These are pages from a book I have been working on from 2003 to the present. This work has slowly revealed itself to be about water, rising water, and human impact on the planet and is part of a larger project called The Sea Museum. The found book that I am altering to make these photomontages was about destroying icebergs, the problem of icebergs, and appears to have been made for children’s education (Danger! Icebergs Ahead! by Lynn Poole and Gray Johnson Poole, Random House, 1961). I’ve always been interested in the absurd, and was feeling a homage to Hanna Hoch, the great Dada artist. I began adding water and related images. I wasn’t working consciously in the beginning, just covering the pages with water. The subject matter feels prescient now, fifteen years in, and I am still altering the book. Like the oceans, this project continues to exist and change.
Tag: erasure works
King Speaking
“King Speaking” is a sequence excerpted from the latter half of a book-length erasure, Her Read, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2021. Her Read reconceives the entirety of The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1931), a highly regarded exploration of art from prehistory to the modern era by British art and cultural critic Herbert Read. Though the maternal body appears with frequency, zero womxn artists are included in the early editions of this text. In 1951, Barbara Hepworth becomes the sole female artist to be admitted.
I began this makeover summer of 2016, in that pre-election heat, when rage at the latest iterations of hate on the American political stage, in conjunction with erasures playing out in my own life, made other writing seem impossible. From the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, I began excavating a first-person lyric, the imagined voice(s) of womxn artists.
The concept of “mastery” appears with frequency over the course of the book, issues of dominion—that is to say—control—over a medium of expression, over other humans, and of course, over the Earth. One may well ask, what is art but a pronunciation of mastery? One may ask, must it always be?
Though I call this erasure, collage is a more accurate descriptor of this late excerpt. The surgical reconstruction contrasts cruder, monochromatic pages early in the text—used canvases treated only with correction fluid. As the book advances, the speaker gains agency over the text, revising the rules to serve to her fluencies. One rule is not broken: all language excavated and redeployed in this text can be harvested from a single copy of Read’s seminal text.
Materials: source text, correction fluid, archival inks, bookbinders glue, florist tissue, window shades, general purpose thread, embroidery floss.
Two Bible Stories
Two Erasures
In a few months another baby will get to the internet
Still sore and broken
after its husband did wrong
betrayed by the woman
the world.
I was secretly hoping
that his eggs made a litter
because the meltdown didn’t happen
there is new news
that years
will soon spit
newborn shit on their hands
To cover that it’s a ‘man’s world’
I’m certain, therefore delighted.
We are expecting a November
named yesterday.
From his yes and into his sound
like the name of a California town
Somebody spiked the table
with fertility.
Either knocked up or out
and now
that grumbling might be Jesse James
It might be America
baking in her.
“In a few months another baby will get to the internet” is an erasure from a Dlisted.com blog post on 7/9/14 titled “In A Few Months Another Baby Will Get To Call Robert Downey Jr. ‘Daddy.’”
We choose to smile in the face
1.
We choose. We choose to look at time.
We choose fives. We choose zig, else zag.
We choose a lot of things, but,
choose us.
Happiness is enough.
We choose to live—
purpose.
Your scent, your style: try these fragrances.
Secret escape.
Everything is better with purpose.
Find out why.
An empty box is filled with possibilities
(find the bottom).
This box is full.
100%.
Don’t throw it away, it’s too pretty:
a light manufactured by Saint Louis,
owned by
société de produits
or used with permission in a dry place in the USA.
2.
Go.
With absolutely everything.
3.
Purpose in 3 simple steps:
Step 1.
Step 2: pour purpose in a box. Refresh.
Step 3: Unwind. Throw some shoes.
You want to worry.
Trust us. You’ll love it.
“We choose to smile in the face” is an erasure from the text on the back of Purina Purpose Clumping Cat Litter 23-pound box.
Wory Gardn
November Nineteenth [On Erasure]
This erasure is from Donald Culross Peattie’s An Almanac for Moderns, a book of daily essays on the natural world written in the Midwest and published in 1935. Moore uses the book as part of a daily erasure practice, erasing the correspondent day and seeking to radically transform Peattie’s meditations, dramatically shifting the topic and focus of the original entries.
Peattie, Donald Culross. An Almanac for Moderns. Editions for the Armed Services, 1935.