ROBERT CREELEY & FRANCESCO CLEMENTE’S ANAMORPHOSIS


It’s nice to see that the 2River has posted an online version of Creeley and Clemente’s collaboration Anamorphosis. Published by the Gagosian Gallery in an edition of 1,500 copies in 1997 to accompany an exhibition by the artist. While the online version states the size of the paintings (46 x 92 inches) the sense of scale and color is lost, the typography abominable. I believe that there is a lot of room for improvement in the digital world and that there is a lot of potential for online collaborations between writers and visual artists, but curiously, the medium hasn't really caught on. 

The book is a nice oversized landscape format with poems on the verso and images on the recto and a generous amount of white space between them. As Barbara Montefalcone noted at the Collaboration and Artists’ Books Conference in Caen, Creeley’s distance from his collaborators was a critical part of his process. Works were often conceived through the mail, correspondence, an exchange mediated by a great deal of time and space as opposed to the live or what Bill Berkson calls the “hands-on” approach to collaboration. Check it out online here.
—KS

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