Below you’ll find the most recent artists’ book reviews and interviews. See the submissions page to find out how your book can be featured.
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The Chiliagon Locket: A Mental Exercise from My Childhood
Neil Majeski
The Chiliagon Locket: A Mental Exercise from My Childhood
From the series: The Last State or the Penultimate
20194.5 × 7 in. closed
12 pages
Saddle-stitched, softcover pamphlet
Inkjet and laser[In a departure from the usual Artists’ Book Reviews format, this mini review is part of a series on Neil Majeski’s pamphlet series, The Last State or the Penultimate. The first of these mini reviews covered Majeski’s series as a whole.]
Like Depictions of a Developing Lampshade, the core of Neil Majeski’s The Chiliagon Locket: A Mental Exercise from My Childhood is a single object which is both real and imagined and which evolves throughout the short pamphlet via visual and verbal mediation. The title references a chiliagon, a thousand-sided shape, which can be conceived of mentally, but not imagined the same way as, say, a triangle, whose three sides cohere into a stable mental image. Majeski borrows this thought experiment from William Goldbloom Bloch’s book, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel, but only to explain his own mental exercise: a locket that opens over and over until some inexplicable mental friction turns its infinite unfolding into an unimaginable mess of imaginary lockets.
Majeski introduces the pamphlet, and the perplexing mental image of an endlessly unfurling locket, with a photograph of the actual locket. Tipped in between paragraphs on the first page, a compound image shows the locket closed (left) and open (right) on a wooden tabletop. The photography is unpretentious, evidentiary even. In the righthand image, we see that the open locket is empty. The image — the only photograph in the pamphlet — is thus a photograph of a missing photograph. The parallels between the compound image, split down the middle, the hinged locket, and the pamphlet itself are unavoidable. Is a locket a photobook? Is his endlessly unfurling locket more like Borges’ library than even Majeski realized?
The photograph signals the reality of the object, but the text on the page blurs the line between real and speculative. (Of course, the value of photography’s ostensible objectivity is already limited as an illustration of a mental image.) Majeski uses phrases like “so to speak” and “that might sound a tad strange” to reinforce the verbal mediation that guides the reader through the pamphlet; something will be lost in translation from mental exercise to verbo-visual account.
The rest of the illustrations are painted, offering Majeski a halfway point between the rigid mimesis of photography and the freedom of imagination. The sparse, surrealist style lends itself to the mental manipulation of an object and maintains a porous boundary between real and imagined. The painted environments could represent a mysterious mindscape or simply a dimly lit tabletop. The empty locket transforms into a velvety void, as though much more than a photograph is missing.
The first two paintings, which depict the orderly unfolding of the locket, appear to form a diptych. However, they are split apart on successive versos, which emphasizes both the temporal and spatial aspects of this infinity; the scene transcends any single canvas or moment in time. It is an ongoing process.
Elsewhere, Majeski uses the book form to punctuate the pamphlet’s verbal and visual content. The orderly unfolding of the locket breaks down in the center spread. The image on the verso still shows the locket’s linear march, but the text on the recto describes the moment Majeski loses control: “Here and there the unruly locket went, every which way appearing as so until at last the image would rupture into imperceptible nothingness:” The colon and the phrase “as so” refer to the illustration on the following page, but they first seem to point to the vast blank space at the bottom of the page — imperceptible nothingness.
The Chiliagon Locket explores fundamental questions about the book as a communication tool: how does an idea get from an artist/author to a viewer/reader? Majeski shows that the process is not linear. Ideas, images, and objects are always fluid and never transparent. Even a short book, like a twelve-page pamphlet — or a locket, leaves its mark on the ideas it conveys, whether visual or verbal, spatial or temporal. Majeski has a knack for reminding us of how books work without detracting from the central object or anecdote. The Chiliagon Locket is an earnest exploration of a childhood experience, one that is as unique as it is relatable.
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Interview with Tiffany Gholar — Part 2 of 2
This is part two of a two-part interview. Read part one here.
Tiffany Gholar. Image courtesy of the artist. Levi Sherman: What lessons have you learned as you become a more experienced book maker? And what are you eager to try out in your next book(s)?
Tiffany Gholar: With every book I publish, I am becoming more comfortable with experimenting. For The Sum of its Parts, I designed a two-page spread for the title page, something I had never considered for my previous books. I took advantage of the format of the ebook edition of The Unforeseeable Future and included links where readers can find out more about the podcasters I mentioned in my acknowledgements. I also decided to link to some of the blog posts that I didn’t include in the book because I thought they worked better online instead of in print.
Tiffany Gholar, The Sum of its Parts, self-published, 2019. LS: Can you talk about what an ebook can do that a blog or website can’t? You seem very thoughtful about the degrees and types of interactivity in the forms you choose.
TG: I actually feel like it’s the other way around, that there are things that blogs can do that ebooks can’t. For example, updating a blog post or a website is a much simpler process than updating an ebook because you have to upload it again to every bookstore that’s selling it.
From: The Sum of its Parts, 2019. LS: Which seems related to that question of closure versus ongoing work. Do you think the expectations of your blog readers differ from those of your ebook readers?
TG: Probably. Readers don’t expect blog posts to be as polished as books.
LS: Do you see those expectations evolving in the future? Will we expect books to be more flexible like blogs? Or perhaps readers will lean into the fixity of print as more things become digital and fluid?
TG: With all the synthetic digital media that we’re constantly exposed to, I think that print books might become more appealing to readers.
LS: Does that same instinct play into your studio work, which seems to revel in materiality?
