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Feb 21

Bindings: Interviews with Booksellers, No. 1. City Light’s Paul Yamazaki

This interview is the first in a series of short conversations with booksellers who, through necessity and with creativity and invention, are making a very different kind of space for books in the world. These are booksellers as curators, as collectors, as community organizers, as auteurs even, whose selection is shaped not by algorithms but by multiple, sometimes competing, criteria with the awareness that books are both commodities and culture, that books instigate all kinds of conversations and connections. I hope that these interviews will illuminate something behind the scenes—beyond the usual “printed-page-brick-and-mortar-local-etc. versus digital-e-book-Amazon-etc” debate—to reveal the inner workings of some remarkable bookstores. —Lisa Pearson, publisher, Siglio

City Lights is a historical landmark, a living testament to the Beat Generation, and a destination for both tourists and the San Francisco literary community. How do these things influence how your curate the selection of books at the store?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has always thought of City Lights as being part of a long tradition of resistance and dissent, a beacon of possibility and a place of refuge to consider the long horizon of potential futures. He has always felt it was imperative that City Lights be a place of lively stillness, where the browser/reader could peruse the shelves, select several books and read them at one’s own pace. Between these broad banks of resistance and possibility lie City Lights’ curatorial mission to include works that incite a dissenting imagination. This has been established over decades of thought, discussion, and practice among the entire staff of City Lights who, together, participate in the selection of titles that find a place on our shelves. This three-decades-old practice is an important part of City Lights’ continued relevance and long-term sustainability.

How much do the Beat origins of the store suffuse its current spirit? City Lights seems to have an enduring commitment to poetry. How does this manifest?

The “Beats” are an honored part of the City Lights heritage, but they are only one current in a broad stream of the “barbaric yawp.” Toussaint L’Ouverture, Rimbaud, Nedd Ludd, Soujourner Truth, Joe Hill, Charlie Parker, Fannie Lou Hamer and many others speak with that “barbaric yawp” that inspires us and helps shape our curatorial practice.

Tell us more about the relationship between City Lights and San Francisco, past and present. Does City Lights actively nurture that relationship?

Poet Gary Snyder said “City Lights was one of the suddenly, new great resources in my life. I discovered an array of books published by New Directions Press. They were bringing in European Modernism, Guillaume Appollinaire and all kinds of great stuff – Ezra Pound, (William) Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, D.H. Lawrence, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist theorist. So there was a real strong intellectual connection …”

Fifty-nine years later, I believe City Lights plays a role that is very similar to what Gary Snyder described, as it is still both a resource and a source of inspiration for readers and writers. Shig Murao was Lawrence’s partner at City Lights for over twenty years and the individual who, along with Lawrence, is most responsible for the renown that City Lights enjoys. And the current staff, most notably Elaine Katzenberger, the director of City Lights, and Peter Maravelis, the events coordinator, continue this long tradition of introducing new and forgotten writers to a wider reading public.

Not many bookstores have a section devoted just to Dada and Surrealism, particularly in a prime location across from the front counter. What’s that about?

Dada and Surrealism are part of the broad river of dissent and resistance, and essential “barbaric yawp’. Nancy Peters, the director of City Lights for nearly 30 years and Philip Lamantia, the surrealist poet, created that section in the early 70s and that the staff has continued over many years. Sections like “Commodity Aesthetics” “Stolen Continents”, “Green Politics”, “Muckraking”,” Topographies & Somalogistics” are other examples of sections created and curated by members of City Lights. What we are attempting to do in these sections is to create a dialogue among the books themselves as well as with the potential reader.

5 QUICK QUESTIONS

What’s your favorite book from childhood?
“Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Graham. The Scribner Edition with illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard.

Do you write in your books? What do you use for a bookmark?
Never! I have a drawer full of bookmarks from other bookstores.

What’s the silliest question you’ve been asked at the front desk?
Where is City Lights?

What’s your favorite spot in the store?
Anywhere in the store after 3AM.

What do you do when you’re not reading or working at the bookstore?
Long walks.

And of course: What’s your favorite Siglio book (so far)?
Danielle Dutton’s S P R A W L  and Robert Seydel’s Book of Ruth.

