Even Through Thick Skin - for Grigori Antonin

Comment

Comment by De Villo Sloan on July 20, 2011 at 2:34pm

Wow, I realized we can add fake Arthur Rimbaud letters to the fakes circulating these days. However, he expressly said they were not to appear in the ether because he had his own struggles in ether. He does right very interesting letters.

Comment by cheryl penn on July 20, 2011 at 2:33pm

Jabe (ALSO with accent but I have no idea where to find that blighter) said something to the effect that the book was the only place where he might live? Rimbaud :-) - yes, a great reminder DVS :-)

Comment by De Villo Sloan on July 20, 2011 at 2:28pm

Excellent Cheryl! I haven't received a letter from Arthur Rimbaud in months. Lost in Africa again, and the arms trade is thriving these days. Maybe he'll write us and tell us what he thinks as card-carrying symbolist too.

Comment by cheryl penn on July 20, 2011 at 2:23pm

The French Symbolist Poet said it all - right?

"Everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book"

Stephan Mallerme - accent on the e!

Comment by De Villo Sloan on July 20, 2011 at 2:20pm

I'm foggy - I meant the idea of seeing language as another material (hardly aesthetic). We had a good discussion about that in the blog about Cheryl's text weaves. So shredded text? Another treatment of the material. But Marie artfully integrates it into a book rather than just shredding the entire book. That's what's nice about Marie.

Comment by De Villo Sloan on July 20, 2011 at 1:38pm

I arrived before CP-SA, sorry. With these books, how would I say?, the book becomes part of the art itself. Think of object poetry or haptic poetry as a guide - the book is no longer a commodity. I think also it uses the idea of language and the material - materiality. Thom raises some excellent points.

 

I'm sure it was Grigori's birthday earlier in July. I visited his blog - the last refuge of scoundrels. Very interesting. He claims he took one Cheryl's books to a friend in the hospital because it might have healing powers. Did you see that one? Alsaceian (Spg?) Studies - that's been there for a while, I think.

Comment by Marie Wintzer on July 20, 2011 at 11:21am

It would be interesting to hear what CP-SA as a book artist thinks about this aura around books and the attraction they generate?

Comment by Marie Wintzer on July 20, 2011 at 9:54am

Thank you so much for all your wonderful comments!

I see what you mean, books can be amazingly compelling. When I was young and reading a lot I never wanted to borrow books from the library because the books I read needed to be mine, I wanted to possess them, in a way. And I didn't like to lend them to anyone either. I had a special relationship to each of them. Now I'm a bit more relaxed and I don't mind cutting into them or tearing off some pages if I think it will give them a new purpose. I don't see it as "disrespect" to the book or to the writer or to the printer. And it's a great feeling too...

Oh, was it the grigstaire's birthday? Happy b-day Grigori, wherever you are in Toxis world!

Comment by De Villo Sloan on July 20, 2011 at 4:09am

Beautiful Thom - not to hijack Marie's photo - but I received some great mail-art from you, Thom. Will blog soon.

 

Marie - with all the birthdays and beautiful books. I think Grigori had a birthday not too long ago! If you see this Grigster, happy birthday - even if you are the mastermind behind TOXIS and broke Dark wall's heart and kidney. "We all shine on, like the moon & the stars & the sun..."

 

Signing off from Cental Command - keep the eternal network free, safe, and kind to animals

Comment by Thom Courcelle on July 20, 2011 at 3:31am

These pieces you're doing Marie, you really are nurturing them into something wonderful and precious (in an awesome way).  I don't want to over-analyze them--eclipsing the artist's intent or message--but I can tell you how they affect me...

I have an hyper-affinity to books, literature, the written word. (I am often embarrassed by the number of books that are contained in my tiny living space, and which I find myself having to defend against the distain for hoarding by friends who encounter them sometimes...)  I have tried identifying what is behind my fetish with books and libraries, and I have often described it as what I perceive books to be: captured snapshots of synaptic brilliance frozen on the delicate paper organized in tomes. They are just reverential things to me--representations of the ideas of real people, our desperate attempts to communicate through language. Your pieces, for me, similarly border on written "artifacts" for me. And further posit philosophical questions in my head: "If a book or a sheet of paper full of words is a sacred thing, is that book or sheet of paper any less sacred because it has been put through a shredder?"  This is both a ridiculously funny question and one that shatters my theosophical core.  Is reverence and sacredness something that we project, something we attribute to things? Or is holiness and sacredness really innately imbibed in things?  Things nature-made or creatively made.... Is creativity itself holy and sacred (which I think is the true reason for my book reverence)?  The piece above seems all the more precious because an attempt is made to contain the miniature shreds of sacred text in a contained space--like a sacred ark.  Anyway... your artwork is visually astonishing, and creates such reverberating questions as these in my head--as any proper altar of creativity should do. Wonderful. And thanks for sharing...

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