M A G A Z I N E November 2011 Volume II Issue 4 $10
Rosaire Appel
The Observationalist’s Dilemma
Jared Ash
Artist’s Books at the Newark Public Library
Buzz Spector
White Insistence
Gallery II Catalog Mapping the Surface
CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE, in concert with its parent art space CENTRAL BOOKING, aims to mediate the zeitgeist of the book arts panorama, as articulated within a broader totality of artistic theory and practice. Addressing the work of both established and emerging artists, CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE champions those who challenge our most deeply seated notions regarding what a book is and where it belongs. Containing interviews with collectors of artist’s books as well as their creators, CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE gives voice to both sides of the fascination with book-as-art-object. This endeavor emerged from desire: to curate concepts, not just objects; to investigate and describe the abiding passions and latest activity of a capaciously-conceived sphere of printmakers, binders, sculptors, painters, photographers, video artists, art lovers, librarians, poets, bibliophiles and bibliophages, antiquarians and deconstructionists alike. These pages exist as an open invitation to any and all with the desire to view, possess, or generate works which, by their very existence, defy either-or constructs of art vs. literature, effectively interrogating the very essence of “bookness.” In addition to articles, interviews, tutorials, art projects and annotated announcements of artist-book-related events around the country, each issue of the magazine will also function as a catalog of CENTRAL BOOKING Gallery II’s quarterly cross-over exhibitions, multidisciplinary explorations of the intersection of art and science. Editor: Jessica Elsaesser is a poet and book artist living in Brooklyn. She graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Creative Writing and has since become co-editor of A Wrecked Tangle Press, specializing in limited edition artist’s books. Associate Editor: Nina Pelaez is an artist and poet. She is a recent graduate of Swarthmore College, where she studied Art History and English Literature. She has also studied in Paris, France and recently completed a program in Museum Studies at the Smith College Museum of Art. She has since returned to her home in Brooklyn, New York, where she continues with her artistic endeavors. Art Director: David Powell is an artist and designer living in rural Vermont. He is Associate Professor of Art at Plattsburgh State University in Plattsburgh, NY. He serves as Art Director for the “Saranac Review.” He shows prints and collages at CENTRAL BOOKING. Designer: Mina Zarfsaz is a Graphic Designer at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh where she is Art Director of “ZPlatt” and the designer for the “Saranac Review” as well as the Plattsburgh State Art Museum. Publisher: CENTRAL BOOKING Maddy Rosenberg, Executive Director/Curator 111 Front St., Gallery 210 Brooklyn, NY 11201 © CENTRAL BOOKING 2011
Cover Art: Marianne Petit The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Eat His Soup , 2011
November 2011 Volume II Issue 4
M A G A Z I N E 2
Speakings:
4
Artist Project:
6
Collector’s Study:
Rosaire Appel
Rosaire Appel
Jared Ash
The Observationalist’s Dilemma
Zone 11
Artist’s Books at the Newark Public Library
Catalog: Mapping the Surface Michael Joseph Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth
19 20 22 24 25
Textcerpts: Buzz Spector
Book Smarts: Margaret Craig
Makings:
Omar Olivera
Goings on: Nina Pelaez
Contributors
Where Should We Be: Geography in Art Bodies Unfolding: Selfportrait.map Collaborative Chronographers of Ancient Lake Bonneville: Artists and Scientists Below the Line
White Insistence
Spandex Etching, Getting in the Groove
In the Beginning
SPEAKINGS
Rosaire Appel, Making Time (version one), 2011, Digital print, Twelve panels, variable
The Observationalist’s Dilemma CB: Let’s begin with your artist’s project, which you refer to as an abstract comic. Comics are generally thought of as illustrative. What do you find interesting in challenging that?
RA: The typical definition has to move aside and make way for abstract visual language. What interests me in the form of an abstract comic, are ideas of sequentiality, rearrangement, suggestion.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSAIRE APPEL CB: What do you discover while in flux, beyond the sequence?
RA: Oh, everything is discovered in the process of making: ways of drawing, ways of using the software, different materials/sources for images, all of it. CB: How does your process fit into your life? Is it a comfort, a release, a communication with yourself or something beyond yourself?
CB: You’ve done similar work with scores, animations and so forth. What draws you to these sorts of “understood” forms?
RA: It is like breathing.
RA: Beats me! I just find myself drawn to something and I go there and see what it holds.
CB: That makes sense, you’re such a prolific artist. Do you feel pressured to make something that is considered good or beautiful?
CB: The abstractions are even pixelated in this piece, almost a deconstruction of a deconstruction. Do you feel this way about them, that they are representations falling apart, or representations viewed very close up?
RA: I hesitate to say it but I have no goals. I think, I make, I look around. This doesn’t mean I don’t have standards! But everything is constantly evolving. CB: Describe your studio space - the materials, hardware, light...
RA: In this particular work, zone 11, I’m using the pixelation as a drawing element. Most of my work doesn’t use this device; it involves more construction than deconstruction. The images aren’t falling apart, though the narrative, so to speak, certainly is.
RA: I have a small room with books and computers that faces east, good morning light, translucent paper over the windows. I also have a small back space I think of as the mud room, cluttered with props and drawing materials, an assortment of tables, and, well, junk.
CB: How would you describe that narrative?
RA: By narrative I mean the story you are trying to construct as you “read” this comic - it doesn’t move sequentially - the frames don’t instruct you as to an order of events - yet something is obviously happening. CB: When it comes to your books, what is the process? Do you work linearly, or create each signature separately and then order them? How do the sequences form?
RA: I make a lot of drawings, a series of related ones, and then I start sequencing. Themes surface, I work more on the drawings, put them back in the sequence or try a different arrangement. Everything is in flux until the last minute. 2 CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
CB: Do you feel like you draw inspiration creatively from the space? Or can you/do you work anywhere?