This interview was the work of two Siglio interns, Delia Barnas and Jasmine Francis. The image of City Lights Bookstore was found on gravelandgold.com. The image of Paul Yamazaki was found on southernliterarytrail.org. City Lights Bookstore is located in San Francisco, CA on 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway (North Beach). Look for the next interview at the end of March (or subscribe to the blog to get an email when it posts).

Nov 1

2 Comments

To abstract. To abbreviate. To finally glimpse the whole. (Tantra Song)

Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme collects contemporary abstract Tantric paintings from Rajasthan. Quite different from more familiar and figurative lineages of Tantric art, these paintings are used as a means to shape and focus contemplation in the adepts who paint and use them. (Below, there is first a figurative image followed by a painting from Tantra Song and an excerpt from Jamme’s writings.)

*

I have noticed in the Tantric works how the simplicity of their conventional, geometric forms is complemented by the infinite complexity of their particular execution” water stains, flaws in the handmade paper . . . It’s not just a desire for the antique or a nostalgic patina that makes the incidental marks so important, it’s precisely that ideal forms—forms plumbed from the depths of the mid, of the soul—need to co-exist with randomness and the emptiness of chance. How is it that a symbol of god alone is so dull, but when juxtaposed with a smudge or a smear it comes alive?

—Lawrence Rinder, in his introduction to Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme


KALI

Kali

From Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme:

Imagine. Suddenly, after weeks, months, perhaps years of evoking the Goddess (for example), her arms, legs, her protruding tongue and frightful gaze, all suddenly resolved into a simple triangle pointing downwards.

To abstract. Abbreviate. To finally glimpse the whole.

*

Shakti in the manifestation of Kali, The Black One. According to an ancient treatise: “Just as all names and all forms disappear within Her, all colors disappear within black.” Night, once more, walks on night.


KALI & SHIVA

Kali haunts the cremation ground, and she is often pictured standing on the chest of the ashen white Shiva, who lies still as a corpse. In some images Shiva is ithyphallic and engages with Kali in a form of sexual intercourse called viparitarati or purushayita. In this position the female is on top, taking the active role. This inversion sends a message of the Mother Goddess’s supremacy. According to Shakta and Tantric cosmology, it is the feminine power that creates, sustains and dissolves the universe while the masculine principle is the static substratum. The sexual union of Shiva and Shakti graphically illustrates that ultimately the two are one, beyond all duality.

—David Nelson, The Many Faces of Kali

Kali and Shiva

From Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme:

The eternal and frenetic race of the feminine principle towards its masculine counterpart. Shakti pursuing Shiva…. The triangle of the Goddess is not presented with point downward, as tradition normally dictates, but in full agitation. In time, the triangle should come to actually tremble, vibrate, hover about its lover, its magnet.

*

Indubitable scene of pure love. The Goddess, transfigured, has mounted Shiva. We might claim that the great Tantric mass is here intoned.

Tantra loves such reversals, such inversions. Shiva who had been dark as night has become as pink as a vulva, and she who was pink has reacquired her original color–Kali, The Black One.


VISHNU

From Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme:

The “illustrious fish,” the little blue form that some eccentrics call “the little blue tongue.” One of Vishnu’s ten incarnations descending into the night of our dark world, yet under the seal of energy (the multi-colored spiral, thus having the power to sport all aspects of manifestation, all taste, all color). As if this energy, slightly drunk on its own richness, and turning in reverse, agreed to be guided—in time without time of a painting, by a god become fish.

*

More about Tantra Song on the siglio website. (Use code TANTRA to get 25% off.) Bill Berkson’s interview with Jamme is excerpted here on the siglio blog.

This post was conceived by Siglio intern Casey Reck who researched and brought together of all the elements here. Please note that all excerpts reproduced here—text and images—from Tantra Song are copyrighted. We request that you credit any usage “from Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme, Siglio Press, 2011″ and link back to this blog or the siglio website.

The figurative images of Vishnu and Kali & Shiva can be found with full citations for their sources on Wikipedia. The single image of Kali was located on a blog discussing the origins of the Rolling Stones use of the tongue in their logo!

Oct 26

Seydel-Book-of-Ruth-Also-a-Pharmacology

Error is Arrow: A Conversation about the Work of Robert Seydel at Printed Matter

On October 21, 2011 Printed Matter in New York City hosted an evening celebrating Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel. Senior BOMB Magazine editor and poet Mónica de la Torre helmed a far-reaching and deeply insightful conversation about Seydel’s work with poet Peter Gizzi and artist Richard Kraft, both friends of Seydel since high school and college, respectively. (Bios and event info at the end of the post.)

