Narrative takes a central role in most, if not all of my artworks. I am often to keen to tell a story, something that develops over time. When it comes to site-specific works that I have made, the narrative might even be driven by details from a place.
Recently, my artwork has been becoming more stand-alone and often a narrative will be confined to just one book (as opposed to a series) and because of this I have been keen to think how I might escape the linearity of the form. Instead of looking out there at other book-objects, I will look at three works in different media to see whether ideas from those could translate across.
Journey Into Fear, Stan Douglas
Journey Into Fear, Stan Douglas
The first is a video installation called Journey Into Fear by Stan Douglas (2001), which I saw at the Serpentine Gallery many years ago. The work is a single screen projection which at first glance appears to be a feature film; some kind of drama set on a ship. The film is mostly made up of exchanges between characters inside the boat - these scenes are interspersed with exterior shots or views of the ship at sea. Except for the exchanges appearing a little cryptic and the dialogue jarring slightly, as if it has been dubbed, the film seems like any other thriller of the genre. Things begin to change however once the viewer sees the same scene repeated, but with the characters saying different dialogue. It turns out that the scenes loop randomly and have several possible dialogue tracks for each, changing the nature of the interaction and subsequently the flow of the story itself. A viewer would have to watch the film for 157 minutes to witness all the possible permutations - this in itself means that each gallery visitor is likely to have a slightly different experience of the artwork, as they are unlikely to see the entire work.
Her Story, Main Screen.
The second example I would like to talk about is Her Story; a video game (Android and
Apple) where players must assume the role of a detective, watching interview footage from a case in order to work out the details and solve it. On the surface the game sounds straightforward, but compared to others, it is pretty unique. When you first open the app you are presented with the desktop search terminal from a police computer (circa 1994) and apart from viewing the 'Read Me' files on the desktop, all you can do is enter key words into the search bar and view the footage that is returned.
Her Story, Interview Footage
Each interview clip is short, only giving you a partial scene, so you are
forced to think up different key words (terms that you think might appear in a
dialogue) in order to piece the scenario together. This technique makes the
game mysterious, but compelling, as the player has to listen and look out for
clues that might suggest a key word or phrase that might broaden the search. As
clips are sorted by key words and not date, the player might be hearing
interview footage from any part of the enquiry. Playing the game makes you feel
like you are creating a huge jigsaw, but without knowing how many pieces you
have left. This narrative device is fascinating and hugely compulsive.
Still from Imitation of Life.
Imitation of Life is an imaginative music video for the group R.E.M., which features a
crowded scene at what appears to be a party. The camera zooms in and out and
the footage plays backwards and forwards throughout the video, highlighting
snippets of action at the party. The thread that ties the video is that
characters in the midst of actions at the party appear to be lip-syncing the
words to the song. The technical devices used make us unaware of the real duration of the
events we are seeing, and the constant refocusing of the frame tease out new
narratives, making us think of the endless possibility in each moment.
Still from Imitation of Life.
Is there scope for this type of story telling in the book form? Could the
author replay scenes but with different elements as Stan Douglas does, or could
a reader be guided through a book in different ways in order to discover
different events first as in Her Story? Or maybe the reader could pick a new narrative out of
an existing one like Imitation of Life?
A friend introduced me to this excellent project which aims to provide clean and safe drinking water to parts of the world that don't have access; the product is a book which contains advice and whose pages can be torn out to use as filters.
I love the aesthetic of the book - the bound and embossed cover, the orange perforated pages with silver text. As this is a prototype, I wonder if the finished product would look dramatically different?
It is interesting that this book started as a scientific project, when it could have so easily been an art project - it's great to see how the two fields converge.
An example of the opposite - an artist whose work becomes scientific - could be Jamie Sholvin in his excellent project 'Various Arrangements' who used a mathematical formula to design covers for unreleased volumes of the iconic Fontana Modern Masters Book series.
The project started when the artist noticed that ten forthcoming books were advertised but never released, so he created a loose formula to determine how the finished covers might look.
fantasmagoria was a form of theatre which used a modified magic lantern to project frightening images such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts
onto walls, smoke, or semi-transparent screens, frequently using rear
projection.
