I made a piece for an altered book competition, at the Wiener library where I have done some research.
You could have one of their books - I got a volume Les Minorité Nationales en Europe Centrales by Joseph Chmelař, published in Prague by Orbis in 1937. Written in French, it details facts about races, nationalities, minority groups and other demographic details in Europe, obviously just pre WW2. It mentions changes in numbers and distribution, and is totally dispassionate about any reasons why. It has a folded map in the back cover, colour-coding central Europe by ethnicity. Additionally the colours of the map are those almost pastel, cheery block prints of the 1930s. From the perspective of the history of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, it is a fascinating document, detailing a moment in time.
This is one of those pieces I thought through very much before even starting. Although time has been full of plenty of things to think about, I had thought through and trialled ideas for this in my head. I was thinking of altering the book by videoing it, layering it through different times and lighting, etc, so not altering the book itself, but how it is viewed. If I had had a suitable tiny TV I may have inserted that into the book itself, along the lines of this:
Myriad 33. EMF. 2013
However, the Chmelař volume is slim, and I didn't want to go fiddling around. There are other technical restraints about where the book might be shown which make other TV and video installations unfeasible, and besides, I was looking for a more integrated solution.
Following the idea of altering how the book can be seen rather than altering it itself, I thought of distorting it through some structure of magnifying lenses and glass, with some kind of shadowy use of the map. What you imagine, what you have, what you can make - making a piece of work is such a balance between considerations. Glass, perspex, how to fit together, what shape, how it works, what I can afford, where I can get bits - all things to think through on the tube.
I love the idea of altering the book by altering how it can be seen, that it can only be seen through a distorted view. It's apt for the subject, that all those facts of demographic shifts utterly depend upon your perspective to give it meaning, and the perspective that you take exposes your thinking.
I'm generally rather obsessed with Fresnel lenses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens. After trialling various bits of glass and perspex I have as a structure, which would contain Fresnel lenses, I decided to use the lenses themselves as the structure. It distorts at all aspects, and the contents, the book, moves as the viewer moves. It's simple but complex, and works on vision both as a physical attribute and perceptive concept. The structure has no surprises - it simply shows itself as it is, and yet it still looks mysterious and hard to figure out because it distorts. It's tricky to make the structure because it also distorts the view while aligning parts.
I printed a detail of the map onto acetate, adding images of German bombers - that's my only real intervention. These acetate prints were going to be in multiple layers, but one merged layer did the job.
While thinking through and making this piece, I kept thinking of the line: Which alters when it alteration finds, from Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare, 1609:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds....
When thinking of a title, I thought I might come up with a word or two which might summarise that - Alteration, or something, but it occurred to use the whole as the title.
I recognise in this piece recurring concerns of destabilised imagery which I make in moving image form and through art contraptions eg Vessels, the bottles with floating eye images, and others:
Vessels. EMF. 2012
In and out of the screen. Upon finishing Which alters when it alteration finds, I immediately thought I might integrate making something along this line for the final project, in addition to the moving image. The found paintings, layers of people, in and out of the screen.
Which alters when it alteration finds, mixed media: vintage book, acetate, Fresnel lenses. 2014.
1st February 2014
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