Where there’s trouble there’s poetry” sang Iggy Pop, proposing that disorder on any scale, manmade or natural, may produce an aftermath of singular, if not terrible beauty. ‘Fallen Books’ a project by Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson could be easily mistaken as an impulse purchase in the museum gift shop or better art supply store. As designed by Francesca Grassi ‘FB’ initially resembles a sample book of vibrantly colored writing paper of the kind favored by female adolescents. But looks deceive. What we hold is an archive in book form, a collection of pages, half of which appear to prophesize its own chaotic future. The organizing principle of this publication by onestar press is the correspondence between photographic documentation of the effects of earthquakes upon libraries, and the Modified Mercalli Scale, a color spectrum used as an alternative to the Richter Scale in mapping the seismic intensity of an individual quake; the ‘hotter’ the color, the greater the disturbance. All of the ‘amateur’ photographs have been culled from American libraries coping with varying degrees of damage. These are mostly reparable messes, multi-colored heaps of splayed volumes clogging the aisles with empty shelving leaning drunkenly. Nothing is irreparable, but wry amusement diminishes to sobriety the more one returns to ‘FB’. How do these unpopulated, cluttered images register the somber mood of the crime scene or the atrocity picture?
The disordered surface of cubism was exploded by WW 1; traumatized Dadaist’s played with art’s broken pieces which were integrated back into painting by the chic surrealists, whose wild juxtapositions were forecasted in the rubble of modern conflict. Wreckage, when filtered through a surrealist sensibility transforms extreme ‘trouble’ into extreme ‘poetry’. Lee Miller’s ‘Grim Glory’ (1940) photographically documented wartime Britain and the London blitz through a surreal lens. One image of a crushed typewriter is an unsubtle Orwellian metaphor for the loss of freedom and the destruction of language. In happier times, the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, and several cohorts would eject a typewriter from a vehicle speeding through the California desert, documenting the event with scientific exactitude. The resulting information took the form of Ruscha’s booklet ‘Royal Road Test’ (1967) - an ‘artist’s book’ masterpiece if there ever was one.
Dubbin and Davidson’s ‘Fallen Books’ lineage stems directly from Ruscha’s important publications. Both ‘Royal’ and ‘FB’ rigorously apply an organizational methodology to a natural, or whimsically contrived event(s), collecting data and keeping to the game plan. ‘Fallen Books’ cheerful exterior belies it content, a complex exercise in entropy, the coexistence of past and future bound (literally) into the present. The rationale behind the Modified Mercalli Scale buckles under the weight of the Smithson-like ‘heaps of language’ on each opposite page. Dubbin and Davidson recognize the melancholia attending forensic procedure (almost a national television obsession) and with the sustained maintenance of any archive. ‘…..this book is also a forecast’, they state cryptically in the introduction recalling ‘Royal Road Test’s’ own coda; ‘It was too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation; carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction’.
Tim Maul NYC 11/08
