Books On Books Collection – Lisa Merkin

Bodies Making Language (2021)

Bodies Making Language (2021)
Lisa Merkin
Brocade-covered box containing six blocks and compartment with three cards. Box: H95 x W225 x D155 mm. Blocks: cube 50 mm. Cards: H105 x W205 mm. Unique work. Acquired from the artist, 20 September 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of artist.

In a play known from fragments as the Alphabet Tragedy (although it sounds more of a comedy), the ancient Greek playwright Kallias had his chorus and actors mime and dance the letters of alphabet. Lisa Merkin’s book of blocks in a box shows that bending bodies to make letters has never grown old. Appropriately, her most recent image comes from Diego Rodas Feroni’s typeface Adonis (2018), which seems to recall the Greek playwright’s actors. Also in the Books On Books Collection, Vítězslav Nezval & Karl Teige’s Abeceda (1926), Pilobolus Dance Company’s Human Alphabet (2010) and Marie Lancelin, Gestes Alphabétiques (2014) have carried on the tradition of the alphabet dance.

Block 6: During his studies at UFRJ Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Diego Rodas Feroni designed the Greek God figurine typeface Adonis (2017).

Many of Merkin’s choices celebrate the more comic aspects of anthropomorphic letters: Carington Bowles’ The Comical Hotch-Potch (1782), Bowles & Carver’s The Man of Letters, or Pierrot’s Alphabet (1794), Honoré Daumier’s Alphabet comique (1836), Edward P. Cogger’s Funny Alphabet (c. 1850-64), Aaron McKinney’s The Unruly Alphabet (2010) and Jérôme Viguet’s caricatures Alphabet (2013).

Block 4: Funny Alphabet (c.1850 – 1864) by illustrator and engraver Edward P. Cogger. McLoughlin Brothers Publishing, NY.
Block 5: The Unruly Alphabet is a “lively and haunting abecedary“ book created in 2010 by the English illustrator Aaron McKinney, who sets the alphabet against a backdrop of rebellious behavior showcasing human nature.

Maybe the human body and the perfect letter have something in common. Geofroy Tory (1529) and Anthon Beeke (1970) certainly thought so — the former in a neo-Platonic, religious way and the latter in a more secular way. Although Beeke is not represented among Merkin’s blocks, she does not neglect celebrations of the female form. Most of them come from the realm of fashion: Erté’s Alphabet (1927-67), Horst P. Horst’s Vogue cover (1940), Yvette Yang’s The Fashion Alphabet (2010) and Alexia Yang’s Grotesque Beauty (2011). From the collection, Rebecca Bingham’s miniature Lady Letters (1986) could qualify for the catwalk.

Champ Fleury by Geofroy Tory Translated into English and Annotated by George B. Ives, Designed and printed by Bruce Rogers (1529)[1927]
Alphabet by Anthon Beeke, Geert Kooiman and Ed van der Elsken (1970).

Block 6: The Fashion Alphabet by Korean-born, Dutch-educated, and Paris-based artist, Yvette Yang. In 2007, Yang began creating her font fashion series with bits and pieces from the runways and magazines. This T is from her interpretation of Spring/Summer 2010.
Lady Letters (1986) by June Sidwell and Rebecca Bingham. The miniature book captures Sidwell’s designs and poses.

Historiated and figurative letters from the 6th to 15th centuries so well represent the Latin alphabet in Merkin’s box of blocks it would be greedy and thematically problematic to wish for one of the Hebrew letters from the Kennicott Bible. If there is ever a second Merkin volume to celebrate anthropomorphic letters, though, another range of languages beckons. For Ukrainian, there are the letters of Tatyana Mavrina. For Arabic, there are Mahmoud Tammam’s inventions, but then the volume would have to admit the zoomorphic, which suggests perhaps a third Merkin volume of animal alphabets.

Block 6: Horae ad usum Parisiensem (Hours of Charles of Angoulême) (ca. 1475-1500) by the French illuminator and painter Robinet Testard (fl. 1470–1531). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Block 2: Moralia in Job by Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). The Abbaye Notre-Dame, Cîteaux, France.

