Thought Laid Bare: Notebooks by Artists and Writers

Daniil Kharms was a Russian writer who saw only two early poems (and some children’s stories) published during his lifetime. A founding member of the group of poets known as the Obeiru, Kharms wrote in private for the rest of his short life, before dying at age thirty-six, incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. The Blue Notebook is a collection of twenty-nine notes, translated by Matvei Yankelevich and published by Ugly Duckling Presse. The book is elegantly designed and misleadingly slim: Each short entry seems simple, yet they all share a labyrinthine scope that’s exasperatingly difficult to explain. Many appear nonsensical, yet Yankelevich, in his excellent introduction to another volume, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, argues that it would be too easy to label Kharms an absurdist. Speaking about the entry titled “Blue Notebook No. 10,” Yankelevich writes: “Kharms gestures at something barely perceptible, a shadow of existence, a ghostly presence, almost invisible. His writing moves toward silence—toward the impossibility of writing, toward self-negation and oblivion, in which being is revealed.”

Saint Petersburg Notebook gathers force, gyre-like, as it goes. It chronicles two weeks in June 2006, when Lauterbach was visiting Saint Petersburg and teaching in the Summer Literary Seminars Series. The intermittent entries she made while in the city are prefaced with a short, four-part introduction titled “The Untranslatable,” written several years later. In the first section of the introduction, Lauterbach writes about the way Herta Müller, in her novel The Hunger Angel, conjures “a near absolute void, caused by the body’s hunger and the spirit’s depletion.” This image hovers over the entire notebook, conveying how the scars of the Soviet Union still mark its citizens fifteen years after its demise. Lauterbach looks both outward—as she tries to reach some understanding of the inscrutable city, and is disoriented by the fabled white nights—and inward, scrutinizing herself and her alienation from both the place and the group of writers who are her traveling companions. Her gaze is sharp, almost photographic, in the vein of Robert Frank, who famously observed: “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to say something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always changing.” Saint Petersburg Notebook is both essay and poem, an extraordinary meditation that keeps circling (no coincidence, perhaps, that Lauterbach is highly attuned to the presence of birds) around the quandary of how to write an experience that cannot be fully understood.

Bourgeois’s notebook, a loose-leaf collection of thirteen drawings, seems to provide a direct entry to her unconscious and, as such, to her practice. The only words in the book are its closing statement: “At first there is a terrific tension. Then slowly line, shape, space and color, like notes on a score, begin to form a rhythm. I begin to relax, slipping into the vibrations of the unconscious. You have to know your unconscious to be in sync.” To the casual observer, the drawings could almost be doodles, but like other works in this syllabus, they only appear simple. Using the most basic of materials, ballpoint pens and music-manuscript paper, Bourgeois fashions drawings that are both mind-maps and landscapes. They are at once instantly recognizable and completely unfathomable—like memories of something long forgotten.

This compilation of Lee Lozano’s notebooks charts, among other things, her transition from making paintings to more conceptual “Language Pieces,” such as Real Money Piece, Grass Piece, No Grass Piece, and Dialogue Piece. It’s a big shift in approach that one can clearly see coming in the written notes (all in capital letters) that accompany her sketches and sometimes stand alone. In November 1968, for instance, Lozano wrote “IDEA THAT CANNOT BE DRAWN,” in which she describes an impossible painting. It’s fascinating to see the intensity of Lozano’s conversation with herself, manifested in her critical annotations of things she had already written or drawn in the notebook. On a page containing four sketches, she has written “NO” next to each one. And on the following page, a trio of concentric arcs is labeled “MAYBE.” Later, another drawing is marked “TRITE!” and in August 1968, a page with two drawings of concentric circles has the following notes:

AUG 6, 68. THE THING THAT’S WRONG WITH THIS IDEA IS JASPER JOHNS AND KEN NOLAND. TRY IT AGAIN WITH A SKINNIER OUTER SKIN TO THE SPHERE.

