I love Erica Baum's work. I am gaga about Erica Baum's work. What is it? Can anyone say in general what she does, what she does? Anna, quickly, what does she do? She is interested in kind of the experience of reading. Okay, that's a generalization about what she's interested in. What does she do? She makes poems out of photos. She's a photographer who thinks of herself as a poet, often. She thinks of herself as involved with poetry and poetics. So, yes, Anna, the result is, she makes us shift our attention. She finds, a little bit the way Kenneth Goldsmith does, she finds language in the world. Language is ambient in her world. And so we're looking at two projects, one a 1997 a project called "Card Catalogue," in which she photographs — she makes poems out of visual language she finds in old library card catalogues, and Dog Ear of 2010, in which she does what? Max? She photographs, well she makes dog ears in the books that she owns and photographs them. She turns down a page and then photographs the resulting parentheses of two kinds of text. So let's look at "Card Catalogues" first. All right, so, somebody tell me about the old card catalogue. There aren't any left anymore, really, Molly, but what are they or what were they? It was a way to find books on different topics in a library. It was an alphabetized list of authors or subjects which corresponded to a number on the book and you'd go find it in the stacks. Authors are interesting, but she doesn't seem to photograph the author. What are these little tabs in the drawers? They're subject headings. It's like, today, if you're like looking for a — you look for like a keyword. That's what you delve on. They're like a key, a subject. Yeah. Subject, keyword. Keyword, subject. Okay. And now, today, you don't have this anymore, this technology done. If you're using the online catalogue, you're not going to get these kinds of random juxtapositions. Why? Molly? Because we don't have this physical system anymore. It's all on a computer. Why don't you get these kind of random juxtapositions? When we search for books now, we go right to them. We go right to the categories. If you're looking for a subject, you will only see subjects germane to the search that you've started. Card catalogues are a little like browsing the shelves. You wind up finding books you never thought you would find. And the Dewey Decimal System, which is not how Card Catalogues was organized, is a cognate to the system of the random, arbitrary relationship between subjects based on alphabetical order. But subjects are not organized alphabetically. Okay. But before we get into a couple of these specific photographs, why do the tabs happen? Do you know enough about librarianship to know, Dave? Librarians do them. Each card in the card catalogue represents a different book. As the number of cards for each subject grow, then they make the decision to make that a subject heading. So that if, for instance, we'll take a look at one of these photographs, if, for instance "fasts and feasts" seems to be an emerging important category in research, this is not something that was decided nationally. This is not a culture-wide decision that "fasts and feasts," this is a library specific decision. So, I mean, there are some that are national trends, but "fate and fatalism" and "fasts and feasts" and "fat," these are categories that are not just somewhat arbitrary, hilariously arbitrary. Some of them are written in hand in the 19th century with what we would call fountain pens now. Some on that wonderful library handwriting that doesn't exist anymore. Some are written in a typewritten, in portable, non-electric typewriters. Some are written in the fancy 60's, 70's typewriters, the IBM Selectrics. And some are what you might say are printed. So you get this archaeology of knowledge and categorization, all of it random and hilarious. So, let's look at one photograph that starts "fate and fatalism," okay? So, would you like to read the poem that's in this photograph, Max? "Fate and fatalism. Fasts and feasts, fasts and feasts." Okay, so what's happened there? What actually did Erica Baum do to make this photograph a poem? She photographed — she pulled out the drawer, she photographed the tabs going back. Going back from front to back, so she foreshortened the image? Sure, she flattened it in such a way and then presented it to us like this, so we read it, actually, in reverse alphabetical order. So, if we were looking in the card catalogue in this drawer, we would start with "fasts and feasts" because that's alphabetically first, right? Sure. Unless there's been an accident of misalphabetizing, but I don't think we have that. Okay. So, the way we read a poem is reverse of that, okay, and so what do we get here? Does it mean anything? Amaris, what do we get? Well, we get a found poem of sorts, which is interesting for two reasons. Obviously, the connection between "fat" and then "fast and feasts." And also the repetition of fasts and feasts, to me, is a cultural commentary. No doubt, she put this in her finished work of all the photographs she took because of the obvious juxtaposition between the category "fat," which is a really thin... No, "fat" is a huge category before "fate and fatalism." I think this is what happens to you. This is what happens to you, right? Okay. First, there are "fasts and feasts, " mostly "feasts," and that's a very thin category, then "fat" is a huge category, and