Hebrew Bible with David Kimhi’s Sefer Mikhlol (“Kennicott Bible“) (1476). Neubauer 2322. Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.
Сказочная Азбука / Skazochnaia Azbuka / A Fairy Tale Alphabet (1969) by Tatyana Mavrina.
In his Arabic letters project, Mahmoud Tammam manipulates the Arabic script ضفدع meaning “frog” to illustrate its meaning.

As shown with the Adonis letter W, Merkin’s blocks remind us of the influence of past art on the alphabets of 20th- and 21st-century designers and artists. Among the modern alphabetic variants, Dada and Surrealism make a strong showing of influence on Yvette Yang’s letter T (above) and Roman Cieślewicz’s letter i (below), and who knows, perhaps Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s letter O influenced the Dadaists and Surrealists themselves. More than a strong showing, these styles highlight something fundamental about the alphabet and art. Both the alphabet and art ask, Are we discovering meaning or making meaning?

Block 4: Alfabeto in Sogno (1683), etchings by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718).
Block 3: From the fantastical alphabet created by Roman Cieślewicz (1930 -1996) for Guide de la France Mystérieuse” (1964).

Every history of letters or script begins with the figuratively pictographic. Someone somewhere at some time scrawled a shape tied to a sound tied to an object — A is for Ox — and some other(s) in the same place and time recognized and accepted the discovery that this handmade shape could conjure up that object in the mind. It would have seemed magical, and they imagined that somehow meaning and reality inhered in that shape or sound waiting to be discovered.

Yet, the shapes of characters — whether Latin or Chinese or Arabic or any language — and their relationship to the sound or meaning they represent is arbitrary, a prehistorical and historical function of social convention, a collective making by individuals. That arbitrariness provides the opening for artists to use the alphabet to question our meaning-seeking behavior and our assumptions about reality, and modern artists’ anthropomorphizing the alphabet pokes fun at that behavior and those assumptions. Perhaps a fourth Merkin box — one for bodies making “asemic alphabets”?

Books On Books Collection – Marie Lancelin

2023/01/042023/01/02Books On BooksLeave a comment

Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)

Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)
Marie Lancelin
Double-sided leporello with sleeve. H200 x W170 mm (closed). 14 panels. Laser-printed, screen print. Interior: offset on Arcoset Extra White 170 gsm. Cover and band: serigraphy on Curious Skin 270 gsm. Edition of 100. Acquired from Printed Matter, Inc., 31 July 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher, Grante Ègle (Nantes, France).

There is a long-standing tradition of “dancing the alphabet”. In his satyr play Amphiaraus, Sophocles brings in an actor dancing the letters. A more extended instance comes from 5th century Greek dramatist Kallias; his entire play Grammatike Theoria (“ABC Show” or “The ABC Tragedy“) presents the alphabet and pronunciation exercises. Apparently in acting out the letters psi and omega, the chorus member’s performance tended to the erotic, a phenomenon still to be found in Erté’s alphabet suite (1927/1978) and Anthon Beeke’s Alphabet (1970). Less suggestive are Vítězslav Nezval’s Abeceda (1926), Toshifumi Kawahara’s Dancing Alphabets (1991) and, most recently, Marie Lancelin’s Gestes Alphabétiques (its publisher issued two editions of 100 copies each in 2008 and 2014).

All the media and techniques that Lancelin engaged to make Gestes Alphabétiques — photograms, photomontage, laser printing, serigraphy, staging, lighting, drawing, printing — take her gestures beyond the alphabet and geometric abstractions we can easily see. Also apparent is her grounding in filming; the overlaying of the model’s poses transform that side of the leporello into a dance sequence. With the combined techniques, the ink and paper create the effect of displaying the dance through transparencies or glass or within some black and white computer graphic setting.

Fundamentally, through these media, techniques and the double-sided leporello form, Lancelin translates gesture, symbol, shape and light into one another and back again, offering the viewer the opportunity to see the artist explore the making of meaning.

