As a reviewer, I’ve wondered about these questions as I consider novels and short story collections, often in translation, that include impressive artwork created in response to the text, or vice versa, texts born from visual art.

Last year, there was Animalinside, a comic-book-length collaborative exchange with existential-themed text by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and paintings by Max Neumann, focused on an enigmatic dog-being with two legs. I ended up liking the pictures more than the words, but Kraznahorakai’s prose proved to be funny in an over-the-top barbaric yawp sort of way.

I also read Paul Scheerbart’s mesmerizing “failure journal” called The Perpetual Motion Machine, published by Wakefield Press (reviewed at Hyperallergic here). Wakefield included 26 schematic drawings by Scheerbart, which added to the humor (he’s a comically bad engineer, though a skilled technical artist), and their meticulousness showed how dangerously lost he was in his utopian fantasy.

Seagull Books recently published some striking examples of art/text: The Loss Library, a collection of prose about failed stories by South African writer Ivan Vladislavic; and a children’s tale by Thomas Bernhard (yes, that Thomas Bernhard) called Victor Halfwit, in which a couple pages of text were transformed into a thick folio-fable of collage artwork, perfectly capturing the tone of Bernhard’s slightly gruesome and hilarious fairy tale.

Both books benefit from complex and hypnotic artwork by Sunandini Banerjee. After several years working on book covers for Seagull, Victor Halfwit became her first full-length, illustrated book project.

“Not having illustrated a book before — but knowing that I disliked children’s books which had pages full of text and a picture cowering in a box in the corner somewhere,” she says, “I began to read it word by word, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, and began to ‘draw’ on wherever the associations and images came to me naturally.”

Bernhard’s work is known for its intense seriousness, and Banerjee said when she first read Victor Halfwit she thought it was “simple and perhaps even a wee bit dull.” “But I found that when you take your time over it… when you pause to breathe between those words, whole worlds of pictures come cascading through the cracks and between the lines. So even though he uses the word ‘forest’ about 20 times, each forest is different. And that perhaps was the challenge.”

She said her goal was “to be true to Bernhard’s style and yet to bring in enough of myself to prompt the reader to read a little more, to bring in some of themselves and go, ‘Ah, that looks familiar,’ or ‘Hah! That’s really funny.’ Each page becomes a story in a much bigger story.”

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "Victor Halfwit" (all images courtesy Seagull Books)

She created over 200 pages of artwork based on a few pages of text. “It was an immense undertaking,” she says, “and I feel that I have to generate a new lifetime of images and memories and associations, for I have vomited everything I possessed into those pages.”

As a collagist, Banerjee is staunchly independent and when I suggested Hannah Höch as one possible influence, she politely resisted the idea. “One of the things I simply do not do is to identify any form or person as ‘an influence’ or as ‘an inspiration.’ I don’t want to be ‘like’ anyone. I want to be me.”

“It is not just a question of assembling images. One is reading, remembering, recalling, reinventing, rediscovering, associating — all at once. One is picking up on certain words or motifs and then chasing them down the alleyways of representation to see what they finally look like when you stand face to face. … After it is over, I can never remember how it was that it came to be done.”

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "The Loss Library" (click to enlarge)

Picture-filled texts make the story feel like it’s drawing two reactions out of me: first comes the calm memory of children’s books I’ve loved; second, the feeling, decidedly more abstract, of knowing that these words triggered images in someone else’s mind, and these “other” conceptions are now alive in the book. The result is a palimpsest — an overlay of visual responses each competing for dominance.

When I asked Banerjee about this in relation to her intentions with the artwork she created for Vladislavic’s The Loss Library, she said, “I don’t think there can be a specific intended effect with any form of art. One can hope or wish for something to have a certain effect, but so much of it lies in the eye of the beholder. Our idea was to have a frontispiece for every story, a pictorial representation that could be its seed or its fruit. And we wanted to treat them like old-fashioned picture plates, which is why they were printed separately and then stuck in. Not to illustrate each story, in the strict sense of the word, but to perhaps walk alongside, to accompany, sometimes even to comment, to point out.”

One thing I hadn’t even considered was what the author might think about any of this tinkering. After all, a book cover is usually something authors just have to live with and hope the publisher can do their best. With The Loss Library, Banerjee said Seagull worked with Vladislavic:

[He] was remarkable in his generosity to allow me to ‘intervene’ if you will, or illuminate if you will, his words. And for that I am grateful. Every reader, every viewer, is welcome to make of it what they will. Once it is in their hands, it is their responses that will make them read or turn away.

Sunandini Banerjee, art from "Victor Halfwit"

Though I greatly admire the artwork in these so-called picture books, I find them a challenge to read and enjoy. Their subject matter lives a complex life, the writer, the artist, and my responses all contending. And I find myself struggling to preserve my ideas and images, to preserve relationship with the author. To preserve its intimacy. Maybe because I write fiction as well as criticism, I don’t want that third partner in my reading experience — no matter how fine or complex their contribution. Mere words on the page may not be very exciting things to look at; what’s exciting is what I make of them. I want to keep that work to myself.

It is Almost That was conceived and edited by Siglio publisher Lisa Pearson, who envisioned the book to be the first of several editions that would document pieces in the fuzzy area between art and text, works that are “not-quite-this-and-not-quite-that.” In her afterword, Pearson emphasizes that “categories cannot contain” and that works that are “partly (almost) visible to one world [are] often entirely invisible to another.” The twenty-six pieces that comprise the volume are not arranged in chronological order, though they are loosely associated with works that precede and follow them. Through this manner of curation, Pearson poses the question of what it means to “read” a text that reveals itself primarily as image when it is not the only work of its kind.

The title of It is Almost That is borrowed from a slideshow included in the volume by Theresea Hak Kyung Cha. Cha is best known for her text-art novel Dictée (1982), a harbinger of the recent surge in experimental memoir. Like Dictée, It is Almost That (1977), designed on black paper with white press-type, explores the effect of point of view in the project of personal narration. The piece is composed of fragments and does not offer the reader the satisfaction of narrative or declaration. Like many of the pieces contained in this book, it incites “more questions than answers.”

Excerpt from "It Is Almost That" by Cole Swensen & Shari Degraw (all images courtesy Siglio Press, © the artists) (click to enlarge)

A vigorous commitment to conceptual practice unites the artists, no matter how different the content of their work. All pieces contained in the volume are by women, including several key performance artists from the genre’s boldest era, among them Hannah Weiner, Adrian Piper and Ann Hamilton. Alison Knowles’s “A House of Dust” (1968), an exercise in randomly generated content, appears as what is arguably the first computer generated poem. Eleanor Antin’s “Domestic Peace,” a graphic notation of the artist’s emotional responses to conversations with her mother during a visit in December 1971, reveals the degree of friction between the two women that arises over mundane topics.

Some works in this collection pursue questions related to the writing process. In particular, the work of Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu & Rohini Kapil, Cole Swensen & Shari Degraw and Fiona Banner provoke a conversation about the relationship between facts and evidence. Jane Hammond’s “Fallen” (2004–), a series of paper leaves reproduced in color that carry the handwritten names of deceased American soldiers, attempts a symbolic documentation of a specific loss. When this anthology was published there was a pile of more than four thousand different paper leaves comprising the work.

