Illuminating the Issue: Artists books as Social/Political Critique is a compact exhibition in the UWM Library, installed just outside the Special Collections area on the 4th floor. Max Yela, head of Special Collections, and Alverno College art student Margaux Carini, organize this rich display into a variety of themes touching on important issues in the contemporary landscape.
Gender, race, identity, politics and more are starting points for commentary, but it is the form they take which is most interesting. A book sounds simple enough on the surface — a cover and some pages in between in the most basic form. The artists in this exhibition stretch the concept of a book in many directions, from the simplicity of a single broadside print, to a crafted bag as metaphor, and a host of works stuctured like abstract literary sculptures.
Sarah Peters, Necessary Disclosures, 2003.
Sarah Peters of the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, crafts a series of diminutive nested bowls in Necessary Disclosures (2003). Their fragile appearance belies the weighty issues of the text within. Conceived as symbiotic statements, Peter’s words dwell on a personal relationship, juxtaposed with larger global issues such as economics and Mideast politics. The micro and macro view of the world ever so gently mirror each other, held in delicate tension.
James Allen, Are Apelike Men Our Ancestors?, 2007.
James Allen, an artist from Seattle, Washington, who received his BFA from UWM, recuts and recasts a 1967 creationist treatise into a veritable explosion of delicate figures in Are Apelike Men Our Ancestors?. A butterfly, sheep, a car, horses, not to mention people, are liberated by his “excavation” of the text, transforming flat pages into a lively relief sculpture.
Caren Heft, book (foreground) and broadsheet (background) from If I Should Die: Children Murdered in Wisconsin in 1993.
Artist, gallerist, and publisher Caren Heft of UW-Stevens Point takes a direct, sober approach in If I Should Die: Children Murdered in Wisconsin in 1993 (1993). In book form as well as broadsheets, Heft’s work, part of the Children Don’t Count Project, memorializes in straightforward text the deaths of children under 14 years of age in 1993. The rawness of the paper and dignified clarity of the prints, which record the names, birth and death dates, and causes of death of young victims, are starkly poignant.
As with reading, it is best to take your time with the works in Illuminating the Issue, letting the details of craft and composition sink in. The main drawback to this exhibition is the necessity securing it in display cases. The objects are literally kept at arm’s length, but understandably so. Despite this space between, their messages come through. There is a sense of gravitas in these pieces, as part of the intellectual status of a book is that it is something of longevity; it is tangible and enduring. These works use the significance of this medium for lasting, resonant statements.
Illuminating the Issue: Artists books as Social/Political Critique continues through December 30, 2011.
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FOR MORE ART WITH A BOOKISH BENT…
There are been a number of recent articles about an ongoing art intervention of sorts in Edinburgh, Scotland. An anonymous artist had left a series of exquisite paper sculptures in various venus with messages and a Twitter component.
Here are pictures and articles of these gorgeous things:
Photograph by Chris Scott.
A beautiful photo essay and commentary by Chris Scott about the project: http://thisiscentralstation.com/featured/mysterious-paper-sculptures/
More in the Guardian newspaper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/dec/01/edinburgh-book-sculptures
And from NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/11/29/142910393/the-library-phantom-returns?ft=3&f=111787346&sc=nl&cc=es-20111204
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