The Rapport of Beauty: Book Design by Ken Botnick | Collage by John Fraser | May 16 - July 25, 2021

THE RAPPORT OF BEAUTY

Book Design by Ken Botnick Collage by John Fraser

The Object of Beauty essay by R. Freeman

THE RAPPORT OF BEAUTY

Book Design by Ken Botnick Collage by John Fraser May 16 - July 25, 2021

MITCHELL MUSEUM, New Semantics Gallery Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, Illinois COSPONSORS Designs by Linda; Sidwell Friends B&B Cedarhurst Center for the Arts is an activity of the John R. and Eleanor R. Mitchell Foundation.

Support for this program has been provided, in part, by the Schweinfurth Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council Agency Booklet graphic design by R. Freeman and Sarah Sledge.

Special thanks to Becky Freeman for her support on this project.

Copyright © 2021 by Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, IL All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing by the publisher.

Works of art and photographs reproduced with permission of Ken Botnick and John Fraser.

COVER: LEFT, Ken Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015; RIGHT, John Fraser, Measure For Measure, 2018. See checklist p. 20 for details.

COVER: Diderot Project, two-page spread.

Emblematic of his book itself and our exhibition.

Image and Word paired. The image on the left displays the structure of a machine. On the right, letters in movement, which by turning pages reveal “DIDEROT.” The ghosted images of other letters are visible and imply movement. Like trains passing on parallel tracks heading in opposite directions. The page also references Botnick’s desire to represent visually the metaphor of transparency, a theme of Diderot’s to make knowledge transparent and available to all citizens.

Ken Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015.

Measure For Measure, seen here in detail, features a book spread with an exposed, aged, yellowing spine, all pages missing. The original endpapers replaced with crisp new sheets. A carpenter’s folding ruler squares one corner of the book. The ruler adds tremendous material and metaphoric power to the book. The disemboweled book and ruler form a relationship binding one to the other.

“Measure for Measure” is also a tragicomedy by Shakespeare.

John Fraser, Measure For Measure, 2018.

occurs from the accumulations of our senses, reaching our thinking, permeating our bodies, creating a circularity with the object to our mind and body. This sensibility has long been interpreted as Harmony. Beauty became a kind of sign for Truth and Harmony was the relationship that recognized it.

The Object of Beauty Rusty Freeman Director of Visual Arts INTRODUCTION

This essay and exhibition unpacks the aesthetic dimensions and social relationships informing the Beauty and Harmony of the artist book and the art of collage. We will explore some of those relationships with book designer Ken Botnick and collage artist John Fraser.

In appraising Beauty, we sense something greater than the sum of the object’s parts. No single attribute defines beauty of the object; it is a cumulative effect.

In order to present the scope of the social conceptions of Beauty and its use in the arts, we will examine Diderot’s analysis of the Beautiful; Elaine Scarry’s treatise On Beauty and Being Just; and Thomas Jefferson’s analogy of excellence in architecture and the principles of a new form of statehood.

laid the groundwork for some of the same key operations of analysis utilized by 20th-century structuralism. Throughout, Diderot’s comments also provide psychological insights into his own thinking and the workings of the world in the mid-18th-century.

Diderot’s analysis used a variety of methods. He searched history for the origins of the concept.

Word definitions and grammatical associations were carefully unpacked. Consideration was given to who was doing the defining and who benefited from such definitions and points of view. The importance of “difference” echoed throughout the essay.

These three standpoints I will use in turn to link bookmaking and collage by their differing harmonies emanating from their use of the book whole and the book taken apart.

DIDEROT

“The question of the beautiful is no longer but a grammatical issue.”

The object of beauty is hard to define, no criteria is possible that fits every case. Beauty differs for most people, although agreement occurs. The only universal among people about beauty is that it does exist.

Denis Diderot, the 18th-century polymath, was also the lead editor of what would become the founding document of the European Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. Diderot who wrote several entries including a seminal essay on the Beautiful. In it, Diderot established rapport, or relationships, as the prime operation defining what beautiful is.

The object of beauty as purpose or goal is also contested. Since we began thinking about these things, beauty has been thought to be a sign of the existence of Truth, Goodness, or Morality. In the late 19th-century the idea that beauty existed for anything beyond its own sake was roundly contested and remains so today.

Also known as the Reasoned Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, and Trades, it was published in 1751. The 28 volume set was Diderot’s twenty-year project featuring 17 volumes for articles, 11 volumes of illustrations, written by 134 authors. The purpose was to put knowledge in the hands of everyday people.

When we experience beauty, we sense with our mind and body a certain pleasure. The feeling

In 1752, Diderot wrote the entry “Beautiful” remarkable for its systematic analysis. Diderot

This artwork may be considered an emblem of the exhibition and essay’s theme of a dialectic reading comparing one oeuvre to the other. An absence sign paired with its “positive” or presence sign.

John Fraser, Square & Positive, 2001.

