GRRRHHHH: a study of social patterns

Winner AIGA Book Award
Exhibited widely

Funded with help from a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the
Arts Fellowship and an in kind contribution of paper from Mohawk Paper Mills.

“Lehrer’s magnum opus GRRRHHHH: a study of social patterns is the first book to really convince me that computer imagemaking has come of age… Don’t most of us, at one time or another, feel the impulse to invent a basic mythology or a new language? How many books in every generation take it from the beginning and set out to replace Eden? GRRRHHHH, Lehrer’s latest participatory read, attempts no less… Like some of Lehrer’s other books, this is a collaboration, continuing his working relationship with poet-playwright-journalist Dennis Bernstein, who contributed text, and introducing a new and very special collaboration with fibre artist Sandra Brownlee/Ramsdale, whose weavings were the starting point for the book’s images…
GRRRHHHH reverses the text-image balance found in most illustrated books, where the text is the basic continuous element and the images deepen what the text presents. Instead GRRRHHHH is a visual book, in that images are the continuous element, present on every page, while the text is more sporadic, though fully essential… The book’s obvious appeal to the eye shouldn’t delude you into neglect of voice and ear. Ordinary silent reading isn’t the ticket here; the grand entrance to GRRRHHHH is reading aloud. Lehrer doesn’t call his press ear/say for nothing. Bernstein is (among other things) a sound poet, and previous books by these two men have had double or triple identities as book, performance, and audio tape…If you’re the sort who likes your Finnegan’s Wake straight, and hold the scholarship, you might want to try Bernstein’s narratives without benefit of the glossary once, as I did. But do check out the definitions afterward. I found the clarifications welcome, though meanings can often be guessed from sound, visual context, or etymology… Roka, the captivating creature who occupies the center of the book is first introduced in six wordless spreads, so that we become familiar with the creature’s copper and green coloring, the characteristic honeycomb patterning, the trunk-like leg shapes and the pyramidal hump of her back, and then when we already know her by sight, the name roka appears. For many pages the only text is the name and a few other equally intriguing and cryptic words (ptoo, zka, gorra). Eventually, after a long visual sequence of remarkable beauty in which the roka shapes multiply and overlay, a simple poetic text tells of roka’s birth from rock, her clumsy relationship with gravity, her difficult emotional development “with a heart smashed by desire” and “an outrage against loneliness” — until (“somewhere between a blind roll and discovery”) the sky of our tears dries up, roka meets roka, and the old miracle of procreation comes into being… Warren Lehrer has been working up to a magnum opus for some years now, GRRRHHHH may be it, his big book—the one that takes on a big subject, gathers together large resources, takes years to produce, and shows a midcareer peak of creative development.”
Fine Print Betsy Davids

“The marriage of the ancient/future technologies of loom/computer may seem an unlikely union… However, In Warren Lehrer’s GRRRHHHH, the computer responds beautifully to the natural grid of warp and weft inherent to weaving, and Sandra Brownlee-Ramsdale’s weaving
in turn is admirably suited to the matrix of pixles inherent to computer graphics… Brownlee-Ramsdale’s potent style and image refer to times of special social significance. It is this referral to which Lehrer is responding. He has taken that reference and built on it and with it, actualizing a history of social patterns… and social context…”
FiberArts Deborah Hickman

“GRRRHHHH is a delight! Lehrer’s playfulness is prolific and joyful, and that is the heart of his work…” Northwest Review George Gessert

“The magic of this book lives within the universality of the animals—their language, building shelters, diseases, coupling, herding, domination, and other discovered themes. The book is filled with revealatory sequences of images, such as the formation of the first animal GRRRHHHH, a celestial reenactment of creation itself; explosive, imulsive, of universal proportions, yet singular and intimate… This book is an extraordinary experience, one which must be savored over a long period of time.”
Umbrella, Judith Hoffberg

Below, a sequence of spreads from movement one, “A Zenocracy of Pre-Thumb Thought”