RA: I work everywhere, even on the street (I carry a camera). I need my space for pulling things together but gathering material can be done anywhere, and gathering is a big part of it, I don’t work with an isolated frame of mind. CB: I know you have worked collaboratively with another woman for some time. How has that affected your frame of mind in regards to your work, together and separately?
RA: Myrna Burks and I have been collaborating once a week in the winter for about
“
Rosaire Appel, Sudden String, 2011 Digital print, 16 x 32 inches
Rosaire Appel, Swing, 2010 Digital print, 11 x 14 inches
The physical realm is really important for the thing to exist and communicate, but it isn’t the whole experience.
“
ten years. It’s a joy to work with someone who isn’t possessive about who makes which mark. The question we get most is: who did which part? But there are really no separate parts. CB: In what way does your work differ?
RA: She is a printmaker and painter; she works with real stuff. I am primarily digital and when I do work with materials it is usually with the intention of scanning or photographing the results. CB: What about digital art appeals to you, as opposed to the “real stuff?”
RA: For one thing, it’s fast, clean, and easy to get into — just flick the switch and you’re there. Also, I question what is really important to me in visual art — is it the actual object or is it a lot of other things that can reside in the image, independent of its actual presence. The physical realm is really important for the thing to exist and communicate, but it isn’t the whole experience. CB: What part of the experience of art do you hope to find beyond its physical embodiment?
RA: Well, this gets circular — I look to see what resides in the work! What is it, what’s in it, what’s behind it, how’s it made — do I connect with it, is it familiar and so forth, which sounds more analytical than my actual experience. What am I looking for in visual art? I don’t know until I see it.
Rosaire Appel, Tropic Anna, 2011 Digital print, Four panels 11 x 14 inches each
CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
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COLLECTOR’S STUDY
Artist’s Artist’s Books Books at at the the Newark Newark Public Public Library Library by Jared Ash My appreciation and love for artist’s books comes by way of the Russian avant-garde. As an undergraduate majoring in Russian Studies, I wrote my Honors thesis on Vladimir Mayakovsky and his circle: David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Alexander Rodchenko, Aleksei Kruchenykh, et al. After graduation, I had the good luck to stumble upon a gallery that specialized in books and photographs of the Russian avant-garde, Howard Schickler Fine Art. It was at Howard’s that I first saw, and, more importantly, held in my hands, such icons of 20th century book design as For the Voice (Dlia golosa), a collection of poems by Mayakovsky, designed by El Lissitzky. Howard’s copy of For the Voice was inscribed by Mayakovsky, and I remember being overwhelmed by how directly connected I felt to the poet and his time. At that moment my fate was sealed. By 1997, I was providing Russian avant-garde related curatorial, translation, and research assistance for private collectors, dealers, and the Judith Rothschild Foundation. I knew essentially nothing about contemporary artist’s books, and gave them barely a thought until 2005, during my Master of Library and Information Science studies at Rutgers University. In conjunction with a course on collection development, I decided to create a presentation for the class entitled “Artist’s Books for Every Branch: Affordable Special Collections.” Aided primarily by the online catalog on Printed Matter’s website, I discovered books such as I Have a Dream by Gray Fraser (Production Gray Editions, 2000), and Junior Prom/Senior Prom by Lori Christmastree (Lori Christmastree,1984). Immediately I recognized the same spirit of humor, wit, and innovation that characterized the first Russian futurist editions. Like their Russian counterparts, these artists were producing work that was intended to be affordable, accessible, and
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Lori Christmastree, Junior Prom/Senior Prom, 1984, Offset, die-cutting, 7 x 3.5 inches
provocative. As I delved deeper into contemporary artist’s books, I recognized more complex similarities: namely a true, pure love for the act of creating, and the establishing of a direct connection between the hand of the creator and the reader. Book artists seemed to take inspiration from the primacy of the book form, to challenge conventional preconceptions, and subvert or appropriate commercial printing processes in an artful, ingenious way. In the words of the Moscow-based literary group Hylaea, artist’s books seemed to issue a “slap in the face of public taste.” In the course of my research, I came across a profile of the artist’s book collection at the Newark Public Library. I organized a trip to visit NPL with fellow members of SOURCE (Student Organization for Unique and Rare Collections Everywhere), and found the prospect of a public, affordable artist’s book collection already in practice. One year later, I was working with the collection as a librarian in the Library’s Special Collections Division. To many in the field, the words “Newark Public Library” immediately bring to mind the name “William Dane,” and for good reason: in the last 40 years of his 62-year tenure at NPL, Bill either personally selected, approved for purchase, or accepted as a gift, nearly every artist’s book that came into Newark’s collection, until his retirement in 2009. It was under Bill’s watch that the cornerstones of contemporary artist’s book culture in the United States (and their European forerunners) entered the collection in the 1960s and 1970s: artist monographs and exhibition catalogs bound in nonconventional materials such as sandpaper, aluminum, and denim, and other books by Edward Ruscha, Emmet Williams, and Dieter Roth. From the late 1970s into the 1990s, the library welcomed offset and photocopied editions from Visual Studies Workshop, Nexus Press, the International
Marcia Sandmeyer Wilson, Every Man I Ever Slept With, 1994 Photocopy on rag paper, 9 x 4.5 inches
Society of Copier Artists (I.S.C.A.) and elsewhere, in equal numbers as silkscreen-illustrated books and portfolios from Circle Press and Women’s Studio Workshop. Despite having an acquisition budget for artist’s books and prints that is exponentially smaller than most other collecting institutions, by collecting ahead of the trend - supporting artists during their emerging, or “prephenomenon” stage - Newark has managed to assemble a collection that is truly world-class. The collection has been enriched greatly by the donation of works by private collectors and others. In considering artist’s books for purchase for Newark Public Library, the following characteristics seem to prevail: works that are affordable and reasonably-priced, yet extremely well-crafted, soundly-made, and innovative in their use of materials, processes, assembly, design, or content. Quite often, teachers and professors bring art students to see examples from the collection to provide inspiration and jump-start their imaginations by exposing them to a medium in which artists are consistently shattering established conventions and traditions. The Library is also open to the public, and encourages visits, by appointment, to see all of our special collections, including the artist’s book, illustrated book, fine printing, and fine prints collection.
