The New York Times article
By Randy Kennedy
nytimes.com

‘Here It Is’: Two Artists on Their Mind-Stretching Art Book

The Conceptualist pioneer Lawrence Weiner and the London designer Jonathan Ellery met by chance in a Berlin bar. They wound up with a new book. But it was not a soft landing.

“Ideally,” the painter Frank Auerbach once said, “one should have more material than one can possibly cope with.”

For more than 50 years, the artist Lawrence Weiner has worked with a primary material so plentiful as to be practically endless: words. And he has made his language-based works on so many different kinds of surfaces — walls, floors, windows, matchbooks, manhole covers, hats, drinking glasses, industrial fish crates that wander through ports like vagabond billboards — it sometimes seems as if there is no place where a Lawrence Weiner could not conceivably appear. But Mr. Weiner, who turns 77 in February, has long held a special reverence for artist’s books, of which he has made dozens, some in humble editions so small he distributed them himself by leaving them behind in coffee shops. (“I still do,” he says. “I just don’t tell anyone.”)

Mr. Weiner is one of the fathers of Conceptual art, which, beginning in the 1960s, attempted to turn its back on object-making and instead present ideas themselves, in the most evanescent of forms, as art works. His foundational 1968 statement helped set the terms of the movement, or at least the terms of the debate over its terms:

“1. The artist may construct the piece.

“2. The piece may be fabricated.

“3. The piece need not be built.

“Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.”

If you think of this three-point proposition as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of the Conceptualist creed, Mr. Weiner’s work has often existed in Holy Ghost mode. Works like “An Object Tossed From One Country to Another” (1969) or “Stacks of Severed Trees Laid Beside a Fissure in the Earth” (2007) remain purely linguistic sculpture, verbal descriptions of actions or states not enacted or embodied; an object is not tossed; trees are not severed.

In 2004, during a visit to Berlin, slightly bored and perched on a bar stool, Mr. Weiner struck up a conversation with a man next to him, the London designer and artist Jonathan Ellery, a founder of Browns studio. The two stayed in touch, writing, seeing each other when they happened to be in the same city. Their deepening conversations led to the idea of making a book together, but for years the plan seemed destined to stay a kind of Holy Ghost. “It very well might have never happened, because we’re both at ease with things that aren’t supposed to be,” Mr. Ellery, 54, says. “But then it came together.”

The highly anticipated book, “Here It Is, Here It Aint,” to be published in January by Browns Editions, is an elliptical 68-page waltz of words and images that shimmies poetically away from attempts to elucidate narrative or metaphor, though it may be offering some considerations about the present political climate. (Mr. Weiner’s phrase “With a Lateral Move Forward,” in bright red lettering, is the first thing the reader sees.) It is the first collaboration in many years by Mr. Weiner, who has previously made books with fellow artists like Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari and writers like the French scholar Luc Vezin.

Mr. Ellery recently visited Mr. Weiner’s studio in Manhattan’s West Village. These are edited excerpts from their conversation.

RANDY KENNEDY At the time you met Lawrence in Berlin, did you know who he was?

JONATHAN ELLERY No idea. Just the other guy at the bar. A perfect way of meeting, really.

LAWRENCE WEINER We got to know each other and we kept talking. And I must say I like to work with people who are good at what they do, who know how to do things. I relate it to brushing your teeth before you go out on a date.

ELLERY [Laughs.] There’s an analogy!

WEINER I mean there’s a dignity and respect that should be involved in making something. In getting it right. Making the design suit the gravity of what you’re trying to put out.

KENNEDY You’ve collaborated often on books, but this is the first time with someone who hails primarily from the design world.

WEINER People often see art and design as very, very different worlds, but I disagree. Every time you make a work of art and have to show it to somebody, there are theatrics involved. Theatrics require a sense of design.

ELLERY Lawrence has always been well loved in the design world but mostly, I think, because he works with type. It suits designers. They’re not thinking much deeper. They just like the aesthetic: ‘Oh, it’s type!’ But for me, Lawrence was the only person I’d ever worked with who had done more books than I had. His team was as sharp as me and my team about ink and paper and binding, about smell and feel.

WEINER Which was lucky. But I think we’re missing the point of what’s worthwhile to talk about. It’s not about the specifics. It’s about the concept. Why would you throw a very talented designer and, it turns out, a reasonably talented artist together in the same pot? It’s what we thought we were going to get that interested me.

KENNEDY What did you hope for? Many years ago you described the ideal condition of being an artist as being ‘perplexed in public … because the artist was to be invested in things that did not have a pat answer.’

