by Cory Dugan
y recollection
of biology is almost as limited as my recollection of 19th-century poetry,
but the word "symbiosis" somehow lodged itself in a corner of
my brain as I wandered through the Art Museum of the University of Memphis.
Like an annoying pop song or commercial jingle or demonic possession, I
couldn't successfully cast it out until I looked it up in the dictionary
and reassured myself that it actually applied.
There is definitely a symbiotic relationship or two or three going on in the university's current exhibitions. Art and words, art and poetry, art and design. And, most of the time, the relationships are of benefit to all parties involved. Especially the viewer.
First
of all, the two exhibits, which share the museum's space, complement one
another exquisitely. In the main gallery is work by New York artist Lesley
Dill, the showpiece of which is "A Mouthful of Words" -- an ambitious
project executed in collaboration with students and faculty photographer
David Horan. In the back galleries is "Word as Image," a collection
of graphic design works curated by faculty members Sandy Lowrance, Wendy
McDaris, and Mike Schmidt. More than anything else, the visual juggling
act between the two exhibits serves to further blur an already fuzzy line
between the fine and the applied arts.
"Word as Image" actually presents a lot of images which aren't words. But, in this collection of posters and books and magazine spreads, it is the words that stand out, overpowering instead of supplementing the visuals, becoming visual forms themselves. Designers have always understood the power of the letterform, the lines and curves and spaces involved in the (yes) symbiotic relationship between letters within a word, words within a sentence, sentences within a page. It wasn't until recent years that designers truly broke free, tearing apart the printed page and putting it back together again in forms which suggested deconstructivist architecture and post-modern art instead of traditional graphic design.
Unfortunately, by now most of this honest experimentation has been co-opted and corrupted by mainstream ad agencies, thus lending an undeserved "seen it, done it, been there" shrug-of-the-shoulders to what is actually an excellent collection of recent graphic work by designers such as Alicia Johnson and Hal Wolverton, Andrew Blauvelt, and the ubiquitous Chip Kidd. The avant-garde has an abbreviated life span in the real world, consumed and regurgitated in the length of time it takes to say "Nike." The relationship between art and design keeps this work fresh in another way: Most of the pieces are designed to advertise theatre, art, or literature instead of corporate or commercial enterprises.
The best pieces in "Word as Image" are almost indistinguishable from fine art. For example, Jack Summerford's Helvetica, in which the name of the most generic sans-serif typeface is writ large and red in a generic serif font, is a post-conceptual graphic translation of Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Or Scott Stowell's similarly conceptual design and packaging of pencils imprinted with the dictums of Jack Kerouac's Tools for Modern Prose. Which is, after all, not that dissimilar from the real art in the main gallery, wherein Lesley Dill has designed and packaged photo-illustrations for select lines from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke. The production process wasn't much different either.
"A Mouthful of Words" was in fact accomplished in much the same manner as the art director for a magazine might accomplish a fashion spread: A photographer was acquired, as were models and stylists and assistants (all from the University's art department); sketches and photo instructions were provided to the photographer; after the photo sessions were completed and prints were made, the final graphic layout was executed, complete with text. (According to the museum's literature, the project was also similar in that it barely met its deadline.)
The result of the process, the final product, is always where art rises above the mass-produced fray. "A Mouthful of Words" completely humbles its otherwise noble gallery-mates, using their own tools and their visual vocabulary, turning a collaborative effort into a singular statement and a unique vision.
There is an unusual (and unusually powerful) crosscurrent at play in this stanzaic suite of works, at its heart a weaving between the late 19th and late 20th centuries, an eerie warp and woof of fins de siecle. There is something Victorian in Dill's sensibility, something more than her affinity for the brittle verse of Emily Dickinson; there is a formality to her imagery, but it is a formality diluted with a dash of Wildean abandon. In fact, though I read Dickinson's words on the bodies of the models and around the margins of the photographs, I see Wilde in Dill's images.
The crust of charcoal, the scraping and scratching of the photographic emulsion on linen, the embroidered and dangling threads, all are at once contemporary images and simulacra of antique images. There is an undercurrent of surrealism in these images, but it is surrealism born of Odilon Redon instead of Andre Breton, filtered through Beardsley, through contemporary neo-Victorians of such different stripes as Edward Gorey and Robert Mapplethorpe, through vaudevilleans of such divergent paths from Marcel Duchamp to Rowan and Martin.
If words become graphic images in the other gallery, images become graphic poetry in Dill's work. It is the images more than the words that inspire them which linger in one's memory -- the Falling Girl in Black Dress, the Jumping Girl, the Man in Black Suit with Outstretched Arm, the Man with Word Crown. [At this writing, there were no titles posted for the individual pieces of the series; titles are drawn from the artist's notes and sketches.] The wilting-flower poesy becomes less narrative than decorative in conjunction with such striking visuals.