Reykjavík Grapevine - 29.07.2011, Blaðsíða 36

36
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11 — 2011
Art | Living Art
Do You Read Me?
Everyday, we face a constant in-
teraction with our internal and
external environments that re-
quires of us one hyperawesome
skill: LITERACY. With this super-
power, we can interpret symbols
flying at us in the form of e-mails
(hello, alphabet!), cloud forma-
tions (those puffy Simpsons
clouds, also known as cumulus,
signal fair weather), smile from a
stranger (so far this article pro-
vides mild pleasure or entertain-
ment), and most everything else
that presents itself as nameable,
knowable, readable, interpre-
table.
One popular technology that supports
our literacy addictions focuses on the
representation of languages through
a tangible, consumable machine: THE
BOOK. We know them, love them, read
them, write them, use them to prop up
foosball tables. But in our speed to read,
how much time have we spent investi-
gating this inherited technology and its
learned, assumed rules of engagement?
WHAT A BOOK SHOULD LOOK LIKE
Nýlistasafnið’s new exhibition—LITER-
ACY—covers a wide range of concerns
within book-art culture, foregrounding
the visual and mechanical materiality of
the book as an object. Curated by Jón B.
K. Ransu, the exhibition features eigh-
teen mainly Iceland-based creators who
interrogate typesetting, bookbinding,
creative composition, and critical inter-
pretation. The most successful works
in this exhibition encourage readers to
break away from many languages’ con-
ventional reading tactics (start to finish,
left-to-right, top-to-bottom) so readers
may enter texts where we like, engage
with books as constructed technology,
and ultimately consider text within the
environment in which it exists.
The exhibition’s statement notes that
“the gallery houses the largest collection
of artists’ books in Iceland.” In a country
steeped with literary history and boast-
ing a 99% literacy rate according to Aunt
Wikipedia, it feels appropriate that 20th
and 21st-century writers and art-makers
here would explore the book as object
and its many possibilities for interrogat-
ing our assumed and learned navigation
of print culture.
Dieter Roth’s and Níels Hafstein’s
bookworks are displayed in large glass-
encased tables, where we find square
books designed in multiples. Dieter
Roth’s contrasting colours of orange/
blue or the typographic standard black/
white showcase typesetting layout for-
mation to mirror text blocks in conven-
tional and unconventional geometric
shapes. The use of die-cut technique to
layer paper provides depth to the two-di-
mensional fields. Níels Hafstein’s twenty
books are constrained to identical size
but feature different geometric cover
designs, underlining the same-same-
but-different limitation placed on the
publishing industry with its rigid design
requirements (or, to speak plainly, dictat-
ing what a book should look like and how
it should behave).
BE LIBERAL
Jan Voss’ ‘D-Tour’ plays on the metaphor
of a book as a journey, with the reader/
narrator/main character sketched on
the book’s spine. The spine itself is
comprised of many pages or signatures
across which the image is sketched. On
one cover is an expansive landscape,
while the other cover displays a human-
made road. Read into this liberally.
Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s ‘Brennu Njáls
Saga’ is the exhibit’s only video inclusion.
It features the pages of a book (one as-
sumes it is ‘Njáls Saga’) flipped rapidly
by two hands, paired with an intense au-
dio track of warps, beats, wails, and
speech that push audience through the
too-quick-to-read narrative—a glimpse
into a possible reader’s experience as
she devours the saga. The book burns at
the end. Read into this liberally, too.
As perhaps the only foreign work on
display in the collection, Douwe Jan Bak-
ker’s ‘Pronounceables’ bridges the space
between visual and aural though a series
of instruments that are to be inserted
into the mouth. This art works to make
tangible what is uttered.
RESONATED MOSTLY
The most curious inclusion strays from
paper. A coarsely sewn-shut animal or-
gan, seemingly ancient and stuck with
a cryptic note inscribed to or about N.
Hawthorne, nods to the many ways in
which books are described in English us-
ing anatomical terms (spine, body of text,
header, footer, etc.). This piece alone is
well worth ample contemplation time
and a jaunt to NÝLÓ. The animal matter
is also useful in relief to the mausoleum
of tree corpses on display in the gallery
(or on any bookshelf in your home), a re-
minder of the deaths that sustain literary
culture.
Set within a wide recent history of
mostly 20th century and mostly Icelan-
dic book arts, it was the 2011 works by
Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir and Ragnhil-
dur Jóhannsdóttir that resonated most
with this reader. Ragnhildur Jóhannsdót-
tir’s sculptural poetry serves as a fine
addition to the cutting-edge realm of
erasure poetry and book sculpture, re-
calling the work of US-based artist Brian
Dettmer and UK-based Tom Phillips’ ‘A
Humument.. Ragnhildur takes books as
‘found objects’ and then applies a cut-up
vivisection to bring into relief texts within
larger texts. Her poems stick flayed from
each spread-open cover’s frame, creat-
ing book-as-organism that fans its small
paper arms. These works meet viewers
on two levels—foregrounding the book-
object’s physicality, and also inviting a
closer, more intimate inspection of the
printed words.
ALPHABET DANCE
The most memorable part of the ex-
hibition occurred as a “happening,”
where board member and gallery sitter
Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir approached me
with a robust though squishy blue orb
and then read aloud two paragraphs.
This bit of ingenuity is excerpted from
Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir’s ‘The works
I should have made, titled If I would be
successful and I’d been born before her,
at a different place.’ As I squeezed and
weighed the orb in my hands, Gunnhil-
dur read for me about an imagined per-
formance created from an “alphabet of
movement,” in which a personal alpha-
bet is choreographed on the bodies of
dancers, tying together a notion of the
poem as a dance (or vice versa).
This work conjured the tactile reality of
the book in hand with the intimacy in-
volved in the literary performance (also
known as The Reading). There I was as
a body, standing in the gallery listening
to a voice while handling this odd object.
This shift in normative gallery behaviour
brought me rocketing into a hyperaware
literate reinterpretation, where I related
this weird performance to my own quiet
book-reading experiences (holding an
object, another’s voice in my head). The
corporeality—our very real bodies en-
gaged in these constant literate acts—
was a welcome finish to this tour of The
Living Art Museum.
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Lækjargata 8
The group exhibition features more than fifteen artists concerned with book arts, books as art. Noticeably missing from
this exhibition are forays into visual poetry, but perhaps this will make for an exciting sequel in a future NÝLO exhibition.
(Call me, NÝLO, if you’re looking for a co-curator). ‘Literacy’ at The Living Art Museum (Skúlagata 28, Reykjavík) runs
from June 17 to September 11, 2011 and the gallery is open 12–17, Tuesday through Sunday.
“There I was as a body, standing in the gallery listening to a
voice while handling this odd object. This shift in normative
gallery behaviour brought me rocketing into a hyperaware literate
reinterpretation”
Words
a. rawlings
Photo
Julia Staples