Throughout, Diderot used series of Socratic questionings to arrive at key points and to encourage further considerations among his readers. Beginning with Plato, he read closely six philosophers from history: Augustine, Christian Wolff, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Francis Hutcheson, and Yves-Marie André. Diderot cited the values of their main premises and expressed his criticisms of their findings.

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PREVIOUS Re-District begins with disassembled books, various papers, and a very old, weathered wood carpenter’s folding ruler. The composition is full of delights - open spaces, compartments, spare use of color, and lines that move. The ruler alone signifies volumes and provides an overall theme.

The title sets in motion the idea of boundaries, and perhaps the idea of crossing boundaries, of exploring new terrains. John Fraser, Re-District, 2010-19.

Diderot Project, “Imagination: The Senses,” twopage spread. On the left, the Botnick theme of transparency, (see caption, inside front cover for more) as a dozen images from the 18th-century book layer over the word and colors “ENCYCLOPEDIA.” On the right, word and image cross boundaries. An asymmetrical orb patterned with hearts; the outline a bust of Diderot. The text is a multi-topic musing by Botnick on everchanging perceptions and the patterns revealed.

Diderot began his own definition with the statement that we have two faculties, one for thinking, one for feeling. These faculties in turn examine perceptions. Perceptions are compared, then weighed to establish relationships between viewer and object. The perception of rapports became Diderot’s foundational operation defining the beautiful. Rapports are manifold and they are differing.

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A brilliant focus by Diderot is his conception that beauty first awakens in the mind the very idea of rapport. “I then call beautiful outside of myself, that which contains in itself that which awakens in my understanding the idea of rapports; and beautiful with respect to myself, everything that awakens this idea” (My italics).

Diderot’s analysis includes a moment of selfawareness where he objectifies his awareness of the relations that he connects to objects with this declaration: “the forms which are in the objects must be distinguished from the notion that I have of them. My understanding does not put anything in things, and takes away nothing from them.” From this extrapolation, Diderot conceives his characterization of two main forms of beauty: “Whence it follows that, although there is no absolute beauty, there are two sorts of beautiful in relation to us, a real beautiful, and a perceived, or relative beautiful.” Real beauty is those objects which contain within themselves what stimulates rapports, and relative beauty objects stimulate rapport by comparisons to other objects.

Diderot conceptualized how rapports function.

“A rapport in general is an operation of the understanding” (My italics). The rapport function when considering one object “supposes the existence of another being or another quality.” (Philosophers will continue to unpack this concept of beauty “supposing the existence of another” until the end of time.) This supposition of “another quality” moves Diderot to characterize rapports into three differing kinds.

One, where the rapport functions in relation to the object’s internal qualities; two, where the rapport connects with qualities outside the object; and three, where human understanding seems to attribute to the object fictive or intellectual rapports.

Interestingly, this third rapport, the fictive, is immediately discarded by Diderot who warns not to use it, but to use the “real” rapports of which there are many and which he will enumerate later. However, the fictive rapport, which Diderot referred to as the “third kind” shows up in history first during the Medieval period and in our time with Roland Barthes.

Medieval scholars referred to the term “fictive veil” which secular poets such as Virgil or Ovid used.

“Integumentum” was the term and meant cloak, veil, or covering. The veil metaphor carried no truths but was used to convey philosophical themes (Copeland 501).

LEFT Sextant and Text. The excerpt quotes Roland Barthes, “The object is the world’s human signature.” Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015.

ABOVE Blind Time highlights what appears to be a singular object. The title offers direction for interpretation. Fraser, Blind Time, 2020.

Barthes wrote “The Third Meaning” charting three levels of interpretation. An informational level, a symbolic level, and an obtuse signification.

Like integumentum and Diderot’s fictive, Barthes’ third kind, obtuse, is linked only to aesthetic expression (Barthes 52-68).

The gist is all three histories recognized the use of aesthetic inspiration but did not come to terms with it. Barthes takes it the furthest theorizing it as the place where “…articulated language is no longer more than approximate and where another language begins….” I read this as the difference between a written word and a visual image and all three uses as the historical sanctioning of the concept of 19th-century aestheticism.

Diderot ultimately concludes that “we will be forced to agree that the only common quality, which applies to all these beings, is the idea of rapports.” Indeed for Diderot, “It is the perception of the rapports which gave rise to the invention of the term beautiful.”

Diderot proceeds from here to outline no less than 12 “sources of diversity in judgments” which act as guidelines to the nature and diversity of how rapports function. It is an amazing breadth of cultural spheres that Diderot identifies. He notes that rapports are “infinite” in number. Almost every one of the 12 sources contain multiple categories.

Diderot’s 12 sources of diversity in judgments find a strong corollary in today’s semiotic codes.

Codes are the conventions used to contextually situate a word or concept. Like Diderot’s, today’s semiotic codes are no less organized, but can roughly be conceptualized by these categories: social codes, textual codes, and interpretative codes. The three have numerous codes within them.