then "fate and fatalism" at the end. It's marvelous. But she didn't write that, she found it, and that's really a kind of instantiation of the thinking that many of our poets have been interested in for decades. Now, let's go to an unusual photograph that's presented vertically in the book, called "Explorers." Somebody literally visually describe that one. Allie, would you describe it? It's upstage, I guess, in the photograph. Yeah. And it's — Not typewritten. Yeah, it's handwritten. And it's slightly obscured. It's kind of in the depths, so you kind of have to excavate, do some exploring yourself, to kind of get to it or to see it. So that's really what this poem, photograph poem, is about. It's about exploration. And I, as a library hound, and not really an explorer, I don't own a pith helmet, but I do own of my virtual research geek pith helmet, as it were. A little cap, I guess a little tweedy cap. And I go in there, and I explore, and this is how I became an explorer professor. I do research. And I come upon this tab, and what's unusual about this tab, other than that it's handwritten? It looks like it's been there for a while. Looks old, it looks like it's partially folded over. It's really been there, it's been through it. It's been explored an awful lot. It's probably toward the back EX I feel that it's toward the back of the drawer, there have been a lot of explorations. And when you get there, you think you're the first one there but it turns out that everybody's been there. Okay, that's a cool one. Let's go to another one, one of my favorites, called 'Once'. "Once..." there's an ellipsis. And then, "Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 1929 —" What's the "1929 —"? Date of birth. Date of birth. And there is definitely a date of death, but we don't see it. Depending on when these cards were made, probably some of them do have the date of death and some don't. Why 'Once...'? Once upon a time? Yeah, it's a really weird librarian decision. What could possibly be in those cards following 'once'? Anybody guess? It's hilarious. I love arbitrariness in the what? Categorization of knowledge. "Once." I mean, we can't possibly figure out what's there. I suppose we could go to a card catalogue that exists somewhere and look. And what is the relation between 'once... ' and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? Molly, you've been thinking about Jackie O a little bit. Yeah. I mean, the juxtaposition kind of tells us that there's a story of Jackie Kennedy Onassis who... It's a storybook story. Once upon a time, this woman lived. Yeah. Yes. It's the French-tutored, Bouvier beauty, who marries the future president and joins a very beautiful established family full of beautiful people. It's a 'once upon a time' story. Then she becomes the first lady and then tragedy strikes. The president is killed and she's a widow forever. 'Once upon a time,' I mean that's pretty straight — and three or four or even five vestiges of Jackie Onassis. One more, and then we'll switch to Dog Ear 2010. Behind us on the wall, on the mantel here, we have a photograph that Erika Baum gave to me, that's why I love this one so much. It's my own copy. It's a photograph. This is to give you a sense of how they look when they're, she does installations in exhibitions. She also prints books. But this is where you encounter her work. And that's the front of the drawer. Anybody want to say anything about the front of the drawer there? Emily? It has that number, 258. It's a place in a huge system of such, like, arbitrary derelictions It's "J," and we're only up to 258, we're already up to 258. This is a big Card Catalogue. I think this is at NYU, New York University. Okay, what do we see, what else do we see there? It tells you that this drawer has categories alphabetically from Jersey City to Jesus. Yup. Just hilarious and awesome. Yes, so that's Jersey City, Jesus is — Jersey City is the first tab, the first topic, and Jesus is the last one. Anybody want to say anything as to why she chose this one? Amorice? I think it, like Anna said, it's hilarious to think of this compendium of knowledge that we can go from Jersey City all the way to Jesus. It's like A to Z. It's like A to Z, alpha to omega. Oh, my that's exactly what it is. Yeah, I mean, there are people who will be studying this who don't know about Jersey City, and I don't want to offend anybody in Jersey City, but what can we say about it? Crummy. It's kind of basic, you know, urban, gritty. It's on the other side of the Holland tunnel. You know, it's the other side of the Holland Tunnel. I mean, it's quite a shi-shi place in lot of ways. And maybe Erica Baum thought about moving to Jersey City, but the point is that we go, it's all of knowledge in this one drawer. Okay, let's look at "Dog-Ear." Dog-ear is — what's a dog ear, Max? Do you still read books? Yeah. Of course. Yeah? I'm so glad. I have not yet picked up a Kindle. And I still dog ear my books. And despite the fact that Joan Retallack throws out books, all of us throw out books, but we feel bad about it. She felt guilty about it, which is why she wrote that poem, "To Record The Archive" what she threw out. What do you do when you dog ear? I want to open it up. Max, start, and then everybody else say what you think of dog-ear signifies. It's when I don't have a bookmark handy or if there's a page that I want to flag it away and come back to later. I just dog ear the page. I take