Excerpt from "Fallen" by Jane Hammond (2004–)

Helen Kim’s “What Remains” (2006) is composed of photographs and text panels that chronicle one Korean family’s life in the United States. Images of empty plates, restaurant takeout containers and notes on napkins do not explicitly reveal any personal history except the sense that a person or group of people have just been missed, perhaps forever, by bad timing, or misinterpretation. Kim’s assemblage makes a powerful statement about how consumer culture overshadows our most intimate interactions.

All of the texts in the book are printed in black and white, despite that seven of the works were originally designed in color. Pearson notes the significance of her editorial decision: “Gray is the color of ambiguity, of it’s almost that, of infinite shading, of the in-between like twilight and shadows, of the merging of the white of the page and the black of the printed text. Gray is, when reading, unseen but sensed (the figurative gray is always there in the best work).” This makes sense for pieces that were originally created in black and white, though for those works originally created in color, the imposition of gray scale may overstate the metaphor.

Excerpt from “Pictures and Early Words” by Hannah Weiner (1972) (click to enlarge)

Some flatness intrinsic to the form of the anthology makes the body of work come across a little more like literature rather than visual art. And the juxtaposition of such different creative impulses can make it easy to forget that these pieces were once hard to classify. Even when presented in gray scale, many of the works have little in common with each other. This may have to do with the fact that each piece is governed by its own rules, which tend to be based in personal aesthetics rather than the collaborative ideas of a movement or group of artists. A couple of the pieces seem under-realized compared to other works in the anthology.

For example, Hannah Wiener’s “Pictures and Early Words” (1972), which attempts to translate visions of words appearing in thin air and falling around her into a typescript, reads more like an annotated diary than visual art. The few pages presented from Fiona Banner’s “The Nam” (1997), a book of descriptions about six well-known films on the Vietnam War, look like bad photocopies: fat, blank margins showing around the edges of the book and the white space between the dense type appearing unevenly grainy and smudged.

While most of pieces presented in It is Almost That are nuanced enough to earn careful study, it is a bit disappointing that a more extensive commentary is not included, given that a lack of little critical attention may have contributed to their initial disregard. The upside of this lack of analysis is that there is no distraction from the works, which demand new ways of reading, each in their own imaginative and often playful ways.

It is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists and Writers is edited by Lisa Pearson and available at Siglio Press and other online booksellers.

(All photos of "Zoe Strauss: 10 Years" by the author for Hyperallergic)

Everything about the catalogue for the exhibition Zoe Strauss: 10 Years, published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2012), where the exhibition was installed this spring, speaks to the personality of Zoe Strauss herself. From the price, an insanely affordable $19.95 for a 270-page book with 250 color reproductions, to the conversational essays, and a layout that reminds you of Frank’s Americans or Eggleston’s Democratic Camera, the catalogue’s book format seems to suit Strauss more than the museum’s galleries. The exhibition catalogue is the perfect delivery system for Strauss’s artwork, bringing together her gritty, urban photographs as well as her conceptual ideas about how to share them.

Strauss is, if there ever was, a democratic artist. During the PMA’s exhibition, Strauss actually kept office hours at the museum. Any viewer, student, or admirer could make an appointment to speak with the artist about her work, making Strauss unusually — but characteristically — accessible. Strauss also installed some of her photographs from the exhibition on billboards scattered across the city, in a continued effort to reach the people who might not have the wherewithal to visit the museum show itself.

Self-taught, Strauss began using photography after she was given a camera for her 30th birthday. After beginning the 10 Years project, Strauss began showing her artwork not in galleries or group shows, but beneath the I-95 freeway in South Philadelphia. Onto the cement columns of an underpass that ruthlessly cut through preexisting neighborhoods when it was built, and left houses and residents stranded from the city afterwards, Strauss pasted her documentary style photographs of working class, American life. Staring outwards from drab, gray pillars were the faces of hardworking, disenchanted, and marginalized Philadelphians. Making the I-95 installation an annual project, Strauss’s unconventional and seemingly impromptu exhibitions gathered momentum and notoriety with each passing year.

Zoe Strauss is a street photographer in the most traditional sense of the word, and street photography has always lent itself well to the book format. Strauss makes use of an aesthetic that has been dismissed, and deemed too dated to be interesting, relevant, or encouraged. It’s refreshing, however, to see that classic street photography can still effectively depict the timeless troubles of American society, and it’s inspiring that the genre has been revitalized by a woman. Competing alongside great male street photographers like Evans, Frank, Eggleston, Friedlander, and their iconic books, Strauss’s 10 Years holds its own; her images have a 21st century poignancy and urgency that makes the exhibition catalogue unforgettable.

The artist in 1991

Small images whether seen in the museum, under the I-95, or in the 10 Years book, Strauss’s photographs lose little of their power when reproduced and placed into a different layout. 10 Years is a simple and straightforward book, beautifully designed to give the photographs room to breathe. Surrounded by a thick, white border and centered on the page, the photographs are not forced to echo each other formally, as so many photographic books do for the sake of cohesion. Instead, the seamless editing and constant narrative of Strauss’s photographs allow the images to work together conceptually, while remaining different formally.

One photograph might be a portrait of a woman’s tattoo, scar or infected navel ring, and on the opposite page battered mini blinds, a nightscape dotted with city lights, or the bright green ceiling of a pizza joint: the two images still work together, united by similar themes, perspective and composition. Not all the photographs in the monograph are forced to work as a spread, either, and some of the images that sit across from a blank white page work best because of it. The spacing and rhythm of the photographs in this catalogue, while seemingly effortless and unintentional, benefits and enhances the Strauss’s images themselves.

The content of Strauss’s individual photographs is not always disturbing, but paging through the entirety of 10 Years means talking a walk through neighborhoods and into situations that you might otherwise avoid. It means coming face to face with the people we don’t normally, or always, spend a long time looking at: sometimes we are uneasy feeling pity, guilt, or sadness. Strauss looks for us, and she looks without bias or judgment. In the first few pages of 10 Years we enter into situations that are jarring, as Strauss takes us into gloomy alleys, strange men’s bedrooms, and through unknown urban landscapes. In thinking about who bares themselves for an unknown camera, the voluntary feeling that permeates Strauss’s photographs is exactly what makes them feel so understanding and empathetic. The photographic curator Peter Barberie says of Strauss, “the woman and man on the street, yearning to be heard, are the basis of her art.”

Interspersed between groups of photographs are the monograph’s three essays: a playful and conversational essay by Strauss herself, a complicated and slightly convoluted piece by the art historian Sally Stein, and a real gem by Peter Barberie, chief curator of photography at the PMA, titled Zoe Strauss: Under I-95. Reading Strauss’s own essay, titled 30 to 40, is like reading an excerpt from her journal. She talks to us in an honest way, like she’s talking more to herself than to an unknown reader. Strauss discusses her own work, the photographs she likes, what they mean to her, and how she wishes to present them. Throughout, she adds humorous anecdotes like, “during the run of I-95, I lost three teeth. Essentially, they just broke and fell out of my mouth. I think three teeth is a high count for the duration of one art project.” Strauss refrains from making her essay like an artist statement, and though 30 to 40 is not a deep glimpse into the mind of the artist, it’s a causal look at what she was feeling and working on at that particular moment.

