Artists' Books by Students of ARTSTUDI 147
 |
In the Winter 2012 quarter, students from Ala Ebtekar's studio course visited the Art & Architecture Library twice to view selections from the library's artists' books collection. The visits helped to inform their own work, providing them with examples of the artist's book form that ranged from the historic to the contemporary, the traditional to the experimental. The works on view in this exhibition are the students' final projects, a set of works that includes altered books, hand-drawn pages, mixed-media boxes, and performance traces. |
Artwork by Yvette Deas
  |
The paintings Juliet is the Sun and Aristotle’s Containers enter into teasing dialogue with each other as they examine the possibility or impossibility of a construction of metaphor that has a finite framework. In Aristotle’s tidy, logical explication of metaphor, relationships fit into nesting categories, like a Russian nesting doll, or as here, in Ziploc containers. Initially, in setting out to represent these categories visually, I imagined images within images, but I soon became concerned with the materiality of the containers themselves, as well as the idea of containment. A contained metaphor cannot be messy; that is, it cannot bleed into other realms, nor suggest any kind of ellipsis or continuation. It must “lock” into place, be sealed against infectious intrusion. Still, it must be transparent and “plastic,” metaphorically speaking. Each container may be seen within the other, and further containers are invited. Standing in counterpoint to Aristotle’s Containers, Juliet is the Sun folds in upon itself in representations of representations of representations, and so on. This is not the actual sun, nor the actual Juliet, of course, but an image set apart at a self-reflexive remove of several layers. The sun is a painted, manipulated image of a manipulated photographic representation, and Juliet is a painted Olivia Hussey portraying Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of the play. The images are then manipulated again in tone: the sun is not seen through clouds, filtered for our easy viewing, nor is it a postcard-lovely setting version. The sun depicted here is blinding and distant; were we to look at it directly, it would cause us pain. Olivia Hussey is shown as the impossibly wide-eyed and juvenile thirteen-year-old she was intended to be. The two images stand in opposition: how can the weepy Olivia Hussey possibly be this vast ball of fire? Juliet, and the sun, are shown in superimposition, as one and the same, but they cannot fully become the other. They “trade” properties, but retain their own distinction as discrete entities. Both paintings approach a containment of metaphor from different perspectives: one in which the containment itself is treated as metaphor, and the other in which the metaphors may trade properties but do not, ultimately, transform one another. Yvette Deas, June 2011 |
Permanent Rotation: Works from the Locked Stacks
 |
Utopie is a sixteen-issue journal (one issue being a double number) that was published by the French ultra-leftist group of the same name in the years leading up to and following the tumultuous events of 1968. In a sense, in its focus upon urban forms and the politics of space, it was an architecture journal, but the group’s collective aim was to move beyond the discipline into a more philosophical and less illustrative realm. Members of the group hailed from the disciplines not only of architecture but of sociology and philosophy (Later, the journal adopted a stance of author anonymity so as to stress pure theory over idiosyncrasy.). Contributors to the journal included the its founder Hubert Tonka, Jean Aubert, Isabelle Auricoste, René Lourau, and, most famously, Jean Baudrillard. Utopie as a group paralleled the Situationists, though it could be argued that the Situationists focused more on practical political action than Utopie did. Baudrillard, in discussing Utopie and its journal, separated his group from the Situationists (with which he had been associated earlier in his career) by claiming: “For us, 1968 was already more than politics. It was symbolic, almost ‘metahistorical.’ Thereafter, it was all over. In the 1970s, we passed beyond the end. Thereafter, we passed entirely to the side of theory." The Art & Architecture Library owns the six published volumes of The Situationist Times (NX600 .C6 S58 NO.1-6 ARTLCKS); Utopie serves as a wonderful complement and counterpoint to this collection. It is worth noting, too, the character of Utopie’s graphic design, each issue’s cover bearing a single color with bold lowercase text. Even as its contributors moved more and more toward an erasure of the visual in favor of the theoretical, appearances—and their uniqueness—certainly mattered. |
PAST:
Winter 2012
 |
In Chinese culture, rubbings are seen as more than mere copies; since each one is unique they are seen as works of art in their own right. There are several names for rubbings in Chinese, but they are commonly referred to as “Black Tigers” (hei laohu 黑老虎) by collectors and connoisseurs because of their color and because of the number of fraudulent rubbings on the market that can “bite” an unsuspecting buyer. The technique of making ink rubbings of stone and metal inscriptions is believed to have originated in China by the Liang Dynasty (502-556 C.E.) but perhaps as early as the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E-220 C.E.). The works shown in this exhibition are all rubbings taken from stelae, vertical stone monuments usually engraved with writings. |
 |
Subject of the major traveling exhibition, “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” and unanimously acknowledged today as a masterpiece of photobook publishing, Robert Frank’s The Americans occupies a privileged position in the history of photography. The communal adulation that Frank’s book now receives justly celebrates this masterwork of picture making, editing, and sequencing. The 506 page catalog for the 2009 “Looking In” exhibition is a scholar’s delight of detail on Frank and the The Americans. Yet the sum effect of this recent attention may actually diminish our ability to perceive the book’s relative position within the larger culture of American photography at the time of its appearance in January 1960. We assume that the considerable influence of Frank’s The Americans today was also broadly shared in 1960, that the book’s impact was immediate and overshadowed all else in American photographic culture. Actually, while The Americans was a bombshell in some quarters, it caused barely a stir in others. The range of photographic practices under consideration by American photographers in the late 1950s and early 1960s was remarkably diverse. It is this array of practice, and the possible role of The Americans within that array, which is the subject of this exhibition. [Read more] |
Fall 2011
 |
In 2010 the Stanford University Libraries purchased the archives of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Within the 170 linear feet of boxes lie the records of four decades of production, from the earliest works of the 1970s to the works-in-progress of the past few years. Materials include documentary photographs and slides, audio tapes, correspondence, notebooks, blueprints, financial records, grant proposals, newspaper clippings, exhibition catalogs, and computer equipment.
