6/3/2023 0 Comments Illuminate book![]() ![]() So I bought two more used copies of the same book and then enhanced Dali with more Dali and still more Dali. I thought Dali would be an interesting challenge for me because his work also involves a kind of cutting things together. Sometimes, the match will be contrived as such, like Dali Dali, which began when I came upon Salvador Dali’s self-designed Harry N. Or, in Giotto Gorey, I made two stories (words plus images) from Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey to fit into a book of Giotto frescos from the Scrovigni Chapel. Sometimes, the primary book (A) will be made to match its mate (B) evenly, as in Diane Arbus Apocalypse, in which the pictures in Diane Arbus’s 1972 Aperture monograph precisely fit the pages of The Cloisters Apocalypse: an early fourteenth-century manuscript in facsimile. a book of “infinity pools” enhanced by miscellaneous images from the history of cartooning). David Foster Wallace’s This is Water and a yoga manual) some draw from numerous sources (e.g. Some of the bibliolages consist of a mashup of two source books (e.g. My extra-illustrating involves other motives beyond enhancement, but none of the work is done with photoshop or other digital means. That craft was sometimes called Grangerization, after James Granger, who published a book that was commonly used to create an "improved" book. ![]() Mostly I work with the graphic elements in a book, super-layering an illustration with another illustration, so that, for example, a book of photographs of gargoyles suddenly contains a cut-out image of Tarzan on each of its pictures or a volume of paintings by Henri Rousseau takes on fragments of images from The History of Medicine. I call this hyper-illuminating. The heritage of this work is in the nineteenth-century craft of extra-illustration, in which favorite books were reconfigured to include more illustrations, to enhance the experience of reading the book. I usually take special care to create a binding, a box, some dedicated cover to frame and protect the bibliolage, and I record all I can recall about the contents in a special notebook-and now on this website. Every book used should hover at the very bottom layer of the book market, either valueless (a freebie) or cheap (from a library or church rummage sale), although I have exempted myself from this rule on occasion when I knew just what I needed or could not resist what I desired. That ratio provides a means of downsizing-taking plentiful and useless books to a new synthesis, which is singular and potent. The sacrificed source book or books seem exhausted and ready for the recycling bin. The achieved book is ample it usually bulges. At least two books are synthesized in the creation of a bibliolage, but one is augmented by being heaped (over-layered, imbricated, superimposed) while the other is diminished by being culled (eviscerated, raided, spent), and in some cases many books are synthesized to make the final bibliolage. I keep the one and throw the others away. Every image in Book A is altered by images from Book B (C, D, E,…), and at the end Book A is full, while the other books are empty. As I have developed the art of synthesizing books in this way, I have followed these guidelines: Each begins with an illustrated book (A) and a source of other illustrations (B, C, D,…). Something about that act of cutting and reducing gave me joy, and soon I was making other book collages, or what I began calling bibliolages. I cut up many dictionaries, leaving a large pile of ruined books, in order to compile and glue one new book, a wordless pseudo-dictionary, which is also a sort of collage but shaped like a book. (But aren’t. One is about gathering together, the other is about gluing.) At the time I began writing Collections of Nothing, I also began assembling (gathering) what I called my dictionary collection-a volume full of lexical illustrations. ![]() ![]() Collage seems a logical extension of collecting. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |