One of a Kind, Unique Artist's Books Heide
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ONE OF A KIND ONE OF A KIND Unique Artist’s Books curated by Heide Hatry Pierre Menard Gallery Cambridge, MA 2011 ConTenTS © 2011, Pierre Menard Gallery Foreword 10 Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 by John Wronoski 6 Paul* M. Kaestner 74 617 868 20033 / www.pierremenardgallery.com Kahn & Selesnick 78 Editing: Heide Hatry Curator’s Statement Ulrich Klieber 66 Design: Heide Hatry, Joanna Seitz by Heide Hatry 7 Bill Knott 82 All images © the artist Bodo Korsig 84 Foreword © 2011 John Wronoski The Artist’s Book: Rich Kostelanetz 88 Curator’s Statement © 2011 Heide Hatry A Matter of Self-Reflection Christina Kruse 90 The Artist’s Book: A Matter of Self-Reflection © 2011 Thyrza Nichols Goodeve by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve 8 Andrea Lange 92 All rights reserved Nick Lawrence 94 No part of this catalogue Jean-Jacques Lebel 96 may be reproduced in any form Roberta Allen 18 Gregg LeFevre 98 by electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or information storage retrieval Tatjana Bergelt 20 Annette Lemieux 100 without permission in writing from the publisher Elena Berriolo 24 Stephen Lipman 102 Star Black 26 Larry Miller 104 Christine Bofinger 28 Kate Millett 108 Curator’s Acknowledgements Dianne Bowen 30 Roberta Paul 110 My deepest gratitude belongs to Pierre Menard Gallery, the most generous gallery I’ve ever worked with Ian Boyden 32 Jim Peters 112 Dove Bradshaw 36 Raquel Rabinovich 116 I want to acknowledge the writers who have contributed text for the artist’s books Eli Brown 38 Aviva Rahmani 118 Jorge Accame, Walter Abish, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Max Frisch, Sam Hamill, Friedrich Hoelderin, John Keats, Robert Kelly Inge Bruggeman 40 Osmo Rauhala 120 Andreas Koziol, Stéphane Mallarmé, Herbert Niemann, Johann P. Tammen, Frederic Tuten, John Wronoski, John Yau and Zao Zhang Kathline Carr 112 Tom Roth 122 I also would like to thank all participating artists Chrissy Conant 42 Jacqueline Rush Lee 124 and everybody else who has helped to make this a beautiful show Steven Daiber 44 Elsbeth Sachs 126 especially Nick Angelo, Erica Bernstein, Christoph Brudi, Alexander Campos (Center for Book Arts, NYC), Steven Clay, Mary Curtin Clayton Eshleman, Michael Fagan (Pierre Menard Gallery), Ronald Feldman, H.P. Garcia, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Serge Gregorian George Deem 46 Cheryl Schainfeld 128 (H.P. Garcia Gallery), Skyela Heitz (Barbara Krakow Gallery), Stefan Huber, Richard Human, Peggy Kaplan (Ronald Feldman Gallery) Thorsten Dennerline 48 Carolee Schneemann 130 Barbara Krakow, Guy Lesser, Ruediger Lentz, Hannah Monyer, Irina Protopopescu (Slag Gallery), Susan and George Quasha, Richard Peter Downsbrough 50 Ilse Schreiber-Noll 132 Nash, Maddy Rosenberg (Central Booking), Anna Salamone, Sara Seagull, Amy Silver (Ronald Feldman Gallery), Joanna Seitz Margret Schepers, Elmar Seibel, Ben Shiff, Chris Shultz (Pierre Menard Gallery), Robert Shuster, Harley Spiller, Simon Spiller Debra Drexler 54 Pat Steir 134 Lynne Tillman, Luisa Valenzuela, Ronald Vance, Sharone Vendriger, Uwe Warnke, Len Walker, Walker Waugh Max Gimblett 56 Michelle Stuart 136 (Yancey Richardson Gallery), Steve Weintraub (Pavel Zoubok Gallery), Elga Wimmer PCC, Bill Wilson Chie Hasegawa 58 Aldo Tambellini 138 Martha Wilson, Andrew Witkin (Barbara Krakow Gallery), and John Wronoski Heide Hatry 60 Sharone Vendriger 142 Laura Hatry 62 Maria Viviano 144 Ric Haynes 64 Lewis Warsh 146 Cover image (detail): Paul* M. Kaestner Anna Helm 66 Clemens Weiss 148 Beuys in Darmstadt, 1991 9 1/2 x 13 3/4 in., 15 pages, mixed media on cardboard Betty Hirst 68 Mark Wiener 150 Frontispiece (detail): Richard Humann Richard Humann 70 Ottfried Zielke 152 Cut-Up, Brooklyn, 2011. 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 6 7/5 in., 80 pages, paper covered boards, mixed media. Signed. Courtesy of Elga Wimmer PCC, NY Iliyan Ivanov 72 Strange & Wonderful 154 Foreword Curator’s Statement John Wronoski Heide Hatry If there is such a thing as an immortal soul, it is in the book that it resides. A book must be an ice-axe to break the frozen seas of our souls In working with the book or book-form as a visual art medium, or as a mixed art form enfolding the visual and I fell in love with bookmaking long before I thought of myself as an artist, and I lived a long life in books – the verbal, we draw upon the ontology, epistemology, and history of the book without necessarily incorporating I was an antiquarian bookseller for seventeen years – before I ever had the chance to live my life as one. I am, them in all their depth and complexity into our productions, almost necessarily not doing so, in fact. The unique therefore, keenly attuned to the