Four Proposals for Reading

F OUR PROP O S A L S F OR R E A DING

SEAGER/GR AY GALLERY February 1 – March 1, 2015

JUL IE C HE N | C L IF T ON ME A DOR | B A R B A R A T E T E NB A UM | P HIL IP Z IMME R M A NN

IN T RODUC T ION We live in an era that uniquely challenges what it means to be a reader. The experience of reading printed text on hand-held paper books has evolved in a myriad of directions not seen since the technological revolution brought by Gutenberg's printing press.

The traditional role of the reader has been to re-create the images, emotions, sensory experiences and concepts proposed by the author's words through their individual internal senses and imagination. Today text is often presented digitally-grafted to picture, sound and video in order to expand the reader's experience and presumed understanding of content. This puts the reader between the modes of traditional active reading and the more passive role of observer.

Artists' books is a genre in which reading is an essential part of the practice. A book holds texts and supports experiencing those texts through design, layout, pacing, materials, structure, and media. The reader of an artist book is an active participant in the tactile, paced performance of its contents. The four artists represented in this exhibition – Julie Chen, Clifton Meador, Barbara Tetenbaum, and Philip Zimmermann – are close friends and professional colleagues, teaching various aspects of the book arts at the college level. They all have long-standing commitments to the book as a central part of their artistic practice. The exhibition at Seager Gray offers them the opportunity to propose that the book, in its many forms, still has enormous power and validity in the hands of the reader.

Only a handful of books published -- such as Keith Smith's Structure of the Visual Book -- attempt to tackle a complete understanding of the artist book. For artists and teachers in the book arts, a wide array of books from tangential disciplines are needed as reference. These books will be history and technical books on bookbinding, printmaking, papermaking, type founding, book design, calligraphy and artist books; monographs on significant artists in each of these areas; science books which focus on how our brains function when we read; theoretical books on the relationship between text and image; books discussing the future of the book in a growing digital age; and books from the sister arts of music, poetry, dance, and performance.

These four artists have chosen to focus this exhibition catalog on their personal libraries. They photographed bookshelves that contain materials that serve as a reference to their studio work and teaching practice. From these photos they created life-sized digital prints to be shown in the room adjacent to the main gallery space at Seager/Gray Gallery. In this catalog, these photographs are interwoven more randomly in order to create a hypothetical library of libraries.

Like Borges’ Library of Babel, the four libraries of the four artists in the show contain for them the bare necessities for human survival – and for their artistic practice. In each of the four libraries, there are numerous overlaps and repetitions, but each hold books that inform their own particular private interests and tastes.

-Barb Tetenbaum

JUL IE CHEN Julie Chen is an internationally known book artist who has been publishing limited edition artists’ books under the Flying Fish Press imprint for over 25 years. She received her undergraduate education at University of California, Berkeley in studio art, and a graduate degree in Book Arts from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her artists’ books can be found in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She is an associate professor of book art at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Statement: When we read, we take in words and images with our eyes and interpret them within our minds to create meaning. In the digital era, this activity is just as likely to take place on a screen as it is on a paper page. My own explorations of the reading process take me back again and again to the book as physical object and the essential qualities that only objects can impart.

When presented in concrete form, image, text, and the reader inhabit the same space. While there is no guarantee that a book in paper form will necessarily be more exciting and engaging than content presented on a screen, the physical book is undeniably present in a similar way that a person in the room with us is present: photographs and stories may bring that same person clearly to mind, but no matter how emotionally powerful and engaging those things may be, they are not a substitute for the actual person. In just such a way, the artist’s book seeks to present a primary experience for the reader for which there is no perfect equivalent.

Composite Impressions

7.75” x 9.75” x 2.5” Digitally printed text and images, paper, book board, Book cloth, acrylic paint Edition of 50

Composite Impressions examines the meaning of images and objects in relation to the activity of reading in today’s digital age. The book presents images of natural objects and replicas of paper objects, both originating in the 1880s, combined with text that is self-referential in nature. Composite Impressions poses questions about the meaning of the reading experience, and asks the reader to assess his or her own reading process as it is occurring, both through interaction with the text and through interaction with the physical format of the book itself.

These sculptural wall pieces puts into physical form the process of trying to define the relationship between images and objects.

Ovals in each piece containing words and images are ordered into a grid that shows a relational understanding of a central concept and how it relates to the reader/viewer’s experience of receiving information within a framework that is subconsciously built around that concept.

Formation I

44” x 46” Digitally printed images, book board, laser engraved acrylic, book cloth and wood.

Formation II

Photo Credit: Sibila Savage

44” x 46” Digitally printed images, book board, laser engraved acrylic, book cloth, and wood.

CLIFTON MEADOR Clifton Meador combines writing, photography, printmaking, and design to make narrative works that explore culture, history, and place. His books are in many major collections, including the Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Yale Art of the Book collection. His work has been supported by grants from the Rubin Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Soros Open Society Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He was twice awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, was a Fulbright Scholar to the Republic of Georgia, and was the winner of the 2013 MCBA Prize. He is a professor and chair of the Department of Art at Appalachian State University.

