Text on display - Johanna Drucker's 'The Next Word: Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1999 by Nola Tully

The Next Word: Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning Neuberger Museum of Art Purchase College, State University of New York Purchase, New York September 20, 1998-January 31, 1999

The Next Word: Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning by Johanna Drucker Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 1998 32 pp./$12.95 (sb).

Artist and historian Johanna Drucker has culled an extensive and eclectic assembly of works from the fields of visual art, artists' books, graphic design and visual poetry for "The Next Word: Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning." One recoils from the heft of such an unwieldy title not to mention the reciprocity among these broad categories (as the title implies). "The blurring of our boundaries suggests the shape of new terrain" - an aphorism from Bruce Mau's offset print poster Rice University School of Architecture (1997) - could be the show's motto. In her catalog essay, Drucker makes the point that cultural changes and technological advances have helped to blur the lines that once defined mediums and genres. She suggests that it is the job of the viewer to maintain a distinction between these boundaries through looking, reading and creating meaning.

Of primary concern to "The Next Word" is the issue of "text and/as image" in contemporary culture. Here, the artist's book serves as both a point of entry and a point of departure for examining ways in which text and image come together. In her 1995 book, The Century of Artists' Books, Drucker calls it "the quintessential 20th-century art form,"(1) one that "synthesizes the traditions of the craft of the book, the visions of the fine press and independent publishing, and the conceptual artistic idea of the multiple in all its variations into a form which did not exist before."(2) The artist's book offers the possibility for dialogue between various mediums, most commonly photography, design, writing, offset camera work, computer work and offset printing. Images may overlap and/or run parallel to one another, writing may be crossed out or superimposed and sequential rhythms can create a temporal effect. Throughout the exhibition, from billboards to video screens to canvasses with text as image, the viewer can trace a debt to the artist's book. As technology becomes more available, as mass media impinges on art, the distinctions between art and commerce become more subtle.

In an essay entitled "Diversity in American Art from 1975 to the Present," Drucker writes, "[T]here is no formal value distinct from the cultural network within which that value is produced."(3) Brad Freeman's synthesis of mass media, popular culture, politics, history and personal experience in MuzeLink (1997) exemplities Drucker's philosophy of contingency - no work of art is independent of its context. Images of a headless corpse after a bike accident or of a child with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) are juxtaposed with natural and industrial landscapes and become the ground upon which the shift between private and public takes place.

As mentioned in the catalog in nearly every case, many of the books exhibited have an autobiographical aspect that one suspects is crucial to their inclusion in "The Next Word." Clifton Meador's Folly (1990) requires the reader to look between the folded pages to find the hidden text, a not-so-user-friendly approach. Biblical words that hark back to the folly of the human condition lie between the folded pages and can be read when the viewer forces the pages apart. High Tension (1993) by Phillip Zimmermann is a kaleidoscope of late twentieth-century words and images - "technology scares you" is juxtaposed with images of pills and coffee cups. Joan Lyons's My Mother's Book (1993) is a dialogue, past and present, about her mother's life - a personal history. In the seriously oversized Book of Fires (1990) by Murray Zimiles, expressionistic lithographs and text tell the story of the burning of a synagogue in Poland in the late 1930s. Tataria Kellner's B-112266: Fifty Years of Silence (1992) is die cut to incorporate a sculpted, tattooed arm into the book. The text, handwritten on the left-hand page and typed on the right, is a transcription of Kellner's father's story of his imprisonment in a German concentration camp. For the month of September, Printed Matter, the New York City gallery for artists' books founded in 1976, featured books by artists included in "The Next Word" that could be handled or purchased. This was a welcome extension of the exhibit as at the Neuberger most of the books were in vitrines.

In Corona Palimpsest (1995) by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, new media intersects with book form. The piece exists in two volumes. One book is suspended, anchored to the ceiling and floor by heavy chains. The book is open to reveal a hole through which appears a video screen with an image of two eyes. The other volume is placed on a desk, situated on a platform made of books onto which the viewer walks. Inserted into this second book of printed images is another small video screen with scrolling words. However, the mere insertion of the video does not guarantee integration and in this case the technology dominates. Although the piece may work conceptually or metaphorically there is no visual synthesis.