Threads: A Fantasmagoria About Distance was the main Kaunas Biennial 2015 show (finished on 31/12/2015), curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. "A damn good title!", as Agent Cooper might have said. The title draws from the concepts of phantasmagoria (19th century "almost real surreal" horror theater, from the times of pleoramas, dioramas, padoramas,
myrioramas, phantom rides, panoramas, magic lanterns and peep-shows) and distance (the space between two points). The ideas of distance and phantasmagoria are not the subject of the show, however,
but a metaphor for contemporary art exhibitions, according to Bourriaud.
Based on the link between science, poetry and spiritualism, Threads
is an exhibition about art as a system that connects itself to a
different time and/or space. The artwork as a telegraphic device,
entering into contact with something happening somewhere else, in
another realm, world, place or times. (Nicolas Bourriaud)
According to the curator, “the exhibition strives both to approach the
form of fantasmagoria and address the way today’s artists include the
notion of distance in their works. In a globalized and digitalized
world, how does art deal with transportation, with real time
communication? What is the current shape of presence/absence dialectics?
How do artists present absent realities?”(Virginija Vitkienė)
Threads: A Fantasmagoria About Distance unites eighteen artists working in very different media (dominated by installation artworks). The title not only unites, but also highlights each of the works' "phantasmagorical" and "connective" aspects by re-contextualising them. Highlights? In certain cases excavates, where no phantasmagoria was seemingly present beforehand.
Attila Csorgo
One of my favorite works is Attila Csorgo's gently geeky poetic contraption Clock-work (2015): a three-dimensional curve projected onto the wall casts the shadow of (the symbol for) infinity, with a second hand moving round in circles, as propelled by ticking of the mechanism at the bottom. Installation itself looks like something from the 19th century - one of the popular spectacles, that later gave birth to the film. Like the 19th century visual illusions, Csorgo's work is based on science and meticulously engineered devices. Unlike the 19th century illusion, Csorgo's work is not just a visual spectacle - it is also an analytical glance into the fragments of reality that might not be noticeable otherwise, as well as a "thread" back into the world of phantasmagorias, shadows and mechanical timekeeping.
Amalia Ulman's Stock Images of War (2015) is a video piece of poetry. A TV screen in a small room loudly recites a poem to the soudtrack of the war, supplemented by brash animation of the text. I am assuming it is original poetry - although, it could also be an accumulation of phrases from online sources. I have found no information about this arwork, beyond the fact, that it was created to supplement an exhibion (under the same title) of very delicate wire sculptures. The video can be considered in relation to its very prominent soundtrack, visual effects and vocal poetry tradition, but in Threads: A Fantasmagoria About Distance the video is primarily a tardis into the distant horror theater of war.
Darius Ziura's autobiographical work The Monument to Utopia (2015) is a collaboration and a re-connection of three friends: Darius, Serge and Slava, who had met during military service twenty-five years ago. The work is authored by Ziura; it includes a statue made by Slava, a film about the making of the statue and two tons of books stolen in Dublin by Serge (another currious subject, which I hope to explore somewhere later). Twenty five years of separation, eight years of stealing books, two hours of film; thousands of miles between Vilnius, St Petersburg and Dublin are contained in this memorial, which collapses physical and temporal distance between the three men. Like in a theater of shadows, their ghostly presence rises from the objects and suggests undelying reality and possible authenticity.
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An exhibition - like a book - is a structure, where each element is exposed to the title and appropriated by it. The title Threads: A Fantasmagoria About Distance tints every artist in the show. Some works employ obvious links to the metaphor, such as flickering light by Carsten Holler, creaking doors by Julijonas Urbonas or live webcams by Roberto Cabot. Others, however, benefit from some excavation, to regenerate unexpected semantic aspects of text/artwork that might have got burried as the work evolved.
Title is the viewing lens into phantasmagoria of the art show.
Welcome back after our summer break, we hope you had a nice few weeks!
To ease us back, I thought I'd start with a gentle post about one of my all-time favourite websites - OpenLibrary.org. For the uninitiated the goal of OpenLibrary is to be "an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published".
As well as being a catalogue, OpenLibrary also contains millions of scanned copies of books that can either be downloaded, borrowed or read online completely for free. Below is a selection of the the books to read and books to borrow.
This library is a huge resource - according to the stats for the past month they had over 7m unique visitors, who borrowed over 95,000 books!
Open library is a resource I have used in three art projects (twice as integral parts of the work and once in the background):
For The Good Reader: Between the Lines, I created a narrative about Paris comparing my own recollections to the stifled descriptions from travel guides. Using a QR code reader readers can borrow electronic copies of each of the guidebooks referred to.