The audio was recorded on an iphone and begins with Mónica de la Torre speaking just after a short introduction which included Siglio publisher Lisa Pearson reading Seydel’s preface (text below) from the Book of Ruth. After the preface, you can find the images that were referenced during the evening. The audio just below may take a minute or so to download.

PREFACE TO BOOK OF RUTH by Robert Seydel

As my hair dries my mind goes.
—Ruth Greisman

The Book of Ruth is concerned with two main characters, my aunt and uncle, Ruth and Sol Greisman, who were siblings, born in Brooklyn, New York. Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp put in minor appearances as friends to both of them. A fifth character, mostly invisible, is “Robt,” or Robert Cornell, Joseph Cornell’s homebound brother, or myself, nephew, and the “half-wit” of the Book. Neither Ruth nor Sol married; they lived together for the better part of their adult lives in a small apartment in Queens, New York, not far from the Cornell house on Utopia Parkway.

Sol (sometimes Saul) was in real life a veteran of the First World War and suffered, as it was later said, from shell shock. After the War he became a plumber. Ruth was a Sunday painter who worked days in a bank and was active in Hadassah. In the Book the two of them meet Cornell and, through him, Marcel Duchamp. Ruth fell in love with the former, who was, in his own way, as impossible and sealed-off as her brother.

Ruth is the artist in the Book, her work taking the form of mailings to Joseph, various serial and other collages, such as Ten Tiny Collages for Teeny, and journal writings. Her work was first discovered among the boxes of miscellanea in the Joseph Cornell Study Center at The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Later research by family members turned up a treasure trove of material in a garage in suburban Fort Lee, New Jersey. Ruth’s emblem is the hare, Sol’s the worm, or sometimes a star-nosed mole.


IMAGES REFERENCED DURING THE CONVERSATION


Siglio Ephemera: from 5 HARES & 3 RUTHS



One View of Robert Seydel’s Library (photo: Richard Kraft)


Collaged Text

On left, “Moth” and on right, “R. ‘Our Bob’” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel

“Yeg” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel


Seydel + Duchamp

“Also a pharmacology, for marcel” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel and featured in BOMB, Winter 2011

“Pharmacy” by Marcel Duchamp

“Marcel Duchamp, Par-Fume” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel


On Hares & Stains

“Untitled [Hare, Dürer-type]” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel


Seydel’s Desk at Richard Kraft’s Playa del Rey studio



Untitled (Sun) by Robert Seydel


Printed Matter Event Info & Participant Bios

Book of Ruth is available directly from Siglio press. Use code AMHERST for a 15% discount or sign-up for the Siglio mailing list to get special offers and discounts throughout the year. All images and text by Robert Seydel and photographs by Richard Kraft are copyrighted. Please credit any online usage appropriately and link back to this post. Thank you.

Oct 19

Nocturne (for R.S.) and A Ghost Card for Robert


A GHOST CARD FOR ROBERT by Peter Gizzi


What do you see when you see a dress sounding in
deep indigo, a head made of text, a paper halo torn
about the head.

•

What do you see when you see the shape of a hare
and a galaxy, a river and some rushes, when you see
the outline of hare and its positive adrift.

•

What do you see when you read from left to right, a
cartoon boy on a cartoon lawn, arms outstretched,
when you see the word SUN in block capitals over
there, a shaft of whiteout above the hare leaping into
an inked heart into a ghost boy into a green ray into
space.

•

You’ll see the red and blue shift, you’ll see orbiting
patterns, and now you see a woman buried in sepia
with child.

•

There is also a yellow star of construction paper, and
on it, a handwritten plus or a sign, the number 2 in
red ink, illustrations.

