New episode coming soon!
The next episode of Book Looking is Saturday, February 26, with special guest, artist Harrell Fletcher. We will look at John Gossage’s book The Pond. Tune in via Instagram Live at 11am PST (2pm EST) Update: the talk will start at 2pm Pacific (5pm EST).
A second look
I bought Guestbook: Ghost Stories by artist and writer Leanne Shapton the day it was released in 2019 and returned it the next day. I was giddy for it to be straightforward and full of her lively watercolor paintings. Instead it seemed like fragments of stories with drab imagery on newsprint. I barely gave it a second glance before I walked it back to Powell’s.
Now it’s back in my life informing my exploration of artists books and publishing as an artistic practice. I spent time looking at it this week and I like it so much that I might even buy it…again.
Honestly, I wanted it to be like the easy-to-follow prose narrative of Swimming Studies, her National Book awarding-winning memoir from 2012. It’s punctuated with blue-toned photos of her collected swimsuits and dreamy paintings of places she swims. I loved how that book gave me easy access to her experiences, wardrobe, and aesthetic, just like when I read Women in Clothes, a book she wrote with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits in 2014.
Fast forward to December 2021, when I found out that she’s the first-ever art editor at The New York Review of Books. That’s when I started revisiting my collection of her work, including my collection of her “Style Dispatches” published in Elle magazine. As I looked at more of her work online, I yearned to try reading Guestbook again and quickly requested a copy from the library.
The timing of this book’s return to my life couldn’t be more appropriate. As a lover of ghost stories, Shapton uses them as inspiration for exploring absence and memory in poetic juxtapositions of images and text. (While I consider my projects to be about memory, I hadn’t considered how much they are about absence, too.) Chapters like “At the Foot of the Bed” are full of delightful imagery and sophisticated observations, as she visually explains that when people report seeing a ghost it’s often at the foot of a bed. Then there’s the shiver of longing for familial ghosts that she conjures in “Gymnopédies.”
In this chapter, she altered architectural floor plans, adding captions from her mother’s observations of her grandmother’s behaviors related to dementia. These pages captivate and perplex me, driving me to find out the backstory by reading interviews with Shapton. Sometimes having to do this annoys me and I feel like I’m not savvy enough to figure it out on my own and needing the artist/author to explain mysterious content in order for me to feel fully engaged with the book. But in this case, it gave me a new way to think of floor plans as a storytelling device and about her family’s experiences.
I couldn’t accept this book as an artists book in 2019 especially since it’s from a big corporate publisher. Now that I’m doing my own projects exploring collections of images, Guestbook is a dreamy inspiration. I get lost in these visual ideas and cryptic captions. I am not interested in ghosts but I am interested what Shapton has to show and tell me about absence and memory in this picture book for readers.
Touching precious things
This weekend I did some book looking at PDX Contemporary’s exhibit D.E. May Archiving Project. The exhibition collects work from Salem, Oregon artist Dan May, who created art from found objects until his death in 2019. As the gallery prepares materials for a book of his artwork, the public is invited to touch and examine pieces that are laid out on a table in the middle of the gallery.
It was thrilling! My favorite part was opening the drawers of this upright cabinet, each one containing small books made by May which I could touch and read on my own instead of trapped in a vitrine.
The gallery hopes to keep the exhibit open through the end of February but might change. I’ll end this newsletter with a quote from May in one of the books about him: “A number of years ago a musician was in my workroom holding one of my constructions in his hand and commented, ‘it looks like it has always been this way.’ I carry that observation with me like a compass.”