WEINER We’re stuck in an aesthetic now in the art world where people have the answer and then try to rationalize the question. We did this in order to enter something into the culture in a way that the culture has to adapt in order to use it. Well, that’s what art should do!

ELLERY This morning I found an email Lawrence sent me a couple of years ago, when we were really working toward something. He said: ‘My envisagement of the work would be like one of those people on the street with a cardboard box and three walnut shells and the public is supposed to find which shell the pea is under, very much like three-card monte. And all of the images that inspired you would be translated into a composite image, a development that would allow us to speak of our anguish and speak of our aesthetics in a presentation of line and form.’ It ends: ‘I think that with the inherent talents we have, we can come up with an innate book that, when found, requires no explanation other than itself, because in fact it does not refer to anything but itself.’

KENNEDY Do you think the book feels like a document of its time?

ELLERY Through most of it there was Brexit and Trump, and we enjoyed the freedom of being international when it seems that no one wants anyone to be international anymore. So that was certainly the backdrop, certainly in our minds. As for the book itself …

WEINER I don’t really know what ‘a document of its time’ means. I think of this as two people who have a tendency to tell the truth and of the possibility that truth might collect. I’m very pleased we got a book out of this. I thought we were going to lose our friendship in the middle, if you want to know the truth. It didn’t look good.

ELLERY It’s not easy to put two strong sensibilities together, even if the people tend to get on with each other.

WEINER This was about making each one of these pages into the right thing without having to explain it. You miss it sometimes, you don’t see it the same way. What can you do?

ELLERY There’s a page of mine in the book with writing that says ‘A soft landing is not a given.’ And it wasn’t. It’s wonderful to have this book in the world, but it was quite rough along the way. As I guess it should be. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Would you, Lawrence?

WEINER Oh, God no. Not unless you’re a masochist.

Jonathan Ellery and Erik Kessels: Panning for Gold 
By Robert Urquhart

There is a stark sensitivity to the work of both Ellery and Kessels. Ellery, the provocative post-modern minimalist and Kessels, the auteur observing the vernacular. There is an urge to communicate beyond the narrow confines of a brief, towards a more nuanced poetic output that leads them and us, on a journey as they search out meaning.

Here, we find them collaborating against the backdrop of COVID and Brexit as they deal with isolation, loneliness, and upheaval from the everyday.

Ellery and Kessels are friends. They both had each other’s books on their bookshelves long before they ever met. They share the same vigour, restlessness and politic, yet the two are different in character. However, the seamlessness between the two artists revealed in this collaboration is beguiling and remarkable.

“We have quite different characters in that sense that Jonathan is quite precise, and everything is neat, and I’m a bit more involved in collecting and working with a lot of things,” says Kessels, “we just thought ‘maybe we can do something together from a distance?’ One way or another, an idea came up for my work for this, from visits to scrap metal yards and from scrapbooks. There wasn’t a very big plan behind it all, but I just needed to collaborate.”

Ellery goes further, “I think Erik and I had very different reasons for doing this work, but it’s really two things coming together; we were creating this work during Covid, which was loneliness and isolation, and on the back side of Brexit.”

There is another factor for Ellery: Ellery’s brother died during this time, a time that reignited Ellery’s relationship with Cornwall, the re-emergence of a family connection. The words you see are surfing terms, a reference to Ellery’s love of surfing. Yet it’s not just the words; there is a rhythm to the work, a gritty, gnarly quality here that speaks out to the windswept, to the B-Side, to the higgledy-piggledy, to a dusty and rusty Americana, akin to the wing-ding surf and turf of our post-industrial world.

For Kessels, this work was born of foraging to make good. “People sometimes say that I’m like an artist/designer/collector”, reflects Kessels, “I collect a lot, but that’s just stuff that I really want to use and do something with because the title of ‘collector’ is something that I find very boring: It’s boring because it’s just about the accumulation of stuff and the quantity and the fetish of it. When I find or buy stuff, I want to work with something; I want to do things with them. I want to change them in some way,” he explains. This statement appears to align the two.

This active collecting has previously led Kessels down the route of photography, but here we find him amongst the ruins of the physical. “This was also something new for me to make single objects that, in a way, don’t really have a story. The only story is that it is made from scrap and done in collaboration. In my case, I reappropriate things. Normally, these are sequences of images with a story, and they’re just like a single work made like that. But then, we exhibited this work in Amsterdam, this was the first time we got everything together, and suddenly, it became quite interesting because the words reflected on the images and brought everything together,” explains Kessels.

