Crossing the Boulevard

Afterimage, May-June, 2004 by Johanna Drucker

CROSSING THE BOULEVARD

BY WARREN LERHER AND JUDITH SLOAN New york., W.W. Norton, 2003 $19.95 (hb), with CD

In a project inspired by the changing cultural landscape of the neighborhood in which they live. Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer have assembled personal narratives elicited from dozens of recent immigrants and refugees living in Queens, New York. Crossing the Boulevard, this book publication, is part of a larger multi-media project consisting of community activity, exhibits, and performances. The book is designed to communicate the diversity of the people whose stories it presents through its layout, typography, images, and other formal devices. Heterogeneity is at the core of this work, though the role of the transcriber-editors in shaping the whole provides certain unifying frames within which the presentation of unique, individual experiences is ordered. Lehrer's graphic and Sloan's dramatic sensibilities drive their collaboration, producinga book that is part score and part exhibitionary artifact.

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Crossing the Boulevard is an artists' vision of a book, well-wrought, and much labored in all details of its production and conception. The amount of attention to detail is prodigious, and the sheer energy involved in its execution (line by line, page by page) is almost staggering. Those without experience in oral histories, the dubious joys of transcription, or first-hand knowledge of the design profession can't really imagine the effort involved in making such a work. And perhaps in our jaded media-saturated age, the critic has an equally difficult task in leaping to appreciate its aesthetic achievement. We are so accustomed to receiving mass-circulation magazines, whose armies of design lackeys laboriously produce fashion spreads and ads and editorial pages ad nauseam, that we have few critically self-conscious categories in which to place Crossing the Boulevard.

The content of this book is inseparable from its form, a banality perhaps, to utter in this very-much-post-McLuhan age, but a fact irrefutable in this instance where the choices made with regard to presentation are incontrovertibly performative. But if the idea that a book's forms and formats embody its conceptual precepts is a familiar one, the critical vocabulary for discussing the specific features of its aesthetic performance are still woefully inadequate. The book form is so familiar that we rarely pause to ask precisely how it is that it does perform the presentation of textual and visual material. The tendency is still to either describe a work like Crossing the Boulevard in terms of its design, or to address its content, but not to discuss the embodied condition of their intersection. The press release material falls back on the term "filmic" to invoke the montage, cross-cutting of voices and objects, full-frame and detailed close-ups, inventory of objects and establishing images of parts of Queens. But a book has its own specificity, and the physical as well as conceptual execution of this work happens in a series of bound pages and an accompaning CD.

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Eighty narratives have been recorded and transcribed to create the texts in this book. Eighty individuals, each displaced and relocated, each struggling with the invention of a new life in a strange land. This is the most obvious and overt aspect of this work. The immigrant experience as a feature of the American landscape is not so much taken for granted as posed as a question against the changes in attitude, law, status, difficulty, economic and cultural conditions that characterize contemporary urban experience. The outstanding contribution of this book will derive largely from the insights it provides into current life in urban America in a complex global era, but the formal structure of this work also merits comment with respect to text display and navigation.

Ten years ago the idea of linking one piece of text with another, or navigating a pathway through a textual field in a digital environment was charged with an aura of novelty. Hypertext was a specialized term, known to cognoscenti andtechnical sophisticates with knowledge of a new and rather rarified sphere of electronic data. Hypertext novels and works with forking paths seemed brinked to reorder our textual universe. Ten years later what is most striking is that the influence of new media has been to shift our understanding of the functional structure of traditional forms even as it has increased our appreciation of digital environments. Books, it turns out, are hardly static instruments. They have a potential for dynamic spatio-temporal experience across a network of associative links. Books are hypermedia. And the navigational complexity of book space has rarely been more thoroughly or deliberately designed than in the work of Warren Lehrer. Disentangling Lehrer's work from that of his collaborator. Judith Sloan would be specious, but his track record as a designer has qualified him expertly for the task of making a book object in which graphic features and content forms are intertwined. Leher's earlier books are well known for their inscription of voice, their use of typographic devices to create a score, their engagement with the possibilities of performed text-space as page space. In many ways, Crossing the Boulevard is a tame work by contrast to French Fries or I Mean, You Know, or at least, appears to be.