Co-evolution
A strange loop
A study of biology might lead you to the concept of co-evolution. This is defined as the “change of a biological object triggered by the change of a related object.”
This is an apt metaphor for the relationship between your original work and that representation of it that we call a portfolio. On the one hand, the very minute you create new work, your portfolio is obsolete. On the other, when you create a portfolio, with all of the editing and decision-making it entails, it changes your perception of what is interesting. This quite naturally affects the direction your work takes next. This relationship is a feedback mechanism that feels much like M. C. Escher’s Drawing Hands lithograph. Where does the cycle start — or stop?
In his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, this is what Douglas Hofstadter calls a strange loop. He defines this as a phenomenon that “occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.” A portfolio exists apart from the individual works collected in it. Over time, we can and should replace those works with other, newer works. A portfolio cannot, however, exist without the discrete works that give it a particular essence — the author’s worldview, if you will.
A never-ending story
The portfolio’s existence is, as a whole, certainly other than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, as the author’s expression of his or her worldview evolves, the parts (the works) and the whole (the portfolio) co-evolve. Each affects the other as these levels of hierarchy return to infect each other. Like the two halves of Michael Ende’s fantasy novel The Neverending Story, these two halves of your work are mirror images of one another. And we all know what happens when two mirrors stand face to face: a strange and infinite loop!
Portfolio case study I: Boîte-en-Valise
During the rise of fascism in Europe, displaced artists sought expatriation to places that could support their work. Many left behind irreplaceable work and studios. In this context, Marcel Duchamp began creating his Box in a Valise (Boîte-en-Valise) in the period from 1938 through 1941, spanning locations from Paris to New York. He was dispossessed and homeless, concerned about the loss of much of his physical legacy since many of his readymades had been destroyed. Duchamp intended the Box at first to be a kind of portfolio. But as it evolved the concept expanded to become a “portable museum.”
The description of his process is fascinating by Frances Naumann, who maintains that the “significance of the… boîte-en-valise… has increased considerably; it is no longer regarded as a mere collection of reproductions having little more than documentary value, but, rather, a unique and important work of art in its own right.” This is a strange loop: the portfolio has become a work, which could become part of a portfolio!
Portfolio case study II: A labyrinth into which I can venture…
When Joseph Kosuth created One and Three Chairs (a kind of portfolio of the idea of a chair), he exploited the idea that text can become an image. Text-as-image became part of the basic arsenal of Conceptual Art.
Portfolio leanings abound in Kosuth’s work — after all, expository text is often associated with work imagery in a portfolio. He mashes them up, making text imagery and imagery text. We can see this in A labyrinth into which I can venture (a play of works by guests and foreigners). A portfolio in exhibition form hosted by Sean Kelly Gallery, labyrinth was a self-selected retrospective. It combined quotes from literati who have influenced Kosuth, who demonstrates he is as deep a student of philosophy as he is of art. A good portfolio can contain an influence on your work, without confusing it with your actual original work. An example exists at williamCromar’s web portfolio entry for his uccello chalice.
Kosuth’s installation is a lot like a movie or television narrative that uses flashbacks. The works are presented asynchronously, out of order on purpose. This fulfills a narrative device of creating connections across a timeline. Sometimes, a perfect chronology is the best choice for a portfolio, but sometimes that can get in the way of making connections explicit.
Portfolio case study III: Ulysses and the fold-in
William Burroughs, the Beat writer, offers an alternative narrative device to traditional chronology, of which Kosuth was no doubt aware. In a brief but highly influential essay from The Third Mind called The Future of the Novel, Burroughs describes techniques of “fold-in” and “cut-up.” These allow an author to collage text much the same way Picasso collages space and image.
A portfolio is a narrative, not unlike a novel, and we can find new insight into the threads that tie work across time by exploring Burrough’s fold-in sensibility as a portfolio-making strategy.
The ideas behind Burrough’s fold-in technique have precedent that he acknowledges in the Novel essay, namely the use of narrative flash-back and flash-forward in cinema. Even almost a century ago, modernist author James Joyce exhibited a fascination with this. He developed a cinematic technique in the delivery of narrative in books such as the notoriously difficult Ulysses. Critic Anthony Burgess described Joyce’s book as
… a labyrinth which we can enter at any point, once we have satisfied ourselves as to its general plan and purpose… [representing] a new wave in the novel, which is quite capable of asking us to treat a work of fiction as if it were a dictionary or an encyclopedia – something to be stepped into at any point we please, begun at the end and finished at the beginning, partly read or wholly read, a plot of space for free wandering rather than a temporal escalator.
— Anthony Burgess
Meaning we can cherry-pick Ulysses, rather than read from end-to-end. It’s a little bit like surfing the web or looking at a portfolio somewhere mid-way through.
Or gazing at Kosuth’s labyrinth…. How natural, then, that Kosuth was invited by gallery owner Sean Kelly’s wife Mary to collaborate on a work with Duchampian overtones titled Ulysses: Wrectified. Kosuth cut a large hole out of the text and inserted a schemata of Ulysses. A schemata is a diagrammatic map of thematic elements and character relationships in a text. The unsuspecting reader opens the book to find the schemata folding out of the original text, in accordion-book fashion.
Leporello: a book with multiple readings
Without a sewn spine, we call a book made by folding a long paper scroll to make several pages an accordion book. Another name for an accordion book is a leporello. Your portfolio will exist in two environments, one physical, and the other digital. The physical element of your portfolio will be similar to Kosuth’s fold-out. We can read the leporello 1) as a traditional book, 2) as a fold-out to be read as one long scroll, or 3) as a mural or a kind of free-standing sculpture. It is often used as a format for an artist’s book such as the one by Zoe Keramea.
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has devoted considerable effort to a collection of artist books. Curator Rosemary Furtak defines an artist book as “a book that refuses to behave like a book,” which she describes:
I mean books that have no pages, books that refuse to open, books that wear trousers like Daniel Spoerri’s Kosta Theos: “ Dogma I Am God”. I mean books that when opened become sculpture, … or books that cannot stand upright; Unnecessary Disclosures by Sarah Peters rolls like a ball and Sarah Parkel’s book Even The Birds Were On Fire is meant to hang like a Buddhist prayer flag. I mean books with no title page or table of contents or index, books devoid of text… .
— Rosemary Furtak
The leporello, of which Furtak has an extensive collection, is a favored format for the artist’s book.
