Fragments
of
Possibility

Brian Dettmer in conversation with Laura McGrane, John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities

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“Elemental” suggests something basic, building blocks or firmament; but it also points to a spiritual or supernatural force. What does the term mean for you and this show?

When I began to create work for this show, I started working in the studio as I usually do, focused on individual pieces and thinking about how each might eventually lead to a larger context or theme. As more work accumulated, a few tangible themes began to emerge—games, society, education and instructional forms from early education. Outside of the studio, our daughter was beginning her first years of primary education, and I had been doing a lot of research into education philosophies. I began thinking about the role books and other iconic symbols of early childhood education played in my personal history and how these tools and techniques have shifted since the end of the twentieth century. The title Elemental emerged as a reference both to early education and to the idea that images and concepts break down to their basic elements within my work. This happens in a quite literal way as I sculpt away fully formed stories and ideas from books into smaller fragments of image and text. These individual elements within the work can then be considered for their individual meanings, or they can take on different significance within a new visual context. Like molecules, the isolated images and ideas have the potential to become part of any number of new forms.

You have described your artistic approach (as writer and artist Buzz Spector notes) as dependent on “happy accident”. Can you offer an example of such serendipity and the relation between the intentional and unanticipated in your making process?

When I’m working with a book I follow a strict process I have developed, and I stay within those guidelines in order to allow the existing content to have a strong role in the final piece. After I skim through a book to make sure it has content and concepts I want to work with, I seal the edges of the book (or books) with a varnish so the whole becomes a solid form, although the pages inside are still independent layers. I don’t plan anything within the piece and I begin to carve, one layer at a time, into the surface of the pages. Like reading itself, I have no idea what will come on the next page until I arrive there. The work develops in the moment. Nothing is planned, moved or added into the book while I work. The resulting sculpture is composed of fragmented images and ideas from the book, each physically located in the same position that they always have been. This allows the material book to have a significant collaboration and voice in the final piece and also puts me in the position of improviser, always ready to adapt to encounters that emerge by design or chance within the piece. As new juxtapositions between images and words surface, language itself begins to take on new meanings. Sometimes something historically or visually fitting will emerge, sometimes a cluster of images or words will take on a personal meaning, and sometimes things just become Dada. Connections bounce off of each other at varying degrees—from strong bonds to loose bridges to random textures.

Your work has moved between collage and the sealed-page you’ve just described. Would you talk about the difference between these two practices?

When someone first encounters my work they may think of it as collage because it contains found imagery in a new composition. The work is sculptural in its form and practice, but the imagery is collaged, or rather décollaged. This term emerged in the mid-twentieth century in France to describe several European artists, most notably Mimmo Rotella, who began to work with posters and other materials with a subtractive approach. Décollage is the opposite of collage. Instead of images or objects being built up to create a work, images and objects are broken down, cut or ripped apart. Of course the process is subtractive rather than additive, but the true result of décollage is collage, much in the same way that any attempt at anti-art really becomes art.

As we think about physically sealing off books in order to delve into them, might we (or you) reflect on broader interpretive and reading practices?

There are strong philosophical connotations to the act of sealing a book shut. It becomes useless but archived at the same time. That is the irony of the archive. The more enclosed and preserved something is in its original form, the less accessible it becomes. This is true in both physical and digital forms. The simple act of varnishing the edges shut also shifts the meaning of the book. It transforms from a dynamic communicative or educational device to a preserved material form. It demands a stronger physical intervention that puts narration, structure and the relationship between time and space into question.

Do you think the aesthetic form of a book—its feel, its design lines, its heft—can teach us anything about its content, or how to approach that content?

I have learned from my own experience and insight (later confirmed with readings from philosophers like Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan) that a medium’s form influences the message. That is, anything we learn or absorb is either altered or interpreted through a medium, and that medium’s role has an impact on how we interpret and acquire that information. That is why we instantly have a different experience and absorb text differently when it is on a screen with hyperlinks, videos, and other distractions. A book is a stagnant, printed form that takes a lot of work to assemble, so it comes with a sense of validity or authority. The fact that it is created to remain unchanged for hundreds of years can give us a sense that it is finite, and that assumption certainly influences us as readers. Our interpretation of the same information shifts when it becomes online and updated, interactive or televised.