Peter Barberie’s essay, on the other hand, is a lovely mix of art history and personal opinion. Barberie possesses a deep understanding of Strauss and her history, and his essay seeks to place her into the genre of street photography, where I agree she rightfully belongs. He does so, however, without making her work feel derivative or unoriginal. His synopsis of Strauss’s artistic career is a detailed one. Starting with her obscure early work, he follows Strauss as she began traveling and photographing outside Philadelphia. “As she began traveling across the country,” he writes, “she sought out the places that the American dream had used up and left behind.” He studies her personal inspirations, like the 1985 MOVE bombing, (when local police firebombed a MOVE house, killing eleven people and starting a fire that burned down sixty other buildings), as well as Strauss’s artistic ones. Barberie explores Strauss’s interest in artists like Martha Rosler, William Eggleston, and Mark Cohan.

The 10 Years monograph isn’t an afterthought to the museum exhibition, as many catalogues tend to be, nor is it a beautiful take away, like a packet of postcards that help you remember the real thing. Instead, Zoe Strauss: 10 Years seems to work best as a book. It’s true that art books aren’t necessarily any more accessible to the audience Strauss is trying to reach with her photographs than a museum show, although they cost about the same and books you get to keep, but the format of a book does speak to a kind of inherent accessibility. Books, even art books, are egalitarian by nature, and are something many of us can afford who can’t afford art. I’m not sure that any of the people in Strauss’s photographs would buy her book, but I like the idea that they could. Books are the things, after all, that you find in boxes marked “free” outside the grocery store, or that are left stacked on someone’s stoop. Barberie says that Strauss’s work is “made for the street,” and a natural extension of the street is seems to be a book.

Zoe Strauss: 10 Years is published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

September 10, 1960 issue (image via Tilley’s Vintage Magazines)

In an interview with Nerve, Rawle recounts, “Early on, I let the narrative be driven by what I was finding. The problem was that it would quickly go off the rails.” Thus, to stay on a steady narrative course, Rawle decided to defer the collaging process — that is, the pasting and mounting — until he could write the novel “as a proper book.” Once the rough draft of the story was complete, Rawle painstakingly replaced his text with the collaged bits of magazine material that he had been accumulating and organizing in a database-like system of scrapbooks. Obviously the assembled found text could only be an “approximation” (to use Rawle’s own term) of what he had in mind, and the noticeable and frequent slippages between the intentionally planned and the availably possible gives Woman’s World its most attractive and entertaining stylistic feature.  For example, during a scene in which the protagonist Norma Fontaine prepares to have her measurements taken for a dress fitting, Norma remarks, “Up until then, my measurements had always been a matter of careless approximation — as remote as Dartmoor, as vague as cheese.” The double simile allows Rawle to depart momentarily from the narrative constraints of his rough draft, and he indulges accordingly in a campy rhetorical flourish. It is unexpected — as if the source material had bequeathed the writer with a shimmering gift of the ridiculous. (According to Rick Poynor’s review in Eye magazine, Rawle’s “inspired use of simile” makes him “a kitchen-sink surrealist.”) But unlike Norma’s previous measurements, Rawle’s act of “approximation” is meant to be far less loose and “careless.” Committed to maintaining both a high level of narrative and semantic coherence and what the dust jacket copy calls “the breakneck pace of a pulp thriller,” Rawle couldn’t let his plot get completely lost in surrealism, disruption, or absurdity.

The narrative arc of Woman’s World is melodramatic. The beginning of the book follows Norma, the narrator, and her impassioned obsession with clothing, cosmetics, housekeeping, and respectful male attention — all of the prescribed trappings and concerns of femininity during the 1960s. She is, in a sense, the collective unconscious of the women’s magazines personified.  After mentioning the elaborate planning necessary to achieve “the feminine look,” Norma breaks into the unadulterated language of an advice column: “The make-up you put on first thing in the morning should, if it really suits your skin, last until midday, with possibly a quick touch-up during the course of the morning. When lunch time comes, you should clean your face with cleansing milk…” (Today, Norma would no doubt be an inveterate YouTube “fashion guru.”) The fundamental twist of the novel is that Norma turns out to be a transvestite: the reader eventually discovers that she is, in fact, the alter-ego of Roy Little, a traumatized and guilt-ridden young man who impersonates the grown-up version of his sister, who died in a childhood accident.  While she is alternately a figure for the performativity and social constructedness of gender, a spokesperson for the modern, liberated woman, or a parody of bourgeois ideals of femininity, Norma is portrayed as a quasi-realistic character with psychological depth and complexity, and this attempt at characterological roundness is done with varying degrees of success. Norma works best — particularly at the beginning of the novel—as an uncanny voice that veers unpredictably from naturalistic to formulaic speech. The main tension or conflict of the book stems from Roy’s and Norma’s conflicting desires: Roy wishes to intensify his relationship with his newly-found girlfriend, Eve, while Norma increasingly wishes to venture out in public and have her photograph taken by a “Mr. Hands,” a charlatan that would prove to be villainous. In rebuffing Hands’ predatory advances during a photo-shoot, Norma bludgeons him on the head with a high-heel shoe and flees, thinking that she murdered him. But Hands eventually returns, as if from the dead, to ruin the day.

Although they share certain compositional techniques, Woman’s World, in obvious ways, is quite unlike William Burroughs’ cut-up novels — The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964) — and the textual collages of the historical avant-garde — such as Tristan Tzara’s proposed “Dadaist Poem” (1920)—which radically foreground a wild and aleatory logic, a writing “off the rails.”  For example, André Breton’s collage poem that appears at the end of his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) is meant to evoke, in his own words, “the most random assemblage possible … of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers.”  This is the last half of the poem, which heavily trades upon the “first white paper / of chance”:

Page scan of "Manifestoes of Surrealism" by André Breton, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan Press, 1972)

If Breton’s poem constitutes “a writing with scissors,” then Woman’s World was more properly executed through a revising or redrafting with scissors. Rawle’s multi-stage compositional process (first writing, then collaging) is — quite fittingly — tantamount to linguistic transvestism: a creative employment of found material to “dress up” the book in new attire. It is — not unlike Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947) — an exercise in adaptation and constrained diction. Since a conventionally written and conceived narrative forms the basis and structural skeleton of Rawle’s text, the novel’s conventionality interacts with what Zoe Whittall calls “the bells and whistles of how it was created” in interesting ways. This interaction sometimes blurs the line between the seemingly discrete activities of writing and revising.