Lesley Dill, The Thrill Came Slowly, 1996 Printed on Japanese silk tissue from photopolymer plates; with thread, wire, and shellac CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
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Haptic Lab, Emily Fischer, Silver Lake, Los Angeles Mini Quilt 2009, Cotton, 12 x 18 inches
Sabra Booth, Slick, 2011, DVD
Christina Mitrentse, The Great Mychophagist On Cartography, 2011 Defaced and printed Atlas of the World History, hand-pulled silkscreen printed ribbon with artist’s logo design, 14 x 21 inches
Elena Costelian, Borders, 2011 Video camera, wooden floor, knife, DVD
Barbara Seigel, Whose Boulder?, 2009, Tea-dyed muslin, embroidery thread, Plexiglas, oak table fabricated by Todd Lambrix, 18 x 35 x 39 inches
Robbin Ami Silverberg, Mapping NYC (Free Small Animal Cage), 2011, Archival inkjet on Dobbin Mill papers, pins, staples, street detritus & cut up NYC maps, Varies
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Mapping the Surface November 3rd, 2011 –January 15th, 2012
CENTRAL BOOKING GALLERY II Curator: Maddy Rosenberg
Cindy Kane, Mapping Jules, 2009 Mixed media on canvas, 40 x 30 inches
We are accustomed to looking at maps in attempts to find direction, our relationship to a physical interpretation of the land. But that land can be more than a city or country, it can help us to navigate our bodies, to understand our environment beyond its physicality into the realm of cultural space, and to grasp an understanding though the visceral. Cartographers can tell us more than just the routes from one point to another, they can map terrains of landscape or psychological space, that amorphous state that adds up to a sense of a place beyond mere cataloging. They can also reduce all to the basic, the pure essence of line and plane. We may glide across the surface but there always seems to be a rumble below it, roaming around a skin that is, as skin is, porous and organic. The altered, eroded, sliced and diced work of Doug Beube challenges us to read geography in the third dimension. Jeff Woodbury plays with our idea of mapping both physically with the malleability of rubber maps and metaphorically as we follow a path along a tree branch. Christina Mitrentse folds, assembles and hides travel maps, subverting their original intent, presenting us with an unreadable atlas as Heidi Neilson utilizes a traditional idea of cartography and conceptualizes it into an impossibility of a re-configured world. The collaged artist book of Robin Price extends beyond the 43rd parallel into a personal numerology. Cindy Kane maps individuals we think we know in her writers series and explores regions through their particularity of senses;
Dannielle Tegeder goes one step further and plots a highly abstracted place in multidimensional space. Haptic Lab, blankets a neighborhood, delineating boundaries through the texture of materials with Paula Scher graphically interpreting regions, this one guiding us through India. Alastair Noble takes cyanotypes, the blueprints of architects, to emphasize the blueprint of an environment sculpted by nature. Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault have long used their own bodies and now others to extend and flatten skin into a topographical journey. Sabra Booth provides an animated excursion of the gulf coast, mapping her experience of mapping the environmental disaster, while Public Laboratories photographs the spill from a bird’s eye view, allowing us our own interpretations. The projects of Smudge Studio (Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth) evoke a time and place through the variety of consciously created elements of documentation as Robbin Ami Silverberg creates a sense of New York neighborhoods through accumulation of particular elements that brings the amorphous into the more concrete. Central to Barbara Siegel’s sculptural piece is a boulder that began a controversy over geographic ownership. For another take on the complications of history, Elena Costellian finds herself in a space haunted by the act of its own past circling around, and documents the process of her process of capturing it through a linear retracing. However perceived, a map guides us to more than one destination.
Robin Price, 43, According to Robin Price, with Annotated Bibliography, 2008 Preexisting maps, graph paper,St Armand handmade paper, Tiziano, printed letterpress from handset type and polymer plates, 8 x 11.75 x 1.25 inches, opens to 21 feet
Where should We be: Geography and mapping ne afternoon, inspired perhaps by the first warm breezes, and the new spring growth on the trees above our heads, I announced to a class of undergraduate students that life seemed to present us with only two essential questions: “Where Should We Be?” and “What Should We Be Doing?” My students stared, wondering what I meant, and I stared back, also wondering. Figuring out what it means is the trickiest part of inspiration. To ask, “Where Should We Be?” is to engage a set of related, subtler questions: Where are we now and how do we know? What expectations frame what we see when we look at the world? Landscapes, cityscapes and other less traditional art forms that foreground physical geography, or employ cartography in actual, parodic, or existential ways, provide us with meaningful opportunities to reflect on these questions. They allow 10 CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
us to bracket our preconceptions by showing us new vistas that are not congruent at every point with the world we are accustomed to seeing. In the now familiar word, they defamiliarize the world for us. Mapping, in its actual, conceptual and metaphorical senses, is inherently an ontological, or meaning-making activity. The lofty Catskill Mountains and the sparkling waters of the Hudson River open out paradisiacal from mid to late nineteenth century paintings by Thomas Cole and the American artists named after the region they valorized. These are irresistible landscapes and yet earlier generations of American painters ignored them. Unfamiliar with Emerson and Thoreau (and indirectly, Wordsworth, Burke and Milton), they lacked a conception of nature as a mythic source of beauty and a metaphor of solitary reflection. Their perceptions conformed to other cognitive frames or conceptual
Michael Joseph maps, shaped by neoclassicism — see “Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism” — and so, for idyllic backgrounds to their portraits of the wealthy, they preferred elegant Italian landscapes that signified order and breeding, which they copied from English prints. Neoclassicists and romantics alike projected a specific inner reality upon the world, or, rather, they transformed physical space into a map of an existential reality. Naïve viewers may be content with likening one world, or one map, to another — to gaze at a Luminist painting and imagine themselves the sort of person who would derive pleasure being there. Whereas sophisticated viewers are compelled by the multiplicity of conflicting artistic responses to ask themselves, in what world do I really live, or how can I apprehend how I have been conditioned to form conventionalized expectations about physical space, which have robbed me
