He’s been busy: drawing, photographing, taking notes, making unusually specific requests of the MIA librarians. Being Eric Hanson, basically, as Coffee House Press‘s artist-in-residence at the Minneapolis Institute of Art’ Research and Reference Library, a curious kid in a candy store of historic imagery, news clippings, and ephemera. Here’s the latest download from his overstuffed mind.
But first, about Eric: His illustrations and writing have appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper’s, New York Times, Rolling Stone, McSweeney’s and The Atlantic. A Book of Ages, published in 2008, is his wittily curated collection of moments in the lives of the famous. He also creates children’s books. He will discuss his MIA residency and present new work inspired by it on Thursday, June 19th at 7pm in the MIA’s Friends Community Room, during the MIA’s Third Thursday: Get Local event. You’re invited. Until then, you have his weekly musings, which you can follow here on MIA Stories, or over at CHP In The Stacks.
In The Stacks with Eric Hanson: Material and Metaphor
We seldom conjure ideas out of thin air. A library is our collective memory. I tried to anticipate what I’d want to look for on my first morning, but one found thing always suggests a dozen other things. I expected the Minneapolis Institute of Art’ art library would be one of those endless warrens of crammed shelves. The kind of place where you want to leave a trail of string or breadcrumbs to find your way out again. It’s not like that. It’s a clean, dry, undusty, well lit, new space. Accordion shelves of art books and catalogs raissonés part with the touch of a button. The entire history of art fits into a space you might expect to contain the medical records of a medium-size clinic. This was not the library visualized by Jorge Luis Borges.
Assistant Librarian Jessica McIntyre showed me around on this first morning. But looking for myself is key to my process. From years of combing used bookstores I have an eye for what kind of book contains what sort of imagery, judging by the narrow spine end it shows on the shelf. Looking for myself also leaves room for surprises. I’d thought about what I hoped to find and sent some ideas ahead of me, but laundry lists are always deviated from once I’m looking. Reading these notes again I wonder how I thought they’d make sense to anyone but me, but the list-making did help me plan.
I look for photographs but I want unstudied, offhand, or simple formal documentary photos. Not art photography; photography of art. I avoid “Great Photographs” because they’ve already achieved their best form. Just as it seems pointless to draw a drawing.
That said, I do get a lot from studying drawings. I wound up spending part of this first day looking at the foliage in some of the drawings by Caspar David Friedrich (whose figures always appear like statues set in a landscape) and Veronese, and then at the trees and the foliage in photographs of great Baroque architecture, then the trees framing famous gardens, framing the statuary at Versailles. The context rather than the subject. (I also drew the statuary.) Photos contain everything within that seen frame, not just the subject. I saw figures walking along Italian streets, oblivious of the great architecture around them, and I wanted to draw the oblivious walkers as much as the architecture.
In these big old art books, published in a period when great art arrived in Des Moines and St. Paul in books, primitively photographed and printed, often in black and white, it’s the arrangement of figures you notice in the art. You can’t see the brushstrokes. So I drew this choreography, and a few gestures. I drew fragments of ancient and rococo statuary, hands, arms, but mostly heads. All of it material for some subsequent metaphor. Maybe I would combine the lopped heads with a background suggestive of pre-Revolutionary France?