Altered Books Made From Old Textbooks

Using a folding technique I picked up online (like a tramp during fleet week, the template screamed at me from across the dock), new books spring forth (not fall back) from the studio. Acquired a 1938 sixth grade geography book “The New World Past and Present” and after reading all about the

NuvoFluxus -- Vol 1, Issue 256

South after the Civil War which wasn’t at all civil, now was it?,

I decided to rip out the map pages and fold them into nice little NuvoFluxus Books, the first of a series of  8-

NuvoFluxus Aren't You Tired of Reading NuvoFluxus

page mini-books. Well, those looked pretty cool but rather skimpy and anorexic. For the first book, I stacked 10-12 of the mini-books, glued them together with ES6000 glue, and then bound them with a nice cover made from a stack of ACEO’s that were lying around, doing nothing, just taking their own artful time waiting to become something more than the mere cards they were. No one, so far, has jumped up and hollered “WE want SOME MORE of YOUR Art CARDS! NOW!” so I knew it was safe to include them in this art project.

NuvoFluxus -- Vol. 1, Issue 256

The 8-page mini-book fold directions are simple to follow. Fold page in half fold in half again –  then one more time, open and cut … ooops, that is difficult to explain without the pix.

Go to ThinkQuest and follow their directions. Interesting part is, any page will do, any size piece of paper. So the 6″x9″ geography book produced a really nice palm-size book. As previously stated, I used the endpaper from the book, really nice art deco look to it, and created the binding and cover. On others, I used ACEOs as covers and bound the books with fabric.

These photos were taken with the camera on my MacAir so the quality is not exactly top notch, but you can at least get an idea of the project. It’s an altered book squared, because I am creating an altered book from the textbook and I am making books from the altered book and if you look into a

NuvoFluxus -- Vol. 1, Issue 256

mirror and hold it just right in front of another mirror and hold these books in your hand between those two mirrors, the books will go on into infinity…

And still, no one would read them.

They are my first

NuvoFluxus Book Collection:
Ten Volumes of Pointless Beauty and Never-Ending Joy.

And now, you too, can face an endless evening of unbridled joy, of passion untamed, of love that has no boundaries, all because you read my blog post and know the happiness I feel when I palm this little beauties. Aren’t you happy for me? Why don’t you make a NuvoFluxus volume of your own, so you too can feel my joy…

Plastic Sleeves for Matchbooks

I stumbled into an amazing cacaphony of matchbooks about three years ago. Michael Cable’s Woodside Antiques, an auction house in Farmville North Carolina, offered box loads of stuff at the end of a large estate sale. Cable is a marvelous auctioneer who inserts bits of trivia with every round of bidding. I hesitate to admit how much of my household detritus and ephemera was purchased through his auctions. Lots of decapitated dolls and schmucky bric-a-brac which somehow became art…

Responding to the “Who’ll start at twenty? Twenty? Ten? Ten? Five? Five? Five?” and jumping in at FIVE with no competition, I won the mixed lot. We’d arrived late at the auction and didn’t go through this box of joy, so imagine my surprise when what I thought were cigar boxes were actually fruitcake boxes. Ten of them. Filled with matchbooks. And another large Mason Shoe box filled with matchboxes. International in scope and copious in number, this collection is astounding because of its diversity.

So — I searched around for a way to contain them since I needed the fruitcake boxes for an assemblage project. I bought plastic archival quality sleeves from HobbyMaster. Great products, good service, quality — and I don’t get a kickback from the link. If you check the matchbook gallery, you’ll get a pretty good idea on just what came in those fruitcake boxes.

That particular auction was the estate of a woman who saved everything, but not in a hoarder, styrofoam container kind of way. There were letters, boxes of personal correspondence and buyers really snapped to attention when bidding for those. I think one boxful went for over $85 which shows you ephemera is going for more than it used to. Marty was there from ECU’s Joyner Library – he represents the NC Collection, I think. I knew him decades ago when working on a graduate fellowship for Special Collections. His presence signaled “worth something” because his sniffing around means real history is on sale.

