...
Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison employ an equally slippery approach
to 'facts', creating whimsical narratives about disappeared species
that operate according to their own logic. The printing process, as
both a technical and artistic activity, has been linked not only to
the memory of human thought, but also to the memorial process.23
Haby & Jennison’s artist’s books employ digital collages
of drawings and found illustrations, mediated through offset lithography,
to pay tribute to extinct creatures. Their Christie-esque book titles
— By the Pricking of My Claws; The Case
of the Lost Aviary; Trouble at Sea; The Dubious Clue
– attest to Haby & Jennison’s delight in amateur detective
work. Unearthing sad tales such as that of the Passenger Pigeon (once
so numerous flocks blackened the skies for hours, but lured to extinction
by alcoholic grain and captive pigeons with their eyes sewn shut) and
stumbling across incriminating evidence against ship-jumping black rats24,
Haby & Jennison conjure new, pseudo-scientific scenarios. James
Atlas might have been describing the artists’ work when he observed:
"The truth is in the prose, the style, the quality of presentation
that compels us to believe".25
Haby & Jennison’s truth is, by necessity, a fabrication —
the species themselves being lost for all time, leaving only fragmentary
data from which to glean information. Their Rabbit Rats, Pig-Footed
Bandicoots, Deer Mice and Bulldog Rats are as fanciful as their names
suggest, sporting sailing boats for headgear or fossils as body parts.
Extinct Cloud Runners and Pink-Headed Ducks sing the blues according
to Memphis Slim, sporting jail break outfits as they go fishing amongst
the desert cacti, taking liberties with the argument that "narrative
metaphors are an indispensable part of all "factual" discourse,
whether in history or in science",26
and winking at the commonly held notion that the historian’s work
is partly scientific, partly artistic.27
...
The artists in Ex Libris all, in various ways, employ illustrative
conventions to create new fictions, and new truths. The artifacts they
produce draw from personal libraries, testifying to the illustrated
book’s enduring capacity for inspiring creative acts35 and for
capturing the evolution of the human spirit.36
The research team of Joseph Jacobson is working on the concept [of]
a printing surface that can be infinitely printed upon...It is his vision
that in the not-too-distant future every child will be given his or
her "Last Book"…37 One
suspects that Caleo, Haby & Jennison, Irvin, Manifold, Mills, Silvester
and Zizys imagine a somewhat different future.
An extract from the catalogue essay by Jazmina Cininas, October
2005
Download
the catalogue
to read the whole of Jazmina's essay.
1.
José Miguel Valderrama, EX LIBRIS (Bookplate): A secret bond
of affection between the book and its owner, http://www.geocities.com/andaluzadexlibristas/ExlibrisIngles.htm,
viewed 21 October 2005.
2. From earliest times, books have always been cherished
and jealously guarded by their owners [being regarded as] privileged
vehicles of knowledge, and prized possessions. Benoît Junod, "Ex-Libris
Or The Mark Of Possession Of Books", The World Of Ex-Libris:
A Historical Retrospective, http://www.karaart.com/prints/ex-libris/index.html,
viewed 21 October 2005.
3. "No invention has had a greater influence on
the development of mankind than that of printing." Ibid.
4. See A. Hyatt Mayor, "Herbals and scientific
illustration" and "Printing breaks away from manuscript",
Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1971.
5. "By paying more attention to the duplication
of pictorial statements, we might see more clearly why the life science
no less than the physical ones were placed on a new footing and how
the authority of Pliny, no less than Galen and Ptolemy, was undermined."
Elizabeth l. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:
Volume II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979, p.686.
6. See Hyatt Mayor, "Printing breaks away from
manuscript."
7. "New ways of picture making changed the very
basis of knowledge. The Greeks and Romans...scorned the instability
of appearances, whose images shifted when repeated through the only
replication then known. Today the emphasis is reversed." Ibid,
"Herbals and scientific illustration."
23. "Printing as Memory", a pair of lectures
delivered by Alvin Eisenman at Dartmouth in 1992 imply in their title
"not only the idea of printed texts as the memory of human thought
but also the role of printing, as a technical and artistic activity,
in the memorial process." G. Thomas Tanselle, "Printing History
and Other History", Studies in Bibliography, Volume 48
(1995), p.289
24. Information on the passenger pigeon and the rats
was supplied to the author by the artists, October 2005, citing Clive
Ponting, A Green History of the World, Penguin Books, 1992:
http://www.ulala.org/P_Pigeon.html: and Tim Flannery & Peter Schouten,
A Gap in Nature – Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals,
Text Publishing Australia, 2001,
25. Tanselle
26. Donald N. McCloskey, cited in ibid.
27. See G. M. Trevelyan, cited in ibid.28. Kristen
Bakis, Lives of the Monster Dogs, Farrar Straus Giroux, New
York,
35. "..the effects produced by printing may be
plausibly related to an increased incidence of creative acts…",
Eisenstein, p.688.
36. Our best chance of capturing the human spirit…is
through studying the artefacts it has produced…Printing history
is essential for examining a major class of those artefacts by helping
us to decipher, in the fullest way possible, the physical marks that
constitute verbal messages from the past. Tanselle, p.289.
37. Stephan Fussel, "Gutenberg and Today’s
Media Change", Publishing Research Quarterly, Winter 2001, Vol.16,
Issue 4, p.p. 3-11.
Ex
Libris exhibition, installation view.
