ARTBOOK BLOGEventsStore NewsMuseum Stores of the MonthNew Title ReleasesStaff PicksImage GalleryBooks in the MediaExcerpts & EssaysArtbook InterviewsEx LibrisAt First SightThe Artbook 2022 Gift GuidesArtbook Featured Image ArchiveDATE 4/1/2023 Rizzoli Bookstore presents Pattie Boyd in conversation with Dave BrolanDATE 3/30/2023 The Cold Gaze of trauma in Weimar artDATE 3/27/2023 'Donald Judd Spaces' new edition releases this week!DATE 3/25/2023 Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore presents the Los Angeles book launch and signing for 'Ash Kolodner: Gayface'DATE 3/25/2023 Never a dull moment in ‘Alex Da Corte: Mr. Remember’DATE 3/23/2023 Back in Stock! 'Gordon Parks: Segregation Story,' expanded editionDATE 3/21/2023 Postmodern fashion genius in 'Cinzia Ruggeri: Cinzia Says...'DATE 3/20/2023 Welcome, Spring!DATE 3/18/2023 The spirit of exploration in 'Thor Heyerdahl: Voyages of the Sun'DATE 3/15/2023 192 Books presents a Tony Feher panel discussionDATE 3/14/2023 Celebrate Pi Day with 'Einstein: The Man and His Mind'DATE 3/14/2023 Revised 'Philip Guston Now' on view at National Gallery of ArtDATE 3/10/2023 Hot book alert! 'Cyberfeminism Index' is out now from Mindy Seu and Inventory Press | 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. |