Ex-Abs

This article,

Ex-Abs
Committed abstractionists are finding themselves irresistibly drawn to the figure
By Deidre Stein Greben

http://www.artnewsonline.com/currentarticle.cfm?type=feature&art_id=1634

about artists switching from abstraction to figuration and vice-versa, interested me.

One of (the
main) way(s) I want to write about artists’ books is their identity as
an enabling mode of practice. A way for artists to break through and
express themselves.

There are several characters to this:

I: The
artists’ book as a therapy or remedy (or pharmakon, if you will), for
the “sickness” of an uncontained cultural fragment that has to survive
on its own. I’ve been interested in thinking of the book form as a sort
of “in vitro” (“in biblio”? environment where relationships can be
managed in a more controlled way. My entries on temporary structures
elaborate my meaning here a little.

II: The
book as a method of accessing strategies of distribution and
multiplicity. Of course, this could just as easily be said of any
multiple, but there is a depth in books and a ponderous identity to
them that can be interestingly transgressed.

III The
multivocal propensity of books. This is one of the things leveraged in
the “temporary structure” idea. A book has the potential to act as a
matrix for a number of different poetic approaches, types of media,
overlay, argument, array, etc.

IV As
a means of expressing a fully-formed idea that can only be addressed
through a book object. I’ve encountered this idea of the process of
creating books in various forms and, though it has some anecdotal
soundness (such as in the story of “how an artist solved a brief”) , my
initial feeling is that there is a much more complex chicken-and-egg
scenario going on whereby the artist has ideas which are expressed
through the medium, which gives the artist more ideas, etc. It’s also
the case that artists encountering book art for the first time do not
encounter a pristine medium that they can transparently fit to their
own visions, (not that that was ever the case), nor is the artists’
book form sufficiently well-known as to be easily thought of in a
passing way, without some contact, some previous model- and thereby
previous influence- informing the new artist’s comprehension of the
form. This open up the idea of “does the artist make the book, or does
the book-form prescribe the art”.

 

As
I’ve said, I only offer this doubtfulness as an addition to the notion
of “artists finding solutions”. I’m simply not so sure that this
assumption of artists proactively seeking appropriate tools is quite
how things come about. I think it’s more likely that artists find
something, like it, and start to work with it.

 

Again
I’m nagged by doubt though, because I know perfectly that I have ideas
that haven’t become books yet, and that I’m voluntarily allowed a
comfortable dogma to develop where I assume that the way that I express
them will be through books. They needn’t be, I think. But I can
evaluate why I think it is a good idea if they DO become books: the
reasons of “temporary structure” “multiplicity” “multivocality” et al.

 

Anyway,
I found the article interesting because I thought about the artists’
stories in these terms: as a story of enabling, as a timeline of
realizations and the opening up of new strategic possibilities, new
attitudes to what one is doing. Transforming one’s studio practice from
one methodology of encountering and transforming ideas into another.
The idea of the “artist’s story” is sometimes maddening to me because
it often hinges on inaccessible, personal circumstances that I can’t
reproduce for myself: what is more valuable are those moments when an
artist explains, or tries to explain how they decide to do the work
they do. This article, because it describes artist’s attitudes to a
shift in their work, captures some such moments of revelatory
reflection.

 

Artists talk in it of terms of their desires for their work, and the solving of problems by working in a particular way, with a particular method/medium/sensibility/etc: 

 

““I
wanted to do something more personal, to connect with viewers in a more
specific way by using known imagery,” explains [Jonathan] Santlofer,
who admits that his attraction to recognizable images may relate to his
having lost his artwork in a fire. “I had a need to connect with
something more tangible,” he says.”

 

“At
a certain point, I fell too much in love with someone’s ankles,” says
[Pat] Passlof, explaining her temporary decision to abandon figuration
and stop working from a model. “It got in the way, and I had to stop.”

 

I want to get some information from book artists in the same vein.