Julie Doucet, Suicide Total, L'Association, Paris, France, 2022

I was really excited to get a copy of this wonderful leporello by Doucet which consists of a 60ft long hand-drawn autobiographical narrative. I'm going to let the publisher's statement serve as the introduction to this great book:

"Julie Doucet had promised to stop writing comics and autobiography. Here she returns to her words with a fabulous immersive fresco. The year is 1989, Julie is 23 years old, she creates fanzines which she distributes to bookstores or by mail order. She then begins an intense epistolary relationship with one of her readers, a Frenchman who is doing his military service and whom she nicknames "the hussar". The two young people write hundreds of letters to each other and become enthusiastic about each other, until a trip to Europe offers them the opportunity to meet in the flesh...

Total Suicide reads and unfolds like an uninterrupted flow. No boxes, but pages saturated in an interweaving of known faces (Julie's in particular) and unknown faces, birds, animals, various objects - all drawn in ink - and which carries us away like a river to go back in time. The machine is a little rusty at the beginning and the author urges herself to draw, mentions her difficulty in handling words, before plunging - and us with her - into the flow of her memories to resurrect the intensity of the past feelings.

No more boards and boxes, Total Suicide was drawn in one piece. In order to best render this graphic performance, the book is presented in the form of a leporello which takes place over nearly 20 meters."

At the beginning of the book Doucet gives some rather interesting instructions for the reader, writing "the pages of this book having been drawn from the bottom to top, it is recommended to adapt the reading in this direction."

 

144 single-sided pages, individually 8" x 5" and when unfolded 60ft.

In the late 80s I was doing a project using a pseudonym (Janet Janet) and she published a zine called Schism. Doucet and Janet had an intense correspondence for a while in which we traded our zines and naturally I'm flattered that Janet Janet's name should surface in Doucet's reminiscenses from this period.

                                                                      back cover

Warja Lavater, Cendrillon (Cinderella), Maeght Editeur, Paris, 1976

cover

Warja Lavater (1913-2007) was a Swiss graphic designer who, with her designer husband Gottfied Honegger, ran a design studio in Zurich between 1937 to 1958, specialising in designing symbols, logos and trademarks. Lavater also worked as an illustrator for the young person's magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958. In 1958, the couple moved to New York for three years and she found work designing scientific illustrations for Dell Publishing. 

It was in the USA that Lavater discovered the accordion format during her visits to Chinatown and Lavater would adopt this medium for all her artists' books for the rest of her career. With her non-representational visual vocabulary she was able to create works that could be 'read' by people across linguistic boundaries. Lavater described her books as imageries, and her use of this particular kind of visual language as a way to:

 "...express certain attitudes and actions, not by illustrating, but by writing picture-poems or 'pictograms.' We react to visual signs more effectively than to anything else, and I felt able to write by using such signals as codes, as signs that communicate... each story has its own 'code', signs that are easy to understand and that do not require a particular verbal language." 

Lavater described herself as a Bildstellerin, or "picture writer" and the following quote by Carol Ribi from 100 Years of Swiss Design locates her work at a fascinating intersection between a variety of representational systems: "Warja Lavater's symbol notations and artists' books are situated on the boundaries of graphic design, painting, literature, and object art, and there mark a transition of genres that has yet to be thoroughly explored in picture or art theory."

Cendrillon is a beautiful example of Lavater's use of a signs and symbols to illustrate a story, in this case a version of Cinderalla written by Charles Perrault in 1697. 

Please search for other works by Lavater on this blog.

21 single-sided pages, individually 6.25" x 4" and when unfolded 7ft.