The items on display in the four exhibition cases represent a small fraction of the archive. Drawn from the records pertaining to four separate projects, they provide a glimpse of the Harrisons’ working processes and the environment in which each project was conceived and created. The Lagoon Cycle: 1974-84 |
 |
Summer 2011
 |
Sanaz Mazinani undertook her series Book Case (2004-2007) as a response to the looting of archives and museums in Baghdad at the start of the war in Iraq. Artifacts and written records were disappearing, and most if not all were irreplaceable. In her own studio, Mazinani had been collecting books she had found on the street or otherwise abandoned. They were not rare books—certainly not the recorded history of a nation—but they had their own hazy histories nonetheless, as works of literature, as aesthetic objects, and as bearers of unknown provenance. The tremendous loss of material culture in Iraq was much more urgent than the loss of any single copy of any single mass-produced publication, but still, to Mazinani, there was something both foreboding and enlightening about an abandoned book. She began creating images of the covers of the books she collected, making them larger than life-size in order to reveal new details and heighten their objective presence. |
Spring 2011
 |
 |
My work explores societies and human patterns in its transient states. My background itself is rooted in change. Born and raised in the USSR, my understanding of rules, social status, and human abilities were redefined when I moved to New York City. I quickly learned to adapt and observe things carefully and move fluidly throughout my surroundings. Due to my personal history, I posses an amalgam of opposing belief systems in which I constantly struggle to find refuge. Perhaps this is why I have thus far traveled to over a dozen countries and lived in several states. From my observations I have witnessed an increasing amount of globalization and homogeneity around the world, and through this I have developed a strong interest in examining patterns of humanity and urban development. I share my observations and convictions through visual art. The work functions as a meditation on our unacquainted society, focusing on the ever-growing enslavement of the individual within the social structure. That is, I have witnessed the entrapment of the free mind and the overall denial of this engulfing phenomenon. I explore this phenomenon in my work through the aesthetics of globalization, urbanism, and the underlying structures of the architectural form. Aesthetically my work focuses on space, light, and shadow through techniques of line, repetition, contrast, and illusion. Yulia Pinkusevich |
 |
Donated to Stanford’s Art & Architecture Library by Professor Tatsumasa Watanabe of Tama Art University, Tokyo, the prints in this exhibition were created by graduating students from TAU’s Graduate and Undergraduate Printmaking Courses from the 2008–2009 academic year (April 2008–March 2009). Founded in 1935 as the Tama Imperial Art School (Kaminoge, Tokyo) and renamed as the Tama Geijutsu Gakuen (Tama School of Art) in 1954, Tama Art University is one of only a few Japanese art universities which offer a full printmaking course from the first year. The aim of the Printmaking Course is to provide students with a broad range of practical and theoretical knowledge on which to base their research. In the first-year basic curriculum, students learn a wide range of techniques, including woodblock printing, wood-engraving, etching, mezzotint, drypoint, lithography, woodcut lithography, silkscreen, and digital printing. In the remainder of the course, students focus on one branch of printmaking and develop their own expressive approach. In the graduate program students are encouraged to experiment with non-printmaking techniques. We wish to acknowledge the efforts of Reiko Oshimo and Nancy Nussbaum of the College Women’s Association of Japan, who serve as Co-Chairs for the CWAJ Print Show, Sally Porter, and Nancy Ferguson, Cantor Arts Center, who helped make this gift possible—with special thanks and appreciation to Professor Tatsumasa Watanabe and the students of Tama Art University. |
Fall 2010
 |
The year 1989 was a pivotal year for Faisal Abdu’Allah. Still completing his Bachelors degree in Fine Art at Central St. Martin’s College in London, it was in the course of that year he reached a turning point in his use of paper as a print medium. In the series of works entitled Paper Ends, Abdu’Allah negotiated the printed surface, working and reworking the paper onto which he printed. During the same year, he studied for a semester at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he found new inspiration in the teachings of Malcolm X and the cultural narratives behind the Nation of Islam. After reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, he created a series of prints featuring images of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X himself. Produced during that critical year of 1989, these selected works allow the viewer to trace Abdu’Allah’s growth as an artist both materially and thematically. This exhibition has been organized to accompany Faisal Abdu'Allah: The Art of Dislocation, on view from September 28–November 14, 2010 in the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery. |
Summer 2010
 |