•

And what do you see when you see anatomical tubes
spilling paint into diaphanous patterns becoming a
page becoming a book, a wry smile, a dead man, a
spectacled creature and silver temples, a scuffing of
smoke above a magical head.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

An excerpt from NOCTURNE (FOR R.S.) by RICHARD KRAFT

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On October 21, 2011 at Printed Matter in New York City, artist Richard Kraft and poet Peter Gizzi will have a conversation, moderated by BOMB senior editor Mónica de la Torre, about Robert Seydel, his work, process, and influences. (The conversation begins at 6:30 p.m.) More about Robert Seydel’s Book of Ruth can be found at the Siglio website and here on the Siglio blog including an interview and a window into his library and reading.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Nocturne (for R.S.) is a grid of 108 works on paper, currently on display as part of the installation Something With Birds In It by Richard Kraft, at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

“A Ghost Card for Robert” appears in the book Threshold Songs by Peter Gizzi, Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

All works copyrighted.

Oct 13

New Maps by Denis Wood: Barking Dogs May Have Names

Today Design Observer posted an excerpt from Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas by Denis Wood along with new maps by Denis—and images of the original survey forms used to collect the data. Design Observer also has some images of those forms which include categories that account for everything from hanging plants, clothes lines, lawn furniture, evidence of children and auto repair, to miscellaneous yard and porch “funk”.

The map of “Barking Dogs” was made using the data collected during the “Sound Walk” map (in Everything Sings), but the map (here below) of “Dogs” was collected separately. One aspect of Denis’s subversion of traditional cartography is to replace the uniform with the individual: just as he photographed the actual pumpkins on each porch for his Jack O’ Lantern map, he locates the dogs, often by name.

Copyright Denis Wood, 2011.

Oct 10

A truly dirty rotten book. A filthy weird book.

9-27-2011

A few months ago my daughter 14 years old was given a book for her birthday from my 55 year old nephew. My daughters name is Nancy. She was given “the Nancy Book” By Joe Brainard and it was published by Siglio Press Co. My nephew purchased this book on Craig’s list. He had no idea that is was a filthy weird book. My daughter has a collection of Nancy & Sluggo things and books by Ernie Bushmiller. This book was discusting — I showed the drawings and foto’s to my friends and their reaction was the same as mine. The book was wrapped in cellophane so we were unaware it was a truly dirty rotten book. Can you imagine a 14 year old girl getting a book like that for her birthday gift. I know Ernie Bushmiller has died, he would be astounded that this Joe Brainard copied his comic strip and made such trash out it.

I can not understand how you and your press company would publish such filth. The price of this book was $39.95. This was not works of art.

Aug 28

The Book as Refuge, Beacon, Nexus, and Dissent: Interview with Lisa Pearson, Part 1

This is a short excerpt of an interview conducted by Thomas Evans that gives a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at Siglio. Artbook/D.A.P. just published part one of the interview. Part two will be published later in September.

ARTBOOK: I’ll reluctantly forgo a digression on the topic of Romanian monasteries and ask you instead about starting up Siglio. The press made a splash with its debut publication, Joe Brainard’s The Nancy Book (2008), with lots of reviews and press. How did the book come to be Siglio’s first book, and how did it come about?

LISA: I’ll stay focused! No Romania. (Too bad!) I started the press by writing to individual artists and writers whose work I deeply admired, whose work influenced my editorial vision for the press in some way, and/or who had a particular work I imagined other publishers would find unwieldy, “unpublishable” even. Each of those letters took hours (days, even!), and they jumpstarted a number of projects. The Nancy Book was simply first out of the gate. There was absolutely no strategy here, only serendipity.

After I wrote to him, Ron Padgett—who makes all of the creative, editorial decisions for Joe Brainard’s estate—met me in the middle of March at this tiny, windowless restaurant at the back of the Lithuanian Cultural Center on the Lower East Side. We were the only ones there, and we just hashed out the book over coffee. Six and a half months later The Nancy Book was on press and released just over a year from that initial meeting. There were other possibilities for a Brainard book certainly, but we both really liked putting together a book that Brainard himself had already given a title to (there were two “Nancy” books—one collaboration with Ron from Ted Berrigan’s C Comics; the other a suite of twenty “If Nancy” drawings that included more well-known pieces like “If Nancy Was an Ashtray,” and “If Nancy Was a Boy”). It was also important to both of us that the book contain a lot of unknown and unpublished works, and we thought that—though “Nancy” was only one of many facets of Brainard’s work—this would attract new audiences to his work.