Statement: When we learn to read, we train our brains to recognize the graphemes of a writing system and to associate those graphemes with the morphemes of language—it almost seems like magic when we stare at those squiggly shapes and an unknown person’s voice is summoned into our heads. Learning to read also includes building expectations about where, what, and when we will be expected to read. Reading itself is largely an experience of realizing expectations—of recognition of those learned patterns. Consequently, reading the unfamiliar is slow and difficult. The works I have submitted for this exhibition take two different paths toward creating experiences of reading the unfamiliar, with the goal of creating new understandings by disrupting the established patterns of reading.

Photo Credit: Clifton Meador

Glossalexia

5.825” x 13.375 20 pages, Letterpress and electrostatic printing, Edition of 30

Glossolalia, also known as speaking in tongues, is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables that lack any easily comprehended meaning, mostly performed in the context of religious practice.

Glossalexia—a made-up word—is reading in tongues, the visual/mental experience of trying to unpack letter-like forms into intelligible language. Mostly performed in the context of experimental design or art contexts.

Albert Camus, speaking of the his motivation to write The Stranger, said: “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’”

I understand Camus as talking about the imperative of social expectations, and the price Meursault pays for violating conventional ideas about grief. Glossalexia takes the first line of The Stranger, Aujourd’hui, maman est morte, and translates it into several other languages, while performing a letterform transformation into a new writing system.

Since speaking in tongues does not translate intelligible speech into the language of angels, reading in tongues won’t get Meursault out of prison either.

Cotton Curtain,

Altered digitally printed book, bound with samples of cotton cloth, 8.25” × 10.25” × 0.825” 122 pages, Edition of 5. Installed with digitally printed cotton cloth curtains, 8’6” by 17’6”

In addition to being a brilliant landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmstead was also a journalist. As the political problem of slavery loomed in the minds of Americans during the 1850s, the New York Times commissioned him to travel through the slaveowning states and write about the cotton economy. The resulting articles became three books, which were abridged into one volume was published right at the beginning of the Civil War: Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861). In the preface to this edition, he wrote: My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave States, gave me ... an impression that the cotton monopoly in some way did them more harm than good; and although the written narration of what I saw was not intended to set this forth, upon reviewing it for the present publication, I find the impression has become a conviction.

Interestingly, he wrote of the ordinary non–slave owners in the South: The citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little – very little – of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral ...

They were neither generous nor hospitable and their talk was not that of evenly courageous men.

Cotton Curtain moves the site of reading from an expected location within a book to the surface of curtains, and it positions quotes from Frederick Law Olmstead and others as repeating decorative patterns. Images of the Sisyphean labor of moving cotton to market are interspersed with textile patterns that embody the destination of that labor.

The mechanization of weaving was a significant element in the spread of slavery through the American South. The mills of England developed a prodigious appetite for raw material, mostly cotton, and the plantations of the South expanded to supply it.

Two industrial developments further fueled the growth of slavery: the invention of the cotton gin and the mechanization of textile printing.

The word “text” hovers near the idea of “textile,” and this cotton curtain is woven from a material and a history soaked with the sweat and tears of generations.

BARBARA TETENBAUM Barbara Tetenbaum is a book, print and installation artist interested in the relationship between text and reader. She founded her artist book imprint Triangular Press in 1979 while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently she is Professor and Department Head of Book Art at Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, Oregon. Her work can be found in many US and European public and private collections.

Statement : I have long been interested in the act of reading. My work for the past 35 years has attempted to mirror back the expectations someone might bring to the book as the traditional vehicle for reading. I create books that toy with the reader’s experience: highlighting aspects of the book design or book structure that might otherwise go unnoticed, undermining the assumption of narrative, offering moments of haptic engagement, playing with the conceptual distance between text and image, and so on. More recently I’ve turned the mirror on myself to carefully observe and document my own experience reading the texts of Willa Cather and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Photo Credit: B.Tetenbaum

Landscape Directions; 1-3 15.75” x 19.75” each framed Typewriter text on paper

Melancholia; 1-4

15.75” x 19.75” each framed Letterpress on paper.

Photo Credit: K Stanford

A Colorful Tale

4.5” x 7.75” closed.

Laser-printed text on hammered-finish Zerkall paper, hand bound paper case.

These three projects use a minimum amount of words to ignite images of color and place in imagination of the reader. It is part of a larger body of work began in 1994 of text paintings created to explore this phenomenon.

Reading Emerson’s “Circles”

17” x 10” closed book + gallery ephemera display Hand drawn text pressure-printed onto tissue paper. Supplementary texts laser printed onto UV Ultra.

Covers made of dry mounted cotton batiste with letterpress-printed insert.

