Clifton Meador ~ Illinois

Clifton Meador: "I make books: I make books that are intended to be seen as original works of art, not as collections of reproductions of art. This may seem like a pointless distinction, but when the author of a work has control of the final form of a work, then the piece of art is not a banal, commercial object, but something different, a real experience.

"I have been making books-as-art since I was an undergraduate in art school. I find the book form endlessly fascinating: its strengths in telling stories and disseminating knowledge seem so rich with possibility. My recent work combines photography, writing, printing, and design to explore history, narrative, and place.

"I am fascinated by the way a reader interacts with a book. A book (or at least the book I am interested in making) is portable, creates its own context, has a intimate relationship with its reader, and exists in multiple. The reader becomes immersed in the book, an act of willful self-hypnosis that is unique in art. The reader experiences this immersion in the book over time, allowing for complex, layered meanings to accrue. I am very interested in the development of an idea over time, from the accumulation of small details, hints, tiny nuances, broad gestures, and overwhelming contrasts. Every part of a book presents interesting possibilities for expression, discovery, and meaning."

Avalanche
By Clifton Meador
Chicago, Illinois: 2007. Edition of 200.

11 x 8"; 52 pages. Post binding. Cover folds over from back to front then slips into spine for closure. Each 22" leaf folded to two 11" pages bound into spine at open end.

Avalanche—artists’ book as travelogue—recounts a 2003 road-trip on the Georgian Military Highway from Tbilisi to the Russian border. Meador’s photographs and maps wrap around the pages imitating the winding road and terrain. The commentary, delivered in typographical spurts that jump and sputter like the beat-up “clapped-out Niva,” permanently stuck in low, that lugged Meador northward, detours here and there, to Azerbaijan and to the first Gulag near the White Sea, to the office of the rector who tried to exhort a bribe from Meador, in Georgia on a US government grant to teach. It ends within sight of the Russian border at a monastery, the subject of a Pushkin poem “hopelessly romanticizing the Caucasus.”

The gritty-gray photographs, which take on a faint halo of color near the journey’s end, and the information are worth the price of admission. What if offered for free is the spirit of the road — priceless.
$250

Kora
By Clifton Meador
Chicago, Illinois: Clifton Meador, 2007. Edition of 50.

22.8 x 5.9"; 34 loose pages, stacked as in a traditional Tibetan book structure. Cloth covered boards with screen print in silver of the font Meador developed from his photographs of pilgrims. Title-cloth inset printed in Meador's font.

Colophon: "There pictures were taken at the Dege Parkhang, a printing temple located in Ganze Autonomous Prefecture in western China, in August of 2006, with support from a Faculty Development Grant from Columbia College Chicago. This book is part of a larger project about the Parkhang developed by Patrick Dowdey....The figures are line drawings from the photographs, now converted into a font, so the pilgrims have literally turned into language, at least in this book."

The Dege Parkhang printing temple. survivor of weather and wars, has become the largest concentration of Tibetan literature in the world — thousands of books preserved as wooden printing blocks Printing is still carried out with these blocks every day weather permits.

Pilgrims, circumambulating the exterior of the temple, some carrying prayer wheels their mantras spinning into the ether, are performing kora — an act of devotion and honor to the books housed therein.

Meador’s book posits the possibility that the pilgrims through this act of worship become the literature, or at least the language that gives the books life.

Wrapped in a Tibetan cloth.
$750

Three Tibetan Bookstores
By Clifton Meador
Chicago, Illinois: Clifton Meador, 2007. Edition of 50.

6.125 x 8.125"; 12 pages. One fold-out page extends image 2 to 22". Letterpress, offset, and laser printing. "Partially Enumerating Tibetan Buddhism" pamphlet (3 x 5.25"; 32 pages) housed in library card envelope on inner back flap. Printed at the Center for Editions, Purchase College and at the Center for Book & Paper, Columbia College Chicago.

Meador combines five components: photographs of thee bookstores in China, a photograph of a monk purchasing a book, and a pamphlet "Enumerating Tibetan Buddhism.”

Clifton Meador: "’Enumerating Tibetan Buddhism' is a compilation of topic entries from three English-Tibetan dictionaries I bought in China. One was actually printed in India and has some very funny English. I went through these books, and extracted entries that used numbers as a mnemonic device to teach various aspects of Tibetan metaphysics. I was struck by the way numbers are so important in their Buddhism. In the Christian tradition I was raised in, three was about as large a number as we talked about frequently. They have thousands of Buddhas.…

“The font in this book is the same font in Kora. This time it encodes a story about how frustrating it was to try to buy books when I couldn't read the language at all. (If a reader were patient and willing to take the trouble, it would be possible to decode the cipher using an English frequency of occurrence table to figure out which drawings stand for which letters.) I thought there was some abstract conceptual connection in this idea (an unreadable story about not being able to read books) that might be interesting/funny. I think that at least people will get the idea that there is some kind of text on those pages that is unreadable.

