Making art isn’t giving blood
I tried to give blood the other day.
Back in the US I was a regular donor. Because I’m O-negative, I feel a responsibility to give blood but in six years living in Berlin I’ve yet to do it. At the beginning of our time here I was pretty sure that the level of bureaucracy and language competence required was beyond me. As a few years passed, I mostly forgot about it other than thinking „yeah, I should do that soon.“ Lazy inertia is the strongest kind of inertia. Then the US election happened. The week after, still processing what happened, I decided that it was time to put on my grown-up pants and do something that helped someone. Sure the election was „there“, and my blood would stay „here“, but local action is action nevertheless. It took a whopping three minutes to find the German Red Cross (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz) online and make an appointment later that week. I showed up, honestly quite excited to be doing it again, and was turned away.
“Lazy inertia is the strongest kind of inertia.”
I said we’ve been here for six years. What that means is that we’ve had to renew our visas a couple times, and we’re now eligible for citizenship. Right now we’re both in the middle of renewing, while also applying for citizenship. Whichever happens first is okay by us. We live here legally. We work here legally. But we have a strange piece of paper called a Fiktionsbescheinigung, which essentially says „you’re legally here, but we’re still trying to figure out what box to put you in. Carry on as usual. We’ll get back to you.“ A Fiktionsbescheinigung lets us leave and enter the country, work for German companies, rent an apartment, open a bank account, and so on. What it doesn’t let you do is sign up to give blood for the first time.
It’s that last part that holds the sting, „for the first time“. Had I at any point in the last six years given blood, thereby making an account with the DRK I’d still be giving blood today, paperwork be damned. But I didn’t. I waited until the week when the US officially lost its mind (and the German coalition government decided it couldn’t work together any longer) and felt compelled to „do something“. Well, turns out that that specific „something“ will have to wait a little bit longer. In the meantime I made a few collages.
Clumsy segue, yeah?
Intentionally so. It’s clumsy because what the hell does it matter that I made a few collages? On a personal level it matters to me. The making of them matters. I’ve said it before but for me the value in this work is the time spent working on it. But seriously, compared to giving blood (not saving lives, but saving-lives-adjacent perhaps) it doesn’t do jack for the world. It’s something I struggle with as I watch the war in Ukraine drag on, the Middle East implode, and the US do whatever the hell it’s doing, then head to my studio. I *like* my collages. I *need* to work on them. I know it’s okay to have selfish pursuits, but crises of meaning happen now and then.
A couple weeks ago I went to a conference and heard Jessica Hische speak. She talked about struggling with these same thoughts and said (I’m paraphrasing) one thing that gave her perspective was the idea that some people are here to save the world and some people are here to remind us why it deserves saving. Ooof! This brings up complex feelings. This makes all the sense in the world when considering some of the truly great art the human race has created. If there is any „point“ to humanity, part of that point is the creation and appreciation of art. But.
But.
Boy is this is a great way to let oneself off the hook from leaving the studio (spare bedroom, corner of the living room) and going out into the world to work against systems and governments that are unjust. Yes, studio work is hard, but this kind other kind of work? Haaaaarrrrrrrd. And who am I to elevate my work into the pantheon of work that shows us why the world is worth saving?
Who I am is the author, noting that we’re now 700 words into a newsletter that was supposed to be about four new collages now up on my website and in my store and I’ve still not mentioned them specifically. I’m sharing all of the above because it’s in my head as I figure out how to talk about my work and how I try to sell it. Ultimately it’s not my job to decide if my work shines a dim light on the parts of the human race worth saving, but I can say that it does (at least I hope so) shine a light on the parts of our material culture that we’ve abandoned, moved on from, thrown away, and decided were not worth saving - and asks us to reconsider. It’s not random chance that my collage work is rooted in found paper. Every sheet of found paper that I use was once meaningful and was saved for decades - otherwise it wouldn’t exist today. Someone in the past brought these papers into existence for a reason. Now, in the present, they’re in a junk shop, halfway to the dump. Hopefully with my work I can arrest this journey, if only for a short while and bring these papers back into the light to see what meaning might still be in them.
Elementarmathematik vom Höheren Standpunkte aus still has quite a bit of meaning, as it’s a mathematics textbook. The author, Felix Klein (1849–1925) was a mathematician working in „group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and the associations between geometry and group theory.“ In his later career he focussed on mathematic education and was partially responsible for establishing Gottingen as a major hub for mathematics in Germany, which it remained until the 1930s and the rise of the National Socialist Party (the Nazis). There he campaigned in favor of admitting women into the Universtiy of Göttingen and supervised the first PhD. thesis written in mathematics by a woman at Göttingen.
He authored over a dozen books between the 1870s and his death, including the three-volume Elementarmathematik vom Höheren Standpunkte aus, first published in 1908 and republished multiple times over the following decades. You can also find a copy at the Internet Archive.
I unfortunately only have the first two volumes.