So, all of the sudden I’m rambling on about an auction. That’s because I’m trying to figure out what came in through the front door over the last seven years and what needs to go out the back. There’s a yard sale to benefit our local dog park and it’s next week so this gives me the incentive to sweep the halls and closets clean of some of our EXTRAS.

Back to this auction – I bid on another “lot” of items and it turned out to be a boxful of handmade lace, linens and a couple dresses from the Victorian era. Incredibly intricate, beautiful … breathtaking. There’s a photo  in here somewhere of the lace, let me find it and post it.

Art for the Little Art Show – fundraiser for BCAC

I got all happy-grab and committed to five (5) canvases for the Beaufort County Art Show fundraiser. See here for details. Joey Toler, neighbor and head o’the arts council, was inspired by similar fundraisers held by similar arts councils, knew he had a great conflagration of artistical people within hollering distance of downtown. When I delivered my contributions today, Joey gave me a glimpse of what’s been donated so far and

the art is

fabulous!

Even if you don’t live in Beaufort County, North Carolina, US of A, these $30 a piece ($100 for 4) original artworks are worth your money because the 8″x10″ canvases do more than earn $ for our hometown arts scene. They are damn nice pieces… worth over $30, if you ask me and you must be asking me because you’re reading my blog so you must want to know what I think. Eh? What was that again?

Here’s a preview of MY work for the

Little Art Show.

Oh, yea, I mean CLICK HERE FOR THE ART.

A Book About Death moves into its next phase

Welsh artist Sonja Benskin Mesher is creating an installment of the international “A Book About Death” series. The link is for the Call for Submissions page. Deadline is March 16, 2010 for .jpgs of artist’s submissions for this segment of the International Exhibition. Obviously this is an abbreviated post — much more shall be said regarded this project, Matthew Rose, Ms. Ferrara, etc……..

When I view art exhibitions of this level and magnitude, the corny creative search for synonyms begins and there’s nothing like a cliche’, is there? All the inane descriptions of how one feels when hit by brilliance come to the forefront.

The exhibition by Matthew Rose and artist Angela Ferrara created the video below.  Compelling. Watch the whole thing. The words and music description can be found here after the video CLICK HERE.

Ok, so I’m going to suck it up and send a .jpg to Sonja. Am I worthy? Maybe… but my artist gut tells me not to try, to stay in my studio and not think about death.

Death was my companion throughout 2009. First my Uncle Jimmy, the last of the Bob Clan, then my sister Ann, followed within a mere handful of weeks by my Mom who was 93 and the joy of our lives. Every where I turned last year, death’s memories clouded my view.

Now I polish my ghost with care and silent pain. The dead watch me throughout the house in venues created by memories represented in two-dimensions that turn to 3D when I turn my head quickly and catch the movement of the ever-lingering spirit of the dead.

The Society for the Preservation of Southern Vernacular & e-assemblages

I am reinstating my Society for the Preservation of Southern Vernacular. [that's not a link, okay, so don't mouse over it hoping for a surprise or for clarification of any sort]

It’s time to preserve… and reflect.

The Kindle contribution to my internal knowledge base included last Sunday’s (02/28/10) article on Race in the South. Naturally, I thought the article was about NASCAR . [That's a great joke, me, you should do more of that. Okay, I will.] Race has nothing to do with my hope to preserve the southern vernacular other than to possibly make comments about attitudes of rural v urban yard architects and the urban preference for fancy-shmancy wrought iron antiquities over plywood cut-outs of bloomer clad butts and ceramic squirrels.

After robbing the Wag-A-Bag, Francine and the Boys went to the barn dance.

