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 7/22/2024 Explore the influence of Islamic art and design on Cartier luxury objectsDATE 7/18/2024 Join us at the San Francisco Art Book Fair, 2024!DATE 7/18/2024 History and healing in Calida Rawles' 'Away with the Tides'DATE 7/16/2024 Join us at the Atlanta Gift & Home Summer Market 2024DATE 7/15/2024 In 'Gordon Parks: Born Black,' a personal report on a decade of Black revoltDATE 7/14/2024 Familiar Trees presents a marathon reading of Bernadette Mayer's 'Memory'DATE 7/11/2024 Early 20th-century Japanese graphic design shines in 'Songs for Modern Japan'DATE 7/8/2024 For 1970s beach vibe, you can’t do better than Joel Sternfeld’s ‘Nags Head’DATE 7/5/2024 Celebrate summer with Tony Caramanico’s Montauk Surf JournalsDATE 7/4/2024 For love, and for countryDATE 7/1/2024 Summertime Staff Picks, 2024!DATE 7/1/2024 Enter the dream space of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret CameronDATE 6/30/2024 Celebrate the extraordinary freedom of Cookie Mueller in this Pride Month Pick | 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. ![]() ![]() ![]() |