Yearly Archives: 2006

the big book

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(from The Journal of Typographic Research, July 1968)

Figure 5. The Big Book, 1964–1967, by Alison Knowles. Courtesy of the artist.

The Big Book is not a product, but a process, and the person using the Book must accept himself as part of the process, discarding enough reserve to bend over and enter the Book – flexing, flowing, discarding stances. The Big Book cannot be know without being entered, and it cannot be entered without being modified – so that getting to know it alters it, even as it alters us, and there can be no one interpretation.

So down on hands and knees then, and through the cover, on through a hole burned in page of vinyl artifice, and down onto belly to crawl through a tunnel in a wall of artificial grass and water, imitating a descent, but actually remaining on floor level. After wiggling through the tunnel, one enters the apartment, an image of unpretentious Manhattan loft living in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. This apparent underworld, such as an epic hero usually enters, presents the processes of life nonchalantly, without varnish. Everything is useful here; there are aspirin, books, cans o soup, and other ordinary household objects. The telephone works, the stove will heat water for tea. The acceptance of this mundane, workaday underworld has the effect of elevating it, and while one enters through a tunnel, one exits through a window, and is free to examine the gallery of goats on page 4, or to climb a short ladder which moves on casters, simulating an experience of attaining precarious heights. Of course The Big Book can be read backwards or sideways, and anyone else who takes this journey will read it differently. But from any angle, to be in The Big Book is necessarily to be as mobile, kinetic, audial, visual, energetic, and beautiful, as it is.

—William S. Wilson, New York

the time that remains

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“. . . . Before we begin our reading, I would like to make one observation on the temporal structure of lyric poetry in general, especially in metrical schemes, as they appear in the sonnet, the canzone, the sestina, and so on. From this perspective, a poem is something that will necessarily finish at a given point: it will end after fourteen lines in the sonnet, but may be prolonged by three more lines, if the sonnet has a coda.

The poem is therefore an organism or a temporal machine that, from the very start, strains toward its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself. But for the more or less brief time that the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality, it has its own time. This is where rhyme, which in the sestina consists in repeated and often rhyming end words, comes into play.”

(Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: a commentary on the Letter to the Romans, p. 79, trans. Patricia Dailey)

the big book

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The Big Book
Art in America, Summer 1968
Bill Wilson
Photographs by Peter Moore

Constructed of fantasy and plastics, of metaphor and familiar housewares, this creation is an abode for body and spirit – as well as a witty paradigm of our changing society.

The Big Book is an eight-foot-tall construction by Alison Knowles which has a front cover and several pages, and contains a stove, telephone, chemical toilet, art gallery, electric fan, books and other necessities of life. Alison Knowles has built the Book as a work of art to be lived in, physically and mentally, a place to contemplate useful and changing relationships.

Alison Knowles was born in New York City in 1933, and studied at Middlebury College, Pratt Institute, and the Manhattan School of Printing. Her work with silk screen, direct photographic emulsion and chemical transfers on canvas was extended in 1961–62 to environmental works. Since then she has been active in the Fluxus Movement, and has directed and performed in happenings, published a catalogue of her texts for performance, a T dictionary (in Four Suits), and has built and exhibited The Big Book in New York, Toronto and Chicago. She will travel with The Big Book to the Frankfurt Bookfair this October and deposit it, though perhaps not permanently, in a park in Copenhagen after the fair.

The cover of The Big Book presents a circular hole surrounded by lights, and this hole is the illuminating entrance. The act of entering requires some unbending, some yielding of the body, as a preface to other yieldings of mind or spirit. The cover is likely to move as one enters it, revealing then and there that the Book cannot be used without being modified and without modifying the user. The process of reciprocal modification is one of the themes of the Book: book and reader alter each other.

On the back of the front cover is an assemblage of wrappings and other trash accumulated in making the Book, neatly solving the problem of how to use what has apparently been destroyed in the process of making something, and also suggesting that one theme of the Book will be the story of its own construction. This theme is developed by a tape recording of some of the sounds of constructing the Book, which is in a state of continuous destruction and construction anyway.

