Last Saturday University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gallery 400 closed its late spring show, which had featured Eun Hyung Kim‘s wall paintings and drawn sculptures in the main space, a video by Erin Cosgrove, and, nestled between the two, paintings and a monumental artist’s book by Andy Moore titled John’s Luv. I’m not throwing that work around – at over 900 hand-written and painted pages, the thing was a labor of art making that dwarfed the flanking exhibitions. That’s no knock on Kim or Cosgrove – John’s Luv could have made anything (including Moore’s other paintings) look like gesture in close comparison.

Andy Moore

Andy Moore

Andy Moore

Moore’s book is more than just an extensive stretch of studio labor crystallized into a single object, though had its content stopped there it would have already been worth discussing. It has a written narrative, arranged an ongoing series of non-linear vignettes chopped into chapters, which follows a anti-Meursaultian protagonist in his adventures through life and love. The stories are very compelling, frighteningly honest even when dialed up to near absurdity, and the regularity of the stories suggest some level of autobiography. Where on that continuum between fact and fiction each story lies isn’t made clear, but they’re clearly not all completely invented. Many take place on buses and trains, and its no surprise that Moore’s handwriting also bears the jostled marks of public transportation.

I encourage you to read the text in the pictures below, if you can:

Andy Moore, John's Luv

Andy Moore, John's Luv

Andy Moore, John's Luv

Wherever the source, and even with an otherwise sentimental class of attributes, John’s Luv makes a powerful effect. The layers and layers of white-out editing, with phrases in bubbles and tiny script shoving into and out of every line, give the writing an awesome, stuttering, insisting cadence. Every surface is tortured with paint and sealant to ensure stability, and long stretches feature washy illustrations or abstractions like personal reveries between expressions. There is a forty four square foot painting on the table that the book appears to lie upon, but which is revealed to be a gigantically impractical foldout. Surprise at every turn.

Andy Moore, John's Luv

Its single book form at once connects John’s Luv to a history of printed multiples, but cancels multiplication through its unique hand-made layering and clean documentation through its rough reflective surfaces. The book privatizes the work’s reading to one or two readers at a time, imposing strong control over how this work is seen. The form closes itself by its size, challenging a reader to either stand for unlikely hours absorbing its content or else to leave with the knowledge that the greater part was missed. In this Moore plays to the outside, employing a hermetical attack to frame the book as the product of a self-satisfying creative, but Moore himself (who recieved his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) is no outsider. I’d like to think Moore knew well that the best way to leave an audience is stunned, unsatisfied, and deeply curious, and that’s exactly what John’s Luv did.

I give it a:

9.0

Andy Moore’s John’s Luv was on display April 27 – June 12th @ Gallery 400, 400 S Peoria St.

A studio visit means an excuse to prepare by brushing up on the artist prior to the visit. This means research, you know what that is, how a brainiac pronounces procrastination. In anticipation of a visit this Monday with Stephanie Brooks, I can here and now recommend, just in time for Valentine’s Day (What is that you just said?), Ms. Brooks’ recent Love Is a Certain Kind of Flower, published by the fine folk(s) at Green Lantern Press.

Stephanie Brooks, Love is a Certain Kind of Flower

Ms. Brooks has been known for sculptures that mingle a certain institutional display or delivery of decidedly not institutional thoughts and language. Sometimes the works literalize metaphor, at other times reinterpret abstract forms, and maybe even bring about ridiculous attempts to quantify and advertise those things we get nervous about being quantified and directed. You know, the kind of answer you just do not want to hear or read right now.

Stephanie Brooks, Triple X, XO

With this book we get possibly the most in-depth of Brooks’ many odes to the wooly byways of the heart. Over the course of 36 poems, what the gauche might mistake for lists, love is extolled in its many splendid and resourceful forms: a bed of roses, peaches, leopards, honey, (unspecified) stone, shocking fuzz, a lumbering cart, et cetera. Tempting as it is to see the mark of irony and cynicism in Brooks’ taxonomic treatment of the predictable and not-so-predictable manifestations of love, this is not a tossing into the trash bin of love and its metaphors. For one thing, it is impossible not to get a smile and feel a warm swelling on the inside even in the book’s more pointed moments (sharp arrows, barbed hooks, iron wedges and the like).