Jeff Woodbury, Branch Map (Options) 2003, Branches, paint, 13 x 6 x 6 inches
Doug Beube, Beyond the Wall, 2009, Altered books, collage, glass, light, mirror, 10 x 11.5 x 8.5 inches
Doug Beube, Beyond the Wall, 2009, Altered books, collage, glass, light, mirror, 10 x 11.5 x 8.5 inches
Cindy Kane, Mapping Jules 2009, Mixed media on canvas, 40 x 30 inches
Dannielle Tegeder, Tri-Level Schematic, 2011 Ink, colored pencil, gouache, and graphite on Fabriano Murillo, 13 x 17 inches
Doug Beube, Erosion #4 2004, Collage, 13 x 9 inches
of the joy of immediacy? One artistic response to these questions has been to create ever more complex maps that increasingly efface the borders between map and territory, and between map user and map creator. Yet all mapmaking enterprises must first come to terms with the most basic of questions concerning how human beings confront material actuality. In The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade theorized that space could be divided between sacred space and profane space. There is in human experience an ineffable, transpersonal
force that in manifesting itself disrupts the profane, homogeneous plane of the everyday, from which it is qualitatively different. It is this hierophany, in whatever form we have been conditioned to receive it, that enables us to locate ourselves within a coherent universe, and to bestow meaning on the everyday. He argued that “nature is never only ‘natural’; it is always fraught with a religious value.” Hence mapping entails mapping the sacred (to reference the title of Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson Housley’s recent and highly relevant study of
colonial culture.) In contrast with sacred space, profane space has no “qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure.” Profane space offers us no model for our behavior. It belongs to an undifferentiated universe, to chaos. One can remember here the old phrase used to characterize the unmapped, or terra incognita: “H[i]c Sunt Dracones” (Here be Dragons) found on the Lenox Globe and copied onto early maps in innumerable works of fiction. CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE 11
Public Laboratories, Oil on Isle Grand Terre, Louisiana Gulf Coast, on May 27 2010, 2010, Digital image, produced with weather balloon, nylon string, canon digital camera 42 x 136 inches
Pre 20th century art neatly reflects Eliade’s understanding, apportioning space into sacred (mapped) and profane (unmapped) precincts. One can perceive in the numinous landscapes in medieval paintings, the mythological vistas of Claude, the poetic groves of Corot, and so forth, a conversation with artistically imagined profane spaces. For example, the landscapes of Bosch, or the visions of hell visualized by Jonathan Edwards. Whichever part of the conversation we focus on, our original question, where should we be, elicits the same advice. Situate yourself at the center of a coherent, meaningful universe. However, scientifically grounded modernism complicates Eliade’s thesis and disputes the lucid argument of pre20th century art. It contends there is no exemplary pattern in nature, that the material world has no inherent ability to adjudicate upon human behavior; nor can the human find itself in nature. According to this dualistic belief, the rational, or romantic, or spiritual, values that I intuitively grasp as part of material actuality emanate from my own modality of consciousness, and are incommensurable with any external world. The empty features (landscape and facial) in Picasso’s Family Saltimbanque, the insistence on the subversive intrusion of arbitrary perceptions of unknowable origin in the surrealist works of Magritte, challenge the traditional assumption of geography as mappable in any but a purely descriptive, literal sense. Space is homogeneous and drained of all religious value; no stands of birches or thundering waterfalls transcend the grid. Modernism answers our question, by compelling us to locate ourselves 12 CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
among abstractions, to endlessly consider the underlying assumptions, epistemological and ontological practices that constitute the question and give it moment. It spins us around the hermeneutic circle without surcease. “Wherever you go, there you are” or “there is no ‘there’ there,” are two of the memorable cartographical clichés about space modernism has given us. 26 Gas Stations by Ed Ruscha impishly celebrates the utter banality of landscape, as well as the innate triviality of the book surrogate, thus trivializing both the world before our eyes and the maps that we might construct to understand and valorize it. Nonetheless, it persists in our affection because it also suggests, in a sly, incisive way, that works adverting to their own banality draw force and accessibility from a contrast with the dynamic they corrupt. Their own lifeblood flows from the dialectic of the sacred and the profane. They assert that while our quest for the place to be may be endless, circular, futile, ironic, an infinite regress, an aimless flight into the mise-en-abyme, the need to find the right place endures. It is real. One cannot extirpate the need any more than one can flee into the glossy page. The question “Where should we be?” having been exiled from modernist art, returns as the ghost of a lost quest for the sacred, and is particularly relevant in postmodern works that treat specifically with maps and their implications. These works play with a non-Aristotelian embrace of paradox, in ever more sophisticated maps that admit both the impossibility and the necessity of the sacred. Significantly, they often materialize
actual maps and bits of maps saturated with personal meanings that challenge modernism’s desacralizing project. We see this in recent works, profound and whimsical, such as the painted maps of Cindy Kane, the cut up map sculptures and altered book sculptures of Doug Beube, the cozy, beddable maps of Haptic Lab, and the body maps of Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault, which point out that the primary physical space we occupy is the human body, and that mapping is inevitably mediated by our experiences of embodiment. Our here may be first and foremost our skin and bones. 43, According to Robin Price, with annotated Bibliography uses maps to reassert the dialectic of the sacred while remaining on the modernist knife’s edge. Price concatenates texts from 86 books the artist deems significant, including paper maps from locations along the 43rd parallel, to structurally support the main text. As Price has explained, she selected the number 43 because at the inception of the project she was 43 years old.