The next page is of transparent vinyl with a large hole burned through it and images screened on it. The vinyl has qualities that the Book is trying to define: it is solid, but it gives; it is burnable enough for the hole to be made, yet it bears up under that destruction and is more useful for it. As Alison Knowles said, “One of the nice things about these plastics and about water itself is that even as a rigid form, like ice, or vinyl, you can see through it, and yet you can hold on to it.” This page of burned vinyl offers the reader a passageway to the next page through the qualities of clairity, hardness, flexibility and durability – an ability to yield to destruction in a way that renders it constructive.

The entrance through the burned vinyl is like the trial by fire which the vinyl has survived, and such successful passage through such a trial would, at least in literature, be rewarded. Here the reward is a delightful page of artificial grass and mirror vinyl. Grass and water are on the vertical, with a hole at floor level leading into a tunnel. This upended leaf of grass is frankly artificial, with natural forms (grass, water) imposed on synthetic materials. The result is mock-representational art, calling attention to the representation without damaging the illusion. We see plastic and vinyl, and know that they represent grass and water. Thus The Big Book pursues an artifice without pretense.

Under these circumstances, the grass-lined tunnel is a metaphor for many experiences. One of those experiences is the descent which is not a descent at all, for the tunnel is a pretended descent, an actual horizontal progress, and then a pretended ascent, for one emerges in the apartment. This page is modeled on Manhattan loft-living in the late 1950s: the style is the the domestic unpretentious, everything arranged for informal use. The teakettle, the aspirin, the stove, stool and cans of soup are themselves and cannot be falsified. The reader can make a telephone call, eat, sleep or use the toilet, but with a compression that makes the acts, however genuine, something of an imitation of life. While life in the apartment is unpretentious, the compressed scale delineates every domestic activity with so much care and awareness that it achieves the radiance of ritual. This matter-of-fact world is tinged with artifice, and the apparent descent into the domestic is progress along a continuum, for the apartment is on a level with everything else.

One exit from the apartment is through the window into the next page, where a ladder offers a means of ascent. The ladder is exactly what it seems to be, but it stands on easters between two pages which are themselves on wheels, so the pages can roll one way while the ladder rolls another. Elevation by means of the ladder requires acceptance of these changing relationships, this shifting balance. The ladder is an accurate and unsentimental image of the conditions which must be accepted in order to mound any heights, whether they are erotic, esthetic or ethical.

The Big Book is a way of thinking, not with concepts, but with things, words and images, about relation and about change. Alison Knowles demonstrates in her work that to relate to something is to change it; to change something is to relate to it. If something is inert and unrelated, she introduces it to change; and if something is dissipated in changes, she catches it in relationships. Changing is so much her way of relating that finally the two concepts coincide: relating is changing.

Such change implies use, and use entails destruction, but this destruction can be controlled by the mutual respect necessary for a relation. So the vinyl is burned in a way that respects its properties, that makes it useful and that reveals its strength. The most that Alison Knowles will demand in good conduct at her events, in The Big Book, or in children’s play, is that “nobody gets hurt.” She doesn’t care if people read The Big Book from the front, the back or the side. This reversibility, in structure, and this flexibility, in materials, are parallels of the flexibility, resilience and freedom of a mind that does not seek to impose relations on people or on things, but to find the relation of reciprocal unity and respect.

The test of utility in The Big Book is possibility; what increases possibility and makes more combinations works, while what diminishes possibility or novel combinations does not work. The giving of the materials is a clue to the giving of spirit demonstrated by the Book, wherein people and things yield to the presence of other people and things with care and respect for their possibilities. So in the apartment the necessary routines of life that must be repeated every day have the feeling of ritual, not because it is necessary to do them, but because it is possible to do them, every day. I have described the beginning of The Big Book, but I cannot describe the end, because it is a potentially endless structure. When a story keeps possibilities open and relationships changing, there is no conclusion, and the hero who survives such a story must be supple, resourceful and durable. The reader can participate in these qualities by using this massive book of changes, The Big Book by Alison Knowles.