In the late spring of 2014 I had a two-week residency at Caldera in the mountains near Sisters, Oregon. I read and wrote out by hand Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles using a special pen that leaves a hard raised mark if you go slowly enough, so 23 pages of text took about 30 hours to write. I did this to accomplish three things: to force myself to read Emerson’s essay very slowly; to record distractions and thoughts that I had while reading his words; to create a surface that I would later use to print an edition of artist books using a technique I developed and call pressure printing. Pressure printing uses a low relief image (the Emerson writings) placed underneath the printing paper (in this case tissue paper) and then run through the Vandercook, taking the image off a type-high inked block. This process allows the low relief of my handwritten page to grab more or less ink from the block as it rolls over it. The inspired and wandering thoughts I recorded during the residency are laser printed on transparent paper and interleaved within the book to show that reading is rarely a clear linear experience, but rather a layered experience unique to every reader.

PHILIP ZIMMERMANN Philip Zimmermann is a book artist who has been publishing open and limited edition artists’ books under his Spaceheater Editions imprint since 1979. He received his undergraduate education at Cornell University in studio art, and an MFA degree in Visual and Photographic Studies from Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo in Rochester, NY. He taught for many years at SUNY Purchase and currently teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Among other awards he has received an NEA Individual Fellowship, two NYFA Fellowships and a Lily Auchincloss Foundation Fellowship. His artists’ books can be found in many collections nationally and internationally.

Statement: My work tends to come out of experience and is often a way of working out my fears and angst about the personal, cultural and political world around me. As a time-based narrative medium, the artists’ book is probably the most intimate and perfect way to work on (and work out) these concerns.

In the two works here, I have stayed within the confines of the familiar codex form that we all associate with the book, but I have employed some techniques that take that codex form out into some new territory. I have also used some strategies for text –and how that text is read– that are new for me. For the book Reaper, I have created a viewing environment by the way the book is displayed against a wall piece created for the exhibition.

Photo Credit: Philip Zimmermann

Incident at Deseret

(2014)

8” x 8” x 7/8” Pigmented archival inkjet on French Paper, hard cover, hand-bound, board book.

Deluxe edition of 25, signed and numbered. (There is also a smaller digitally-printed open-edition version of this book.)

Incident at Deseret comes out of a January 2014 visit by a group of artists to Robert Smithson’s canonic earthwork Spiral Jetty in the great Salt Lake in Utah. The book is a slightly off-kilter investigation into the nature of faith. The interior narrative text is relatively straightforward, but the covers hold other informational text in a circular or spiral manner that is not conventional. The general tone of the book was influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Chris Marker’s La Jetée.

Reaper (2015)

6.5” x 7.5” x 1.5” Pigmented archival inkjet on French Paper, hand-bound Turkish-fold book. Cloth spine on boards with inset title text.

Numbered and signed edition of 25.

Reaper is a meditation on the destructive cycle of violence (as in war) followed by attempts at rebuilding. This is then followed by yet another iteration of that destruction and rebuilding: a painful cycle that has continued with minor variations throughout history. It is most commonly caused by the friction and antagonism between different belief systems and the extreme actions of fundamentalists and their often rigidly held intolerant ideas. In this book, based on the Turkish-map-fold structure, text is read on several levels. The outer tabs hold the first ten lines of the primary texts of that particular belief system, and they include the Rig-Veda the oldest sacred Hindu text, the Torah (Genesis) from the Jewish faith, the first lines of the Christian New Testament Bible, and finally the first ten lines from the Qur’an from Islam. The title of the book refers to both death, as ‘the great reaper’, and to the model name of one of the American drone or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) used for bombing in the Middle East.

F OUR PROP O S A L S F OR R E A DING JUL IE C HE N | C L IF T ON ME A DOR | B A R B A R A T E T E NB A UM | P HIL IP Z IMME R M A NN

For ten years now, Seager Gray Gallery has specialized in the Book as a medium for art. It is through this focus that we have come into contact with the amazing community of artists who merge form with content, having at the center of their practice a deep and abiding love of books.

In celebration of the 5th Codex International Book Fair and Symposium, taking place in February, Julie Chen teamed with colleagues and fellow artists, Clifton Meador, Barbara Tetenbaum and Philip Zimmermann to conceive of an exhibition that would examine what happens when art is approached from the lens of reading. Through the combination of visual displays and artists books created for that purpose, these four artists have created an exhibition that challenges preconceived notions and engages their audience in a way that only book artists can. They clearly demonstrate that the written word and how it is delivered is a rich and powerful source for the creation of fine art.

The possibilities are indeed endless.

All of these artists have dedicated their lives to this practice and teach at the university level. They are colleagues and friends who merge their practice with a deep respect for both the materials and text combined and their ability to convey meaning.

With teaching schedules to maintain and their own books to prepare for Codex, they delved into this exploration with the depth of vision and dedication that they bring to everything they do. We are amazed. What they have done here is to make a clear and unmistakable case for reading as a rich and bountiful source for contemporary fine art.

We are grateful.

Donna Seager and Suzanne Gray