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Much of the exhibit consists of fine press books from the Wilson Limited Edition Collection of the Nashville Public Library, many of them produced by the Arion Press in San Francisco. These include a volume of the poems of Wallace Stevens with a frontispiece by Jasper Johns, Joyce’s Ulysses with etchings by Robert Motherwell, and Mel Bochner’s print series Counting Alternatives incorporated into an edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.
Such books, sometimes called livres d’artiste, are joint creations of the press and the artist. They are conceived primarily as art objects, not reading texts, so an art gallery is perhaps their natural home. Certainly, all the examples in this show are complex and engaging as purely visual entities. But they generally rely at least to some extent on reference to the content of the book, so a portion of their meaning is lost on viewers who are unfamiliar with the text in question.
For example, Johns’ print for the Stevens poems features a shadowy figure surrounded by a clutter of icons including the Mona Lisa and an American flag. It’s a sad, almost frightening depiction of an individual’s isolation within a noisy culture. The curator’s statement describes this as an autobiographical statement by Johns—in fact, the figure is supposed to be a silhouette of Johns himself. But the image is also a very apt expression of the central theme of Stevens’ poetry, the ordinary man’s search for meaning and identity within uncertain reality. The curator’s statement notes that fact, but nevertheless, the power of the reference is difficult to grasp without some direct knowledge of the poems.
Bochner’s Wittgenstein illustrations evoke their source text just as vividly, but in this case knowledge of the text seems less of an issue. Bochner incorporates direct quotes from Wittgenstein into the prints themselves, and he has a rather lengthy artist’s statement that helps explain what he’s up to. He writes, “An illustration is (as in Medieval illumination) an idea brought to light.” Bochner’s prints, which depict sequences of numbers laid out on a grid of intersecting triangles, accomplish precisely that illumination. The numbers relate to each other and to the grid—perhaps the best comparison would be an acrostic puzzle—and thus they convey the dynamic of a conceptual structure in which each element supports and leads to another. It’s a brilliant visualization of Wittgenstein’s work, but could serve just as well to illustrate the nature of any analytical inquiry.
The show is not all so highbrow. There’s a delightful edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with collotype prints by Ida Applebroog. Instead of the busy Victorian aesthetic that is usually associated with Dickens, Applebroog’s prints are simple, thick-lined drawings, almost primitive. The book includes a set of prints on card stock, designed to stand up and create a tableau suggestive of—what else?—Christmas cards, or perhaps paper dolls. Kara Walker’s pop-up book, Freedom—A Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, presents a 3-D version of her trademark black silhouettes, which explore racial themes with fierce humor.