1. Clifton Meador’s Memory Lapse -
Clifton Meador’s book Memory Lapse is a photographic documentation of the past and present of the Solovetsky Monastery located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in northern Russia. Furthermore, Memory Lapse is an exploration of how the physicality and sequential nature of the book can be exploited to enrich and complicate the reader’s engagement with memory and history. Memory Lapse was published by Nexus Press in 1999. From 1977 to 2003, Nexus Press operated out of Atlanta, Georgia and was devoted to the production and publication of experimental artist books. Because Nexus Press received significant portions of their funding from state and federal organizations, the initiative fell prey to changing, anti-art politics in the early 2000s. Much of the organization’s information has since been wiped from public memory and documentation, and thus it is unclear how many copies of Memory Lapse had been printed. Meador has stated, though, that Memory Lapse exists in one printed edition, and that some of the books have since been scattered around academic institutions, and art museums and archives around the world.
Meador’s Memory Lapse features a combination of text and printed images. The text ranges from poems to historical writings. The images are all photographs, mostly of the monastery, and some of historical documents or painted representations of the space. The book is 129 pages, constructed from 24 paper octavos which were bound using smyth sewing into a hardcover binder. Sewn onto the outside of the binder is a maroon cloth, and pasted onto the inside are orange endsheets made of paper. These orange sheets of paper conceal the material of the book’s binder, and also separate the hard cover from the printed material of the book. Unlike the rest of the color in the book which has been printed, the orange color of these endsheets seems to have dyed into the paper.
The material of the binder is never visible. The binder is covered by the orange sheets and a maroon cloth. Furthermore, the maroon cloth is also not visible without the intentional removal of Memory Lapse’s dust jacket. The book’s dust jacket features a printed image of the outside of the Solovetsky Monastery which wraps around the front and back of the book. On the front cover of the dust jacket the title of the book has also been printed. Both the photograph and the title were printed using duotone offset lithography printing. The rest of the book’s linguistic and bibliographic/graphic coding also uses printing methods of duotone offset lithography, as well as tritone and four-color offset lithography printing. Offset lithography printing involves the transferring of graphic codes from one inked surface, to another blank surface, before printing the marks onto the final sheet. This differs from other popular forms of printing where marks are printed directly from an inked plate onto the final sheet.
2. Meador’s and Artists’ Use of the Book -
The bibliographic codes of Memory Lapse are difficult to synthesize. Meador’s use of printed type and photographs is not limited to the cover; the printed marks on the pages of Memory Lapse also exist as text/type and images. Both written literature and photographs do not fundamentally root their expression or distribution in the medium of the codex. Especially in the late 90s, these forms of artistic expression do not need to utilize the codex to find audiences. At the time of Memory Lapse’s publication, in 1999, images and writing could interact with viewers through curated instillations, individual photographic or mixed media prints, and, especially–considering artists’ books’ desire for holistic intentionality of craftsmanship through the artistic control of all parts of the book-making process, from curation, to design, to publishing–through the internet. We must, then, consider the codex medium to be a highly intentional choice on the part of Meador, and question what is to be gained from the utilization of, and possibly even exploitation of, the form?
In a 1997 essay, Johanna Drucker discusses how making printed books, but more specifically artists’ books, in an increasingly digital age reflects an extremely deliberate choice of the part of a bookmaker/artist. This choice comes from a need not only to express a particular content, but to do so in self-conscious, meta-conversation with the physicality of a medium. Drucker, writing in close temporal proximity to the creation of Memory Lapse, discusses how the transition from print to digital media resembles a similar shift from manuscript to print culture. Early typefaces attempted to resemble handwriting and familiar aesthetics before developing distinct material, visual languages to subconsciously influence the production of meaning from their (biblio)graphic codes. Drucker argues that in the 1990s digital media attempted to translate content from physical, printed medium online, but “such simulacral mimeses seem likely to be shortlived–the process of manipulating independent units of text or image within the newly discrete bounded spaces of an electronic file will develop their own aesthetic, and these quotations of form will seem as quaint as the ductal patterns of the early typefaces that copied the characteristics of the penstrokes into the resisting material of hard metal.” For mixed media artists working at the end of the 20th century, the choice to engage with the medium of the Book rather than attempt to develop a digital, material language reveals something about how the bibliographic properties of a book–sequence, choice of paper, page openings, text, color, typography, to name a few–are valuable and can be exploited to expand and deepen meaning that is produced from and in conversation with a(n artists’) book’s printed graphic and linguistic codes. Drucker takes Helen Douglas and Tegler Stokes’ collaborative work, Real Fiction, to be an example of meta-production of meaning inherent to 20th century artists’ books.
