The Father Costume
Ben Marcus (fiction) and Matthew Ritchie (images)
(Artspace Books) $20
An artist book has come to mean something quite specific, something apart from a book containing images of the artist’s work with commentary by one scholar or another. It means a book that calls the whole idea of the book into question, that takes nothing on faith–not plot, or sequence, or even something residing between two covers.
I have seen artist books that come apart into pieces resembling a game, that fit into a teacup, that happen randomly within a deck of cards. A thoughtful artist book, often a limited edition or single object, is a beautiful thing.
It is also a confounding thing, and some recent examples have taken this concept to new places by including writers who are willing to pull apart language and story in the same way so that form and function meet. Rebecca Brown’s Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary is the story of the author’s mother’s illness and death told through a series of medical definitions; it is beautifully produced in letterpress, an old-fashioned technique that alludes to both authority (hence the dictionary) and painstaking work (hence the obsessive recording of disintegration), by Chris Stern and Jules Remedios Faye (of the Grey Spider Press in Sedro Woolley).
And now, the artist/writer team of Matthew Ritchie and Ben Marcus throw The Father Costume into the ring, and it has the distinct feel of a challenge to readers: How do you function when all your expectations are thwarted?
There is something like a plot, with a father and two sons and an absent mother who has perhaps disappeared down something called a “kill-hole.” It takes place in a world that is both recognizable and not, with intimations of a hostile environment and tyrannical control from above, conditions we are familiar with but never in this particular form. Embedded in it is the almost-archetypal story of the ill-favored son; where the father and the brother are fluent in fabric-languages, the narrator is not. “I had a language problem,” he laconically says, noting carefully all the ways in which he cannot participate in the family rituals that include “tap[ping] out low-altitude language on the floor,” and “sounds… barked into a stippled leather box.”
In Marcus’ world, objects such as water and landscape contain language that can be read through “the proper cloth filter.” What these things say, we never learn; their importance eludes us as they seem to elude the narrator. The commonest elements of everyday are as strange as can be: Bodies are as changeable as clothes (the titular “costume”), and language is physical and disease-bearing. When the narrator tells us, “The current was troubled enough to break up these… faces as it pulled us along,” he is not simply talking about meteoric conditions. Even his not-so-buried wish to kill his father takes on unimaginable metaphoric flight.
The art that accompanies Marcus’ text does more than question the idea of illustration, but rather inverts it, shatters it, rebirths it into a new costume. Ritchie has created layers of grainy atmospheric photography scribbled over with diagrams, some of which look like football strategy, some more like chemical equations, sometimes with an illegible and telling word (suffocation? decomposition?) floating around in it. Bodies merge into landscape. Not every image is interesting, but most are compelling. Every so often, you can actually decipher something–a landscape, a group of Aryan-looking officers–that feels perversely literal-minded, as if the artist were throwing you a fake bone, urging you to feel comfortable in a minefield.
These images lead you, instead of deeper into the story, very nearly away from it. This is anything but illustration in service of a text. It is illustration in spite of text, against a text that tends to work in specifically visual language, as when the narrator says, “I prefer a picture to a written report.” Which is not to say, by any means, that it doesn’t work. It works very well, in that the images deepen the sense of strangeness and foreignness, reminding the reader of fiction’s deep, potentially drowning, potential. We do not have “the proper cloth filter” to decode this book; it doesn’t make the reading any less thrilling.