From where I haunt, I cannot see the catalogue Work Ethic (edited by Helen Molesworth), but if I could I would open it to page 229 – the exhibition checklist – and read the entry for George Maciunas. Here is what I would have seen (courtesy Google Books – please excuse the poor resolution):
I didn’t visit the exhibition Work Ethic at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I was only a fledgling library back in the fall of 2003, still living in the UK and libraries don’t often have the opportunity to visit museums anyway! But if I had, I would have headed straight to the wall where Macuinas’ four altered Ping-Pong rackets were hanging. Here is what I would have seen via a slide-who to accompany the review of the exhibition (‘Rebels without a Canvas’) in the Baltimore Sun (courtesy Google Image – please excuse the poor resolution)
I didn’t stand before these works back in 2003. But if I wanted a closer look at one of the altered racquets, say Hole in Center Racket, I could perhaps one day find it displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, where it is currently in storage. Here is what I would have seen (courtesy the MoMA website – please excuse the poor resolution).
From here, there are many paths I already haven’t taken and many I could still take, with the help of my librarian who is typing these words, downloading images and creating screengrabs from online sources. But I will stop here – on yet another cliffhanger – as I am building up to the big reveal of this week’s posts.
Today all I wanted to describe what it feels like to fall down a hole, like Alice, where:
she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.
Yet unlike a rabbit-hole, depicted above in by W.H. Walker in the 1907 edition of The Bodley Head, this book-hole I’ve fallen into leads quickly to paths not taken and paths taken in a virtual format that then lead elsewhere, beyond the book. All this is to say, and I will get closer to the point of this week’s posts later, that with all of this build-up, all the ways that books are holes for us to fall into, they can also send us off in directions that bear little resemblance to the experience they claim to depict or narrate. This, I would argue, is especially the case for exhibition catalogues. In short, what happens when a fall down a book-hole doesn’t lead to an adventure, but to a dead end, a wall, a closed circuit, from where there is no white rabbit to lead us, let alone a story to tell of our adventure?
To use an analogy of sorts, what happens when you screengrab an image and try to change it – say, using the fill-function in Paint – and all you get is a stubborn stubble of smudges rather than a fresh block of color?