From "Homicidal" (1961) (image via Goregirl’s Dungeon)

For instance, this is an excerpt from Lopez’s Time Out review that I mentioned above: “Sometimes the writing — if such a term is accurate — falters. Rawle’s obsession with women’s fashion becomes the basis for a detailed meditation on cross-dressing, but the novel’s drag-queen character — stigmatized by mental illness — comes across as way dated.” This, contrastingly, is an excerpt from one of Kevin Killian’s legendary Amazon reviews (two volumes of Killian’s reviews, which were originally posted on Amazon.com, have been published by Hooke Press and Push Press respectively): “The basic plot of the bloke tormented by his own need to cross-dress was trite when producer William Castle used it as the basis for his Psycho rip-off Homicidal (1961). Yet Rawle can write, and has a knack for the unexpected metaphor that illuminates the central situation.” Lopez and Killian appear to be on the same page regarding the predictable psychology of Norma/Roy, but one gets the sense that what Lopez calls “writing” is not quite the same process to which Killian is referring when he says, “Rawle can write.” Lopez seems to be talking about the conventional construction of the plot, what Rawle calls “writing … in the usual way” — a process which surely determined Norma’s mental instability. It is hard to say with certainty, but Killian, on the other hand, seems to be talking about Rawle’s revising-by-collaging, the way that the constrained language from the women’s magazines forces — or at least helpfully suggests — the unexpected figure.  (Here’s another surprising metaphor — one that T.S. Eliot might have penned if he had been a cartoonist: “My brain had dislodged itself and become a slice of peach slithering about on a spoon.”) But in this case, revising (or restylizing) may just be another modality of writing, and Rawle’s book nicely demonstrates the enormous potential of redrafting according to restrictions.

According to Zoe Whittall’s Globe and Mail review, a commentary with which I’d like to end, Rawle’s “language is pleasantly off-the-wall”; she forewarns, “whether you enjoy the tilt-a-whirl visuals and oddball language will influence how much you enjoy the actual story.”  This seems true enough. Roy’s first appearance in the novel — recounted by Norma — allows for some splendid off-the-wall and oddball language. As Norma watches him in the bathroom mirror, Roy, de-wigged and out of drag, applies and combs Brylcreem into his hair to achieve “a lustrous black lacquer shine.” “His hairline is so crisp and even,” observes Norma, “that one would be forgiven for thinking that a long-playing record had melted on his head.”  Not only is the thought wonderfully absurd — thickening our sense of Norma’s eccentric personality and delightfully distorted idiolect — but it is also precise in the way it vividly conjures an image of dark, heavily-pomaded hair. And what Whittall calls “the tilt-a-whirl visuals” are an engaging part of the book’s mise-en-page since Rawle’s carefully collaged bits of text are reproduced in facsimile throughout the length of the book. In the following example, a drawing of a train and railroad track diagonally bifurcates the page at a moment when Roy is attempting to throw a suitcase of Norma’s clothes (and with it some very incriminating evidence) off a bridge and into an open freight car of a passing train:

The divided and cleverly designed page neatly reflects the psychological split of the protagonist; instead of reading across the illustrated gap, we are forced to read in two triangular columns. The passage above clearly demonstrates Norma’s will impinging upon Roy’s actions and shows Roy’s inability to fully relinquish his alter-ego. And even if the figurative significance of Rawle’s collaged insertion is “plain as a hard-boiled egg,” it does show a kitschy ingenuity with the materials at hand.

On a larger level, the novel itself is also divided — we have the story and the “bells and whistles of how it was created” — and sometimes the two components work together and sometimes they are at odds. To adapt Whittall’s observation, you may enjoy the “tilt-a-whirl visuals” and “oddball language” despite the actual story, though Whittall herself seems to view the stylistic eccentricities as an overly repetitive distraction. At the end of her review, she understands the division as a tension between the text and the narrative:

On occasion, the text gets in the way of the narrative. For example, on page 319, when the suspense is high and we are not sure if Mr. Hands is indeed dead, we observe a boy carrying Sugar Puffs cereal under his arm. This is followed by, “Sugar Puffs are the tasty breakfast treat made from crisp wheat puffs glistening with sugar and golden honey! Energizing honey — to give kids extra ‘go’! (No need to add sugar.)” Obviously culled from an advertisement, the effect on occasion is interesting, but 319 pages in, the repetition of this tactic loses its original sparkle, and pulls me out of the story.

Pulling out of the story and retarding the suspense is, I would maintain, a pleasure in itself — that is, reading experiences do not have to be completely absorptive to be enjoyable. What Whittall calls a repetitive tactic I find to be an effective employment of heteroglossic discourse. To entertain an exercise in binary logic and analogy: if Roy is the narrative then Norma is the text. She interrupts. She catches your eye. She gets in the way. In short, she takes the story, if momentarily, off the rails. And it is her very presence that makes Woman’s World worth reading.

Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World (Counterpoint, Berkeley: 2008) is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

After her immersion as a young writer in the ferment of 1960s Manhattan, Fraser has engaged with myriad other influences — among them George Oppen, Barbara Guest and the once scandalously neglected modernism of women poets H.D., Mina Loy and Lorine Niedecker — and the evolution of her feminist-oriented poetics has brought her to techniques involving collage, erasure, found material and typographical experiment. What has never waned is the characteristic responsiveness honed by her New York education, the delight of imaginative “code-breaking” as both the work and reward of keen awareness.

Fraser’s openness has led her to embrace collaboration, and at the heart of movable TYYPE, which gathers poems from 2000 through 2011, are texts from four limited-edition books, three originally published with accompanying works by the artists Nancy Tokar Miller, JoAnn Ugolini and Hermine Ford. (The first version of Fraser’s 9/11 poem “Witness” was created in conjunction with the Spanish painter Gonzalo Tena for an exhibition at Barcelona’s Galería Maeght; Miller’s drawings and prints were included for the artist book version, published in 2007.) Other poems address artists’ struggles and breakthroughs. Studio visits with the painter Rebecca Quaytman in Rome in 2000 became the foundation for “20th Century,” an ekphrastic meditation that seeks not to describe Quaytman’s work but to inhabit her process, her quest for a means to sidestep and subvert male strictures: “she turning / turns his verticals (law / he made)” … “her private height his / ‘death of painting.’” Watching Quaytman’s “hesitancy become physical” in the studio, Fraser endows the painter’s search with a Steinian music: “she is, nor is she / interested in being either / nor summoned directly into one / into one other, but is / two and dark and richly dark.”

Hermine Ford, image from artist book "ii ss" (2011) (image courtesy Granary Books)

In poems like these Fraser gives herself over to the suggestive interplay of word, music and the basic gestures of visual form. “L i g a t u r e, for Mr Coltrane” ventures further than mere homage. Envisioning the saxophonist’s sessions at the Half Note on Hudson Street in 1965 from the vantage of a twenty-year-old Belgian expatriate, it is structured by an unexpected correspondence between jazz and typography: “One night I imagined I could hear Mr. Coltrane thinking in air and it occurred to me that songs could be like old alphabets, going back and back, and someone with a horn and his own way of thinking in sound could cut an old song out of the air like a new typeface finding its inner balance just at the place where a horn player feels something pulling and suddenly changes keys.” The equilibrium imagined here is not an endpoint but a moment of turning, the musical modulation yielding a glimpse of a new alphabet.

Since the early 1980s, Fraser has been interested in the generative power of errors, so that a poem’s drafts submit themselves to the animating energies of chance mutations. One poem in movable TYYPE begins “A photo is often identified incorrectly” — not misidentified, because for Fraser, there is no such thing as a misperception: the only failures are lapses in attention. She has opened herself to “faulty copying,” as she put in in the title of one of her essays, because “perfect copying held less allure as I began to savor the reliability of the unexpected.”