By reading the NY Times Kindle edition on a daily basis, my intellect awakes and my mind pops with anticipation. Ya’ll must understand — last weekend’s article really has nothing to do with the content direction of this blog post — y’all –but it is a fascinating bunch of information and everyone should read the article if they are trying to draw a bead on what’s going on down here on God’s Little Acre… two miles from Tobacco Road… just south of Hog’s Scald Holler… east of the Great Dismal Swamp…

Now, let’s return to the real reason I brought you here today. It’s to re-publish, for the gabillionth time, my Hegelian thoughts in this era of Collectivist Rejuvenation via Ayn and her objectivist buds. One must note that the “Glenn Beck” philosophical take on Ayn Rand is so far removed from the true Rand –> one would hope I had the fortitude to defeat the right-wing interpretations of her writing and philosophical treatise but to argue with unarmed opponents heretofore would be futile. <– Study and reflect until Objectivism becomes more clear.

But to those Beck apologists out there, know this: Wikipedia notes that  “Aristotle scholar Allan Gotthel and other scholars have argued for more academic study of Objectivism, viewing Rand’s philosophy as a unique and intellectually interesting defense of classical liberalism that is worth debating.” (as in not conservative at all)

Ooops, Artist and e-Assemblagist MacEwan makes a political statement. Hope it’s abstruce-ively-ing hidden enough for no one to understand from whence I come to the philosophical debate, John Galt.

True love is found.

So, back to Southern Vernacular which I mean to include Yard Art, Interior Decorating*, and Automobile Archeology. (*not limited to mobile homes)

The following mini-article was originally published on the old Endless Chain Pig Club site, back in its day when sarcasm and derision ruled the content.

From there I posted it on the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature,

again on Mental Kudzu, and eventually — even in a column on Popmatters.

You’d think I’d get tired of it but hell… why hide genius under the Internet barrel? And damn, who knew I had so many blogs? So here, in its 2010 edited glory, I present:

The Sweet Implications of the Hegelian Dialectic and Political Discourse Amid the Concrete Structures Once Held Sacred in Confines of the Southern Yard

(a rejected thesis proposal)

A Brief Yet Adequate Discourse on Hegel’s Idea of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis When Applied to Concrete Chickens

By applying the Hegelian Dialectical form of analysis to the subliminal and conscious pathological urge to attain and prominently display concrete statuary within a public or private architecturally insignificant or ponderously important landscape motif, one can clearly comprehend the Southern love for yard art. The thesis, initially defined as any live, sentient meat-producing animal with its functional characteristics legitimized by an ability to sustain human life through which is provides nourishment essential for the survival of the human species, is as valid today as it was in 1996.

The antithesis of the fully-functional food source strata of yard animal would therefore be the lurking of swine and poultry within the “yard,” serving as mere pets or for the crass entertainment of lower levels of society. A type of cultural travesty visited upon both the rural and urban body politic, as it were. The synthesis is then obvious. And definitions become concrete.

My sister always will.

If, as Hegel explains, the combination of the two (thesis and antithesis) being resolved in a higher form of truth represents synthesis, synthesis therefore can only be proved by the existence of the popularity of cement barnyard animals. The proliferation of cement pigs, and the sister sculptures signified by chickens, roosters, ducks, and turtles, represent, and further solidify, the Southerner’s need to synthesize a wanton carnivorousness with a true appreciation for art.

***

That bit of philosophical debate came about in 1992 or 1995 or sometime in the decade 1990-2000. Philosophy just trips my trigger. Having a modicum of knowledge on certain philosophical topics creates myriad opportunities for e-assemblages.

e-assemblages definition:

One who creates assemblage art  from re-purposed objects which are acquired over a lengthy time. In general, e-assemblages camouflage the original intent of the object by utilizing faux finishes, gels and other mediums.

Many e-assemblagists employ mediums to interpret their work and suggest future projects.

Sister Bonita's hand appears just above my head on the right as she reads my aura.

I myself purchase the services of Sister Bonita on a regular basis.

She not only reads my palms; she inquires as to my muse. Also, the bumps on my head require constant interpretation and inspirational revision.

Are you still reading this? Wow. Go back to whatever you were doing before you got here. Shoo! Skat!