Walker Publishing Filed to Design

Catalogue for the exhibition Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts. Image courtesy Ben Schwartz.

On Designing Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts

The Greek artist Jannis Kounellis was a leading figure in the 1960–’70s Italian Arte Povera movement. The term, which literally translates to “Poor Art,” was coined by curator Germano Celant and describes a group of artists who worked with ubiquitous materials (rope, canvas, cotton, dirt, etc.) as opposed to more traditional art-making elements like marble or canvas. Situated among these artists (including Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Alighiero Boetti), Kounellis operated as a bit of an anomaly. Yes, the artist used “poor” materials throughout his oeuvre, but often did so at a grand, dramatic, or monumental scale. Symbols and motifs reappeared, alluding to more classical forms of art such as painting, Greek sculpture, and theater, which created an atmosphere that felt more baroque or neoclassical than everyday. Kounellis was a great admirer of these traditions, and it is this combination of interests — his ability to seamlessly fuse the sacred and profane — that made me so excited to delve into his work.

Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts, on view at the Walker Art Center from October 14, 2022 to February 26, 2023, is a sweeping survey of the artist’s nearly 50 year career, featuring works across a variety of media from painting to sculpture to performance. In the early stages of the exhibition planning process, curator Vincenzo de Bellis planned to focus the show on the artist’s performances, but due to the unfortunate passing of Kounellis in 2017, the strategy shifted. As de Bellis states, “the exhibition is more like an ‘introspec-tive’ than a retrospective, and it approaches the experience of Kounellis’s art through several themes that recur throughout his long career.”

In my initial conversations with Vincenzo, there was the inclination to make a more traditional catalog, but I kept returning to a sort of open-ended phrase that I was curious to complete: “the catalog as…” It’s a way of thinking ingrained in me from a mentor and the previous design director at the Walker, Emmet Byrne. Some of my favorite catalogs from the museum frame the content as something else… The Quick and The Dead (text book), Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites (lexicon), Graphic Design Now In Production (Whole Earth Catalog), etc. Approached in this way, the book remains in service to the exhibition, but is imbued with the possibility to communicate something additional about the artist and the work, purely through form. 

My initial inclination was to foreground the six acts from the title, an organizing device that stems from the number of acts in a Greek tragedy. We tried to situate the content accordingly, at one point even exploring the use of a tab system to make this division more explicit, but ultimately realized it couldn’t be organized in a way that made sense. The attempt led us to talk about Kounellis’ life, not as a tragedy, but more so as a comedy… but that didn’t seem right either. As we thought about different genres of stories that might frame the life of the artist, we felt that the most appropriate was the epic, and perhaps most notably The Odyssey. It was a connection that made sense on several levels. Kounellis often considered himself a Ulysses-like figure in his writings, and viewed his departure from his homeland and eventual return as a sort of hero’s journey, “I'm an old Ulysses without Ithaca in love with the weight of art.”

The research process led me from Homer’s Ulysses to Joyce’s, a nice connection I can only credit to too broad of a Google search. I became enamored with the physical appearance of Joyce’s Ulysses from 1922: the thick stout size, aquatic blue cover, and unwieldy, untrimmed pages. I included it in a presentation to Vincenzo, who immediately knew that this is what the catalog needed to be. We began to think of the catalog as Ulysses, as a classic piece of literature, and worked backwards from there. We wanted the book to feel soft, supple, easy to handle, something one would read rather than rest on a coffee table. It helped that Vincenzo had commissioned some wonderfully insightful texts on the artist, and we loved that the form would emphasize this new scholarship.

It felt like we had a starting point: the dimensions of the book, the soft cover, and the untrimmed fore edge — almost the total opposite from where we began. In the original Ulysses there is a unique dust jacket that folds around all sides of the cover which we tried to reproduce for Kounellis, but were unable to with the size of the print run. We settled for a jacket that folds down from a larger sheet giving the object an extra “padded” feeling. It was helpful to have such a strong reference to consult for small decisions that I would have otherwise lost sleep over. Like, do we print a color flood on the inside of the dust jacket… Joyce didn’t so we won’t. The book uses one paper throughout (thanks to Sebastiaan from Colour & Books for getting the images to look so good) and is printed in black in white (more technically, a duo-tone black and white). I liked that the simplicity of the materials offset the more classic design, balancing the high and low as Kounellis did in his work.

The other big move in the book (literally, big) are the words that traverse multiple pages at the start of each essay. Ulysses had several designs throughout its different editions, but the first American edition looms large. I liked the idea of taking bits and pieces from various versions of the novel allowing ours to fall somewhere between a mashup and an homage. The designer of the American edition, Ernst Reichl, uses large drop caps to start each chapter. It was a gesture that was “highly praised at the time of its publication, and [...] has gone on to represent a kind of incipient modernity in American book design, particularly in typographic and publication histories.” I wanted to carry these drop caps one step further into “drop words.” I was excited to see how this approach overlapped with works from Kounellis such Untitled (1996) which features five massive steel plates each with a large letter, or his early painted “poems”. In these paintings, letters become form without meaning, and in a way, the letters alone on individual spreads in the book do the same. Graphically, the letters add a sense of drama which ties back to the title of the show. 

The design move made its way on the cover… a giant K that starts out “KOUNELLIS.” I liked its striking simplicity and sense of intrigue, but also felt nervous about its minimalism. I regained confidence about the design thinking about it among a niche genre of novels with large letters on the cover such as Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel. Louis Luthi did a wonderful job researching these covers in his book A Die with Twenty Six Faces. The cover also reminded me of a piece from Kounellis’s exhibition at the Parasol Unit Foundation in London: a large scale labyrinth in the shape of a K. Kounellis compared the form to a cross, whereas another critic saw it as a reference to Kafka (a favorite author of Kounellis), or the tenth letter of the Greek alphabet (the home he left behind). When I presented the idea for the cover, everyone on the team seemed really excited about it, and so it stuck. 

The “drop words”, revealed letter by letter, reinforce one final motif that can be seen throughout the work of Kounellis: the fragment. Throughout the artist’s oeuvre, fragments reveal themselves in a literal way: doorways jammed with chunks of stone, pieces of statue, and shards of wood, or in performances where musicians were tasked to repeat a fragment of a song for the action's duration. But taken one step further, fragmentation becomes an approach, a state of tension or drama. As Kounellis puts it, “We are left with the fragmentary. This is a dramatic state, or a state experienced in a dramatic way, because we want neither to abandon it nor to betray it.” For me, it alludes to the idea that understanding never happens all at once, but over the course of many pages, or maybe many years, or maybe never at all. But there is something to relish in this fragmentation, “In the extension of these fragments you find others and others talk to you, this is reality.” 

A book of this scale can only be seen as a collection of many fragments:  conversations, ideas, hours, and people. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who allowed me to be a part of this project: Emmet Byrne, Vincenzo deBellis, Jake Yuzna, Pamela Johnson, Ian Babineau, William Hernandez Luege, Sebastiaan Hanekroot, Michele Abrigo, Siri Engberg, Mary Ceruti, Coral Saucedo Lomeli, Geoff Han, Kate Arford, Aryn Beitz, Meg Miller, and the wonderful team at the Walker Art Center.▪︎

Learn more about the exhibition and get your own copy of the catalogue at the Walker Shop