Gaps is a 20-year encyclopedic, interdisciplinary project. Artist and author Judith Seligson juxtaposes hundreds of quotes and images from science, art literature, criticism, religion, and more with her own thoughts in between. She sees the quotes and images as neurons in the brain.
The reader’s thoughts are the neurotransmitters that fire across the synaptic gap between the neurons. Like the synaptic gap, the space between quotes and images always remains open for another interpretation. Learning and communication depend on the gap between neurons - and between human beings. Juxtaposition is a tool of the artist and poet - and the brain. Thus, Gaps is an artist’s book - a book built like a brain.
5.0 out of 5 stars A unique, brilliant and beautiful book.
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2021
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Jazz musicians have often claimed that their music is really about "the notes that aren't played." Here, the artist Judith Seligson explores much the same concept -- "gaps" -- as it applies to her own medium of graphic art, as well as masterfully analogizing it to myriad other areas of thought. The result is not only a fully successful "proof of concept," but, in both its design and presentation, a beautiful work of art itself.
5.0 out of 5 stars A true work of art
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2021
This book, the product of 20 years of work, is akin to a Bible that you will consult over and over for insights into many disparate topics, including the essence of creativity, English grammar, the history of art, and scientific discoveries such as brain synapses and tectonic plates. All are united through gorgeous art on every page, including paintings, photographs, movie stills, and drawings by the author herself.
Stephanie K
A book to let you experience thought
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2021
Rather than a book to only read or contemplate, this volume is an experience in beauty, in a truly unique genre that crosses many unusual fields of creativity. Bits and strands of writings and pictures produced mainly in the last 120 years are invited into fresh dialogue in hundreds of pages, prompting in us a movement to conjure their implicit interactiveness.
I keep the book on a stand to literally experience just two facing pages at a time, how the bits of text, fonts and pictorial reproductions speak to each other in me. The book works on the natural impulse to metaphorize, to connect what is juxtaposed, and to form new meaning out of previously separate meanings. It is a truly gargantuan work of research, a trove of information arranged in a magnetic organic whole. Calling on our natural sense for interactiveness, Seligson guides us in a poetics of fundamental pieces of human thought and craft, and in so doing, reignites their freshness in us.
One of the great joys of my high school years was watching “Connections”, a 10-part documentary series produced by the BBC in 1978 and seen in the United States on PBS, written and hosted by the English science historian James Burke. Burke would begin each episode with a seemingly implausible premise: how the search for an improved brewing method by 16th century German beer makers led to the Apollo moon landings, or how the need of 18th century English weaving mills to easily change cloth patterns on their looms resulted in the digital computer. Burke would show how one technological development would make possible another and then another, each one seemingly unrelated to its predecessor until you took a closer look. By the end of the hour, you had landed far from your starting point, from early Renaissance Nuremberg to the lunar surface in the second half of the 20th century. Anyone who understands the fun of browsing an encyclopedia understands the fascination of this “one thing leads to another” experience.
Judith Seligson has achieved much the same thing, albeit in a fundamentally different way, in her book, Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist’s Book. The usual method of this sort of investigation is to concentrate on how things are connected. We take the contiguity of the whole for granted. Seligson, on the other hand, is interested in what lies between these seemingly contiguous things: the gaps that separate them. She examines the world of ideas -- for this is a book not just about art, but about neuroscience, literature, cinema, Talmudic scholarship, and a host of other things -- she examines the world of ideas using the model of the mosaic, where each element is discrete, separated from its neighbor by a slight gap, yet, when seen from an appropriate distance, forming a whole.
Beginning at the beginning, Seligson starts our journey with a discussion of the very format of the book we are reading, the florilegium. The florilegium has its origins in Byzantine times. Authors compiled books that consisted entirely of quotations from other works, a sort of potpourri, a mosaic of ideas, but one which taken as a whole might have an overarching theme. This seemingly dated, quaint form fascinated the 20th century German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who at the time of his tragic death had been at work on just such a work, The Arcades Project. Benjamin’s unfinished work becomes a model for Seligson’s approach. “The Arcades Project was about many things,” she writes, “but its importance for me has always rested in its having been composed of juxtaposed quotations.” So it is here, a book that might at its simplest be described as a book of quotations. For the most part she lets her subjects do the talking, the extensive quotations being the heart of the book. She does not leave us without guideposts, however. Separating these are her own commentaries and observations, sometimes reinforcing the quoted author’s point, sometimes disputing it, but always exploring both the connections and gaps between those ideas.
Having established her premise, Seligson then moves to a chapter on the world of neuroscience, noting how gaps are fundamental to human cognition itself. We learn how the cells of the nervous system are discrete elements separated by gaps, what these gaps are, and how they function. As already noted, she begins at the beginning. From there, like James Burke’s television series, we move from idea to idea, with chapters on Aristotle and the use of metaphor, the art of quilting, the creation of montage, Impressionism, Charles Darwin, the Talmud…one idea leading to another, yet in some ways separated from it. The author and the reader together browse through an encyclopedia of…knowledge?...cognition?...meaning?...ideas, then, undertaking the sort of journey familiar to anyone who enjoys learning for its own sake. Like browsing an encyclopedia, you quickly become absorbed in the experience of it.
Completing that experience is Seligson’s treatment of the page itself, the visual experience of reading. As the subtitle, An Artist’s Book, suggests, the entire book is conceived as a visual work of art. Typography, in both color and form, is carefully exploited on every page, and the whole is profusely illustrated both with diagrams in the more technical chapters and with reproductions of works of art that are related, suggested, or in some way complementary to the subject at hand.
Intellectually intriguing, continually fascinating, and visually beautiful, Gaps and the Creation of Ideas is a perfect example of the truth of the adage that it’s not about the destination, but the journey. Gaps is a journey of learning like few others. To paraphrase Eliot, we explore unceasingly, only to arrive in the same armchair from which we departed, knowing the joy that comes from knowledge itself.
