Charlie Gleek

Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book (2016)

Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book (2016)

Perfect bound softcover. Four-color offset lithography. Illustrated paper wrappers with flaps. Housed in foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot. H203 x W204 mm, 104 unnumbered pages including inserts. Edition of 1000 numbered and signed, of which this is #18. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp, 13 August 2020. Photos: Books on Books Collection with the permission of the artist.

A forthright Franklin Gothic typeface announces the title, descriptive subtitle and author’s name in brown, black, and brown on the warm golden yellow of the die-cut box. As it opens from its velcro fastener, it reveals a gold foil origami crane, inserted in the box’s internal flap. As the flap turns, the straightforward Franklin Gothic re-announces the title, subtitle and author’s name, this time on the book’s white cover. So far, the work gives a sense of simplicity, elegance and warmth. Only the title hints at something uncomfortable to come. Finding a book’s foreword on its cover flap is unusual, but that Franklin Gothic now matched with plain-spoken prose — “I am a black woman. I am an artist.” — reassures. By the foreword’s last line though — “Do we have the courage to live differently?” — the reader/viewer may sense a need to keep the gold foil origami crane close like a guardian angel.

The crane also provides an organizing or, more accurately, guiding principle. Across the double-page spread of near-translucent golden endpapers just before the half-title, the truncated instructions — “cut fold crease flatten turn over cut fold creas” — start to articulate how to alter another book’s pages into origami cranes. On a startling full-page bleed of reddish brown ink, “The Proposal” in yellow and its text in white names the book to be altered: The White Man’s Bible, a white supremacist screed. Wings extended against the reddish brown, the crane hovers over the text.

More startling is the following double-page spread with the artist’s acceptance of the challenge, yet doubt, on the left and a photo of the unopened box full of hate casting a shadow from light falling from the right. The photo on the right spills leftward over the gutter, encroaching on the artist, her acceptance and doubt. And yet, her diagram of a box pushes back, rightward against and into the encroaching shadow.

The guardian angel becomes a necessary angel over the next two double-page spreads. From the left page of the first spread —

My uncle was lynched in South Carolina before I was born. Rope around his neck, his broken body was tossed from a wagon to the yard in front of my mother.

— the text faces on the right a full-page bleed of black ink in which the transparent box diagram sits full of hate-red words. Turn the page.

What the double-page photo of hummocks of grass in the foreground and, in the far background, some fencing, a sandbox, houses behind a stand of brush and trees conveys, with its contrast to the preceding spread of text and image, sticks in the chest and throat.

In the next double-page spread, the box sits, still closed, now on the left in a reversal of its first appearance. The light that casts the box’s shadow shines across the gutter from the artist’s question on the right hand page — “Can it be transformed?” The artist seems to be drawing a deep, preparing breath, one that the next double-page spread implies is calming.

At the next turn, an organizing principle only implicit so far but now explicit in the words “When I was 3” joins the principle of the folding instructions “cut fold crease craft”. These instructions appear again on the same paper used for the endpapers, used here to mark the end of the book’s first section. The first section’s final words “A container to hold broken” fall between the instructions, leaving a warranted sense of foreboding. As the work proceeds akin to a growth chart — “when I was 5”, “when I was 11” and so on — can the necessary angel suffice?

In the four sections that follow, the artist’s life, fears and hopes intersect personally with painful local, national and international history. As she communicates her sense of living this history, she also charts her engagement with others’ history of subjection to hate. If any reader thinks that this somehow gives in to an “all lives matter” chorus, one corrective course is to lay hands and eyes on a copy of this artist’s book. If somehow that does not make plain the power of this artist’s voice, then a further corrective course is to listen to her read the text here. If that does not work, then follow the instructions on the back cover.

Inside flap of the die-cut box; back cover of the book.

I am a white man. I write about book art. Encountering this work of art is to stumble, fall, get up — cut fold crease flatten fold out cut fold in flip over turn again open — and begin to do the work toward acknowledging and accepting this necessary angel. Reminder to self: “again open”.

Mourning/Warning: Abecedarian (2015)

Mourning/Warning: Abecedarian (2015)

Tia Blassingame

Sixteen folios including cover, staple-stitched, digitally printed on 32 lb laser paper. H280 x W212 mm. Edition of 30 copies of which this is an artist’s proof. Acquired from the artist, 5 August 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection with permission of the artist.

At its most fundamental, Mourning/Warning — as with any abecedary — is about doing the work of learning to read. In this case, doing the work extends also to learning the maritime signals associated with the letters of this alphabet. In one of several signals of its artistry, it strips the nautical flags of their primary colors (with the occasional exception of the color blue) and replaces them with black and muted browns. Obviously difficult to read in practice, these modified signals for mourning and warning intentionally raise the bar on “doing the work”.

