Visualization of words, etymology, messaging, reading, and writing thread together these selected works. Lehrer and Karasik play with the word “opening”; Serafini illuminates his imaginary world of asemic writing; Sim focuses on the looping nature of multilingualism; and Winston plays with words and definitions. Schulz responds to reading books from his father’s library. Stettner and Zimmermann both address how language has at times become a focal point for war and destruction. Invisibility of words and censorship is addressed in Wu’s The Cookbook of Invisible Writing.
The presence and absence of words play central roles in these works.
Warren Lehrer and Adeena Karasick. Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings & Touching in the Wake of The Virus. New Orleans, LA: Lavender Ink, 2023.
Offset printed, hardbound with cloth and paper on boards printed by hand with metallic foils. Poems by Adeena Karasick visualized by Warren Lehrer. Book has a QR code linking to Karasick recording with music by Sir Frank London.
This is a graphic text collaboration by poet and theorist Karasik and artist, designer, and writer Lehrer, who has created several iconic artists’ books. Lehrer visualizes Karasik’s words on each page, each with its own poem.
Reflecting Walt Whitman’s work, Lehrer writes: “Whitman and Karasick both write from an ecstatic tradition and rapturous embrace of the world, which includes the light and the shadow … the sensuous and the transcendent, … characters, nature, things, culture, America.”
David Schulz. The Library. Walla Walla, WA: Light Rail Works, 2019, edition of 100, signed by the artist.
David Schulz is an artist, graphic designer, and teacher who has created many artists’ books.
The Library “is a meditation on realization and loss through the practice of reading. … A fugue-structure assembles photographs of books from his father’s library alongside the author’s prose-poems which respond to his reading of those books. … The multiple voices and narrative perspectives encountered in the books from the library expose a series of formative events within and surrounding the father’s life …”
Luigi Serafini. Codex Seraphinianus. New York, NY: Rizzoli, 2021. 40th anniversary revised edition, first published in 1981 by F. M. Ricci in Milan.
Serafini, an Italian architect, artist, designer, created this visual encyclopedia drawn from his imagination written in an imaginary language known as asemic. Very much a product of the “Information Age,” the book addresses coding in genetics as well as in literature.
Jana Sim. Language Möbius. Chicago, IL: Self-published trade edition, 2011, edition of 15.
Möbius strip constructed of Somerset paper, with letterpress text in Korean and English, presented in cloth covered box with acetate slip on band.
Korean book artist Jana Sim created this trade edition with one Möbius strip (a loop with a half-twist in it) to illustrate and symbolize the difficulty of learning another language.
”The most difficult part of learning another language is everyday conversation where an immediate response is needed. Language Möbius is about my conversation process. The loop in my brain goes like this: hearing English, thinking in Korean, translating, then speaking in English.”
Luke Stettner. History Database. London, UK: SPBH Editions, 2016, no. 320 of an edition of 500.
Luke Stettner explores a range of experimental techniques in his photographic and sculptural works. Here he creates a visual language through this compilation of photographs, drawings, xeroxes, and pictograms drawn from books, archives, and the Internet. This photobook is a visual splintered treatise on the destruction and preservation of culture as captured in this image of a still frame taken by a video made by ISIS documenting destruction of a cultural heritage site in Iraq.
Sam Winston. A Dictionary Story. London, UK: Arc Artist Editions, 2013, second trade edition of publication by Circle Press 2005.
Three single-sided folded accordions in silkscreened plastic slipcase.
Akin to the books created by Johanna Drucker, Sam Winston’s works focus on the alphabet and its legacy. His artistic practice includes works on language executed through typography in his books, drawings, poems, and performances. Originally written in 2001, the Dictionary Story Book is a re-imagined version of the dictionary as concrete poem.
”…Each of these separate accordions plays with the connections between each word and its ‘wordy’ definition, with the words questioning their order in the dictionary, and then spinning out of control with their individual letters spilling haphazardly across the page creating a crazed kind of visual poetry.”
Amy Suo Wu. A Cookbook of Invisible Writing. Eindhoven, NL: Onomatopee, 2019.
Based in Rotterdam, Amy Suo Wu is an artist, designer, and teacher who wrote, designed, and illustrated A Cookbook in collaboration with the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. Wu’s use of language results in an inventive and artistic array:
“A Cookbook of Invisible Writing … is an introduction to analog steganography, a type of secret writing that is hidden in plain sight. It is an invisible ink coloring book, recipe book, puzzle book … with a wide variety of invisible ink recipes and other communication techniques that may be used to subvert surveillance, bypass censorship and make visible the struggles of minorities and other marginalized culture.”
Philip Zimmermann. Reaper. Tucson, AZ: Spaceheater, 2015, no. 22 of an edition of 25.
Pigmented archival inkjet on French Paper, hand-bound Turkish-fold book. Cloth spine on boards with inset title text.
Since 1979, Zimmermann has made many innovative artists’ books integrating photography and printmaking within provocative bindings. This book, with its Turkish map pop-up pages, uses texts to refer to the relentless cycles of war, rebuilding, and destruction. Akin to the book by Luke Stettner, language is a focal point to depict antagonism between belief systems.
“Reaper is a meditation on the destructive cycle of violence and war, followed by rebuilding and reconstruction, then waragain. … the primary texts of four specific belief systems. ...[It includes] the Rig-Veda,the oldest sacred Hindu text; the Torah (Genesis) from the Jewish faith (the Old Testament); the first lines of the Christian New Testament Bible; and finally, the first ten lines from the Qur’an from Islam.”
