SUBSTANTIVE SPACES.

KARDANAKHI TATAROBA BY CLIFTON MEADOR

CHICAGO: EPICENTER, 2006

88 PP./$42.00 (HB)

THE NAMELESS DEAD BY CLIFTON MEADOR

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT: PABA PUBLICATIONS, 2004

112 PP./$65.00 (HB)

Clifton Meador's most recent books move across the arid zones of the Republic of Georgia, into Bukara, Khiva, and Uzbekhistan, and through the interior spaces of abandoned monuments, occupied gardens and streets, and into the village of Kardanakhi. They do not depict these exotic locations so much as they move the reader-viewer through them. Meador's narratives create pathways up, down, across, along, and through the many spaces of the book that are the framework and substance of his designs. Few book artists have had as extensive and creative a dialogue with the codex as a dynamically structured space as Meador has over the last twenty-five years. He understands book form as a literal, referential, conceptual, physical, temporal, and virtual space, and he knows how to maximize each of these registers for complex effect. The result is elegant and smart, especially since his content is adventurous, informed, and imaginative.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

My stress on prepositions in the description above is deliberate. Prepositions are the grammatical terms on which phrases literally turn. They articulate relations among clauses. They are spatial in their metaphoric force. Why invoke these to talk about books? Because the dynamic structure of book space is one of the taken-for-granted features of the codex form to which familiarity blunts the habituated reader, one that Meador has worked assiduously to call to attention. Meador's productive output (almost forty editioned books) has systematically undone those habits of reading to create alternative experiences of book spaces. This was true of his early work: Book of Doom (1984) uses sequential unfoldings from large to small sheets to lead the reader-viewer to the awful, apocalyptic inevitability of a final explosion; New Doors (1985) uses perforated sheets and openings to create ways to see through the book in a literal sense, playing with the paradox of reading as a gateway to perception. In every instance, Meador insists on showing that the book is an object, simultaneously material and conceptual, not merely a convenient vehicle.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This approach holds true in his two most recent books (as it does across his entire oeuvre). In The Nameless Dead he takes us on a journey in first-person narration with photographic evidence shot from the same point of view as that from which the tale is being told. We are in a strange hot desert, one that is remote and unfamiliar. We come to a ruin. A guidebook appears in the pages to provide the historical background to the document our narrator provides. This reference within the book turns the photographs into a ghost record fraught with associations and phantom history. The color images are echoed by wire frame drawings void of apparent content. This conceptual engagement with history and place (and use of a book space with attention to conventions of representation) is extended in Kardanakhi Tataroba, a travel narrative about Kakheti province in the Republic of Georgia. The book bifurcates between a mute photographic document and a wire-frame drawing image sequence with linguistic transcription. The theoretical lesson is striking: the apparent replete richness of images is put in dialogue with the schematic referential force of language. Few semiotically informed gestures read more clearly than this simple contrast: the way the sequential ordering juxtaposes the two and brings the reading experience into critical focus.

Meador is not a formalist. His books are increasingly dense with content. Long Slow March (1996) marked a major turning point in bulk and substance. The thematic engagement with social issues that determined the choice of figures in Great Men of the Modern Age (1982), the ecological anger that drives in Rising, Converging (1988), or the fury at genocidal tactics in Nutritional Disease Throw Rugs (1995) has always been central to his books. Long Slow March used primary materials from slave narratives, Ku Klux Klan accounts, newspapers, and other documentary sources to create intersecting texts that interrupt each other on the page. The threads of abuse and subjection are intercut with justifications and official language. The second half of the book is a photographic record with a picture taken every mile on the road from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The book replicates a journey, each opening is a stop on a map, a view into that southern landscape of small towns and main streets, civil war monuments, one-story hardware, and feed stores lining the route. Meador does not use the book to tell us "about" the March, he recreates the experience of it. The book is a place, a space, as well as a dynamic form for holding images and texts in structured relations. Twenty-five years, forty titles--if book arts criticism comes of age to meet its best practitioners, Meador will be among the canonical figures in the field.

JOHANNA DRUCKER is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is a well-known book artist and scholar of visual and graphic media. Her most recent book, Sweet Dream: Contemporary Art and Complicity, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. A book of creative writing, From Now, was published by Cuneiform Press in August 2005. She helps run the Virginia Arts of the Book Center in Charlottesville, Virginia.