I need to take a touch of umbrage with the editors of this fine collection. They’d like us to believe: “To say a thing is as red as a rose is as misleading as a phrase like ‘I changed my mind’ or ‘I couldn’t believe my ears.’ And yet these things, embedded as they are in a cultural landscape tradition do in fact convey a necessary and essential meaning.” Now maybe I just fell off the turnip truck, but to me that is one mighty big “and yet.” I’d argue these phrases and metaphors are not misleading at all, are in fact quite exacting and telling. Furthermore, the fact that Ms. Brooks’ book is ridiculously broad in the items, moods, places and times that love is, likes, plays, smells, has, constitutes, and the such, and still this collection is nowhere close to exhaustive, reminds us that on a quick level it is easy to think love is one thing. This is our mistake and the fault of three dozen too many romantic comedies and sensitive indie rockers. (For the sake of argument let’s let Al Green and Sade off the hook for the moment.) Love is precisely all things listed in this book for each and every one of us. And secretly we know it. Only our well-oiled coping mechanisms make us try and forget the times that love was like a bat.

Stephanie Brooks, Untitled (metaphors for love)

Maybe the editors forgot what Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote for us: “There is a great deal of difference between still believing something and again believing it. Still to believe that the moon influences the plants betrays stupidity and superstition, but again to believe it displays philosophy and reflection.” To which, Ms. Brooks has provided an easy to reference collection of categories—in that time-honored format the poem—needed to again express my heart whenever, say, I change my mind and decide that my love is, say, a resplendent raisin.

Get this book for those you love, and those you’ll love in the future. And fast! Only 250 copies. Otherwise you’ll just be left to love the one (book) you’re with.

(by Anthony Elms)

Question: When is an artist’s book not an artist’s book?

Answer: When it isn’t a book and is not really by an artist.

I submit, for your consideration, the most recent record by The Red Krayola with Art & Language, Five American Portraits. Art & Language have been complicating the structures and forms by which we understand judgments since the sixties. They were classic conceptual art before conceptual art had any classics. Indexicality is often the name of their game. In the heyday there were British and American branches of the Art & Language brand (even Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow put in her time). In recent years the group was solidly settled and grooving along with the classic line-up of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden with Charles Harrison, until Harrison’s death last year. (For you locals, check out the upcoming Art & Language exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Oh, and the record comes to us thanks to the good folks at Drag City.)

The Red Krayola with Art & Language, Five American Portraits

Red Krayola is a straight-up rock band, England by way of Germany and Texas under the guidance of one Mayo Thompson (art nerds please note that he worked for a time as Robert Rauschenberg’s assistant). They were psychedelic rock before rock took psychedelics (or contemporaneously at the least). Confusing codes is the name of their game. Truth be told, I respect The Red Krayola more than I always love the music. Still, you cannot disrespect or pass over a band led by a man who said: “I always try to be timely. But I insist on asking my own stupid questions rather than the ones that are on everybody else’s mind. As I said, I was under the impression that that was what rock ‘n’ roll was all about.”

Since the seventies, The Red Krayola and Art & Language have collaborated sporadically, yet fruitfully. Purportedly the collaboration began after Thompson gave Art & Language members a copy of a record. The story has it Art & Language let him know they thought the music was good but the lyrics terrible, to which Thompson responded something to the tune of, if you can do better I’ll sing them. The rest is barely noticed or understood history.

This most recent record is the doozy. I might not like it as much if I had not seen Mayo and his mates deliver a crack performance of the material back in November, but that backstory doesn’t help you. What is this record? Five musical portraits of some idiomatic Americans of the past half-century: Wile E. Coyote, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, John Wayne, and Ad Reinhardt. So what’s the catch? Each portrait is developed along programmatic music to set the tone of the subject, music that seems vaguely familiar… overtones, say, “Roadrunner” by Muddy Waters, or maybe “The Eyes of Texas,” “Georgia On My Mind,”  “Dixie’s Land,” and “Piano Sonata No. 6,” you know, the one by Mozart. The stylings are a bit all over the place.