So, I’m not sure The Nancy Book was a “splash” but people really do love this book. And that people’s first association with Siglio was through Brainard was very potent. Brainard was a part of one the richest collaborative communities in twentieth-century America, the New York School, and particularly Brainard’s generation was fueled by real and enduring conversations across art and literature. Brainard’s own work is rich with play, a sense of joy and wonder, but it is also incisive with an extraordinary visual sophistication. And it’s utterly unpretentious (and obsessive, which I love). And finally, his work is not nearly as widely known and appreciated as it should be. All of these things set excellent precedents for what might follow in future Siglio titles. Behind the scenes, too, I got an excellent start. The love and goodwill surrounding Brainard just rubbed off: people were unbelievably kind and willing to help. But my luck was greatest in getting to work with Ron on the first book. He was very generous in teaching me things that I would’ve learned through much, much harder lessons any other way.

ARTBOOK: That’s a lovely tale. Did other Siglio books come from this first round of letters?

LISA: Torture of Women by Nancy Spero did, and I’ve got two projects in the works—one likely to come out next year—that also originate in these letters. I also wrote to Louise Bourgeois then too, and while that didn’t result as book, she gave me permission to publish “He Disappeared Into Complete Silence,” which is a cornerstone piece in It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers that’s out this May.

ARTBOOK: You’ve just posted a great essay on your new Siglio blog, in which you cite an early samizdat copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being that was circulating prior to its ‘official’ publication (and which I imagine you encountered on your aforementioned trip to Prague?) as “something of a totem for Siglio.” You describe it as “an act of resistance to the literal, the authoritarian and the facile, as the result of undeterred ambition to share a work of art that might otherwise remain unseen and unread, and as a testament to the ‘book’ as refuge, dissent, beacon, and nexus.” Siglio’s publication of Torture of Women seems like a great example of this stance, and a beautiful production to boot.

LISA: (Just a quick clarification: The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published—just not in Czechoslovakia–first in France in 1984 and then widely translated. The samizdat copy I read—yes, on my first trip to Prague in 1988—was in English. I don’t know if there was a copy being passed around in Czech, but from conversations with friends, it seemed as if censored literature was often read in foreign languages.)

So Siglio’s “translation” of Spero’s Torture of Women to book form absolutely has that in mind. Spero’s own work certainly embodies acts of resistance. As an early feminist artist who worked in relative obscurity until her 50s, Spero persisted when the dominant culture refused to listen or to look. While Torture of Women definitely transcends its time, we live in a culture that, thirty years later—as torture, human rights abuses, and gross injustices are being debated—makes this work persistently topical.

For those who don’t know Torture of Women, it’s an epic piece, composed of 14 panels totaling 125 feet, that juxtaposes bulletin-typed and block-printed testimony by victims of torture, news reportage, and ancient creation myths with quite startling imagery drawn from Egyptian, Sumerian, and Babylonian art without making torture visually explicit. And I’ll take a moment here to stress that Siglio’s publication is a “translation” because this is a work that has a kind of impact in space that can’t be replicated on the page—which is why so much of Spero’s work is so hard to reproduce effectively. (Here is another small act of resistance: imagine a book that does an artist’s vision justice by creating a parallel work rather than collecting images which simply document the fact of the work’s existence.) The question here was: what can the book do that the exhibition space can’t? And the answer is that the book can provide time, a shift from looking to looking and reading. Here is complex, multi-layered narrative (of words and images) that deserves to be truly read, a kind of engagement virtually impossible in an exhibition space. We collaborated with Nancy to reproduce the piece (with shifts in scale, repetition, various framing/cropping, etc.) so that it could have another life on the page—and a wider audience. (And there is an interview with the designer on the BOMBlog that goes into detail about the process of translation/designing.)

But I also say in this essay that Siglio is not a political press. I am interested in many different kinds of acts of resistance and subversion, in the book as refuge and beacon and nexus (in addition to dissent). And this manifests in what I choose to publish and how I publish it.

Read the entire interview here.