AUG 14, 68. WHY DO TWO CIRCLES WHEN ONE WORKS BETTER? THE THING THAT IS WRONG WITH THIS IDEA IS THAT IT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH . . .TRY A TORUS . . .NON-ESSENTIAL COMPLEXITY EQUALS WEAK (BAD) ART/IDEAS.

Since removing herself from the art world in 1982 (Dropout Piece has been called her final work), Lozano has acquired near mythic status. Of the many books of her work that have been published (I have four in my library) her notebooks are perhaps the most compelling, because they pull back the curtain, allowing us to see a restless, relentless artist, always probing and trying to move her work forward, who ultimately had the courage to tackle her questions about the art/life continuum head on.

Technically, Tablet is not a notebook. However, given its contents and the title’s etymology (the word tablet is first found circa 1300 as a “slab or flat surface for inscription,” and five hundred years later as “a pad of writing paper”), it certainly belongs among the others. Tablet consists of 217 sheets of board onto which Kelly mounted drawings and notes made on all manner of things, including newspaper and magazine cuttings, letters, menus, napkins, and photographs. In some cases, Kelly simply includes a found object with no modifications of his own. He began mounting the drawings in 1973, after he moved to the Hudson River Valley. His initial intention seems to have been to keep them as working drawings, but with time, they have been recognized as providing a vital insight into Kelly’s thinking and process, revealing his penchant for finding abstraction in the everyday. Unlike his paintings, which are spare, polished, and immaculately executed, the drawings in Tablet are quick and rough and the multiple pieces mounted on each board form new (and often surprising) relationships. Leafing through the pages, one revels in the access to a protean mind, to an artist’s process filled with curiosity, wit, wonder, and play.

Robert Seydel lived a hermetic life, rarely showing his work in public, and deeply invested in the world of the imagination. In his small, book-filled apartment (just a few blocks away from the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts), he created hundreds of works, almost all using quasi-fictional constructs and alter egos. Like the poet Fernando Pessoa, Seydel understood that truth must sometimes be disguised in order to be made believable. At the heart of Seydel’s daily practice were his notebooks, which he playfully called “Knotbooks.” While they have yet to see publication (it’s a huge task, as he averaged four notebooks a year for almost thirty years), A Picture Is Always a Book brings together almost all of what Seydel called the “journal pages” of his primary alter ego, Ruth Greisman, a Sunday painter and bank clerk. Beginning as handwritten entries in Seydel’s notebooks, they were later typed and drawn on brown, brittle paper. These are small-scale works, yet their range is immense. They are dense poems—ecstatic and melancholic—rooted in the streets of Queens and in Ruth’s interpersonal relationships.

Like Kharms’s Blue Notebook, Living Locally is wrapped in a blue cover. The type itself is also blue, and while Van Horn and Kharms may seem unlikely bedfellows, they both find meaning and transcendence in the most ordinary occurrences. Van Horn is an American who lives in Ireland. In addition to her work as an artist and writer, she runs (with her partner Simon Cutts) Coracle Press, a small independent publisher of artist’s books, chapbooks, broadsides, and ephemera. Coracle’s books refuse easy genre definitions—they are art and literature at once, and Living Locally, a selection of entries from a daily journal punctuated with drawings of objects collected on Van Horn’s frequent walks in the fields around her home, is very much in this vein. Here, there’s none of the violence to be found in Kharms’s work (although there is certainly sadness and death, as well as humor), nor does the writing appear nonsensical or absurd. But like Kharms’s writing, Living Locally is very difficult to describe adequately. It is quiet, intimate, and meditative. The alchemy lies in Van Horn’s ability to observe the quotidian with wonder, and yet write about it with a complete lack of pretension. Here is Matvei Yankelevich again, writing of Kharms, although it could just as easily be a description of Van Horn: “When literature gets too self-important, he’s just outside . . . sometimes making it disappear altogether.”