More Writing and Painting

I had some paint to use up after the wall writing exercise at home, so I decided to try a medium-sized approach, and drew a series of single 'characters' onto a heap of sheets of A4 cartridge paper.

It was interesting to do individual large designs, done rapidly so I didn't have time to consciously think and design' the outcomes.

I wasn't sure what to do with them, but brought them into college today anyway.

In the end I taped them together to make a series of accordion books,  which, if I can work out how to do it, would look good hung in vertical columns, rather like Chinese banner writing.

The books would benefit from some good binding and a handsome cover with a writing image, but I'm not sure I'll have time to do this before Monday's assessment session.

More books which can't be read

This time by Germna artist Anselm Kiefer, who has constructed impossibly heavy and un-book-like books out of lead. such as these.

Tannhauser, 2000

Lead Book with Thorns

Image copied from here.

Volkszählung (Census), by Anselm Kiefer, 1991, mixed media with lead books.

Permanent installation at the Museum für Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art), Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße, Berlin.

Untitled (Constellation Book), 2004, mixed media on lead, dimensions variable

His works are not about illegible type or script, but about books which while looking externally a bit like a book, are absolutely not like one - they are made of lead, they are huge and heavy, they cannot be opened and held in the hand, and - crucially - they do not contain writing.

I am not sure what, if anything, they represent.  But to my mind, a book which is not a book is something about the vast amounts of infomrtaton we either cannot have, or cannot absorb even if we can have access to it.  And some books, some information, is deliberately made obscure, so that some people can hold onto knowledge (power) which is denied to the majority.

Or maybe they are just immense and formidable book structures made, improbably, out of lead.  Finit.

More thoughts on Pathway II

I often look at the blog (the link is here) of London-based quilter Margaret Cooter, who manages to find, and share, a rich seam of work by other artists, in textiles, and in books and paper, in particular.  My own interests in quilting and bookmaking often overall with hers.  Today she has flagged up an American artist Jan Owen,  based in Belfast, Maine, whose work includes hand-written text on translucent fabrics as well as handmade and specialist papers, which, when laid together in layers, builds up into a rich and slightly different set of images, such as this one

This one I particularly like as it is also a book, which can be folded up or hung as a wall hanging.

This image came from the Abecedarian Gallery blog here.


Another of her accordion books is this one, First Brush Strokes

First Brush Stroke, 2001, 43.75 x 42 inches; 3 hanging, accordion fold books. Acrylic and sumi ink on paper with woven Tyvek. 

Collection of National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

Jan Owen's website here has more of her work, including this image of a series called Book of Names which includes names of war dead and was inspired by a performance of Britten's War Requiem.  This piece is entitled WHO

WHO   2006, 72 x 36 x 24 inches, four hanging panels of Reemay with ink


All images © Jan Owen 2011.

More art I like: Jacqueline Rush Lee and Marcus Raetz

Jacqueline Rush Lee is an Irish artist now living and working in Hawaii, much of whose work is based around re-using books to create fantastic objects and sculptures.  

Her website here gives more information about her work and practice.  I think it is interesting that she sees books priorly as a material source, and is not too bothered about the nature of the books, or what information or ideas they contained.  She says: 

"I transform used books into works of art by scrambling the formal components visually and conceptually. I like to disrupt the original meaning and intent of the books through various modes of intervention that create narratives with subtle meaning. Many of the techniques that I employ are informed by both traditional and non-traditional artistic practices. These include utilizing the pure components inherent in the books themselves, such as inks, covers, pages, binding threads and reconfiguring them.
For me it is not important to discuss or aggrandize the relevance of the book as a medium in the 21st century as there are themes regarding these matters implicit in the work that I produce. For me great art is evocative, not didactic, and should express ideas through veiled layers of meaning."

This one is called simply Cube.

Marcus Raetz creates sculptural forms which embody illusions: the image changes as the viewer walks round the object.  Some of these use words, such as Yes No,  as here 

You can see more of this and others of his works in this You Tube video accessible here.   

More about the artists and his ideas are here.

Ariana Boussard-Reifel created a unique book by removing all the words and leaving just the white paper.  her piece was part of an exhibition about racial discrimination and religion.  There is more info here about her work.  

This seems to me the most meaningful of all the altered books of this kind I have seen.  It makes a valuable and sharp political point in an elegant and artistic way. creating a beautiful object but one devoid of all meaning.  

In the Collection of Allan Chasanoff, NY

Ma

More art I like: Tom Bendtsen

Another artist who creates large installations/sculptures using books as a building material is Tom Bendtsen, website here, who uses the content of the books as well as the simple physical presence.  For example, his tower with a staircase, seen here, has 'heavy' books at the bottom, getting progressively 'lighter' as the stairs rise up.   He also uses the size and colour of the books to create secondary patterns in his sculptures.  He pays respects, as it were, to the content of the books, although by using them thus he debars the viewer from reading them. 

