Subject to Change. A new collaborative bookwork by Michael Corris, Stéphane Mroczkowski, Alexandra Pignol, and Marjorie Welish. Available from Mare et Martin (Paris) as a hard bound, full-color, 144-page bilingual English/French edition.

A poem by Bertolt Brecht, written during World War II (1939-45), is the starting point for a book of graphic creations and texts exchanged between Michael Corris (Dallas, TX), Stéphane Mroczkowski (Strasbourg, France), and Marjorie Welish (New York, NY).

The work reveals and deconstructs the process of creation and research in the course of a series of exchanges about Brecht’s exile in Santa Monica, California. 

Subject to Change is a collaborative work of text and image that takes as its starting point Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Mask of Evil” (1942). This poem draws its inspiration from a Noh mask in Brecht’s possession since his exile from Germany. The poem depicts the objective and subjective dimensions of evil, in an obvious allusion to the course of fascism through Europe.

The authors of Subject to Change followed many paths in their elaboration of the meanings of Brecht’s poem and the circumstances of its composition. Graphic expressions of resources drawn from history, literary criticism, theater, poetry, and philosophy may be found throughout the book. These richly textured responses to Brecht are nothing more than the product of collaboration; a network of points of reference, digressions and elaborations, generated by responses to each other’s graphic offerings and a continuous flow of email correspondence.

The appended essay by Alexandra Pignol functions as a further resource in conversation with the project as a whole, adding detail and insight into the time of Brecht’s exile. Here, Pignol links Brecht’s poems composed during his exile in the United States to his writings on the Bauhaus ideal of functionalism.

Subject to Change animates the relationship between looking, seeing, and reading; art and knowledge; form and content. We’ve tried to represent the dynamic quality of collaboration in as transparent a means as possible, by eliminating wherever possible the distinction between research and exposition.

Subject to Change is not an illustration of Brecht’s “The Mask of Evil”. Rather, it is the elaboration of a figure — in this instance, “Bertolt Brecht” — who happened to pen a poem, in the course of trying to maintain a creative life in the midst of war, displacement, and despair. 

To purchase a copy of Subject to Change, follow this link.