In the Black Book series, Manny Prieres investigates books that bind American culture. The pillars of literature often have a controversial history: banned, burned and reviled, these titles become even more appealing once they are marked as taboo. What does mainstream culture want to hide?
Prieres’s renderings are deceptively simple conveyed in various shades of black. Upon closer inspection, they reveal signs of the artist’s hand and allude to the craftsmanship of book making. Based on dust jackets and first edition covers, the artist’s visually-striking drawings uncover and appropriate the aesthetics of literary controversy.
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How did you develop your process? Where do you draw your influence from?
My work has been very much about appropriating graphics, mostly of printed work. It could be books, records, or advertising. I like the idea of mixing influence from opposing groups and factions and appropriating slogans that might hail from different areas. I’m interested in the aesthetics of surrendering one’s own identity for a bigger cause. I appropriate different iconography and images and symbolism of the counterculture of the United States. My inspiration comes from all over: from Woody Guthrie to the Weather Underground to skateboarding and punk rock graphics. I have experimented with silk-screening and transfers, but have always drawn. A lot of people think my work is carved out of something, but it’s actually all hand drawings.
The pieces in the Black Book series employ a limited but expressive palette of inky blacks and smokey greys.
Obviously the color black has a lot of different meanings. For me, the first time I was interested in the color black was seeing Ad Reinhardt’s paintings, and of course Rothko’s black really spoke to me. I started playing around with different shades of blacks from matte to glossy. I happened upon working with gouache and graphite and it really interested me visually because graphite over gouache results in a silvery luminescence.
Why are you interested in books?
The way I came to the books was doing some counterculture pieces. I started looking into a lot of the literature I grew up with and mostly it was the books I read in school and it was such a huge part of our society that at one point they were either marginalized or censored. That’s where I came up with a list where I wanted to appropriate the covers, make them tone-on-tone and turn them into the series. I am subscribing to the book-making tradition by framing my pieces in editions.
To go back to the discussion of black and the material of charcoal, I guess it goes to the power of print. No matter how many times you try to cover something up, it’s meaning or message it always finds a way to come through.
Of course, yeah. It’s layers. That’s a great way to look at it.
You mentioned that these are books you read in school. Have you read all of these books? How do you choose which books to focus on?
I just started off with a list of books that I read in school. I’ll be honest: I have not read all these books. That’s one of the first things that people ask me. I’ve read probably like ten of them. The first few that I did in the series were books I had read as a child or in college.
I am more interested in the idea of how certain things become sublimated into culture. Huckleberry Finn was banned but now it is a part of the identity of our country. So it started off with those books and then I started making lists of fringe books like The Anarchist’s Cookbook or The Satanic Bible or The Turner Diaries (a very right wing, white separatists novel.) I wanted to open up the conversation to books that might still be inflammatory.
How faithful are the drawings to the original books?
The majority of my pieces are modeled after first edition dust jackets, with the exception of a few. The size, topography and cover art are all accurate. I did switch up The Communist Manifesto: I decided to go with the American version that came out in 1964. Walking around with that book in the 60’s could have gotten you thrown in jail. It made the most sense to take the cover design from the Cold War.
What kind of investigation is involved in retrieving first edition covers?
They come to me from many different sources. The Internet definitely helps. Sometimes, friends will scan high res images and email them to me. I own the second pressing of Naked Lunch so I used that as my reference. An interesting thing about the Naked Lunch cover I used was that the book publisher from Paris included a typo: they added the word “the” to the title. It’s interesting that there’s a typo in the actual first edition of the book.
Featured image: Manny Prieres, Farenheit 451, graphite, gouache on paper, 7″x 5″, 2012
All images © of the artist