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 12/13/2023 Eat More Plants: Daniel Humm and Gerhard Steidl in Conversation at the 92nd Street YDATE 12/2/2023 In Sugimoto's 'Time Machine,' the flicker of a second lifeDATE 12/2/2023 Museum Store of the Month: Walker ShopDATE 12/1/2023 Come see us at Art Basel Miami Beach 2023!DATE 11/30/2023 The Definitive Marisol RetrospectiveDATE 11/27/2023 The Academy Museum presents Peter Spirer and Big Boy for a Los Angeles screening and signing of 'Book of Rhyme & Reason'DATE 11/27/2023 Forever ValentinoDATE 11/25/2023 Indigenous wisdom in 'Let's Become Fungal'DATE 11/23/2023 Happy Thanksgiving from Artbook | D.A.P.!DATE 11/20/2023 Holiday Gift Staff Pick: Kerry James Marshall: The Complete PrintsDATE 11/17/2023 Fotografiska presents a book signing with Andrew DosunmuDATE 11/17/2023 Shaggy and spontaneous, 'The New York Tapes' collects Alan Solomon’s mid-60s interviews for televisionDATE 11/17/2023 Book Soup presents the LA launch of 'Stephen Hilger: In the Alley' | 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. ![]() ![]() ![]() |