For The Unassuming Collection I created a fictional narrative about a library, illustrated by images from existing books. A QR code on each page linked to the full book behind each of the illustrations. The intention was to create a real library that sat behind the fictional one.
The third way I have used Open Library is to catalogue a small collection of books that was part of an exhibition called Folles de leur Corps at Cafe Gallery Projects, by Sharon Kivland. This was a great way to group the books so a more permanent record could be kept.
I hope this post has given a suggestion of the artistic possibilities of OpenLibrary - the potential of it seems immense to me.
Earlier this month I was lucky enough to visit the Venice Biennale and one thing that struck me was the amount of art involving books – clearly Collective Investigations is bang on trend! I wanted to outline them to briefly document the incredibly diverse ways that books are used within contemporary Fine Art.
Of the Biennale’s two sites, I’ll start with the Giardini. The first work I came across was a humorous, zine-like series of comics presented next to two newspaper kiosks full of fabricated publications by Francesc Ruiz entitled 'Il Fumetto dei Giardini' in the Spanish Pavilion. They contained a story featuring two gay characters (lifted from existing Italian comics) having debates in various parts of the Giardini itself. The work was playful and thoughtful. The most successful element was its site-specific nature, as the locations in the comics were not only places I knew well (from previous visits) but were places that I would be visiting and discussing myself that day.
The second was part of the Dutch Pavilion. herman de vries' meditative 'to be all ways to be' is a layered-multimedia installation featuring a circular carpet of dried flowers, a selection of agricultural tools, watercolour paintings of colours and a video featuring the pages of a book being turned. The video, which was meditative in itself, was like an old agricultural dictionary featuring Latin names of plants. The strength of the work was that it added a time-based element to exhibition, a potential cue to pace the audience, encouraging them to slow down and take their time.
'Latent Images, Diary of a Photographer' by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige linked the two pavilions. In the Giardini this took the form of a public reading. An actor at one desk turned pages of a book and cut open sealed pages to reveal texts (texts which described unseen photographs). These were then read aloud one by one by three actors at another desk. Every day the same performance takes place using a new copy of the same book. In the Arsenale a huge wall housed the books for each day, alongside a desk providing a handling copy for guests to cut open and read. This work was engaging on several levels, not least because viewers could experience the performance in one venue and carry it out for themselves in the other – making for a very different reading.
Other work in the Arsenale included a publication by ('From The Horde To The Bee') by Marco Fusinato about capital. Copies of the book were piled up around the edges of a large table – a table empty except for a large mound of Euro notes. The notes were left by visitors in exchange for a copy of the book – an act that brought the content of the work into focus.
An artwork that I particularly liked was Mariam Suhail's handmade books ('To Propose a Site for a New Capital City') about inhabiting the urban environment as it used the language of books (i.e. what a book should look like and what it should contain) to mix the corporate and the personal. The books were made to look like manufactured, hardback books, but had the warped and less-than-perfect finish that can mark a first attempt at book-making.
The Arsenale also contained three other bookworks including 'The Diaries' by Peter Friedl, the archive-like 'A Morning Breeze' by Petra Bauer and 'Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Stratagems', by Armando Lulaj which had a museological feel. The theme that connected these was that they each used display systems or the language of the archive to give the books they contained a different type of presence.
I hope this has provided an overview of the ways in which books can manifest themselves in different ways in contemporary Fine Art.
The artworks in each had a very similar flavour - they were beautifully presented, simple in nature and thoughtful in different ways. A particular highlight was Carol Bove's work of art 'Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges' which takes the form of three shelves, holding various objects. Describing the artwork, the gallery states:
"Holding books, a metronome and string object, its references point to Bove's research into the subconscious, Utopian ideologies, meditation and the appropriation of Eastern thought in 1960s America. Frozen in Bove's chosen arrangement, this experiment tries to seize a picture of a particular cultural period."
There's something very satisfying about this tableau, it sits somewhere between being a sculpture, a still life, a ready-made or a physical bibliography. It has a strong visual appeal; the uniformity of the shelves and the mix of objects creates a bold image, and is intriguing; the choice of books and objects used evoke a narrative, they evoke a specific time period (through the choice of shelving, and the age of the chosen books) and hint at a certain academic discourse through the books chosen.