The exhibition in Amsterdam in 2022 was the first cross border journey for this collaboration, and the second, in London in the Autumn of 2023, provides a second meeting, and may lead to others.

Ellery and Kessels talk with heavy hearts about Brexit and the disjointedness of this political and cultural uncoupling. “My approach to the world, and the way I try and live my life, has taken a beating: The odds are not in my favour at the moment”, states Ellery.

This exhibition is a two-fingered salute to Brexit and the ties that it has severed. Ellery wants to prove that it’s still possible to work across borders, be friends, collaborate, and fly in the face of nationalism and the little Englander. This is a reoccurring theme for Ellery, Populism (2022) was a provocative and crafty wakeup call to the manipulation of society; the work here is more guttural - a brick through the window.

“Homogenization, that’s the battleground”, notes Ellery, “my work doesn’t work for an algorithm. I don’t mind admitting that I’m losing the battle, and I have been more victorious in the past, but ‘I am what I am, it is what it is’” states Ellery.

Whilst remaining provocative, Ellery also appears to place vulnerability centre stage, “Independence is important to me, but of course it comes at a price” says Ellery, “this space is something that I’ve worked hard to get to, and want to be in, however, it can be very isolating. And, if ever I stumble across someone else in this independent space, I admire their bravery.

Ellery thinks on, “Oh, I’m not going mad, there are others here! I understand the constructs of life, so this independence that allows for freedom in my work, is something that I’m very proud of.”

Back to Kessels, there is a similar urgency but a slightly more laid-back approach, “I see a big difference between us says Kessels, “but the clash is quite nice. For me, it’s really about the traces that I can find. It’s about maybe saying something about us or trying to find where we fit into this jigsaw puzzle; you build the pieces around you to explain yourself to others,” he notes.

This jigsaw puzzle is remarkable as the edges appear to blur between Ellery and Kessels. There is a sensitivity to the edit, a blunt force trauma of Ellery’s specifically designed stencil, a jazz fused entanglement of Kessels’ photographic lamination and lamentation between the two for the long lost yet not forgotten.

Kessels sums up their shared approach, “The purpose of this is to get together and play; maybe the most interesting thing is that you end up somewhere where you don’t know: You never know where you’ll end up.”

“It’s easy to play and collaborate, but it’s not enough” adds Ellery, “Something must come from it. Something that should never have been. Otherwise, admit failure and go again.”

Another Day In Paradise
By Lydia Fulton

Through an initial large and comical black hole we fall into an absolute battlefield of Jonathan Ellery’s symbols, cursive gestures, drawings, sculptures, words and photographs. These sonnets of the seemingly unremarkable, are compressed into a myriad of fragments and synapsed connections.

Screwing, masking and soft crumpling offers temporary form to the mediums captured within this softcover. Chance is accepted and is positively asserted through the elementary and provisional use of modest materials, substantiating these tactile pages into something like an archaeological dig for truth. In them Ellery silently composes a score themed around freedom, geography, money, positionality and desire.

The attraction to materials from the domestic, everyday realm is obvious: the tape and foil offers permission and freedom to move in a sculptural sense, its lack of preciousness a chance to play without the inhibition of extravagance. The traditionally taut formality of the book is overcome with disobedient, sprawling shapes that spill from its seams, straining from the corners of the rectangular page. This contradiction of form and content stretches the work to the absolute limit.

Malachite green and decadent yellow seep into an orgy of shimmery mercury; its darkening surfaces flow in burrowing streams, coaxing the promiscuous debris of truth to rise. Japanese mannequins and opulent automobiles, abandoned perspex seats and solitary hotel suites, are absolved in morsels of hand written words: an annotated map of Ellery’s solitary terrain. The silky, white pages, traditionally seen as sumptuous, are subverted by details of a burnished, severely bruised thigh and a naked man - a sense of unrestrained rupture amid the vestal canvas.

Despite its constrained format there is something performative about the nature of this work – a slow descent into and out of a two dimensional hole, to unfold a new way of thinking. The universe is full of nothing, ever expanding and ever destroying itself. A smouldering black hole.

The Graphic Rise of British Modernism
By Robert Urquhart

All life in England now is here. Wrapped in boxes. Ticked after being negotiated around a table. Subtle, crisp, empty and locked in limbo.

