The Sanguine
The Sanguine is an artist’s book and a greedy poem, collaged and doubled-up to evoke the ‘sanguine mythology’ that Roland Barthes associated with wine, steak and commerce.
The Sanguine is written through citations of this section of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and an entry about meat from Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture. These texts appear in this poem as scraps, reconstituted to interrelate Barthes’ mythology of the sanguine with McGee’s observations on the consumption of meat as an important factor in evolutionary development, particularly in advancing human intellect.
The interrelation of these sources suggests a strange relationship between the consumption of meat and the capacity for abstract thought, which The Sanguine takes as its subject. In this, it has become possible for animals to be conceived of and consumed as ‘meat products’ through commercial systems which are also by-products of the particular cognitive traits produced by the historical prevalence of meat-eating. However, the same cognitive traits that have both arisen from and motivated these activities are also precisely those that have made it possible for humans to object to them.
The materials of the artist’s book reflect the ideas and themes explored in The Sanguine. Between its red covers, the inner pages are folded into an accordion of roughly pressed scrap papers. These have been heavily coated with glue in multiple layers beneath and over the collaged poem, lending a near-sticky texture, coolness, weight, and other meaty qualities to the inside of the book. The concertina sits within a soft outer cover of orange netting derived from food packaging, referencing a typical means of presenting food items as consumer goods.
Few books resist and cry out as you open them, but this handmade accordion of heavily-glued, pulped paper definitely appears more animal than mineral. One of five handmade copies of a special edition of this ‘greedy’ poem, typewritten and bound in red, it came wrapped like fruit, about to break free from a tangerine-coloured net. Artist-poet Jennie Cole uses Barthes’ Mythologies and Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking to fire debate about the ‘strange relationship between the consumption of meat and the capacity for abstract thought’ and to develop a ‘mythology of the sanguine’.
Poetry Library, Southbank Centre (London, UK)
Jennie Cole, The Sanguine (2015)
Artist’s book, concertina edition
Details:
Book measures 14.5 x 14.5 x 2 cm.
A fold-out accordion book, equivalent of 6 unnumbered double-sided pages.
Edition of 5.
An artist’s book by Jennie Cole. Made in London, 2015.
Construction:
Outer soft cover of orange plastic net derived from food packaging, hand-sewn in acrylic thread.
Covers of red acrylic-painted paper and board with titles in white Letraset.
Pages of roughly pulped and glued scrap paper and tissue.
Text typewritten on a Maritsa 30 in red and black ink.
The Sanguine features in private and public collections including the Rare Books collection at The Poetry Library, Southbank Centre (London, UK).
Sold Out.
Jennie Cole, The Sanguine (2016)
Poem in EPIZOOTICS! #1
The text of The Sanguine / The Same Sanguine featured in EPIZOOTICS! #1, published in November 2016.
EPIZOOTICS! is an online literary journal for contemporary animals, dealing with experimental poetry and fiction, as well as critical theory, continental philosophy and radical politics, focusing on questions concerning the anthropocene, the post-human, the ecocritical, the phenomenological, the spatial, the philosophical, the contemporary and the migratory.
You can read EPIZOOTICS! #1 on issu, or download a pdf.