Bill Wilson who teaches in the City University of New York, is at work on a long study of “energy in terms of art.”

and again

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“. . . . There was a time when people recognized things easily when they were depicted by Fromentin and failed to recognize them at all when they were painted by Renoir.

Today people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, “Now look.” And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest – more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.”

(Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp.323–325, trans. Mark Treharne)

on being wrong

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(The narrator goes to see La Berma for the second time.)

“My impression, to tell the truth, though more agreeable than before, was not really different. Only, I no longer pitted it against a preconceived, abstract, and false notion of dramatic genius, and I understood now, that dramatic genius was precisely this. I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experience of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier encounters with Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées, I had approached it with too strong a desire. Between these two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, but another, deeper one. The impression made upon us by a person or a work of strong character (or its interpretation) is intrinsic to them. We have brought along with us the ideas of ‘beauty,’ ‘breadth of style,’ ‘pathos,’ which we might just possibly think we recognize in the banality of a passable talent or face, but our critical mind is confronted in fact with the nagging presence of a form for which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, the unknown part of which it needs to extricate. It hears a high-pitched sound, an oddly questioning intonation. It asks: ‘Is that good? It it admiration I am feeling? Is this what is meant by richness of color, nobility, power?’ And what answers back is a high-pitched voice, an oddly questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person we do not know, in which no scope is left for ‘breadth of interpretation.’ And for this reason, really fine works of art, if they are given genuine attention, are the ones that disappoint us most, because in the sum total of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.”

(Proust, The Guermantes Way, p.43, trans. Mark Treharne)

how to gather cinnamon

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“Cinnamon they collect in a yet more marvellous manner than this: for where it grows and what land produces it they are not able to tell, except only that some say (and it is a probable account) that it grows in those regions where Dionysos was brought up; and they say that large birds carry those dried sticks which we have learnt from the Phenicians to call cinnamon, carry them, I say, to nests which are made of clay and stuck on to precipitous sides of mountains, which man can find no means of scaling. With regard to this then the Arabians practise the following contrivance:— they divide up the limbs of the oxen and asses that die and of their other beasts of burden, into pieces as large as convenient, and convey them to these places, and when they have laid them down not far from the nests, they withdraw to a distance from them: and the birds fly down and carry the limbs of the beasts of burden off to their nests; and these are not able to bear them, but break down and fall to the earth; and the men come up to them and collect the cinnamon. Thus cinnamon is collected and comes from this nation to the other countries of the world.”

(Herodotus, Histories, 3.111, trans. G. C. Macaulay. Referenced in Piers Moore Ede’s review of John Keay’s The Spice Route, in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 January 2006.)

from “life and its shadow: the art/life dichotomy”

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“. . . what differentiates the artist’s book from normal books is that the artist’s book always transcends its subject matter, including its own text. Within the category of artists’ books there exist many varieties of book-related works. One subcategory is the ‘bookwork,’ usually a one-of-a-kind or multiple which comments through its very existence on the question: ‘what is a book?’ For example, there is Alison Knowles’s Big Book (1967), which was discarded when it wore out but which had pages, a spine and copyright notice, a fold-out page, a telephone line to the outside world, a grass tunnel in which one could sleep, and many other features not usually found in books or other works of art. Less literally a hybrid of environment, book, and perhaps residence, one could cite a piece by Susan Share, Stream of Consciousness (1979), in which the pages were cut and folded so as to form a paper spring, not unlike a child’s ‘Slinky’ toy. When the work was allowed to move from one space to another beside it, it suggested a paper waterfall. Stream of Consciousness had no words. The fold used was a ‘leporello,’ a zigzag fold found in many oriental books and some Western ones. If I ask myself, ‘Is it the text which makes a book a book?’ I must answer ‘No – its bookness comes from its shape, from the experience of moving from page to page – that is what gives a book its identity.’ This work defines its physical space and reality neatly and efficiently. It may be art but what gives it its meaning is its relationship to the living and interactive world around it.”

(Dick Higgins, in Sculpture Magazine)