OPEN THE BOOK
ARTIST DIANE SAMUELS TURNS WORKS OF LITERATURE INSIDE OUT IN A DRAMATIC PROCESS OF CREATIVE REWRITING THAT HIGHLIGHTS THE INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WRITER AND READER IN A PAINSTAKING HOMAGE TO THE ULTIMATE ACT OF CREATIVITY: WRITING.
Artist Diane Samuels turns works of literature inside out in a dramatic process of creative rewriting that highlights the intimate relationship between writer and reader in a painstaking homage to the ultimate act of creativity: writing.
WHEN I open a book, I open my life,” says artist Diane Samuels. “I find worlds to explore beyond my own. Doors open to experience solace and pleasure and joy.” Writers and readers the world over can surely relate to that feeling of escape that so often accompanies the creative, imaginative, even spiritual engagement with a book. But the Pittsburgh-based visual artist takes that experience a step further with her series of art pieces One Book, One Drawing, which she has been slowly creating for nearly a decade.
Samuels is primarily a visual artist, but she is also an equally committed reader and activist. Her artistic practice is a unique form of creative rewriting that involves transcribing every word of a published poem, novel, essay, or play in her beautiful microscript, making ekphrastic works, often on handmade paper, that are monumental in size or scale. Samuels typically devotes more than a year to each major work in a process that begins with reading the book from start to finish, then reading it again, this time slowly, out loud, recording herself while she puts her pen to paper and rewrites one phrase, one line, one sentence at a time.
“When I read a line or a sentence from a book out loud, I hear the music of the sentence or the line in a way that I don’t hear it when I am reading to myself,” she says.
In The Arabian Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern and Indian stories nearly three thousand pages long that was compiled in Arabic three centuries ago, the beautiful Scheherazade survives her captivity at the hands of King Shahryar by telling a sequence of stories that lasts 1,001 nights. Samuels transforms this epic of world literature in a work titled Scheherazade, which is made up of more than ten thousand fragments of paper and resembles a carpet with a bloody crimson center and gold edging. Samuels has copied out the book’s text onto the paper in a spiraling microscript, thus bringing the book’s 1,001 stories together into a single, transporting narrative.
On a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency in 2013, Samuels created Metamorphoses, Ovid after the Roman poet’s magnum opus. The poem contains 11,995 lines, including a prologue that begins: “spin me a thread from the world’s beginning down to my
own lifetime, in one continuous poem.” Samuels transcribed the entire poem onto a single “thread” of paper measuring a kilometer in length. We see a “ball” of paper thread washed with a hint of pale green watercolor representing land and immediately understand that the artist has, in fact, wound Ovid’s poem into the shape of our globe. To read it would require unraveling the world.
Samuels chooses books from her extensive personal library in her home in Pittsburgh as well as her husband’s antiquarian collection. She also draws inspiration from the exiled writers who come to live for a time at City of Asylum, the nonprofit she cofounded with her husband, Henry Reese, in 2004. City of Asylum offers a home, stipend, and transitional support to exiled writers on the city’s North Side. The organization also runs Alphabet City, a programming space and bookstore housed in a former Masonic temple where Samuels regularly attends readings.
Often it is the first line of a work that compels her. For instance: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” At more than seven feet in height, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman contains all 438 pages of the poem, each one handwritten in green ink along a single line that rises from the drawing’s base like individual blades of grass in a field. Samuels was inspired to begin the work during a reading by Chinese poet Huang Xiang, a City of Asylum writer in exile who read from the first edition on the 150th anniversary of the poem’s publication.
Calling the drawing “a literal embodiment of the poem’s central metaphor and theme ‘One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word EnMasse,’” Samuels sees herself and the viewer of her work in dialogue with each other and the world.
The relationship between the individual and “the other,” as well as the natural world, was the inspiration for tackling Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale, which begins with one of literature’s most famous first lines: “Call me Ishmael.” Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Herman Melville unfurls like a forty-seven-foot wave. The 209,117 words of the novel are handwritten in blue ink, seeming to float on strips of multicolored paper like foamy ripples on the surface of the sea.
In confronting Samuels’s work, we are seeing and reading. We are examining fragments and details, taking in the parts and the whole simultaneously. We are invited to follow her line of microscript across the paper, and we must move our bodies to take in the size and scale of the work.
After Samuels heard Richard Powers read from his latest novel, The Overstory, in May 2018 at Alphabet City, she tackled her most recent Herculean work. Samuels loved both the form that the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel took as well as its content, not least because Powers references and quotes from several literary works that she already transcribed, including those by Ovid and
Whitman. She appreciated the double entendre in Powers’s title—referring to both the definition of an overstory in dendrology and the structure of the novel, which has an overarching narrative and nested stories within it, much like The Arabian Nights.
The novel begins, “First there was nothing. Then there was everything.”
The Overstory, Richard Powers features white microscript on top of densely textured shades of burgundy, sienna, brown, gold, and green, which is suggestive of the layers of earth, bark, and leaves that Powers describes containing past, present, and future. At 160 feet in length, the work appears either as a scroll or a tree stump, depending on how it is displayed.
For this piece, Samuels wanted to work with materials that had a relationship to one another and the novel. Working as she always does with recycled paper, Samuels mounted “The Overstory, Richard Powers” on silk and backed it with mulberry paper. Silkworms do their handiwork in mulberry trees—the tree Powers associates with one of his characters, Mimi Ma, who inherited a Chinese scroll from her father and carries it with her in the story.
The four sections in Powers’s novel—Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds—reference the circular system of nourishment and growth in a tree; when we view the artwork from above, we can see the sections like growth rings in a tree. In Roots, Powers introduces nine characters in eight distinct stories.
Samuels creates roots for these stories that run adjacent to one another for fourteen feet. The roots include leaf rubbings from the nine trees associated with each character surrounding a central image of the needles and cones of the Sequoia sempervirens on the work’s verso, like historiated initials in illuminated manuscripts. The transcription of the Crown section’s text is written on strips of paper glued across other barklike strips to resemble branches; the Seeds section drops and wiggles down through the completed transcription of the previous two sections, stopping at Roots.
Both Powers and Samuels are magnifying a theme of our time: the struggle against powerful forces that seem bent on destroying the only things that can save us. How can this struggle find expression in a literary and artistic work? Powers writes a hopeful message near the end of the novel that includes a quotation from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “They will come to think like rivers and forests and mountains. They will grasp how a leaf of grass encodes ‘the journeywork of the stars.’” Samuels shares that hope. “Reading fiction teaches empathy,” she says.
In other pieces, Samuels has transcribed work by Homer, Shakespeare, and Gertrude Stein, as well as 198 of her favorite poems in Poetry Quilt, which measures more than seven feet tall. In each, Samuels honors the writer and engages with writing beyond reading— opening the book to reveal the worlds contained on every page.