the corner down, and it's easy to when you flip through it to find it that way. Okay. Good. Anybody else? What is it? To my father, it's a desecrating secret. Your father doesn't like that. Yeah. He also doesn't like you marking them with a pen. It's a form of marking. It's a stopping point, it's a point where you mark a favorite passage, especially if you don't have a pen handy. It's a place to remember. It's like marginalia and underlining. I mean, everyone kind of has their own way of doing it too. Like, I tend to go, like no matter, whether I'm on the left page or right page I always mark the right, on the top, just a little bit. My sister goes, like, from the bottom, like, folds half the page. That's odd. I've never seen that. I haven't, either. A dog ear is legible as a form of readerly engagement. And also, because it's somewhat permanent in the creasing, it kind of tells us where we've been. Okay. Kenneth Goldsmith wrote the preface to the book; "Dog-Ear, 2010." He says, "For Baum the act of reading is up for grabs. What's the best path?" All right, and another blogger poet, Sina Carreiras, I apologize for mispronouncing her name, writes, "The visual structure of the poems make explicit the poetic convention of the term. What was once an implicit gesture of expression in the traditional turn in a poem here becomes physically manifest." What's a turn in a poem? Dave? It's the point at which it changes directions or it's theme or some type of subject. Often with a "but" or a "and then," right? So, the turn in analogies, the turn from sadness to happiness. Why do we say, why does Sina say that this makes explicit a poetic turn? There's explicitly a turn in the language. And a turn in the page. That's right. That's right. Books that we like are called page-turners because they turn. What's happening here is that the page is being turned down very carefully by Erica Bauman, and then she photographs it. So let's stop talking generally about it and look at maybe two, possibly three, if there's time. Okay. The first one is called "Corpse." It actually has a title called "Corpse." All right. And I'm going to read it one way and then another, and I would like you to do a close reading. So, you know, I might ask you, when you read this, do you try to piece together the story on the pages as they were originally arranged? Do you try to? Because there is a relationship between one text and another. First of all, where is it located in the book? Can we figure this out? Page 242 is what kind of page? Where is it? Could be the middle, towards the end, I mean, on the length. Oh yes it's a long way, probably well along the way. Max? The left-hand side it's verso. It's what we call a 'verso'. Okay. The left-hand side, top left, and the fold-down would be a recto. Yeah. Right? The recto, the right-hand side, 242 and 243, and so we get a view of a piece of language from one page and a piece of language from the other. And so, these are all collage texts created from within one book. I'll read it, and I'd like you to do close reading. "To the corpse, I had worn away, the lips. In a stirred and a bright arousing struggled hopeless had move," or "had move grip." Okay. What do you get from this? I mean this really was semantically standard language in this book. Emily, got anything going here? What's the scene? It's a corpse that is sort of being described sensually, evocatively, in a way that sort of revives, reanimates it. And there's something sort of Dickinsonian in almost with that dash. Big dash. Yeah. Reminding, the poem she has with the lightning that sort of flashing, scintillating stuff at the end. Okay. Is there a tone here? There's definitely a tone to the story, whatever was being told in this book about the corpse, but do we have a tone here? Molly, what's the tone? Is it happy? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I find it a little bit, like Emily said, sensual. Oh my goodness. Well, sensual in a ghoulish kind of way, right? Well, yeah. "Had worn away the lips.". Right. Ooh, this to me is like a kind of horror flick, sort of. It's like Ruth Renelle. It's like an alluring murder mystery. This happens in most of them just the way, you know, the way that the kind of geometry of it is constructed. But especially in this one, just considering the content. The fact that it just shrinks as it gets as it goes on and everything. You know, the language, you get to "struggled," "hopeless," and the language kind of enacts that. It starts struggling to express itself. And especially with that last word, "grope, " or whatever it is. Yeah, it sort of reduces itself to be more articulate. And then, you know, one of the kind of options that could possibly be for one of those words is "help, " and it's just, I think that is a really moving aspect. Fantastic. So, the difference between what Cage does to Ginsberg's "Howl" and this they're cousins in a way, right? Because what we get in Cage is a viscera, a remnant. A reduction of "Howl." Here we don't get so much of a reduction as a parentheses of texts that are one page apart. Who's to say that we can't read it down 242 and then down 243? And we can. "To the corpse, the lips, in the bright struggled had worn away stirred and arousing hopeless move." That's actually nicer, isn't it? Yeah. All right, let's look at another one. Two more. Let's see if we can do two more. So, this is the one that starts "I don't see why." And it's actually got a