“The little book in the back is supposed to give some idea about what might be in those unreadable books. The form, that of a library card, suggests that the ownership of the books (part of the function of a library card is to assert control and ownership of a book) would be full of frustration: the little book is full of mnemonic codes for abstract spiritual ideas, and offers no access to those ideas and practices. The reader is faced with knowing something that isn't particularly informative or helpful. It is part of my daily experience, being overwhelmed with tons of useless information, but information that gives me the illusion of knowledge.

“The entire piece reflects on book ownership, at least my own relationship with books. I have a degree of book lust for books that is sometimes out of control: many times I would rather have a book than an actual experience. I see some problems with that, but I still really love books.

“Even books I can't read!”
$85

Crossing the Oxus
By Clifton Meador
Atlanta: Nexus Press, 2001. Edition of 75.

7 x 11"; 24 pages. Photographs taken by Meador in Uzbekistan in 2000.

This is "a little book about the drying up of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan." The understated tone is typical. The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest body of fresh water on the planet. No longer.

This cautionary tale, told in photographs and Meador's sensitive but incensed text, recounts the plight of the Oxus River, which "in classical times … was the boundary of the known world." Soviet mega-planners determined that Uzbekistan would be the cotton producer of their empire and that the Oxus River (now called the Amu Darya) would be diverted for vast irrigation projects. When Meador crossed the river in the year 2000, it a "vanished river" — victim of "one of the largest and most horrifying ecological disasters in the world."
$60

bad
By Clifton Meador
Chicago, Illinois: Clifton Meador, 2006. 20 copies.

7.25 x 9.5"'; 18 pages. Paper wraps. Printed at the Center for Book & Paper, Columbia College, Chicago.

Reflections on — actually a riff — not only bad printing, but also printing as representation and the page as window to reality.

Johanna Drucker, Artists' Books Online: "This funny book comments by demonstration on the ways image and text production ignores the reality and material facts of the page, book, ink on paper, and other specific properties of works in favor of reading for meaning through the page as window."

Clifton Meador: Bad is "a response to William Blake's There is No Natural Religion, to which I reply that 'There Is No Natural Reproduction.' It demonstrates nearly every single mistake that can happen in offset printing and the large text inside says: Bad Artifacts Seem Like Errors, Rather Than As Evidence Of Something Real….It is quite badly printed and I am rather pleased with myself for it."
$45

Long Slow March
By Clifton Meador
Purchase, New York: Center for Editions, Purchase College, 1996.

5.5 x 8.5"; 235 pages (unpaginated). Perfect bound hardcover in illustrated dust jacket. Photomontage. Offset printing. Type designed by the author.

Johanna Drucker, in JAB 12: "History plays an important part in Meador's new works ... Long Slow March documents the history of African-American struggles for civil rights in the United States, taking the concept of narrative into the social domain where it creates both real and imagined histories of lived events. Meador uses photographs he made of the route of the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King in 1965 and other documentary material. He collages and splices his version of this history into a single book, but one that refuses to coalesce around a simple line. His identity as a Southern white man, raised in the era of the civil rights movement, is the point of departure for the work. There are no easy ways to tell historical tales, no singular perspectives from which to objectify the interwoven subjectivities that form our past."

Clifton Meador, JAB 12: "Long Slow March weaves together multiple narratives focused on a theme: the African-Americans' struggle for civil rights. The Selma march (itself a narrative structure) forms the backbone of the book; the limbs of the book (primary source texts and photomontage of slavery and the civil rights struggle) hang on either side of it. The first section is a typographic lift of an old form, the polyglot bible. Polyglot bibles presented an original text in its original language, with commentary in translated languages surrounding it. This form seemed suitable for combing slave narratives with slave owners' rationalizations for slavery, since this typographic form preserves the autonomy of the texts while suggesting that the reader consider the texts together.

"Having presented the history of the struggle (in warped abbreviated form) as a prelude to the central issue, the heart of the book is literally the road from Selma to Montgomery, photographed every mile or so. Title pages from slave narratives begin to hang in the air, floating overhead, witnesses to the march. Eventually, as the march (road) nears Montgomery, mainstream newspapers start publishing attacks on the march, on the participants in the march, and on the idea of civil rights. It was a shameful rearguard action on the part of people who should have known better; the evidence hangs in the air over the road. Using a shift in color to indicate a shift in narrative, images from the actual march in 1965, end the section of the book that addresses the march itself. Pictographic Klan warnings are knocked out of the documentary photographs, emblems of the persistent repression that impeded the struggle for civil rights. The last section of the book is a conflagration of all the forces and interests that collided over the civil rights struggle.

"History itself is a confusing narrative, continually rewritten from the viewpoint of the reader."
$100