TG: Absolutely. The more the world becomes virtual and digital, the more I want to work with my hands.
From: Post-Consumerism, 2012. LS: What about your own reading habits — do you read more in print or digitally? And are there artists or authors who particularly influence your work?
TG: I have been reading more digitally lately. I like the convenience of the format. In an effort to prevent myself from acquiring too many books that I’m never going to read, for over a decade I’ve been trying to check books out of the library first and only purchase them if I find myself wanting to check them out more than once. I love being able to read ebooks through the library. Not having to worry about late fees is such a relief. I also like the privacy that reading books digitally can afford. I often read when I’m not at home, and it’s nice to be able to enjoy books without other people asking about them.
I feel like I’ve been influenced by other writers and artists on a subconscious level most of the time. Often I don’t realize their work influenced mine until later. I don’t set out to create anything in anyone else’s style. In terms of art, I think pretty much anyone working with found objects and bright colors has inspired me.
From: Post-Consumerism, 2012. LS: What project(s) are you working on now? Do you have a book-in-progress?
TG: I’m working on a few new pieces for my Post-Consumerism series. I’m also working on my next art book. My goal is to publish it in 2025.
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Interview with Tiffany Gholar — Part 1 of 2
Tiffany Gholar is a Chicago-based multimedia artist and freelance interior designer. She studied art at the University of Chicago, interior design at Harrington College of Design, fiction at Columbia College Chicago, and painting at Governors State University, where she received her Master’s degree. In distinct but related bodies of work, Tiffany explores the economics and aesthetics of our single-use, consumer culture and the social (and medical) ills it engenders. That doesn’t mean, however, that the work isn’t fun. Super saturated colors and irresistible textures transform everyday materials — even “trash” — into compelling compositions that question values like beauty, utility, and permanence.
However, I was most excited to talk to Tiffany about the role — or rather, roles — played by books in her practice.
The following interview took place via email beginning February 2023.
Tiffany Gholar. Image courtesy of the artist. Levi Sherman: Books are clearly important to you. They are part of your art practice and a way for you to share your non-book art with viewers — plus you’ve written a novel! So how did your relationship with books begin? Were you initially attracted to art or writing — or is that division too simple?
Tiffany Gholar: My relationship with books began as it did for so many of us, with picture books. I suppose the division really is too simple because you start reading and all the books have interesting illustrations in them; very appealing if you’re also interested in art.
LS: When did you realize that you could make books in addition to reading them?
TG: I realized that I could make books at an early age, in kindergarten. Our school system had the Young Authors Contest and I was very excited when I first learned about it. From kindergarten through eighth grade, I wrote and illustrated my own books. One of my art teachers, Mrs. Mollison-Douglas, taught us how to make books by hand using Con-Tact paper, cardboard, and duct tape, and sewing the folded pages together. I wrote my first few books by hand, then enlisted my dad’s help to type them up for me on his typewriter. I think my eighth grade book of poetry, the only one without illustrations, was the first one that I typed up myself on our computer.
Tiffany Gholar, Roxy, collage on Con-Tact paper and cardboard, 1991. LS: I wish I’d had a program like that in school! When did you know you wanted to seriously pursue art and design?
TG: I’m really grateful that we learned how to do so much in our art classes. I always knew that I wanted to be an artist, though I was often encouraged to do other things instead of art. My interest in interior design started with selecting and building furniture for my dollhouse when I was eleven. But it wasn’t until I moved out after college that I realized it might be something I would want to pursue a career in.
LS: The dollhouse is a great segue into your book The Doll Project, but I hadn’t yet made the connection with your interior design practice. The Doll Project addresses negative pressures that children, especially girls, face from the adult world, but it sounds like your dollhouse was also a place to grow into your professional and creative pursuits.
TG: Oh yes, it definitely was. I learned so many things from the process of building my dollhouse and making and buying miniatures to furnish it. It taught me about architectural scales. I’m pretty sure that the first floor plans I ever drew were for the rooms in my dollhouse.
From: The Doll Project, 2014. LS: The Doll Project combines narrative doll photography with diverse texts on diet culture, body image, family, and media. So, my first question is whether you knew the project would become a book, or did you think it would stay online as a blog?
TG: When I first started, I wasn’t planning on making a book. I didn’t expect to have so much material. But as the ideas kept flowing, I realized that I wanted to at least show the series in public. I think I probably decided to publish my Doll Project photos as a book while working on my first art book, Post-Consumerism, which I published in 2012.
From: The Doll Project, 2014. LS: That’s so interesting, because a book plays a starring role in The Doll Project — as the antagonist. Does How to Lose Weight suggest an ambivalent relationship with books?
TG: No, I’ve always loved books and reading. I chose to use the How to Lose Weight book as a recurring prop in my photos because it was easy to replicate. Something that I realized when I had my first dollhouse was that the easiest miniatures to make were of printed matter, whether books or household goods in boxes. Rather than buy it vintage from eBay, I could print as many copies of it as I wanted. The book appears in most of the photos in The Doll Project and then, in one of the photos that I set in the Y2K era, it becomes a website, too.
LS: That evolution from book to website seems important since your own work shifts between media. Books like Post-Consumerism present distinct lines of inquiry in your studio practice. Do those lines become clear in retrospect, or are you working toward that goal all along?
TG: I think my art books are highly retrospective. Most of the text in them comes from blog posts and journal entries and as I combine them into a narrative, they help me to notice themes and patterns that I may not have been aware of at the time when I wrote them.
