"blessed are the nonchalant" (2024)
Essay accompanying the exhibition PROOFREAD, works by Yvonne Mullock, Fine Arts Building Gallery, Edmonton, AB, January-February 2024

“You've decided upon an abecedary as format, you've informed me of the themes, but I don't have your questions, and in this, I have only been able to think a bit beforehand about the themes. Well, answering a question without reflecting beforehand is rather inconceivable to me. […] But anything goes in this, so let’s begin, A-B-C-D, whatever you want.”

—Gilles Deleuze [1]


A.
If the author and illustrator Edward Gorey is to be trusted, and with a degree in French Literature (Harvard, ’50) I’m inclined to think he might be, a direct translation of one among the French Beatitudes en Anglais reads “blessed are the nonchalant.” [2] This phrase, absent in the King James Bible of my Anglophone upbringing, strikes me as a good spot to start when thinking about Yvonne Mullock’s recent work, presented here in the exhibit PROOFREAD.


B.
We read left to right, along the wall, a series of cut-out letters; movable type, composed of socks and bras and shirts and pants. They spell out messages:
        The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
        How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!
        Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.
These phrases containing each letter of the alphabet—pangrams—are set at the beginning of each day by the gallery employees. From there, however, the public may intervene, arranging the letters as they choose. Will the gallery walls become a space for political protest? Declarations of love? Obscene bathroom stall graffiti? Haiku? Will letters be thrown about haphazardly, as if we are infinite monkeys at typewriters, producing gibberish as we try to bang out Shakespeare? Or might we pose like angels at the Tower of Babel, deliberately scrambling each others’ phrases? Mullock has provided us the alphabet and the space to deploy it, but the messages will be ours to spell as we see fit.  


C. Changes and Disappearances
Artists have deployed alphabets before. One thinks to the Czech Devětsil group, inheriting the interdisciplinary and experimental enthusiasms of Dada, and to Vítězslav Nezval’s cycle of poems Abeceda, with their words playfully responding to their carriers, the letter forms, in a surreal homage. Nezval’s words inspire the typographer Karel Teige, who collaborates with photographer Karel Paspa on a ‘photo ballet’ starring dancer Milča Mayerová becoming the letters herself in illustrations printed alongside the original poems, simultaneously witnessed and read.
        One can follow their thread to the 1970s, to Italian artist Tamaso Binga who has utilized the alphabet for over fifty years in her ongoing project to dismantle the patriarchal implications of language. For one early work, she shaped her nude body into the letters on a set of flashcards. Later, taking these same shapes, she inserted herself into the illustrations typical of a child’s school workbooks. She reframes Mayerová’s contortions within the alphabetic ballet such that we might see such images not as woman subsumed into text, but as text originating from women; in the beginning was the word, and the word was Binga. In other artworks and writings she playfully rebels against the gendered spellings of the Italian language, suggesting the right to recast the inadequacies of patriarchal systems in the same way one recasts the lead of a worn out font. No need to suffer broken type and missing letters—we made it once, we can make it again, differently, better.
        Binga’s American contemporary Martha Rosler performs a similar undoing of language in her video Semiotics of the Kitchen. She recites an alphabet of implements with deadpan affect, demonstrating their use: Apron… Bowl… Chopper… and so forth. As the video goes on, however, these actions become increasingly violent and strange. By the time she gets to W, Rosler runs out of implements and becomes the final letters herself, flailing her arms with just-contained rage. After slashing a Z through the air with her kitchen knife, Rosler finishes by folding her arms across her apron, before opening her hands upward, raising her eyebrows and cocking her head in an ambivalent shrug.
        What does it mean to question what language has become, or how it is deployed? When taken apart in the ways demonstrated by Teige, Mayerová, Binga, and Rossler—deconstructed into sounds and gestures and forms—the viewer becomes conscious of the otherwise overlooked within the ubiquity of our speech. The letterforms are themselves constructs, created by a long line of others before us, and are now millennia away from their sources as more literal hieroglyphs and pictograms. What does it mean to recall the origins of the letter A as an Egyptian eagle? Or the letter S as an inundated garden? If I imagine the concept of Mullock’s alphabet, and the repetition of its letters when printed, I also think of their difference. What does it mean to make an M from a frayed pair of stockings rather than an owl? How is the language changed when it is made from socks rather than teeth and eyes?    