Stagnant has pretty negative connotations. Is the stasis, as you see it, innate to the book as codex?

For generations, the book has been the best technology we have had to record and share ideas, but it has also been a slave to its own form. A book is a linear form, structured as a series of pages containing strings of words that all fall in line with our basic concept of time. The arrow shoots in a single direction. It is the perfect form for a novel or chronological narrative, but the medium begins to fall apart when it takes on non-linear information or ideas that connect in endless ways. This is why we are seeing reference books and books on evolving subjects as the first to be endangered. If the information within a book speaks to a subject that requires changes in perspective and regular updates over the years, the form eventually fails (although it does takes on a new role as an archive or historical record, which is something that is often lost in digital form). An old set of encyclopedias is not only weighty and hard to navigate intuitively but it also becomes out of date very quickly. The non-linear and dynamic structure of the Internet is much more accommodating as we jump directly to a single subject and the endless connections we can make from there. We don’t have to follow the path of the single arrow or jump ahead on a single road. There are thousands of directions we can take to get to our destination.

Sounds a bit like Chaos, one of your pieces in Elemental. For a non-linear visual, there are a lot of lines in that work, and the destination still seems prescriptive. Where do you see the balance between freedom and control?

Chaos began as a consideration of the structures behind reference books, a thesaurus, to be specific, in this piece. I traced the synonym trails starting with the word “Chaos” and ending up with over 2600 words that grew from it in five phases. Each word either proliferated in possible connotation, died out because it wasn’t in the thesaurus I chose, or bounced back on a previous phase because the word had already emerged in the pattern. The structure ended up mirroring that of the Internet with hyperlinks leading to new destinations, dying out or rebounding to a previously visited spot. As with most of my work, I created a prescribed set of rules to follow in order to reveal a truth, and the restrictions I established allow for more freedom, for creative alternatives to emerge from the piece.

The materials you use cross many genres and media: encyclopedia, thesaurus, romance novel, state flag—does the genre or historical context of a given source-object shape how you approach it?

It does. I always consider the original meaning and context of a material or subject before I begin to work with it. All of the materials and forms my work takes on evolve from ideas and connotations that I find inherent in the original material. I am trying to question the symbols and tools of authority while exploring new interpretations. Even in the case of fiction, there is an assumption that the author is present in the printed and mass-produced book, but I do approach fiction and non-fiction differently. With non-fiction, specifically with reference books like encyclopedias and dictionaries, editors often attempted to erase the presence of an individual author or voice so the material could act as authority and truth, an educated consensus that should be taken as fact. I find this an interesting subject, not only because these are some of the first books to become obsolete in the digital age, but because I like the idea of being a new part of that truth. My individual voice, my own interpretation is added to that educated consensus, much in the way we see with crowdsourcing online every day. I can question the construction of these truths and expose new histories or alternate relationships and ideas. Or, at the very least, I can break them down to create that potential or that idea of fragmentary possibility for the viewer.

And is that act of breaking down important in your work with fiction too?

With fiction, I am sometimes thinking about the specific author or the specific title, about the associations people have with that work. I have two pieces constructed from paperback fiction in the show. One Word at a Time is a linear text-based piece sanded down to disguise itself as the original wooden form from which the individual books emerged. It is constructed from a single copy of every Stephen King novel available in paperback in chronological order. In the piece Emergency Exit, dozens of paperbacks take on the form of an old sanded and charred door. This piece is composed of every Danielle Steel novel available in paperback. I don’t like to tell the viewer the origin of the material right away for these two works, because the objects then become too circumscribed. The viewers can get hung up on those particular authors and their own histories with, or opinions of, them. I chose these authors as more of a tool, an iconic male and female figure known for horror (King) and romance (Steel) respectively. That is to say, the work is not about them, even though the material is from them. It is about what they represent for me in a larger context, and what these symbols of the masculine and feminine—the horrific and the romantic—can become.