As we know today, the meaning and significance of words and concepts are constructed through Rue Cler juxtaposes three objects across a spacious and open field; a wood walking cane, a likely early 20th-century architectural wood ornament, and possibly a page from a book illustration, which clearly depicts Melpomene, the muse of tragedy. Fraser, Rue Cler, 2018.

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PREVIOUS The opening page for Volume One (there are three chapters). “To observe without confusion” was Diderot’s editorial directive to the artists who would illustrate the crafts for the Encyclopédie. More curious is Botnick’s sub-head: “Memory: The Hand.” It stems from the original 1751 organization of the Encyclopédie. Three master themes organized that project: Memory, Reason, Imagination. Under Memory was History, under History was Nature, under Nature was the Crafts. Hence Botnick links Memory and the Hand.

Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015.

RIGHT Aspiration features the tools of the architect.

Thomas Jefferson as an architect had aspirations of using symbolic excellence with which to teach.

Fraser, Aspiration, 2018.

their differential relationships with other words and concepts. Meaning does not reside in the word itself, but in its relationship by contrast and comparison with other words.

Diderot further prefigured the relationships we know today as the synchronic and the diachronic.

“Place beauty in the perception of rapports, and you will have the history [diachronic, genealogy] of its progress… and your idea will be found concentrated immediately in a point [synchronic, archaeology] of space and time.”

Diderot distilled and finalized his study of how beauty functions and comes to significance through differential relationships by recognizing the linguistic realm. “The term beautiful is often understood in opposition to pretty; and from this new perspective, it seems that the question of the beautiful is no longer but a grammatical issue, and that it is a matter only of specifying the ideas attached to this term” (My italics).

Diderot’s brilliant reference to the grammatical puts on the table linguistic considerations: binary oppositions; the associations of connotations and their influence on a word’s meanings; and that a word’s meaning is first and foremost a

grammatical issue. Elaine Scarry would later make great use of the lexical dimension and its power forming relationships and analogies.

Diderot knew that any judgment on the part of the viewer must allow for differing viewpoints and interpretations of the beautiful. “The perception of rapports is thus the foundation of the beautiful ; it is thus the perception of rapports, which has been designated by an infinite number of different terms in the different languages, all of which indicate only different sorts of the beautiful” (My italics).

project of creating a new and a theoretically humane form of government, they read closely the best thinkers of political philosophy of the time. Among their resources were: John Locke in England, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Diderot’s Encyclopédie from France.

Americans constructed one of the boldest political documents of the European Enlightenment, the US Constitution.

Diderot also called for “an art of how to read” works of art or literature. Co-editor Jean de Rond d’Alembert had already called for such an art for reading music. Their joint aspiration is at the core of their Encyclopédie project. Diderot wanted to provide the everyday man and woman with knowledge and to encourage understanding for all citizens.

The idea of sharing information and knowledge with everyday citizens also appealed to Thomas Jefferson who was a contemporary of Diderot.

Benjamin Franklin it is speculated, had met with Diderot face to face. Diderot and the Encyclopédie were a powerful intellectual ally and tool for the American insurgents.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Thomas Jefferson, in 1781, purchased Diderot’s Encyclopédie for the state of Virginia and the public’s use. Later, he purchased his own set of volumes and ordered a set for the College of William and Mary. Jefferson also bought a complete set for James Madison and sent sets to Benjamin Franklin and James Monroe as well as at least four other Americans (Watts 318-325).

The political theorists Jefferson, Franklin, Monroe, and Madison were deeply read scholars and up-to-date with current thinking. For their

Their principles of bold thinking, collaboration, a singular sense of purpose, of embracing theoretically the entire spectrum of humanity in a common cause of uplifting and improving society are the hallmarks of the American republic.

Jefferson introduced neoclassical architecture to America and did so with a specific rationale motivating his decision. “To Jefferson and his contemporaries, the classical portico on the front of an American government building symbolized the democratic, republican, and humanistic values for which their new country stood” (Craven 110).

Jefferson designed the Virginia State Capitol with his well-researched and beloved style of neoclassicism. Jefferson appropriated the principles of Greco-Roman architecture for its aesthetic qualities of balance, clarity, harmony, unity of design, and restraint; and aligned it with the aspirations of the new government: Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, and Liberty.

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PREVIOUS TWO Colonnade uses what is referred to in the essay as “historical ruins.” As colonnade is a support structure, what might these columns of book parts represent? Fraser, Colonnade, 2012.

An 18th-century illustration of a Baker at work in her bakery. As a two-page spread, Botnick layers half in translucent paper suggesting a dichotomy.

Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015.

Jefferson and Franklin were friends with the French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon, who immortalized Diderot, Voltaire, and George Washington. The Washington statue in the Virginia State Capitol features Houdon’s robust symbolism of the farmer and the statesman. The symbolic power of art was well known to Jefferson.

sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it” (Scarry 3). Beauty inspires replication.

She establishes that justice will be fashioned into existence finally through the hands writing law.