Now a resident of Oakville, Ontario, the woodcut artist Naoko Matsubara (b. 1937) was born on the island of Shikoku in Japan and was raised in the Shinto tradition. She trained in the fine arts in both Japan and the United States, first coming to the U.S. as a Fulbright scholar in 1960 and staying to teach at the Pratt Institute and the University of Rhode Island. Not long after producing the Solitude portfolio, Matsubara moved to Canada, where she has continued to produce woodcuts and illustrated books. Her works are in the collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of the Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art. Matsubara’s artistic influences include traditional Japanese prints (17th–20th-century ukiyo-e prints being the most well known in the West) as well as—especially due to her studio assistantship in the 1960s with German illustrator Fritz Eichenberg—the stark woodcuts of German Expressionism. Matsubara was selected to illustrate the 1971 Aquarius Press edition of Henry David Thoreau’s fifth chapter of Walden because, according to the editors, her “philosophy of life and language of artistic expression exemplify the same forceful individuality and inner strength of the Thoreau text.” All of the prints from the portfolio are on display, along with excerpts from Thoreau’s chapter. |
Spring 2010
 |
The MFA Thesis Exhibition is an annual presentation of the Department of Art & Art History's graduating visual artists. This year, the students have extended their exhibition, Square Root, into the Art & Architecture Library, each of the four artists filling a case in the Reading Room with materials related to their work on view in the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery. The materials are a mix of preparatory sketches, inspirational materials, journal entries, and finished pieces--all helping to reveal the very personal steps involved in creating a cohesive body of work. The artists represented in the show are Jeremiah Barber, Jamil Hellu, Juan Luna-Avin and Armando Miguélez. |
Winter-Spring 2010
 |
During the Fall 2009 quarter, the students of Dance 171: Conversing Across Dance History (led by visiting artist Ralph Lemon and Professor Janice Ross) visited the Art & Architecture Library in order to view a selection of artists' books from the Art Locked Stacks collection. One of the students' culminating assignments was to create books (or book-like objects) that distilled their class experiences in some way. Inspired by the range of bindings, formats, and themes they saw during their library visit, they created a unique and highly personal set of works. |
Late Fall 2009-Winter 2010
 |
Clothing is relatively inexpressive on a hanger. It can hint at its conceived form and utility; it can suggest its potential for movement. But it is not until a garment is viewable in four dimensions, supported by a body and moving through space, that it is truly activated. Studying clothing is therefore a complicated task, as it often requires one to imagine movement or to mentally add volume to a limp structure. There are times when two dimensions can help in this task. Fashion, or costume, illustration is a centuries-old genre that has always been utilized for a specific, though evolving, purpose: to animate representationally that which cannot be animated physically. This exhibition is an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which artists have undertaken this illustration (or, more recently, photography), and to trace the contexts in which they worked. The items on display range from historical costume books to Parisian fashion plate portfolios to designs for the ballet; from glossy magazine page spreads to, finally, contemporary visual critiques of the genre itself. |
Late Summer-Early Fall 2009
 |
This exhibition of photobooks marks the culmination of a collaborative effort between Lukas Felzmann’s Spring 2009 class, Art Studio 276: The Photographic Book, and the staff of the Libraries. Over the course of the quarter the class twice visited the Art & Architecture Library for extended viewings of classic and contemporary artists books and photobooks led by Peter Blank, Head Librarian. In addition, David Brock, SULAIR Book Conservator, attended these viewings and made an additional presentation on book structure to the class. The photobooks produced by the students reflect not only the examples seen from the Locked Stack collection, but also the students’ unique perspectives and aspirations. The photographs featured in each piece are clearly drawn from the student photographers’ personal experiences, their friends, their travels, their worlds. This is to be expected. What is surprising is the range of means by which the students meld photographic images with presentation formats. From Chelsea Chiara Chau’s delightful, dragon-like, constantly unfolding Emotionary, with its play on photographic framing, to Mike Attie’s simple, accordion-fold narrative presentation Leaving CA, a wonderful road trip of images taken with both a plastic and a pinhole camera, each of the nine books on exhibit are exemplary in their own way. In addition, we are pleased to present a copy of Lukas Felzmann’s most recent book, Waters in Between: An Archive of a Marsh (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2009). |
Spring 2009
 |