There is more than a slightly menacing air to these photographs of England, for they scream, to me, of the state we’re in. I say England rather than the UK because these houses, garden sheds, kitchen tables and politicians are all subtle pointers to a singular country rather than a united pact of nations.  It takes a keen eye to spot, but you need not be a sociologist to enjoy, for this book is a simple, brilliantly executed, thoughtful conversation starter about contemporary England.

There are four undefined, but clear, chapters: houses, garden sheds, kitchen tables and politicians. To unpack the relevance of these let’s look at each from a micro and macro perspective – they remind me of the 1977 Eames film, Powers of Ten, that zooms from finite to infinite.

It has long been said that an Englishman’s home is his castle. This is often to denote the importance of independent power and autonomy. However, if we look at it within the current political climate, we see another angle, that of isolation, attack and defence. From an architectural perspective, these are ordinary homes, unremarkable, conspicuous only by their vast numbers, populating the suburbs of London. They range from the Victorian, through the Edwardian and into the 1930s and are the homes of a middle class which thinks it has a voice, but actually has none. 

The garden shed has long been popular in English ­­culture as a place where amateur innovation happens. A place for ‘tinkering’ with technology, a refuge for the male of the house from his wife and children, or a den for drinking illicit supplies of homemade wine and beer and looking at pornography.

The contemporary description of this is ‘man-cave’, but that is really far too grand a title for the humble garden shed, without which no Englishman’s castle is complete.

The kitchen table. Aside from his shed, for the suburban Englishman this is the centre of home life, at the head of the table. More than a place to eat, this is the place where discussions, negotiations and business happen. This is the desktop that Steve Jobs didn’t have in mind.

The kitchen table may have taken over from the shed when it comes to tinkering with innovation; small business empires are set up and run from around its cheap wooden frame. But here, the tables are empty. No one sits here. No one is working. There is no meal on the table. These are blank canvases.

And then we come to the politicians. We see life, or do we? Here they are, leaving the types of houses we see in the first element of the book. These are classic doorstop paparazzi shots that readers of newspapers in the UK will be familiar with. These photographs tend to be a prelude to an urgent issue of some kind or other. We still take the liberty of our politicians seriously, unless they do something completely idiotic, which is often.

On the other hand, on occasion, a politician may invite photographers to their door, perhaps to show their caring homely family-man side, to prove that they exist beyond the fudge of state.

The faces here are our former Prime Minister David Cameron, our current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Prime Minister that never was, Michael Gove. The all-Conservative ‘tory-de-force’ is sabotaged here by a picture of Nigel Farage. The then-leader of the UK Independence Party – UKIP – that has shaped politics, without portfolio. Farage was involved in a light airplane crash on the day of the 2010 general election; he staggered away unscathed, as ever. Now we see the inside of a standard family car, full of the detritus of everyday life. Or perhaps it is a crime scene?

Perhaps, these are all crime scenes? I read a book with no words and yet conjured this narrative. Talking to Jonathan Ellery, the only time he interjected was to explain that the inside of the family car was Boris Johnson’s. Quite possibly a crime scene then.

We find a set of large-scale stickers interleafed within the book. We are inside a macabre comic book world where campaign colours are expected to be posted and worn.

Stuck.

The absurdity continues at comic book pace with shiny foil with the expletive demands of ‘Intrinsic Extrinsic’ and ‘Martial Art’. We then go down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole with the questioning ‘And Maybe You Are’, with rabbits bounding. We end with the quasi-religious undertones of ‘Formulaic Mass’ and ‘A Swim Beyond’. Where to stick them?

And the title. We are witness to a sharp break from the past with a thematic, formal and stylistic tone, here being set by Ellery, to reveal the fetishistic nature of English everyday life.  Britain’s civilised war is afoot here, wrapped in boxes and ready to go. Are we contained within defined borders? In many ways, we always have been.

The ‘negotiating around a table’ days are fast disappearing; the family has moved away. Yet we remain, subtle, crisp, empty and locked in limbo, atop our castles, lurking in sheds and around our kitchen table, while planes crash and crime scenes go undetected.




A Pursuit of Truth
By Lydia Fulton

The pursuit of truth is important to British artist Jonathan Ellery. 

Through the cadence of his art practice Ellery challenges the constructs of society, deftly seeking out the tensions surrounding uncomfortable realities whilst navigating the audience through a multifarious terrain to seduce a sincere discourse.

