Scott MacLeod

I made this book using "erasures" by Texas Fontanella, sent to me by John M. Bennett, as captions for panels culled from Russell Keaton's 1940s comic strip "Flyin' Jenny."

Unique edition, November 2016
38 Pages, approx 9" h x 5" w
Collage in perfect bound found book
Collection of Torreya Cummings

Sometimes it really just helps to have a theme or title dropped into your lap. When I found this green book, I got inspired to look again at all the nautical imagery left over from the making of First Aid Afloat. And for whatever reason I found myself willing to incorporate some of my favorite found images, ones that I'd been holding onto for years, such as the last fragments of my copies of Roni Horn's edition of pointes d'ironies, e.g. the man (who reminds me so much of Pepa Volvovič) wading in the transistor & glitter filled aquarium from my Dhghmunculus exhibition (p.34); the original b&w photo of the running Czech girl (p.29); the b&w photo I took in 1973 in Boulder, Colorado of the leaping woman (p.20); & the two small b&w photos of the person diving into a canal, photos I think Jakub Kalousek gave me (p.13) & others. There just comes a time when you have to gamble away what you hold to be precious, & at the time this book seemed to be a good gamble. Looking at it now, I think it was; I like it very much. I didn't get a chance to live with it very long before I gave it to the person I made it for. I'm not sure but I hope she likes it even half as much as I do.

Unique edition October 2016
50 pages, 13" h x 12" w

I had saved a lot of newspaper photos of Desert Shield & Desert Storm, with the intention of making a different sort of book. But I made this book instead, about a long march down the dusty never-ending road to power.

Unique edition August 2016
62 pages, 8.5" h x 5.5" w
Collage & mixed media in found booklet

Immediately after I finished making First Aid Afloat, I made this book, for pretty much the same reason: to distract me from grief I was feeling while friends died around me. What I said in the intro for First Aid Afloat applies to this book as well: "Each collection of similar materials is begun with the idea of eventually completing a that project manifests a perfect synthesis of those materials. In reality, one day a switch flips & I grab a stack of stuff & go at it, making the best result I can make at that time with that set of materials. First Aid Afloat is exactly that; not exactly an academic exercise, but kind of an arbitrary one, not generated by a strong inner need or passion, but by a decision: I will make this book now from these elements."

This book is kind of long too so I just posted a few of my favorite pages.

Unique edition August 2016
70 pages, 14" h x 10.5" w
Photo album w/green cover w/gold fleur-de-lys design

In the late summer of 2016, with friends dying all around me, I dove into the many boxes of materials in my studio, looking for projects to divert me from grief. Each collection of similar materials is begun with the idea of eventually completing a that project manifests a perfect synthesis of those materials. In reality, one day a switch flips & I grab a stack of stuff & go at it, making the best result I can make at that time with that set of materials. First Aid Afloat is exactly that; not exactly an academic exercise, but kind of an arbitrary one, not generated by a strong inner need or passion, but by a decision: I will make this book now from these elements. Sometimes these types turn out better than the more "inspired" ones. I'm not sure this one holds up over the full course, but it has its moments. It probably should have been a shorter, smaller format book, but I thought it would be more about "being at sea" than it turned out to be, & I liked the wide expanse of these pages. Anyway, it's a bit bleak but that's probably to be expected when working on a sea of grief. It's a long book & I have only posted some of my favorite pages here.

Unique edition April 2016
140 pages, 6.5" h x 4.5" w
Found French notebook w/ruled graph pages
Made during artist residency in Silver City NV, March & April 2016

For a few years I collected headshots from the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. I was struck by the uniformity of the format & by the implied assumptions about identity. I ended up with about 300 images & it took several years to figure out what to do with them. Originally I'd intended to do some sort of room-sized installation, but I didn't have enough, and, well, Boltanski had pretty much covered that base. Anyway while in Silver City I decided to just make this book. There's no text, just a photo on each page. There was some thought given to sequence & juxtaposition, but not a great deal. Here are just a few representative pages.