Detail of a page from "movable TYYPE" (click to enlarge)

This practice of welcoming slippage, of incorporating random mistakes and miscues into the writing process, has determined the ultimate versions of poems such as “La La at the Cirque Fernando, Paris” (1998), where an accidental capital letter in the name “FernanDo” set her to play with full words found in the final syllables of the draft she’d written, with a transformative effect on the final outcome. But most of Fraser’s poems have not been written this way, and her courting of error is best regarded as an attitude that typifies her larger receptivity. She is committed to investigating “the potential plasticity of language,” and by her own account her furthest experiment in this vein is hi dde violeth i dde violet, the 2003 book (collected in movable TYYPE) with its origins in a few pleasant days spent with Italian friends around Easter 2003. The occasion was, she recalls, “so Roman — sweet, bourgeois, and nutty,” and elicited a poem that serves up a feast of visual and typographic inventiveness. Intentional misspellings and other verbal distortions make every page a field of aural and lexical wordplay:

Radio linguaggio 

                                                                                    coming through

neighbor’s hedg

erow

slice of     nowwhere

bOther

Here a passing impression — irritation at what’s coming over the radio from next door — lacks the weight of even the slightest domestic anecdote, but it is nonetheless delved into: because of the repeated w in “nowwhere,” we read the word as marking the disembodied presence of the offending broadcast, its being “nowhere,” “now here,” and “now where?” all at once. And the page’s spare music — all those o’s resounding with each other, as if echoing into the white space surrounding the text — dispatches a gentle rebuke to the “bOther” of the radio’s blare. In a mere ten words Fraser absorbs what’s been given to her, unbidden and unwelcome, and responds in a counter-linguaggio of delicacy and wit.

Detail of a page from "movable TYYPE" (click to enlarge)

Even the seeming triviality of such a moment is belied by the larger intention of hi dde violeth i dde violet, which was written for Fraser’s friend, the poet Norma Cole, after she had suffered a stroke and was unable to speak: the radio’s exasperating logorrhea is set against the misfortune of Cole’s imposed silence. In a note, Fraser explains how an earlier version, “a condensed, highly polished poem that finally felt beside-the-point,” had led to a dead end, as Fraser found herself “writing from the impossible position of saying something real that might acknowledge [Cole’s] situation yet possibly amuse her.” hi dde violeth i dde violet emerged out of an Oulipian repurposing of this stillborn ur-text, when Fraser enlarged the manuscript, cut-and-pasted its letters, words and punctuation into new combinations (nothing was discarded), and hung the resulting thirty-one sheets on the wall of her study.

There’s no missing the relish Fraser took in assembling this poem-object, with its nonsense, bilingualism, contrapuntal type-sizing and jokey liturgical allusions. And yet its irreverence is never at odds with its aim to be a gift for her suffering fellow poet, and the Easter setting accords with the offering of hope that concludes the poem, cast in a simple and gorgeously lucid utterance:

by unseen hand. Light

opens over trees’ abundant

suspend

The poems in movable TYYPE show Fraser tuned in to higher frequencies: “In empty expectancy,” she writes, “what movement may reveal itself stepping from behind the cypress sending signals out to its planetary rings.” Such heightened mindfulness calls forth an enlarged subjectivity. Fraser has resisted the lyric impulse, grounded in the poet’s ego: even in her autobiographical poems, the self seems effaced (thus the experience of 9/11, which has yielded much overwrought writing, is pared away to haunting spareness: “You will always be there and it will be collapsing”). What bubbles up through the “impersonal” surfaces of her poems is an unmistakable sensibility, generous in its sympathies and restless in its explorations.

Kathleen Fraser’s movable TYYPE is available at Nightboat Books and other online and independent booksellers.

A photograph by Victoria Sambunaris in "Altered Landscape" (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

It makes perfect sense that the photographic collection Altered Landscape, founded in the early 1990s, is the seminal photography collection at the Nevada Museum of Art, in Reno. Though New Yorker’s might complain as their skyline and neighborhoods change, the vast landscape of the west cannot conceal the overwhelming changes our society has brought upon it. The Nevada Museum of Art’s collection, made possible by Carol Franc Buck, is personal in concept but universal in experience. Buck, raised in northern California, witnessed the changes sprawling suburbs brought to her once agricultural town, just as I watched as the grassy pastures of my childhood were replaced with big box stores like Walmart and Big 5. Regardless of where you grow up, however, we all have stories like these regarding the land we grew up on. “The term altered landscape in this context is sensibly understood to mean that it has changed relatively recently, and not necessarily for the better,” the critic Lucy Lippard writes of this collection.

Altered Landscape is a collection of over 900 photographs, spanning the last fifty years, by hundreds of contemporary photographers, all of whom have helped to redefine contemporary landscape photography. Leaving behind notions of pristine and idyllic nature, so popular in the early 20th century, contemporary photographers now question the disturbing consequences of modern life. Taking their cue from the New Topographic photographers and the Dusseldorf School of the 1970s, and greatly influenced by the industrial German photography team Bernd and Hilla Becher, contemporary landscape photographers have embraced the German model of objectivity. Many of the photographs in the Altered Landscape collection turn a coldly objective camera onto the landscape we inhabit, scar, deface and pollute. Collectively these photographs represent a bleakly dispassionate survey of landscape photography.

The catalogue for this collection, and a recent exhibition of it at the Nevada Museum of Art (September 2011 through January 2012), is titled Altered Landscapes: Photographs of a Changing Environment (2011). It’s a big, beautiful, heavy book over a foot long in each direction, and almost 300 pages in length; it’s too heavy to look at comfortably, but is engaging because of how large and seductive the reproductions are. It’s also a book consisting almost entirely of photographs. The four essays in the middle of the book, demarcated by bright orange, are powerful but short, the introduction is to the point, and the explanation for each photographer’s work is succinct to non-existent. Provocative quotes from each author’s essay are taken out of context and float throughout the book in large, brightly colored letters. These quotes are unnecessary and give the catalogue a coffee table appearance it would otherwise lack.

Edward Burtynsky

The publishers (Skira Rizzoli), however, do seem aware of the fact that the artists need little explanation, making Skira Rizzoli smart enough to let the photographs in the collection speak for themselves. The book, arranged by the museum’s curator of exhibitions and collections Ann Wolfe, is designed to give a kind of visual continuity to the massive collection of images. Falling back on formal minimalism, Wolfe has arranged the photographs by line, color and composition, where one photograph often leads directly into another. The most obvious and distracting moments of the layout are when the photographs are grouped by subject — a spread of pipelines, gas stations or suburban houses. This forces us to rank images that have no similarities outside of their subject matter, in a sort of if-you’ve-seen-one-gas station-you’ve-seen-them-all manner. It becomes easy to dismiss images simply because they happen to feel repetitious, which does not benefit this catalogue or our impression of the collection.