Tiffany Gholar, Post-Consumerism, self-published, 2012. LS: Does the book provide closure for a series or project? Or do you circle back to your studio once those themes and patterns emerge?
TG: The only book that has provided closure for a series has been The Doll Project. My abstract work is an ongoing project and my goal is to release new art books every three years.
LS: From a more practical standpoint, how do the books serve your abstract practice? Are they an alternative to the gallery system or a supplement to it? And has the role of these books evolved as artists turn to social media to share their work?
TG: I offer signed copies of my art books as a gift to my collectors when they purchase my larger artwork. They are a supplement to the gallery system. They’re a tool to connect with audiences at shows and I like being able to display them alongside my art at solo shows and art fairs. I like that I can sell them for less than the rest of my art, except my mini paintings. It gives people another way to engage with my art without purchasing a painting, especially if they can’t afford one or have run out of wall space. I also like being able to tell my story as an artist from my own first-person perspective instead of having it filtered through the words of curators and gallerists.
From: Post-Consumerism, self-published, 2012. I was already pretty active on social media when I published my first art book. What I like about writing a book is that it allows more time for reflection, as opposed to the reflexive hot takes the world of social media expects us to churn out on a regular basis. Another thing I appreciate is that I can say what I have to say without getting annoying comments from reply guys and people who want to debate every little thing. Books give me enough space to fully express my thoughts without worrying about character limits. They are also not subject to the whims of tech bros. It’s nice to be able to give my words and images a more permanent format than a social media post.
LS: This answer really shows the complexity of how books mediate relationships between artists and readers! It sounds like these books are empowering and effective — so why don’t more artists do this?
TG: I’m not sure why more artists don’t do this, but I think they should! I would encourage all my fellow artists to publish books about their work. It’s pretty easy to do it now with print on demand companies. All you need is an InDesign subscription.
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Depictions of a Developing Lampshade
Neil Majeski
Depictions of a Developing Lampshade
From the series: The Last State or the Penultimate
20194.5 × 7 in. closed
8 pages
Saddle-stitched, softcover pamphlet
Inkjet and laser[In a departure from the usual Artists’ Book Reviews format, this mini review is part of a series on Neil Majeski’s pamphlet series, The Last State or the Penultimate. The first of these mini reviews covered Majeski’s series as a whole.]
“I once made a study of a table lamp which I acquired from an estate sale not long ago,” Neil Majeski announces on page one of Depictions of a Developing Lampshade. The strange temporality of this statement, straddling the remote and recent past, contributes to the overall sense that time works differently in Majeski’s series, The Last State or the Penultimate. It is hard to pin things down; they are always in a process of becoming. In Depictions of a Developing Lampshade, it is the lampshade that is becoming. Images on the recto document each new state of being while accompanying text on the verso explains how it was brought into existence.
I use the passive voice to describe this because, even as Majeski details precisely how he creates each rendering, he also conveys the agency exercised by the object and each subsequent depiction of it. This agency seems to work through the transformation of ideas into images, images into objects, and objects and images back into ideas. No sooner does Majeski turn an object into an image — say, a lamp into a study — than the image asserts its materiality. The reproductions are conspicuously tipped into the pamphlet like old-school color plates and the text revels in the material of each image, emphasizing the many layers of media, like titanium buff and charcoal.
The boundary between material forms, whether image or object, and immaterial ideas is as unstable as that between image and object. Majeski is motivated by his own curiosity, which is to say he renders ideas. Yet, once material, the image-objects he creates elude him. Furthermore, we should take seriously the possibility that the original object, the lamp, is being altered through Majeski’s mental and artistic activity. After all, these are “depictions of a developing lampshade” and not “developing depictions of a lampshade.” And if Majeski’s mental activity can alter the object, why not the reader’s?
Therefore, we should resist the temptation to see Depictions of a Developing Lampshade as a form of documentation that offers closure for the endless circulation of ideas, images, and objects. Majeski certainly uses the book form to neatly frame a small idea (and, likewise, uses the series format to connect these small ideas into larger ones). However, the book is an opening as much as a closure. Alongside the particularities of his estate sale lamp and the quirks of his curiosity, Majeski leaves plenty of room for the reader.
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The Last State or the Penultimate
Neil Majeski
The Last State or the Penultimate
2019–20214.5 × 7 in. closed
Varied page counts
Saddle-stitched softcover pamphlets
Inkjet and laserDepictions of a Developing Lampshade
The Chiliagon Locket: A Mental Exercise from My Childhood
The Perverse Doilies
Curious Details in Postcards
Music of the Uncanny Soundscapes
To review Neil Majeski’s The Last State or the Penultimate, a series of five interrelated publications, I will depart from the Artists’ Book Reviews format. After this overview, which will introduce the overall themes and shared elements of the five pamphlets, I will publish brief reviews of each work. (This format may also allow me to review future additions to this ongoing series, for which Majeski has planned two more publications.)
Depictions of a Developing Lampshade (2019) The pamphlets in The Last State or the Penultimate share a consistent look and feel. The page counts differ, but their size is the same, their saddle-stitch binding is the same, and their inside paper is the same. Each has a different cover paper, but the titles are set in the same face. The colophons are similarly consistent, and the typography and layout overall lend a sense of cohesion to the series. Perhaps the most notable feature is that the illustrations are tipped in like color plates in a vintage book, adhered along the top with three unfixed edges. This, and the typography, give the series a decidedly antiquarian feel that suits the subject matter, which often originates in estate sales, antique stores, or other, older books.