Drucker is interested in how Real Fiction calls attention to and exploits features of its concrete and conceptual properties. She describes how the Real Fiction’s sequential visual and verbal openings alternate as the book’s printed images gradually transform from a photographic representation of a book into an image of a rural house that is in the process of being rebuilt. “The photographs begin with an image of an open book, exactly the size and shape of the actual book (thus creating the illusion of staring into a half a dozen page openings) while the text suggestively weaves together themes of architecture (‘threshold’ and ‘door’) with metaphors of a spatialized narrative of interrelations.” Drucker asserts that the use of the graphic to create a representation of the bibliographic makes the interplay of representation of ‘real’ referred to in the title into an investigation of the book as a space of illusion. The pages that have been the image of a material support become a structural form, while the type of the alternating pages appears to float above the paper, casting a shadow downward. The illusion of space is treated literally, while the literal space of the page is used to support an illusion. The idea of a book as only a representation, a fiction, is rendered ‘real’ through exposing the artifice of bibliographic codes through a meta-representation and deconstruction of such properties in graphic and linguistic terms.
Drucker discusses how the sequential quality of the codex is exploited in many artists’ books to organize and articulate time and space. Real Fiction, however, utilizes the inherent sequencing of codices’ pages in conversation with Douglas and Stokes’ printed, photographic and typographic elements to illustrate the imaginary space of the codex. In an article in a 1999 publication of Journal of Artists Books, Clifton Meador makes an argument for intensive reading practices of artists’ books. He asserts that “a book is an experience in time (well, most books), and books that ignore the possibilities of narrative miss much of the point of books.” Meador’s understanding of narrative is essentially synonymous with Drucker’s idea of sequence. However, where Drucker’s discussion of sequence is concerned with the relationship between the artist, print, and the bibliographic, Meador makes use of the word ‘narrative’ to more overtly bring the reader into this relationship. The book artist can be preoccupied with structure, with materiality. Readers of artists’ books, however, will have a more linear, temporal experience of structure as they search for meaning from the book, transforming the book’s designed structure into an expressive and meaningful narrative through readers’ interpretative processes. By using the word narrative as opposed to the word structure, Meador indicates that his creative processes give weight to and find value in both authorial-artistic intentionality and reader experience and interpretation.
To the reader in this artist-print-material-audience relationship, structure becomes narrative through the accretion of experience that is the engagement with a book’s print and structure over time. Meador asserts that many traditional bibliographic properties of the book are enough to make an engaging media. Yet, he additionally notes, writing from his experience with making artists’ books, that each little image, each bit of text, every juxtaposition adds to the total. And with each small addition, the reading, and thus the meaning, of a book shifts. Drucker argues that artists’ books’ use of the Book as medium, as opposed to a digital medium or a medium more traditionally connotated with art as opposed to craft, places meaning in the physicality of the book. She contends that this meaning is inherent to and latent within book making processes and the Book-object.
This idea that expression and meaning can be subconsciously transmitted to readers because particular visual forms intrinsically are responding to histories of the book and other media finds rejection in Meador’s thought and practices. Meador contends that, similar to Drucker, artists’ books have a self-consciousness to them. He asserts that artists’ books’ self-consciousness should be used to engage and deepen a meta-exploration of what books can be. This quality of the medium can be used most productively when book artists deliberately engage with the textual, graphic, and structural elements of a book’s sequence whilst considering how a reader will transform sequence into narrative so as to find meaning. Artists’ books propose a collaboration between reader and artist in order to make meaning of the codex-object and the history of codices. Meador writes that in order “to understand this kind of book, a book that uses every nuance possible to article a narrative, you do have to read it closely. In this new art of making books it is mandatory to read every word.”
Meador’s thought is reflected in the relationship between print and structure in Memory Lapse. In Meador’s book, most properties seem to be a combination of bibliographic, graphic, and linguistic. For example, upon opening Memory Lapse – following the title page which contains the name of the book, its author, publisher, and a small, blue graphic print of a hammer and sickle amongst a bouquet of fabric and wheat – the reader is confronted with five pages of black and white photographs. Each of these five photographs receives an individual page. Additionally, each page frames its singular photograph with wide, blank margins. The bottom margin is always wider than the top, and the exterior margin is always wider than its interior opposite. These photographs depict monuments of past communist leaders, and in the frame of the second photograph readers see a group of people standing between a monument and a photographer.
