ARTBOOK BLOGEventsStore NewsMuseum Stores of the MonthNew Title ReleasesStaff PicksImage GalleryBooks in the MediaExcerpts & EssaysArtbook InterviewsEx LibrisAt First SightThe Artbook 2023 Gift GuidesArtbook Featured Image ArchiveArtbook D.A.P. Events ArchiveDATE 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 1929DATE 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 SelfDATE 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 MuseumDATE 3/11/2024 Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of 'Richard Nonas' | THOMAS EVANS | DATE 5/3/2011Charles 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).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: “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. |