Alastair Noble, Island-Mapping its Surrounds 2010 , Cyanotypes, 9 x 9 x 1 inches
“43” maps her position in timespace (43/43). While, as with Ruscha’s “26,” the 43rd parallel is impersonal, it arrogates meaning from its inclusion in, and functional support of, the personalized structure of the book. To make another numerical comparison, “43” reminds us of what the figure 5 signified for Charles Demuth and William Carlos Williams — the hierophanic trace, or “The Great Figure.” It echoes Eliade’s assertion that nature is “never only natural.” Another deeply personal work, Anamnesis (The Opposite of Forgetting) by Robbin Ami Silverberg takes the form of a wall papered with postings, placards, maps, detritus and a video. Its collages reference actual historical and dreamed events connected in Silverberg’s experience to places in New York City. The title of her work descends from Plato’s Dialogues, in which Socrates posits that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated. Earthly knowledge is transferred from soul to soul, but the soul forgets what it knows in the birth trauma. What it perceives to be learning, then, is an act of remembering or recovering parts of the ageless knowledge one has forgotten. Eliade adapts the concept of anamnesis in discussing the sacred. Recognition of the hierophany is always a matter of “reacquaintance” with prior hierophanies. Mapping, no matter its practical uses, serves to strengthen and consolidate our ability to remember, to facilitate meaningful reacquaintance and thereby to restore lost felicity. Silverberg’s highly ritualistic work seeks to remember, or to recognize what she already knows deeply by remapping space in terms of hierophany. Knowing that she posted many of her pieces at specific NYC locations helps us to see the resacralizing aspect of her project. Anamnesis thus facilitates anamnesis by ritualistically transforming physical space into a map of the artist’s interiority. For Silverberg, as for Price, sacred space acknowledges modernism’s claim that sacrality is a notional reality, but resists the argument that the sacred cannot extend to physical space, or that it can have no part in organizing the world in real ways. If artists no longer use or make maps to address the question, where should we be, they offer assistance in answering the related question “How do I know where I already am?”
Heidi Neilson, Atlas Dream Study 7, 2011 Collage from maps, 11 x 11 inches
Paula Scher, India, 2010 Screenprint, 44 x 40.5 inches CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE 13
bodies Unfolding:
selfportrait.map
A
fter seeing Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Dymaxion World Map,’ a projection of the earth as a flattened isohedron, we began working on the idea of using computer technology to transfer details of our physical bodies onto two-dimensional surfaces. Representing three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces has been a concern of artists through the centuries, and the concept of simultaneity where all views of an object are experienced at once was a major theme of the Cubists and Futurists. We conceived selfportrait. map to explore this in a contemporary way using new digital-imaging tools. The earliest map projections were produced first visually and later mathematically by projecting threedimensional details onto flat surfaces. With the advent of computers, ever more complex objects could be electronically recorded and transformed. As artists accustomed to working with physical materials like clay, stone or steel, we considered the manipulation of three-dimensional forms in virtual space, like map projections, as a non-traditional extension of the sculptural process. Selfportrait.map looks at the digital reordering of threedimensional forms through a reshaping of the digitized body. It offers an alternative way of representing the human figure by remapping its surface onto a set of simple shapes. The fragility and tenuous nature of existence is a recurring theme in our work, and in the process of unfolding the scans the computer generated a complex network of jagged seams and torn edges. Although stitching utilities exist that allow the projections to be repaired, we considered the holes and gaps to be evocative of both 14 CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
landscape maps and fragile skins. The scanner we used consisted of four recording heads mounted on vertical tracks that surround a stage where the subject is scanned from the top down. The device uses both lasers and digital cameras, which produce files containing photographic data tied to spatial coordinates. In order to create maps of the scan data we used the Geocart cartography software and software written with a mathematician that enabled Geocart to import our figures as databases. The scanner’s software also contains a utility program to align the four cameras, and this creates horizontally oriented topographic sections. Likewise, we used our software, augmented to allow more manipulation of the model, and sectioned our scanned bodies into innumerable slices. As each layer was separated from the next it could be viewed as an individual drawing, and by varying the depth and position of each slice a complex, painterly set of calligraphic lines that resemble brushstrokes developed. From compilations of these sections we created a short animation. Imagine looking down at a topographic map, seeing only the topmost layer and then scanning through each stratum, one layer at a time. Altering the angle and depth of each stratum greatly affects the appearance and speed of the resulting motion and these in turn became part of more complex compositions. We were aware from the start that the images captured by a traditional camera were limited to a single viewpoint, fixing the photographic eye in time. Whether the picture is of a speeding bullet or a still life, the camera is limited by its position and temporal mechanics. Viewing all surfaces of a figure in a single instant
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault
places the viewer outside the frame of traditional lens-based perspectival vision, and with the photographic data produced by a three-dimensional scanner the views of the body become omni-directional. This allows for an unlimited number of viewpoints to be derived from a single scan, and in visual terms the result is similar to surrounding the subject with an infinite number of eyes that can see all sides of an object at once. In further work, we used this quality of the scanner to explore the camera’s spatial relationship to the subject as well as the topology of the figure. Our software now allows more complex interactions with the models and outputs motion files. In the completed animations the body, shown from more than one viewpoint, can assemble and disassemble itself and at times dance across the screen in a macabre snowfall of thin slices. Digitization and virtualization have allowed artists to visualize the world in a way impossible until recently, unique to our time yet still able to reference traditional subjects and artistic concerns. The incorporation of new technology within the arts has always been controversial and the introduction of digital tools has proven no different. New methods of producing art are often as slow to be accepted into the mainstream now as acrylic paint and photography were in the previous century. As we see in retrospect though, what finally overcomes this initial resistance is the quality and validity of the underlying ideas behind the art and its ability to impact its audience in a meaningful and resonant way. previously published in part by: Wiley-Academy, Mapping in the Age of Digital Media: The Yale Symposium, 2003