Scarry structures her treatise along three functions. That of the object, the perceiving mind, and the action of creation. “The invitation to ethical fairness can be found at each of these three sites” (Scarry 65). She allows for a variety of objects or events to evoke beauty, most notably, those of everyday life. Beauty is demonstrated as being available in a variety of places, such as the partners we love, or the simple beauties of nature, such as the sky.

Jefferson knew aesthetic support was required to launch the unseen principles of the new nation.

Jefferson designed the University of Virginia’s central Lawn creating one of America’s best neoclassical architectural statements which still stands today as “the visual counterpart of the humanistic education to which Jefferson was devoted” (Hartt 866).

For Jefferson it was paramount that the new country have public and visual models of excellence with which to represent the young burgeoning nation’s lofty aspirations.

ELAINE SCARRY

Language and literary scholar Elaine Scarry’s ethical treatise on the relationship between beauty and justice succeeds where others have not by showing the structural operations that begin in the body, take hold in language, and move into spheres of action.

Like Diderot, who elevated the hand crafts on par with the sciences and the arts, a key pillar of Scarry’s treatise is the making by hand of objects.

This is so for Scarry as the recognition of beauty comes to inspire replication and does so by the hand (My italics). “Wittgenstein says that when the eye 12

Kamini features Jayadeva’s 1,000-year old love songs about Krishna and Radha. Botnick used 20 different blues to portray the various manifestations of Krishna. Botnick, Kamini, 2007.

Her skillful analysis of how analogy actually works, allows Scarry to move into a comparison between beauty and equality. “…equality is the heart of beauty, that equality is pleasure-bearing, and that (most important in the shift we are seeking to undertake from beauty to justice) equality is the morally highest and best feature of the world” (Scarry 67) (My italics).

She concedes that justice will take time to achieve.

Justice is hampered by not being directly available as an “object” to our senses as is beauty. Justice becomes visible with the aesthetic support of beauty.

Diderot’s fundamental discernment when defining beauty is the manifold relationships between subject and object that are paramount.

Like Scarry, Diderot realized the definition of beautiful hinges, articulates, on the grammatical.

Scarry uniquely establishes lexical associations or relationships to beauty. Scarry asks when a person seeks beauty what is it they seek? They seek beauty to align themselves with its qualities.

A continuity ensues between the two. The continuity reinforces what Scarry calls “aliveness” which I equate to “harmony.” For Scarry, as for the other historical philosophers she cites, beauty becomes a contract between the beautiful person or object and the viewer.

Scarry establishes in key words—symmetry, fairness, equality, distribution—their influencing ideological connotations connecting beauty to justice. Fairness refers to a “loveliness of countenance” and the ethical associations of “being fair,” “playing fair,” and “fair distribution.”

Scarry coalesces the binding relationships that connect beauty and justice as the “beautiful things [that] give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but also in the sense of ‘a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other’” (Scarry 65) (My italics). Diderot too, sought to create a forum for justice by distributing knowledge to ordinary folk. In Diderot’s time, knowledge was withheld from everyday citizens by the church and state. Diderot’s Encyclopédie project profoundly exemplifies Scarry’s premise on the importance of distribution and fairness equaling justice.

BEAUTY & HARMONY IN THE OEUVRES OF JOHN FRASER & KEN BOTNICK

The first half of the essay sought the concepts of Beauty itself and the various relationships used to define it. Harmony is the poetic term for relationships. Both collage and artist books exude their own unique versions of harmony.

There remains one major caveat regarding beauty and harmony: can anything, including art, be reduced to one singular property? Diderot said beauty cannot be defined by one relationship. I offer that reductions are useful to think with, and that all reductions re-expand naturally. For example, a word performs a temporary reduction that expands and contracts at will through connotations.

THE ART OF COLLAGE

Collage became one of the predominant art form of modern art. First used by Picasso and Braque, collage is regarded as “the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in the 20thcentury” (Ulmer 84).

The collages of John Fraser emanate certain harmonies from the work’s diverse and sometimes disjunctive elements. The collaged elements are removed from their original structures and creatively refashioned into new wholes. By intuitive and reasoned arranging and sequencing Fraser orchestrates pleasing compositions.

Fraser’s message declares beauty itself a worthy end goal. “My work, for over thirty-five years, has been concerned with things of a timeless and universal import. These concerns have manifested in various materials, and formal facture, via forms, shapes, suggestion, and restrained applications of process and intent.”

Simplicity is a virtue when divining complexities. In one piece, we can surmise the complexity of structure itself.

Note the space of absence as the square moves from the whole; while the square retained absences within it.

Polarities abound. Fraser, Refuge, 2020.

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PREVIOUS Diderot and Paul Rand noted the importance of patterns and relationships for creating meaning. Space is the very means by which things come to function with meaning.

Space is active not passive, it is a “structuring absence.” Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015.