Kim Stringfellow (click to enlarge)

Despite Wolfe’s awkward attempt at organization, the Altered Landscape collection is incredibly and impressively diverse. It includes photographers who analyze the landscape from every possible perspective, and who harbor an overwhelming diversity of intent. There are the detached and epic photographers who allow the landscape itself to overwhelm their viewers. This is seen in images like Victoria Sambunaris sweeping photograph of the Alaskan oil pipeline that snakes through the breathtaking mountain range and valley of the Atigun Pass, or in Edward Burtynsky’s sea of car tires in Westly, California.

There are the photographers who document the residential footprint we are more familiar and comfortable with, though it’s doubtful if it is any less destructive. Lee Friedlander, snapping photographs from his car window of American towns and cities, and Robert Adams, who voyeuristically peers his lens into residential homes and windows, both address concerns surrounding our built landscapes, be they urban or suburban. There are earth artists who see the landscape itself as a material. Robert Smithson’s infamous Spiral Jetty, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s manmade interventions and Andy Goldsworthy’s ingenious contributions, like his trench-like “Red River” dug where a real river used to run, are a few of the collections photographed earthworks. Though in the minority, a few photographers in the collection favor a less literal, more abstract and constructed approach. David Maisel’s aerial photographs look less like geometric agro patterns, and more like painterly fields of abstract color, and Amy Stein’s cover photograph of a howling coyote beneath a nighttime, suburban streetlamp is actually stuffed.

Olaf Otto Becker

It’s hard to group the work of so many artists together, and to describe the overall intent of this kind of collection, but the purpose is to bring our attention to the environment, and awareness to the hand we collectively have in the destruction of it. Many of the photographers in Altered Landscapes utilize breathtaking ugliness to achieve this, and the collection functions almost like the antidote to the National Geographic style of saturated landscape that we are so used to seeing. As Lucy Lippard states in her catalogue essay titled Neutered Landscapes, “whether or not the artists were focused on aesthetic illumination or harbored activist intent, their images are wake-up calls.”

The most interesting aspect of this collection is that while most of the photographers in Altered Landscapes are well known and familiar, the result of seeing them altogether changes their work. It’s almost as though Altered Landscapes should only be seen and discussed as a collection, as it’s own body of work, as something new made from individual images. The power of the collection comes precisely from looking at so many different viewpoints, techniques and styles. Paging through Altered Landscapes we constantly struggle to define and redefine the photographs in it, to discover the meaning of the collection rather than each individual image. The collection is confusing more than it is depressing, complicated more than it is reductive, as though the problem of our environment has many different contributors, and the solution has many possibilities. As Ann Wolfe states in her essay, “these images suggest that the earth’s surface offers an irrefutable record of some of human civilization’s most impressive endeavors — as well as its worst failures.”

The Altered Landscape exhibition page at the Nevada Museum of Art is here and the book is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

This aesthetic position, of course, has a centuries-long tradition, but reading Traveler alongside some of the dominant strains of current American poetry, which often feature high-flying wit and aggressive fragmentation, we grasp the meditative, reflective possibilities of a lyric that courts stillness. Johnston illustrates how poetry activates an attention to words as well as to the natural world, and in doing so, he shows himself to be one of the most meticulous poets of his generation.

Deploying a contemporary idiom within the structure of traditional cadences, Johnston brings together two diverse strains of poetics. His tight, clear prosody and even occasional use of complex, interlocking rhymes draws upon the cadences of British Romanticism, with its sense of structural tension and release that generates anticipation and offer satisfaction. Yet, Johnston avoids letting the lines slip into becoming mere finger exercises by marrying this lush elegance with the terse, compact style favored by the American Objectivists. This debt is announced by the epigraph from Louis Zukofsky’s “Anew #20” that opens the collection: “the lines of this new song are nothing/ but a tune making the nothing full.” Drawing from these two traditions, Johnston crafts poems that often hover around three syllables in length and then, with the next poem, expand to pentameter. The collection presents a range that runs from the compression of the four-line poem “Relatives,”

no one left

the same to say

what it is

that changed

—to the sonic and narrative expansiveness of “Iona,” which begins

Arriving damp with sea spray, fingers cold,

I disembark a day already old

as billows scatter seeds or smithy sparks

across the west, against the growing dark

of Dalriada, Pictland, Gododdin,

and Strathclyde, shadows flooding every glen.

In bringing avant-garde strategies to classical ideas of form, Johnston’s poems show language to be a means of ordering experience so we can consciously recognize it as an experience. With all “hinges of habit undone,” to borrow a trope from “Thin Place,” we become conscious of how we perpetually negotiate thoughts and sense perception.

Left, Devin Johnston, and right, Portrait of William Wordsworth in 1798 by William Shuter (images via slu.edu and Wikipedia)

Johnston’s innovations and reclamations remind readers that poetry can draw upon everyday speech as well as elevate language. In their reworking of rhetoric and syntax, these poems reveal the artifice of langauge so the experience of the meaningfulness of words steps forward at every moment. In essence, the concision of these poems crystallizes acts of perception. This effect is, of course, the very foundation of a Wordsworthian poetics. The question is, then, how Johnston manages to pull off this Romantic position without seeming antiquated.

The opening couplets of “Expecting” give some indication. About the impending birth of a daughter, the poem complicates that sense of parental anticipation by raising a question about what the daughter, in utero (“an embryo in amnion”) might be expecting based on the sounds heard in the womb from the world outside:

what will she

now a she

trailing clouds

yet hearing our

muffled voices

all the while

from this dark

world and wide

what will she

mew or bray

The poem moves appositively and parenthetically, deferring the construction of the question (“what shall she … what?” we ask) and thereby generating anticipation through the torqued rhetoric and syntax, even as the images and metaphors become more elaborately articulated. The opening couplet may resist immediate meaning, but upon rereading, the syntactical pattern becomes evident. We come to see the way it means. These poems require (and reward) patience; like the embryo, readers experience sound before they divine meaning.

Leonardo da Vinci's "Studies of the foetus in the womb" (c.1513) (via wikipaintings.org)

If poetry is the act of the mind finding itself, Johnston shows again and again that we find ourselves at the point where language, daily life, and the natural world intersect. Indeed, the measured sense of Johnston’s work, its stillness and care, provides relief from some of the high irony that, in some quarters, has begun to seem like a period style. It would be contrary to the meditative nature of Johnston’s poems to put them in opposition to, for instance, recent inheritors of the New York School’s dynamism, or its pervasive and persuasive sociality.

The 17th-century philosopher Nicolas Malebranche once wrote (in a line quoted by Paul Celan as well as Walter Benjamin), “attention is the prayer of the soul.” In Traveler, attention is the means of locating ourselves within the binding together (call it a revelation) of world and language — it is the means of finding where we stand. In Johnston’s hands, poetry is a devotional act and his use then of a classical sound — beyond any polemics or doctrine — enacts a political, ethical, and even spiritual commitment to the care that allows our attention to sustain itself.

Devin Johnston’s Traveler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

All images via poets.org

A couple of months back I was sitting in an East Village dive bar enjoying, oh, I don’t know, my third or fourth whiskey (it was Tuesday, after all), when I noticed a very attractive girl next to me committing what appeared to be lines of verse onto a yellow notepad. Hang on, I thought: a fetching young poet sitting next to me in some blighted Manhattan grotto? What movie are you in, buddy? I stole a second glance. True enough, there was her pen scribbling curtly on the paper, and there were the one or two-word stanzas — illegible, from where I sat — filling up the left-hand side of the page in cursive, like the lines of an EKG.