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, selfportrait.map, equidistant 2001, Pigment prints, 13 x 19 inches
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, selfportrait.map, conformal 2001, Pigment prints, 13 x 19 inches
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, selfportrait.map, boggs eumorphic 2001, Pigment prints, 13 x 19 inches
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, selfportrait.map, hammer retroazmuthal, 2001, Pigment prints, 13 x 19 inches
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, selfportrait.map, august epicycloidal 2001, Pigment prints, 13 x 19 inches
Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, selfportrait.map, loximuthal 2001, Pigment prints, 13 x 19 inches
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Smudge Studio, Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, 2011 FSC paper, vegetable inks, 8.25 x 4.5 x .25 inches
Collaborative Chronographers Of ancient lake bonneville:
artists and scientists below The line
Smudge Studio Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth
*Chronograph: an instrument for measuring and recording time intervals
n May 2010 we embarked on a project entitled Below the Line. For this project we traveled the strandline of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville — a lake that once covered 20,000 square miles of the Great Basin around 15,000 years ago. Our travels were supported in part by a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover, UT site. During our time at Wendover, we stayed in a retrofitted, off the grid Quonset hut on the historic Wendover Airfield. The airfield is located on the dry playa of ancient Lake Bonneville. For Below the Line, we considered ourselves to be collaborators with geologist and author G.K. Gilbert and the illustrator-artists of the seminal 1890 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) monograph entitled “Lake Bonneville.” This monograph is one of the first surveys for which artists worked side by side with a geologist to image and interpret American landscapes. As artists collaborating, imaginatively, with scientists across time, we took this monograph’s maps, charts, and illustrations as inspirational 16 CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
data for our contemporary expedition. We identified various intersecting “chronographic lines” to follow by vehicle and foot, map, and creatively respond to during our trip. The first set of lines we traced are what scientists call “strandlines.” These are pauselines, material traces literally carved into the landscape by wave action at places where Lake Bonneville’s depth held steady, sometimes for thousands of years. We also followed the lines of artists’ and geologists’ pen and ink maps and illustrations in the 120 yearold monograph. Finally, we mapped the formal lines of landscapes that result from present day land use. Lake Bonneville’s geologic marks on the landscape can still be clearly seen today. Bonneville formed 32,000 years ago and existed for 17,000 years. It was considered extinct 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. However, contemporary remnants of the lake exist today as The Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake. Visible traces of high water levels of Lake Bonneville provide backdrops, and infrastructures for Salt Lake City, as well as throughout
the Great Basin. Today, the various strandlines allow us to read the area’s landscape as if it were a timepiece. It is possible to stand upon a wave-cut bench carved by the ancient lake, and imagine water covering all that you see below. Or to stand in Wendover and see the waterline where the Lake would have lapped hundreds of feet above your head 20,000 years ago. We experienced the strandline both as a point of reference, visually inscribing the location of the Lake’s changing shorelines, and as a line of collaboration between artists and scientists who have been drawn to this ever-evolving body of water. Using a contemporary map produced by the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey, we routed our travels as close as possible to the fluctuating perimeters of the ancient Lake. Throughout the trip, we found ourselves projecting our imaginations back through millennia, visualizing water lapping at a strand line, submerging much of the present day desert. These chronographic
lines set the stage for activating our imaginations in ways we had never before experienced. We were able to see the contemporary reality of the place today as an extension of vaster time, of the long span of geologic history continuing into and beyond the present. For twenty years, G. K. Gilbert did extensive surveys of the geomorphology of Lake Bonneville under the USGS. During those years, he collaborated with several artists who created detailed drawings of landforms and elevations. Their styles are varied and particular to each artist. Some are abstract, highly technical and cartographic. Others are more detailed, pictorial landscape scenes populated with people, clouds, and lone homesteads. The purpose of their marks was to record data and present it in a way that would allow a scientist to read what happened and when. In a sense,zzz the artist’s hand functioned in these surveys as a human analogue of the stylus on a chronograph. The Frontispiece of the 1890 monograph features an image by William Henry Holmes. In this drawing, two lines converge: Lake Bonneville’s strandline and the artist’s hand drawn line. To us, Holmes’ drawing purposefully encourages a palpable sense of the power of the Lake’s relentless lapping over thousands of years. The simply rendered lake-cut lines take on the appearance of earthworks, a watersculpted mountain. His emphasis on the lake’s strandlines gives the impression that the lines carved in the mountain millennia ago had only just retreated. The caption for the image told us the drawing was made at the North end of the Oquirrh Mountains in Utah. We decided to seek out the place where the actual strandlines of the lake and Holmes’s drawn lines of illustration converged. We would use this image as a geographic point of reference and also a point of connection between Gilbert’s and Holmes’s scientific work and our own work today. As we traveled through the Bonneville Basin, we collided continuously with other lines of force and materiality—political, ecological, economic, cultural, historical, military— drawn directly onto the landscape. The
ancient strandlines of Lake Bonneville are put to use as valuable supports for contemporary infrastructure. As we followed the chronographic lines of the lake, we discovered that the wavecut terraces provide convenient, level surfaces for suburban developments to march up otherwise steep mountainsides. They also offer readymade corridors for power lines, roads, and runways. They elevate cell towers and provide commanding, high priced views for desert chateaus, and their adjacent beaches contain collections of valuable geologic deposits that are mined for gravel and minerals. Our circumnavigation of the shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville also took us down into and across its floor. We experienced firsthand how the unrestricted visibility, remoteness, extreme climate, sparse population, and vast expanses of playas make the interior of the ancient lake basin perfectly suited for military testing and training, nuclear and chemical waste dumping and storing, mineral evaporation ponds, experimental bomb pits, casinos, and speedways.