Music of the Uncanny Soundscapes (2020) The physicality of tipped-in images also reminds the reader that images are also objects — and objects are of central importance to Majeski. Throughout the series, Majeski plays with the relationship between objects, images, and imagination. Objects are never fixed, and it is through their own agency as well as the agency of the viewer that they change. Objects change when they are put in dialogue with one another or set in new contexts, when we attend specific aspects of them or mentally will them into new configurations. So too does the entire series, The Last State or the Penultimate, change with each new pamphlet. Majeski suggests a reading order, but the pamphlets are unnumbered and develop as much through accumulation as sequence.
The Perverse Doilies (2019) This, too, suits the subject matter of the individual publications, where Majeski explores sequence and seriality, changes over time, and the progression of time itself. While this is most obvious in illustrations, where the same object might morph from image to image, Majeski also subtly distorts time through his writing. The first- and second-person narration is emphatically present with deictic references to corresponding illustrations as if the pamphlet transcribes a slide lecture, but references to recent and distant past events push and pull the reader into other times, sometimes within the same sentence. The pamphlets also manipulate time through their pacing. All five are relatively short, but the length and pacing of each is tailored to its content. Text and image are carefully meted for the unit of the page and two-page spread to maximize the impact of a reveal or a text-image relationship. Despite their simple structure, these are thoughtful space-time sequences, not interchangeable containers of content.
Curious Details in Postcards (2019, 2021) In this way, the pamphlet format emphasizes the material presence of the text in the same way the tipped-in illustrations emphasize the physicality of images. Thus, just as Majeski’s objects act and are acted upon, the physical structure of the pamphlet co-determines the reading experience along with the reader. What could be better than a book to think through the ways objects change time and change over time, give form to experience, and invite and resist interaction and meaning?
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Stock Pile
Stock Pile
Areca Roe
Design by Kelly Munson
Foreword by Sheila Dickinson
2021
Self-published, printed by Edition One8.5 × 11 in. closed
90 pages
Perfect-bound softcover with French folds
Laser
Stock photography is an uncanny reflection of reality. Its sanitization and anonymization of familiar settings function as a trick mirror, an almost-real representation that subtly but indelibly differs from what we encounter in everyday life.
Stock Pile serves as a distorted reflection of that distorted reflection, highlighting the surreality of stock photography and more accurately — in an emotional and intellectual sense, if not a physical one — reflecting reality. Areca Roe, a multidisciplinary visual artist and member of TITLE Collective, both satirizes and reinvents the language of stock photo marketplaces and the aesthetic values of the genre.
Her process is relatively simple, but results in a wide variety of works. Each image (a photograph or video still) is based on a prompt from one of three major stock photo marketplaces. Normally, these prompts serve as suggestions for photographers attempting to make and sell stock photos, predictions as to what types of content and style will sell well next quarter. Roe, however, deliberately misinterprets or over-interprets the prompts to create pieces thatsurprise and provoke emotion in a way stock photos rarely, if ever, do. The text of the prompt that inspired the image is included, sometimes helping the viewer to interpret the work and sometimes sharply contrasting with it.
Most images are given an entire page or two-page spread, accompanied only by the brief text of the prompt. Occasionally, multiple images responding to the same prompt share a page. The large size of the images allows the reader to easily take in the finer details, while also imitating the appearance of magazine advertisements or billboards. The size and shape of the book and feel of the paper call to mind both the aforementioned magazines and exhibition catalogs—simultaneously placing stock photography in its expected context and asking us to view it as fine art.
Roe uses herself, her husband, and her children as the models in images containing human figures. While this may have been as much a practical decision as an aesthetic one — much of this work was produced during the height of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions — it also fosters a sense of intimacy and personality. In most stock photography, the artist is totally unknown; credit is usually given to a company rather than the individual or team that actually produced the work. Here, the artist is often quite literally on display.
This is only one of the ways in which Roe skewers stock photography as a quintessential product of late capitalism: a usually meaningless visual produced by someone not paid enough for their labor, most often used as advertising to sell equally meaningless products whose makers were paid even less.
The content of the images pokes fun at the assumptions stock photos have primed the audience to make. In one set of video stills, she presents two well-plated meals exactly like what we would see on a cooking show or Instagram — except that the salad appears to be made mostly of veggie fries and the plate smeared with sriracha and yellow mustard. Another image consists of a woman practicing “self-care,” cucumbers over her eyes and a soothing mask on her face. Reflected in her hand mirror is a burning forest.
While it is perhaps the most obvious interpretation of many of Stock Pile’s images, this satirical impulse does not overshadow the other main thrust of Roe’s work, which is more documentary: an examination of the way people live — and try to live normally — in unsettled times.
An obvious and important inspiration for most of Stock Pile’s images is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In her artist’s statement, Roe indicates she had been interested in making work about or imitating stock photography for some time, but it was in part the pandemic and its associated feelings and changes to daily life that made the project a reality.
The markers of COVID, and particularly those most uncertain and deadly early days of its spread, are everywhere in Stock Pile: face masks, empty shelves, working from home, an attempt to recreate the feeling of a dance club alone in the garage. Roe laments the devastation of the pandemic and laughs bitterly at the “solutions” advertisers offer, but also displays the more mundane feelings isolation produces: boredom, the awkwardness of masks and at-home haircuts, a longing for the familiar structure of the day.
Tackling multiple subjects from multiple angles means the tone of the images varies greatly. In some works, this might be seen as a flaw, muddying the proverbial waters, but with regard to both stock photography and the experience of the pandemic, this nuance and willingness to hold different, sometimes contradictory feelings enhance the work.