FAR LEFT In our context of structures and art languages, an untitled work, spool, could symbolize any sort communication device where the medium of correspondence was wound. String connects objects, creating correspondence, or relationships. Fraser, No Title (Spool), 2018.

“My goal is to produce and offer to a potential viewer an object worthy of prolonged study and reflection; to provide an opportunity for a contemplative viewing experience… and for seeing.”

LEFT Texts literally merge; insects seem to pull back the curtain. Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015.

Fraser practices the reinvestment of historic cultural objects into new contexts that allow reinterpretations with his new associations of perspective and mood.

Books are often a source for reinterpretation.

New readings of the cultural artifacts are given sanction by the object’s placement into a new context and by Fraser’s dedication to aestheticism as the motivating discourse governing his practice. Whatever the practice, when making a work of art, any artist will use the aesthetics of form, style, and materials to shape what will become a sign standing for something.

Aestheticism is simply the practice of art-making that assigns no a priori content.

Aestheticism is its own ethical justification. The Aesthetic Movement of the 1880s was many things, but it was also a reaction to the market’s relentless cooption of people and things. That reaction is only a tiny portion of its justification.

Fraser’s aestheticism as a mode privileging material form itself foregrounds the value of aesthetic inspiration.

The material (physical) objects of collage are given new life functioning with double readings, the literal and the symbolic. Original contexts influence the reading, while the objects in their new contexts ignite new associations.

Collage has been aligned with allegory and this parallel has significant features with regard to Fraser’s practice.

It is the use of allegory as aesthetic apparatus that puts a “reader in an analytic frame of mind.” (qtd. in Eagleton, n44, 24).

Allegory makes strong use of the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete. The historical ruin is allegory’s best expression. Ruins stand symbolically for history. Allegory reclaims the past through historical objects and elevating an inevitable comparison of past values with today’s.

Walter Benjamin considered the historical ruin the quintessential sign of the allegory. “This is the

form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious.” (Owens 206). Fraser’s recurring use of dismembered books has become his hallmark of an allegorical ruin sign.

As Benjamin has noted, allegorical signs have doubled meanings, but their material aspect signifies as well. He pointed to the overlooked fact, in 1925, that the sign in an allegory “is in itself an object worthy of knowledge.” (qtd. in Eagleton 4).

The materiality of signs is at the heart of Fraser’s aestheticism and Botnick’s bookmaking.

Baudelaire described modern life as the dialectic of “the contingent and the eternal.” (Owens 211).

A major consideration for a Fraser collage is their capacity to represent allegorically Baudelaire’s characterization of our paradoxically and simultaneously whole and fragmented existence.

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THE ART OF BOOKMAKING

For Ken Botnick, the art and craft of graphic design is central to his practice of the artist book.

Equivalent in task and magnitude is the related editorial process of selecting the right symbiotic author for publication.

The 16th-century historian Vasari wrote: “Design is the animating principles of all creative processes.” 20th-century graphic designer Paul Rand described the process as: “one who creates ideas that are expressed in words and pictures and solves problems of visual communication.” For Rand, the graphic design tool box wielded “significant form, meaningful ideas, metaphor, wit, humor, and exercises in visual perception.” A Rand reference: “…where we perceive no patterns of relationships, no design, we discover no meaning” (Rand xi-xiii) (My emphasis).

Washington University Professor of Art Botnick refers to himself as a designer. Botnick defines his work by analogy: “artist books are to the world of books as poetry is to the world of language.”

Botnick as partner of Red Ozier, a two-man literary press, created artist books from 1976 to 1987 (See artist bio for more).

Botnick prioritized craft and handwork: “Craft is one of the defining human characteristics.” “The book has been a kind of path toward that humanity” (My emphasis). “Bookmaking is the nexus point between the hands-on practice of the craft, the hands-on design work, and the interpretation of the text.”

One Botnick masterwork may be the Diderot Project. Four years in the making, the limited edition artist book reinterprets for the 21stcentury the defining document of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts.

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Key themes of Botnick’s Diderot Project are: the essentialness of craft itself, the role of the hand as sensory instrument, the significance of cultural objects, our relationships to tools, the dynamics of visual perceptions, and the ability to shift one’s perspective.

To begin a bookmaking project, Botnick seeks to establish a kind of graphic or aesthetic symmetry between the author’s written content and his visual interpretation of it. If the first correspondence succeeds, a second emerges between the book’s totality and the reader.

Within the expansive genre of the artist book, Botnick interprets an author’s written word as visual metaphor. Botnick has at hand a number of devices or codes to achieve such transcoding.

Typography, illustrations, and the graphic design of page layout are perhaps the main codes. The method of printing plays a key role, with letterpress the standard of quality and expression.

Blank space on a page can be used strategically, dramatically, or metaphorically. Color (inks), the fibers used in the making of the paper, and page sequencing are also orchestrated and directed towards the reader to heighten engagement and challenge expectations. The point above all is the designer communicating the author’s written word through the visual and material use of metaphor.