There is an alchemy of materials at use in Ellery’s work, a purposeful randomness which he delights in, together with a confidence to resist from settling upon any one medium. Sometimes he creates stand-alone sculptures: monumental brass works are dramatically side-lit then suspended, as though floating in space; other smaller works are cast directly into the floor of public places or meticulously spread out inside spotless cabinets. There are charcoal drawings, collectible objects, tape assemblages, live performance works, textiles, fanzines and special edition books. He astutely folds together techniques to construct what may at first glance seem to be straightforward statements, but soon transform into something far more complex.

In contrast to the fluidity of materials, there is a consistent development of thinking anchoring his work which can be traced from the 2005 piece 136 Points of Reference. Its inaugural manifestation was in tactile book form, followed by a show in New York City, the content for both composed of a seemingly fluid stream of thought: an edit of accumulated items from the artist’s collected memorabilia, communicating his artistic and personal sensibilities. The seed for narrative-based works was sown, and the sequential book form assumed the perfect conduit. 

In the ten years since, his work has gained momentum, producing twelve solo publications and exhibiting five shows. For Ellery, there is a delight in the sculptural objectivity of the book and the tendency to work in this form is a purposeful one. The books are accessible, akin to a catalogue, poster and billboard, as a means of directly communicating outside the cloistered realm of the museum. The narratives inside often take on a tide-like formation, spiking to an intensely fertile peak that inhabits an almost impossible space. In Constance, the intimate tale unfolds through live performance, setting the exploration of women, power and sexuality to the tempo of rock’n’roll drums. The middle crescendo is a deafening silence, coupled with the stillness of a nude: a perfectly placed shock of reality in the centre of the work.

The arrangement of formations is of continual concern to Ellery and has become a defining part of his practice. The flow of an early book, In and Out, charted the trajectory of a tiny circle transforming into a square, through a multicoloured central explosion. In The Human Condition, the starkly lit tale of morality is laid bare within a cabinet, taking us from sentiment and love through to the darkness of erotica. The relation each sculptural object, in this case rings, holds to the next is crucial. The single object becomes part of a series, intensifying the curation of order. In another more recent series, Ellery continues this theme through the production of a boxed set of five meticulously crafted books. The consequence of sequence upon narrative, the context of one title to the next, is crucial: the unnerving deviancy of Sexual Predators curiously offset by the fragility of London Garden Birds. In fact Ellery frequently wades into shady territory through his art practice, tackling a mass of disarming issues with a delicate gesture, allowing challenging topics to slowly surface.

The camera’s objective eye creates the nuanced sequence in Tribes 1. Filled with snapshots which he has taken, or of which he is the subject, their meaning left deliberately wide open for the viewer to interpret. In shifting the onus to the audience the work becomes a functioning dialogue. This sense of freedom is continued with the clusters of drawings and tumultuous tape assemblages in A Bewildered Herd. Foreboding charcoal, stickers, and fragile tape sway then dart across the page, the modesty of the charcoal separated from the ambiguous duct tape by a centrefold of silver. The materials and techniques employed are humble, chosen as means to communicate his now trademark narrative in the most democratic way. In Mergers and Acquisitions the choice of medium, a traditional cotton Tenugui cloth, ubiquitous in Japanese society, was selected for the same effect. Fuelled by the tenebrous mayhem of politics, Ellery designed a series of seven Tenugui, coupling graphic elements to form patterns and awkward alliances that would never normally come together: Black Panthers with the Federal flag, the Catholics with the Nazis. 

This tender friction continues with Populism, Ellery’s latest book, which returns to a conceptual quality first seen in 87 (an early book that appropriated numbers as characters). This 850-page tome is akin in form to an old telephone directory, a stout white cube, puncturing the seductive yet banal Helvetica typeface with three exposed arseholes controversially gaping and voluptuous. The starkness of this coupling mirrors the subversive tensions apparent throughout all of his works: a sensibility aligned to the world around us. 

The tenor of his practice is akin to that of a composer, asserting a tempo and arrangement over the fragments of his surroundings. This enduring body of work explores our relationships, our fears, our families, our dark sides. The abstract use of form, numbers, colours and shapes belies the subversive messages of social concern in his art, in which the tug against social constraints and a pre-programmed existence are recurrent themes. The more time we spend submerged in these works, the more the truth unfolds, map-like, before us, simultaneous and immediate. It is a gritty, against all the odds sort of truth, with a fervent undercurrent, shifting the responsibility of artistic interpretation to the viewer. 

In the context of contemporary art, this territory is new, and deliberately so. Ellery’s works are a pursuit for truth and a force against mortality.

Jonathan Ellery lives above his studio in Bermondsey, London.