BALTIMORE CITY PAPER (2008)
2008
Molly Springfield by Martin L. Johnson
[review of Sondheim Prize exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art]
For today's critics and graduate students, the text is never a simple thing. We have all been trained to dissect, discredit, and deconstruct everything around us, from literature to advertisements. But in all this deconstructing we sometimes forget how material the printed word once was. Those of us who still sign checks know about the pen, but even typewriters required white-out for correcting, mimeographing for copying, and other inky processes. Manuscripts were not the neatly bound and typeset books we read, nor the easy-to-reproduce computer files we put on Kindles. We have only the legendary stories--the continuous rolls of paper used by Jack Kerouac for On the Road, the handwritten mess Max Perkins assembled to make Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, the sprawling manuscript of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time--but they're far from the only examples.
Washington artist Molly Springfield takes a different tack to approaching the materiality of the written word. Growing out of a longstanding interest in paper, and notes in particular, Springfield has hand-drawn, or redrawn, the printed pages of literary works of all sorts in a series of pieces that reopen questions of the text in an age where even Xeroxing sounds dated.
The most obvious of the pieces is her series of reproductions of the first chapter of Proust's Swann's Way, the opening book where Marcel first tastes the madeleine cake. If Springfield had reproduced the original manuscript, it would have been a three-dimensional piece, with entire passages crossed out and others tacked on, as Proust, defying his editors, made a new work with each correction. While Springfield performs a similar trick by drawing on three English translations to create a compiled work, she draws the pages as they might appear in an undergraduate course pack, including the underlining of shockingly few paragraphs and the print marks of an indifferent copy job.
Springfield's painstaking attention to detail gives the pieces the shine of carelessness, but not in her other work displayed here--particularly her reproductions of work by the early photographer William Henry Fox Talbot, who published the first book to be illustrated entirely with photographs in six sections, between 1844 and '46. Springfield doesn't try to reproduce Talbot's photographs, though, instead focusing on the pedagogic warnings he used to alert the viewer or reader of what they were about to encounter. For these pieces, Springfield has enlarged text or pages from Talbot's book, like one reading only Gentle Reader, recalling the trompe l'oeils and word plays of 1960s artists such as Ed Ruscha.
And Springfield follows through on this promise of conceptual work with a series of reproductions of theoretical texts written in the '60s and '70s that helped establish the very tradition she is following. Although artists and writers such as Lucy Lippard might not be known outside of art school, Springfield's nod to these works allows her to claim a stake in the now familiar debates about nostalgia, memory, and imitation.
Materialists often get caught up in the materials themselves, usually antique products and processes, from handmade paper to natural fibers. Springfield's drawings of haphazardly copied and annotated books reminds us that almost everything becomes material; only we choose to reward the old processes, like books, and ignore new ones, like photocopies. By reversing this process, Springfield shows us that the text is often as material as we want it to be, even in an immaterial age.
(Martin L. Johnson)
[review of Sondheim Prize exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art]
For today's critics and graduate students, the text is never a simple thing. We have all been trained to dissect, discredit, and deconstruct everything around us, from literature to advertisements. But in all this deconstructing we sometimes forget how material the printed word once was. Those of us who still sign checks know about the pen, but even typewriters required white-out for correcting, mimeographing for copying, and other inky processes. Manuscripts were not the neatly bound and typeset books we read, nor the easy-to-reproduce computer files we put on Kindles. We have only the legendary stories--the continuous rolls of paper used by Jack Kerouac for On the Road, the handwritten mess Max Perkins assembled to make Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, the sprawling manuscript of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time--but they're far from the only examples.
Washington artist Molly Springfield takes a different tack to approaching the materiality of the written word. Growing out of a longstanding interest in paper, and notes in particular, Springfield has hand-drawn, or redrawn, the printed pages of literary works of all sorts in a series of pieces that reopen questions of the text in an age where even Xeroxing sounds dated.
The most obvious of the pieces is her series of reproductions of the first chapter of Proust's Swann's Way, the opening book where Marcel first tastes the madeleine cake. If Springfield had reproduced the original manuscript, it would have been a three-dimensional piece, with entire passages crossed out and others tacked on, as Proust, defying his editors, made a new work with each correction. While Springfield performs a similar trick by drawing on three English translations to create a compiled work, she draws the pages as they might appear in an undergraduate course pack, including the underlining of shockingly few paragraphs and the print marks of an indifferent copy job.
Springfield's painstaking attention to detail gives the pieces the shine of carelessness, but not in her other work displayed here--particularly her reproductions of work by the early photographer William Henry Fox Talbot, who published the first book to be illustrated entirely with photographs in six sections, between 1844 and '46. Springfield doesn't try to reproduce Talbot's photographs, though, instead focusing on the pedagogic warnings he used to alert the viewer or reader of what they were about to encounter. For these pieces, Springfield has enlarged text or pages from Talbot's book, like one reading only Gentle Reader, recalling the trompe l'oeils and word plays of 1960s artists such as Ed Ruscha.
And Springfield follows through on this promise of conceptual work with a series of reproductions of theoretical texts written in the '60s and '70s that helped establish the very tradition she is following. Although artists and writers such as Lucy Lippard might not be known outside of art school, Springfield's nod to these works allows her to claim a stake in the now familiar debates about nostalgia, memory, and imitation.
Materialists often get caught up in the materials themselves, usually antique products and processes, from handmade paper to natural fibers. Springfield's drawings of haphazardly copied and annotated books reminds us that almost everything becomes material; only we choose to reward the old processes, like books, and ignore new ones, like photocopies. By reversing this process, Springfield shows us that the text is often as material as we want it to be, even in an immaterial age.
(Martin L. Johnson)
