Catharine Clark Gallery | UNTITLED, ART Miami Beach 2021 Nina Katchadourian, Stephanie Syjuco, Lenka Clayton, Jen Bervin, Ana Teresa Fernández, and Bradley McCallum Mon, Nov 29, 2021 – Sat, Dec 4, 2021 Booth A56 NINA KATCHADOURIAN | Noguchi, 2021 (“Sorted Books” project, 2010 – ongoing) In a 1962 interview, Isamu Noguchi said, “I always work with whatever medium is at hand. I don’t believe in sticking to one medium.”2 This has been my approach as well, and I’ve found that deliberately working with the limitations of the materials at hand has been productive for me. My ongoing project “Sorted Books” began in 1993 as an experiment that I undertook with a group of fellow graduate students in 1993, when we took over a friend’s parents’ house in the small coastal town of Half Moon Bay, in California, and made art for a week using only what we found in the house. I got interested in the couple’s books and spent a week rearranging them on the bookshelves. The basic rules of engagement have remained the same through many iterations of the project ever since: I limit myself to a particular collection of books and by organizing them into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, I construct phrases, stories, poems. I think of the project as a form of portraiture. Both through the books Noguchi collected and his writings about his own work, I was keenly aware of his own intense attention to what materials communicate. The most common misunderstanding about the “Sorted Books” project is that it’s only about language, and merely about the arranging of words. There is an absolutely elemental importance to engaging the books as physical objects: to consider height, width, heft, color, typeface, texture, gloss, damage, dust jacket. These things communicate in different ways than language can, and to me they are as big as part of how the images are “read” as the words on the spines or covers. I’ve seen paperbacks that are so banged up and mangled from reading that they look like they’ve been eaten alive, in fact, a reflection of the voracious way in which I imagined they had been handled. (Perhaps the most extreme example I’ve encountered was in the personal book collection of William S. Burroughs, where a medical thriller paperback titled Nerve had been shot through the cover, the bullet still lodged inside). I’ve also encountered libraries where the books have been treated so carefully that you wonder if they’ve ever been opened—or, perhaps, the books are there to serve a future moment when one might be needed as reference. Noguchi’s books are kept in his two homes, in Long Island City, New York, and Mure, Japan. Adding to the complexity, during this project I was in Berlin, Germany. From my studio there, I worked with snapshots of the book spines from both book collections, pinning up color prints of them on a large wall. In this simulated library, I used my usual method: reading the book spines over and over, transcribing onto index cards the titles I thought might be useful, and then spending a great deal of time composing potential book clusters using the index cards. I sent some preliminary groupings to Kate Wiener, assistant curator, who pulled those books from the Long Island City shelves and sent me back snapshots. Since the books in the Mure library couldn’t travel, we ordered secondhand copies, matching the editions exactly, and worked with those books in Long Island City as well. The photo shoot was an eight-hour long Zoom session in Long Island City, with Kate and photographer Frank Oudeman arranging the books and making small tweaks based on my feedback as they screen-shared images I scrutinized in Berlin.
Catharine Clark Gallery at UNTITLED, Art Miami Beach 2021 | November 29 - December 4, 2021
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