At the time of making The bread and butter stone I had been working on a self-published book entitled The White Book, which comprises a series of formal and structural manipulations made by hand to the pages of a paperback book. I had shown some of this to John and he suggested I incorporate this material into our book. I took text fragments imprecisely cut with a scalpel to use on the cover, and inside interspersed John’s writing (itself subjected to technological processes to disintegrate the letterforms) with further text fragments, to amplify the thematic throughline of the malleability of memory. Alongside strike-throughs, handwritten marks and what looks like large ink smudges and misprints these pages appear provisional or even ineptly arranged. We might look at this treatment and be reminded of fanzines, but in this art gallery context and in a book format like this (paperback size) this sits outside of our expectations. I am drawing the reader towards a conventional, formality and professionalism (or mastery) with which a book like this is normally designed, while disrupting its conventions to articulate thematics. The book, due to severe budget constraints is printed almost entirely in black on white and in combination these elements lend an impression that everything is subsumed and unified by a textural whole. In making this book I learned that this use of monotone can work as ‘flattening device’ to remove or decentre hierarchy.
Fig. 49 Make Ready, 32
‘The complexity migrates to the materiality of the book. The object too becomes an expression of the content’
The production of PATMOS (2001) too is a consequence of costs, but this time round the print budget is more than six times that of The bread and butter stone. Published five years later, we live in different times socio-culturally, and I am at the forefront of producing high-quality artbooks for Irish art institutions. In PATMOS all the images are in colour, and the writing – a reflection on journeys towards enlightenment – is mirrored by a complex blend of papers and inks. The book is casebound, with debossed title: , similarly austere to The bread and butter stone, but in its material characteristics PATMOS conveys a calm authority. We cannot but be struck by the exemplary production values. The text – set in blocks while recalling The Bread and Butter Stone – is more recognisably conventional, and only on close-reading do we become aware of subtle breaks in convention – a shift from justified to range-left type signifying an undoing, or slippage; amplifying a particular segment of writing. The mastery here – the exemplary book production values of Dutch printing and binding – is both instrumentalised and subverted through an unorthodox sequencing of papers and ink modulations which bring the reader through a haptic, reflective, reading experience as surfaces, textures, and tonalities shift with the turn of the page.
Make Ready too is printed to the highest technical standards. Essentially black-and-white-looking (used again as flattening device), images are in fact reproduced in a complex blend of monotone, duotone, and tritone processes to articulate nuances. A gridded page structure is counterpointed by the quite crude (or again inept?) typesetting of the body text. Set in a ‘display’ font, the letterforms lend themselves uneasily to continuous reading, and line breaks and letter-spacing contribute to making this seem awkward or ‘unprofessional’. There is a tension between the readerly tone of the writing, and the ungiving setting of the type. Overlays, image ‘clashes’ and the constant modulation of the complex page grid further contribute to a lack of fixity or organisation. Balancing these technical and formal elements suggests a collision of mastery and anti-mastery is productive. Our expectation that a book by a graphic designer about graphic design would be expertly designed is confounded, causing us as reader to question why this would be otherwise, and how our expectations affect meaning.
In These Islands this anti-mastery is used as strategy. From the outset my bricoleur approach determines my technical constraints and limited expertise. What I make is defined by these, but this is an operative position and it does not necessarily reflect an inability – I could, for example, follow a more conventional art practice approach and seeking funding, subsequently hiring equipment and employing a crew. This would require careful planning and logistics, and would bring with it its own visual language. By then though the moment would have passed, and more significantly this would preclude my making an intuitive response to the phenomena. Instead I choose to shoot this myself with semi-professional equipment, and the only plan or shooting schedule I have is to encounter the place through the camera and the microphone, recording the results. I respond to the vagaries: of daylight (which in the filmed material disrupts chronology); the wind (which produces substantial ‘wind-thumps’ in the recordings and must later be addressed); and to the phenomena of place and landscape itself. In post-production I must (re)encounter (again with my limited expertise) this filmed material, and make a response to this. Without shooting schedule I am free to work intuitively, cutting and disrupting the material to (re)produce a filmic encounter for the viewer-reader. The resultant film in its ad-hoc, disruptive nature is reflective of the ‘unauthorised’ development or ‘henge’ itself, which while evidently carefully coordinated (but left incomplete) is roughly assembled, with scars left in the displaced earth which surrounds it.