The Redchurch Idler, resident book critic, reviewed twenty eight small publications and artists' books at KALEID editions' project space in Shoreditch between August 2009 - July 2010. An online compendium of his original, dark and witty writings can be read in full below.
KALEID editions and artists who do books are indebted to the Redchurch Idler's support. In his own words:
"FLASH Reviews are a bibliographic sport, a hundred words more or less about selected works. These special ‘blurbs’ absolutely honed down, chairs without any upholstery are a few crisp sentences conveying a brief synopsis.
Special care and attention too has gone into brief surveys of work by artists-of-the-month, often involving a wider angle consideration of painting, drawing, collage, video, print and sculpture. Such diversity has generated many stylistic types of ‘flash’ review as can be seen.
Timewise, some of the reviews have been written in a jiffy, well maybe a couple of jiffies, after scanning a publication and taking secretarial notes. Others, particularly discursive texts such as Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson’s As a Weasel Sucks Eggs, An Essay on Melancholia & Cannibalism or the 3rd edition of Karsten Schubert’s The Curator’s Egg have taken longer to mull over and do.
Creative spin-offs happen along the way too, and of course a great opportunity to learn about artists’ books."
The Doll
Hans Bellmer
Published by Atlas Press
Containing among other texts Bellmer’s key theoretical statement Die Puppe (1934), translated here into English for the first time, this vital collection of Surrealist writing and photo-documentation symbolically evokes the collapse of the Weimar Republic with its cabarets, lust murders and violent polarisation into right & left-wing politics, through a home-made doll, “an artificial girl with anatomical possibilities” as Bellmer put it, and tool for circumventing repression. This disturbing, dismembered kit/object becomes the focus of desire for an artist who has left books behind and embraced stage magic, in an effort to represent his shocked psyche.
10.07.09
Dark Matter
Victoria Browne
Artist's book, 2008
Exactly what is Dark Matter? Darth Vader’s pocket hanky?! It purports to be a book. Is it? Unfolding the contents is a discipline in itself, unheimlich, vertiginous, a laser-cut axonometric sheet of cuts, holes, folds and scores definitely unavailable in W.H.Smiths. Made in response to Edwin Abbot’s Victorian curio Flatland (1884), Browne’s piece constitutes a link between the pre-Einsteinian world and today’s exotic cutting edge physics, its specially selected black matte paper literally cancelling reflective light. Your mum’s best cake doily it ‘aint. Hold it up and be bogglestaggered. Read it somehow.
16.07. 09
Bedlam
Jennifer Higgie
Published by Sternberg Press
Jennifer Higgie’s account of a year in the life of the 19th century fantasy painter Richard Dadd, starts and ends in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, but focuses largely on his trip to the Middle East as a companion to
the lawyer Sir Thomas Philips. Venice. Delphi. Palestine. The Nile. In Bedlam, Higgie’s récit works as a video diary, loaded with the stimuli of foreign travel that were to trigger Dadd’s psychosis. The artist’s subsequent murder of his own father with a cut-throat razor in Cobham Park in 1843 would have represented to Victorian society the ultimate transgression.
24.08.09
Our Worlds Collided
Leigh Clarke
Artist's book, 2009
Babyfaced/squashed/écrasé/flattened/punctured/mashed/comminuted/warped/flayed/anonymised/trashed/defaced/plasticated/mutilated/crumpled/stigmatised/abominated/KO’ed/Mercatored/snagged/debased/anamorphised/scarified/chewed/dirempted/bashed/framed/unidentified/abused/pulped/compacted/deflated/bodged/knackered/layered/embalmed/roadkilled/Torquemada’ed/kaput/vandalised/mullered/undercarded/bastardised/demonised/dissed/shrinkwrapped/cameoed/twisted/deadbeaten/rammed/1D’ed/scrunched/crushed/Metzgered/guineapigged/remixed/outlasted/JCB’ed/Oldboyed/soft-targeted.