Some of your viewers have intensely personal relationships to Stephen King and Danielle Steel novels. Are words like loss and nostalgia interesting concepts for you as you trace hybrid forms?

Much of what I do is about loss. It is about the loss of the physical, the stable and solid, but also about the loss of authority and the necessity of verification. It is about the loss of information as we now store our personal and cultural records in ones and zeros, formats that suffer from entropy as new updates render them obsolete. Our recorded ideas are now on life support, requiring a constant stream of electricity and upgrades. Erosion and loss feed on the world of the printed word when material text is replaced by formats that make things more accessible but also more vulnerable. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing when celebrated and revered just for the purpose of an idealistic and unrealistic memory of the past, but it is important to consider what is being lost as the tangible world of the printed word is replaced by the digital. We now have access to newer and faster forms of information, but the speed and dynamic qualities that make knowledge so accessible are also the characteristics that threaten it the most.

What do you think about the trend toward digital pedagogies and online materials, whether textual, visual or musical?

My work is focused on the subject and material of the book, and I try to expose and recognize its great position in history, its benefits but also its vulnerability and the vulnerability we now face during its decline. I have mixed feelings about the way things are now. We no longer have the objects (books, records, CDs, etc.) we once had as physical reminders of what we own, enjoy, and value. It is beyond simple fetishization. It is important to have these things for longevity as an archive, especially now that formats are constantly shifting in digital form. Form is constantly updated under the veil of convenience and progress, but more often than not these processes are driven by the need to push consumption and commercialization at an ever-increasing pace. If I buy a book or a CD, I know that I probably won’t have trouble accessing it 1, 10 or 100 years from now. But if I buy an e-book, MP3, or other infotainment in digital form, I can be sure that the formats will change over the years. If the media doesn’t get lost in a computer crash, it will slowly degenerate to the point of uselessness as I upgrade to several new computers and companies work to shift formats for profit. So, I buy audiobooks and MP3s for their ease of use, but if I really like a specific album or book I will still buy a physical edition, so I know that I will have it decades from now.

Do you imagine your audiences as you create? Do you consider us users of your art? Are you interested in how we engage your creations, our passive and active responses?

I think about the viewer when I am working, but I am also aware of the fact that once a piece leaves my studio I have no control over it, and the viewer can bring his or her own history and interests to the work. I can guide the subject matter and hope that some of my ideas about art, philosophy and media theory come through, but ultimately it is up to the viewer. I like to think that my work can be approached on several different levels and that, because I am working with a common material we all relate to, everyone can get something out of my work.

I also like the idea that I am taking a narrative or story developed by one person or group of people and breaking it down to basic textures or events without a narrative or plot. I think it becomes more of an actual experience in this way, and it allows the viewers to take in disparate elements and appreciate or meditate on them individually, or to reconstruct their own narrative from what they see in the piece.

I hope they will think about why they are responding the way they are and consider what books mean to them, why we think of them as alive, and what is happening now as they take a different role in our information ecosystem.

Do you think of reading and making as separate acts? How might we all participate more fully in acts of making cultural objects and information ecosystems?

For the most part I do think of reading and making as separate acts, but I think it becomes most interesting when we find ways to make the two merge. As an artist, I always want to find a way to create, and even when I am reading in a traditional sense, I ask myself how I can materialize what I am acquiring. This is probably why 95% of what I read is non-fiction. Of course, we bring our own visions and ideas to what we read so in a way we are making; we complete a text when we read it and make it our own. I have always been interested in the idea of consumption as creation. That is, finding a way to create something new as we consume something that already exists. DJs do this when they explore music and represent it in new ways. They are creating something new for an audience while simultaneously consuming the music they attempt to redefine. I think my process can be considered parallel to this. I am consuming and creating simultaneously, which makes me the artist and an audience, the maker and reader.