The Book of Jests began in an antiquarian bookstore in Vienna where Hyung-Min Yoon found and purchased a 1922 edition of Albrecht Dürer’s illustrations. The book, Marginal Drawings for the Prayer of Emperor Maximilian I, was bound in grey cloth with beveled edges, and contained illustrations created for the margins of a prayer book. Originally created in 1515, Dürer’s illustrations were used in the mass publication and distribution of a single Christian prayer to multiple language groups, leaving blank the centre of the page, onto which the texts of different languages could be printed. For an artist whose work has explored the ‘imperfect path’ of translation, the interpretation of images across cultural contexts, and the history of printed text, this central unmarked ground must have seemed an almost overwhelming space of possibility.

The illustrations, inked in green and orange and sepia, are familiar biblical themes – mass produced extensions of the sacred manuscripts illuminated by hand in Medieval times. Horned devils perched on filigree, winged dragons and architectural flourishes, charging mounted knights and mythological beasts: what might these have meant to the readers of some forty-three languages of the polyglot prayer book?  What universalities were assumed to reside in the scrollwork embellishments, allegorical arrangements and fantastical landscapes? What process of translation transformed the meaning of these renderings placed next to such diverse scripts?

Vilém Flusser’s The Gesture of Writing is a typed work from 1991. It describes in fine, methodical detail the act of writing through its phenomenology. Written in English, it is an example of his practice of translating and retranslating his writing as a way of mining his own thought: seven versions were produced in four languages.  He begins by analyzing handwriting:

“It is a gesture of making holes, of digging, of perforating. A penetrating gesture. To write is to in-scribe, to penetrate a surface, and a written text is an inscription, although as a matter of fact it is in the vast majority of cases an onscription. Therefore to write is not to form, but to in-form, and a text is not a formation, but an in-formation. I believe that we have to start from this fact if we want to understand the gesture of writing: it is a penetrating gesture that informs a surface.”

Flusser traces the movement from writing by hand as a sculptural form, forward to typing, a process that removes irregularities and unwanted incidental marks, in which “we no longer engrave with a stick, but with a series of hammers”. Placing the gesture of writing into an historical context, he notes that the practice of typing ultimately transformed how we define writing, that is, as a conceptual gesture processed through a rigidly formed technology, a template.

The Gesture of Writing contains strikeovers and typos, and moments when the hammers glanced unevenly. Reading it (so odd in PDF form!) thus also requires care and a certain level of translation, of filling in, or working to discern the author’s intent. The text lightly abrades our reading of it, a distant echo of Flusser’s process of translating and re-translating. But his process, while arduous, was not endless:

“Theoretically I could go on translating the re-translating ‘ad nauseam’ or to my exhaustion. But practically I find that the chain of thoughts is exhausted in the process long before I myself am exhausted. Thus the process of translation and re-translation provides a criterion for the wealth of the thought to be written: the sooner the process exhausts the thought (the sooner it falls into repetition), the less worthy the thought is of being written.”

Dürer’s lithographs, inscribed and re-inscribed over centuries, are now subject to a new interpretive maneuver, moving from their 14^th century European Christian context to the present day. What sort of profane texts might occupy the space intended for the sacred?

The artist looks to the role of the Jester, an ancient figure found the world over, and found in close proximity to power. Able to speak the unspeakable, the Jester claims an uneasy space of intimacy and exclusion, whether in a monarch’s court or, these days, on late night television. The Jester draws and re-draws the line between insult and adulation, using flourishes, oblique angles and sidelong curves in his speech. Jokes – like prayers – are most often spoken.

Transposing the method of the polyglot prayer book, Yoon sought out political jokes in English, Italian, Hebrew, Hindi, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, German, Greek and Czech from friends and associates. They address classic themes such as hypocrisy, corruption and oppressive bureaucracy yet riff on the culturally specific paradoxes and absurdities of power. Certain formats – light bulb jokes, doctor jokes, and the like – repeat across nations, historical moments and regimes. Using a font developed in Dürer’s times, Yoon letter-pressed these jokes into the Terra nullius at the centre of the illuminated pages. By indexing the landscapes, forms and figures of the illustrations to the content of the jokes, new meanings are constructed. Emil Hácha, the President of Czechoslovakia during Nazi occupation, becomes a hooded monk waiting for dinner; German Chancellor Angela Merkel is seen as the Virgin Mary, no less, and Berlisconi becomes King David.   Bound in deep magenta, the photo-lithographs with their letterpress texts form a new volume of flagrant iconoclasms – and in the case of the Arabic scripts, near-blasphemies. Yoon’s method proposes the artist as editor, as publisher of a trans-historical, multilingual anthology, in a finely crafted limited edition.

