`And Then I Started Drawing on Them'

Mass e-mailings at the office are written solely to be deleted but this one contained magic words in the subject line: “Free Books.” An artist had created an “installation” (when did artists stop painting?) using thousands of donated books, and the surplus volumes were free for the taking in the campus gallery. By the time I got there, three women were picking over the books, which had been arranged spines-up in cardboard boxes along a narrow hallway. I found some paperbacks for my kids but the selection was heavy on best-sellers, textbooks and computer manuals, none of which had aged well. I know from experience that the surreal lurks beneath the ordinary and the random, so I noted some of the titles:

Mary-Kate & Ashley Starring in Switching Goals, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, Bat Mitzvah: A Jewish Girl’s Coming of Age, Weetzie Bat, Religion and Economic Action: A Critique of Max Weber, Upchuck and the Rotten Willy: The Great Escape, Frommers Thailand ’92-’93, and I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed (the last by Jesse Ventura).

In the gallery foyer is “When the Animals Rebel,” the installation assembled by Mike Stilkey, who is 32 and lives in Los Angeles. His web site assures us that Stilkey’s work is “reminiscent of Weimar-era German expressionism and his style has been described by some as capturing features of artists ranging from Edward Gorey to Egon Scheile [sic].”

Against a 44-by-16-foot wall, Stilkey has stacked books in tall, irregular shapes and painted cartoon-like humans and animals in acrylics on the spines. The human figures are pale and ghostly and resemble the fashionably anorexic cousins of Pugsley and Wednesday Addams. Is this a statement about animal rights? The animal nature of humans? The state-subsidized destruction of books by National Socialism? The title card on the wall next to the installation is helpful:

“Stilkey is a passionate collector of old records, cameras and especially books, to which he is attracted `sometimes by the title, or more the look of it, the antiqueness of it, or the wear and tear of it. Sometimes there’s a weird illustration. I’ve got these books and I’ll never read them, but I want them for some reason and I’ve never know why. And then I started drawing on them.’”

In Cleveland, we called that vandalism. I nag my 4-year-old to stop drawing in his books, and here’s Stilkey making his living doing the same thing. Judging a book by “the look of it” is like judging a painting by its smell (“Ah, a late Tanguy”). I know a book dealer in upstate New York whose legitimate trade is amply supplemented by wealthy non-readers who buy books by the yard to adorn their walls, based exclusively on the elegance of their bindings. The same dealer sold books to Martin Scorsese’s production company when he was filming The Age of Innocence in the neighborhood. You can see them on the shelves in Mrs. Mingott’s mansion.

“When the Animals Rebel” is set back about 10 feet behind a plate-glass window, so reading the defaced titles of the books is difficult. I noticed some vintage James Micheners, Maeve Binchys and Sidney Sheldons. Perhaps, I thought, briefly, Stilkey’s graffiti doesn’t threaten the net literacy of the nation. Then I saw it, near the middle of the installation, on the giraffe’s leg, I think, the book about which W.H. Auden wrote: “There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.” Yes, it was Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy about the Great War and the passing of a civilized world. Stilkey had incorporated one of the supreme literary works of the last century into an almost-life-size caricature of a giraffe. Had I underestimated him? Was this a subtle allusion to Ford’s hero, Christopher Tietjens, a loving hommage to “the last English Tory?” This charitable thought faded as I remembered Stilkey’s deathless prose:

“I’ve got these books and I’ll never read them, but I want them for some reason and I’ve never know why. And then I started drawing on them.”