27.08.09
The American War
Harrell Fletcher
Published by JL
It’s impossible not to be moved by The American War, though it is only for strong stomachs. A collection of skewed images and dry captions taken by Fletcher at the chillingly entitled War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, are re-presented here at several removes from the atrocities themselves. The effect is to waken the reader from anaesthetic complacency, but also challenge today’s growing distance between frontline combatants and the public. Photos of napalm casualties, de-formed children and waterboarding act as reminders that for many Vietnamese and traumatised US soldiers, the war casts a long shadow.
22.08.09
Blumenfeld, An Elderly Bachelor
Franz Kafka
Published by Four Corners Press
This fable demonstrates how the sad life of an office worker is turned on its head by the unexplained arrival of two stripy balls that challenge his routine and repressed outlook. Narrated in Kafka’s flat yet suspenseful style, it probes the pain of relationships and loss of childhood. David Musgrave’s lapidary images which accompany the text depict inscribed ceramic and stone fragments, primitive glyphs reminiscent of finds from the archaeological ‘hoax’ of Glozel. In Blumenfeld, nothing is what it seems, the pipe-smoking hero coaxed from his sorrowful dreams and Byzantine labours by the diplopia of twins, buffoons and balls.
30.08.09
Notes from Russia
Alexei Plutser-Samo
Published by FUEL
Notes from Russia has the lot: a rag bag of flyers and handwritten ‘For Sale’ notices, telephone numbers, latrinalia and dire warnings not to overcrowd the lifts in case of suffocation, small ads for lost dogs, temporary work, complaints and grievances, appeals, sexual services, public service announcements no-one obeys, autographs, doodles, spells, Post-its on the bathroom mirror, even the prophesies of false messiahs; you name it, modern Russian history from below, the minutiae of everyday life. Alexei Plutser-Sarno’s trawl through streets, kiosks and stairwells nets the ephemera of a mentally disturbed nation, catching its voices in windblown billets-doux.
31.08.09
Dernier Espace avec Introspecteur
Caroline Tisdall
Published by Anthony d'Offay Gallery
Caroline Tisdall’s blend of text and image conveys both the visceral and the psychological aspects of Joseph Beuys’ 1982 installation Dernier Espace Avec Introspecteur. Avoiding the hazards of academic observation, her writing outlines the historical backdrop, the novel array of substances: fat/felt/beeswax joined by a rear view mirror salvaged from a car crash, warping both contents and spatial boundaries of the Anthony d’Offay Gallery. Looking back, the figure in these photographs is a far cry from the celebrity Beuys, his gaunt face mythologised in diamond dust by Andy Warhol, and show a man with a peasant-like rapture for natural materials.
7.09.09
Return of the Crayfish
OTTO
Artist's book, 2007
Less ghost story than an angler’s porky in which the crayfish in question grows bigger with every page, engulfing its author and the capital city, OTTO’s highly stylised comic book treats it both as a War of the Worlds predator and an abstract motif, woven virally into the urban fabric. Nature re-asserts itself through this decapod, with its party trick: an escape tail-flip. Studied by Aristotle, Huxley and Freud himself, whose work on crayfish nervous tissue marked a turning point in the understanding of cellular life; now we just eat them jellied or in a sandwich at Pret.
13 9 09
Arches and Seizures
Alex Hamilton
Artist's book, 2009
Amending the 4th Amendment alters the constitution in one fell swoop, leaving a junk document to provide a halting lexical experience, viz Arches & Seizures, a fragmentary sous-texte that evokes dropped-off shop signage on Main Street, set against a background of swirling calligraphic lines, a black & white banner to go with the convulsive bop phrasings of Alex Hamilton in ice trumpeter video mode, his woolly-gloved jazz lampoon of State pageantry and grandiloquence also an auto-destructive take on polar meltdown, glottal buglings that dissipate meaning, handiwork inducing confusion & paralysis in the flag-waving masses.