In the gallery, in addition to the book, framed prints reproduce several two-page spreads. These particular excerpts are often in a left-page question, right-page answer format, or one printed page weights the blankness of its neighbour. In the archive area behind the exhibition space, a video records the artists’ hands turning the pages of the book. She takes care to time the page-turning correctly: in comedy timing is everything. This video of the silent reading, along with Yoon’s process of photographing and photographing the pages, as well as the framing and reframing of the letterpress jokes remind us of Flusser, translating and translating again.  From one medium to another and back again, Yoon re-works her thinking along Flusser’s chain, to the point when all possible meanings have been extracted, seeking exhaustion.

Lorna Brown
August, 2014

 DOWNLOAD| The Book of Jests, an essay by Lorna Brown.

Written by Anastasia Scherders

Valerie Salez’ installation project Play, Fall, Rest, Dance, exhibited at grunt from June 2 to July 5, 2014. Over the course of one month, the gallery space was continuously transformed. You could anticipate that, in visiting grunt, you’d witness Salez’ effort to facilitate art-making that was full of possibilities, and you’d get a glimpse of the experience of artistic exploration and uninhibited creativity of four children with disabilities: Amelie, Deshik, Henry and Isabelle.

Upon meeting Salez, the first thing she told me about Play was there are no rules. This is one of the philosophies that underscored the project; and with those words I was encouraged to let go of my own assumptions surrounding art and art making, and the limitations that we often impose upon creative expression and creator. With Play, she facilitated a kind of freedom in art making, providing the materials, tools, and guidance for children to create within a safe and accessible space.

Salez invited me to sit in on an art-making session with 12-year old Henry, who is autistic. The three of us sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounding a large piece of particleboard where pieces of chalk, charcoal, and a hammer and glue gun lay. Henry, who loves working with the hammer, had broken some of the chalk into fine powder. Valerie pushed the powder around with her fingers, smudging it onto grey cardboard while Henry carved small details into a piece of yellow chalk with a razor blade. “Like any good artist, he will try anything,” says Salez.

Photo by Valerie Salez

Scattered next to me was a collection of Henry’s drawings that he brought from home – highly detailed pencil-drawn characters crowded each page. Salez explained to me that Henry, whose bold and energetic painting dominated the gallery wall behind us, draws all the time. The white wall seems almost limitless compared to the confining boundaries of a piece of paper. Through Play, Henry has experimented with new forms of artistic expression.

Elisha Burrows, grunt’s Exhibition Manager who was video recording this session with Henry, asked Salez if the art world is pretentious. “It can be,” replied Salez. “It can be a world of criticizing and classifying; I don’t like to see my work in those ways. I want my work to be accessible.”

Play, Fall, Rest, Dance followed Salez’ residency at Open Space Gallery last summer where she worked with children for the first time. “Open Space invited me to do whatever I wanted. At that moment, I wanted to have fun and create art with children without intellectualizing or conceptualizing it,” said Salez. “Kids go to art galleries, see the work of adults, but aren’t allowed to touch anything. Now, they are the artists, able to touch everything.”

And no two sessions were alike. Some days they’d listen to music or spend most of their time talking. Some days they wouldn’t talk at all. Some days the kids got stuck. Salez felt the biggest challenge came from the children’s inhibitions, which she deeply empathizes with. Since childhood, Salez has suffered from severe, sometimes life-threatening, depression and is familiar with the debilitating feeling that comes from a lack of self-esteem and confidence. “It has really been a mirror for me. I am observing them and observing myself – my insecurities and fears, and theirs,” she says.

Photo by Valerie Salez

Throughout the process, Salez talked to the children about failure and would ask them what is the worst that can happen if we fail? “Kids need freedom, but it is hard for children to feel free. They are so worried about making mistakes, about doing right or wrong. They don’t feel comfortable making decisions. I want to empower them to make decisions, I want the kids to feel confident and brave, but I don’t want to influence them too much. It’s a fine balance.”

Salez emphasizes that Play is about her and the children spending time with materials in a space. She spent four sessions with Amelie, Deshik, Henry and Isabelle, allowing time to develop a rapport and build trust to support an experience of teaching and learning, exploration and discovery. Salez feels they came to understand one another through constant learning and negotiation. “I had all sorts of assumptions,” she says. “They’ve all been blown out of the water.”

When asked about curating the space and removing some of the children’s work over the course of the exhibition, Salez says it felt natural and intuitive. “That’s my playtime. The kids are okay when I erase their work. They will just make something else.”

Once the art making part of Henry’s session was over, we worked together to clean up the materials and sweep the floor. While I pushed around a broom, Henry transformed his straw broom into a ninja’s baton, stopping it firmly in midair, then spinning it in every direction. Henry spun around the room in circles, too. Witnessing Henry’s re-imagining of this object, it seemed that the most striking quality of Salez’ work is the way in which it has nurtured beautiful and ephemeral moments of uninhibited imagination, creativity and play.

