ARTBOOK BLOGEventsStore NewsMuseum Stores of the MonthNew Title ReleasesStaff PicksImage GalleryBooks in the MediaExcerpts & EssaysArtbook InterviewsEx LibrisAt First SightThe Artbook 2024 Gift GuidesArtbook Featured Image ArchiveArtbook D.A.P. Events ArchiveDATE 6/1/2025 Pride Month Staff Picks 2025!DATE 5/28/2025 Aeon Bookstore launches The Further Reading LibraryDATE 5/17/2025 Jasmine Benjamin and Alex/2Tone present 'City of Angels: A Book about L.A. Style' at Printed Matter's L.A. Art Book FairDATE 5/16/2025 Hot book alert! 'Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers'DATE 5/12/2025 Ethics of care in California quilts from the Second Great MigrationDATE 5/10/2025 Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents Prem Krishnamurthy, David Knowles and others launching 'Past Words'DATE 5/10/2025 Mothers Day Staff PicksDATE 5/8/2025 The exquisitely rendered botanical watercolors of Hilma af Klint, published for the first timeDATE 5/6/2025 "Confidence to do whatever the hell you want" in Nina Chanel Abney's 'Big Butch Energy/Synergy'DATE 5/4/2025 In celebration of the 2025 Met Gala honoring Black style, 'Black Ivy'DATE 5/1/2025 A Granary History of 20th-Century Experimental PoeticsDATE 4/30/2025 Christopher Rawlins and Charles Renfro launch 'Fire Island Modernist' at RizzoliDATE 4/26/2025 Join Artbook | D.A.P. at Shoppe Object High Point, 2025 | 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. ![]() ![]() ![]() |