As with any abecedary, each letter is printed to stand out; here, it is in Josefin Sans Bold, a typeface designed for display and having a nautical feel. As with any abecedary, each letter offers an example of its use: here, it is the name of an individual. The bar may be raised a little in that the letter may be the initial letter of the first name or the last. Still, as with any abecedary, the reader is expected to say the name aloud to memorize the letter. “A for Marissa Alexander; for Marissa Alexander, this flag”. In itself, a very small step in doing the work.

Some readers will know these names, some will not. For those who do not, doing the work means learning that Marissa Alexander is now free but with seven years of her life lost to incarceration and home arrest in Florida and a felony conviction for firing a warning shot at an abusive husband in 2010. Or that Ousmane Zongo was an immigrant from Burkina Faso in the wrong place at the wrong time, unarmed and shot twice in the back by police in 2003 in New York.

The work of learning the ABCs or the International Code of Signals is about memorizing. Doing the work with this abecedary is about memorializing. By the time the letter “P” is reached, there can be no question how hard this is. If there is, readers will be stopped in their tracks here: there is no letter “Q”. Why? Because the question mark at the end of the question — “Where is Relisha Tenau Rudd?” — is in bold, demanding the work of remembering Relisha and her circumstances as one of the many Black children gone missing in the US. But the question demands another: “Why?” This is another aspect of Blassingame’s artistry that makes the impact of “doing the work” — learning what lies behind the individuals paired with letters — land with that much more force.

And why do the letters “I”, “U” and “X” have no names assigned? Of course, “I” and “U” have no names; they are reserved for the readers to be drawn into mourning and warning, to imagine themselves speaking the letter aloud to themselves, to imagine themselves as one of the named. As for the letter “X”, the artist writes that it refers to

the anonymity experienced by African Americans today back to when they were enslaved. It references how education and literacy were and in many ways continue to be restricted. How many of our enslaved ancestors made their mark or signed with an X in lieu of being able to sign their names. How they were often forced to make their mark on documents that diminished them. X as a reminder of those that cast off their given, or slave name to own their identity and authority. X is the nameless, unnamed, renamed. X is the sharecropper. X is those that fought fear, and terrorist threats of violence, poll taxes to vote. X is Malcolm X. X is the potter’s field, the slave cemetery, those incarcerated brothers and sisters, the penniless and the powerless. (Correpondence with Books On Books, 10 August 2020)

The fact that the maritime symbol for “X” is cruciform and, here, plain and dark should make for edgy and uncomfortable reading/viewing. Doing the work of learning these altered nautical signals means “doing the work” of looking into the heart of transatlantic slavery and the Black diaspora. It signals a mourning for the known and unknown dead and a burnt warning of those to come if we do not learn these ABCs.

Mourning/Warning: Numbers and Repeaters (2018)

Mourning/Warning: Numbers and Repeaters (2018)

Tia Blassingame

Twelve folios (including cover), digitally printed, H280 x W212 mm 8.5 x 11 inches. Edition of 30 copies of which this is an artist’s proof. Acquired from the artist, 5 August 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection with permission of the artist.

Numbers and Repeaters signals to its readers there is still more to the work begun with An Abecedarian. The flags for the numbers 0 through 9 must be learned, so too the four “repeaters” for handling messages with duplicate letters or numerals.

Numerals are not numbers, of course, but symbols of them. By associating a name with each numeral, repeater and its altered maritime flag, Numbers and Repeaters doubles the symbolism: the number of names continues to increase and the circumstances to repeat themselves. “Doing the work” required in this added volume reveals, though, that “circumstances” have widened to include gay, lesbian and transgender victims, others who may have been mentally disturbed, the domestically abused and the political activist. The widening does not dilute. It confirms that, as Blassingame writes on her website, “hatred comes constantly in waves”.

As with An Abecedarian, some readers will know the names of the individuals in Numbers and Repeaters, some will not. Readers will also naturally break down into two other groups: those who see themselves as persons of color and those who do not. On her website, the artist writes to all, regardless of how they see themselves, that Numbers and Repeaters “serves as a method of honoring, mourning, and remembering the slain and wronged”. For those who do see themselves as persons of color, she calls it also a method of “teaching our children and ourselves to be vigilant and wary in hostile terrain, where your skin color makes you an easy target.” Whichever group into which readers fall, Numbers and Repeaters demands “doing the work” to learn this “alternate means of communication in times of emergency and duress”. Those times are with us now.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – Clarissa Sligh

Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book (2016)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Tia Blassingame

Mourning/Warning: Abecedarian (2015)

Mourning/Warning: Numbers and Repeaters (2018)

Further Reading

Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book (2016)

Further Reading

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Mourning/Warning: Abecedarian (2015)

Mourning/Warning: Numbers and Repeaters (2018)

Further Reading

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