possibilities that the book form opens up to the visual artist as well as the limits artist’s book is often more an allusion to the book, or a dream of the book, an homage or a monument to the book, it imposes. I have been observing the practice of book artists for many years now, and I have long harbored the a fantasy or a symbol or perhaps even a theory of the book, than a book proper in all its richness, density, depth, plan of creating an exhibition in which I could reveal this rather secret aspect of art practice to a wider audience. and disseminative complexity. Whereas the book is a broad-ranging social entity, a collaboration between author, who is in fact a fiction himself, and reader, who is everyone and no one, the unique artist’s book tends to be idi- For me, all art that deserves the name must shake us from the complacency of habit, expectation, and received osyncratic, even idiolectic, a retreat into the lost and forgotten depths of the book, to its reptile brain, as it were, opinion. This is its very purpose. Kafka’s injunction that a book must be an ice-axe to break the frozen seas of our souls to the book that is each of us rather than the book that is all of us. has remained the standard by which I have judged art and the goal which has informed the creation of my own. It is the standard I have employed in curating the present show. The unique artist’s book, more typically than not, bears the characteristics of what is known as outsider art. It seems almost like a rebellion from the book in its rigid formality, a return to the earnest play of childhood, though I think of this exhibition as a way to identify, point up, and explore spiritual dimensions of the book which, al- certainly with the notion of breeching the walls of the formidable adult world. though they are inherent in it, rarely assert themselves forcefully in an age in which mass publishing turns the form to inferior purposes and in which the form itself is widely perceived as being in decline as a technology. Children love to play at making books. Paranoid schizophrenics are attracted to them like moths to the light: What the book is in itself and what it can be as a social force are hardly touched by contemporary publishing, and Books harbor secret voices, ever subtly mouthing their obsessions in silence. They also represent order, and a even the contemporary artist’s edition is typically bland and repetitive or arbitrarily clever. It is an apt time to per- realm of stability, perhaps of objectivity, for the mind at sea. Watchers (or at least makers) of movies seem to be mit the book to speak on its own behalf, in all its breadth and depth, and to reassert the fundamental interior act convinced that they hold the impenetrable secrets of the “real” world – these closed, opaque, silent things whose by which a creator relates to another being. The power of the medieval codex gradually and imperceptibly waned dormant texts might as well be lists of intransigent numbers requiring genius to decipher them. They are a mystery over the centuries during which an art form became a mechanical method and eventually simply a means of con- for those who have not surrendered all imagination in actually reading them. And the books children make, the veying information. Although the same potential always resides in the charged object that is the book, its social books the barely literate outsider makes, the books of the schizophrenic, are unique and simple things – books destiny has obscured that fact. The use of the codex form by single individuals whose work specifically addresses that disavow the welter of books, even as they are made compulsively, again and again. the essence, the history, and the full spiritual and emotional range of the book redeems its promise. In entering the world of the book and abandoning the self to the ethereal world of the mind, we respond not to a personality, The epitome of the unique artist’s book might, in fact, be the book without text, or more pertinently, the book an imagination, or an individual artist, but to what is inherent and possible within each of us: we recall, if only for with nonsense text, faux-hieroglyphic, the suggestion of a forgotten, pre-Babel language, a holistic language not a while, the unity, and the universality, that both language and the sensorium imply. susceptible to mis-understanding because it requires no interpretation. It is inhabited by a spirit, a unique spiritual being – and not the plurality of voices in dialogue, or cacophony, that constitutes even the most naïve work of The book is unique among human creations. It transcends its ostensible purposes and potentiates thought and literature. experience beyond what it contains. It is our conscience, and we are at pains to silence it; it is the best that we are, and we scarcely give it a thought.