CODA: COMPARATIVE READING

Collage and the artist book are linked by differing harmonies that emanate from an aestheticism of the collage and the representational pragmatism of the artist book which must convey an author’s written text. Collage functions through a synchronic stance backed primarily by metonymy.

The artist book functions with a temporal or diachronic stance backed primarily by metaphor.

There is almost no contest in comparing a book to a work of art. The penultimate abstraction of

humankind, the book is the methodology that brought civil society into view. The book opened doors where there were none.

But the reading value of any spatially-foregrounded work of art including collage offers itself as synchronic model with which to read the dynamic temporality of the diachronic book.

Collage has a spatial distinction as all its semiotic relations are visible in one field. A book displays its semiotic signs one or two pages at a time, with the added dimension of page sequencing and page turning in order to see and study the whole.

The value of the book may be its slowed unfolding of patterns which encourage rereading.

Collage compels readings of intertextuality, the notion that all texts are composed consciously or unconsciously by previous texts. This reference to using other texts also goes by the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Books and collages are by their very materiality nothing but intertextual.

The intertextuality of the Diderot Project comprises 71 bibliographic entries across centuries spanning the genres of science, art (literature) and craft.

Collectively, the texts are poetic, pedagogic, and enlightening. The printed texts on the page skillfully reconnects one’s attention to the images and page layouts. As images must be read through words—a step that may be called the first allegorical move—the written word moves analysis towards associations.

Both collage and printed books resist digital cooptation. The digital washes away the original and signifying materialities. Both collage and the artist book require a pace of reading that slows the now-normal hectic pace and in doing so retunes the senses. Reading becomes sensual again.

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PREVIOUS The last page of text in the Diderot Project. The first a Diderot quote, the last, from Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Diderot established, above all, the gravity of grammatical relationships. He mused that if common correspondence could be established, all living beings would be in contact. Merleau-Ponty considered how we merge ourselves into the object, the quintessential Other.

Botnick, Diderot Project, 2015.

Fraser’s collages suggest “the allegory of reading” and “the allegory of the possible.” As his content or symbolism is by intention left open-ended, viewers can practice the art of linking credible associations to the historical objects while observing “anything goes” is not an option.

The delights of collage are in its unexpected play of separated parts, fragments, ruins compared, put next to, other abstractions that create a momentary totality, a unification all over again.

An “allegory of the possible” might reach for transcendental orders—time, fate, freedom— to compare.

There is a comparable play of codes and text in almost any novel, but especially noticeable in the artist book which emphasizes the reading of the various codes of bookmaking that materially and metaphorically interpret the written word.

Collage specifically and the book more generally may be said to represent the two poles of language, metonymy and metaphor. Metonymy works by a literal materiality representing the object while metaphor functions by analogy comparing and symbolically linking dissimilar objects. Both collage and artist book use either trope at will.

Reading works of art and books involves a careful inspection of how the literal, the symbolic, and their aesthetics operate.

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Associations must find their correspondence or symmetry through the object’s features and original context weighed against the new context.

Artist books are complicated by essentially having two “authors”; designer and text author. Here, the “allegory of the authorial dialectic” may suffice.

One for the artist book might be “the allegory of the codes of bookmaking as art.” One possible example for books in general, “the allegory of structure as sequence.” Others may be: “the allegory of the book as humanitarian symbol for equality and justice.”

An allegory comparing both oeuvres might be “the allegory of spatial projection (collage) and temporal projection (artist book).” Or “the allegory of the holy trinity: the literal sign, the symbolic sign, and the aesthetic sign.”

The art object or the artist book is but a momentary reduction necessary to open understanding.

What insights for social discourse today might our artists provide?

In the Glimpse, one sees Everything.

What if we looked at their art through the lens of allegory?

The rapports of beauty do lead to considerations of justice. Diderot, Jefferson, and Scarry established the manifold relationships connecting beauty to all levels of social life. Ultimately,

Diderot declared the final determinations of what defines beauty to reside in the grammatical realms. Scarry pursued these lexical spheres establishing connections to higher ideals that often reveal themselves in our everyday actions and affairs. Jefferson established that an aesthetic system can be in a direct relationship by analogy to a specific ethical system.

Nonetheless, as we know today all too well, justice is paradoxically resisted as justice is demanded.

What our analysis of the rapports of beauty means for our two artists is found somewhere between Scarry’s well thought out lexical work and Jefferson’s grand aesthetic experiment.

Collage and artist books operate in pictorial and written language modes. Each mode works first in a material presentation which is it own kind meaning, significance, and content. Like beauty, materiality is pleasurable. Collage and artist books also operate in a symbolic mode. As we do with collage and books, we do with beauty itself; upon sensing beauty, we begin a search. Those searches are exemplified in Diderot’s and Scarry’s myriad relationships. Possible search avenues follow an appreciation of beauty for its own potential, and some avenues pursue symbolic systems of a higher order that are by analogy beautiful.