Aug 17

1 Comment

Affinities: Arranging One’s Books, No. 2 (Robert Seydel)

I walk with a library at my ear.
—from “Flowers & Formulas” in BOOK OF RUTH by Robert Seydel

Artist and writer Robert Seydel, author of the Book of Ruth (Siglio, 2011), lived in Amherst, Massachusetts just around the corner from the Emily Dickinson house. Like her (and he revered her), he was reclusive and spent his time reading and working, both as natural and necessary as eating. His three-room apartment was on the first floor of an old house, and it was brimming with thousands upon thousands of books. His library was a marvel, a work of art itself. His shelves had rows of books two deep—pull out a book and there was another behind it, and there were stacks of books everywhere—on top of the fridge, next to the stove, in the closet, on every available surface. In his notebooks, he made lists of the books he was reading—twenty, thirty, forty at a time.

Here’s a list from December 12, 2008.

1. Ashes of Rings, Mary Butts
2. Terminal Curses, Stephen Barber
3. The Dairy of Vaslav Nijinsky
4. Madness & Modernism, Louis Sass
5. The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth, Valery Larbaud
6. The Diary of A.O. Barnabooth, Larbaud
7. Armed w/ Madness, Mary Butts
8. History of Madness, Michel Foucault (dropped)
9. My Wars Are Laid Away in Bks: The Life of ED, Alfred Habegger
10. Joan Miro: Painting & Anti-Painting, 1927-1933, Anne Umland
11. Tales & Sketches, Library of America ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne
12. In the Hand of the Holy Spirit: The Visionary Art of J.B. Murray, Mary Padgelek
13. Jess: A Grand Collage, 1951-1993, Michael Auping
14. The Figure of Beatrice, Charles Williams
15. From Altar to Chimney-piece, Mary Butts
16. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
17. A Tall, Serious Girl, George Stanley
18. The Macedonian, Mary Butts
19. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose (LOA edition)
20. Other Traditions, John Ashbery
21. Letters of Wallace Stevens
22. The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow, Opal Whiteley/Hoff
23. Young Robert Duncan, Ekbert Fass (dropped)
24. The Rd to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes
25. The Crystal Cabinet, Mary Butts
26. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen
27. St Francis of Assisi, G.K. Chesterton
28. Windows Walls Yards Ways, Larry Eigner
29. My Unwritten Bks, George Steiner
30. The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
31. The Posthuman Dada Guide, Andrei Codrescu
32. New Goose, Lorine Niedecker (again)
33. The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A Symons (again)-(dropped previously)
34. New Collected Poems, George Oppen
35. Erwin Blumenfeld: Dada Montages, 1916-1933, Helen Adkins
36. Borrowed Love Poems, John Yau
37. Hadrian the Seventh, Fr. Rolfe

The following images are from a “library portrait” of Robert made by his friend, the artist Richard Kraft. They are included in a booklet published by Siglio in the most recent edition of ephemera. (Double-click to see an enlarged view of each image in which many of the book spines are legible.)

Aug 10

The Humming State of Not-Quite-This-and-Not-Quite-That

Earlier this summer, Siglio published a collection of image+text work by women artists and writers entitled It Is Almost That. It includes twenty-six works—reproduced in their entirety or as substantial excerpts—by artists and writers whose work transcends typical categories and genres. A list of contributors is below the images, and you can find more information about the book here as well as current reviews here.

Over the next few months, I’ll be posting special features on It Is Almost That artists and writers, including exclusive interviews, resource hubs of information, as well as small portfolios of works (both published and unpublished). This entry is the first introduction to the book and includes an excerpt from my afterword as well as a portfolio of single images from select artists and writers in It Is Almost That.
—Lisa Pearson, editor

Excerpt from the afterword:
IT IS ALMOST THAT: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

It is almost that evokes the humming state of the not-quite-this-and-not-quite-that. What is it? Almost that. The word almost seems key to the not-quite, suggesting it is left wanting. But what is it? Almost that. That is where the smallness resides: it is a thing that accepted categories cannot contain, familiar taxonomies cannot order, one medium cannot express, a single language cannot circumscribe; something, in other words, that can never be just that—fully one thing or another, wholly belonging here or there. Rather, it is something mutable, indeterminate, ineffable. And the phrase it is almost that, in its indeterminacy, signals the many things something may or may not be—and may or may not become—simultaneously. It is almost that points to the inverse of lack—to boundlessness.

