“This is Me Writing” by Micah Lexier

Sometimes deliberating the phenomena of numbers can be so compelling you just have to stop and ruminate on curious ambiguities like randomness and order. Toronto-based artist Micah Lexier recently published three book-based projects that straddle several such investigations, moving from a collaboration that includes 1334 students to a closer observation of his own writing hand. And compellingly, he continues to effect mathematical visualizations of subjective experience.

The focus of this review is the small book entitled This is Me Writing, published in 2008; two prior book projects were also published in the same year. As well, there was a colouring book entitled A Number of Things, designed in collaboration with Jen Eby and illustrated by Christy Nyiri as part of Artspeak’s program that “takes artist projects outside the gallery.” The other work is 1334 Words for 1334 Students. This collaboration includes a story that Lexier commissioned Irish author Colm Tóibín to write, which was then “handwritten by the students of Cawthra Park Secondary School and collected by teacher Don Ball’s Grade 12 Visual Arts Class – Art of Our Time.” The latter two conceptual works use collaboration in innovative ways. All three carry the generous impulse of moving forward to meet the viewer. In their multiple layers of meaning, they stimulate pleasure in thinking about numbers.

Lexier’s practice has often focused on text and numbers as a way of exploring human existence. His intellectual rigour maintains the purity of self-reference. In past work he has studied the graphics of the individual hand, and this has often become the subject of 09production, transposed into materials ranging from laser-cut steel to neon tubing to sign painting.

This is Me Writing is handwritten by the artist himself, with a single sentence on each page that describes the writing process for that page. The process then simultaneously becomes the subject. Physical idiosyncrasies of writing the sentence are explored. “This is me writing very small…, very fast…, uppercase….” It is a conceptual investigation with a clearly imposed boundary of page and pen. In a wry reference to one form of scientific method, there is experimentation wrapped in the narrative of “what-ifs”—“what if I speed up?” or “what if I close my eyes?”

Lexier follows a logical and yet meandering path trying out the many variations of putting pen to paper within a certain stricture. At first glance the work harkens back to a child’s workbook. The modest size, the directness and repetitiveness of writing practice, the emphasis on “this is me” speak to a developing voice. There is a familiarity in the voice that we have all used, especially when describing snapshots of ourselves; the phrase “this is me” is another form of self-portraiture. Lexier is known for his alternative strategies of depicting portraits, not only by facial image but also by referential artifact, numerical representations or signatures, to name a few. Yet here the text becomes not just the author’s voice, but by its humble penmanship and familiarity also becomes the reader’s voice. His gestures invite us to join in the game of writing. Each page contains an element of surprise that unfolds upon reading the statement and then studying its graphic form. The reader lingers on the text as if it were an image, provoking a sensory shift between states of reading and viewing.

Lexier has a history of transforming experience by looking through the lens of mathematics. In This is Me Writing he enacts another kind of accounting, using body action while narrating the physical process of writing. The moment becomes methodically framed by the actions. This self-referential process is a thought-provoking extension to his well-known series, “A Minute of My Time.”

Lexier’s interest in mathematics is also applied to his colouring book project—A Number of Things. On the first page he introduces: “A colouring book of favourite artworks and other related things having to do with counting and measurement, ordered numerically.” Lexier features 12 conceptual artists’ works that cross time and space, among them illustrations of Walter de Maria’s 1977 work, The Vertical Earth Kilometer (referencing the number “minus one”—a metal rod installed one kilometre vertically below the ground) and Germaine Koh’s 1999 work, Poll (referencing the number “one”—a metal post that splits a path in two). Lexier describes each work in relation to numbers. Conceptual art is transformed into illustration; art history is transformed into mathematics. The interactive format of the colouring book is used not only to educate students on the rarified subject of conceptual art but is historically also a genre intended to democratize the subject matter. In this case, the broad target audience is introduced to an alternative way of viewing the world, and art, through numbers.

Lexier’s 1334 Words for 1334 Students is a remarkably orchestrated collaboration between an artist, a writer, a visual arts teacher, his students and the rest of the student population, published on an eight-page newspaper-like format. During the process of production, each of the 1334 students hand wrote a word from author Tóibín’s 1334-worded story in sequence. Reading the story, one’s inclination is to focus on the individual components of the written word. Another narrative emerges as idiosyncrasies like flowery embellishments, rigidity, neatness or distinct slants are noticed. Each page becomes a drawing; the lyricism of the changing line and the tonal variation are held together by a linear pattern floating within a white space. The experience of the work unfolds from layers of visual language that carry several narratives—that of the story, but also what is suggested by each word’s form, scale and juxtaposition.

Among Lexier’s wider practice that includes significant public art projects and installations, he also models a participatory practice that depends on collaboration as a tool of production and thinking. This collaboration occurs on the macro scale with communities, museums, artists and writers, but also on the micro scale with the varied audiences he coaxes to join him in his wanderings between formal logic and intuitive response. ❚

This is Me Writing by Micah Lexier, Paul + Wendy Projects, 2008, 32-page booklet in a letterpress-printed cardboard envelope, edition of 300, each hand-numbered by the artist.

Ingrid Koenig is a Vancouver-based artist and Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.