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)

I like artists books but don’t really know anything about them, so it is with great pleasure that I present local maven and collector Anthony Elms’ first in a regular or irregular feature of artists books suggestions. He’ll be focusing on books that are generally affordable, still in print, and available to a Chicago buyer at a local bookstore or via the web. Let Elms spend your money!

Exhibition Prosthetics by Joseph Grigely

Every now and then I teach a course, “Publications as Curatorial Practice,” and the most frustrating part of organizing the class is finding readings that don’t talk about publication projects as if artists’ books are the only solution to thinking with form. Now there is this slim volume from a lecture Joseph Grigely gave in London at the always interesting (let’s hope) Architectural Association. The book is published by the newish upstart publishing imprint Bedford Press run by the friendly graphic designer Zak Kyes (who you might also be reading).

Exhibition Prosthetics, by Joseph Grigely

You’ll read this book in 40 minutes, tops. And that is if you rest to take notes, or wonder why all the images are yellow. But a good and necessary quick read. It will train your eyes on the little ways that art is framed, and the peculiar, strange and necessary relationship between titles, wall labels, press releases and art works. In fact, even if I have a disagreement with the angle Grigely takes a time or two (privileging the artist a touch too much in the relationship to museum wall labels, stopping to consider press releases as artistic gestures, but not simply as press releases, etc.), the only real complaint is that the book is over too soon. So some items seem skimmed rather than developed.  Then again, it was just a lecture–with a lecture’s gentlemanly time constraints. And I must admit that I know this book is just the beginning of Joseph’s recent public grapplings with the issues. (See, for example his recent exhibition at Rowley Kennerk Gallery.) Exhibition Prosthetics is an opening volley into what are essential and complicated questions.  (Anthony Elms)