Photo by Henri Robideau

“The kids are okay with doing something for the sake of doing it,” says Salez. “They are okay to walk away with nothing except the experience.” Unlike the end of a school day, the kids of Play do not take home an object they have crafted. Instead, they take home the most challenging and delightful experience of having worked to create something.

About the Project:

Play, Fall, Rest, Dance occurred at grunt gallery from June 2–July. Artist Valerie Salez blogged the entire process. Read the exhibition press release here.

About the Writer:

Anastasia Scherders, who moved to Vancouver in 2012 from Brantford, Ontario, began volunteering at grunt gallery in November 2013. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Theatre & Film from McMaster University.

A raw steak must be among the least likely of things you’d expect to find in a cardboard box of papers. But that’s exactly what myself and another volunteer found, to our surprise, during an afternoon of work on grunt’s archive a couple of weeks ago. We discovered that the uncannily realistic-looking steak had formed part of a mid-nineties grunt exhibition called Palimpsest, and when the artist behind it, Marcus Bowcott, happened to stop in a few days later, it seemed only natural to catch up with him to discuss his art, personal philosophy, and what he’s doing now.

I took a rainy-day journey out to visit the artist in his studio in peaceful North Vancouver – a town that Bowcott’s long-time partner, Helene, describes as a “bedroom community, separated from agriculture, industry, entertainment”– an exemplification of the separation in the modern world of the facets of our lives, the way in which we work, eat, play and sleep in locations far removed from one another.

The modernization of the human experience is clearly something of combined terror and fascination to Bowcott. As we sipped on tea provided by Helene, who Bowcott describes as “a partner, in so many ways, in developing my work,” the artist described to me a recent trip down to Seattle, during which he was struck by “just the number of cars on the highway… The automobile is gobbling up energy.”

The automobile, in its used-up state as compacted refuse, has been a recurring theme in Bowcott’s work for some time. The painting exhibited at Bowcott’s grad show from London’s Royal College of Art featured wrecked and compacted cars, and since then, he’s explored the theme in sculpture, notably in a piece, 25 Standard Stoppages, currently being featured at Seattle’s Punch Gallery as part of a show, curated by Rock Hushka, titled Whither the American Dream?. He’s also developing a massively scaled-up version of the sculpture for Vancouver’s upcoming Sculpture Biennale, although, as he wryly comments, “people don’t want to show wrecked cars.”

“The bull doesn’t look that big here [in the photo] but he was 1200 pounds, and the whole gallery became like a manger… There were tons of people packed in there, but all of a sudden you’re honoring this animal, something that is often considered to be below us.”

The wrecked cars in question provide Bowcott with a vehicle to examine modern industry and its often unexamined aftermath. He titled a handful of these sculptures Das Kapital, which he explains as “a reference to our surplus capital, our surplus value/goods…which I’m presenting here as wrecked cars”, a leftover of the industrial process upon which most of us will never lay our eyes.

Another, perhaps more tragic, forgotten leftover of the industrial process was featured in Bowcott’s Palimpsest, the show that, years later, would inspire this article. Something amazing was accomplished in addition to the hyper-realistic steak sculptures and paintings of packaged steaks: for one night, the gallery was emptied of breakable artworks, and a live bull was brought in to inhabit the space. Marcus and Helene evocatively described what it was like to experience such a surreal coming-together of incongruities –

“The bull doesn’t look that big here [in the photo] but he was 1200 pounds, and the whole gallery became like a manger… There were tons of people packed in there, but all of a sudden you’re honoring this animal, something that is often considered to be below us. The cave painting [which was projected onto the bull’s body as part of the show] had much to do with feeding people. They were honoring the animal…and today we just shop for meat. We all had to be really quiet to keep it calm; that kind of hush was a really interesting addition to the installation and performance.”

“We live atomized lives,” Helene continues. “With technology, people become more and more isolated from each other. The same thing happens with food production. In many different aspects of our life…we are becoming more and more specialized.”

A critique or exploration of that atomization could be seen to run through Bowcott’s work as a unifying thread, perhaps in a sense of superimposition, of “stacking, or layering,” Helene tells me. “Even Palimpsest, the word, has to do with layering… An image on an image,” she says. A cave painting projected on the side of a bull. Crushed cars on top of cars on top of cars.

Visit Marcus Bowcott’s website.

About Genevieve Michaels:

Genevieve is studying art history and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She has been volunteering at grunt since last October, writing and assisting with maintenance and digitization of the archives. She also writes about music and city life for local magazine Beatroute BC. Follow her on twitter: @LavenderIndigo0