A Closer Reading

During the summer of 2005, I lived and worked at Kaus Australis, an artist’s residency in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I had two objectives: to experiment with new painting and drawing materials and to finally read Moby-Dick, a task that I knew required generous time. According to everyone I had spoken with, Melville’s masterpiece was supposed to have been a headache to read. But by the end of the first chapter, I was astounded by how relevant it was for an artist such as myself, who had consistently been working with the phenomenology of visual perception and the fluctuations between figuration and abstraction. I also had an immediate awareness that in spite of Melville’s nineteenth-century aesthetic gyrations, Moby-Dick was a prophetic vision of contemporary America. I decided to create a series of artworks based on the novel, and since then I have produced numerous paintings, drawings, and sculptures that attempt to capture the grand spirit of Moby-Dick and elaborate on some of Melville’s most salient questions. Of all the works made in the series, a six-page letterpress edition on paper, A Closer Reading (2011), is perhaps my most substantive, personal response to the seductive nature of Moby-Dick and the enigmatic aura that surrounds it.

A Closer Reading, as well as being an homage to the novel, was more importantly a deliverance from working with the gravitas of the enterprise for six years. Made late in the development of the series, it does not contain any of the earlier archetypal images of whaling ships, harpoons, blackened seas, or American flags. Instead, it emphasizes something much more intimate: the physical properties of 2003 Penguin Classics paperback that I read in Rotterdam. In that edition’s compressed paper-and-glue frame, the contradiction between its mass-produced physicality and the spectral content of Moby-Dick could not be more vivid.

Several previous works in the series had their origins in this paperback, such as Chapter 1: Loomings (Pl. 2) and Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale (Fig. 1). In the former, page 7 was enlarged to totemic proportions, giving the print and my added gestural marks room to establish the relationships between solidity (the ink as text, hard-edged form) and fluidity (the ink as amorphous, abstract form). Seen at this scale, individual words, rendered in a deep red-bister ink, a material which is resoluble even after drying, are simultaneously emphasized and disembodied on the smooth, hot-press, ultra-white paper surface. In the silkscreened painting Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale, I paid attention to reversals of tone and material, in this case white text on raw linen, and to the unattended spatial relationships between the end of each paragraph and succeeding pages in the chapter. In the latter, while remaining faithful to the proportions of the paperback edition, I ignored well-known aspects of the content of this chapter, such as its ruminations on the nature of color and the territories of myth (both part of artists’ traditional sovereignty), in order to reveal a gracefully systematic and visually formal exigency that was inherent in the print itself. Melville’s intense cataloging of the cultural and historic symbolism of this hue-less color ends with questions about certainty and purpose, asking the reader to have faith in chasing the mystery of whiteness. The experience of seeing the entire chapter laid out in nine separate panels, connected by bands of inexplicable and seemingly irrelevant linear forms, was meant as a personal response to the experience of reading this critical text.

Fig 1.

Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale (detail panels 1–3). 2008. Acrylic on linen on nine panels. 24 x 170 in.

Yet A Closer Reading went much further than these artworks in its aspiration to establish an intimate connection with Moby-Dick. It occurred to me that given the fierce density of the novel, there was ample material to distill it into an enigmatic prose-poem by eliminating the majority of the text and relying on the residue of Melville’s...