To Change Shape by Stretching
A Conversation with Bonnie Gordon
Fig 1: Bonnie Gordon, Wave Man, 1975. Cyanotype, 8 1/4 × 10 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist/Courtney Grim.
I can't write any poetry, I don't know what to say.
/
I'm not a poet, and besides, I haven't got all day.
❧
I can't write any poetry, I don't know what to say. / I'm not a poet, and besides, I haven't got all day. ❧
Bonnie Gordon sing-spoke these words to me over the phone, delivering each line with precise scansion and the sort of insistent, trance-like cadence that emerges when one recites from deep memory. Gordon, born in 1941, was recalling an eighth-grade poetry assignment: “I remember it was Mrs. Mender, and she said, ‘Now here’s what iambic pentameter entails: da-daa da-daa da-daa da-daa da-daa.” Gordon recounted this story just moments after insisting that she would “freeze up” if asked to write a poem anew. “I don’t think I could write poetry if I didn’t have an entrée into it,” she shared. “If I jump into the deep end, I sink like a stone.” The formal structure of meter lent her what poet Denise Levertov has called the “pilots and charts” of traditional form.[2] Like her eighth-grade poem, Gordon’s more recent creations hinge on a rhythmic oscillation between structure –– lent by found material and self-generated complex systems –– and open experimentation and contingency.
Gordon’s art ranges from cyanotype and more conventional photographic prints to artist’s books, sculptures, and installations. In the 1970s, Gordon developed a unique process of transferring text and found photographs onto highly flexible sheets of acrylic polymer and printing from these. Flowing lines of text spill and stretch across her surfaces. She expands the images beyond recognition, transforming them in obscure seas of halftone dots, as in Wave Man (1975) (Fig. 1). Across dimension, form, image, and text, Gordon’s work explores and expands representational and symbolic meaning in languages both visual and verbal.
“Across dimension, form, image,
and text, Gordon’s work explores
and expands representational and
symbolic meaning in languages
both visual and verbal.”
Pulling text from Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, Gordon hazards a dense connective tissue of words and their roots. After meticulous documentation in her notebooks (Fig. 2), she combines the entwined strips of undulating text with stretched halftone images. Looking at (or rather, reading) these prints in 2022 –– well into the Information Age –– the connections appear like hyperlinks or an inventive form of the kind of analysis promoted by network theory. The prescience of her textual hyperlinks and maps of nonsequential language demonstrates Gordon’s importance not only in the realm of printmaking, artist’s books, graphic arts, and visual and concrete poetry, but also in the expansive history of cybernetic art.
Fig. 2: Detail of Bonnie Gordon’s notebook, c. 1970–95. Courtesy of Jim Morris.
Prints created with this dynamic printing technique and language-mapping system filled two artist’s books published by Rochester’s Visual Studies Workshop Press in 1982: The Anatomy of the Image Maps: According to Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Fig. 3) and The Anatomy of Proteus According to Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. These books provoke a semiotic journey through networks of signifiers and slippery, symbolic meanings. For instance, in the print “Photography,” one learns how “chamber” holds hands with “curiological” (Figs. 4 and 5). Words and images, deconstructed into fragmentary particles then manipulated and merged, gyre among multiple simultaneous possibilities of meaning.
Fig. 3: Cover of Bonnie Gordon’s The Anatomy of the Image Maps: According to Merriam- Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1982).
Gordon has lived for much of her life in Western New York, and currently resides in Buffalo. She received a BFA from Syracuse University, an MFA in printmaking from RIT, taught for many years at Buffalo State College, and has exhibited widely in New York and nationally. Her work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, International Center of Photography, Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, among other museums. Bonnie Gordon: Mapping Image and Word, Stumbling into Streams of Consciousness, a multidisciplinary exhibition of Gordon’s work, opens at the Burchfield Penney Art Center on June 10 and will run through November 27.
Fig. 4: Detail of The Anatomy of the Image Maps (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1982), 28.
Fig. 5: Detail of “Photography” in The Anatomy of the Image Maps (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1982), 29. Courtesy of Courtney Grim.
Bonnie Gordon: I’ve been an artist since I was three years old. Growing up, adults singled out my unusual academic drawing ability, which was very unfashionable when I got to college. I was good at drawing and loved drawing, much to the horror of my Abstract Expressionist professors. I would ask to go to the anatomy lab on drawing day. When I would come back with my drawings, they would have to sit down and draw a deep breath.
Caroline Webb: Your medical drawing experience makes me think about how, prior to the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century, artists were relied on to represent the body hyper-realistically. The stakes were high; there could be no margin of error.
BG: It’s true with anatomy. I began to use terms like “the anatomy of the image” or “image-maps” because that was my preferred way of thinking and working, this academic drawing by way of anatomy.
After college, I got hired at Buffalo State, and I found myself in the bookstore, where Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary was on sale. A new edition had just come out, so they were dumping the old editions for a very low price. I bought a copy and I brought it home, and I thought “Well the first word I'll look up is ‘draw,’ D-R-A-W,” because drawing has always been my main event. I looked up the word, and it said, “to change its shape by stretching.” I thought, “Shazam. I’ve got to photograph this, or who's going to believe me?” People tend not to believe written evidence. It's just the way the world works.
I knew about etching and photoetching. I realized that I could rub printing ink into a printing plate and pull the ink up on acrylic polymer. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but at Buffalo State College one of my students learned that you could transfer montaged materials onto plastic using the acrylic polymer medium. I had all this stuff in the studio, so I rubbed ink into my printing plates and coated the results with acrylic polymer. And I found that when I stretched the dried polymer, you would see the halftone dots expanding into this beautiful formation, like what you see in nature. It fascinated me, and I stopped drawing in the normal way –– I just played with those stretched images.