Both avenues of pursuit bear fruit. ▪

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Ulmer, Gregory. “The Object of PostCriticism.” The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. H. Foster. Seattle: Bay Press.

Watts, George B. “Thomas Jefferson, the ‘Encyclopédie’ and the ‘Encyclopédie méthodique.’” The French Review 38.3 (1965) 318-325.

EXHIBITION CURATOR WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland, “The Third Meaning.”

Image Music Text. NY: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Copeland, Rita. “Medieval Theory and Criticism.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Eds. M. Groden, M. Kreiswirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Craven, Wayne. American Art: History and Culture. NY: Abrams Publishers, 1993.

Diderot, Denis. “Beautiful.” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2006. Web. [Accessed

December 2020]. <http://hdl.handle.net/ 2027/spo.did2222.0000.609>. Trans. of "Beau," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 2. Paris, 1752.

Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin.

(London: Verso, 1981).

Hartt, Frederick. Art: A History of Painting Sculpture Architecture, 4th ed. NY: Abrams Publishers, 1993.

Rusty Freeman Director of Visual Arts Cedarhurst Center for the Arts since August 2009. I thank Ken and John for their generous support and for sharing their art with our communities.

Ken Botnick, Kavya, Epigrams from the Sanskrit, 2002, Designed, printed, and published by Botnick through his emdash literary press.

Translation of the poems from North India Spanish

by Octavio Paz; English translation by Eliot Weinberger. Photographs by Nina Subin.

Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse.”

Art After Modernism. Ed. B. Wallis. Boston: Godine Publishing, 1984.

Rand, Paul. A Designer’s Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

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EXHIBITION CHECKLISTS JOHN FRASER Select works sponsored by the Illinois Arts Council.

Refuge (2 Parts), 2020, Acrylic, Graphite Wash, Paper Collage, on Wood Panel Construction, and on Carved Wood Relief Construction, 40x42x1.75" Blind Time, 2020, Acrylic, Graphite Wash, Paper Collage, on Wood Panel Construction, with Found Object, 42.25x12x2.75" To The Scribe, 2020, Acrylic, Graphite Wash, Paper Collage, on Wood Panel Construction, with Inlaid Found Object (& acrylic on cording), 32.5x5x1.5" Re-District, 2010 - 2019 (2 Parts), Graphite, Acrylic, and Mixed Media Collage on Wood Relief Panels, 30x41x2" Measure For Measure, 2018, Graphite, Acrylic, Graphite Wash, and Mixed Media Collage, on Wood Panel Construction, with Found Objects, 36x20x2.5" Aspiration, 2018, Graphite, Acrylic, Graphite Wash, & Mixed Media Collage on Wood Panel Construction w/ Found Objects, 36x30x2"

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Rue Cler, 2018, Graphite, Acrylic, Graphite Wash, & Mixed Media Collage on Wood Panel Construction with Found Objects, 34.25x31x2" No Title (Spool), 2018, Acrylic, Graphite Wash, and Paper Collage on Wood with Found Objects, 11.5x3.5x3.5" Both Sides of the Argument, 2013, Mixed Media Collage on Wood Panel Constructions, 30x32x2.25” A Question of Formality, 2013, Graphite, Acrylic, and Mixed Media Collage on Wood Panel Construction, 18 1/4x 18 1/4x 1 1/2" Colonnade, 2012, Graphite, Acrylic, and Mixed-Media Collage on Wood Panel Construction, 20x24x1 3/4" Measured Relief in Soft Green, 2008-2012, Acrylic, mixed media on Wood Panel Construction, Found Rule, Nails, and Fabric, 27 3/8x 27 3/8x 1 3/8" Scaled Relief (Revised), 2008-2012, Acrylic and M/M Collage on Wood Panel Construction, with Fabric, Thread, and Found Architect Scale, 27 3/8x 27 1/2x 2” Grey Composition With Orange Bar, 2007, Graphite, Acrylic, and M/M Collage

on Wood Panel Construction, with Nails, 18 3/8" x 18 3/8" x 1 1/4" Square & Positive, 2001, Graphite and Acrylic on Linen Panel, Wax on Wood Construction, 17.5x37x1” KEN BOTNICK Diderot Project, 2015, 11.25 x 7.25” Designed, written, edited, and printed by Botnick; emdash printer and publisher (owned by Botnick).

Letterpress printed in a limited edition of 70 copies. 150 pages using 6 different paper types featuring papers with watermarks designed exclusively for this edition by Dieu Donné Paper, NYC. Bound in handmade papers over boards

by Daniel Kelm with modified sewn boards structure.

A Defense of the Book,

by William H. Gass, 2001, 6 × 9”.

Letterpress printed, limited edition, typeset into photopolymer plates.

36 pages; five sections of this essay are illuminated by the printer’s specially made, initial letters.

Book covers are printed silkscreen on uncoated boards, bound by the printer/ publisher with Japanese silk cloth spine.

EXHIBITION CHECKLISTS (CONTINUED) (cont.) This is a well-known essay by Gass.

