ARTBOOK BLOG

RECENT POSTS

DATE 4/25/2024

The Strand presents Joshua Charow launching 'Loft Law'

DATE 4/21/2024

Time & Space Limited presents "Memory as Various: Bernadette Mayer's 'Memory'"

DATE 4/13/2024

Unnameable Books presents "Reading from Bernadette Mayer's 'Memory'"

DATE 3/31/2024

Behold the photographic work of Jay DeFeo, born OTD in 1929

DATE 3/30/2024

Seminary Co-op presents the Chicago launch of Danny Lyon's 'This Is My Life I'm Talking About'

DATE 3/23/2024

On view now! 'Surrealism and Us'

DATE 3/20/2024

Sublime punk protest in 'Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot's Russia'

DATE 3/15/2024

A gorgeous and compelling new exploration of bodega culture from rising star, Tschabalala Self

DATE 3/15/2024

Vintage girl power in ‘Las Mexicanas’

DATE 3/14/2024

Celebrate Pi Day with 'Einstein: The Man and His Mind'

DATE 3/12/2024

Kindred Stores presents Anita N. Bateman on 'Where is Africa'

DATE 3/12/2024

Hot book alert! ‘God Made My Face’ is NEW from Dancing Foxes Press and Brooklyn Museum

DATE 3/11/2024

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of 'Richard Nonas'


THOMAS EVANS | DATE 5/3/2011

Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia (Walther König/Koenig Books, London, 2011)

Of the many inspired curatorial concepts that Harald Szeemann devised in the course of his career, one of the most suggestive was “individual mythologies.” Szeemann debuted the term as the guiding thesis of the legendary Documenta 5, 1972; he later explicated it (in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist collected in the latter’s A Brief History of Curating) as “intense intentions that can take diverse shapes: people create their own sign systems, which take time to be deciphered.” Nebulously broad as this may sound, what Szeemann intended by “individual mythologies” was an art in which a unified system, or world view or cosmology manifests itself across a range of media—via a repertoire of signs and symbols, as in Marcel Broodthaers’ eagles, pipes and bricks, or Matt Mullican’s generic Isotype symbols; or through allegory, as in the cosmologies of William Blake, or Paul Thek, whom Szeemann included in the 1972 Individual Mythologies show. Such cosmologies would operate independently of existing religious, scientific and philosophical systems (though inevitably borrowing from them).

Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia
Among the few contemporary instances of “Individual Mythology,” Scottish artist Charles Avery (born 1974)’s The Islanders project stands out for its especial richness and spirit of adventure. In 2004, Avery invented an island (known just as “the Island”) and began to populate it with natives, industries, colonists, philosophical systems and beliefs partly drawn from such thinkers as Kant and Heidegger—all illustrated in large drawings and sculptures.
Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia
Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia
The Islanders is a philosophical allegory, somewhat in the fashion of a Borges parable, with problems posed through encounters between competing or conflicting positions. Much of its thinking takes place through the Hunter, a would-be anthropologist from Triangleland (the name for everywhere that is outside the Island) who pursues a beast called the Noumenon, in a plotline that allows Avery to explore various allegories on the subject of absolute truth. (The Noumenon is a philosophical term associated with Kant’s “thing-in-itself,” i.e. an unknowable entity existing independently of human cognition.)

The Island’s port is named Onomatopoeia, and this second volume in what Avery envisages as a multivolume encyclopedia on The Islanders gives a detailed rendering of what the local businesses and flyposter ads around the port of a philosophical allegory might look like:

Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia
Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia

“If the drawings are compelling, it is because of the sheer effort I got to and my earnest attempt to portray a place to the best of my abilities,” Avery told a recent interviewer. “It’s as though I have an intense conviction about how this place and its people look.” The Islanders differs from other artistic mythologies in which symbolism is often privileged over description, as Avery’s drawing skill takes the enterprise almost to the realm of the virtual in its illustrative zeal; perhaps it also helps obviate the hazard of author-centric solipsism particular to individual mythologies. With each new installment in the project, Avery throws open another vista onto a fresh corner or hinterland of his philosophical playground.


Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia
Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia
Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia

Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia

Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia

Walther König/Koenig Books
Hbk, 9 x 12.75 in. / 80 pgs / 22 b&w.