Tucker Nichols reinvents the art book. But first, you have to figure out how to open it

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

Opening Tucker Nichols' book feels like an IQ test.
'Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols' has two covers that fold out in opposite directions, plus the book has a second spine, which makes it all the more baffling. It's an experience akin to a Japanese puzzle box — or the first time you tried to find the door handle on a Tesla.
'I still can't open it right, and I've really opened a lot of them at this point,' Nichols, who worked with McSweeney's art director Sunra Thompson on the design, admitted in a recent conversation with the Chronicle. 'When Sunra showed me one of the dummies he made, I said, 'The first thing I feel is confusion.''
It's a wonderfully destabilizing prelude to what's to come.
Nichols, 55, is a longtime Bay Area artist whose work spans drawing, painting, sculpture, public art, editorial illustrations and children's books, among other media. His work often appears deceptively simple in its fascination with everyday objects and use of text, but there's always a wit that inevitably turns them on their heads.
Nichols, who lives in San Rafael, has been published and exhibited internationally. Locally, his work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, among other Bay Area institutions.
'This is very much born of a McSweeney's mindset,' Nichols said in reference to the San Francisco publisher. 'They don't make art books, so there isn't some way that they think art books should be. We had an agreement right from the start there that we didn't want something that was talking about how important anything was.'
Nichols' companion exhibition, 'Mostly Everything,' is on view at Gallery 16 through Aug. 29.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Did you set out to create a book that subverts the art book genre?
Q: How did you come up with the final cover concept?
A: When Sunra got the dummy made, it opened the other way, and that was just really too confusing. You'd open the first cover the way you'd normally open the book, but then you'd be reading from the back.
It came from the conversation that we had about: What if the book feels more like an object? What if it's more of a thing? There's no words in this, so what if you're really trying to force people into having a physical experience?
(At McSweeney's) there seems to be an unwritten law that every project should be doing something that hasn't been done before. The hunger for that makes it worth it to go through all the headaches of trying to figure out how to print a double cover.
Q: How did you decide to organize the book?
A: I really wanted this to not be my book of my work. I knew Sunra and his work, and really wanted it to be his take as an outsider to all of this stuff that I've been making for so long that doesn't really belong together, and have him try to solve that problem.
This book doesn't really make sense on the surface, and that's really what started the whole process of what form the book was. Maybe it should have categories? Maybe those categories shouldn't quite work? Maybe part of it is the impossibility of trying to make sense of what one person has been making for 25 years?
Q: Even though this is a book that doesn't use text in the conventional way, you have a very text heavy practice.
A: Text is this weird thing, it has this promise of helping us not be confused anymore. It's mostly telling us what we don't know about what we would need to know in that particular context, and my text typically plays with that without actually delivering on the promise. You're left with maybe more questions than you had in the beginning or a slightly different view that didn't quite tell you what you were hoping for.
Q: What was it like to look back at your work in a different way for the Gallery 16 show?
A: It's really the first time that I felt prompted or even comfortable with the idea of showing things from really different time periods. I'm very happy with how it came out. It makes me always want to be incorporating older work in the shows from now on.
I think there's another piece that really came out of the book, which is really a kind of letting go of a story, letting go of how things are supposed to be, and owning the fact that I make lots of different things in lots of different styles — even while knowing that the art world doesn't really like that because it complicates the story.