Sufficiently tight to be recklessly confident, I downed my drink and racked my brain: how did it go again? Had we but world enough, and time … erh, something something something, and pass our love’s long day? … No, that’s not right. Long love’s day? Ah, fuck it. Maybe she prefers Donne: I wonder by my — troth, was it? — what you and I — no — what thou and I / Did, till we loved? In the end I simply asked if she preferred choriambic meter to amphibrachic? Or perhaps she was fonder of trochaic tetrameter? With a look of vague alarm she politely told me she was making a list of people she had yet to buy Christmas presents for.

I recall this episode now because a couple of days ago I was sitting at that same bar, a couple of whiskies in, a book of James Fenton poems unfolded before me. Seeing me there with my slim paperback, the clearly erudite bartender asked me if this was my idea of celebrating National Poetry Month. National Poetry Month, with its exhortations to “integrate poetry with technology,” “write a letter to a poet,” and — worse — “sign up for a poetry class or workshop”? No, I told her, I would absolutely not be celebrating National Poetry Month. What a racket. Another whiskey, please.

If you aren’t familiar, April was claimed as National Poetry Month in 1996, evidently by someone with appropriately literary sense of irony (“April is the cruelest month,” begins one of the most famous poems in the language). Three years later UNESCO declared March 21 to be World Poetry Day, a decision rumored to have been motivated by a desire to outmaneuver National Poetry Month — the idea being that if World Poetry Day falls on March 21 the American populace will be sufficiently versed-out once April rolls around. Not wanting to be embroiled in a poetic turf-war, the United Kingdom celebrates National Poetry Month as early (or, if you like, as late) as October.

The purpose of National Poetry Month is to spread awareness, as they say. But you’ll quickly find that spreading “awareness of poetry” is a bit like trying to spread a brick on a bagel. Have any actual non-readers of poetry suddenly discovered an unchartered love for, say, Ezra Pound, in the month of April? I doubt it. Have any of my non-poetry-reading friends called me up asking what the name of that poet who jumped off a bridge was? The one who jumped off the boat? The one who stuck her head in the oven? No. No. And no. If poetry’s record of tabloid mayhem isn’t enough to bring out the fans, a version of National Secretary’s Day isn’t going to do the job.

Charles Bernstein once wrote an essay contra National Poetry Month. He argued that the underlying message — “Poetry is good for you” — was a load of crap; a way of promoting bland, morally ‘positive’ verse that challenged no one’s intellect or sensibilities. So unless you’re really excited about that Maya-Angelou-at-your-local-library event, you’d probably be missing out on a lot of great but not necessarily ‘positive message’ poetry: Larkin, Seidel, Berryman.

That said, Mr. Bernstein’s call for an International Anti-Poetry Month is a just a tad overzealous. (Let’s not kid ourselves, Charles: if the poets start turning against poetry, we’re all goners.) If we absolutely have to celebrate poetry in some fashion during the month of April, then why not use the occasion to bring some long-but-unjustly-forgotten poet back from out of print? Howard Nemerov, say, or Genevieve Taggard. Or why not some of the British poets no American publishers have ever really bothered with: Christopher Reid, Mick Imlah, Tom Paulin.

On the other hand, to go back to Bernstein’s idea, maybe we could celebrate anti-poetry month in a more poetic vein: Dislike Poetry Month. We could all wear little pins and t-shirts that quote Marianne Moore’s ars poetica, “I, too, dislike it,” and walk around comforting each other by continuing,

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in

it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Takeshi Murata’s still life photographs from "Get Your Ass to Mars" (all photos courtesy the publisher)

In July 2004, The New York Times Magazine signaled the advent of the “literary” comic book and described how a significant group of cartoonists — including Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Seth and Marjane Satrapi — had popularized these “comics with a brain.” Though stylistically distinct, they are united by a realist mode of storytelling: many, we are told, are set in a “slacker world” on the East or West coast or in the “nostalgialand” of New York’s Lower East Side or small-town Canada; a large number are autobiographical, while even those that aren’t tend to pursue similar courses, examining the kinds of personal and psychological issues one finds in literary novels. The article seemed to find acceptability in these “high” examples of a traditional “low” medium — thus parsing degrees of quality along the same lines we do with literary fiction, in order to distinguish it from other kinds of fiction. But if eight years ago “serious” comics implied a particularly “literary” vantage, today that mantle appears to be taken up by works that appropriate aspects of genre to produce sophisticated, avant-garde tales.

The eighth, and most recent, installment of Kramers Ergot, a preeminent comics anthology, has me thinking about this divide in the medium. Its previous seven incarnations were often overstuffed collections: the rare first volume is a kind of hodgepodge, described as “Eightball-type artist’s own showcase series”; the seventh was famously oversized at 16 by 21 inches, allowing Chris Ware to draw a sleeping baby to scale. This incarnation, however, boasts a tighter list of contributors, a more intimate size, and a “more specific and unified aesthetic space of discipline, sophistication, and quiet power.” Editor Sammy Harkham and his publisher stop short of naming that aesthetic space. I’d argue that it’s genre.

The anthology has always featured stories that deal in genre, but the focus in this edition on that particular kind of work suggests that there is now a concentration of excellent, daring artists working in that vein. The book gathers work by cartoonists who, by and large, published their breakthrough works in the years since the literary graphic novel made mainstream headlines. And contrary to the writerly bent of their immediate predecessors, these artists — among them C.F., Johnny Ryan, Kevin Huizenga, Dash Shaw and Ben Jones — have embraced and reimagined the traditionally less “serious” tropes — and those more endemic to the graphic novel’s roots — of science fiction, fantasy, and pulp and psychological horror. If the Times profile aimed to announce the literary-comics scene, then this volume seems to make the case for the prominence of the genre aesthetic.

A panel by Gary Panter (click to enlarge)

Gary Panter, the book’s lead entry, is its presiding spirit: He’s been creating pop-genre hybrids for decades — his eighties strip Dal Tokyo, for instance, is a détournement of Japanese monster movies, Texan self-mythologizing and alien worlds — and his multifarious output is reason enough to abandon the neat categories that seek to organize artistic movements. In the Jimbo strip for Kramers, Panter gleefully upends aspects of capitalist enterprise and commercial consumption amid a culture and landscape laid waste. Jimbo travels with his friends to a big-box store called Love Chunk — a bright, clean shopper’s paradise set against the mud and rock of the surrounding nocturnal landscape. Love Chunk, Jimbo explains, produces “many products from one muscle cell pool,” but on their arrival at the store, the trio discovers that it has been anagrammatically reinvented as Hulk Coven, whose one product is derived from “many cell pool variants.” The tale’s ending depicts the horror of modern malaise: the trio lies slack-jawed and dumb, overloaded by an endless variety of choices.