It is almost that is a phrase from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s eponymous work included in this collection. She uses it to set a syntactical inquiry into motion in which relationships are constantly shifting and small white letters momentarily hold inscrutable fields of black. I use it as if to chart a constellation, selecting a discrete number of stars from the infinite field of the night sky, connecting them in unpredictable ways, in order to see something that might not otherwise be seen. It is almost that titles this collection not only to invoke the resistance to categorization and accepted order, but also to acknowledge the expanse, the limitless possibility of what one might still see: look at the sky again and, by force of imagination and concentration, another constellation emerges.

In their unique use of image and text, in their own expansion of the given conventions and paradigms, each individual work included in this collection lives in the visual and in the literary but also beyond them. These are works that are often relegated to a single world—art or literature—and thus they are “read” in that particular way within that particular context by that particular audience. In the contraction to that, they are partly (almost) visible to one world, often entirely invisible to another. There are differences between seeing a work of art and reading it, between reading a literary work and seeing its visual presence within the space of the page. These are works that are truly hybrid, in which language and image are inextricable and thus must be seen and read—not two separate acts but multiple ones.

Read the entirety of the essay here.
All rights reserved. Text © 2011 Lisa Pearson and Siglio Press. All images below © the artists.

FROM “TRIXIE, THE CONNOISSEUR” (1975-1978) BY DOROTHY IANNONE

FROM “THE NAM” (1997) BY FIONA BANNER

FROM “A HOUSE OF DUST” (1968) BY ALISON KNOWLES

FROM “A FLOATING WEFT / WOVEN” (2010) BY ANN HAMILTON

FROM “IT IS ALMOST THAT” (1977) BY THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA

FROM “DOMESTIC PEACE” (1971-1972) BY ELEANOR ANTIN

IT IS ALMOST THAT includes work by:
Eleanor Antin
Bambanani Women’s Group
Fiona Banner
Louise Bourgeois
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Cozette de Charmoy
Ann Hamilton
Jane Hammond
Susan Hiller
Dorothy Iannone
Bhanu Kapil & Rohini Kapil
Helen Kim
Alison Knowles
Ketty La Rocca
Bernadette Mayer
Adrian Piper
Charlotte Salomon
Geneviève Seillé
Molly Springfield
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Washing My Hands in Sand: An Interview with Franck André Jamme by Bill Berkson

Bill Berkson: How did you first discover this type of Tantric art?

Franck André Jamme: Well, very first in a small catalogue from an exhibition held in 1970 at Le Point Cardinal Gallery in Paris. At a bookseller’s stall, a few years later, the names of Henri Michaux and Octavio Paz (who had supplied a poem and a short essay, respectively, to the thin volume) drew me like a magnet. There were also some books by Ajit Mookerjee. All that I found in Paris. Then, later, in 1982, I went to Nepal and on the road I actually stopped for a short week in India, hoping I could see and perhaps find some of these abstract Tantric paintings. I saw the “Mookerjee Room” in the National Museum of Art in Delhi but I couldn’t find any pieces. In fact I just wanted to go to Nepal because I was very interested in Tibetan people, loved Milarepa and Drukpa Kunley (a major author of medieval Himalayan culture, from Bhutan). Frankly, I was not interested in this particular school of Buddhism, but rather in the physical and cultural similarities between the Tibetans and North American Indians, for example their folk dances, shamanic practices and even the fact that some Tibetan men actually look like Geronimo or Cochise. It was just before I helped René Char edit his complete works. In fact René offered me this trip. He was also a Milarepa fan and he loved the idea of going to see the Tibetan people. At that time, entry to Tibet was forbidden and the only way was to go to Nepal where there were very big camps of Tibetan refugees around Katmandu.

BB: This was the first of many trips to India for you . . .

FAJ: Yes, so many, more than fifteen now. I made my next trip in 1984. Char’s complete works were finished. I stopped for something like two long weeks in India. I seriously tried to find some abstract Tantric paintings. I asked everywhere I could, but in vain. After these two first voyages to India, I decided in 1985 to dedicate a new trip—this time, just in Rajasthan—exclusively to searching for these pieces. I was very curious about them; they were so close to our modern or even contemporary art, from Malevich and Paul Klee to Agnes Martin and Daniel Buren, and many others. It was strange that such modern, occidental-looking patterns already existed in India during the 17th century, and they were so simple, so powerful, so quietly and naturally abstract, so near, as well, to my own field, which was already something like poetry. Poetry is so often like that, isn’t it? Playing with words, using words in such a natural abstract way.