I would love to make an artwork that is so confident, but simple, one that creates such possibility, whilst appearing so restrained. A beautiful catalogue is available to accompany the exhibition.
in the reflected sky was a three-part installation by Collective Investigations for Art Language Location (ALL), installed in Cambridge during October 2014.
Whisper it, but books are boring. Not the content - there are plenty of interesting texts to be found, sampled and enjoyed - but the context in which that text has been placed and offered to us for consumption is, too often, dull. The paperback, in particular, tends towards mere utility, with its frequently mealy paper, single digit font sizes and abhorrence of white space. But even a book which is without doubt an object of great beauty and desirability is like a mono recording in a stereo world. For books are designed for the private, solitary consumption of words. We curl up with a good book, adopting the foetal position on the womb of the sofa. We become lost in a book, adrift from the anchors of the everyday. Turning inwards, there is no externality, nothing beyond. A book is the wafer of communion between reader and text: miraculous maybe, but nevertheless a functional go-between in a private exchange. Artists who present text in other formats and in other places are therefore performing an act of liberation. The words are rescued from the confines of the printer's galley and set loose to breathe amidst the joyous possibilities of The Real World. Here, text can truly flourish: it becomes social. In Art Language Location we see this transformation of text in a magnificent array of guises. Text on the wall, text on the floor, text on the river, text at the bus stop. Text to be sat on, text to be walked over, text to be eaten. Text inhabits the world. This relationship between text and place can work in several ways.
First, it is an interruption: an unexpected encounter and a confrontation. The consumption of words is no longer on the reader's own terms, for the reader has chosen neither the content of the text nor the time and place of the encounter. It is a violation of the quotidian routine. This provides the text with a force that it does not possess on the printed page. In Lilian Cooper's work these interruptions are gentle yet insistent, beautifully realised reminders of the world around us that we so often forget to see.
Second, there is an enriched visual hit. The superimposition of text onto the everyday creates an additional layer. Our observed landscape is at once both aesthetically modified and also made to serve as a substrate, on top of which the text can lie. So with Susie Olczak's work: its punchy playfulness creates a set of buzy new sense-data. Our retinas respond; then our brains set to work on the process of assimilation and interpretation.
Guy BiglandAll the four-letter words I could find on the Casimir Lewy Library webpages 2015
But then there is a third relationship: the way in which the content of the text interacts with the borrowed landscape of its location. The words themselves, which on the sofa trigger private thoughts and private responses, now cannot avoid referencing public objects and the world beyond, conversing with the surrounding visual array. In Guy Bigland's intervention for the Casimir Lewy Philosophy Library, the content of the text, its placement and its mode of display all echo and comment upon the library itself. Placed right outside the entrance to the library, it becomes a mirror with which the institution can view itself.
Adding of context to text is like adding sound to movies, or colour to photos. There is new vitality, a richness and an added dimension. A synaesthesia between text and context. Text becomes social, experiential. Of course the nature of the intervention between text and place is almost limitless in possibilities. But a successful intervention always seems to create a dynamic between the two, a buzz of interactivity where the visual and the verbal meet and spar. Context enhances text like switching on the surround sound and feeling the boom of the subwoofer. [Robert Good]
The Kraszna-Krausz and First Book Awards 2015 is a temporary exhibition in the Media Studio at London's Science Museum. I wanted to talk about it because of its creative approach to displaying books and the way it makes the content accessible.
On display are theory, coffee-table and high-end books - the exhibition style seamlessly caters for each.
The theory and coffee-table books are exhibited in two ways. Firstly, the desk-like tables have a dip built into them so the books can rest and be viewed fully. The dip ensures they don't move from their position. The books themselves are strapped to the display to keep them secure without damaging them. Secondly, above these are sealed copy of the books, so they can be seen from a distance.
The high-end books (limited editions of books, within uncommon structures or bindings) are exhibited in a slightly different way. A sealed copy is still presented, but below them is a touchscreen with page spreads, so visitors can flick through the contents.
Several of the photographic books are supported by prints displayed on the gallery walls (this is a nice touch, as it gives the visitor a better idea of how the images may have been intended to be seen) and a book of postcards is exhibited next to the original postcards (so the visitor can see how faithfully the colour and size has been reproduced).
Exhibition view featuring My Paper Chase by Harold Evans.
In addition the space is bright and well-lit, so the content can be seen at its best and the 'desks' all have chairs, so visitors can pull up a chair if they wish.
by Robert Sitton
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by Harold Evans.