1000 WORDS: CHARLINE VON HEYL
THE BOOK IS CALLED SABOTAGE for several reasons. I like that it is the same word in several languages, and that it is, like desire, a generic, overused nonword that almost works like an image but actually stands for something simple and raw. It is also what I’m doing in my own work, always sabotaging my own concepts and approaches, my own linear advancement, my own visual expectations.
Sabotage is always a kind of violent change, the “sabot”—a wooden clog—thrown into the machinery, creating a new situation through disruption or destruction. It describes what happens in the book while you’re working with it or looking at it. The very simple formal device of the Mylar pages that one turns back and forth forces the mind to create and re-create abstract images, and to always wonder about what that could mean. And every Mylar page is actually two images—an image and a reverse image. So for every double page you have six images. Mylar pages do very different things when you turn them: They cover up and reveal; they add up, change, and destroy. These effects work in a kind of narrative way, as you take away and add and take away and add. It’s a book that cannot take the whole into account.
And then you’re reading backward all of a sudden. This backward movement is a very important aspect of Sabotage. Once you’ve destroyed an image, there is an urge to create a new one. And because the mind refuses to remember abstract images, you have already forgotten the image you have just destroyed, so you move backward in order to see what has happened. The first, initial movement is so fast that you don’t understand, so you want to do it again.
With the Mylar pages, the book provides a weird satisfaction of creation, because you’re not going through it looking for something—you actually create something and then you destroy it. You don’t destroy it by changing it, though; you destroy it by forgetting it. It works through repetition and surprise. And, as in my paintings, I try to use the images in such a way that you don’t actually see this happen, but your body gives you a strange feeling of recognition that you can’t name.
You turn the page and suddenly everything starts to move. It’s a movement that cannot be escaped, and the reader is going to see that one image completely transforms the other. It is an immediate Op-art sort of effect that is in the realm of physical manipulation. The eye is a part of the body that reacts in a physical way, and that’s what I am using.
THE BITS AND PIECES of imagery all come from things or works that I want in one way or the other and that do something to me. The sources are very different and don’t really matter in the end: They might be taken from a crumply Magritte drawing, or a photograph by the painter Wols, or Dino Buzzati’s 1969 comic about Orpheus—a book whose urgency and awkwardness of line I could never fake, but want.
I became interested in the myth of Orpheus in all its variations through the centuries when I read Klaus Theweleit’s Buch der Könige [Book of Kings], and I started thinking of Orpheus as the image of the artist who sabotages his own happiness and is actually incapable of being with someone. Narcissism, opportunism, the abuse of the muse, and all these “bad” qualities of the artist are figured here. So without being named, Orpheus is the sort of no-story behind Sabotage, and some of the images actually refer to that theme. But all that doesn’t matter, and just becomes part of a manic formal and purely visual universe.
It’s a little bit like concrete poetry. It sets association chains in motion through formal juxtapositions. The book has complete respect for the insanity and intelligence of association chains. I want these to be as different as possible for everybody who uses Sabotage, so that they each make their own book, completely unpredicted by me. I like the idea of images expanding into different head spaces in different ways.
I STARTED TO LEARN different printing techniques last year, and I had a lot of fun experimenting with them, creating the body of work that led to the idea for the book. I am using them now as tools for works on paper, layering different kinds of prints on top of one another, drawing on them, sticking things onto them. Usually you do not put a woodcut on top of a lithograph on top of a silk screen. I have always been a sucker for the look of prints and have often faked that look in my paintings, so maybe it makes sense that I am using printing techniques now in the same way that I paint, so that one cannot follow the steps. These steps often contradict themselves, making an image that ultimately does not reveal its roots. And that’s what makes it, in the end, something that has presence. It has a weird mood, but you cannot pin down what it is really about. With the book, the challenge was to use the form of the book and the idea of a text that never surfaces but is there as form, and to use that as a tool to insist on presence.
I want to get abstraction to a point where it screams that it is something: a representation and a thing. I am interested in a kind of iconic statement that, in the moment where you actually try to read it, refuses exactly that and insists on having nothing to say. It insists on being abstract, like a painting that is almost something else, but that something cannot be named. To do that with a book seems to me the ultimate challenge. A book that mimics the feeling of a story without ever delivering; a picture book that refuses to illustrate but is made entirely of centerfolds. —CHARLINE VON HEYL