Unique edition April 2016
68 pages, perfect bound, 6" h x 3" w
Made during artist residency in Silver City NV, March & April 2016
collection of Jakub Kalousek
 

Unique edition 2014
10 pages, 14" h x 10" w
Ten loose ink on dura-lar drawings inside paper folder
collection of František Skála

Unique edition 2013
229 pages, 7.5" h x 5" w
Mixed media on found hardbound Czech book by M. Čapek

This book is so pretty, with a wonderful blue velvety cover & lovely typeface within; I just had the urge one day to make drawings on every page. Here is a selection of my favorites.

Unique edition 2013, Blurb edition 2013
36 pages, 8.5" h x 5" w, photo album book

100% appropriated & edited from children's book "Fun with Dick," my book follows Dick's emotional journey from unhappiness to happiness, a journey he freely shares with members of his family.
 

Unique edition 2012
26 pages, 8.5" h x 5.5" w chapbook

Sometimes you get so tired of the piles of crap stacked all over your studio that you just grab a couple handfuls & see if you can make something, quickly. This book is a good result from one of those moments. Technically its title is the image on its cover, but "Red Lion" will have to suffice for purposes of documentation. This book is about the fall of Soviet Communism, about my increasingly problematic experience of physically aging & about the relationships between the two. This is a much more personal book than it probably seems to be.

Technically the book has 26 pages, but about half of those pages have inserts that can be unfolded, so often a two page spread might have 3 or 4 different viewing possibilities. I've included a few of those types here in this incomplete selection of pages.

Unique edition 2012
21 pages, 11" h x 9" w photo album
Collection of Jakub Kalousek

This gift made for my friend Jakub is a hybrid of sorts. It's a narrative but also a kind of scrapbook. I don't know if he likes it, but I do.

Unique edition 2010
52 pages, 10" h x 8" w
collection of Barrett Watten

Just what it says it is: a meditation on our ghosts: dead people, shadows, erasures, lost utterances, copies, rituals & memories. Kind of a Guest book of ghostly touches.
 

Unique edition 2008
12 pages 11" h x 8.5" w photo album book

It's not so much a sequel as a reboot, like the Star Trek movies reboot, or like Gospel of St. John is a reboot of the Synoptic Gospels. In many ways this is the Gospel that Jesus' family would have put together if still cameras had been invented.

Unique edition 2007
67 pages, hardbound found book w/collage & mixed media
approx 6" h x 4" w
Collection of František & Eva Skála
Digital version published in Otoliths 42 and Otoliths 43

Maybe it's because I was raised Catholic (till age 11) that that religion's imagery always inspires me - to subvert & convert it. This book was a "godsend" in that, like the source background for Kvéten, it provided me with a non-narrative frame to build on. I got to use up a lot of xeroxed texts & images that I had been saving for a long time. This book was super fun to make (they all are pretty much) & I am still delighted with it. I love looking though it when I am at Franta & Eva's house. I've included only my favorite pages here.

Xerox edition 2007
65 pages 11" h x 8.5" w
stapled cover
Digital version published in otoliths 41, 2016

I had some pretty good text from some sort of book about depression etc, but the text wasn't suited for narrative, so it wasn't until I found this Czech version of a German "Modenshau" which means "fashion show" but is a colloquial term for a fashion catalog, and which allowed for lack of narrative development.

Xerox edition 2007
20 pages, 11" h x 8.5" w
Stapled cover

I had bunch of material left over from the making of a collage/painting of the same name, so I combined them with some pages from another untitled project. I used to insert copies of this one in the stacks at the main SF library.

Unique edition 2006
70 pp.
10.25" h x 14" w

This alternate history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas is kind of my version of Aguirre, The Wrath of God, or my Heart Of Darkness.

unique edition 2006
33 pages, 10" h x 13.5" w
Digital version published in otoliths 41, 2016

This is about the terror & rage of being an individual on this planet.

I collected panels from newspaper comics for a couple years & finally in 2005, I made my own comic strips, which I called Comix because I was mixing them. I think they are good; what do you think?