This piece is called Arguments 6(b), 2002.  Accession of staircase,  contrasted by books becoming more superficial/homogeneous as you climb.  Playing more with colour.  7' to 5' x 10'.

Accession of staircase contrasted by books becoming more superficial/homogenized as you climb. Playing more with colour. 7’ to 5’x 10Accession of contrasted bya

More art I like: Charles Round and Matej Kren

I have also come arose the work of Charles Round, a contemporary British artist.

Font Especial, 2005-7
True type font, vinyl on wall
Dimensions variable

Installation view at El Basilico, Buenos Aires

The following is an extract from the ICA's website (link is here)  relating to a recent exhibition of Round's work.

The relationship between line and volume is explored by Round in his typographic work. The artist has created a series of fonts that mimic this formal balance, and which he uses on the posters, hangings and animations that feature within his installations. These 'signs' contain texts that fluctuate in their legibility, overwhelmed by the structure of the font and its grid-like presentation. Containing phrases of romantic excess, their semantic collapse evokes an altered state of perception; the bourgeois refinement of forms and arrangements shifting towards a giddy, transgressive lyricism. Round's Nought to Sixtyproject makes reference to the British sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill (1882–1940), through a phrase lifted from the latter's diaries: “Strange days and nights of mystery and fear mixed with excitement and wonder strange days and nights strange months and years”. Round's use of the text – which operates as a leitmotif throughout the exhibition – evokes Gill's influential work as a typographer, but also the latter's complex persona. During his lifetime Gill presented himself as a deeply religious man, publishing numerous essays on the relationship between art and religion, and encouraging the formation of arts and crafts communities. This worthy image was shaken when the artist's diaries were published in the late 1980s, documenting his adulteries, incestuous liaisons and experiments with bestiality. The confrontation between noble aspirations and transgressive desires that is apparent in Gill's diaries is mirrored in Round's exhibition. 

I think it is interesting that Round deliberately creates a font which is hard to read - while clearly wanting the meaning of the text to be apparent.  This makes the work something of a puzzle for the viewer to decipher.


Another artist working with books is Matej Kren, a Czech artist who builds seriously large structures from old books.  His website (the link is here) says that this is an attempt to convey the increasingly blurred boundaries between fiction and real life:   "His work not only touches on very contemporary problems, such as erasing the boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and the present, but also on classic themes in art - the relation between inner and outer, the part and the whole. Typical of his work is a searching for a complexity of content expressed in a monumental and comprehensible language."

Book Cell, Centro de Arte Moderna - Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal, 2006. 

Passage, Bratislava, 2005

Passage, Passage, GMPassage, GMB,PassagePP Bratislava, 2005B, Bratislava, Bratislava

I like these works because of the way in which Kren uses the books in such a simple way, rather like building blocks, and makes such enormous constructions out of them.  They remind me of library stacks,  where you can get lost among the books and lose track of being among writing, but rather among buildings.  The Passage reminds me of old libraries, like the Chained Library at Hereford Cathedral, here...

or the wonderful sixteenth century library at Trinity College Dublin. 

Art I LIke: Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman is another artist who uses the written word in a creative and witty way, as here:

Untitled 1990 The artist writes his signature repeatedly for the life of a pen 106.7 cm

(detail below)

Many of his works are made of recycled paper or cardboard, but the focus is on the material itself, rather than any writing it contained.  This is another example, which I like for it's simplicity and sense of balance.

                             Smile (2009)     

sculpture, Assemblage de rondelles de papiers, 27 cm x 65 cm

More of his work, and about him, is here.

Art I Like: Wendy Wahl

High time I was back on this blog!  House building, Christmas and a heavy cold are my excuses for rather a long absence.   But now I must focus on my next Pathway Project,  around the theme Writing/Word.

Looking around at the work of artists who use writing and words in their work, I came across Wendy Wahl, (b 1961, Los Angeles, now living in Rhode Island) who creates fantastic and often large sculptures out of old copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.    Her website is here, including some of her works, also more here and yet more about her is on the Encyclopaedia Britannica blog (yes, there really is an EB Blog) here.

Wendy Wahl seven pieces, paper, yarn 95" x 60" x 36", 2001-2002

REBOUND: MIXED VOLUMES 3
Wendy Wahl
discarded/deconstructed/restructured encylopedia pages
40" x 16" x 17" ; 50" x 78" x 17" ; 60" x 95" x 17", 
2009


I like the structures themselves, for their obviously tactile appeal, and their simple but somehow organic shapes.  But most of all, I like that Wendy Wahl has found a way to translate (or perhaps transfer) the information and knowledge contained within the EB to new and visible forms.  The EB sits on many dusty library shelves, often unopened for years, and the contents are seen only by the eager searchers after knowledge.  her works expose the pages, individually and en masse, to a wider audience, who may wonder about their original meaning, while enjoying the fantastic shapes and swirls of her sculptures.