September 18–December 7, 2013
Thomas Ingmire: Calligraphy in Collaboration with Poets and Artists
ST. RAPHAEL (with poetry by Federico García Lorca), 2010; courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library Special Collections.
B
ack in the 1980s, a period when
Thomas Ingmire was already
beginning to establish himself as
a calligrapher of note, much of his
work drew upon poetry by William Blake,
Arthur Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens,
Denise Levertov, Basho and the like— exactly
the kinds of texts we typically associate with
the strategies of modern calligraphy, which
tend to adhere to a canon congenial to the
traditional, rule-bound duties of elegant
lettering and decoration. To look at that work
now, after more than two decades, we can
see that Ingmire was never interested only
in the beautifully composed page, or in the
well-trodden avenues of visualization and
interpretation that preoccupy calligraphy
at its most straightforward. Even then he
was fascinated by the pictorial possibilities
of language, the word(s) as image, the
immersion of language in an exhilarating
atmosphere of visual invention. Indeed, the
very familiarity of those texts demanded that
he invent, extravagantly at times, in order to
challenge readers to consider them anew.
Still, as we look across this selection of
Ingmire’s work from the past fifteen years or
so, the labor of an artist who has emerged
as one of the most prominent practitioners
of contemporary calligraphy, we soon
sense that the 1980s brought him to a
kind of crossroads. He could easily have
continued the pursuit of further refinement,
an honorable branch of the calligraphic
tradition, certainly, or he could forge ahead,
on his own, into a largely blank — or unwritten — territory of exploration,
research, and radical development, thus to
advance the boundaries and critical reach
of the medium itself, as art.
By choosing the latter path, Ingmire, to
speak in a general way, has been required,
almost as a matter of necessity, to begin
dismantling the borders between some of
the hoariest, most restrictive categories of
cultural practice: visual art and language;
the pictorial and the literary; the drawn
line and the normally stable structures of
letters and words; reader and viewer; and,
finally, artist and writer. In his hands, those
relationships are reviewed at length, tested,
and sometimes merged, but Ingmire brings a
persuasive logic to the business of redefining
activities we often take for granted — ways,
that is, of discovering, defining, interpreting,
and expressing cultural value and meaning.
In his work, the normative is always open
to further inquiry. The entire basis of his
enterprise can be enclosed, perhaps, by
the idea that (our) written language, as a
repository of repeatable, ostensibly secure
communicative forms, related to drawing
through line, can still partake freely in the
protean, originative energies of drawing,
while its bases in orthography and the
alphabet insure as well that the calligrapher
is free to look every which way across an
endlessly negotiable territory between text,
functionality, and art.
Here, the exuberant collusion of writing
and drawing is nowhere more apparent
than in The Night (2010, poem by Georg
Taki), Colours (2012, poem by Angeline Yap),
the dense, sinuous Human Cosmos (2012,
poem by Allen Fisher), and Seismograph Jitter
(2011, poem by David Annwn), in which the
seeming invincibility of the black lines is
toned by the improvisational qualities of the
sketchbook and graffiti writing. The abundant
vitality of drawing radiates majestically
from these pages, though we have no
difficulty recognizing the forms as letters,
words, sentences, now unfettered by the
organizational orders of baseline and margin
— it is imagery, rather, whose “meaning”
derives, at least in part, from its connection
to language, as other kinds of images in art
may derive from their connections to the
world’s fundamental forms, figure, say, or
landscape. Elsewhere — in Ma/Rarus (2011),
a collage, or sheets from the Dante and
Federico García Lorca projects — Ingmire
HUMAN COSMOS (with poetry by Allen Fisher), 2012; courtesy the San Francisco Public Library Special Collections.
shows his willingness to transgress the
boundaries of painting, as well, acting as
a colorist and painter whose foundational
motif is always linguistic.
We have witnessed similar kinds of
ideas and instincts throughout the history
of modernism, episodes that constitute a
tale of unbridled visual curiosity and its
transformative effects on the central forms
of Western art. This in turn alerts us to the
accretive, bibliographic nature of Ingmire’s
research. Paul Klee comes to mind, as
does Joan Miró, the wandering poetic line of
Guillaume Apollinaire, or the space-sensitive
lyrics of Kenneth Patchen or Charles Olson,
among others; so, too, visual surrealism,
the paintings of Mark Toby, the sturdy, fully
exposed compositional latticework of Franz
Kline, and the moody sensualism of the
symbolists; also ideographic writing and
ancient cursive scripts, and early modern
English handwriting, lettering of ripe visual
appeal. But all this should be understood
as background, something to look for as we
continue looking, not always immediately
recognizable as such, but felt, and it is a
clue to the thoroughness with which Ingmire
has investigated his medium and gradually
incorporated a variety of interests into his
visual means.