In their encounter with the remains of antiquity, European writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were most concerned with, sought out, and recorded those objects that they believed held aesthetic value. These objects served as markers of taste and distinction for Europe’s elites, either in their suitability for inclusion in private collections or as inspiration for new art that evoked the classical past. In the last two centuries, with the emergence of the professional archaeologist, new agendas opened up that focused on the antique fragment. Today, the kinds of data that archaeologists deem worthy of inclusion in a standard archaeological report have diversified and multiplied with the availability of new analytic techniques. Objects of specifically aesthetic interest must share time with other site data—for example, the different stratigraphic layers of soil deposits. There is the (often explicitly stated) aim of capturing all the available data from a site, no matter how apparently trivial. This has become all the more important for archaeologists with the relatively recent realization (or emphasis on the realization) that they can never repeat the excavation of a site and that discarded data cannot be recovered. Once lost, data is lost forever. Yet no matter how meticulous an observer he or she aims to be, the archaeologist must still make decisions about what does or does not merit recording and portraying in the final publication. The visual examples in this exhibition, chosen from texts in the Art & Architecture Library’s Locked Stack collection, illustrate the field’s evolving approach to representing the past’s fragmentary remains. Although the exhibition casts light on the fragment’s transformation from art piece or aesthetic ruin to a more ascetic archaeological object, it does not map a linear narrative of the development of a “true and correct archaeology.” Several of the oldest texts here display an almost unparalleled concern for technical accuracy. As a whole, the books collected reveal a number of influences on representational form, especially the interests and agendas of professional archaeologists compared and contrasted with the expectations and requirements of other audiences. |
Fall-Winter 2008-2009
 |
How do we decode the images that we see? For example, when we look at an image, how do we distinguish an object from the space surrounding it? How do we know whether the image depicts a part or a whole? How do we infer its temporality? By what means do we interpret its scale? This exhibition gathers together books filled with images that ask these questions and, in some cases, force viewers to test their own presumed answers. The featured works refer out to the world and into themselves, each functioning both representationally and self-referentially. These thirteen books comprise a view into systems of image-making and image-reception that is less comprehensive than it is exemplary; less scientific than it is anecdotal. Yet this arrangement of disparate materials helps to elucidate a truly fundamental concept: the images we encounter can never be neutral. |
Late Summer-Fall 2008
 |
Winter-Spring 2008
 |
It is rare to come across a publication that is not a collaboration of some sort. Editors help writers to shape their texts; designers direct page layout; colleagues compose introductions. The collaborations that we have in mind in organizing this exhibition, however, are ones in which various parties have conceptually partnered in order to create original content that forms, if not a single, unified entity, at the very least a packaged merger of shared and evolved aspirations. A project undertaken by multiple participants (painters or poets, calligraphers or critics) is often deemed experimental, or at least unusual. In any case, it is an opportunity for the juxtaposition of media or styles in ways that might not occur to or be possible for any single artist. Within the fine arts, the book format seems especially welcoming of such collaboration. The book’s ability to perform as its own, compact container allows for it to facilitate unity in unique ways. The two dimensional page provides a venue for the melding of text and image forms; multiple sequential surfaces accommodate both static and temporal themes. Every turning of a page allows for a fresh development, while building on preceding experience and anticipating future turnings. Ultimately, each viewing of a piece results in a new collaboration, as individual readers appreciate and engage with the original collaborative project in their own manner. |
Fall 2007 Winter-Spring 2008
 |
The Art & Architecture Library recently purchased the three Parisian journal titles featured in this exhibition—Le Coq (subsequently titled Le Coq Parisien) (1920), Les Réverbères (1938-39), and Néon (1948-49)—in honor of Alex Ross on his retirement after 32 years of service as Library Head. The richness of the Library’s collection is due primarily to Alex’s superb skills as a bibliographer and his extensive knowledge of art history. The journals’ editors and contributors included the Dadaist and Surrealist luminaries Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, and André Breton. This exhibition’s juxtaposition of these rare ephemera reveals the idiosyncratic atmosphere of Parisian avant-garde design and publication over three decades, illuminates the often conflictual manifestations of these politically activist movements, and foregrounds the commitment of the journals’ producers to a revision of art’s form, purpose, and value. |
