Visit the Proteotypes website!

All the works shown below are available online at the Proteus Store.

Proteotypes is the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus, an interdisciplinary gallery and reading room in Brooklyn, New York. Proteus Gowanus develops exhibits of art, artifacts, objects and books around a yearlong theme. Related programs are held at the gallery throughout that year.

Tom La Farge is the Managing Editor of Proteotypes and Wendy Walker is Editor.

Proteotypes are publications that grow out of Proteus Gowanus exhibits and programs, with particular emphasis on publications that are designed to challenge the notion of what a book is; that emphasize the book as aesthetic object; that link art to disparate disciplines; and that juxtapose seemingly incongruous ideas to create new important meanings.

PUBLISHED WORKS

Blue Fire

In BLUE FIRE, a major new work in poetic non-fiction, Wendy Walker reexamines the case of Constance Kent, protagonist at 15 of “the Great Crime of 1860.”  Accused of murdering her younger half-brother and stuffing his body down the privy at her father’s house at Road in Wiltshire, Constance was cleared at the coroner’s inquest.  In the view of most at the time, the boy had been killed by his father and his nurse.  Yet five years later in 1865 Constance, under the influence of a priest, confessed to the crime.  Her death sentence commuted to twenty years in prison, on her release she left England to spend a further sixty years as a nurse in Australia.  The murder and the investigation inspired both Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

It also was the subject of the first true-crime book, The Great Crime of 1860, which Joseph Stapleton wrote largely to exonerate his friend, Constance’s father.  Walker has taken this book as the base text for a compositional procedure based partly on the non-fiction work of the poet Paul Metcalf and partly on the mesostics of John Cage.  She has selected one word from each line of Stapleton’s text and used them in order to create a poetic secondary text, both to bring out the patriarchal bias in his writing and to contest his version of the facts.  Then she has gone to books and documents about the case, other books that Constance is known to have read, and still others published between 1860 and 1865, and extracted passages to place facing the sections of her derived text on which they comment.  The book may thus be read in two different directions, as a consecutive poetic narrative, and as a commonplace book illustrating the mindset of the early 1860’s.

WENDY WALKER has been practicing and teaching constrained writing for fifteen years and with Tom La Farge founded and leads The Writhing Society, which meets weekly to practice these techniques at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn.  She is currently at work on Sexual Stealing, which uses a similar method to show how much the discourse of the slave-based West Indian sugar plantation permeates the originating works of English Gothic fiction.  She is the author of a novel, The Secret Service, and two collections of tales, The Sea Rabbit; or, The Artist of Life, and Stories Out of Omarie, all from Sun & Moon Press, and Knots, a selection of tales, from Aqueduct Press.

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Homomorphic Converters

Homomorphic Converters, the second pamphlet in the series 13 Writhing Machines, continues Tom La Farge’s exploration of the techniques of constrained composition, begun in Administrative Assemblages (recently reissued in a perfectbound paperback edition).  Homomorphism is new wine in old bottles, and Homomorphic Converters teaches you how to use a pre-existing form of words or of images, found or invented, to express matter radically different from what that form originally expressed.  Several procedures for homomorphic compositionare examined, including “Homovocalism” (re-using the vowels of one sentence in writing a new one), and the “Chimera” (keeping the sentence structure of one text while replacing the words with vocabulary from one, two, or three others).   “Homoikonism,” the conflation of visual forms with imagery not usually associated with those forms (a bowl of vegetables turns out to be the face of a man, when you turn it upside down), discusses the visual applications and is illustrated throughout the pamphlet by several homomorphic alphabets.

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623 Titles Without Painting

FOR FIFTY YEARS a painter, Ernst Benkert, kept notebooks in which he recorded the passages that had struck him in his reading.  From the writings of Meister Eckhart and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robertson Davies and Thomas Bernhard, Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche, Abram Tertz and Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag and Thomas Merton, from proverbs Rumanian and Haitian, from graffiti and the Upanishads, from the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, from the pages of the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books, and above all from a library of books about art, Benkert culled an extraordinary set of assertions, propositions, opinions, and definitions.  “This activity became the other side of my art.”  On each of these passages he cast a steady gaze, asking if it were true and useful, a basis on which to build an artistic practice.  From each he extracted a title, as if it were a painting.  Occasionally he follows up with a comment:  to a crack by Wilfred Sheed that people “talk about sports from morning to night for fear something else might get in,” he remarks:  “Stuart Davis used to watch baseball on TV while painting.”  Still more occasionally he adds a  second-thoughts comment, to confirm or contradict his own first one.