a pit over 0.75 miles deep and 2.5 miles wide. The benches in Holmes’s drawing are used today for copper smelting and as convenient shelves for holding the railroad tracks and roads that support the pit. The mining operations made it impossible for us to get as close to the benches as Holmes had been. Our contemporary view of the site featured modern infrastructure, mineral extraction operations, and an interstate transportation corridor in the foreground. Directly behind us, the shrunken remnant of Lake Bonneville, The Great Salt Lake, silently persevered. The historic scientific data and images complied in Gilbert’s survey, along with the work of contemporary geologists, give us one of the realities of Lake Bonneville: its vast and monumental geologic forces, materials, fluctuations, non-human characteristics and duration across deep geologic time. In our imaginary collaboration with historic geologists, we drew these scientific realities alongside other, equally potent realities: those created by intense conjunctures of the geologic and the human (including the artistic) that
Smudge Studio, Below the Line: Lake Bonneville salt flats , 2010
On our way to Wendover, Utah, we located the site of Holmes’s drawing. From the southern edge of today’s Great Salt Lake, we viewed the same benches that Gilbert and Co. studied and recorded. Looking south, the mountainside in Holmes’ image was unmistakable, and today forms the backdrop to the Bingham Copper Pit Smelter. One of the world’s largest open pit mines, the Bingham Canyon Mine is also known as the Kennecott Copper Mine. It has been in production since 1906, and has resulted in the creation of
have occurred in this place and compounded during the 120 years since Holmes made his drawing. As we traveled these two lines of reality, we came to see and creatively respond to the contemporary landscape of the Great Basin as a Great Chronograph. The Basin’s linear markings, at the hands of both geologic and human actors, are carved and displayed as portentous geomorphologies — forms that foreshadow monumental changes already underway and those yet to come. CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE 17
CENTRAL BOOKING GALLERY II MAP
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
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TEXTCERPTS WHITE INSISTENCE
Buzz Spector
BOOK SMARTS
Flexible etching, Getting into the Groove
Margaret Craig acrylic medium: An etching or collagraph plate, Clear Tar Gel by Golden Artist Colors Inc., oil-based etching ink, tint base extender and a reducer such as Easy Wipe, a brayer, Tarlatan, an old phone book, and small pieces of mat board cut up for inking.
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The ability to stretch an image over a three-dimensional form led to a whole new direction in my work. It was suddenly possible to have a form grow out of an actual object.
INSTRUCTIONS: Ink the plate as you would for an etching or collagraph.
Margaret Craig, Boil & Bubble, 2006, Mixed media, 16 x 17 inches
Despite my instantaneous attraction to printmaking, I have always been frustrated with the need for a press to create beautiful impressions, as well as by the twodimensional limitations seemingly inherent in the process. Manipulating materials has been a consistent part of my own process, and I was experimenting with some Tar Gel when I realized the true extent of its elastic properties. I tried pouring the medium over an inked plate to see what it would lift. The result is what I refer to as Tar Gel Etching. It produces a kind of spandex etching, or collagraph, by casting an inked plate with acrylic medium. Because the Tar Gel flows into every groove, the impression it makes is actually more complete then a “pressed” print. The ability to stretch an image over a threedimensional form led to a whole new direction in my work. It was suddenly possible to have a form grow out of an actual object. With this newfound capacity to manipulate prints in such an unusual way, artistically I began making all sorts of conceptual leaps: creating installations in which forms grew through the walls, making prints with various expressions of biomorphic imagery. With the incorporation of heat-malleable transparent plastics on which to stretch the etchings, my work explored a whole new world of shadows. The materials necessary are standard for printing an intaglio, absent a press, and with the addition of some 20 CENTRAL BOOKING MAGAZINE
Roll the surface with a second color of ink. The surface roll is necessary to ensure that there is an oil barrier between the plate and the Tar Gel. Without that barrier the Tar Gel will stick to the plate. This is particularly crucial with collagraphs since the plate is usually something acrylic tends to bond to. If no relief top color is desired, try a very thin coat of tint base. Dribble Tar Gel over the surface and spread with a card, without touching the inked surface of the plate. It should be about 1/16-1/8 inches thick and fairly even. Do not be concerned if it is not perfect, Tar Gel is somewhat self leveling. Set on a flat surface to dry. Allow the print to dry overnight. A fan in the room that is not pointed directly at the piece will quicken the process. If it dries too fast cracks will develop, but these can easily be filled in with more Tar Gel. When the Tar Gel is clear, loosen around the edges of the plate. Pull off the image in a slow, steady manner without stopping. Let the print dry image side up. This will take some time as it is an oil-based ink, but the Tar Gel will retain its elasticity. The print is then ready for a variety of uses: it can be glued to paper for a traditional print, stretched into a form and glued down, or stuck to glass, which eliminates the use of glue altogether. Tar Gel etching is truly a flexible medium!
Margaret Craig, Little Fish Big Fish, 2011 Tar Gel etching and epoxy resin, 5 x 12 x 7 inches
Margaret Craig, Little Fish Big Fish, 2011 Tar Gel etching and epoxy resin, 5 x 12 x 7 inches, (detail)
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MAKINGS
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Omar Olivera, In the Beginning
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GOINGS ON compiled by Nina Pelaez Editions : Artists’ Book Fair ‘11 November 4, 2011 – November 6, 2011 Former Dia / X Initiative, New York, New York
Text as Inspiration: Artists’ Books and Literature July 30, 2011 – January 29, 2012 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
http://www.eabfair.com/info.php
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/artistsbooksinfo.shtm
The 13th annual Editions| Artists’ Book Fair has been getting bigger and better every year. It is a great opportunity to take a peek at some of the best, and most innovative, artists, publishers, and book dealers around. If you will not make it to the fair, be sure to take a peek at this year’s special edition print, a gorgeous multi-colored screenprint by artist Fred Tomaselli, which will be available in an edition of 200. This prismatic design will also be used on the cover of the fair’s catalog.
This exhibition at the National Gallery of Art showcases the power of artist’s books to transform poetry and prose. The works on view in this exhibition were all inspired by works of literature, whether original work by the artist, or by familiar texts. These books go beyond illustration, rather, they synthesize word, image, and form into something much greater.
