The Book As Main Menu A Repository of Information A Performance A Journey Jessie Carter A Conceptual Playground for Choice ​(sagesolar, 2014, “The king of hearts”) A Medium for Universal Language A Phenomenal Reading A Relationship Between Recto and Verso A Vision of the Future A Repository of Language

The History of the/my Wor(l)d

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Johanna Drucker’s The History of the/my wor(l)d plays with the relationship of four distinct narratives, each carrying individual meaning.
  1. The large black text  is more of a pragmatic telling of a story – perhaps the history of the world.
  2. The smaller red text is a more romantic telling with phrases evoking soft emotions where “pleasure was slight, sweet and spasmodic, secret and unachieved”. The red color too seems to reflect a more passionate tone, especially compared to the straight black text of the main story and descriptive footnotes.
  3. The black footnotes meanwhile descriptively paint scenes – the history of her word now.
  4. Finally the images are linked to the footnotes, often illustrating key words.
 Although together they come to form the artist book, the network of connections between each item is specific enough that if not considered at overlapping points the relation makes little sense.
 
Drucker seems to be especially playing with the connections between what draws our eyes first. The bright red images and the large black text both stand out from the page. However to consider them together might simply confuse. To illustrate, examine page 10. What connections can you make between organic chemistry images and “SNAKES and parting waters”?
 
The format forces you to consider the illustration in relation to the footnote first, where “fragments of the original memory comes in molecules”. The talk of memories is a subject shared by the red text on the page where someone is “swallowing memories of tortured afternoons”. That sentence goes on to the “strict measure of hard rules”, which - to me at least - reminds of the story of Moses parting the waters to escape the tyranny of the Pharaoh at the time.

Of course that is just one reading, and disagreeing with it simply proves the flexibility of meaning with the text form. 

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