marginal bracket, like a pen was brought to it to create a kind of a bracket. So, this was actually on the verso, actually a marked passage. All right, I'll read it both ways and you tell me what it means, if it means anything. "I don't see why I am emptying them rather than hamper the contours from each fact. Can each fact with fact embrace time or thrill anew her... " and I think that last word might be read as "God." It's kind of a deformed "G" and a "D" or no, nothing at all. I'm going to read it the other way, too. "I don't see why, rather than hamper each fact and each fact with fact time all thrill and emptying them the contours from embraced anew her God." Okay, what's going on here? Dave? Anything? Can you do anything with it? It's fine, because this makes me really pay attention to the words that are cut off and how I choose to fill them in. In my mind I automatically come up with conjunctions or other words that make sense of it. Just like you pointed out, the word at the end could be "God" or it could be something else. Right. It just really makes me conscious of how this is something that I'm creating in my head. How many of you others read these and try to fill in what might have been conventionally seen? But because it's a photograph of a book you don't know what the book is. You could probably Google BookIt, do a search of Google Books and probably reconstruct this thing. But, generally speaking, she has given you the poem and you have to work backwards to try to remember the conventional sense. Usually we do it the other way around. Let's look at one more, and then I'm going to ask you to make a couple of generalizations about Erika Baum's art. This is my favorite. There's a lot of words here. Here we go. "My boy spends time in plying himself. He is not... " Uh-oh, I think we might be back to masturbation. Is that possible? "My boy spends his time in plying himself. He is not outskirts of activities, he is good enough and he is pulling a fast..." Whoa! "Are the best enjoy to observe that hymns now, they are while though a records in his a draining of triumphs and indecision. Throw ball be differ is back, what always that he miss." I love that. But what was, does anybody love it? Emily, what's going on? Tell us about this boy. My boy. Some weird, maybe sort of sexualized, adolescent moment. And, I guess I just — it's the sort of description of this child in the way that you find a lot of people analyzing stuff, deconstructing their kids and what is and isn't wrong with them. And by sort of creating this artwork, it falls apart. And I love it that you're assuming that the speaker is an adult as a parent. What if the what if this is a boyfriend? Probably not. He wouldn't say "My boy." Max, do you like this, and, if so, why? Yeah, I do. I think this is just such a great juxtaposition. As Emily was saying, it seems like it creates this voice, this speaker who's defending probably a child, I assume the same thing, defending this child who was maybe suspected of doing something lewd, plying himself, or he's been on the outskirts of certain activities. And he's saying, or the speaker says, "Well, he's not on the outskirts of those activities, he's good enough, and all of it," you know. It's so familiar. It's so everything. It is. It works so well. Let's talk about, quickly about Erica Baum's art in general. You're likely to encounter her work in a Chelsea gallery or a Soho gallery, but it's poetic. She thinks of herself as a poet, photographer poet. So, this suggests that the conceptualists are really mixing genres. They're not interested in separating the media. What else do you get from this? Amorice? Well, I mean, I think there are many modes of reading and of seeing and of creating, right? So, the word "genre" even seems obsolete in the context of conceptual art. The other thing that's so cool about this, and maybe Christian brought together, is that both of them are looking back toward older modes and they're using cool new ideas, experimental concepts, in order to find in her case, to rediscover technologies that are being outmoded. Certainly the technology of the Card Catalogue is an organization of human knowledge, but also to be sure, the book, the experience of reading the book. I mean, there's going to come a time when we're going to look back at this and not really remember what that — you can't dog-ear an electronic text unless somebody really writes a program for it. All right, final word. Molly, you like this stuff? Yeah, I mean, it makes me really nostalgic and it makes me really sad and it makes me — How interesting, that something so cool and new it makes you nostalgic. Yeah. I like that. Max? Yeah. I agree. It will be a shame when we can't do this anymore. But we can do the conceptual stuff. Okay. Dave, final word. You're the last one. I just love it. I love the visual representation of this analog language, it's historical. The same way it's DuPont poetry. And also let's remember, you know, along with Kenneth Goldsmith and others, all they're suggesting is that there's plenty of interesting language that's out there, you just need to go look for it. You need to explore a little bit. When you explore, you're not going to find anything new. You know, you're not going to go to the, you know, way down on the trail to find something new. You just have to look around. You go to the New York University library and you'll be able to explore as I did with my Tweety cap.