Xerox edition 1996
29 pages 8.5" h x 5.5" w
stapled chapbook
Blurb POD edition 2009
29 pages 10" h x 8" w
perfect bound paperback

This slow meditation on friendship, love & loss (really it's an elegy or dirge) was inspired by a murder case in the UK whose details I forget. I made a chapbook & then years later decided to make a Blurb version also.

1990
8 pages, 8.5" h x 5.5" w
Xeroxed, stapled chapbook w/ cardstock cover.

And no reason is too… was made in 1990 and is probably the most cynical & least personal of any of my chapbooks. Not that either distinction is necessarily a bad thing…. This is a short glance at hypocrisy, paradox & whatever else that cold breeze is blowing in our direction.

1989
30 pages, 8.5" h x 5.5" w
Xeroxed, stapled chapbook with cardstock cover
A collaboration with Raegan Kelly

The entire book is here below, shown mostly in two-page spreads.

Xerox edition 1986
18 pages, 8.5" h x 5.5" w
Stapled cardstock cover

I made this book in 1986 in Los Angeles. It was included in the compilation The Trouble I Had by anabasis/xtant books 2004, editors Jim Leftwich & Thomas Lowe Taylor.

Although produced immediately after High Time For Bed, Strap-On Life was really the conceptual & emotional sequel to Unraveling The Hypervolume. Where Hypervolume is understated, dispassionate, distanced & disconnected, Strap-On is fevered, direct, literal, emotional, violent, relentless & absurdist. I feel it is a more mature work emotionally & aesthetically, but I have fonder feelings for Hypervolume because it did, after all, save my life. Strap-On in some ways describes my condition at the time I made Hypervolume: there is slapstick comedy; there are lies, admonitions & self-help advice; there is a psychotic break of sorts; there is suffering & redemption; & there is a coda that reminds us that death, madness & humor are not only never far from us, they are never far from each other either.

1986 / 2004
6 pages 8.5” h x 5.5” w

I made this book in 1986 in Los Angeles. It was included in the compilation The Trouble I Had by anabasis/xtant books 2004, editors Jim Leftwich & Thomas Lowe Taylor. Cover image is from an oil painting by Margaret Bigley (now Margaret Nissan.)

Besides giving me a release for the pent-up psychological trauma I was putting myself through in L.A. & being my first positive accomplishment in the past seven or eight months, Unraveling The Hypervolume began a new type of engagement with found text-image materials. Initially I’d made discrete frames & spliced them together into narrative books. Now the compositional priority was the book as a whole; the strength of each individual frame was less important than the overall narrative flow. Bearing that in mind, High Time For Bed ended up having the structure of a short joke. Produced in my nasty tiny bitter apartment in about two hours, it is a nasty tiny bitter book, a bitter joke that helped me allow myself to laugh at the nasty tiny bitter life I’d somehow gotten into.

Xerox edition 1986
11 pages, 8.5" h x 5.5" w

I made this book in 1986 in Los Angeles. It was included in the compilation The Trouble I Had by anabasis/xtant books 2004, editors Jim Leftwich & Thomas Lowe Taylor.

In 1986 I was living in Los Angeles in great despair. A high-school friend of mine had given me his 1/3 ownership of a French antique wholesale & import business, for free. Let me immediately state that I have never been & will never be a businessman. The store was located adjacent to (in the same building as) a live porn theater on Venice Boulevard. I slept on a mattress in a four-foot-high loft over my shop office, cooked on a hot plate & had to walk two miles to do my laundry. I didn’t drive, I didn’t have a car, the business sucked, there was no income, there were no customers. I lived on $40 a week. In Los Angeles in 1986. After a few months it became obvious even to me that the entire enterprise was doomed, so I began paying myself $125 a week, learned to drive the 1969 Peugot 404 that my French partner had shipped over (don’t ask) & moved to a $375/month, one-bedroom basement apartment on a hillside pretty far up Echo Park Boulevard. I got this apartment for $180/month because I was supposed to dig out the dirt hillside that had yet to be dug out of what would eventually be the one bedroom. My front door opened directly into my living room, which had just enough room for a bed, a desk & a chair. The kitchen was junior-sized appliances in a clothes closet. As I said, I was in great despair, had completely lost hope, had nowhere left to turn except onto myself, with emotional razors and psychological pliers. There’s only so much coffee a man can drink in 24-hour restaurants like Ships & The Penguin trying to avoid going home to nowhere & nothing. One night I started making Unraveling the Hypervolume & it saved my life.