It’s the lyrics that get you. They don’t vary much song to song; at least in structure. Before you protest that nothing, absolutely nothing, besides big feet and a desire to kill animals smarter than them connects Wile E. Coyote and George W. Bush; it is the formal descriptions that remain the same–not the finished portrait. The image each song will call to mind, now that won’t be the same at all. Here’s some sample lyrics:

A light patch on the left of the throat,

A light patch to the right of the mouth,

A light patch on the left of the lower lip,

The left eyebrow,

A shadow beneath the left nostril,

A major part of the hair

Of President Jimmy Carter

See, you can take it from there. The lyrics are somewhere between concrete poetry, lame joke, strict factual descriptive and measure of difference. They are as all over the place, like the music, except the everywhere the lyrics are allover is someone’s face. These are old-fashioned representational portraits. No metaphor no how. The sharpness is all in the delivery, and there is no better straight man in this business than Mayo Thompson, and his timing is infallible, even when off. This is pop minimalism, conceptual classic rock, political shuffle, and imagist critique of the highest order.

This record will either drive you to the back of absurdist pleasure or drive you to drink, either way you won’t be the same when the needle reaches that inner groove. You might even find yourself with a desire to draft up some iconic representations, unconsciously tracing the line from your temple to the corner of your mouth, from the bottom of your cheek to the left side of your…well… you know. Draw your own connections.

(Anthony Elms)

This is the second in a new feature of Artist Book suggestions from Anthony Elms. For more information, check the header on the first post of its kind. Today, Elms wants you to consider buying The Incredible Journey that is Consciousness, by Alex Fuller & Gabe Usadel, and Melissa Oresky’s Mineral Fabrics.

This is the “Who has time to read?” edition. Up to your ankles in work? Trying to manage the work you’ve gotten yourself into? I hear yah. Sometimes you need a book when you sit down with a drink in your hand but just don’t have mental energy to pay attention to plot twists and back story. Worry not, look below for lightweight tonic to cure your ills.

The Incredible Journey that is Consciousness by Alex Fuller & Gabe Usadel

Incredible Journey that is Consciousness by Alex Fuller & Gabe Usadel is small (5 x 7 inches), thin (32 pages), and slight (newsprint with a vellum bristol cover). But like all good overachievers trapped in unassuming packages it will kick your ass when you least expect it. Flipping through the pages, we meet Red Circle, Blue Square and Yellow Triangle as they love, laugh, try a ménage-a-trois, start a company, embezzle trade secrets from a foreign competitor, get caught, hightail it for the desert, learn a little about themselves during their convoluted escape, and finally decide that while they are each one good at heart, they may sometimes turn a little devilish when they interact and must give each other some space.

The Incredible Journey That Is Conciousness

Maybe I have embellished some plot details of this purely visual book, but it is hard not to when you sit down with this small package of delight. In fact, the only reason I don’t tell you to run out right now and drag this book home is that Golden Age, where I picked up my copy, closed January 24 to relocate in the West Loop. Opening date TBD. So you missed your window of opportunity. Now you need to wait until they reopen, at which point you should storm the barricades and hope they still have a copy. Did I mention this is only an edition of 500? Not nearly enough.

The Incredible Journey That Is Conciousness

So, in order to offer something you can take away right now to brighten the gray skies above I offer an alternative. While you are stalking the alleys of the West Loop, huffing and puffing until Golden Age reopens, slip in to Western Exhibitions and demand that gruff Mr. Speh hand over a copy of Melissa Oresky’s Mineral Fabric. Seems Oresky at first set her sights on outdoing Fuller & Usadel. Her book is smaller (6 x 4.75) and thinner (16 pages), but then she pulled that ship out of tailspin and went for broke with screenprint ink and nicely weighted black printmaking paperstock. As sloppy and wobbly in line as Fuller & Usadel are clean in shape, Oresky uses pastel colors to spin a woolly, stripped tale of pattern and confusion without wasting a single gerund. So action-packed is Mineral Fabric that a formal fender-bender breaks out on every page—spectacular enough to produce one bad-ass case of gaper’s delay. But you better act fast, did I mention Oresky’s book is an edition of 100? It is like these artists hate us or something. Don’t you bookmakers want us all to take home a copy of your hard efforts? Whatever.

Melissa Oresky, Mineral Fabric

No matter whether you zig or zag, both books have a touch of the playfulness and visual invention of Bruno Munari’s children books, or the more formal investigations of Dieter Roth. That goes beyond high praise. A word of advice: maybe you shouldn’t choose between them. Let he/she who has two pairs of pants sell one pair and use the cash to pick up both these little gems.

(written by Anthony Elms)