David Laufer in his art conveys a sense of personal language and demonstrates an impressive sensitivity to contemporary social issues. His juxtaposition of language, signs, and symbols sets up a coexisting tension and dialogue between the varying signs and symbols of our era. Despite the imaginary notability of David Laufer's art books, their underlying themes parallel real books and issues currently filling the texts found in book shops and libraries.
Over the past one-hundred years artists have been devoted to the tradition of the book as a unique art form; artists recognized the book as an important object in society and it being an accessible vehicle to elaborate dissimilar ideas varying in topics from literature, history, politics, art, and science fiction. Throughout the past century, they have utilized its potential to convey their visual and conceptual experiences in an unrestricted object. The list of artists who have produced artists' books is long, and the medley of books composed throughout this century span a spectrum from the simple to the complex, and the traditional to the electronic. Included in this rich history are works by such artists Marcel Duchamp, Stephane Mallarme, Picasso, Juan Gris, El Lissitzky, George Grosz, Max Ernst, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Allan Kaprow, Martha Carothers, Les Levine, and Hans Haacke, to cite only a few amid the many. Books afford artists a freedom to meld aesthetics and content and to author a new hybrid of expression: books are befitting settings for the confluence of composition and content, and the admixture of creative discipline with ideas.
Since the mid-1960s when Modernism came under attack and a new generation of artists began recognizing that purity was not possible in an impure world, especially in western capitalist countries, there has been an energetic revivalism in the production of artists' books; this creative outpouring of commingled artist books came from Great Britain, Germany and the United States. In addition, artists living and working behind the 'Iron Curtain' found the artist book an important means of communication.
Pop art provided a precedent for contemporary artists, to borrow imagery from mass produced culture. Inspiration for this came from the Dadaists and Surrealists who used text and collage extensively in their art production. Their directness parallels the immediacy and impact of the electronic communications whose effects on the populace were first experienced in the 1960s.
Conceptual artists of the 1970s further pushed the genre of the artist book because the book became an ideal structure for conveying their dematerialized art forms. So much of the art work executed in the 1970s did not easily fit a pattern; much had to be interpreted anew, casting off all the old critical formulas. Through the varied experiments of the Post-Minimalists, Conceptual and Process artists, a highly volatile and untraditional aesthetic emerged that gave rise to Post-Modernism. Post-Modernism acknowledges diverse forms of social and individual identity; the deletion of boundaries between art and everyday life; the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between elite and popular culture; and the mixing of social, stylistic, and cultural codes. Artists producing books in the 1990s welcome the inherited aesthetic freedoms established over the past twenty-five years; today they utilize multiple facets of media and mass cultural expression in an art which becomes an optional arena for analysis. An examination of the range of books available at Printed Matter Inc., in New York City, is a testimony to the extraordinary multiformity of artists' books that exist.
As we in this Post-Modern time, rapidly move into a computer dominated world, speculative discussions about the obsolescence of the traditionally bound book, with its printed text, are topical. Some believe on one hand because of the evolution of information technology that in the not too distant future our information will exclusively be disseminated through electronic technology--the book as we know it will become a thing of the past. Others, on the other hand, believe the book's format will merely undergo yet another transformation, as it has since Alois Senefelder discovered lithography at the close the eighteenth century. There is no doubt that desktop publishing and computer access is vastly revolutionizing book production and making it more economically beneficial and available to diverse audiences. Despite the manifold predictions, the book today continues to retain a significant vitality and is amenable to mass production.
David Laufer not only embraces the book form as a critical scaffold, but also makes his books from wood and paints them by hand. His meticulously constructed, fictitious texts contradict the temporal and ephemeral aesthetic fragmentation characteristic of much Post Modern art. Unlike the norm of Post-Modernism that is distinguished by a demanding sense of instant success, rampant materialism, and abounding cynicism, Laufer's art is quiet, requiring the viewers full attention. He works within the broadest definition of a book and his art appears to go against the boisterous spectacle of Post-Modern culture.
Laufer's book constructions simultaneously operate as a three-dimensional aesthetic painting and as conceptual satire that references literature, history, politics, and gender issues. Themes of catastrophe, humor, social criticism, and language comprise the subject of his inventive texts; the pervading concept becomes enhanced by co-existing imagery Laufer appropriates from popular culture, art history, as well as with his own fabrications. The actual structure of the book appears to function as an arena or a theatrical setting for his staged personal dramas and commentary. The content of Laufer's social commentary is implied by the text appearing on the book's cover jacket. The physical weight of each illusionistic book object performs as a type of metaphor for the abundance of information bombarding our minds (both in book form and through electronic communication).
In these non-functional books in which the process of association is crucial, Laufer mediates objects and images imbued with cultural references. Often an inversion of context and meaning is suggested through the actual shape of the book, the treatment of its decorated surface, and the actual data presented. Titles also play an essential role in the signification of each individual piece. His fanciful humor is especially vibrant in such chimerical relief sculptural texts such as Diagnosing Uncertainty, The Pocket Cyclopedia of Systematic Doubt and The Skeptic's Catechism. References to a real event, place or thing becomes the jumping off point for Laufer's conceptual fiction. Throughout Laufer's sculptural book production, repeatedly a fictitious editor and protagonist by the name of Dr. Dave appears; he is a Renaissance man who writes and comments on an array of subjects ranging from inequity of human rights in Romania under the Ceacesu administration, science fiction murder mystery in Manhattan, as well as on virtual philosophy. Who is Dr. Dave? Is he perhaps the alter-ego of the artist?
Conceptual issues and psychological content permeate the individualistic narrative of Laufer's art. Although the surfaces of his trompe l'oeil wood sculpture books do convey information through their carefully painted-text covers and spines, the contents of each book is locked in a type of silent serenity by the physical constraints of each object.
The idiosyncratic quality of each book tends to imply that information is deliberately being withheld by the author who chooses to present only surface data. According to the artist, "...they cannot be opened. Yet each one is written and designed to evoke a much longer text, a text which the reader/ viewer may find both familiar and unexpected." Since the viewer cannot open the cover and begin reading, he/she must accept the face value of the available information provided by the artist author in his fictitious texts. Perhaps the author is really presenting conceptual puzzles for the viewer to decipher. One questions whether perhaps Laufer is intentionally playing an intellectual game with his viewer, as marketers and publishers do (when they commission designers to prepare evocative book covers). There is no denying that we frequently take a chance when we purchase a book; we partially rely on the published reviews or the power of its cover.
As a container of information, the book nevertheless is associated with ideas and a journey. Laufer's art books function as object, subject, and text. He engages us but deliberately withholds information; what he presents is open to interpretation. According to the artist, there is no absolute meaning being conveyed through these books. His sculptural illusory texts incite the viewer to unravel the visual puzzles presented.
Elaine King @ July 1996
