Traveling, for John Gall, tends to revolve around two questions: where are the bookstores, and where is he going to eat?
That first question led Gall, a renowned book designer and collage artist based in New Jersey, to Bottom Feeder Books in Point Breeze, where he struck up a conversation with owner Ryan McLennan about a few original editions from Grove Press.
“It was just these three or four weird books,” Gall tells Pittsburgh City Paper. He admits the books feature wholly unremarkable covers but are invaluable as historical documents.
Gall used to work for Grove under Barney Rosset, a publishing legend behind some of the 20th century’s most important and controversial texts, from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Gall now serves as creative director for the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, but his collage work — which he says started as a purely personal endeavor — has appeared as illustrations for articles in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times.
Pieces appear on Gall’s Instagram account with more than 31,000 followers, or in zines that he sells in limited runs. They also anthologized in books like By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers, and The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art.
McLennan, who manages a gallery space in the back of Bottom Feeder Books, arranged for Gall to exhibit his collage work there. The result is Folded and Gathered, a collection of recent collages currently on view through Sat., July 27. The show features pieces from the last six years, including two series that incorporate components of books.
“Half-titled,” a riff on the art world’s oft-employed “Untitled,” uses inner title pages as canvases. Gall prefers to use non-interesting parts of source material, which people might otherwise never take the time to notice. In one piece, a fragment of the title remains visible but indecipherable, made ghostly behind a piece of translucent paper that seems to have been dipped in a sunset.
Other times, Gall cuts out the main element of an image. In one Folded and Gathered piece, a figure in a wedding gown stands in the foreground, a long, flesh-colored strip covering her face, obscurring the place where an observer’s eyes would otherwise land.
A new zine, which really is untitled, assembles collages on book jackets, the pages of which can be interchanged to make new combinations of colors and shapes like a mix-and-match book. The elongated, horizontal format is inspired by some of Gall’s earliest collage work, back when he was posting them anonymously on Tumblr. When word spread, he started crafting illustrations for the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review Shortlist column.
Gall has designed covers for some of literature’s biggest names: Vladimir Nabokov, Haruki Murakami, Jennifer Egan, and Jane Hirschfield, to name a few. He’s also done album covers. Experimental musician Laurie Anderson once invited him to her flat, where he suggested that her dog play him a song on the piano. (Unfortunately, the dog and its dog walker got stuck in the elevator, and by the time they escaped, the animal wasn’t in the mood to perform.)
Book covers, Gall says, “are windows into the story.” Depending on the story, the design will lean toward the literal or metaphorical, but a good cover, he says, “becomes part of the reader’s experience.”
The process that it takes to go from an idea to an agreed-upon final product can be long, arduous, and exhausting. Gall initially turned to collage during a creative run, drawn by the elementary means of creating outside of the publishing world’s constraints.
Collage became an outlet to get away from having to tell a story or make connections with imagery, of having to make things that look “good” and instead challenge his subjective notions about beauty.
“Everything has some kind of rules that you need to work within,” Gall says. “I love that collage is, the way I approach it, it has to be super simple: paper and glue.”
He prefers paper that is cheap or would otherwise be thrown away. When traveling, he likes to make collages with materials sourced from a particular place.
“Then you have a body of work from Topeka, Kansas,” he says.
Many collage artists, particularly those popular on Instagram, tend toward the surreal. Gall’s exhibition, on the other hand, evokes the geometric abstraction of Jean Hélion or Fernand Léger. A spark of recognition devolves as one component collides with or dissolves into another. The eye catches on what might be a porcelain dog or a Victorian mirror, only to confront unstructured blankness or something vaguely lamp-shaped.
“None of these things are to be interpreted literally in terms of imagery,” Gall says. “It’s sort of the opposite of that.”
In the forward to John Gall Collages 2008-2018, Matt Dorfman, creative director for the New York Times Book Review, writes that explaining Gall’s work “makes me feel like an adjunct veterinary anatomist pleading for tenure.”
At the end of the day, what draws Gall to collage is the purity that comes with making it, often late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. “Sitting at a desk, the light on, some music,” he says.
It’s a place without the usual distractions, the inner voice asking, Is this good enough? You’ll just have to come see for yourself.Folded and Gathered: Recent Collages by John Gall. 12-6 p.m. Wed.-Sun. Continues through Sat., July 27. Bottom Feeder Books, 415 Gettysburg St., Point Breeze. bottomfeederbooks.com