William Gass (1924-2017) is renowned worldwide as novelist, essayist, literary critic, and philosophy and humanities professor who taught at Purdue University from 1953-1969 and Washington University, St. Louis from 1969 to 1999.

Gass’ 1995 novel The Tunnel won the American Book Award.

Kamini, A Cycle of Poems from Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda, 2007, 9 3/4’ x 11 3/8” Designed and printed by Botnick and his emdash printing and publishing concern.

Translated by Sanskrit scholar Andrew Schelling.

Letterpress printed limited edition of 65 numbered copies. 42 pages, hand-set Dante type on Bugra paper, bound in boards covered with Kuzuryu printed papers.

This new edition features selections from poet Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda, the 1,000year old love songs of Krishna and his consort Radha. Printed in English and Sanskrit, the book used 20 different blues to evoke the various manifestations of the god Krishna. Most images are printed from polymer plates, but the endsheets

are printed in multiple shades of blue monoprint.

Mary Jo Bang, the illusion of physicality, 2017, 12 7/8x 6 1/8”.

Kavya, Epigrams from the Sanskrit, 2002, 8.5 × 8.5”, Designed, printed, and published by Botnick through his emdash design studios.

This was their third collaboration and the last book published by Botnick’s emdash print studio/press.

Translation of the poems from North India Spanish by Octavio Paz; English translation

by Eliot Weinberger. Photographs by Nina Subin.

Professor Bang teaches English at Washington University St. Louis.

Mary Jo Bang is a nationally recognized author of seven books of poems.

Letterpress and Inkjet printing; limited edition of 45 copies; 39 pages.

This translation from Sanskrit into Spanish

by Paz; translated into English here by Weinberger. Each spread features Sanskrit, Spanish, and English.

The Road at Night: Andhra, 2009, 2010, 8.5 x 9.25” Designed and printed by Botnick. Limited edition of 25 numbered copies.

Ken Botnick, The Road at Night: Andhra, 2009, 2010

34 pages, digital printing on very thick Moab Entrada paper, a weight of 190 grams.

Signatures bound as a “modified” accordion with dry adhesive.

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ARTIST BIOS JOHN FRASER John Fraser is a multi-media artist whose work has been shown worldwide since his first one-person exhibition in 1980.

His practice embraces collage, assemblage, drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. Fraser has taught art in universities across the US, and in his home state of Illinois. His work is held in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, and in private collections in Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Iceland, and Scotland.

Fraser has described his approach to collage, and as it relates to this exhibition, with certain themes in mind. Fraser holistically considers “the architecture of the book,” and the components — the spine, crash, covers, paper stock, etc. The play of geometry is important, or as he terms it: “the gathering of planes.” The sheer delight of the play and movement of geometry is a key feature of Fraser’s art.

Portals, such as windows and doors, function metaphorically as “access.” Key Fraser terms are: Incident, Metaphor, Structure, Surface. Fraser enjoys and makes strong use of the “laconic nature of found material.” Fraser never waivers from

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his keenly attuned sense of the idea of “Source: what is seen.”

All of Fraser’s themes are conceptually critical for his practice and its guiding philosophy of aestheticism.

The highly respected Hamza Walker of The Renaissance Center wrote that Fraser’s collages used “art as a medium (in the other worldly sense) to portray the trace for what it is,,, nothing.” Nothing’s synonym is “absence.” Prime examples in The Rapport of Beauty illustrating Walker’s reference would be Square and Positive or Refuge.

The late art critic Polly Ullrich understood well what occurs within a Fraser work of art: “Fraser’s art stands as a site where the inception of being—the formation of the world at the instance that we begin to perceive it—jumps into consciousness.”

KEN BOTNICK Ken Botnick is a designer, printer, and publisher of limited edition artist books.

In St. Lous, his books were published by his press known as emdash. Botnick recently retired as Professor of Art at Washington University, St. Louis, where he was the inaugural director of the Kranzberg Book Studio.

From 1976 to 1987, Botnick published limited edition literary books at The Red Ozier press in New York City with press founder, Steve Miller. They published books featuring the writing of William Faulkner, William Burroughs, and Octavio Paz among many others. The New York Public Library purchased for its permanent collection in 1988 the Red Ozier Press archive.

Botnick subsequently designed books for Yale and Princeton University Presses.

Botnick’s books have been collected by: The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Library of Congress; The Getty Center for the Humanities; The Newberry Library, Chicago; Sterling Library at Yale University; Princeton University Rare Book Collection; the Duke Collier Collection, and Special Collections at Smith College; Brown University; Wellesley College; University of Delaware; University of Georgia; UC Santa Barbara; UC Santa Cruz; UCLA; University of Wisconsin; University of Iowa; University of Vermont; SUNY-Buffalo; Wesleyan University; University of Washington; Florida Atlantic University; and Washington University in St. Louis.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France purchased for their permanent collection the Diderot Project.