The Rosetta Stone, and its decipherment, is just one historic object that reverberates through time to influence works created by contemporary artists.While the virtual world was thought to have eclipsed the physical book, it has prompted the opposite effect, as evidenced with the expansive world of artists’ books. To quote Dutch book designer Irma Boom:
In older days, a book was made for spreading information, but now we have the Internet to spread information. So to spread something else — maybe sheer beauty or a much slower, more thought-provoking message — it’s the book.
This exhibition offers a kaleidoscope of text and images from antiquity to present that center language in their formulaic practice, explored especially through artists’ books. The contemporary artists’ books and other works on display trace their influence to historical works and ideas about language, its decipherment and translation.
Books made by artists defy definition and I avoid defining these works of art in my writings. Printer, publisher, and book designer Ken Botnick aptly characterizes the field:
Artist books are to the world of books as poetry is to the field of writing. They don’t follow the same rules as the rest of the field, they are generally much shorter, have a high degree of craft to their making, and their distinct visual character is not only conceived as essential to their message but as an expression of their authorship.
Artists’ books have been a main focus of my collecting since the 1980s. Today, my collection includes examples of multiples (open editions), limited editions, and unique works made by artists working internationally. Many of these works offer an innovative way to consider language, decipherment, and translation through words and images.
Cari Ferraro. The First Writing. San Jose, CA: Prose and Letters, 2004, no. 38 of an edition of 50, signed by the artist.
Accordion book based on a unique painted book by the artist.
Calligrapher Cari Ferraro writes: “I was inspired to create this book by the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose theory was that the first writing actually predated Sumerian businessmen by a few thousand years, and instead grew out of symbolic marks on ritual objects made to venerate the Great Mother in Old Europe. … I invented an alphabet style based on Marija’s catalog of marks, and in the background of the paste paper used symbols found in the 5000-year-old passage grave Newgrange in Ireland …”
Michael J. Winkler. The Book of Spells. New York, NY: SignalGlyph Press, 2014. Offset printed edition of 500, with framed prints of three studies for Rosetta Stone Studies: SHAPES, BEHAVIOR, INTUITIVE (2013).
Along with several artists in this exhibition, I have long followed the career of Winkler, a conceptual artist focused on language with an interest in Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and Mayan glyphs. In his work he explores abstract imagery, revealing hidden patterns in the signs of language.
“This process-based work of visual and conceptual art explores ‘spelled-forms’ merged with images of writing on the Rosetta Stone. Spelled-forms are created using a process that translates the spelling of words into abstract images. … These process-generated abstract forms map the choices made by our cultural ancestors when they created the signs for words.”