The wide variety of images, which jump from one tone or subject to another, mirrors the often jarring, sometimes amusing juxtapositions of radically different images in everyday media. In addition to the COVID throughline and reappearing models, this seeming disunity actually ties these images into a cohesive whole. When Roe follows an image of “the sublime” with a “fantasy, botanical, Nordic noir” book cover and a “subtle image of consumers wearing floral,” the experience is not unlike a serious piece of journalism being interrupted by a pet food ad, followed by one for a new antidepressant — except that Stock Pile’s version is a bit more fun.
Because of its sheer ubiquity, stock photography creates reality as much as reflects it, allowing large companies to not only appeal to the way we live, but in some small way to shape it, repeatedly exposing us to their idea of normal: an idea driven more by profit and assumptions than reality or need. Stock Pile’s emotional variety and focus on surprise and humor contradict and counteract what Roe terms the genre’s “bland cheeriness” in her project statement.
Instead of the calculated invisibility and inoffensiveness that seems the goal of much stock photography, Roe offers up a personal, messy look at human emotions and experiences. There are terrible moments and wonderful ones, and many shaded with both. Rejecting a normative, capitalistic view of the world, Stock Pile reminds the viewer not to forget the sometimes simultaneous beauty and absurdity of messy, contradictory life.
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Owed to The Mountain
Owed to The Mountain
Diane Jacobs
2021
Scantron Press12.5 × 12.5 in. closed
36 pages
Single-section softcover pamphlet
Digital inside with letterpress cover
Owed to The Mountain is a lavish tribute to Mt. Hood, which, on clear days, is still visible from Portland, where artist Diane Jacobs resides. The years-long project includes three versions of the book — an elaborate sculptural box set, a fine press edition, and a longer-run, digitally printed edition. This review will address the digitally printed version, whose exceptional production quality leaves little to be desired. Jacobs presents a kaleidoscopic view of Mt. Hood by transcribing and illustrating stories from indigenous people in the area, ranging from minimalist myths to conversational oral histories. Each story stands on its own, but together they form a longer arc about reciprocity and healing. In the title’s playful homonym, Jacobs sets a new standard for fine press publishing in the Anthropocene. She presents not just poetry, but a call to action.
Before focusing on the digitally printed edition of Owed to The Mountain, it is worth addressing some features of the sculptural version. Inside each of the four sides of the box is a print depicting Mt. Hood from one of the four cardinal directions. The box unfolds into a square cross with these four views surrounding a cast paper model of the mountain. The mountain comprises three nested layers, representing different geological strata. The book per se — or, at least, the printed codex — slips out from beneath the model mountain. This brief description leaves out numerous features of the deluxe edition, which raises interesting (but here unanswered) questions about the ontological boundaries of “the book.” Nevertheless, the digitally printed version I am reviewing retains many of the same themes in its structure and layout.
Even without a sculptural reading environment centered around a three-dimensional Mt. Hood, the book’s physical form echoes the mountain. The book is square, its four even sides referencing the four seasons, which play out within, and the four directions, each of which Jacobs renders with a different print process. While the tactile subtleties of these print techniques, ranging from relief processes to lithography and screen printing, are no doubt lost, the digital production preserves remarkable detail and visual texture. Rather than remaking the book digitally, Jacobs has created a facsimile of the fine press edition. The resolution of the scanning and printing is so high that the letterpress-printed text remains crisp and there is a discernible difference between the original book’s various papers, although the digital version is printed on the same stock throughout.
Though simple, the book’s engineering also contributes to its success. The nine-hole pamphlet stitch keeps the book stable, and the paper drapes nicely without feeling delicate. At over two feet wide, the book is best read at a table, and fortunately lays open completely flat. Its large size makes it hard to take in the imagery at the same time as the text, lending it the feeling of a children’s book whose text is meant to be read aloud to someone who is enjoying the images. This orality seems especially well suited to the texts, which are transcribed from spoken word. The conversational, sometimes stream-of-consciousness quality of the stories emphasizes the vital present-ness of the indigenous storytellers. Though originally hand set in metal type, the stories in Owed to The Mountain are unfussy and contemporary — from a pandemic parable by a seventeen-year-old to the wide-ranging reflections of a Paiute Elder.
Just as Jacobs approaches the mountain from all four directions and peels back the layers of its unseen history, she joins the multiple perspectives of her book’s contributors into a cohesive message about the ethics of interconnection. Of course, the bound codex format lends cohesion to the stories, as do the design constraints of hand-set metal type, but it is Jacobs’ illustrations that tie everything together. The book is just long enough to unify its wide variety of media and mark-making while maintaining a sense of variety and surprise.
Animals, printed using solar plates, retain the fluid, transparent quality of Jacobs’ original Sumi ink drawings. Meanwhile their environments, especially the flora, are printed using sharper, more opaque processes. The animals may be rendered more softly, but their gaze is piercing, implicating the reader as an ethical subject. More than any other aspect of the book, the animals moved me to consider my impact on the environment. Yet even as they raise concrete questions about one’s actions in the world, so too does the presence of black and white animals in a color environment create a mythical or imaginary space, perhaps belonging to more than one time.
Indeed, the book’s temporality is spiral more than linear, circling the mountain as Jacobs does. Many of the indigenous stories bridge the inconceivable gap between human and geologic time, which so often stymies climate action. “All the mountains were once people,” begins a story by Myra Johnson-Orange and Átwai Geneva Charley of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. At the same time, we witness the mountain change from one generation to the next, its (mis)management by the US Forest Service and grassroots efforts to encourage youth to become stewards of the land. The idea that we have reached a tipping point where humans must actively manage the environment to avoid catastrophe is not a new one — “Thousands of years ago,” Johnson-Orange reminds us, “…people took care of the earth, so that the animals and birds would have a beautiful and safe place to live and to take care of their families.”
