Jill Moser
Aenigma, a spread from artist’s book The Introvert (2010), a collaboration with poet Charles Bernstein
Mixed media
Jill Moser is a NYFA Fellow in Painting

In the late spring of 2010 I was invited by Gervais Jassuad of Collectif Génération to collaborate on my first artist book, The Introvert, with the poet Charles Bernstein. Inspired by Kahnweiler and Tériade, Jassaud formed Collectif Génération 40 years ago in France to bring together the work of visual artists and poets. Since then the Collectif has published the collaborative work of international contemporary artists and poets such as John Ashbery, Daniel Buren, Ann Lauterbach, Shirley Jaffe, and Polly Apfelbaum.

This invitation allowed me to realize a long held desire to work in tandem with a poet. A show at the Whitney in the early '70s of Frank O'Hara's In Memory Of My Feelings sparked my early interest in the play between words and images, influencing the first drawings I made.

The books arrived as 12 unbound portfolios, pristine and white with Bernstein's poems letter pressed in Garamond type on BFK Rives paper. Titles and type shifted in their placement on the pages and there was an occasional diagonal cut through some of theme—this is Jassaud's intervention or voice in the three-way conversation he sets up for each book, his "putting the body of the book into play, action and language."

I spent the first weeks studying the poems and considering them as they were laid out in the architecture of the book. To deconstruct the poems was to find my way into them, to engage with them with my voice, my hand. I was looking for visual equivalences and correspondences; as Bernstein titled one of the poems "If you say something, see something."

Jill Moser
If You, a spread from artist’s book The Introvert (2010), a collaboration with poet Charles Bernstein
Mixed media
Jill Moser is a NYFA Fellow in Painting

One of the first pleasures of working with Bernstein's poetry was finding a kindred spirit in text. I recognized the provocative play of his language, how he offers the familiar, even the obvious or banal, as a warm up act for a great range of linguistic styles and forms. The literal sets up a string of metonymic relationships of sense and sound, a charge for the rhythmic that moves you from knowing to not knowing and back. The performer flirts with being understood. The obvious reveals the unknown.

Bernstein's poetics seemed very much like my use of indexical line and marks. They refer to how they are made in both an explicit and deceptive way so that they appear self-evident but are not. You think you are seeing the directness of the hand but sometimes it is the miming of the hand through mechanical means. In both our work we call attention to the essential conditions of the languages we work in to arrive at the unexpected. By inviting the viewer and reader into an intimacy with how the work is made, to re-enact its construction, they too become players.

To paint the book I became a cartographer, mapping out each page and setting up rules of engagement. I was intrigued to work for the first time in a medium that would be held in one's hands. This led me to choose methods and tools that would call attention to the tactility of marking. The traditional printmaking paper allowed me to play with its absorbent qualities. Using printmaking tools such as inking cards and brayers in unorthodox ways, I limited my methods to a series of actions: brushing, dripping, blotting, spreading. With these I could embed the paint in the pages of the book, creating fields in which the printed text could act as figure.

Jill Moser
Colophon, a spread from artist’s book The Introvert (2010), a collaboration with poet Charles Bernstein
Mixed media
Jill Moser is a NYFA Fellow in Painting

I wanted to set up a tempo of viewing similar to Bernstein's tempo of speech. The poems swerve from the antic to the mournful so I limited my palette to fluorescent and mineral based pigments and played them against each other in the sequence of pages. The fluorescents' active, glaring luminosity (and fugitive state) suggesting the fictive and transient appear in contrast to the metallic paint's recessive, grounded solemnity.

With this arsenal of materials and techniques I wrote instructions to myself and proceeded to paint each set of 12 books in a sequence of theme and variation. The series of books are related but different from each other in their play on structure and improvisation: the great space between intention and serendipity where Bernstein's poems exist.

Jill Moser is a painter who lives and works in New York City. She has exhibited since the 1980s in galleries and museums throughout the United States and in Europe. Her paintings, drawings, and prints are included in many museum and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The National Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Museum, and The Fogg Art Museum. An edition of The Introvert is now on view at Dorsky Gallery as part of the group show, Extravagant Drawing, through April 10. Upcoming solo shows include James Kelly Contemporary in Santa Fe and Heriard-Cimono Gallery in New Orleans. Moser is represented by Lennon, Weinberg, Inc, NYC.

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Jill Moser
Detail from If You, a spread from artist’s book The Introvert (2010), a collaboration with poet Charles Bernstein
Mixed media
Jill Moser is a NYFA Fellow in Painting