I realized that if I stretched these photoetchings from magazines and newspapers then the halftone pattern would become part of the product that we see. The dots sort of transform. That’s a part of chaos theory in nature, where you can see the transformative flow in the patterns of blowing sand and leaves. In nature and living creatures, the cells will kind of transform. It looks like a transformation by stretching.
When I was twenty and living in New York City, Time Life came out with a book on mathematics. It had a chapter on topology, the mathematics of distortion, and morphology that was illustrated with D’Arcy Thompson's images of transformations in nature (Fig. 6).[4] I immediately made the connection between topology and how an image that stretches does not really change fundamentally. All these interest areas of mine just fell into place.
Fig. 6 Graph of the form of Diodon (porcupinefish), left, distorted to produce the form of an Orthagoriscus (ocean sunfish), right, from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form. Courtesy of Linda Hall Library.
CW: Talk to me about the polymer. Is it thin and malleable?
BG: It's a varnish or protective coat for acrylic paintings that comes in gloss and matte. Normally, the matte is considered more desirable, but I prefer the gloss because it stretches more readily. If you want to coat a magazine to scoop its images off, it’s a little bit more flexible. When you lift the magazine image, the ink is ensconced in the polymer, and it’s not going to wash off.
CW: Were you developing the dense system of connections among etymons and definitions at the same time?
BG: I was. The etymons were like anatomical labels for the experiments with the elastic halftone grids. I looked at words like “stretch” and “black” and “blank” — you need black and blank film to make photoetchings. So I began with words that were very literal descriptions. The word “draw” turned out to be more literal than I thought it would be –– just “shaped by stretching.”
And then to go further, I started looking for the words that were in the words because I was kind of literal and anatomically inclined. Sure, it’s poetic, but I wasn't engaged in free association, which was considered the thing to do. I don't think I could do that if I tried. I was looking up the descriptive term –– the anatomical label –– and I was looking up the labels within the label. I found that “draw” meant “to shape, to form, to mold,” so I looked up “shape.” I looked up “stretch” and went with all those words. I found surprise after surprise. It was so addictive; it was like eating potato chips! There was nothing I would rather do. I was unbearable. I just loved it. I looked up thousands of words and then photographed and photoetched them.
CW: Your process of word-mapping –– making connections among language, the body, and the world –– is as compelling as the images. At what point did you share your work and begin to make your artist’s books?
BG: I kept doing it because it worked for me. I met Bill Parker by chance in the Visual Studies Workshop.[3] John [Pfahl, Gordon’s husband] had heard that he should take his workshop, so I drove John there, and Bill was so fascinating that I stayed for the workshop. It occurred to me that Bill hadn't seen Niagara Falls. I thought, “We'll drive him to Niagara Falls, he’ll stay at our house, and we’ll drive him back to Rochester in time for his classes the next morning.” I took my project –– my bag of potato chips –– with me everywhere, and I went through it with Bill in the backseat. We took Bill to Niagara Falls, but he was more interested in my project. Bill loved words and etymologies of words and he just tapped right into it. He was my angel; I had a show at Visual Studies Workshop, and after that my life changed.
CW: Bonnie, I’d love to jump back to ask about Wave Man (Fig. 1), or what you call the “Protean Man.” Where does that image come from? Who is he?
BG: Oh, he's a found image! John and I went to a rummage sale, and I found this awful little snapshot of a man next to this dour woman. There’s a girl dancing around next to him, but he's standing there straightforward in this sort of stock image look. He's got his hands right at his side; he is absolutely not posing. He seemed so generic. The appeal was the suit coat. I knew that if I stretched an image of a suit coat, just a suit coat, that the dots usually made a wonderful pattern.
I bought the picture and made an etching, and then I used him for all my work. I never used another image.
CW: I’m struck by how chance — accident, incidental encounters, serendipity — reverberates through your practice.
BG: Oh, yes. Fast forward another couple of years: Bill told me that he had shown my work to his friend, who said, “My goodness, this is hypertext.” Bill and I had never heard the word before, so I rushed out to the bookstore and I got this book on [Ted] Nelson’s hypertext. In Nelson’s model, you start with a full-text search for a keyword, and then you find words that connect to that word –– the verbal links. With verbal links, you find the context of a hypertext. It's sort of like a cluster or a network of related words –– the bag of potato chips, as opposed to chip by chip. It was just a direct correlation to what I'd been doing instinctively.
CW: The poetic agency you exercise in creating resonant connections among words and meanings is inspiring –– especially now that we’re living with machine learning technologies that systematically organize data as hypertext. The dictionary aligns words in alphabetical order, but your connections demonstrate the expansive, fluid meanings revealed when reading against such systems of organization.
BG: Oh, it’s nothing if not fluid. It's sort of like poetry by default, by accident. It doesn’t mean to be poetic; it’s not what it has in mind to start out. I'm sure I'm not the only person that's done this: look up a word, look up a word, extend and repeat. I know there are kindred spirits out there. But that brings me around to the present because I'm still holding that in mind. I still like potato chips. I'm still into it, full-tilt.
[1] I would like to thank Courtney Grim, Roberley Bell, and Jim Morris for making this interview possible.
[2] Denise Levertov, “Technique and Tune-up,” in New & Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992), 93.
[3] William Parker (1932–2009) was an artist, educator, scholar, and a renowned authority in the history of photography and Jungian interpretive analysis of visual art.
[4] D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s images of fish morphology were first published in his opus On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917) and were reproduced in Mathematics (New York: Time, Inc., 1963).
Caroline Webb is a museum professional based in New York and currently serves as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is completing an MA in art history at Hunter College.
by Caroline Webb