Books On Books Collection – Toshifumi Kawahara

2022/12/29Books On BooksLeave a comment

Dancing Alphabet (1991)

Dancing Alphabet (1991)
Toshifumi Kawahara
Hardback, casebound sewn. H307 x W236 mm, 96 pages. Acquired from Paper Cavalier, 27 July 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The tradition of the dancing alphabet goes back to the Greeks. In one of his plays, Kallias the 5th century Greek playwright had his characters each dance a letter of the Ionian alphabet. This may also be an early instance of product placement. At the time, there were a variety of Greek alphabets, and it was the Ionian that won out. The tradition (without the product placement) continued and, in this collection, is represented by Vítězslav Nezval’s Abeceda (1926), Marie Lancelin’s Gestes Alphabétiques (2014) as well as Toshifumi Kawahara’s Dancing Alphabet. Kawahara’s CG animation work contributed significantly to Polygon Pictures, which created the Emmy Award-winning animated series Transformers Prime and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. But this book’s presentation of Kawahara and team’s work on the “In Search of New Axis” series adds a colorful flavor to the dancing alphabet tradition.

The book’s section “Jazz” adds bright notes to the works of five artists in the collection who bring the alphabet, musical notation and artists’ books together: Jeremy Adler, Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz, Bernard Heidsieck and Karl Kempton.

Dancing Alphabet is not an artist’s book, but the notes and moves it adds to the collection may serve as a spark to the next artist looking to the alphabet and book art for inspiration — or the next scholar intrigued by the connections between the alphabet, music and dance.

Books On Books Collection – Vítězslav Nezval

2021/07/162023/01/31Books On BooksLeave a comment

Abeceda/Alphabet (1926/2001)

Alphabet (1926/2001)
Vítězslav Nezval / translated by Jindřich Toman and Matthew S. Witkovsky
Facsimile and translation of Abeceda. Perfect bound paperback, H305 xW235 mm, 72 pages. Acquired from Ergode Books, 1 July 2021. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

From the Afterword:

The 1926 book Alphabet (Abeceda) is a landmark achievement in European modernism. Its frequent reproduction in exhibition catalogues and scholarly articles has made it a key symbol of Devětsil (1920-ca. 1931), the Czech artists’ collective within whose ranks the book was conceived, and its importance is increasingly measured in international terms as well. The book consists of a series of rhymed quatrains by Devětsil poet Vítězslav Nezval, titled and ordered according to the letters of the Latin alphabet. Facing each set of verses is a Constructivist photomontage layout by Karel Teige, a painter turned typographer who was also Devětsil’s spokesperson and leading theorist. Teige developed his graphic design around photographs of dancer and choreographer Milada (Milča) Mayerová, a recent affiliate of the group, who had performed a stage version of “Alphabet” to accompany a recitation of the poem at a theatrical evening in Nezval’s honor in April 1926… The project to create a new alphabet epitomizes the proselytizing attitude of avant-gardists in various fields in the years after World War I. From Dada poetry to Constructivist architecture and design, from calls to overhaul theater to revolutions in literary theory, a panoply of experiments took the alphabet as their model or target and disclosed the potency of this elementary linguistic structure as a trope for creative renewal and social revolution.

Full scan of original Czech edition here.

The Afterword mistakenly asserts that there was no precedent for Mayerová’s choreography and performance of the alphabet. In fact, the Athenian dramatist Kallias (late 5th century BCE?) wrote Grammatike Theoria, sometimes called “a spectacle of letters”, the ABC Show or ABC Tragedy, in which actors and a chorus sang and danced the twenty-four characters of the new-fangled Ionian alphabet. What does seem to be without precedent is the collaboration across poetry, dance, typography, photography and bookmaking.

Carrying on the collaborative tradition and more emphatically challenging gender stereotyping, here is Paulina Olowska dancing Abeceda at the Simon Lee Gallery’s 2019 exhibition of Tomaso Binga/Bianca Menna‘s works, which included Alfabetière Pop (1976), his/her nude alphabet portfolio. If only Tomaso/Bianca or Paulina would find a book artist to reprise the codex part of the collaborative tradition.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Kallias

Books On Books Collection – Lisa Merkin

Bodies Making Language (2021)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Marie Lancelin

Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Toshifumi Kawahara

Dancing Alphabet (1991)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Vítězslav Nezval

Abeceda/Alphabet (1926/2001)

Further Reading

Bodies Making Language (2021)

Further Reading

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Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)

Further Reading

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Dancing Alphabet (1991)

Further Reading

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Abeceda/Alphabet (1926/2001)

Further Reading

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