of the background research he's doing on a project he's doing based underneath a highway overpass in Northern Manhattan. we spent some time shooting pictures there while I was over in the United States to speak at a conference on artists' books in Chicago.

Secondly, I came across Smithson's collected writings again when I looked over the resource materials at the Alex Hartley exhibition at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket gallery- Hartley's work on the built environment, using 'buildering', the technique of climbing on buildings as an act of urban trespass or critique, and his appropriation of urban spaces and architectural spaces as a realm of artistic reflection, presumably reflected in Smithson's writings.

Thirdly, I was speaking with Julian Warren and Smithson came up. Julian is working at Bristol Record Office just now, doing some preliminary sorting of the Arnolfini's archives, which at the beginning of Julian's task were literally 400 boxes of assorted stuff. Amongst this lot they have a very interesting collection of artists' books from the 60's and 70's, including, I'm told, comprehensive examples of Ed Ruscha's 'trade' books... and works by Robert Smithson.

From my point of view the significance of the coincidence points up the collision of some of my interests. There must, I think, be something in this. So I'm off to find out more about him and his work, which I previously only knew through Spiral Jetty.

Technorati Tags: Robert Smithson, Smthson, Robert Moses, Moses, art, planning, urban renewal, coincidence, Alex Hartley, Hartley, buildering, climb, L.A. climbs, exhibition, Edinburgh, Bristol, Manhattan, New York, Arnolfini, Fruitmarket, gallery, Andrew Atkinson, Atkinson

Book review "The World Without Us" (partial)

First impressions are that this is going to be an interesting read, with lots of individual pieces within it. This goes two ways- first, it's a fascinating silva rerum, casting sidelights on the subject from many different angles, and ensuring that the individual pieces, the little stories that inform the narrative, each get their own ray of illumination. One is bound to remember one or two amidst the collection. By the same token it seems to be suffering as an extended essay,reading instead as a series of themed pieces. This is by no means a bad thing, nor, really is it a bad way to write a book, per se. But the argument arrives in a sedimentary manner, not through the guidance of the author as intellectual champion- despite the fact that it's the author's hand guiding the shovel.

Another way of criticising this method would be that it comes off as somewhat journalistic: the research comes in digestible chunks and serves to confirm the story as reported.

Despite my criticisms, I really enjoy this sort of reading. It's not as taxing as other sorts of non-fiction reading, and one tends to remember more facts, even if the great ideas tend not to come to the surface. I suppose that this is the dilemma faced by non-fiction authors: whether to serve the average reader something more palatable, or to run the risk of believing so strongly in their thesis that they sacrifice entertainment for difficult-to-read expressive clarity. Is there a way to have both?

(more on this book when I'm finished with it).


Technorati Tags: book review world writing

De Certeau on gifts

De C, around p28, mentions gifts and potlatch. This of course shifts my attention to Lewis Hynde's book The Gift, with its emphasis on gift economy as a tactical 'way' within the world that is particularly suited to creative work (in the broad sense). I'll take another look at my notes from Hynde shortly.

Around about the same area, DeC starts talking about the diversion of la perruque taking place across contexts (ie not localizably), through actions. The coincidence of terms (if it is a coincidence), makes me wonder what the current popularity of Getting Things Done reveals about its adherents' attitudes to work and the order on which it takes place. In the Spinozan sense, perhaps they are taking charge of an internal order of justification for their work? Aided and abetted by the fluidity of digital working?

Technorati Tags: book, reading, review, studio log

Breaking the Rules

From Rare Book Review:

The British Library’s major exhibition, ‘Breaking the Rules:The Printed Face of the  European Avant Garde 1900-1937’ explores the creative transformation which took place in Europe during the first four decades of the 20th century – a revolution which encompassed visual art, design, photography, literature, theatre, music and architecture. Each style is traditionally regarded as a movement in itself but for the first time they are brought together to explore common themes and the creative transformation which took place at the time as well its continuing impact on contemporary culture.

Technorati Tags: art, book, report

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

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.

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

Proboscis

I'm looking at www.proboscis.org.uk today and thinking about how their work overlaps into some of the territories I'm interested in. Most of what they do depends on digital media at some point- except when it doesn't. I just bought a pack of their landscape magnets and story cube templates to use in my Bibliogroup artists' book collaborative project, but I'm thinking beyond that.

I'm intrigued with the way that their practice tantalizes my thesis' grasp of book art. I'm looking at books as an inclusive matrix of different roles and legitimation contexts, something which isn't so in evidence here where publishing seems to be more about experimentation and diffusion. I'm really intrigued by the problems that trying to describe their work with publishing and books throws up. It's not, for me, about defining book art, but about coining descriptions for their role as it applies to books. I'm going to try to find out more about their work and eventually go and speak to them. I think it'll form a counterpoint to my book-artist interviews to see some people who are 'less loyal' to books.


Technorati Tags: book, research, proboscis

Powered by ScribeFire.

What I actually did today:

for Alex Itin's the library group on flickr:

---

and I bound the first copy of Turndust.






More of the same tomorrow.




Technorati Tags: art, bookbinding, turndust, BookArt, Itin, Eason

Powered by ScribeFire.

periodics

A slight coincidence over the last couple of days:

Firstly, Seb gave me and Andy this splendid periodic table shower curtain as a farewell gift-



Then I found that there is a new set of previously-unpublished stories by Primo Levi (of Periodic Table fame) available. Here's a review.

Anyway, I've placed a reservation for the Levi book.

---

Could the periodic table be a treasure trail? Do aspects of matter constitute a 'hidden fortress'?

---

Work today: printed the borders for the covers.





and trimmed a load of paper for printing tomorrow. Hard work, bent over sheets of Zerkall, but the guillotines I've got access to just don't...well, cut it. Still, I got lots done, with short breaks for t'ai chi to stop my back from seizing up. (Seemed to work. I've found this paper-trimming a punishing task before).

Also visited Lindy, did a bit of garden helping.


Technorati Tags: periodic table, shower curtain, primo levi, BookArt, Turndust, Eason, paper, rubber stamp

Powered by ScribeFire.