The first four of these photographs touch each other when Memory Lapse is closed, however the fifth photograph faces a similarly stark yet different bibliographic arrangement. On this page, one line of type is placed at the bottom of the upper third of the page. The line of type reads “What is a moment? What is it good for?” and draws on the blank quality of the rest of the by including a wider than average space between the two questions. Within the photograph on this page’s opposite, Meador has printed a photograph of a monument erected for Lenin and the Soviet Union. When Memory Lapse is closed, the photographic representation of Lenin in this monumental, sculpture form rests upon one question, and the piece of the monument for the CCCP rests upon another. This unique bibliographic coding makes it appear as if Lenin was an inked surface, and his translated, printed form is the question “What is it good for?” The CCCP symbol appears to be translated into type to read “What is a monument?” In this bibliographic coding, Meador introduces an idea that is central to Memory Lapse. Meador is suggesting that photographic images hold the same linguistic identity as pictographs. Thus, when text appears in Memory Lapse this text is not necessarily linguistic coding, and when non-type print appears in Memory Lapse it is not only bibliographic coding. This idea that Meador represents in his book not only challenges readers’ methods of engaging with the book, but it also complicates methods of analysis used in book studies and book history disciplines.
3. Text, Image, and the Codex -
The reverse side of the page that asks the two aforementioned questions is similarly bare. This page presents to the readers a poem, using the same black, serif type, and is justified on the right side. On the left side, as the lines descend, the width of the text shrinks. The shape of the poem has been designed to resemble an image of a train, which has been printed on the subsequent page. When the book lies open and flat, the poem and the train seem to mirror each other. The widest part of both the poem’s text and the image’s representation of the train draw towards each other at the top of the pages, and pull apart from each other at the bottom. Meador’s design here is clearly intentional. Similar to the juxtaposition and bibliographic organization of the two questions and the printed image of Meador’s photograph of the monuments, this poem appears to be an imprint of the subject of the train image. The linguistic code of this poem discusses everything that is depicted in the corresponding photograph – the wood, the air, the smoke, etc. However, the bibliographic code is made only to resemble the train. Through this designed parallel, Meador asks the reader to consider photographs to be possessive of expressive language.
Roland Barthes speaks to Meador’s notion of a relationship between written-verbal language and a language of photographs. Barthes notes that, despite the lack of a structural study of this relationship, a frequently noticed relationship between text and image has existed since the advent of illustrated books. Yet the question remains, why is there such frequent linkage between text and image? “What is the signifying structure of illustration? Does the image duplicate certain of the informations given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the text add a fresh information to the image?” Barthes places image and text within the relationship of signifiers/the connoted and signified/the denoted. He claims that a photograph without linguistic companionship is subject to the proliferation of meaning, whereas text upon an image creates a fixed meaning of such image, intentionally designed by an artist or creator. Barthes coined the term anchorage to describe this function of linguistic codes in their relationship to image.
In Barthes’ discussion of anchorage, he typically uses images with that feature superimposed or in-frame, photographed text as examples for analysis. Memory Lapse, then, poses a problem. Meador’s text is superimposed atop his image, but this superimposition can never be visible as it only exists when the codex is closed and the pages rest upon each other. Memory Lapse brings into a third component, materiality, into Barthes image-text/signfied-signfier relationships. Drucker and Meador made clear artists’ books the meta-representative element that emanates from the books’ self-conscious exploitations of their forms. The medium is the message of artists’ books. Once we think about the impacts on reading experience and creation of meaning through the self-conscious exploitation of the material properties of the book, we are able to think about the impacts on reading experience and creation of meaning of the graphic medium of photography. The overt, self-conscious exploitation of one medium leads us to critically engage with the latent functions of another. In Memory Lapse, specifically in these pages that juxtapose a print of a poem and a print of an image both with the same subject matter, the consideration of the physicality of medium alters the relationship between text and image. As readers, we understand the relationship elucidated by Barthes exists in Memory Lapse, but, again, we are never given access to this relationship. Considering materiality in the context of Barthes’ ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ illuminates Meador’s deliberate positioning of graphic and linguistic printed codes in relationship to physical, bibliographic codes; Meador’s intentional organization of coding creates another self-conscious, meta-representation of analysis and the relationship between text and image.
Meador’s placement of the linguistic code on one page and the graphic code another the other exploits the codex’s sequential property, rendering the space between the two pages to be a representation of the viewer. In this space, by looking between these two prints, readers continually confront themselves. Confrontation of the self makes the viewer aware of their relationship to what is being looked at. Utilizing sequence, space, and organization of printed marks, Memory Lapse forces a meta-analytical method of reading. Meador urges the viewer to be aware of how they derive meaning from what is visual, and then he challenges the notion that a photograph has a single subject, which in this case would be the train. The design of the text’s form tricks the reader into looking at the representation of the train within the image, yet when they look at such a supposed subject, they are unable to engage with the majority of what the linguistic code of the type discusses. The type’s bibliographic code mirrors how we normally read photographs, while the type’s linguistic code prompts an alternative form of reading images.
