Marginal Behavior: Book Graffiti

In “Marginal," featured in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker, Author Ian Frazier relays his experience at the New York Public Library event focused around marginalia, aka those markings sketched into the body, cover, and/or margins of books, what NYPL's Anne Garner calls "book graffiti." Of course, the library wasn’t displaying just any marginalia. Selected from the library’s collection were the in-text scribbles of literary giants like Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, William Coleridge, and Vladimir Nabokov to name a few.

Image from here

 For designers, marginalia are probably best equated with one of our favorite ideas – the palimpsest. Great marginalia takes on a palimpsest-like quality – the layering of thoughts, intersections, and outside references that inform and reform the text in question. This is why ebooks for all their convenience are lost on me. Sure, a digital book is great for a beach read I never plan on picking up again, but for those texts that are important to me, a digital highlighter will never replace the physical act of underlining an exquisite sentence or marking a particularly convincing passage. (Sue Halpern speaks to the digital marginalia problem in "What the iPad Can't Do" on the New York Review of Books blog.)

Image from the New York Review of Books

The most serious marginalians I’ve known in my life were philosophers. I once noticed that my philosophy mentor, a certain Mr. Casey, having read everything on the planet at least half a dozen times, created a key with dates on the inside front cover for his marginalia, i.e. black ink for the first read, blue for the second, pencil the third, double underlines on the fourth, and so on.

As an interpretive device, marginalia inspires a certain kind of faith. When returning to a text weeks, months, or years later, I always glance at my marks to get a feel for my prior readings of the material. I’m no longer surprised when my marginalia seem to be written by someone else – someone better read in some instances, more naïve other times, or enamored with an idea for a reason inconceivable to me today.

Read Frazier’s piece and decide what sort of marginalia-maker you are (I’ll admit I enjoy hostile marginalia or what I’ll call satirical marginalia, but seeds of ideas and cross references fill most of my margins).
Do you have a good example of marginalia in your library? Send it in. Perhaps an online exhibition is in order.

I Heart Engravings: Never trust an octopus

Of all things I love, books are at the top of my list, right next to millinery, engravings, sea monsters, and all things baroque. Webster's Pictorial Dictionary offers all of this to me within the bounds of a beautiful kiwi green hardcover, complete with gilded title block and sea monster illustration (okay, it's an octopus, but we all know what those can do. I'll just refer you to It Came From Beneath the Sea and King Kong vs. Godzilla. Enough said.)
Ah, rejoice my heart.

And for all of those octopus-defending types - you know who you are - who go on and on about squids being the true culprits of aforementioned crimes:

Case closed.

Art World Icon: Louise Bourgeois

Famous French-American artist Louise Bourgeois died yesterday at age 98.

Let me start by saying that I didn't think I would have to write this post. I planned to link to the Art of the Day blog of my dear friend, an art historian and librarian, who, I was sure, would have written a beautiful and enlightened tribute to one of her favorite artists. Whether from shock or lack of knowing, my friend has yet to write on the subject, so I find myself having to muster up the courage to write something myself. Here goes...

Born, raised, and trained as an artist in Paris, Louise Bourgeois moved to New York in 1938. Bourgeois' started her artistic career as a painter, but a decade after her arrival in America, she took up sculpture, the medium in which she became one of the greatest innovators in the history of art.

Her first sculptures were slender wooden figures carved from wood and painted black or white. Arranged in groups and placed vertically, the sculptures suggested a group of figures despite their abstract form. Indeed, Bourgeois called them "Personages."

Personages (1947-50)

Photo: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

As the art world moved further into abstraction to the point of near annihilation of the figure, Bourgeois remained committed to tactile, plastic sculpture. To this day, her organic, sexually suggestive sculptures of the 1960s, when Minimalism was de rigeur, give me pause. One of my favorite descriptions of Bourgeois work comes from the PBS Art: 21 series: "The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take...are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two."

Never crossing into fetishism or vulgarity, sculptures like Cumul I (1968) or Double Negative (1963) are almost too palpable, too explicitly plastic to view at length.  

Cumul I (1968)

Because of her sustained explorations into the inner life of the subject, Bourgeois is often linked to Surrealism, but she was never interested in dreams for dreams' sake or sexual transgression per se. This interest in the subjective psyche is even more evident in her later work. In her 80s, Bourgeois created a series of multi-media environments composed of made and found objects that she called Cells. Complex assemblages like Cell (You Better Grow Up) (1990-93) speak to the psyche, its complexities and contradictions as well as to childhood, another recurring theme in her work.

Cell (You Better Grow Up) (1990-93)

I would be remiss if I completed this post without one mention of Bourgeois' spider sculptures. I'll admit, these creep me out, but their delicacy despite their size, make them, dare I say it, beautiful. Of course, they are also capable of terrifying small children. Maman, the most famous of these sculptures and standing over 10 meters high, refers to Bourgeois' own mother: "My best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as an araignée [spider]" (Source).

There is so much I must leave out: drawings, works on and with fabric, decades of work from a fertile mind. Bourgeois's productivity left us with art enough to ponder for years to come. As a woman, as an artist, as a pioneer, as an individual, Louise Bourgeois is an icon we will all remember with respect and love.

Lee Bonticou - Sculpture in 2D

MoMA is currently running a Lee Bontecou exhibition through August 30.

I first experienced Bontecou's work at MoMA Queens in 2004. I was initially struck by the tactility of the work and her use of materials - felt, metal, clear wire, canvas. Bontecou's compositions range from kinetic whimsy to Star Wars inspired wall art (in a good way), but each piece, for all its tactility and three dimensional qualities, works remarkably in two dimensions. Take the press image that the Museum chose for the exhibition:

At first glance, this could be the work of a (very) talented graphic artist. It is actually a photograph of one of Bontecou's kinetic sculptures (Untitled. 1980-98), which also happens to be the centerpiece of the exhibition. Don't get me wrong - seeing this piece in the flesh is breathtaking, but I wouldn't mind hanging this print on my wall either. 

Some might say that all great sculpture works in 2D - art in the round means it should present well from any angle, however flat, right? Fact is that few sculptors cross the graphic divide so easily. Let's just say that Bontecou's sculpture exceeds the qualification of photographing well.

As has been my fate recently, writing about these events takes the place of actually attending them. If you're in NYC this summer, check it out and tell me what you think.

Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense