Monthly Archives: October 2011

by | October 28, 2011

Filing Cabinet as Treasure Chest: Diving into the Artists’ File

There’s an unassuming row of grey filing cabinets along the back wall of the Art Library’s first floor.  In their quiet nook beside the scanners, these cabinets house a veritable treasure trove of artifacts.

Image copyright Creative Commons, Origamidon, South Burlington, VT, 2004.

Packed away, you’ll find the creative detritus of over 7,000 artists – including exhibition invitations, small catalogs, newspaper clippings, and posters.  You almost expect to happen upon a lucky shoelace or a tube of Pantone 292.

The collection of ephemera in the artists’ file has been built up over the course of several decades. Most of the materials come to us via UNC’s Ackland Art Museum, but some also come directly from artists themselves and other donors. No matter the source, the file offers the researcher or browser an opportunity to come across unique and unexpected artifacts.

The materials are mostly loose in the file cabinets – no library of congress call numbers to tame the riotous explosions of colorful paper.  Every artist with three or more “objects” has been given a file folder with a name label as well as a record in the online catalog.  For artists with fewer than three artifacts, each floats freely, filed in alphabetical order by the artist’s last name.

This relative chaos is no tragedy, though;  in fact, it derailed my own searching in the best possible way.   Having read through the list of all artists represented in the file I thought I knew exactly what I was looking for.  But once I dove into the packed cabinets, I quickly stumbled on work by over a dozen artists that weren’t on my list.  What follows are some of the highlights.

Christo and Jean Claude's "Wrapped Mirror," 1963.

In a folder containing Christo’s documents, I came across a clipping from Time Magazine, dated February 7, 1969.  Reading through, I encountered this little zinger: “Christo – he never uses his surname – knows how to muffle a rampant motorcycle so that it acquires the petrified dynamism of a stuffed buffalo or a blind-folded rhinoceros. He can embalm a slender sapling so that it lies with the mute pathos of Pearl White bound and gagged on the railroad track.”

In case you’re as out of loop as I was, Pearl White was a star of silent movies, known for her sassy stunt work.  Included alongside this article was a mailing from an art dealer advertising the sale of a piece entitled “wrapped mirror.”  In a humorous twist, the shift of scale from architectural to domestic renders Christo and Jean-Claude’s work almost ordinary, the mirror looking as if it were ready to be loaded onto the U-haul, driven across town, and unwrapped.

Elin O'Hara Slavick. (1998). Post colonial girl: paper doll. Glen Mills, PA: Paper Crane Press. pp. 2-3

UNC’s studio art faculty have some of the more complete files, and it was exciting for me to learn new things about their work.  The artists’ book Post Colonial Girl Paper Doll, in elin o’Hara slavick’s file, features a host of colonial outfits that might be “appropriate” for “Priscilla” to wear to some of the darkest events in the history of advanced capitalism.  The effect is powerful, poignant, and eerie.  Slavick’s file also includes some wonderful volumes of writing and art produced in association with the University Program in Cultural Studies.

Wenzhi Zhang, Life Sea (No. 1 & No. 2). 1998

Other North Carolina gems include catalogs from various museums and galleries in the state.  “Affinity with Water and Fire: ceramics by Wenzhi Zhang and Wenying Xiong,” is a catalog from an exhibition hosted by St. John’s Museum of Art in Wilmington, in 2001.  With text in Chinese and English, it not only includes beautiful color reproductions of Wenzhi Zhang’s work, but photographs of her working alongside students and mentors in the studio.

Whether you’re in the mood to browse, or are on the hunt for something quite specific, consider checking out the artists’ file.  You might just find what you’re looking for – or something else entirely!

– Madeline Veitch

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Filed under Artists' files, Special collections in the Art Library

by | October 24, 2011

Curl up with a good (artist’s) book: Clifton Meador’s The Nameless Dead

This is the first in a series of posts about artists’ books in our collection. Since most of our artists’ books are kept behind the desk, we hope that these posts will help you to begin your own exploration of the collection.

The Nameless Dead, by Clifton Meador (PABA Publishing, 2004)

If you’re familiar with artists’ books as handmade examples of bookbinding craft or innovative, unusual structures, you may look at The Nameless Dead and wonder “Why on earth is this an artist’s book?” It looks like any hardcover you would pick up at your local bookstore. Open it up and start to read, though, and it quickly becomes obvious that this is no ordinary book.

The book-within-a-book featured in The Nameless Dead.

Some artists’ books are like lyric poems, others are more like one-liners. Clifton Meador‘s book is a novel, packed with detail, plot, and multiple levels of narrative. A conventional novel would do those things solely with text, but Meador uses all of the tools of the page to tell the story. Text shares space with photographs, diagrams, even an entire book-within-the-book that Meador inserted to add an extra layer to the fiction.

Through his arrangement of all the elements on the page, he guides you through the story’s multiple levels and controls the pace of your reading. The first pages of the book are a good example:

The opening pages of The Nameless Dead.

The first spread has no text at all — just a photo of a roadside scene. The empty white space of the sky gives the impression of expansive desert. The blurriness of the photo gives the impression of speed.

The book’s first words appear on the next spread of pages:

The second spread of pages.

Above a similar roadside landscape are the words “Let’s say you just woke up in a car, a car going too fast on a narrow winding road.” The shortness of the text and its placement on the righthand side of the page help to continue the feeling of speed.

The subtle touch, though, is the way he splits that first sentence into two lines and italicizes the second line. There’s no textual or grammatical reason to do it, but there is an artistic one. It prepares the reader to expect two voices. That becomes very important as the book goes on and the layers of the story multiply.

On the surface the story is about traveling to a ruined city in the desert, but it becomes obvious that all is not as it seems. Midway through the book, while exploring this ruined city the narrator asks, “Am I dead?” Suddenly we must re-think the whole story up to that point.

Things get a little weird later in The Nameless Dead.

Part travel narrative, part meditation on the afterlife, part postmodern novel — and we haven’t even begun to look at the visuals or the exquisite offset printing! I can’t adequately describe The Nameless Dead in this small space. You’ll just have to come curl up with it and read for yourself.

– Josh Hockensmith

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Filed under Artists' books, Special collections in the Art Library

by | October 11, 2011

From the Studio to the Stacks: a Conversation with Travis Donovan

This post is the second in a series focused on MFA students and their research.

Travis Donovan (MFA 2011) makes sculpture that is powerfully infused with cross-disciplinary research.  Recently, I was able to sit down with him to learn a bit about how he integrates a wide variety of sources into his working process.

"Molt", by Travis Donovan. 2011 (Materials: Down Feathers, Mattress, Mechanical Components. Dimensions: Variable.)

Donovan’s interest is in creating “poetic image[s] through the exploration of materials and processes.” In his current work he is dissecting feathers from a multitude of angles, examining “comfort, sensual qualities, but at the same time this history of loss.” His creative process involves gathering a wide variety of information, then “letting that come together in an image – a new experience but referencing back to its echoes in history.”

Although his undergraduate work focused on ceramics, Donovan’s research process has become increasingly cross-disciplinary during his time at UNC.  In his first year in the Master’s program he began to explore materials and processes more broadly. His research has taken him all over the UNC library system, including to the Kenan Science Library and the former Brauer Math/Physics library. Delving into scholarship ranging from philosophy to fluid dynamics, he’s interested “not just in the scientific and mathematical properties of material, but also the symbolic, poetic, and literary connections they might carry.”

Current reads? “Fragments of a Poetics of Fire” by Gaston Bachelard, and various works by preeminent phenomenologist  Henri Bergson. He has also been researching whiskey distillation and the thermal properties of certain minerals in North Carolina clays used for brick-making.

"Illuminationem", 2010. (Materials: Monofilament, Light, Motors, Wood. Dimensions: 20’ x 16’ x 17’.)

Of the resources that have proved especially useful, UNC Master’s theses and dissertations from various disciplines rank high on his list. “They present such a specific, condensed form of research – and local as well.”  While Donovan’s research draws on materials from across campus, Sloane Art Library is his home base:  “This library is my hub – where I start research, but also the place to get stuff and bring it back…it’s allowed me to feel comfortable checking out strange, odd books I wouldn’t otherwise access because I don’t know where they’re at.”

"Prometheus", 2009. (Materials: Fire, Acetone, Steel, Glass. Dimensions: 6’x 8’x14’.)

What would he check out if the library’s collection expanded beyond the usual media? “There are certain tools like microscopes that I wish were available – everything from electron microscopes to vibration sensors, things that allow for the dissection of a phenomenon.  It’s hard to get access to tools like that if you’re not in that field of study.  In an ideal world, there would be some access to those types of tools – with training, of course.”

– Madeline Veitch

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Filed under MFA student work, Patron interviews

by | October 5, 2011

Faculty Interview: Paroma Chatterjee on using manuscript facsimiles

You look at books, right?

Dr. Chatterjee sharing an illuminated manuscript facsimile with one of her classes.

That is to say, whatever form they take, you probably think of books as something you take in almost wholly through the sense of sight.  In a world of “disembodied” books on Kindles, Nooks, Crannies (which do not exist just yet), and other e-readers, it is easy to get used to the idea of a book as a visual phenomenon divorced from a physical, touchable, smell-able shape.  In my work with manuscript facsimiles, however, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with some of our patrons about how they use our facsimile collection.  As it turns out, some of them have very different ideas about how best to experience a book.

Professor Paroma Chatterjee has been teaching medieval and Byzantine art here at UNC for the last three years.  Her particular interests are in “textual and pictorial narrative, concealment and revelation, the creation (and sometimes destruction) of cult images, the delights and discontents of illusionism, and silent cinema.”  When we met, she explained the benefits of bringing her classes to the library to use our manuscript facsimile collection — which she does at least once each term.

“For them to actually see the stuff and to touch it, and to use it, to see how even the shape and the weight of the folio is different from a regular book, that is what I’ve tried to do.”

The unique physical experience of these facsimiles is not limited to books, either.  For example, there is also the Codex Vaticanus Palatinus Graecus 431 — better known as the Joshua Roll. The Joshua Roll is a large scroll facsimile which Professor Chatterjee enjoys showing the students because it exposes them to an alternative form of the book.

The Joshua Roll in action.

“A lot of the students are very unsure of how to use this object; and then there’s the whole box in which it’s kept, so you open the box, and it has those rollers… but then you begin to play with it and they get more comfortable,” she said, describing the experience.

The “experience” seemed to be the most important part of our facsimile collection for Dr. Chatterjee, and the ways in which that experience differs from more typical means of viewing manuscripts.

“You realize how much your body is implicated in that (handling a manuscript).  I’ve had to lift some of these facsimiles to show, and I can tell you it really was a workout.  And then there are these tiny ones, which also require your body, because you literally have to peer (at it); there’s so much detail and you feel clumsy compared to it, your size is so out of proportion to these beautiful little things. That is what I want the students to get a sense of, there’s NO way a slide lecture does that.  There’s no way a museum does that either, because you can’t actually touch it.  That’s the fun thing about the library, that’s what I try to make them see: look, you can touch it, you could tear it if you wanted!”

“Which we won’t!” she hastily added.

Feeling the love.

Apparently her approach works, too.  Professor Chatterjee described situations in which students simply could not stop handling the facsimiles, staying even after class had ended.  I’ve attended a few of these sessions myself and their excitement is palpable.

If you’re interested in learning more, Professor Chatterjee will be presenting some of our illuminated manuscripts at the Art Library on the evening of October 11 at 6 p.m. I’ll also be continuing to explore our facsimile collection in a series of similar interviews here on the blog. Stay tuned for more discoveries and insights!

– Eva Sclippa

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Filed under Events, Illuminated manuscripts, Manuscript facsimiles, Patron interviews