1982 / 1986 / 2004
This xerox edition was republished in 2010
6 pages 8.5” h x 5.5” w

Each of these pages including the cover were collages made in 1982 on 5” x 7” index cards for Lise Swenson after she broke up with me. They were compiled into small sequences & exhibited as “Suspended Narratives” by the San Francisco State University Student Union Art Gallery in that same year, curated by the gallery director, Lise Swenson. In 1986, I published several of the sequences as xeroxed chapbooks. Those chapbooks were in turn compiled & published in 2004 as The Trouble I Had by anabasis/xtant books, editors Jim Leftwich & Thomas Lowe Taylor. I republished individual editions in 2010. The scans for this website were taken from the 2004 anabasis/xtant compilation.

The title of this one somewhat ironically refers to the particular kind of absence that is an alcoholic father & uses some Asian-related material gathered during a trip I took to Bangkok in 1982 to visit my own alcoholic father.

1982 / 1986 / 2004
This xerox edition was republished in 2010
11 pages 8.5” h x 5.5” w

Each of these pages including the cover were collages made in 1982 on 5” x 7” index cards for Lise Swenson after she broke up with me. They were compiled into small sequences & exhibited as “Suspended Narratives” by the San Francisco State University Student Union Art Gallery in that same year, curated by the gallery director, Lise Swenson. In 1986, I published several of the sequences as xeroxed chapbooks. Those chapbooks were in turn compiled & published in 2004 as The Trouble I Had by anabasis/xtant books, editors Jim Leftwich & Thomas Lowe Taylor. I republished individual editions in 2010. The scans for this website were taken from the 2004 anabasis/xtant compilation.

By now I was getting down to material that didn't fit together so easily, so formally this one isn't as tight. But I think its deep melancholy gives it a more-than-compensatory emotional coherence.

1982 / 1986 / 2004
This xerox edition was republished in 2010
15 pages 8.5” h x 5.5” w

Each of these pages including the cover were collages made in 1982 on 5” x 7” index cards for Lise Swenson after she broke up with me. They were compiled into small sequences & exhibited as “Suspended Narratives” by the San Francisco State University Student Union Art Gallery in that same year, curated by the gallery director, Lise Swenson. In 1986, I published several of the sequences as xeroxed chapbooks. Those chapbooks were in turn compiled & published in 2004 as The Trouble I Had by anabasis/xtant books, editors Jim Leftwich & Thomas Lowe Taylor. I republished individual editions in 2010. The scans for this website were taken from the 2004 anabasis/xtant compilation.

1982 / 1986 / 2004

This xerox edition was republished in 2010
8 pages 8.5” h x 5.5” w

Each of these pages including the cover were collages made in 1982 on 5” x 7” index cards for Lise Swenson after she broke up with me. They were compiled into small sequences & exhibited as “Suspended Narratives” by the San Francisco State University Student Union Art Gallery in that same year, curated by the gallery director, Lise Swenson. In 1986, I published several of the sequences as xeroxed chapbooks. Those chapbooks were in turn compiled & published in 2004 as The Trouble I Had by anabasis/xtant books, editors Jim Leftwich & Thomas Lowe Taylor. I republished individual editions in 2010. The scans for this website were taken from the 2004 anabasis/xtant compilation, except for the cover, which is a modified reprint of the original 1986 cover.
 

While most of my artist books & many of my paintings involve heavy use of collage, I don't make a lot of individual, independent collages outside of those more complex mixed media projects. But I do make some & here are the ones I like best. Note that the third one is from a photo album artist book called Ulysses No Longer Able To Resist; the book's not good enough to include on this website, but I like this page a lot so I've included it here.