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Three Visual Litterateurs (1992)

We are coming to recognize visual literature as a distinct genre whose measure is simply the visual enhancement of language. Once the concept of a distinct genre is in mind, we can acknowledge that visual literature can appear in many media, only one of which is books. Paul Laffoley paints large canvases customarily filled with words, more syntactical than not, and images, to degrees reminiscent of William Blake, though quite different in style. Laffoley is essentially a visionary painter, who portrays unseen forces, mostly cosmological, who has conducted some of his activities under the name of The Boston Visionary Cell, Inc. Some of his paintings realize a density of words and symbols that reflect as they transcend charting. However, whereas Blake favored script that reflected the vagaries of his own hand, Laffoley’s literary style is blockish sans-serif letters whose bottoms make a straight line.

An Ivy League boy, trained in classics and architecture before turning to painting, Laffoley made a typically unfashionable move in writing his own retrospective catalogue. Given what he knew about his purposes, who else could do it? His ideas and motives are not easily understood. The best attempt I’ve seen was John Yau’s, in Sulfur a few years ago. Quite simply, Laffoley is one of those rare artists whose criticism of his work is far ahead of that of other commentators; other artists of this type were Ad Reinhardt and John Cage. By most measures known to me, Laffoley’s illustrated book about his own work—more precisely, his own imagination—ranks among the greatest artist’s self-expositions.

The principal value of The Phenomenology of Revelation (1989) is his commentaries on his own paintings. For instance, he describes The Levogyre (1976) as “nested shells connected by gimbels [in] an attempt to model a photon creating light, and in turn an atom of consciousness. The structure of the Levogyre derives from structure of the Universe proposed by Eudoxus (the astronomer pupil of Plato). Eudoxus stated that the Universe is a series of nested crystalline spheres which contained the stars as fixed, the planets which moved, down to the central non-rotating Earth. Each sphere is connected to the next by gimbel-like axes which are randomly distributed.” It’s hard to imagine any of the current art reviewers beginning to approach such discourse. To say that his work looks like no one else’s is a minor compliment, for no other visual artist writes about his work as Laffoley does.

II

Whereas visual poetry is language enhanced primarily by design, visual fiction would be images in sequences that depend upon changing pictures for narrative development. Whereas one image from Eric Drooker’s new book would be a graphic, in succession his pictures tell a story. His protagonist is the single male artist in New York City. To judge from the few times the protagonist’s face appears in the story, I would say his resemblance to the author’s photo on the back cover is more than slight. In the first part of the novel, the protagonist goes from home through the subway to a workplace that is surprisingly closed; he meets at a bar a young woman whom he seduces, only to discover that she is an addict with a nasty boyfriend. In the second part, while working at his drawing board, he imagines a flood that envelops New York, including a protagonist-within-a-protagonist.

Technically, Drooker generally casts a single line image into his book’s 7” by 10” pages, sometimes breaking through its narrow frame. From time to time he divides his page into 4 frames, 16 frames, and even 64 frames, accelerating his narrative by reducing the size of his picture. His images initially resemble those of Lynd Ward (1905-85), perhaps the most distinguished visual fictioner ever in early-twentieth-century America, who favored woodblocks and heavy contrasts between black and white (and thus, like Drooker after him, portrayed earnest artist-protagonists attempting to survive economic misfortunes). However, by the second part, the imagined flood, Drooker has developed his own visual style, with far more detailed drawings, that benefits from the printer’s adding a light blue color to a deep black. Principally because of this last development within Flood!, I look forward to Drooker’s next novel.

It is distressing to discover in a book with so few words that “millennial” is misspelled on the back cover, much as the front of a new, under-populated hotel across from New York’s World Trade Center is emblazoned with, no joke, “Millenium”!

III

One of the most ambitious and imaginative book artists of our time, Warren Lehrer has produced several large-format, sumptuously designed, elegantly printed (at SUNY-Purchase’s Center for Editions) volumes filled with a wealth of images and words. Perhaps because they “smell of money,” as we say, they appear in high-priced limited editions, with a yet more limited “deluxe” edition, and are thus designed to become books one is pleased to possess. The language sometimes comes from Lehrer himself, at other times from collaborators such as the poet Denis Bernstein. Ostensibly scripts, they address major cultural issues, typically in a style more intimidating than communicative. One of the technical innovations of French Fries (1984), perhaps Lehrer’s most sumptuous work, is that a summary of its obscure pages appears continuously in the upper outside corners.

His most recent book, Grrrhhh (1987), is similarly dense, though different in format, being only 7” high and 7 1/2” wide and much thicker. Whereas the typical Lehrer page once had neat, discrete blocks of text and image, one departure in Grrrhhh is superimposition. Though apparently not a script, this draws upon Bernstein texts and Sandra Brownlee/Ramsdale’s weavings of imaginary animals and landscapes. Once again this Lehrer book seems to address cultural issues with politically correct attitudes, but the exposition is so obscure and the format so expensive it is doubtful that anyone’s mind has been changed. I sense that his texts would benefit from being taught in a classroom (as perhaps they were).

Lehrer also works in audio, collaborating with Harvey Goldman on the song cycle The Search for It & Other Pronouns (Ear/Say-La La Music, 1991) that appeared as a full-length compact disc that incidentally has the most intelligently and imaginatively designed (not to mention legible) accompanying booklet to come my way, reminding us that secondary elements of any artifact deserve as much attention as primary.