25.09.09
Intelligent Design
Peter Rapp
Aritst's book, 2009
The bad acid imagery of Peter Rapp’s Intelligent Design would normally belong in a zine, its mutant cartoon figures parading across Old Testament wallpaper in a post-apocalyptic narrative: the return of the devils of Loudun, an outbreak of St. Anthony’s fire, the studio disjecta of Hieronymus Bosch, a believer’s detox session? Its black cloth binding suggests a prayer book or catechism, but the scary endpapers and brand of genetically modified religion soon upset the reader’s quest for solace, Rapp’s fastidious production values exemplified by inkjet printing on Somerset archival rag, quite at odds with the guide’s trashy content.
2.11.09
The Lion and The Ox and The Boar and The Bear
Nick Morley
Published by KALEID editions, 2009
If Nietzsche’s observation in The Birth of Tragedy that the novel was an “infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable” remains true, then Nick Morley’s new publication might be viewed as not only a shuffling of age old texts but a challenge for the contemporary novel also. Printed on a bench top Adana 85, and held together by cylinder posts, the book’s user is invited to participate in an act of ongoing recombinance, generating via the fan-format, pantomime animals that threaten zoological taxonomy, and textual disjunctions which thwart the desire for a familiar or happy ending; unkind nursery stories so to speak.
02.11.09
Entrata
Lucy Harrison
Published by Lucy Harrison
Lucy Harrison’s Entrata features a sequence of photographic off-cuts, haunting glimpses into the closed universe of a 19th century Venetian asylum. These precious fragments from what appear to be ‘booking photos’, document moments of induction, part embrace part regimentation, onto the island of San Servolo. We are left with off-centre souvenir snaps of the administrative event, incomplete impressions of some of the maniacs, their forgotten case histories indexed by folded hands, cheek bones, and shoulders inside oval or baguette frames. A blank space in the book’s gutter threatens to engulf all such synechdochic traces of the inmates’ fate.
07.11.09
The Curator's Egg
Karsten Schubert
Published by Riding House
Ideas heavy, The Curator’s Egg is part eulogy to the museum as institution, part discussion document revealing how the museological egg in question has been fried, poached and scrambled. Karsten Schubert traces the history of public museums from imperial storehouses, via glass fronted kunst palaces, customised buildings such as Tate Modern, to the dysfunctionality of the Guggenheim branch model. They are shown to be sensitive ganglia where contemporary art works, curatorial hobby-horses and business politics knot/unknot, their display methodology registering nervous crises almost as they occur, architectural ‘user-friendliness’ often as important now as core collections themselves.
23 11 09
Driven-Out, Ditched and Deserted
Jason Clarke
Published by Coracle Press
Jason Clark’s sequence of expressionist drawings Driven-Out, Ditched & Deserted is a wintry study in vehicular dereliction that documents his hikes off-the-beaten-track in New England. Upturned chassis, twisted fenders, buried wheels, his eye for detail at these ‘graves’ avoids fetishism by treating the wrecks as more than anti-romantic subject matter, each a recursive opportunity that “contrives dialect for the drawing” to quote from the afterword. Driven-Out might be read as a fiche of human presence in a doomed civilisation narrative, but equally a set of liminal swatches, a hunter’s private moments of discovery and delirium in the woods.
17 12 09
Platonic
Louise Bristow
Artist's book, 2010
Louise Bristow evokes the anodyne world of corporate management, its hegemony concealed behind glass facades and atrium art. Assembling her platonic forms i.e. cube, tetra-/icosa-/octa-/dodeca-/hedra from cardboard templates, a rudimentary task that involves folding and sticking a series of flaps, mocks the executive decision-making which shapes social reality for the multitude, whilst implying that outcomes, the artificial hives and insane systems mankind has built, are universal default structures. The De Chirico like atmosphere depicted via her boardroom toys suggests we have become mere drones in a totalitarian business machine, desperate to recompose the given, to recollect the womb.
2.01.10
A Line of Thought
Owen Bullett
Artist's book, 2010
‘Happy ever after’ - ekphrasis for Owen Bullett
Curlicued semblance: call it knowledge,
thrum of unfinished business in the head;
paths that lead nowhere, or to dead ends
old tools rusting in a derelict garage.