The linguistic code of the type asks readers to look beyond what they perceive to be important – the image’s subject – and to rather holistically engage with the photograph. Meador similarly suggests this mode of engagement through the bibliographic coding of the train photograph. His notion of the photographic image containing multiple subjectivities finds resonance in Susan Sontag’s reflection on the medium. Sontag notes that, “from its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.” Sontag proposes that the proliferation of images has formed a new visual language. Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. She asserts that images “are a grammar and, even more, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images.” Sontag understands that as images proliferate, they accumulate a social language that is not dependent on any particular gaze. Additionally, the proliferation of images has altered the social worldview. As images now have language, the photograph’s ability to represent many objects renders the image full of expressive subjects.
Meador’s design choices in Memory Lapse emphasize a multi-faceted engagement with photographs. By juxtaposing a poem shaped like a train with an image of a train on facing pages, Meador not only highlights the interconnectedness of text and image but also leverages the physicality of the book to deepen the reader’s experience. The sequential nature of the codex compels the reader to move back and forth, fostering a dynamic interaction between the visual and the verbal. This design choice mirrors Barthes’ concept of anchorage, where text stabilizes the meaning of an image. However, Meador subverts this traditional anchorage by separating the linguistic and visual codes onto different pages, thereby necessitating a more active and interpretative reading process. Meador allows the photograph of the train to take up the entirety of the page it is printed upon. He gives the reader the space to intensively read the photograph. By excluding margins in the design of this page, the reader begins to lose the concept of framing as an artistic device to dictate the subject or object of an image. With margins, this photograph would be an object or subject of the book. Without margins, what is represented in the book is the book.
4. Why a book? -
Meador’s choice of the Book as the medium for Memory Lapse is a deliberate artistic and theoretical act that transcends mere aesthetic preference, reflecting a deep engagement with the unique qualities that books embody. Unlike digital or static visual media, a book offers a sequential and tactile experience, inviting readers to interact with its content over time and through a personal, material journey. This physical engagement mirrors the process of memory, where the act of turning pages becomes an analogy for how memories are accessed, revisited, and reinterpreted. Meador’s use of the book format allows him to layer text and images in a way that creates a dialogue between them, encouraging readers to explore and derive meaning from their interplay. The book’s materiality—its paper, binding, and cover—becomes a metaphor for the tangible nature of memory, illustrating how physical objects are imbued with personal and historical significance. By leveraging the book’s inherent properties, Meador crafts a multifaceted narrative that challenges readers to consider the complex relationship between memory, history, and the medium through which they are conveyed. Thus, the choice of the Book is not merely a vessel for content but a critical element of the artistic expression, offering a meta-commentary on the act of remembering and the construction of historical narrative.
Bibliography -
Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image, Music, Text, 152–63. London: Fontana Press, 1977.
Coover, Robert. “The End of Books.” archive.nytimes.com. New York Times, June 21, 1992. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html.
Drucker, Johanna. “Experimental Narrative and Artists’ Books.” Journal of Artist Books 1, no. 12 (1999): 3–30. monoskop.org/images/2/20/Journal_of_Artists_Books_12_Experimental_Narrative_and_Artists_Books_1999.pdf.
———. “The Self-Conscious Codex: Artists’ Books and Electronic Media.” SubStance 26, no. 1 (1997): 93. https://doi.org/10.2307/3684834.
Levy, Michelle, and Tom Mole. The Broadview Introduction to Book History. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2017.
Meador, Clifton. “Clifton Meador.” Journal of Artist Books 1, no. 12 (1999): 14–15. https://monoskop.org/images/2/20/Journal_of_Artists_Books_12_Experimental_Narrative_and_Artists_Books_1999.pdf.
———. Clifton Meador - Scripps College Book Arts. Interview by Samantha Shaffer, Hannah Travis, and Natalie Bauer. Scripps College Book Arts, 2019. https://scba.omeka.net/exhibits/show/sp2019_interviews/clifton_meador.
———. Interview with Clifton Meador by Sarah Bodman and Tom Sowden (05/11/08). Interview by Sarah Bodman and Tom Sowden. Book Arts at the University of the West of England, 2018. https://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/pdf/canon/meador.pdf.
———. Memory Lapse. Atlanta, GA: Nexus Press, 1999.
———. “The Small Pond.” Journal of Artist Books, no. 21 (2007): 35–39.
Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” In On Photography, 3–24. New York: Delta Books, 1977.
