I have been captivated by pictures in dictionaries for quite some time; I imagine because dictionary pictures promise a utopian ordering of the world into perfectly legible Platonic diagrams.
Many years ago, I found an old dictionary in a used bookstore, extracted all the pictures from it, and pasted them on 5×8 index cards. I thought they might come in handy later as material for collages or as reference sources for drawings and paintings. I never got around to using them for that purpose, but at some point it dawned on me that what I had thought was merely an archiving process had generated a set of readymade collages that did not require further elaboration.
The real usefulness of this exercise turned out to be that it alerted me to the hidden-in-plain-sight strangeness of the alphabetical aggregation of images in illustrated dictionaries. The marvel of “objective chance” Breton had discovered in Lautremont (“the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”) is present multifold in illustrated dictionaries but obscured by the dispersal of the images across text-laden pages. Once the text is removed, provacative analogical juxtapositions emerge.
See Section originated as an effort to digitally “X-ray” a complete dictionary and reveal in situ the montages latent in it. The idea was to scan the pages of a dictionary, remove the text, and keep the pictures in place in a transparent block. I wanted to create a radiograph of the lexical unconscious.
As long as the only scanner I had at my disposal was a plain flatbed that scanned a page at a time, this was a daunting proposition. It was not until I acquired a scanner with an auto document feeder that the project became feasible.
Even so, it took months to process an entire dictionary.
Layering every image in the dictionary produced an extremely dense montage.
To alleviate the congestion, I have divided the results into a separate montage for each letter from A to W and one for XYZ
The whole set is compiled into an artist’s book. T-shirt versions available.
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