Although the sprawl of reference — the
calligrapher’s omnivorous cultural appetite
— amplifies the zest of the imagery and our
pleasure in it, the work can hardly help but
raise questions regarding the medium itself.
Such rampant inclusiveness speaks, yes,
to the integrative possibilities of modern
culture, a time when our technologies
make cultural exchange more available
than ever before: but what happens when
this occurs in fact? Is it more than cultural
tourism, or less? Of even greater importance,
perhaps, is the positioning of calligraphy
itself, this quiet art in the midst of a noisy
age. Ingmire has striven to overcome the
reticence and poise of the conventional
medium, to invest it with the boldness
of contemporary art practice, though we
must recall, too, that calligraphy is itself
a technology, one whose rise in the West
occurred in conjunction with early book
production — a sophisticated, intensely
creative handcraft, but antiquated in every
way. Is it another instance of historical
obsolescence we face here, like smithery or
quilting, whose survival in the present day
is deliberate and self-conscious, feeding
another kind of tourism, that of nostalgia? Or
can it intervene in contemporary life, and so
make a stand against the ruthless normative
drives of modern printing technologies as
they continue their headlong plunge into an
electronic future in which language itself
will be merely light on a screen, weightless,
evanescent, homogenized?
These questions are for the moment
unanswerable, though answers will come
with time. Yet we can see all that is at stake.
In the sheer abundance with which Ingmire
composes, he, and every calligrapher
working a similar terrain, reminds us that
language may be the most miraculous
of human inventions, that we proceed at
much peril with the technological impulse
that longs to bind it in the sheen of the
uniform and the ordinary, measuring words
by their utilitarian value alone. If we allow
our language to slide into banality, will not
our lives follow it there? This work wants
us to look again at something whose true
character is no less extraordinary for its
ceaseless daily use. Maybe more so.
Ingmire’s work bears its critique largely
by inference, of course. The artist’s own
passions are visual. He is forever testing
the means of lettering, the effects of its
various available techniques — elasticity
and distortion, fragmentation, altered
typographies, shifts in placement, formal
arrangement, composition, background,
color, and so on — and how these influence
alphabetic legibility, and further, how they
influence a reader/viewer’s reception of
meaning. In this sense, Ingmire’s approach
to calligraphy as a mode of research, typified
by his relationship with Annwn, is especially
intriguing. Their collaboration, which began
in the early 2000s, is based on ekphrasis,
a rhetorical device from antiquity, in which
one art medium is described by another,
thus heightening its affect for viewers or
readers. In this case, the poet sends a poem
to the calligrapher, who answers it with an
image, which is then returned to the poet to
become the basis of another poem, and so
on, back and forth, an evolutionary process
which, from the calligrapher’s perspective,
yields a dynamic exchange, provoking
the visualization of the written word well
beyond the safety of individual style. As
a collaborative undertaking, it is at once
conversational and deeply personal.
Further, it casts a fruitful reflection on
some of Ingmire’s other work — the epic
achievement of his multi-volume livre d’artiste
projects with Manuel Neri, from poetry by
García Lorca and Pablo Neruda, and with
Oliver Jackson, from poetry by Quincy Troupe.
These are gorgeous, exquisitely rendered
volumes in the grand tradition, unabashed
displays of virtuosic skill and material
accomplishment. As we turn from them
again, back to the adventures of the smaller
poetry books, we can see without question
how far Ingmire has carried calligraphy into
the realm of contemporary art practice, its
inquiries, its imperatives, its discontents.
Bruce Nixon is a writer based in Washington D.C.
HUMAN COSMOS (with poetry by Allen Fisher), 2012; courtesy the San Francisco Public Library Special Collections.
This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of the following
lenders: Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries,
the Marjorie G. and Carl W. Stern Book Arts and Special Collections,
San Francisco Public Library, Duke Collier, Joseph Goldyne, Anne Kohs,
and Robert Williams. Additional support for programs was provided by
the Newberry Library.
The Center for Book and Paper Arts is dedicated to the
research, teaching, and promotion of the interdisciplinary
practices that support the book arts and hand papermaking
as contemporary art media. The Center is part of the
Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College
Chicago, and in addition to housing both graduate and
undergraduate classes for that department, it publishes a
critical journal and artists’ books, mounts exhibitions, hosts
artist residencies, sponsors symposia and public programs,
and provides advanced study through a workshop program.
colum.edu/bookandpaper
Center for Book and Paper Arts
Gallery Hours: Mon–Wed, Fri, 10–6; Thurs 10–8
1104 S Wabash Ave, 2nd Fl, Chicago, IL 60605
book&paper@colum.edu