Century Girl

Over the weekend, I read Lauren Redniss' (2006) Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfield Follies.

As the title suggests, the book tells the life story of Doris Eaton. Born in 1904 and still alive when Redniss' book was published, Doris lived to the ripe age of 106 and, if Century Girl is to believed, danced right up until the end.

The book isn't a traditional literary biography. It doesn't try to get into the mind of it's central figure and tell the story from her perspective in minute detail. Rather, what it does is give an overview of the exciting and unbelievable life Doris Eaton lived, from Broadway to the movies to unemployment and dance-school teaching, and featuring a host of famous figures from years gone by.

The book was a reaffirming read: Doris Eaton has certainly had a fascinating life. More than this though, Lauren Redniss has brought the book to life too with photographs and artwork, making it not only an amazing story but a beautiful object.

Reading each page becomes an activity you savour, as you take in all the details, the narrative, the documentation; look over the images of Doris, her family, her closest and most famous companions; and you do all this with wonder.

The book enthrals us as much as Doris' life does. In telling Doris' story in this artistic mutlimodal way, Redniss forces her readers to marvel at it all at once.

Would you read a 3D novel?

Artist and Designer Tristan Eaton has edited, or perhaps curated is a better word, a new book of retro 3D art. And when I say retro, we're talking the old lo-fi red-and-blue glasses, not more recent forays into 3D as seen in stereoscopic cinema.

Here's a sample image from the book: 'The Merchants of Cool' by Kevin Bourgeois.

(The Guardian has a gallery here if you'd like to see more.)

The book is simply a collection of 3D artworks by young contemporary artists exploring the form. Which isn't to belittle it - It looks great. But it did get me thinking about whether 3D is a possibility for literary fiction. I for one would love to see a book made like this, an experiment in taking the fictional and imaginative into 3D. But I suspect this is a pipe dream that would never be realised, and perhaps it would be more novelty than novel... Perhaps.

What do you think? Would you read a 3D novel?

Franklin Furnace

On Wednesday,  I went to a fascinating research seminar at DMU's IOCT, given by Toni Sant who lectures at the University of Hull. Toni was talking about a New-York based avant-garde institution called 'Franklin Furnace', on which his book Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A History of the Future focuses. I'd never heard of Franklin Furnace before so I was utterly intrigued.

Founded in 1976 by Martha Wilson and originally based at 112 Franklin Street, New York, the avant-garde collective was started to collect and archive ephemeral art (which itself seems somewhat paradoxical). Initially, they produced and showcased Artists' Books, which took many forms from the limited paper editions of Ida Appledroog to the more conceptually challenging (in terms of the notion of Artist's Books) work of Timm Ulrichs who in 1986 produced an artists' book called 'Concrete Poetry' which was, in fact, a block of concrete produced in an edition of 50.

For me, what was really interesting about Franklin Furnace's interest in Artists' Books was the way in which 'the page as alternate space' was not confined to a particular medium. It could be in book form or concrete or later what Franklin Furnace conceptualised as electronic artists' books, featuring works such as Jenny Holzer's online project 'Please Change Beliefs' which invites participants to alter the cultural idioms available on the online site.

I also liked the political radicalism of Franklin Furnace, demonstrated nicely by the project 'Bikes Against Bush', an interactive Graffiti project that printed text messages sent by web users directly onto the Manhattan streets.

Franklin Furnace is still active today, but has now moved to the web - http://www.franklinfurnace.org/ - where you can find its art archive.

Only a year to wait! : The Card - Graham Rawle

If you don't already know this, let me boldly proclaim: I am a huge fan of Graham Rawle's work.

For those of you who don't know, Graham Rawle is a writer and collage artist who made a name for himself with his early work Lost Consonants, a series of visual collages playing around with the meaning of words, which appeared in the Weekend Guardian newspaper for a lengthy period of fifteen years, and later published as a series of books (see some amusing examples here).

His career has moved increasingly into the realm of writing and the literary, with the visual dimension of language and narrative continuing to be a significant part of his work. His two novels, Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998) and Woman's World (2005), both use collage and are multimodal (I've written a chapter on the latter in my forthcoming monograph).

Rawle's newest novel will be The Card and will be published in April of 2012 (How long am I going to have to wait?!). Since news of this project emerged, there has been lots of speculation about the nature of this book. In particular, that it may be "a piece of writing rather than collage".

On his blog, Rawle has finally put a stop to such speculation, revealing some 'rough page layouts' that show, beyond doubt that the book will be multimodal (though as you can see, it doesn't look like collage).

According to Rawle, The Card, will be about "a man who picks up cards he finds on the street, believing that they hold clues to a secret message". As such, he has also created cards for the purpose of the book, such as the example below (more on his blog):

It's not yet clear whether these cards will be shown in images throughout the book (which I suppose has genre connections to novels such as Italo Calvino's (1967) The Castle of Crossed Destinies) or whether they will be provided as a deck of cards accompanying the book and/or in addition to images of them in the book.