Small Print, Big Impression October 22, 2011 – December 4, 2011 MAC, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Atlanta Print Biennial International Exhibition November 4, 2011 – December 3, 2011 Barbara Archer Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia http://atlantaprintmakersstudio.org/exhibits.html
http://www.macarts.co.uk/event/small-print-big-impression
The name says it all! This exhibition, which has been touring through the United Kingdom this past year, is now on view in Birmingham. The exhibition features 150 contemporary fine art prints, all of which are smaller than 100 square centimeters. In case you are not able to make the trip to Birmingham, all of the prints, as well as an exhibition book, are available for purchase on the Phillips and Evans and Leicester Print Workshop websites. It is a sure testament to the saying that big does not always mean better! Christian Dotremont October 12, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Centre Pompidou, Paris, France http://www.centrepompidou.fr
On view now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris are seventy word-drawings by Belgian artist Christian Dotremont (1922-1979). Dotremont’s “logograms,” as he terms them, are painted poems. These energetic works of art, which play on the distinction between words as being expressive for their ability to convey meaning, and in their ability to be descriptive as concrete forms of their own, are as gorgeous in their visual effect as in their meanings. It is a must see!
Head south for this month-long inaugural exhibition of internationalprintmakers, coordinated by the Atlanta Printmaker’s Studio. It is an opportunity to see somegreat work by international artists, all of whom work with hand-pulled printmaking processes. Bookmarks IX: Infiltrating the Library Systems September 2011 – February 2012 http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/bookmark.htm
You use them everyday: a scrap of paper, a pencil, a discreet fold to the top corner of the page. The inconsequential bookmark: an oft overlooked but indispensable part of reading. In celebration of these pauses, of these placeholders, of the recess and the resting place, this ongoing project, now in its ninth year, makes art of the whole thing. Thirty-seven participating artists from around the world have produced editions of 100 signed and numbered bookmarks, which are distributed across the globe in bookstores, galleries, and libraries. Find the perfect placeholder for your favorite artist’s book, or take a look online to see some of the featured designs! Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair November 11, 2011 – November 13, 2011 Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts http://www.bostonbookfair.com/
For collectors, book lovers, and artists alike, the International Antiquarian Book Fair has plenty to do, see, and enjoy. Included in this year’s events is the Boston Book, Print and Ephemera Show, taking place on November 12th at the Park Plaza. Also at the fair will be myriad exhibitors, as well as events and discussions. These will include a lecture displaying antique books and prints as works of art in your home, talks about collecting, and the changing nature of reading and writing.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Rosaire Appel is a digital artist who makes prints and visually orientedbooks, which range from limited edition self-printed accordion books to unlimited print-on-demands. She also publishes short visual works in web magazines and at http://issuu.com/rappel. She is particularly drawn to abstract comics and asemic writing because of the openness of these forms. Through drawing, and sometimes photographs, she uses the language of suggestion to indicate and circle around content that resides just below the surface. Jared Ash is a curator, librarian, and Acting Head of the Special Collections Division of the Newark Public Library in Newark, NJ, where he has curated exhibitions on artist’s books and book art, photographic books and prints, and pochoir. He collaborated with Drew Cameron and Drew Matott on The Combat Paper Project: Healing through Art, and with Nick Kline on GlassBook Project: Newark. From 1997-2002, he curated the Judith Rothschild Foundation Collection of Russian Avant-garde Books and Prints, which was donated to MoMA in 2001, and celebrated in the exhibition (and catalog), The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934 (MoMA, 2002). Margaret Craig received a degree in Biology Secondary Education, a BS in Art and an MA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She invented Tar Gel Pressless Etching and has demonstrated that and other techniques at SCGI and MAPC conferences. She often instigates and participates in trade portfolios, and exhibits nationally and internationally. Currently she is Chair of Painting, Drawing and Printmaking at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, TX. Her original Biology degree has been a major influence in the visual and ecological context of her work, and her shop promotes a less harmful approach to printmaking. Michael Joseph is a poet, writer, critic, Rare Book Librarian at Rutgers University, and Founder, Director of the New Jersey Book Arts Symposium, an annual conference about book arts and artist’s books. His most recent publications are Lost Light, poems set in a song cycle by the eminent composer, Herbert Rothgarber, and hand-printed by Barbara Henry of the Harsimus Press (2011), and, in collaboration with the artist, Sarah Stengle, Useless Tools: For Every Anxious Occasion, a work of fiction with photographs of sculptures by Sarah Stengle, published by the Hunterdon Museum
(2011). In 2012 he will curate an exhibition on mapping urban spaces. Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault have collaborated since 1991. Recent solo exhibitions include Samuel Dorsky Museum, NY, New York, Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, Spain and a traveling show, selfportrait.map, originating at the List Visual Artv Center at MIT. Their work has been included in such group exhibitions as New Art. New York: Reflections on the Human Condition in Traun, Austria, Digital: Printmaking Now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Contemporaneous, Cornwall and Sunderland, UK. They have also held residencies at Maryland Institute College of Art, Colorado State University, Harvard University and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Omar Francisco Olivera studied art at Cooper Union where he received his BFA and at Brooklyn College where he received an MFA in painting and drawing. Since 1998 he has taught art to NYC public school students through organizations such as the Cooper Union Saturday Program, P.S. 1, and currently LEAP and Studio in a School. He was also the artist in residence at the Taller Artistico Xuchialt in Leon, Nicaragua and has exhibited in group-shows at Brooklyn College’s library, HQ gallery, and CENTRAL BOOKING. Smudge is a collaboration between Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Their current project meets sites and moments where the geologic and the human converge. They creatively respond to the complex forces we encounter: natural, built, historic, social, strategic and imagined. They are the co-authors of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog. Current projects include the recently released Geologic City: a Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York and they are co-editing a collection of essays entitled, Making a Geologic Turn (forthcoming). Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer. His work has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. He has contributed to publications including American Craft, Artforum, Art Issues, Art on Paper, Exposure, and New Art Examiner, and is the author of The Book Maker’s Desire (Umbrella Editions, 1995). He has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and multiple National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards.
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