A shaving from a chip from a block from a
forest, each is fugitive without context,
kinks the way so avoid muddy footsteps;
Hansel & Gretel’s dangerous journey.
Disbound pages flutter and rip
nosegays on trees shrivel, then darken;
curvilinear ash, cool as home-made butter
life’s big ending: a pig-tail marker;
Once or twice or thrice upon a time, who knows?
For an unbroken twig preserves its mystery.
3.01.10
Little Wonder...
Jonathan Ward
Published by KALEID editions, 2010
Red fox fur, white sugar, dandelion seeds in microscopic close-up on original Brooke Bond tea cards might be catalysts for Jonathan Ward’s new album Little Wonder…, that touchstones unforgettable childhood moments such as bathtime, a trip to the barber’s, and fishing in hidden places. The lacunae where his new set of 30/40 laser-cut cards will fit are heavy with suspenseful pathos, and alongside retrospective images of his funky artists’ ‘books’, make up a collection-in-progress, hoarded moments and rites-of-passage that record the scrapes and scars of growing up; existence toughened by therapeutic abreaction, the future a gallery of uncrystallised events.
30 1 10
People I remember, places I don't
Rob Hunter
Artist's book, 2010
Rob Hunter’s People I Remember, Places I Don’t investigates selective memory syndrome inside the framework of nuclear familial experience, highlighting the way our near past is often edited cinematically into back-drops and cut-outs. Working from intimate photographs he has evoked places in the USA such as Carmel, New Jersey, and Disneyland, or a placid summer holiday in Devon, his snappy drawing style aimed to recapture human size moments that somehow got dwarfed by the massive impersonality of nature and architecture. Phrased as half-full or half-empty conundrums, these images of absence ask “Are we lost or are we found?”
24 2 10
You and Me
Sheila Ghelani
Artist's book, 2010
Four wing-nuts compress floral boards that function liminally, both preserving the hidden contents of Sheila Ghelani's private world, whilst relaying its signal. Her table-top 'quasi-lectures' are poised between autopsy and playful recipe, poised between ‘pure’ and ‘polluted’, home and away, YOU & ME, the flower press encoding neo-Victorian billets doux of passionate love. Similarly the gap between page and readership is intensified by her performance rationale of cardinal points within which a dabbling, non fine art use of materials announces hybridity, unzips difference, trades in confusion, those sequencing misprints in the human genome that inflect ME & YOU!
2.03.10
Hairpiece
Helen Schoene
Artist's book, 2010
By turns sumptuous and heavy with abandonment yet also verging on the macabre, Helen Schoene’s inkjet, hand-sewn leporello book hairpiece, in an edition of 100, features a representation of her own long red tresses, plus a single filament of this unruly hair appended in a ziplock sachet. Clearly fascinated by the semantics of the word ‘hair’, her investigation mocks philosophical hair-splitting, as an absurdist inability to see the whole. Yet as the pages extend from her chevelure entangled face to the last coppery loop, Schoene’s handwritten signature is disclosed, name-dropping its owner into the very epistemological system she reviles.
8.03.10
Monster
Francis Elliot
Artist's book, 2010
WANTED signatories. Francis Elliott’s Monster, a new parlour game, consisting of a stout white paper poster 33 X 24 inches, and two cheap biros, seeks players. Must be prepared to make their mark whilst blindfolded. Be the proud owner of a unique artwork by signing your name obsessively. Played against the clock, Monster prompts a DIY exploration of the running together of identity, and of random mutation as the participants proper names become improper, and the game morphs them together into a pantomime horse. The end product becomes a playful treaty, a map of terra nullius, and overwritten space.