Either way, I am already far too excited. It's going to be a long wait until April 2012!

"Before I Die" - Candy Chang

Fascinating interactive art project in New Orleans from artist Chandy Chang.
"Before I die" invites passers-by to complete the sentence, 'Before I die I want to_________', transforming this disused building into a blackboard and a collaborative piece of public art.

'Before I die I want to___________' : What would you write?

John Stezaker

I also went to see the three-decade retrospective of another important British artist, John Stezaker, at White Chapel Gallery. I've known this for some time, but now it's definitely official - I love collage! So, as you've probably guessed, Stezaker's work is an art of collage and appropriation, of putting unlikely images together and in doing so creating something new.

Some of my favourite pieces are the ones that seem to create metaphors from the collage assembly. This seems to be the case in both 'Sonata' (2009) and 'Bridge' (2007), for instance, both shown below.

While 'Bridge' is suggestive of the relationship between the depicted father and son, 'Sonata' reflects what we might think of as a dreamscape, perhaps conjured up for the female pianist by the beauty of the music she plays.

I also really loved the 'Mask' and 'Pair' series' which transpose landcapes onto faces in beautiful and haunting ways.

Not only do these collages show up the sophistication of the human perceptual system (in that perceive continuities between the human figures and their facial landscapes), they also show up the way in which we as viewers seek meaning. Somehow and for some reason, these surreal images till conjure an affective response.

One last mention is the (2006) 'Love' images:

The simple act of overlaying the eye area of the same image gives the impression of enhanced attraction, of sensual stimulation.

Ultimately, I can't talk about everything - I would if I could as I was so overwhelmed and excited and intrigued by all the pieces in the exhibition - and I have to say that the images shown here don't do justice to seeing them for real.

The John Stezaker exhibtion is on at White Chapel Gallery until 18th March 2011.

British Art Show 7

The British Art Show is organised every 5 years by Hayward Touring and showcases leading and emerging British artists. British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (BAS7) is on at the Hayward Gallery at the moment, and so I took myself down there on Friday as a treat.

BAS7 featured 39 Artists exploring themes of history, temporal continuity, and parallel worlds. Overall, I found the exhibition invigorating. As is always the case, there were highs and lows in the collection for me. I'm going to use this blog to mention some of the stand-outs.



Christian Marclay - The Clock (Video) was one of the reasons I went to the exhibition in the first place. I was so excited about it, and it did not disappoint.

The Clock is a 24hr video that is composed of found video clips from countless films; each flim-clip or fragment features a reference (visual or verbal) to time. What's really cool about this work though is that as we watch these clips, narrating a disjointed story of sorts, the film-time unfolds in real time. As a viewer, you are both intensely involved in the bizarre story of the screen while being hyper-aware of how long you have been watching the piece. Your attention is somehow strangely split or perhaps it oscillates between the fictional and the real. I also really liked the fact that the film seemed to be littered with meta-comments about time.
I started watching The Clock at 12.10. It was hard to drag myself away.



Elizabeth Price - User Group Disco (Video) was the other video piece that I was really engaged by.

Set in a "fictional institution", this piece explores parallel worlds, while merging worlds through a clash of visual, verbal, and sonic register: images of kitsh porcelain and metallic utensils, corporate ppt text, and the music of A-ha (Take on Me). What I thought was really fascinating about User Group Disco was the way that it seemed to gather momentum, exposing the ideology of the corporate discourse and casting it in an unsettling light.



Charles Avery - The Islanders; Onomatopoeia also explored parallel worlds, this time a parallel world of the artist's own creation. And on a epic scale: The world of Onomatopoeia is a four-year project for the artist. The project features large scale pencil drawings, sculptures and installations. On display at BAS7 was an installation and a sculpture. It was the drawing that caught my eye.

I've seen Avery's work before at the Tate Triennial on Altermodernism, but this was the first time I'd seen his drawing. Its sheer size and detail really work to bring the world alive, and the comical yet grotesque figures who populate this world disturb and thrill the viewer in equal measure.



David Noonan - Untitled (Tapestry is the final work I'd like to mention here. Another large-scale item, Noonan's piece is a monochrome tapestry which collages images by overlaying or superimposing them.

The effect is both beautiful and haunting. The images and the worlds they represent are somehow coexistent, blending different periods and cultures within the space of a solitary tableau.



Ultimately (as you can probably tell), I loved British Art Show 7. Ironically given the theme, and felt particularly while watching The Clock, I wanted more time there!

More Altered BookArt Works

For those of you who enjoyed the previous post on books as sculptural works of art, feast your eyes on the work of Brian Dettmer who alters books, etching them into complex topographies.

There are obvious formal differences between the works of Brian Dettmer and Isaac Salazar, but it's still fascinating to witness just what a book can be.


Visit Brian Dettmer's website here; his flickr page here; and here's an interesting article from The Guardian.