I’m guessing that mathematics instruction has changed over the past 100 years, and as influential as this book once was, it’s value as a three-volume set is waning (though the Klein Project was founded in 2008, inspired by his work as an educator). This explains how I came across it while walking around my neighborhood. (Previously documented in this blog post) I have a regular walk, and on this day I decided to stray from it and wander some less familiar streets. I wound up in Kungerkiez, a small neighborhood (Kiez) in the Treptow-Köpernick district (Bezirk) of Berlin. There I found Fritz Klein and two volumes of German history. I’ve not yet worked with the history books, but after sitting with the math lectures for a bit, I allowed myself to start cutting them up.
One of the things that first jumped out at me from these pages is that they appear handwritten. A second glance assures you that they’re not. I don’t get the sense that the publisher was trying to fool their readers. Rather, they found it worthwhile to preserve the personality of the handwritten lecture notes. To be clear, this isn’t cutesy „handwritten“ typography. The book is lithograph printed from a handwritten source. It’s likely Klein’s stature that allowed this to happen. I’ve not found other similarly-printed books from this same time period and don’t get the sense that it was a regular occurence.
I started these collages by cutting out four pages and painting gesso rectangles on them. I’ve been working for a while with old paper and gesso’ed frames and find something very compelling in painting over a book page with white gesso, which is traditionally used as a primer for painting on canvas. Gesso gets a canvas ready for paint, making an already blank surface a more receptive blank surface (note: I’m not a painter and there are other uses for gesso, so excuse any misstatements here). Book pages aren’t blank, and aren’t generally meant to be used as canvases but there’s a particular energy in a painted book page. A rectangular white shape that’s brighter than the white page, that mostly (but not totally) covers the typeset words, and largely (but not completely) obscures them adds a dimension to the page that gives it a push-pull dynamic not previously present. The size of the rectangle and the amount of gesso both matter. I don’t know if I’d like the pages as much if they held two or three coats of gesso and erased the content completely. One coat does the job, priming the paper but leaving the words still there, stubbornly hanging on.
Cutting out the center of the gesso rectangle brings a hint of three-dimensionality to the paper and gives me one more set of edges to play with. I’ve written about edges (and margins) before. The short version of edges and margins in my work is that they’re a place where one can see, or show, attention. Is the artist (am I) paying attention to the whole collage? Am I balancing the page, or just getting excited about this one little part over here? How much one piece overlaps another, and how close one element is to the edge of the next - these relationships lie at the (formal) heart of collage. I’m exaggerating to make a point, but this is what I’m thinking about when I’m in the studio. And cutting out the center of the rectangle gives me a third set of margins to wrestle with (the first margin is the page, the second is the outside of the gesso rectangle, and the third is the inside). It’s a bit like moving from juggling two balls to three. The complexity increases, as does the visual interest. The fourth and fifth margins, the matte and the frame, are also important but are their own, separate step.
“There’s a way of thinking about collage where the entire art is boiled down to one simple question: „how much does this overlap that?“”
Inside the gesso frames are the bottles and vases. I’m not sure why bottles and vases are my go-to drawing subject. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a huge Giorgio Morandi fan, and that’s certainly part of it. Maybe it’s also that they’re on the surface quite simple, but with an infinite variety of shapes and (here I go again) overlaps. I’ve been collecting my vase and bottle drawings here and as silly as it is, it may be the most charming page(s) on my site. When I get a new pen I’ll draw a vase to test it out. When I go out in public with a sketchbook I’ll frequently find a vase to draw. When I’m sitting on the couch with my iPad I’ll draw a vase to warm up. Of the four drawings inside these frames, three were drawn specifically for this series. The fourth, the one drawn just to be drawn, was the first. It was a random sketch lying around my studio that I stuck behind one of these book pages and, lo and behold - it worked! The sketchy line of the parallel pen, the interplay of different whites against the different blacks and then the pale yellow of the book page, the way they each fit the frames, but differently. Looking at the four as a set, one drawing sits entirely inside its frame, one is cropped just the slightest bit too tightly in a way that pleases me, one is satisfactorily anchored to the left and right edges, and one is rooted to the bottom. It’s four different relationships happening, each of which works, but for different reasons.
The quality of the drawings plays well with the handwriting. To me, everything about these images feels personal. I know the author of the book didn’t draw the vases, but it’s not inconcievable that they came from the same hand. The scratchy line of the parallel pen makes these sketches vibrate, just a tiny bit, which is why they work set inside a frame. Without one, who knows what would happen.
A vase with a flower, or a potted plant is a small ecosystem. It’s one we can direct, help thrive, and keep healthy (the state of the plants in my home may not be the best proof of this). It can surprise us, and bring a bit of joy and color into our lives. From Bonsai gardening, to Dutch still life painting, to office plants, we’ve made a point of keeping plants close to us as we’ve moved inside because we know they help us, even if we’re not sure why. Plants are absolutely worth saving the world for. It may be that pictures of plants are too.
These four collages are all now up in my store and on my gallery. Each is 50cm x 70cm (matted).
Note: the collages pictured are shown in mockups.