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Secret Order

Climb the stairs to the third-story attic inTim Ely'shouse in eastern Washington, and you find yourself in along beamed room that is part laboratory, part art studio,part stage set for one of those movies where old booksspring open and invite you into a less than predictablealternate universe. Wooden-and-metal instruments oftorture turn out to be book binding tools watched overby models of fictional exploratory craft hanging overhead.Think Jules Verne. Rows of neatly labeled journals thatlook like they should contain alchemical formulas, onceopened, are revealed as singular and complex artworks,the subjects of which almost seem comprehensible-yetnever quite within reach.

The problem presented us by those journals-and thesingular bookworks to which they are connected and thatare the primary output ofTimothy Ely's work-is thatthey aren't confined within what we expect of art. Orscience. Or even nature, for that matter: But, then, muchart that fully engages our attention is defined by jumpingthe fences we erect around disciplines. Ely mashes upmathematical and spatial intelligences with linguistics,painting and drawing with printmaking and bookbinding.All in one object. Obviously the guy's mind is,to put itmildly, eciectic.This is good. His work is arcane, beautiful,and the mysteries it contains make novels about secretorders of the Church pale by comparison. The artistcouldn't accomplish this without deploying multiple talentssimultaneously

There's a history of artists making gestures that areboth more and less than language, the paintings of MarkTobey and CyTwombly being often cited. In the late1980s the Chinese artist Xu Bing created more than fourthousand faux characters that for years had scholarstrying to decipher the enormous scrolls in his Book fromthe Sky Ely's project is different. He had the habit while aschoolchild of doodling in class. Unlike most boys contentto sketch cars, tanks and airplanes, the left-handed kidbegan to invent a set of personal hieroglyphics. Later heturned to writing from right to left to avoid smearing theink from his fountain pen. The combined results weresymbols for an unknown language, a notational system hecalls "cribriform."

He has been growing those tiny, precise, and elusivemarks ever since, and although each symbol in his mindstands for something else-be it a real object ormetaphorical relationship-there's no system of syntaxshared with us. It is, in short, not really a language as muchas a collection of conditional gestures that creates theappearance of such.Tell that to the graduate student who

a few years ago attempted to write his dissertation on alexicon of Ell's work. Clearly this was a project doomedto failure, as it presupposed definitions and boundaries,exactly what Ely is busy clambering over and tunnelingunder. The cribriform wasn't just unknown, it wasunknowable.

Besides an affinity for what appear to be markingsfrom the side of an alien spaceship, Ely is fascinated bygeometry-whether it's the spirals generated by theGolden Section and found in everything from pine conesto paintings by Leonardo, or the fractals arising from thestrange attractors of complexity theory The grids belovedby cartographers, the tensegritic polygons of BuckminsterFuller that underlie both the patterned desert floor andhis Dymaxion domes, the crystalline intricacies ofdiatoms-he uses them all. Often Elywill start one of hisbooks with a geometry in mind, or actually incised intothe paper; then he'll paint objects that relate to oneanother around the theme of his current obsession andwithin the constructed field.The pyramids of Egypt, mapsof Mars, astronomical charts and observatories, theperiodic table, the internal armature of human anatomyYou get the idea.

What we are presented with-the idea of it all-is agraphic map of Ell's mental process, which means animplied narrative. All art shows us something of the artist'smind, hence things about our own consciousness and thestories we construct. His books are also a finely tunedillustration of "par eidoli a," that tendency of the humanmind to construct meaning out of random visual noise,whether that's the supposed canals of Mars or the Man inthe Moon. But rarely are we confronted with such aschematic version of this mental process that is also adeliberate fiction about that cognitive act. Ely is thus actingout his thoughts, sharing them with us, all the whilereflecting upon the process itself.

This is a very particular and valuable kind of metaphor;a trope, a situation in which the object doesn't justperform its function, but comments on it at the sametime. It's thus self-reflexive, which philosophers in the mid-20th century decided was an indicator of post-modernismat work.The admixture of such a contemporary artisticpractice with an arcane set of symbols strewn aboutpaintings based on both scientific and mystical themescreates books that look as if they were made by Pharaohsof the future.

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Did I mention that Ely is one of the world's mostinnovative book binders, lauded internationally forinventing new ways of assembling a codex, one of theoldest form of books known to mankind?

His bindings are often intricate marvels of wiredgeometry in their own right. serving to hold together;literally and figuratively, the cribriform, images, artist'sintentions and our interpretations. We are bound to thebook even as the pages are. Ely traveled to England tostudy traditional book binding, and he knows as muchabout the material science of the craft as anyone, but he'sacutely aware that how a book is physically constructed isan integral part of how we experience it, hence what itmeans.This high degree of order reminds us that, if youwere to sit with the artist and point to any picture,symbol, or line in one of his books, he'll tell you what itsignifies,what it connects to, what it implies. It's not thatthe books are completely inscrutable, but deeply interiorto both his mind and ours.

Timothy Ely's books are deeply seductive pieces of artcreated through acts of the highest craft. They are non-syntactical, so don't try and read them.They are semiotic,however-the symbols do have a relationship tomeaning-and are best experienced, if not while sippingwine in the presence of the artist in his third-story lair;then by just looking and letting your mind wander.Associations will occur; and you'll realize you foundsomething you'd thought you'd lost: that fascination whenyou were a kid looking at a book or a map or a chart youdidn't yet know how to read. But you sensed it saidsomething about the universe that was important andfascinating that you just had to know.

-William L. Fox

William L. Fox is Director of the Center for Art + Environmentat the Nevada Museum of Arl, and has published numerous bookson art and landscape, including In The Desert of Desire,Terra Antarctlco,and Aereolity: On the World from Above. He has received awards fromthe Cuggenheirn Foundation, National Science Foundation, and theNational Endowment for the Humanities.

Two folios from Seed of Mercury, 2009, a one-of-a-kind manuscript book. 15 x 22"

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Block Mops, I 997 • cover

Flight into Egypt: The ThirdMagnitude, 2009 • two pages

Bones o( the Book' An OblongIdentity, 1990 • cover detail Anacrusis, 2000 • cover

Anacrusis • spreadDust 2006 • cover detail

Selected works (rom publicand private collections.

Halo Chalice, 2005 • cover

Tables o(Aries, 2005 • cover detail

Secret Books of Natural Philosophy.- Time, 2008 • page detail

Apocry-chronon, 1995 • cover detail

Timothy C. Ely has been drawing continuously since he could hold a pencil and has been making books since a family frienddelivered a trunkful of papel- from the local mill when he was eight. This culminated in an MFA in 1975 from University ofWashington, where he began incorporating his artwork into original bindings. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellowshipin 1982 took him to England and Japan to study bookbinding with some of the living treasures in the book world. His drawingsand one-of-a-kind painted books are in public and private collections worldwide including Boston Athenaeum, Getty Center forthe History of Art and the Humanities, Grolier Club, Library of Congress, Lilly l.ibrary Morgan Library. New York Public Library,Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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