So, when Jacobs labels Owed to The Mountain a call to action, it is because there is still time left to act. It is an ode, not an elegy. And while I must admit that the book left me more contemplative than moved to action, that may just be the result of reading as a reviewer. For her part, Jacobs has committed 2.5 percent of proceeds to the Columbia River Institute for Indigenous Development. It is in this regard — the way Jacobs approached the project — that Owed to The Mountain is a call to action, a gauntlet thrown to other artists and publishers. Jacobs’ philanthropy is commendable, but what really matters is how she enacted the book’s ethics of reciprocity throughout its creation. The stories Jacobs presents are the result of thoughtful collaboration with members of the Warm Springs community, and she is meticulous in her acknowledgements.
One reason I set aside my questions about where “the book” resides amid the various iterations of Owed to The Mountain is that the richness of the relationships that enabled the project, from Jacobs’ collaborations with indigenous storytellers and fellow artists to her connections with the more-than-human world around her, exceeds any book object. If I am moved to action, it is to pursue a publishing practice rooted in reciprocity, one that can only be seen from many perspectives and, even then, never completely.
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Copy No. 1
Copy No. 1
Edited by Vanessa Norton and Steven Trull
2022
Wasted Books6 × 7 in. closed
74 pages plus a single-sheet insertion
Perfect-bound softcover
Digital printing
Copy No. 1 is the first issue of a new periodical, a “magazine of recycled materials,” published by Wasted Books. As a celebration of plagiarism in all aspects of creative production, this debut issue includes art, poetry, music, pop culture, and profiles of notorious copycats. It concludes with a manifesto-style letter from the editors — a diagnosis of this late capitalist pandemic moment where every activity is monetized, and every object or relationship is commodified. There is no introduction; a book of copies about copies is sufficiently self-explanatory.
In the spirit of copying, the cover of this first issue of Copy is taken from the first issue of another periodical: Semina. Editors Vanessa Norton and Steven Trull have swapped out the title text from Wallace Berman’s 1955 Semina cover, which features a photo of the artist known as Cameron (Marjorie Cameron). Berman’s 1957 arrest for obscenity seems to foreshadow Copy’s own brush with censorship — an erratum reproducing a printshop’s refusal to reproduce artist Johnny Ray Huston’s contribution, A Look at Nighthawk in Leather, is slipped between the blacked-out pages where Huston’s work should have been. Copy’s spine is taken from yet another publication, Paul Virilio’s Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, but with “wasted” pasted over the MIT Press logo. Along with the editors’ manifesto, one can perhaps locate the politics of Copy between Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles and Semina.
Visually, Copy reminds the reader that the word copy shares an origin with copious. Starting with the inside covers, it is bursting with full-bleed text and image. In a few cases, text is swallowed by the perfect-bound gutter, but most of the critical content is easily accessed. The maximalist aesthetic enhances the wide variety among the issue’s ten contributors. Amid the chaotic copiousness, each contributor is clearly announced with a name and title in black text on a white verso. A brief synopsis of each contribution is also included toward the end of the issue, which is especially helpful given the range of disciplines represented. However, the authorship is (fittingly) less clear when it comes to the profiles of forgers, copycat criminals, and other artists, which serve to expand the cultural context of copying from art per se and make connections between the issue’s contributors and other artists. Cribbed, naturally, from Wikipedia, these profiles may be key in shaping future issues of Copy to address different aspects of creative plagiarism.
For this first issue, Norton and Trull show their commitment to unoriginality by opening with a contribution called Copy by Stewart Home. Home’s Copy is a copy of pages 62–66 from a book called Copy by Chus Martinez, a collective pseudonym adopted by numerous artists and activists. Distributed authorship, whether anonymous or attributed, is a key feature of Copy No. 1. An obvious example is Norton’s After Michael Mandiberg, which rephotographs Mandiberg’s rephotograph of Sherrie Levine’s rephotograph of Walker Evans’ Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife. If the piece elicits an eye roll, it also provokes deeper questions about appropriation and originality. A similar dynamic is at play in contributions by Derek Beaulieu and Eîlot Tuerie, both of whom appropriate turn-of-the-century composer Erik Satie’s composition Vexations, which was first published by John Cage in 1949.
A more surprising dynamic is introduced by the editors’ profiles of an entirely different order of copying. Forgers like Lee Israel and Mark Landis perhaps bridge the gap between artistic copycat and criminal, but we see a darker side of imitation in references to the Tylenol Murders, the Manson murders, and other so-called copycat crimes. Copying, it seems, is something done by people who are not in their right mind. The dismissive reaction that often meets uncreative works is not unrelated to this deep-seated mistrust of copying. Plagiarism is seen not only as unethical but as an affront to an entire culture that prizes originality and self-sufficiency. The artist Elaine Sturtevant, whose work is featured on the back inside cover of Copy No. 1, upset the art world as much for rejecting the avant-garde mandate for originality as for (intentionally imperfectly) imitating iconic artists who embraced that ideology.
