Crossing the Boulevard

CROSSING THE BOULEVARD

BY WARREN LERHER AND JUDITH SLOAN New york., W.W. Norton, 2003 $19.95 (hb), with CD

In a project inspired by the changing cultural landscape of the neighborhood in which they live. Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer have assembled personal narratives elicited from dozens of recent immigrants and refugees living in Queens, New York. Crossing the Boulevard, this book publication, is part of a larger multi-media project consisting of community activity, exhibits, and performances. The book is designed to communicate the diversity of the people whose stories it presents through its layout, typography, images, and other formal devices. Heterogeneity is at the core of this work, though the role of the transcriber-editors in shaping the whole provides certain unifying frames within which the presentation of unique, individual experiences is ordered. Lehrer's graphic and Sloan's dramatic sensibilities drive their collaboration, producinga book that is part score and part exhibitionary artifact.

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Crossing the Boulevard is an artists' vision of a book, well-wrought, and much labored in all details of its production and conception. The amount of attention to detail is prodigious, and the sheer energy involved in its execution (line by line, page by page) is almost staggering. Those without experience in oral histories, the dubious joys of transcription, or first-hand knowledge of the design profession can't really imagine the effort involved in making such a work. And perhaps in our jaded media-saturated age, the critic has an equally difficult task in leaping to appreciate its aesthetic achievement. We are so accustomed to receiving mass-circulation magazines, whose armies of design lackeys laboriously produce fashion spreads and ads and editorial pages ad nauseam, that we have few critically self-conscious categories in which to place Crossing the Boulevard.

The content of this book is inseparable from its form, a banality perhaps, to utter in this very-much-post-McLuhan age, but a fact irrefutable in this instance where the choices made with regard to presentation are incontrovertibly performative. But if the idea that a book's forms and formats embody its conceptual precepts is a familiar one, the critical vocabulary for discussing the specific features of its aesthetic performance are still woefully inadequate. The book form is so familiar that we rarely pause to ask precisely how it is that it does perform the presentation of textual and visual material. The tendency is still to either describe a work like Crossing the Boulevard in terms of its design, or to address its content, but not to discuss the embodied condition of their intersection. The press release material falls back on the term "filmic" to invoke the montage, cross-cutting of voices and objects, full-frame and detailed close-ups, inventory of objects and establishing images of parts of Queens. But a book has its own specificity, and the physical as well as conceptual execution of this work happens in a series of bound pages and an accompaning CD.

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Eighty narratives have been recorded and transcribed to create the texts in this book. Eighty individuals, each displaced and relocated, each struggling with the invention of a new life in a strange land. This is the most obvious and overt aspect of this work. The immigrant experience as a feature of the American landscape is not so much taken for granted as posed as a question against the changes in attitude, law, status, difficulty, economic and cultural conditions that characterize contemporary urban experience. The outstanding contribution of this book will derive largely from the insights it provides into current life in urban America in a complex global era, but the formal structure of this work also merits comment with respect to text display and navigation.

Ten years ago the idea of linking one piece of text with another, or navigating a pathway through a textual field in a digital environment was charged with an aura of novelty. Hypertext was a specialized term, known to cognoscenti andtechnical sophisticates with knowledge of a new and rather rarified sphere of electronic data. Hypertext novels and works with forking paths seemed brinked to reorder our textual universe. Ten years later what is most striking is that the influence of new media has been to shift our understanding of the functional structure of traditional forms even as it has increased our appreciation of digital environments. Books, it turns out, are hardly static instruments. They have a potential for dynamic spatio-temporal experience across a network of associative links. Books are hypermedia. And the navigational complexity of book space has rarely been more thoroughly or deliberately designed than in the work of Warren Lehrer. Disentangling Lehrer's work from that of his collaborator. Judith Sloan would be specious, but his track record as a designer has qualified him expertly for the task of making a book object in which graphic features and content forms are intertwined. Leher's earlier books are well known for their inscription of voice, their use of typographic devices to create a score, their engagement with the possibilities of performed text-space as page space. In many ways, Crossing the Boulevard is a tame work by contrast to French Fries or I Mean, You Know, or at least, appears to be.

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But perhaps the toning down of certain design features has allowed Lerher to pay attention to the functional structure of this book in a way that sacrifices none of the earlier design virtuosity.