15.03.10
Love Hurts
Jordan Mckenzie
Artist's book, 2010
Talking love. Talking death. Talking sugar milk. Talking bad teeth. Talking Orpheus. Talking Eurydice. Talking sex. Talking treachery. Talking tough. Talking tease. Talking murder. Talking trickery. Talking Heathcliff. Talking Cathy. Talking Blue Velvet. Talking pillow. Talking nothing. Talking chivalry. Talking Lot & his daughters. Talking Cartland. Talking goo. Talking Gretna. Talking cliché. Talking thong. Talking Double Indemnity. Talking Paracetamol. Talking dowry. Talking rude. Talking Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Talking French letter. Talking cello. Talking whip. Talking turtle dove. Talking viola. Talking Orbison. Talking oboe d’amore. Talking Venice. Talking St.Pauli. Talking gigolo. Talking Pigalle. Talking adult. Talking humiliation. Talking Arabian nights. Talking...
22.03.10
Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio
Fraser Muggeridge Studio
Volume of artist's books, 2010
The product of secret disbinding by an assistant equipped with hot iron and paring knife, Designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio is not just a crafty way to showcase a back catalogue, but hints at a darker agenda: of interbreeding, and remixture, explicit messing with bibliographic protocols. Designed in 12 sections, the reading experience it serves up is disjunctive and maddeningly modern: pages of shorn text become cliff-hangers, divorced visual images pressed flowers, footnotes stranded data, as incompletion becomes the norm, its jumbled pages research nodes to be explored later; a classic case of what Charles Jencks has called “jumping architecture”.
26.03.10
Being There II
Annette Habel
Artist's book, 2010
Twenty-four characters emerge from twenty-four pinhole camera images, some with blurry Francis Bacon faces, others steadfast as soldiers, a few managing a shy smile. Their thoughts are hidden, likewise their crimes and misdemeanours, each probably aware this laborious exposure is an indexical moment in their mortal existence, itself blessed with the fragile charm of a decaying isotope. Habel references sub-standard passport photos, you know the ones, but these shots would fail the stringent biometric criteria for crossing today’s borders, and so as implied by the deixis of the title, she seeks to explore a different human zone of mistaken identity.
24.04.10
High Light Bell
Katherine Jones
Artist's book, 2010
When opened, the contents of Katherine Jones’ High Light Bell are extremely suggestive, its tentlike or bladder structure in lieu of the book block, a rudimentary organ rather than a text to read. This detachable pop-up cunningly made from Japanese tissue, archival mount board, thread and PVA has properties that render it oxymoronic: flimsy yet tough, inflated yet see-through, protective yet suffocating. When closed its angled edges evoke a Wardian case (employed by Victorians to keep indoor ferns) that has been flatpacked; Jones’ loose etched organic forms that spread via the lantern onto the endpapers, inscribing a green memorandum.
30.04.10
Black & White Dreams of Cesare, a 23 year old somnambulist
Colin Waeghe
Artist's book, 2010
On the face of it Colin Waeghe’s Black & White Dreams of Cesare, a 23 year Old Somnambulist is a portfolio of ten 73 x 55cm silkscreened cinema posters with a Hollywood Oscar embossed on its cover, but look again and fan browse a prankster hommage to movies that never were, using the tear-soaked images of retro film publicity as background to trail the insertion of Waeghe's friends' names: Vega/Ruegg/Carr/Niwa/Greir/Schiffer/Miss Y as screen vedettes, his digitally manipulated gestalt allowing Monsieur Hulot to meet Colonel Kurtz; history rewritten as scrambled memory syndrome after Jules Verne.
28.06.10
As a weasel sucks eggs, an essay on melancholia and cannibalism
Daniel Birnbaum & Anders Olsson
Sternberg Press
Tracing the archaic concept of melancholy from its Aristotelian origins as one of the four humours, and how it became a sine qua non in Renaissance Florence’s construction kit of genius, the authors examine its presence monographically in the work of Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Gunnar Ekelöf and Dieter Roth. Cannibalism is invoked as melancholy’s other, a worst-case scenario eating disorder, sublimated through ritual sacrifice (a kind of holiday from the normal) or via art. The book itself comes across as the leftovers of a research meal, pudding heavy in its reading, drifting towards brandy cigars and death.
