Oaths? Questions?
(In collaboration with James Siena)
2009

Coincident with The Napkin and Its Double was the inception of a more ambitious project for which Steve Clay said that I was to “take charge of the whole thing.” This meant that I was given permission to conceive the idea, construction and methods, for working a codex collaboratively, which I did. To this end, I invited James Siena, whose tactical headspace and mine are compatible, to work independently, yet as both responsible for image sequences and for texts. (By the way, this was Siena’s initial foray into sequenced images.)

The conception developed from the confounding of lexical and graphical strata. So the book issued as a construction interleaving transparent and opaque pages, such that text by either of the artists printed on these transparencies would read as intelligible until turned, whereupon reversed texts became unintelligible though still legible. This was eventful insofar as turning a page induced a rich crisis in lexical/graphical identity.

Another instrument for inducing eventfulness occurred in the opacity of color in images interfering with legibility: the overlaid printed texts, now partially obliterated, became concrete poetry to be performed as such, hence a reading of only what you could see. Yet another interference pattern occurred in the pixilation of lexical phrases with overlaid graphical elements of nearly the same size: graphical and lexical identities exchanging places.

Published by Granary Books