Anya Davidson’s very smart contribution, “Barbarian Bitch,” functions the opposite way, making a pastiche of a handful of narratives in order to arrive at a common ending: a troll and a woman watch a TV movie about a warrior woman pursuing her nemesis amid what could be the highways and bars of 80s Los Angeles; the troll falls asleep, dreaming about playing basketball with a man’s head; the TV movie’s action progresses with ever-increasing brutality. The film’s narrative, interlaced with the troll’s trollish behavior, is counterposed by panels illustrating the central tenets of Buddhism. These calls for mindfulness and inner balance initially read as non sequiturs, sprinkled as they are throughout the plotlines of the movie warrior and the troll, yet they eventually begin to call forth thematic similarities between fantasy/action and morsels of reflection, producing a kind of koan on the nature of power.

Anya Davidson’s "Barbarian Bitch" (click to enlarge)

Johnny Ryan expands his usual gag-strip format to tell a longer tale about a rescue mission on a distant planet that metamorphoses into a hypersexual, gross-out chronicle of aggressive alien horror. It’s quintessential Ryan (his Prison Pit books are the form par excellence) but with a darkening edge that is rarely present in his work. With the closing panel, in which the mysterious planet hangs, ripe with sinister import, in the void of space, I feel the same pang of existential dread as I do in the closing shot of Solaris.

Resembling mixed media installations, Takeshi Murata’s still life photographs, which make up his contribution, Get Your Ass to Mars, are a mix of high, low and the preposterously offbeat. Most contain unambiguous genre references (VHS boxes for horror flicks Dawn of the Dead, Exorcist II, Terror at the Opera) as well as suggestions of a lurid techno-modernity (a cracked iPhone, multiple mirrored surfaces, plastic objects meant to look like real food); all elements are simultaneously forward-looking and antiquated. In one image, a copy of Douglas Davis’s 1973 book, Art and the Future, lies alongside a stepped pedestal littered with eggs, fingerless driving gloves, a pot pipe, and a couple oranges — objects that metaphorically or symbolically express potentiality: temporally, spatially, or existentially. Atop the pedestal is a metal skull akin to that in Terminator, a film that projects the future into the past. But the microphone that rests near the skull troubles the arrangement. Is it now a pedestal or a stage? How much future imagining is pure performance? I wondered, too, whether the photographs in this series were meant to be read as such; that is, as a sequence of images describing an abstract narrative. In this sense, Murata becomes, in the manner of Philip K. Dick, a kind of “fictionalizing philosopher,” whose surreal metaphysical tale rests on shifting perceptions and simulacra.

Panels by Johnny Ryan (click to enlarge)

The latter question gets some scrutiny in C.F.’s narrative, “Warm Genetic House-Test Pattern,” which is set in a recognizable near-future. Alex, a morbid young man who lives with his sister, teaches a class that deals in some way with identity. “You need to ‘see … through’ obstructions,” he tells his students, all of whom wear placid, smiling masks. Alex invites a young student named Lily to join him for a family dinner. She arrives, maskless, and after the meal Alex and his guests press her into a night of S&M debauchery, with hints of incest. She participates, but her demeanor bespeaks uncertainty, horror, and fear. At school the following day, Alex asks Lily how she’s feeling. “I’m great,” she replies. But the presence of her mask calls into question the legitimacy of her response. The truth of her feelings is hidden away.

What Kramers, as well as the now-defunct Mome, has always done well (go here for a look back at Kramers earliest numbers) is to show cartoonists at work, with sweat on their brows, rather than retrospectively, as anthologies in general tend to do. And this volume in particular reads like a laboratory in which artists spin new creations out of older traditions and expand the frame of reference both for the form (comics and genre alike) and for the social and cultural ideas they engage.

Kramers Ergot 8 (PictureBox, 2012) is available at PictureBox and other online booksellers.

Miniscule Blue Helmets on a Massive Quest. (All photos taken by author)

Do children’s toys breed a culture of violence and war? This was one of the many questions you’re left to ponder when reading Miniscule Blue Helmets on a Massive Quest by Dutch artist Pierre Derks. The book arrived at Hyperallergic HQ with its very own UN Peacekeeper, a zip tie to secure your soldier to a location and instructions on how to become a part of the global online project. The book is mostly a selection of 500 images of the 50,000 blue-topped toy soldiers that have been distributed to more than 60 countries as park of Derks’s global art project. These images are the result of collaborative efforts by participants from all over the world who uploaded their toy soldier images onto Minibluehelmets.com.

Miniscule Blue Helmets on a Massive Quest begins with a unique ensemble of essays about the art project and its subject, the UN Peacekeepers, from several perspectives. Although the authors’ opinions of the UN Peacekeepers are varied, many focused on the power of toys to prepare kids for war. They believe that militarism is embedded in children through toy guns, tanks and soldiers. This project begs the question, could we give our children symbols of peace to play with — and are the UN Peacekeepers that toy?

Peacekeeper killin’ the bad guy.

Susan Manuel, who is part of the Chief, Peace and Security Section of the UN Department of Public Information, is the first essayist in the book and she celebrates the UN Peacekeepers, writing that “Many of them serve in hardship situations trying to heal conflicts that were not of their making. Each year, more than 100 die in service. For this they should be acknowledged and thanked, even in plastic form.”

Linda Polman, journalist and author of We Did Nothing – Why the Truth Doesn’t Always Come Out When the UN Goes In, wouldn’t claim the UN has a perfect record, but when comparing their military missions with those by the US, she thinks the UN is remarkably successful. “The costs of one year of American military operations in Iraq comes close to the costs of all the UN peacekeeping missions together that have taken place since 1945,” she writes in her contribution to the book. The lesser of two evils argument, when talking civilian deaths, always seemed like a weak point to me, but the comparison is astounding.

Peacekeeper fighting for the whole planet.

UN Peacekeepers are by no means without criticism. Policing the globe is a problematic task at best. There have been accusations of personnel abusing their power through rapes and stealing. Also, as we saw in the Rwandan genocide, the UN Peacekeepers can be horribly ineffective when it truly matters. These are important counter-points to pro-UN involvement, but deeper questions in many of the essays are simply, whose peace are they enforcing? Who decides where these soldiers go? These questions are unignorable as you flip through the book and look online at the images of the UN Peacekeepers spread across the world.

There are currently 16 UN peacekeeping missions on four continents (via un.org)

Jonathan Vickery talks about the blurry line of where global conflict zones begin and end. He writes, “sometimes we can’t see conflict anymore than we can see peace.” Peacekeepers are only deployed in conflict zones, so seeing blue helmets deployed in New York City or Houston would be extremely disorienting — the West always believes that they are the peacekeepers.

These little peacekeepers show how much meaning can be embedded in a color — one dab of blue paint completely transforms the toy soldiers. The transformation is strong but ambiguous, creating different meanings for everyone. After reading the essays and uploading my own photo (Look for one in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn) this playful project slowly became more serious to me. I suddenly remembered that in fact there are major conflicts in Afganistan, Iraq, Syria and more. The whole world must be asking themselves these questions around what peace looks like and how to realize it. Although this book is just a scratch on the surface, it is a enjoyable start.

Pierre Derks’s Miniscule Blue Helmets on a Massive Quest is available at minibluehelmets.com or can be purchased at various bookshops in the Netherlands and New York, including McNally Jackson (52 Prince Street, Soho, Manhattan).