Starting with the front cover, the sense of spatial complexity--physical, graphic, cultural, metaphoric--is apparent. The title, in a sans serif font, has a safety crossing guard boldness. The type sits on the image of a street as if it were pedestrians and shadows, traffic barriers and street signs. The references are clear, but not over-worked. The subtitle has its own strip of color, red, on which the words "strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America" stand out with drop shadow accents. The grid of tiny photographic faces, all close ups neatly cropped to fit in the same tiny allotment of thumbnail space, speaks volumes. Many persons, all individual, but of a crowd and group who are bracketed together into a unifying--if circumstantial and arbitrary--frame. The motifs of street sign and boulevard recur as we move through the end sheets to the half title, title, credits and permissions, and into the introductory pages.

The number of textual elements that need to be differentiated are few: commentaries by the editor/authors are distinguished from the transcribed stories of the individuals whose names are highlighted with yellow, almost as though with a marker. These names serve as headers on the pages, keeping the reader oriented, so that with a single glance toward that mnemonic device one recalls immediately that this is "Tulasi" or "Lana" whose story is being recounted. The book is divided into five movements derived from the range of impulses for immigration, or grouping--freedom of religion, asylum seekers, family ties, neighborhoods, and the incidental circumstances of coexistence. In many cases, an individual story might "fit" into another category. Overlap of motivations participate in complicated issues of authenticity and presentation.

As each individual story unfolds, we mark a shift into a distinguishing typeface. Why? No attempt is made to match "character"--in the punning sense of letterform and personality. Rather, within the synthesizing and inevitably somewhat levelling act of interview and transcription, reinserting marks of difference seems necessary. Lehrer is actively differentianting each voice, in order to be certain that no confusion arises as to the homogeneity or standardization of personal narrative. Pull quotes, larger point sizes, emphatic excerpts--all the conventions of print emphasis are made use of in these pages. Some texts are more even, flatter, less conspicuously manipulated than others. But just as the treatment of images is deliberately handled with the intention of making every person stand out from their background--to starkly emphasize their iconic individuality--so is their voice made distinct from the others. The work is made to be seen, and read, and navigated, and related to the recorded materials on the CD and in the performances and exhibits organized by Lerher and Sloan in an ongoing series of events.

My one major quibble concerns an unfortunate feature of the design. The gutter, that tight space of the spine that is pinched by the binding, is the one irrefutable physical fact of a book's existence as an object. Creating any book design that pretends that gutter doesn't exist, or asks the viewer to ignore it when looking at an image that cuts across that space, is a mistake. People's faces are pinched, bodies distorted, and other mutilations are inevitable. I would advise against ever designing a codex that pretends that bound sheets can be read as spreads. This is one of my personal hobby horses, but since this work is so carefully designed in every other respect--making, for instance, wonderful use of the bleeds and turns, changes of size and scale, and use of color, borders, margins, this decision was a mistake.

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Several years ago Lerher put together a series of portrait books published by Bay Press that are antecedents for the current work, though less successful in certain ways. Those works were somewhat uncomfortably premised on the idea of packaging a number of specific individuals (real persons) as "characters"--vivid, colorful, exaggeratedly idiosyncratic in the way they were rendered by Lerher's typographic and textual structures. The current project feels far more mature, and succesful, in rendering the individual experiences. But a tendency to push the unique "character" of each person represented sometimes still feels forced in this project. The visual indication of this for me is the extent to which the carefully cut out images reinforce an individual's ethnic or ritual costume or identity. Lerher and Sloan are sophisticated, and politically as well as culturally sensitive, but a trace of ethnographic tourism and even essentialism lurks in such treatments. Would I want to be excised from my surroundings as a white-Jewish-Protestant-American-artist-professor in my black tights and zip cardigans? A parodic edge slips inevitably into such striking characterizations, no matter how "true" they are in their factual reality, they can read reductively on the page. That said, the complexity of individual existence, the multi-layered and multi-faceted even often contradictory strains of interwoven activity of our lives, is demonstrated in the variety of artifacts, statements, settings, and evidence Lerher and Sloan bring into consideration in these individual cases.

The book enacts its communicative efficacy, sometimes at so high a pitch that a gentle reader might seek relief from its relentless demand on visual and verbal and cultural frames of reference--or for a bit of toning down. Sometimes the best registration of difference is within finely tuned, less marked, conditions that resist the design terms of mass media presentation, and slip back towards lower production values that propose an alternative to, rather than a compliance with, the "produced" terms of mass culture.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group