It is this unsettling of the usual values of the art world — originality and commodification — that drives Copy and connects its contributors with more established artists like Levine and Sturtevant. The artists seem united more by what they oppose than by any particular aesthetic program. Indeed, the letter from the editors is mostly a manifesto of what Copy will not do. Copy is not, strictly speaking, a pandemic project, but it positions itself as a diagnosis of and logical response to the various intersecting crises that characterize 2022. Copy gives an account of why plagiaristic practices arose in these cultural and economic conditions and how they contribute to contemporary art. The editors not only sidestep any futile “is it art?” debate, they remind the reader that copying remains provocative in the broader culture beyond the art world.
At the same time, though, Copy No. 1 is undeniably self-reflexive. It is a work of piracy and plagiarism that explores the potential and limitations of appropriation and distributed authorship. It is no surprise that the first issue of a periodical would stake out its territory and reflect on its own methods. The future success of Copy rests in its ability to be about more than copying and more than art. If Norton and Trull continue to position their contributors within, against, and outside of the discourse of contemporary art, Copy will fill an important gap in a publishing landscape that is overly concerned with brand identity and monetization.
This first issue shows the importance of producing and distributing such a publication, even if it only remixes existing works. The dialogue among contributions clearly illustrates the intertextuality that underpins uncreative art practices, while the spat with the printer shows that every copy introduces friction, entropy, and chance. What remains to be seen is what comes of the connections the publication will forge among its readers, contributors, and publishers.
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A Ghost Story: Photographs
A Ghost Story: Photographs
Bret Curry
2021
A24 Films
Temper Books8 × 11.5 in. closed
136 pages
Smythe-sewn hardcover
Offset inside with foil-stamped cover
Edition of 500
We expect ghost stories to scare us. Whether they’re shared on screen or around a campfire, we expect our surroundings to be dark, making the eeriness even creepier. Ghost stories should leave us looking over our shoulder, keeping all the lights on. But not this one. Curry presents a passive, spectating ghost that is the embodiment of the memory of a past life and relationship. As readers, we are invited to reflect on what ghostly memories are following us, and what role we have as spectators.
A Ghost Story: Photographs is a photobook that represents and documents the 2017 feature film A Ghost Story. In it, we get photographs of the set, crew and their equipment, cast both in and out of character, and stills from actual scenes, most of which are close-up or medium shots. The book can stand alone, but reading a short synopsis of the film provides helpful context to the characters. This tangible version of the film is heavy even for its coffee table size, but is relatively short. There is plenty of whitespace to show off the thick, semi-gloss paper. Interspersed are black pages with short quotations from Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House. The only other text, besides a short introduction by the film’s director David Lowery, is a few single-page excerpts from the screenplay. The layouts vary, with one or two images per spread; some include a full page of whitespace and others feature images that reach over the gutter onto the second page.
Although the black cover is reminiscent of the darkness with which we surround ourselves to make ghost stories scarier, the playful cover image of a sheet ghost by Casey Affleck, who plays the ghost, and the glitter in the bookcloth hint at the tone of the book. Instead of jump scares and a violent backstory, this book reveals as its ghost a past companion that looks in on our protagonist with longing and love. I opened this book expecting a single ghost story. But the further I read, the more I felt myself to be the ghost, invisibly observing the contents of the photographs as if floating through the house myself alongside the protagonist’s deceased husband. Like the viewer, he watches the protagonist without being able to interact with her.
The calm domesticity of these images recalls the opening scenes of many haunted house movies, where the family (or, in this case, a single woman) moves into a perfectly lovely house and everything is going well until it isn’t. But Bret Curry’s photographs stay softly lit, devoid of the shadowy fears we expect from the genre. Even in the darker black-and-white images, the shadows serve more to enhance the lighted subjects. The domesticity of the images is further enhanced by Curry’s use of closeups; the intimate framing puts us right in the house with our protagonist. We become ghosts who watch her. A great haunting movie typically makes me dread all the unexplained sounds in my house, turning them into ghosts and ghouls creeping around the corner. Instead, after reading this book, the ghosts I see in my apartment are the memories I’ve made here. This book is no horror story, after all, but a romance between a ghost and his widow.
This one-sided relationship between the ghost and the protagonist is as painful as unrequited love, as the ghost is literally invisible to the person he desires. Still, his presence in the house is light and playful. In a typical ghost story, it is often guilt, greed, and abuse that haunt a home, but this ghost is the memory of a loving, gentle husband, a manifestation of a memory wrapped up in the sheets of the former marital bed.
The ghost itself is both serious and silly. The tone of the photographs — depicting closeups of abandoned objects and unsmiling subjects — is often serious. But the somewhat-cartoonish ghost is a fully-grown adult under a sheet with eye holes, much like the Peanuts characters out for Halloween. The death of the character is tragic, as are his forced passivity and disconnection as a ghost, but we can also see him as a person in costume, particularly when we see the film crew adjusting his sheet or otherwise interacting with the actor. Throughout the book, scenes from the movie are interrupted by scenes from its production, where equipment and crew members remind us that what we are seeing is staged.
These crew members haunt the house more as poltergeists than as passive sheet ghosts. The film’s characters are fully unaware of these watchers, but they actually have control over the situation, manipulating not only their equipment, but the characters themselves. We sometimes see the crew, but more often see evidence of their presence: their equipment set up to better see and document the characters they control. The crew members’ invisibility then comes from their control over the situation instead of adding to their powerlessness. Like the sheet ghost, the crew is both serious and silly. The high value of their equipment and the detailed nature of the setup is juxtaposed against someone playing dead in a T-shirt printed with the cover drawing.
As readers, we have only a small bit of control over our experience. We can flip back to various points in the book and decide how long to spend on each spread, but Curry dictates the book’s sequence — and its contents. In fact, we don’t even get page numbers to better orient ourselves within the book, and instead float through the pages almost timelessly.
