Timothy C Ely: Secret Order

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Secret Order

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limb the stairs to the third-story attic in Tim Ely's house in eastern Washington, and you find yourself in a long beamed room that is part laboratory, part art studio, part stage set for one of those movies where old books spring open and invite you into a less than predictable alternate universe. Wooden-and-metal instruments of torture turn out to be book binding tools watched over by models of fictional exploratory craft hanging overhead.

Think Jules Verne. Rows of neatly labeled journals that look like they should contain alchemical formulas, once opened, are revealed as singular and complex artworks, the subjects of which almost seem comprehensible-yet never quite within reach.

The problem presented us by those journals-and the singular bookworks to which they are connected and that are the primary output ofTimothy Ely's work-is that they aren't confined within what we expect of art. Or science. Or even nature, for that matter: But, then, much art that fully engages our attention is defined by jumping the fences we erect around disciplines. Ely mashes up mathematical and spatial intelligences with linguistics, painting and drawing with printmaking and bookbinding.

All in one object. Obviously the guy's mind is,to put it mildly, eciectic.This is good. His work is arcane, beautiful, and the mysteries it contains make novels about secret orders of the Church pale by comparison. The artist couldn't accomplish this without deploying multiple talents simultaneously There's a history of artists making gestures that are both more and less than language, the paintings of Mark Tobey and CyTwombly being often cited. In the late 1980s the Chinese artist Xu Bing created more than four thousand faux characters that for years had scholars trying to decipher the enormous scrolls in his Book from the Sky Ely's project is different. He had the habit while a schoolchild of doodling in class. Unlike most boys content to sketch cars, tanks and airplanes, the left-handed kid began to invent a set of personal hieroglyphics. Later he turned to writing from right to left to avoid smearing the ink from his fountain pen. The combined results were symbols for an unknown language, a notational system he calls "cribriform."

He has been growing those tiny, precise, and elusive marks ever since, and although each symbol in his mind stands for something else-be it a real object or metaphorical relationship-there's no system of syntax shared with us. It is, in short, not really a language as much as a collection of conditional gestures that creates the appearance of such.Tell that to the graduate student who

a few years ago attempted to write his dissertation on a lexicon of Ell's work. Clearly this was a project doomed to failure, as it presupposed definitions and boundaries, exactly what Ely is busy clambering over and tunneling under. The cribriform wasn't just unknown, it was unknowable.

Besides an affinity for what appear to be markings from the side of an alien spaceship, Ely is fascinated by geometry-whether it's the spirals generated by the Golden Section and found in everything from pine cones to paintings by Leonardo, or the fractals arising from the strange attractors of complexity theory The grids beloved by cartographers, the tensegritic polygons of Buckminster Fuller that underlie both the patterned desert floor and his Dymaxion domes, the crystalline intricacies of diatoms-he uses them all. Often Ely will start one of his books with a geometry in mind, or actually incised into the paper; then he'll paint objects that relate to one another around the theme of his current obsession and within the constructed field.The pyramids of Egypt, maps of Mars, astronomical charts and observatories, the periodic table, the internal armature of human anatomy You get the idea.

What we are presented with-the idea of it all-is a graphic map of Ell's mental process, which means an implied narrative. All art shows us something of the artist's mind, hence things about our own consciousness and the stories we construct. His books are also a finely tuned illustration of "par eidoli a," that tendency of the human mind to construct meaning out of random visual noise, whether that's the supposed canals of Mars or the Man in the Moon. But rarely are we confronted with such a schematic version of this mental process that is also a deliberate fiction about that cognitive act. Ely is thus acting out his thoughts, sharing them with us, all the while reflecting upon the process itself.

This is a very particular and valuable kind of metaphor; a trope, a situation in which the object doesn't just perform its function, but comments on it at the same time. It's thus self-reflexive, which philosophers in the mid20th century decided was an indicator of post-modernism at work.The admixture of such a contemporary artistic practice with an arcane set of symbols strewn about paintings based on both scientific and mystical themes creates books that look as if they were made by Pharaohs of the future.

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Did I mention that Ely is one of the world's most innovative book binders, lauded internationally for inventing new ways of assembling a codex, one of the oldest form of books known to mankind?

His bindings are often intricate marvels of wired geometry in their own right. serving to hold together; literally and figuratively, the cribriform, images, artist's intentions and our interpretations. We are bound to the book even as the pages are. Ely traveled to England to study traditional book binding, and he knows as much about the material science of the craft as anyone, but he's acutely aware that how a book is physically constructed is an integral part of how we experience it, hence what it means.This high degree of order reminds us that, if you were to sit with the artist and point to any picture, symbol, or line in one of his books, he'll tell you what it signifies, what it connects to, what it implies. It's not that the books are completely inscrutable, but deeply interior to both his mind and ours.

Timothy Ely's books are deeply seductive pieces of art created through acts of the highest craft. They are nonsyntactical, so don't try and read them.They are semiotic, however-the

symbols do have a relationship to

meaning-and

are best experienced, if not while sipping

wine in the presence of the artist in his third-story

lair;

then by just looking and letting your mind wander.

Associations will occur; and you'll realize you found something you'd thought you'd lost: that fascination when you were a kid looking at a book or a map or a chart you didn't yet know how to read. But you sensed it said something about the universe that was important and fascinating that you just had to know.

-William

L. Fox

William L. Fox is Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Arl, and has published numerous books on art and landscape, including In The Desert of Desire,Terra Antarctlco, and Aereolity: On the World from Above. He has received awards from the Cuggenheirn Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Two folios from Seed

of Mercury,

2009, a one-of-a-kind manuscript book. 15 x 22"

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Block Mops, I 997 • cover Flight into Egypt: The Third Magnitude, 2009 • two pages Bones o( the Book' An Oblong Identity, 1990 • cover detail

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Anacrusis, 2000 • cover

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Dust 2006 • cover detail

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Anacrusis

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• spread

Halo Chalice, 2005 • cover Tables o(Aries, 2005 • cover detail Secret Books of Natural Philosophy.- Time, 2008 • page detail

Selected works (rom public and private collections.

Apocry-chronon,

1995 • cover detail

Timothy C. Ely has been drawing continuously since he could hold a pencil and has been making books since a family friend delivered a trunkful of papel- from the local mill when he was eight. This culminated Washington, where he began incorporating

his artwork

in 1982 took him to England and Japan to study bookbinding and one-of-a-kind

in an MFA in 1975 from University of

into original bindings. A National Endowment

for the Arts Fellowship

with some of the living treasures in the book world. His drawings

painted books are in public and private collections worldwide

including Boston Athenaeum,

Getty Center for

the History of Art and the Humanities, Grolier Club, Library of Congress, Lilly l.ibrary Morgan Library. New York Public Library, Sackner Archive of Concrete

and Visual Poetry, and the Victoria and Albert

Museum.