These quotations visit many areas of life but always return to art: the making of it, the conditions for its existence, the life of the artist.  Now Ernst Benkert has selected 623 of these passages and made a book of “titles without paintings,” a commonplace book of quotations that are anything but commonplace.  Benkert’s own point of view is never concealed and never imposed:  the passages are there to be read however one likes, continuously or at random, and any reader will find some profit in it:  a fact not known, or an idea well expressed, or a usefully irritating opinion, or a good laugh:

Ernst Benkert, born in 1928, grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, reading the Sunday comics and listening to Art Tatum records with his father, an architect.  He graduated from Harvard in 1953 after a tour of duty in occupied Japan, where he bought woodblock prints in Kyoto.  Then, after a few years of travel and painting in Europe, where he studied at the Oskar Kokoschka Summer School of Painting in Salzburg and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, he took up a two-year graduate teaching assistantship at Oberlin College.  In 1958 he met Frank and Karen Hewitt and Ed Mieczkowski, with whom in 1960 he founded the Anonima Group.  Anonima’s decade of work used the grid to investigate spatial fluctuation and optical perception; seeing itself became the matter of their art.  In 1965 their work was included in “The Responsive Eye,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  From 1966 to 1990 Benkert taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and also at the University of Vermont.  Now living in Brooklyn, he has never stopped traveling:  to Europe, to South India, to Turkey, to Argentina to learn the tango (“Did not learn the tango”), to the Yucatan, to Russia, to Guatemala.

The Social Vision of Alfred T. White
edited by Wendy Walker
A book of essays about the little known but immensely important 19th century Brooklyn social visionary

The Social Vision of Alfred T. White is the first full-length study of the work  of Alfred Tredway White (1846-1921). Largely forgotten today, his name known only to specialists, Alfred White at his death was eulogized as “the great heart and master-mind of Brooklyn’s better self” for his many forward-looking innovations in low-income housing and in promoting the welfare of poor children, for his ability to enlist others to this work, and for his insistence that rapidly growing Brooklyn retain a sense of community values. At a time when the divide between rich and poor is increasing, this book highlights the important work of this turn-of-the-century social visionary. Read the full description here.

$22 Paperback

Administrative Assemblages

By Tom LaFarge

Administrative Assemblages is No. 1 in the series, “13 Writhing Machines”, Tom La Farge’s pamphlets on constrained (oulipian) writing. Thirty-six pages long and illustrated with attractive and curious images such as Sir Francis Galton’s display case of eyeballs, Administrative Assemblages discusses the use in composition of forms that the world sends us: the book-index (J. G. Ballard), the US Zip Code Directory (Paul Metcalf), or the gallery checklist (Gilbert Sorrentino). Priced at ten dollars plus tax, Administrative Assemblages may be purchased at the gallery or online through Pay Pal (email your orders to info@proteusgowanus.com).

$10 per copy

The Play Book

OUT OF PRINT
An upcoming PDF version of Play Book will be available on Proteotypes’ website.
Art Director: Maddy Rosenberg, Editor: Wendy Walker, Creative Director: Sasha Chavchavadze

The Play Book (cover)

The Play Book, the initial offering of Proteotypes, was published in conjunction with the Proteus Gowanus 2007-8 theme “Play.” The Play Book collects artist’s interpretations and configurations of play, ready to cut, fold, paste, and assemble. Included are a match game, a word game, a word maze, a geometric puzzler, paper dolls, an automaton, a miniature card deck, a flip-book, and a toy theater. Other features include images of play and games, pages of anagrams and palindromes, ponderings on the meaning of play, conundrums by Lewis Carroll, and a short play by Gertrude Stein.

UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS

Libraries and Danger
Creative Director: Sasha Chavchavadze, Editor: Wendy Walker.
Publication date: 2009.

A compilation of text and images that grew out of the 2006/2007 “Library” exhibit and programs at Proteus Gowanus. The topic of “Library” is captivating the minds of people in many disciplines today, from the history of libraries and their elaborate cataloging systems, to the challenges that are facing libraries as they confront the web. The visual, conceptual, and metaphorical implications of the theme have inspired work in the arts, and a flowering of small alternative libraries has appeared around the country as the role of the library, and the book itself, is questioned. The book will include images of burned, bombed, rotting, and neglected libraries around the world from Alexandria to Iraq.

The Museum of Matches, by Sasha Chavchavadze.

Publication date 2009.

The author, a visual artist, explores her father’s career as a Cold War CIA operative in an interdisciplinary memoir, a non-linear compilation of visual art, narrative prose, documents, photographs and memorabilia. The body of work has been presented in exhibitions, in interdisciplinary publications and as a “one-room Cold War Museum” called The Museum of Matches, a permanent installation located in the space adjacent to Proteus Gowanus. The work was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s description of a match game in Speak, Memory and by Nabokov’s passion for finding symmetries between past and present.