What we are left with at the end of the book is a glimpse into production as well as a produced work of art in itself. After spending time between these pages, I cannot help but think of the memories in my life that have become ghosts following me around in my apartment, and whose houses the memory of me haunts.
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Necrology
Necrology
Lawrence Levi
2021
Printed by Conveyor Studio5 × 7 in. closed
48 pages
Perfect-bound softcover
Digital offset
Edition of 100
There really isn’t much to say about death. Each metaphor for it feels imprecise; each explanation of its mechanics or significance says too little or too much. Where consciousness ends, so too do art and science or any other way we have of making meaning.
Of course, we can’t stop talking about it anyway. That final experience is perhaps the only one we can truly term “universal,” and the fact none of us among the living can crack the mystery makes it all the more compelling.
Lawrence Levi’s Necrology manages to say a lot about death — and about the variety, beauty, and absurdity of the life that precedes it — by not saying much at all.
The book’s premise is deceptively simple: Levi, an editor at The New York Times as well as a photographer, sequences decades of photographs from that paper’s obituaries, presenting one or two images per page. The pictures themselves are cropped tightly and primarily feature neutral backgrounds and facial expressions, clearly taken for documentary more than sentimental or aesthetic purposes. While they are good photographs, surprisingly if subtly expressive, it is their arrangement rather than their content that makes this an artists’ book.
Contextual information for each image consists of its original caption, usually providing only the name of the deceased. The few longer descriptions provoke more questions than they answer: “Walter S. Taylor in 1978, before the accident that crippled him” or “Anthony J. Giacalone, who was said to be in organized crime.”
Nothing further about the subjects is shared until Necrology’s last few pages, allowing (or requiring) the viewer to make their own interpretations regarding meaning and sequencing. The fact that these subjects are all but anonymous, unless the reader happens to recognize a name or two among them, incites a desire to study them more closely.
After spending a bit of time with an image, getting lost in the little idiosyncrasies of a given face, I come to feel as if I know the subject. At first, this sentiment is sweet, a bit of connection between the viewer and the rest of humanity.
However, the knowledge that all these people are dead and the association of their photographs with death adds a different resonance to the images. Every picture of a model on a gallery wall is motionless, but here Levi correlates the stillness of the medium with the stillness of death. The subject I felt I knew intimately becomes alien, separated by an impenetrable barrier.
This is not to say Necrology is solely a dreary, ruminative work. As the crush of images grows, the reader begins to consider the universality of the human face, the amazing similarity of shape between any one and another. Differences of appearance that play outsize and oppressive roles in the land of the living — ethnicity, gender, visible disability[1] — begin to feel less significant. As the faces themselves become generalized, the viewer begins to differentiate individuals by other means: the shape of a tie knot or hairstyle, the thickness of eyeglass frames. This often has a humorous, softening effect: after my first viewing, I couldn’t remember every face in Necrology, but I clearly recalled the two cowboy hats on display.
The text that fills the last few pages of Necrology, while minimal, opens up additional meanings and methods of grappling with the photographs. A short — usually one sentence — biography is provided for each individual pictured. The biographies and the photographs are not presented in the same sequence, making the viewer put in a bit of work to match a name to a face. This almost game-like quality further emphasizes the book’s subtle humor, highlighting the laughter in many of the faces and the absurdity of many of the facts.
Levi further underscores this humor with some of the biographies themselves: “Alan Dugan was a writer of stinging poems who won the National Book Award twice and worked for several years in a plastic-vagina factory”; “Rodman Rockefeller was a Rockefeller.”
The endnotes also provoke consideration of the potential for a disconnect between a face or other aspects of a person’s appearance and the facts of that person’s life, in ways ranging from amusing to upsetting. Theodore McCarty’s mild, aged appearance is a stark contrast to the hard living and frequent early deaths of the blues and metal musicians who made his Flying V and Les Paul guitar designs into icons. The jovial, grandfatherly man smiling broadly on Necrology’s cover was a French politician who came to associate with that country’s far-right National Front.
Sometimes, this effect is reversed: Arthur “Spud” Melin, with his broad smile, tanned face, and comparatively long hair, does look the most likely of all these people to have headed up the company that popularized the Frisbee.
Even taken in isolation from the pictures, the simple biographies say something about the universality of death and the near-infinite variety of life. While all of these people were notable in some way, the breadth of that notability is vast. Some were at the center of sweeping changes, such as the first democratically elected president of Azerbaijan or a psychiatrist who worked to end the American Psychological Association’s classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. Most, however, were a bit more ordinary: poets, cowboys, scientists, gangsters, and priests who in one moment or another did something truly wonderful, terrible, or strange.
Lawrence Levi does not tell us what death is in Necrology, nor what to do with our brief lives. What he does is give death a face — or more accurately, forty-six faces — to express just a bit of its mystery, its power, and its grim humor. Even to the last page, Levi invites us to play with and explore death rather than dreading or ignoring it, ending with an author photo formatted identically to the obituary images and a poem excerpt from one of Necrology’s subjects:
as if the mouse’s fingers…
Alan Dugan, “Funeral Oration for a Mouse”
could grasp our grasping lives, and in
their drowning movement pull us under too,
into the common death beyond the mousetrap
[1] Because the individuals pictured are selected from a pool a major US newspaper deemed ‘notable’ upon their deaths, many of them some years ago, white men are quite overrepresented. Perhaps an assemblage featuring the many people eulogized in the Times’ ongoing Overlooked project would broaden this universalizing effect.
Artists’ Book Reviews 