rsverso 11A magazine for the Book as a Work of ArtEdited by Alan Loney / October 2015 issn 2205-4405 (print)

Alan hands me a box, marked Arete Books, AbeBooks, andAustralia Post. I open it and it contains another box, darkblue, with on its spine or back, a rectangle of paper namingthe contents: Alchimie du Verbe, assembling. The As have it.

The blue box is covered in fabric with thickened horizon-tal lines in the weave, lines of texture in the textile. The boxopens to reveal a wad of folios and an introductory brochurelisting the participating artists and an editorial by Peter Rut-ledge Koch, noting the project’s genealogy in archaic alpha-bets and avant-garde practices of assembled publications.

The book celebrates the 5th codex Symposium, the 10thanniversary of the Codex Foundation, and the 500th anniver-sary of the death of Aldus Manutius (1449 – 1515). Here, thenumerics mix with pragmatics. There are 30 participatingartists, with four pairs, giving 26 works. The artists are listedalphabetically, but there are slips in the structure. Some let-ters are unrepresented, others overrepresented. There are 26lettered copies of the book: I am looking at copy O. And thisis Alan’s copy – Alpha and Omega all over again. Once more,pragmatics hang around the perfection. There are 40 num-bered copies for sale, and four hors de commerce.

For the record, the participating artists are Walter Bach -inski and Janis Butler, Victoria Bean, Karen Bleitz, CaroleeCampbell, Aaron Cohick, Crispin & Jan Elsted, Nacho Gal-lardo, Martha Hellion, Sarah Horowitz, Mikhail Karasik,Peter Rutledge Koch, Patricia Lagarde, Clemens-TobiasLange, Alan Loney, Peter Malutski & Ines von Ketelhodt,Russell Maret, Rick Myers, Didier Mutel, Robin Price, HarryReese & Sandra Liddell Reese, Dmitry Sayenko, VeronikaSchapers, Gaylord Schanilec, Johannes Strugalla & Fran-coise Despalles, Richard Wagener, and Sam Winston.

Someone has opened this box before me because thefolios are not in alphabetical order – or maybe that’s the waythey were packed. Here is the first bookish thing about thispublication: there is a linear order, numerical or letter-basedassembled order. Also, a reading order: I take out five of thefolders (because there are five vowels, I have five fingers,there are five Chinese elements and because four doesn’tseem like enough of a sample). I note the similarity to look-ing into a book, where there is a fixed sequence of text andpages, but where the book can be opened anywhere, andread in any order, to any amount.

Alchemy in 26 partsAlex Selenitsch

VERSO 5

Victoria Bean’s is the first contribu-tion I look at. It’s a folded grey cardwith a seven-line text in caps, letter-press in transparent ink and dustedwith fingerprint powder, shiny silveron the grey. The text describes the

‘selfies’ taken by young car thieves, the theft of Bean’s car initiating theprint. But not just the theft: a visit to the Police included a demonstration of their forensic techniques. Finger-prints are a cliché of our forensic infra-structure, and here they are shown tobe Print Family.

Karen Bleitz is next. (Q: how did Iget two successive Bs in a random pick?A: the chance of coincidence is there as much as un-coincidence.) There is a warning on the back of the folder/wrapper: Small Magnets Inside. At mysecond sample, non-paper/ink objectsare already in the mix. Bleitz’s workconsists of two double page spreads in card, each with a grid on the left sideand a small metal object on a stringreaching out from the other page whenthe spread is opened. It’s an image ofstitching, as if the stitching were thetext, not just the binding.

Then, Martha Hellion. Hellionprints the poem that Alchimie du Verbe

comes from on a transparent folio, on a page adjacent to a faded image of anarched doorway. This is held inside asti¬er folio of silver background withblackish overhead foliage, and a hori-zontal scatter of capital letter vowels inArthur Rimbaud’s famous five colours.The poem and the arched door areentrances to the constellation of vow-els: letters against leaves, which insome traditions are the source ofwritten signs.

Rick Myers’ piece is simple anddirect. It is a trace of a real event which

describes itself: sound / of a / pencil / writing - handwritten in pencil, page by page. Of course, for me, there is alsothe sound of the paper being turned.The Zen-ish touch continues when Inote that a pencil is held in one hand.Myers notes that ‘text, medium andresistance of the page may be poeticallyunified by the reader’.

Peter Rutledge Koch’s work is afolio of eight pages, each with a page-filling red capital X. On six of the pages,the Xs are packed with tiny words, ‘over4,100 words that contain the letter X,extracted from a dictionary of over235,000 words’, as the colophon putsit. The colophon also lists nineteen pos -sible meanings for the letter X: theserange from the purely alphabetical tothe semiotic and visual. The letter X isone of about eight or nine letters thateasily slip from writing to drawing, andin Koch’s piece it becomes a geometriccontainer for objects which contain thesame geometry in a tiny fragment: theunknown in macro and micro.

So, five folios have already extendedmy notions of print. I feel I must selectanother five, and wonder if the exten-sions will continue. Bachinski/Butler,Gallardo, Lange, Maret and Campbellcome out of the stack.

Work by Johannes Strugalla and Francoise Despalles, Germany. Digital prints made of workin mixed media.

Work by Peter Malutzki and Ines von Ketelhodt, Germany. Letterpress & offset lithography.

6 VERSO

Walter Bachinski and Janis Butlerare one of the four pairs of artists toproduce a single folio. Their work is a double folio, one inside the other.The outer one has a torso profile withwriting like body tattoos on each page,the inner one has two images of male(green) and female (red) head andhands with red hands making/touch-ing the green head on the left side, and green hands making/touching the red head on the right side. Derivedfrom D H Lawrence’s poem ‘Thingsmen have made’, the double foliomerges concepts of touch and lan-guage through a reduction linocut.