So I arrived in Delhi, spent four or five days there, and found myself one morning in front of a bus for Jaipur. I immediately felt the bus was not the right one, but I was with my wife and quite a lot of luggage and stress, so reluctantly I decided to board this bus. On the road, thirty kilometers after leaving Delhi, first the driver ran into a small farmer’s cart. He argued half an hour with the peasant, finally gave him some bills, and we started off again. By then, the driver was looking really tired; perhaps he had driven his “deluxe” bus for some days without really resting, I don’t know. I had chosen a seat in the front row (I wanted to shoot some photos on the road, quietly). Another thirty kilometers later, suddenly I saw a big truck coming from the opposite direction and heading straight toward our bus. After that, I have just bits and pieces of memory. I experienced several comas. Later I learned that I had been brought in another bus—because I had a ticket for Jaipur, I had to go to Jaipur—to the Jaipur General Hospital with nine fractures, and also that seven people around me on the bus had died. I spent two days in this hospital without any special first aid. I remember hearing that the hospital didn’t have any anesthetic. Then my wife called the French embassy in Delhi. They sent somebody who put me on one plane Jaipur-Delhi, then another Delhi-Paris, in a sort of hammock. I spent three weeks in a Parisian hospital, then six months at home in a hospital bed. In this bed I wrote the book called The Recitation of Forgetting that John Ashbery translated almost twenty years later.

BB: A silver lining to all that darkness . . .

FAJ: Yes—fortunately. But there followed two bad years, not just for my broken body but also for my mind. It was really too difficult to live with the memory of this failure. Like when you have fallen off your horse, the best is to get up and ride again as soon as possible. After many discussions with friends, especially a doctor, I decided to go back to India. I went to a friend in Udaipur. I spoke with him a lot, and he told me that perhaps it would be a good idea to go and see an astrologer and soothsayer whom his family had known for a long time. I went and saw this strange man. He just asked me my astrological coordinates and what I wanted to know. I replied that I just wanted to know if I could try to continue my research on these abstract Tantric paintings. He told me to come back in two days time. When I came back, there was something new in the room, a very big bowl full of sand. He asked me to wash my hands in this sand, and he then read the sand during, you know, fifteen minutes, which seemed to me an eternity. Then he told me something like, “In fact, you are a lucky boy.” Here, I’m afraid, I smiled. “You have paid your tribute to the goddess. You can carry on now with your research. You can find some of these paintings, you can discover what they mean, you can show them abroad, you can even sell them. But after what has already happened, we must be very prudent. If you really want to continue your research, okay, but you will have to follow very strictly two rules. First, when you go and visit a tantrika family, you must go only alone or with someone you love—to be clear, for example, not with your best friend or your sister or your new girlfriend. The second caution is regarding the possibility of showing and selling the pieces. You can show and sell them, okay—but for just enough to make your living.” Then he added, “With these conditions you could be of great help to this small, wonderful art, in which so few people in India take an interest.”

Interview above and images and text below from Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme, published by Siglio Press, forthcoming October, 2011. All material is copyrighted. Please credit any online usage “from Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme, Siglio Press, 2011″ and link back to this blog or the Siglio website.

The twenty-eight dazzling tongues of Kali. (In the Vedas, Kali is also the seventh tongue of the god Agni, Fire.) Kali extends her red tongue, its repetition inducing a true intoxication.

The eternal and frenetic race of the feminine principle towards its masculine counterpart. Shakti pursuing Shiva. Motion seeking stillness. The triangle of the Goddess is not presented with point downward, as tradition normally dictates, but in full agitation. In time, the triangle should come to actually tremble, vibrate, hover about its lover, its magnet.

The notion of time or its tracks. Another interpretation: instantaneous emancipation and prosperity. For the tantrika, awareness of time's powerful stride can induce a sudden liberation, giving rise to a richness–especially within.

Simply the king. The Shiva linga, the original representation of the deity. Sign among signs (in Sanskrit linga means “sign”). In the form of a man’s member joyful, erect, and sometimes so impassioned that, in the ritual, according to André Padoux, “it must be continually watered to cool it down.” . . . A body surrounded by vapors–another clear sign that a flame burns eternally within.

The purer the consciousness, the bluer and clearer the sky.

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