A few years ago I made a very technically challenging stone lithograph leporello which was an abstract comic. I created it in collaboration with the Swiss author Daniel F. Ammann and the master printer Urban Stoob. Due to the process and so on, it is a rather expensive object, as comics go, yet not all that expensive for a limited edition print ($500.--). Since there were only about 50 though, and due to the price, I decided to make an unlimited edition of it much smaller, in a do-it-yourself, cut-and-paste form. It was published in a cultural magazine, Saiten, in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Now it is on the Abstract Comics blog! Please do it yourself! Cut it out and have a tiny cross between an artist's book and a comic mini. It is in German, with many wordplays, the images are an abstraction of a car-chase. The "five-fingered" form is chasing the "o" form. The text is of a detective-type shadowing someone.
Cut out the grey areas: The squarish cut-outs complete the images by showing other pages through them, the rectangular cut-outs give the page numbers by revealing the number-word hidden in the text in the see-through page. The image above shows what it should roughly look like when you are finished.
Click on the image and print out at your desired size.
That looks great, Mark! Any chance you could link to a higher-res file somewhere (so I can make a really nice printout)? And any chance of a translation?
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking recently of toying with words over abstract art myself. It wouldn't fit the definition of abstract comics I worked with for the anthology, but it could be a really fascinating hybrid. The question becomes then, how to connect to the words images that do not seem arbitrary? How can you be sure you got just the right abstract image for the words--or just the right words for that abstract image?
Thanks! I'm still struggling with that too, Andrei --- it's almost as if the words should also border on "abstracT" --- here we did a play with analogy, a similar but not anyway near identical chase scenes.
ReplyDeleteThe res on this one (when you click on the image) should hold up to A4 size, which was the size in the magazine. If not I'll scan a new one!
this is just too cool Mark!
ReplyDeletei'm going to have to look into your work in depth because i'm highly impressed with this -- the merge between book-arts & comics, so often the aspect of book as object is overlooked & i'm very happy to see someone bringing both worlds together -- also i'm reminded of one of my favorite artists, Dieter Roth, & how he never took the flat page for granted, always playing with new techniques for reading a page.
thank you so much for sharing this!
oh, i forgot:
ReplyDeletethe discussion about textual elements in abstract comics is certainly a topic which needs discussion, interesting possibilities.
very cool
ReplyDelete