|
Art: The art of
making book art
September 15, 2005
"Bound to be Unbound: Thoughts on Censorship" by Mitzi Pratt.
Photos courtesy of Etherington Fine Art
Stella Waitzkin's "Wedding Book."
|
By Brooks Robards
"Read With Your Eyes, Not With Your Lips," the current Show at Etherington Fine Art in Vineyard Haven through September, looks at books as the subject matter for artists. The theme comes naturally to gallery owner Mary Etherington, since she studied bookbinding at the Center for Book Arts in New York in the 1970s. Later, as a studio art major at Smith College, Etherington made her first bronze casting of a book.
Now she has brought together nine artists to display their interpretations of books as art. California-based Elena Mary Siff uses Vineyard locales in five collages from her Nimby series inspired by vintage postcards. These charming period pieces contain such familiar Vineyard landmarks as Oak Bluffs's Ocean Park gazebo, artist Thomas Hart Benton, Menemsha boats, and the old A & P building — jumbled pleasingly with dancing girls, monuments like the Eiffel Tower, and accoutrements of busy Island summers.
The late Stella Waitzkin, a New York artist who spent many summers in her West Tisbury studio, is represented by a haunting "Wedding Book." Made of polyresin, it incorporates a classic country couple with fishing rod on the book's cover, and its mottled red, gold, and green colors glow from an internal light source.
Describing her Buchovinan (now part of Austria) heritage, Waitzkin has written: "My great-grandfather was a religious Jew and a scholar. Books were treasured in his house as they are in mine."
Painter and printmaker Michele Ratté has collaborated with longtime friend and bookbinder Mitzi Pratt to create "Abecedary of Woe," a book-like work of art labeled on one side with words like "assumption," "arrogance," "aggression," "annihilation." On the other side is a Pieta Manqué, an image of four men holding the limp body of slain boy.
The two artists explain, "We were struck by the absence of a female presence in what otherwise startlingly resembles a classic (Renaissance) Pieta.
"When we began to think of the attributes that got us (get us) to this sorry state of war, sacrifice and carnage, we realized that many of the words coming to mind began with the letter ‘A.' The idea of an Abecedary of Woe was born."
Also in the exhibit is Pratt's "Bound to be Unbound: Thoughts on Censorship." This handmade book, crisscrossed with cloth ties, will not be finished until the book is filled with viewers' comments. The first page contains a Gunther Grass quote, "The job of a citizen is to keep your mouth open."
An oil painting by Pola Wickham is filled with brightly colored books in a blue-green bookcase. Next to them a woman holds a half-opened blue book. Nearby is "Bound Journals" by Peigi Cole-Jolliffe. This Irish-born artist has spent time on-Island and exhibited her work at Etherington and other Vineyard galleries since 1995. The ethereal "Bound Journals" consists of a delicate birch twig frame. Suspended in it by gold thread is a gauze cask decorated with red, berry-like beads. Inside the cask rest 15 pale, soft-covered notebooks. This work projects the fragility of personal words.
Adriane Herman describes "Containment" as "a series of books I have shrink-wrapped into oblivion. The books enveloped by the protective coating are not new and are all books that I have judged ‘by their covers,' just as we often are judged by those who don't know us."
She also has taken images from old-fashioned "how-to" manuals in "No. 3 (The Betty Bissell Book of Home Cleaning…How to Clean Your House and Everything in It!)" and "No. 4 (Normality and Pathology in Childhood)." One of the funniest is "Gum Care: Spit It Out," portraying a stern teacher with her hand out for a piece of gum. This work is made of Chiclet gum. By recasting these simplistic hortatories, Herman helps the viewer reconsider the whole notion of pop psychology manuals.
Collages by Vineyard native Tobias Shepard include "Untitled (Dictionary Pieces), where words like patchwork/pattern, swan/sweet and sure/surveying are paired to prod the viewer into making visual as well as verbal connections. Shepard's "Arrows" takes arrows from Cronig's paper bags and arranges them into patterns, again shifting conventional perceptions of what function paper serves.
Artist Julie Speed, who grew up in Rhode Island and Connecticut and now lives in Austin, Texas, has appropriated etchings from a damaged Gustav Doré bible to create a series of works that comment powerfully on the impact classical images and doctrines carry. In "Women's Studies," an etching with gouache on chine colle—a process that introduces color and texture into etchings — she reproduces a historical scene of men accosting women in various ways. In "Yellow Leviticus," a man wearing a gothic Venetian pillbox hat has double eyes while a third eye stares out from a typeface background from the third book of the Torah or Old Testament.
In "Sassafras Codex," West Tisbury artist Lucy Mitchell arranges images of 25 leaf specimens from a single sassafras tree. Two of her installations, "Cedar Tree Neck" and "Great Neck Bight," are not actually part of the current exhibit but could be. Like a visual book, each is a glass-covered sample box of objects from a particular part of the Island, arranged and ordered to help the viewer see these artifacts from a new perspective
Taken as a whole, this thought-provoking exhibit illustrates the range and impact of conceptual art. While sometimes thought of as overly intellectual and lacking in warmth, the conceptually based art of these nine artists demonstrates how provocative the combination of books, words, and the visual arts can be.
Brooks Robards is a poet, author, and former college film instructor. She frequently contributes stories on art, film, and poetry to The Times.
|
