Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Bill Gaglione (aka Picasso Gaglione), 8 accordions, various media, 2022

I'm not going to say anything about these wonderfully experimental accordions from the Dada master down in Knoxville, TN. They really don't need any written explanation as they speak quite eloquently for themselves. 




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Monday, June 13, 2022

Stephen Perkins, The Accordion and The Fold, 2022

The accordion book has played an important role within the history of the book, as it served as the bridge between the scroll and the contemporary book (codex). But strictly speaking, an accordion is not really a book at all. If the following contemporary definition of a book defines it as "...a sheaf of pages fastened along one edge...,"(1) then we are obviously in a different territory with accordion books. 

The accordion has not one, but multiple spines and comes with its most signature characteristic, its ability to open up, to unfold and expand indefinitely. Additionally, it can stand alone as a three-dimensional object while still retaining its legibility. The book offers the reader a single fixed point of view, while the accordion offers the reader both literally and metaphorically, a panorama of viewpoints. 

Decoupling the accordion from its role within the larger history of the book, I want to explore other avenues through which to approach the accordion. But let's start with a definition of an accordion as: 

"a length of paper with alternating equidistant folds that create parallel uniform-sized sections or pages."

An accordion

Thus, an accordion is essentially a folded length of paper, often with front and back covers, or presented in a protective sheath.

Anne Boyer, in a review of the artist Hannah Wilke's recent retrospective,(2) addresses the centrality to her work of what Wilke called her "one-fold gestural sculptures,"(3) which were small vulva-like folded works that were made from a variety of materials. Boyer, in a particularly lucid passage responds to Wilke's folded works with an inquiry into the nature and definition of the 'fold' itself: 

"Folding is the gestural equivalent of paradox, in that it takes what had neither inside nor out and, without transforming its substance, gives it both. Before a flat plane is folded, we know it as surface — superficial, exposed. Once a flat plane has become a fold, the same material becomes an intriguing half-secret — the fold alerts us to the once clandestine affordance of surface."(4)

Boyer continues examining the broader landscape in which Wilke's folded works are located, and notes the following:

"Important too to Wilke's work is that the fold is a gesture linked to feminized labor, what was once understood as "women's work": doing laundry, diapering, preparing dough. The efficiency of the fold, done over and over, mimics the ongoingness of folding as care work, while it simultaneously creates mystery out of shallowness, dimensional form out of apparent flatness."(5)

In opening up the activity of folding through the concept of 'feminized labor' Boyer also broadens the larger terrain within which folding is located. It becomes clear that folding, as in folding newspapers, letters, dish cloths, napkins, clothes and all the other myriad things we fold, is an activity deeply embedded, but largely unnoticed, within all of our everyday lives. 

Brendan Murphy, Folding Linens, oil on wood panel, 2019

Locating the domestic sphere as an active site of folding links it to one of the key terms used to describe accordions, leporello. This name was coined after a character in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (1787), in which Don Giovanni's numerous seductions are exposed by his manservant Leporello when he produces an accordion style list that he unfolds to reveal 2,064 names. The term leporello situates the genesis of this term firmly within the domestic realm, as well as connecting the making of lists to the larger history of the fold and accordions. Leporello's choice of the accordion format for his list was a wise one, as the accordion is eminently suitable for organizing large and small amounts of information in an economical and efficient format, both for storage and retrieval. No doubt we have all made shopping lists and folded them, to make them more manageable. Interestingly the term leporello has more currency in Europe than the USA, presumably because of its German and Italian origins. 

The accordion's innate ability to expand and contract, and to fold and unfold is directly related to another popular name that has been ascribed to them, that of accordion as in the musical instrument. Analogous to the opening and closing of the pleats of the bellows of an accordion, one commentator has stated that the "...bellows can be compared to the role of breathing for a singer."(6)

The accordion's often unwieldy length presents the reader with both a physical and intellectual challenge. To hold, and then open up an accordion is to enter into a unique visual and literary relationship with a sculptural object. However, as long as the accordion is closed, it functions as a discrete book-like object and can be read page by page, like a traditional book. But once it's opened up it requires spreading one's arms in a kind of open embrace in order to take in the measure of the body of the accordion. Couple this with the expansion and contraction of its folds simulating that of a living breathing body, and you have an encounter shaped by a physical intimacy that's unique to the accordion. 

In our interactions with accordions it's as if we have to fold them into our bodies in order to ensure their safety. And, like Hannah Wilke's folded vulvic works, our encounters with accordions make us aware of how our own bodies with their sheath of endless folds, both protects and nourishes us. 


Stephen Perkins, 2022


Footnotes

1. Margalit Fox, "The Fine Print", The New York Times Book Review, review of "Index: A History of the Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age," Dennis Duncan, Norton & Company, 2022, p. 16. 

