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Archive for August, 2011

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 It was also important to both of us that the book contain a lot of unknown and unpublished works, and we thought that—though “Nancy” was only one of many facets of Brainard’s work—this would attract new audiences to his work.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

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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
Cole Swensen & Shari DeGraw
Suzanne Treister
Erica Van Horn & Laurie Clark
Carrie Mae Weems
Hannah Weiner
Sue Williams
Unica Zürn

Aug 3

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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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