The Red Headed League (2012)
The Red Headed League: A Furlough Project (2012)
Michael Day and Lesley Guy, curators
Pamphlet, saddle-stitched, staples. 100gsm recycled stock, with abaca insert. H210 x W146 16 pages. An edition of 300, of which this is #253. Acquired from Furlough, 24 April 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The title of this artists’ pamphlet might entice Sherlock Holmes fans, who may avoid disappointment if they are sticklers enough to miss the hyphenated parting of the League’s hair. More likely, the title’s amusingly appropriate typography, the nod of the format and price toward the “democratic multiple”, and especially the quirky introduction will entice the collector of artists’ books. They will not be disappointed, but they will need their pipes and deerstalker hats.
The most interesting art makes you feel and think as you perceive. Thinking vs overthinking is the hard part. If you can’t figure out what it is you’re meant to think when perceiving the artwork, how can you be sure of what you’re feeling? Although with book artists like Ed Ruscha, sometimes the thinking process is supposed to come up with “Huh?”
From the brief introduction to The Red Headed League, you might reach the intentions expressed in the extended curatorial statement here. It seems unlikely. In our age of appropriation art, you might spot a clue in Wilson’s assigned task of copying out encyclopedia pages. But only by knowing that each artist received a mere £4 for the assigned task of reworking one of the first thirteen images under the A’s in Encyclopedia Brittanica’s Micropædia would you recognize that there’s more afoot. And perhaps only a Sherlock Holmes would spot the selection criterion of red-headedness as a clue to the intention to call out art show curators’ “selecting artists based on nonartistic criteria”.
The Red Headed League is certainly more than a flippant homage, dear Watson.
Like the invitation to Wilson to get him out of his office, Day and Guy’s invitation is a distraction from the invitees’ “other more self-directed creative endeavours”. Just as the proposed £4/weekly remuneration might appeal to the Victorian businessman’s instinct, so too might this post-conceptual art proposal appeal to the artists as an endeavour worth the effort for its post-post modern mickey-take on the artist’s “nominal” role in society as well as art and originality.
Contemplating the fee, the task and freedom of expression, some artists inclined toward the vituperative and even scatological. Daniel Fogarty‘s contribution in response to an image of Aachen cathedral seems to be a sharp comment on the project: from “Start to End” as “This useless cooperative”. The outpouring from the cathedral window frames has the look of sewage. Kim Noble‘s ingestion of an image of Alvar Aalto and the subsequent defecation may be an outré response in the outré book art traditions of John Latham, Dieter Roth and Piero Manzoni.
The task clearly tickled some artists’ funnybones. Alice Bradshaw demonstrates the lengths to which an artist will sometimes go. Confronted with her source material — a photo of the annual flower festival in Aalsmeer — she tracks down Nicolaas Slotboom who appears in a green crocodile costume while sitting on a float waiting for the parade to start. What Holmesian detective work. And what a surprise, all text and no images. Perhaps it reflects that ongoing rivalry between text and image in the artist’s book tradition as art writ (or painted) large. Surely the curators and Bradshaw must have known that readers would be so intrigued by the description that they would engage in their own detective work to see Nicolaas sitting in his costume on the float.
Alice Thickett must be counting on that curiosity, too, but provides a tiny clue in the lower left of her image responding to Micropædia‘s photo of the 52-carillon bell tower in Aalst. By showing only half the clock, are we also being sent on a chase to count the rays drawn? Might there be 26 of them (half of 52) in a sly nod to the curators’ alphabetically restricted choice of images?
Cathrine Dahl ‘s and Lesley Guy‘s contributions show the associative mind and visual imagination of the artist at work. Give Dahl the image of perhaps the only termite-eating hyena in the world — the aardwolf — and you get a wolfman-like creature made of wood with a Pinocchio tattoo. Give Guy an image of Firmin Abauzit, the French philosopher with an encyclopedic mind and known for correcting the writings of Isaac Newton, and she sends a beam of light through an Abauzit-ic prism to be broken up into the ROYGBIV spectrum. (As co-curator as well as artist, is she winking at us with the single-hued page?)
The Red Headed League is as much zine as democratic multiple of an artist’s book. Each artist — Alice Bradshaw / Cathrine Dahl / Eddy Dreadnought / Tim Etchells / Daniel Fogarty / Dag-Arve Forbergskog / Chris Gibson / Lesley Guy / Lisa Murphy / Kim Noble / Jóhanna Ellen Ríkharðsdóttir / Mary Smith / Alice Thickett — has contributed as if to the issue of a zine. A rich variety of styles, techniques and artistic traditions is the result. Day and Guy have assembled the mysteries into a mystery-entitled work held together by the pamphlet’s cover, binding, and red-hued pages as well as their rule of selection for the artists, the source of starting images, and words framing the task. Mysteriously in the end, The Red Headed League operates simultaneously as a loose assemblage of mysteries, each requiring more or less detective work, and a singular mystery requiring its own.
Further Reading
Drucker, Johanna. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books [Second edition] ed. New York City: Granary Books.
UNT Special Collections. 2024. From Artists’ Books to Zines. Symposium. University of North Texas. Denton, TX.
Vincennie, Joey. 2024. “Opening the Page: Exploring the Potential of Circulating Artists’ Books“. Presentation. Art Libraries Society of North America 52nd Annual Conference. Pittsburgh, PA.