2. Anne Boyer, "Living as Art," Art in America, September/October, 2021, pgs. 38-47. Hannah Wilke was as American artist who was born in 1940, and died from cancer in 1993. The exhibition was: Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis, 2020-2021. 

3. In, Nina Renata Aron, "Hannah Wilke's 'labial' artwork challenged both the patriarchy and feminists," at: https://timeline.com/hannah-wilke-labial-art-97c5bc488a67, accessed 3.21.22. 

4. Ibid, Boyer, p. 40. 5. Ibid, Boyer, pgs. 40-41. 6. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accordion, accessed, 3.23.22.

5. Ibid, Boyer, pgs. 40-41.

6. Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accordion, accessed, 3.23.22





Friday, June 3, 2022

Bernard Villers, Le Nouveau Remorqueur & Bruno Robbe Editions, Brussels, 2016-2012

This post features seven accordion works by this Belgian artist who was born in 1939 and currently lives & works in Brussels. Trained as a painter at the L'Ecole national superieure des arts visuels de La Cambre (Le Cambre) he developed a painting practice that took the medium itself as the subject of his paintings, and he subsequently started examining the relationship between painting and its support structure, as well as color. Indeed, color would become the central feature in his painterly research, and in due course extended to his sculptural and bookmaking activities.

In 1976 he turned his attention to publishing his own works via three successive publishing houses, Le Remorqueur (The Tugboat): 1976-2003, Le Nouveaux Remorqueur: 2002-2015, and Le Dernier Remorqueur: 2016 onwards. With the exception of Leporello, published by Bruno Robbe Editions,1990, all the other works featured here were published under Villers' own imprint.

When asked about the relationship between his artists' books and his paintings he replied that they were "...a way of painting, an extension of my painting." And when he introduced a fold into his monochrome works he realized that the "...fold gives the monochrome different aspects...", and further that "You fold a sheet of paper, the idea of a book is born, that's where it starts," concluding, "So the fold is very important to me."

As can be seen in the works accompanying this post, the 'fold' is essential to his experimentation with his books and paper works, and it's evident that his previous mode of pictorial research into the support structure of paintings has now been applied to the more than 150 folded books, accordions and assorted paper works he's published.

For further information about Villers I recommend the catalogue raisonne titled Bernard Villers: Les Editions du Nouveaux, Editions Sens, Rennes, 2016, in which can be found the following works featured here. Additionally there is an illuminating documentary (25 mins) created by Lionel Dutrieux in 2016 and available on youtube at: Bernard Villers, peintre et éditeur - YouTube and his website; Research - Bernard Villers

                                  HAHOH, 2006, unlimited edition
           4 double-sided pages, individually 8.25" x 2.75" and fully opened 11"

This work is a palindrome (a word that reads the same either backwards or forward) that uses three of the eleven letters of the alphabet which have symmetrical vertical axis.





VA (Go), 2006, unlimited edition
           4 double-sided pages, individually 8.25" x 2.75" and fully opened 11"

By associating the folds of the paper with the symmetrical axes of these letters, the viewer can see through the work and view the two letters superimposed on each other reading VA and AV to which Villers has added two dots, that appear as four when viewed in this manner.  

                                            






Ose (Dare), 2010, unlimited edition
4 double-sided pages, individually 6" x 4", and when fully open 16"

A play on the well known phrase by Gertrude Stein from 1913. Three components make up this work, with a play on the French words 'ose' (dare), 'rose' (pink) and 'roser' (rose). 






Leporello, 2009, Bruno Robbe Editions, Belgium, ed. 150
16 double-sided pages, individually 4.25" x 2.5", and when opened 3ft 6"

A leporello that has a continuous line of text running the length of the back and the front of the work. The text is from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and is part of the text that his manservant Leporello (for whom this folded format is named) reads from a folded (accordion?) list of all the names of his masters conquests. 






à suivre (to be continued), 2012, unlimited edition 

6 double-sided pages, individually 5.75" x 2.5" and when fully open 1ft 3"

A completely abstract accordion that is bound in its center to its covers, so that both sides open out into the one work. The dots are 'ellipses', and are used to indicate that something has been left out, and coupled with the title of this work suggests something is to be continued also.






to be continued, 2012, unlimited edition
6 double-sided pages, individually 5.75" x 2.5" and when fully open 1ft 3"

Villers writes about his work that "...it plays on the deformation of the patterns printed on the folds of the paper. Here the leporello unfolds in six shutters. In the center of each of the five front and back folds is printed perpendicularly a black segment whose flatness is disturbed by the two flaps to form angles."







Remorqueur (Tugboat), 2012, unlimited edition
5 double-sided pages, each 5.75" x 3", fully open 1ft 3"

At the top of each page of this leporello are printed in capitals the ten letters of the name of his publishing imprint "remorqueur", with the word "remor" (remorse) on one side and "queur" (queer) on the other, additionally when seen from a slight angle the folds running down the middle of the circles create hearts.