Nacho Gallardo’s folio is a setting of Ezra Pound’s ‘Ancient Music’ (a satirical take on the tradi-tional ‘Sumer is Icumen in’), done in two pages, each time distributingthe text through a fluid abstraction of a standing figure. The link to Apolli-naire’s calligrammes is obvious. Onefigure is in capitals which flesh out the body, the lettering reminiscent ofHaight-Ashbury graphics of the 1960s.The other figure uses lines of text asoutlines, as if the language was cloth-ing the figure. There is a slip of paper in the folio to note a spelling error onthe colophon wrapper, but no erratafor the ‘errors’ of omission and spell -ing in the artist’s setting of the text.

Clemens-Tobias Lange’s work is afolio within a folio. A grey/silver some-what wrinkly folded folio is presentedwith an image of Christ on the left andan image of Buddha on the right: theseflaps open to reveal a view between twosphere-topped obelisks framing thesea across to the horizon. Some kind of absolute is being hinted at, and thisis perhaps the theme of the Italian textby Domenico Brancale. This workdemands a knowledge of Italian to befully taken in. For illiterates like me,the piece appears to separate word andimage in a very traditional manner.

Russell Maret’s work, by contrast,is totally concerned with image, orrather, with the emergence of suchfrom an optical matrix – with the fur-ther provocation that what emergesis not imagery, but language itself. Athree by five grid of separated squaresis evenly spread over a backgroundusing the same parallel line hatchingas that within the squares. The hatch-ing of the squares and the backgroundare displaced in various ways to pro-duce an optical shimmer, in which thesquares sometimes continue the back-ground hatching and other times breakfrom it. On the fourth page, the individ-ual squares change the hatching direc-tions inside themselves, and capital let-ters begin to appear, some very obvious,others not so. In the spirit of the shim-mer and di~cult focus, these don’tappear to have a simple order or wordstructure: I do my best but cannot closeall of the patterns into letters. This is animage of pre-language, incomplete,setting out its future realisation.

In contrast to Maret’s geometricand perceptual work, Carolee Camp-bell’s piece is blatantly old-fashionedin every way. She has set an encyclopae-dia entry on the world-tree Yggdrasil in Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift type

(designed by Rudolf Koch in the early1920s), but which I know colloquiallyas ‘gothic’. A couple of faux-Celticwoodcuts of the world-tree are inte-grated into the lettering. As I look atthis work, I am puzzled by it, not by the ancient motif of the Great Ash Tree,but by its presentation as a near perfectpost-medieval manuscript. Yet in thiscompany, it’s a useful provocation.Maret’s work copies Op Art from the1960s, Gallardo’s points to the Cubiststart of the 20th century in France, the X in Koch’s work goes back to theSuprematists, also a century ago. All of these, it seems to me, conduct a conversation with their forebears, that is, engage in meta-commentarythat places the now against what camebefore. Does a reproduction or simul -acrum do this? Making a perfect Mingvase, or painting a Botticelli, or writinganother Handel Concerto Grossomight be a useful way of learning howit was done, but this is a gain for theartist, and has nothing for the rest ofthe social ecology that constitutes art.

A quick shuffle through the otherfolios inAlchimie du Verbebrings outanother pair of works that illustratethis issue. Jan and Crispin Elsted’ssetting of Elinor Wylie’s poems as a

VERSO 7

Work by Mikhail Karasik, Russia. Silkscreen print.

simple (!) book is like many other well-printed books – but it is just a book,a continuation of the idea that printand words (and poems, and books)should be invisible vehicles for thewriter’s ideas. Against this, MikhailKarasik’s silkscreen folio is a tributeto Ilya Zdan evich’s remarkable work,in which language is always gettingin the way. But Karasik’s work is not acopy: Zdanevich never produced suchpowerful figure/ground pages: here thetribute leads you back to Zdan evich’swork, but also allows you to ponderon the issue put forward by Karasik:where does the letter dwell? Whiteprint on black paper gives letters whichlook like white paper showing through– foreground and background together,utterance and its time/place fused.

Without listing and describing allthe folios, I can sense one of the mainqualities of this collection, which sitsat one edge of the concept of anthology.

This is clearly described by the word‘assembling’. In contrast to the con-tent-driven noun of a traditional anthol-ogy, which usually is historical, geo-graphic, thematic or formal, ‘assem-bling’ is a verb, to paraphrase Buck-minster Fuller, whose heyday was con-current with assemblage’s acceptanceas a cultural practice. Assemblage isa method of putting a diverse range of works together with a minimum (if any) of restrictions. Mostly thesehave been restrictions of format: size of paper, number of pages, edition. In fact, apart from the Alchimie title, this has been the case for this publica-tion. What the method produces is anedition of identical copies which have a heterogeneous texture, a kind ofcrazy quilt in the American tradition,where an enabling structure allowsindividual di¬erence to blossom.

This brings me back to the alphabetand its curious number, which is 26,

and its curious order, which we know by heart. It is one of the perfectways of assembling a heterogeneouscohort, being without an internalstructure, but giving the impression of being a whole, because there are no more letters than those in the alphabet. Everything can be classifiedand listed, and then found again,through its standardised sequence of letters. In a data-obsessed culture it is a fundamental. But its arbitrarysequence is a kind of residual skeletonof what was once a shaman’s compan-ion of symbols and glyphs, or thetraces of minerals and fluids of analchemist’s laboratory. Because theartists in this assembling have allprinted their own folios, in their ownways, the interaction with matter andprocess seems to have ensured that a materialist magic comes through,able to renew language, and print, in profound and delightful ways.

8 VERSO

Work by Aaron Cohick, United States. Letterpress.