D.
Mullock casts ten artists to ink and print her letters. The inkers start their job wearing uniforms formed from circular pieces of fabric, pure white when they begin but becoming inky as the process continues. When each letter has been sufficiently rolled with ink, they are positioned for printing on the press, a grey floor painted with overlapping outlines of each letter to indicate their location. Once in place, the letters are covered with a sheet of paper, a layer of packing, and a stiff tympan likewise painted with the locations of the plates below. The printers then arrive in their black costumes, which reveal their square construction each time they prepare to print, raising their arms like members of a Busby Berkeley chorus line around the edges of the press. They proceed to move across the painted surface, a sort of dance floor, clogging the ink into the surface of the paper underfoot as they go. The inkers and printers come together to remove the completed prints after the dance is complete. Clad in their minimalist black and white chasubles, the inkers and printers evoke Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet costumes, the habits of some obscure religious order, or perhaps the hooded performers of Beckett’s Quad I + II. Like all of these forerunners, they are silent as they work. There is communication though—in discrete gestures, glances back and forth between each other and the camera, in eyes cast down at each other’s feet as they dance.
        My thoughts turn to Mullock’s previous works: recordings of phonetically transcribed bird calls, soft sculptures for infants to crawl on and explore, or the hosting of an Arabian horse named Shere Kaan, who she assisted as he operated another of her custom printing presses, embossing sheets of paper with inked Smithbilt cowboy hats. On Fogo Island, she performs a requiem procession for the extinct Great Auk, with the unstated hope their ghosts might understand the sentiment—a possibility which paranormal experts do in fact support, given that spirits can and will communicate in the language to which they are spoken.
        Mullock is an artist out on a limb, having faith that some kind of transfer is indeed happening in the interactions created or enabled by her work. There is something here that is absolutely serious, in the way that all faith tends to be. But it’s also uncanny—an artist creating work through collaboration and about communication, but with and for audiences that don’t speak back. Her works remind us that roads to understanding are many, and need not be logical to lead us to our destination. There’s a lesson here, and it strikes like lighting—the instant flash, and then the delay of the thunder, rattling the rafters in the aftermath. The humour in Mullock’s works might move this way too—the zigzag shock of the koan, which untethers our dependence on illusions of certainty, or the limerick which causes us to spit out our drink, breaking the ego’s hold on the body for the length of our laughter.


E. Ensembles and Multiplicities
Yvonne Mullock: Chester-born, English, of a long line of dairy farmers; landed immigrant, presently Calgarian; a daughter, sibling, friend, partner, costumer and dresser for theatre and TV, “artist and maker of things.” Like all of us she is many things to many people. And these things she makes will mean different things for each of us too, even if we handle the same letters--différence all the way down. We might spell the same words with her alphabet, but we are heightened with the awareness that they’ve been other words before for other people, other voices, other rooms…

…or perhaps we let ourselves forget as we write—one can’t always get so hung up on things. Blessed are the nonchalant, you know?

***

Z
On this edge of farewell, as we ready our good nights,
flashes the tenth muse—old toothy, the bachelor, pulling back his bow--
does each parting have such bite? Well yes, despite
your zigging up the Eiffel Tower, the reaper zags up, too, you know! [3]

***

— Luke Johnson, 2024

Images of Yvonne Mullocks's work from this exhibit can be found on her website.


[1] Gilles Deleuze, in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet, directed by Pierre-André Boutang (1988-89; Strasbourg: Arte, broadcast 1994). This translation is a hybrid of that of Charles J. Stivale and the English closed-captioning on the SUB-TIL Productions release of the documentary.

[2] Edward Gorey, in Clifford Ross & Karen Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey (New York: Abrams, 1996) 40.

[3]  ‘Z’, from Vítězslav Nezval, Abeceda (Prague: J. Otto, 1926), 54. This is a provisional translation from the Czech by author, with apologies to the poet and my proudly fluent Czechoslovakian ancestors.