Warren Lehrer


A LIFE IN BOOKS won a CBAA Exhibition Prize at the College Book Art Biennial Exhibition—“particularly for the way animation and video is used as an extension of the physical book.”

Videos, animations and other electronic branches of this project were made with the help of an Individual Artist Grant in Electronic Media + Film from the New York State Council on the Arts.

The performance was developed in part with help from a LaGuardia Performing Arts Center 201 Lab Residency Grant, and direction from Claire Lebowitz.

“A genre-defying night that fuses art and literature, prose and design into a multi-media presentation unlike any other.”
Skylight Books

“Lehrer delivered a dynamic performance based on selected episodes of the life of the “controversial author” Bleu Mobley. The articulation between the script and the projected animations, designed to augment the print version, was carefully choreographed. As a result, Lehrer’s presentation was a compelling experience for the audience.”
Materialidades da Literatura Samuel Teixeira

“Warren Lehrer has built a career collapsing the boundaries that most of us take for granted. Blazing a new path, A Life In Books proves that motion design and literature (among other things) need not be strangers… Creating an “illuminated novel” today could be interpreted as nostalgic, but the hardcover book, enhanced by animations and a multimedia performance is decidedly high-tech, a hyperlink mosaic of multimedia.”
Motionographer Justin Cone

“Warren Lehrer has spent a decade writing and designing a book that is way more than a book. A blend of writing and design, which extends to performance art… A Life in Books is a typographical and design tour de force.”
Print Magazine Ellen Shapiro

“Meet the Biographer of a Man Who Never Lived. Warren Lehrer is touring the country with a multimedia presentation of his meticulously illustrated chronicle of the fictional fiction author Bleu Mobley… Lehrer’s performance begins with an audio recording of Bleu whispering into a microcassette recorder from the darkness of his prison cell. Lehrer animated the words through kinetic typography so audiences get a visual feeling of what it’s like inside Bleu’s insomniac mind. The audio quality is poor, but even so, ‘Some people have remarked on how similar Mobley’s voice is to mine, and that we have other things in common, too,’ Lehrer says. ‘But in a lot of ways we’re very different. He never had a father, for instance. He wrote 101 books. I’ve only written 10. I may be obsessed with my subject, and bursting with all things Bleu Mobley, but I’m not confused about where I end and he begins.’
     A Life in Books is a bit like a Russian Matryoshka doll. Nested within the tale of Mobley’s life are 101 book covers and 34 excerpts that read like short stories. ‘Mobley claims to have never written about himself,’ Lehrer says, falling into his voice as third-party biographer. ‘Yet in this juxtaposition of memoir and monograph we discover him and the people he loves sluicing through all his books, however obliquely.’
Since he cannot afford to tour with an entire cast, Lehrer has produced short video vignettes. In the filmed version of Bleu’s 1998 novel No More Mrs. Niceguy: Confessions of a Nice Catholic Girl, actress and performance poet Caridad de la Luz, a.k.a. La Bruja, plays Paula Martinez. A dutiful daughter, wife, mother, and church member, Paula is diagnosed with cancer and soon discovers her own voice through the transformative power of hard-earned rage. The novel grows out of the experience of Bleu’s daughter Frida being diagnosed with a rare and potentially deadly blood disease. After three years—going to scores of doctors, dozens of labs, too many clinics, treatment centers, and hospitals—Frida becomes an expert at waiting her turn, but impatient when it comes to being bullshitted. ‘Paula isn’t Frida, just like Bleu isn’t me,’ Lehrer says, ‘but La Bruja’s moving performance helps demonstrate Bleu’s use of fiction as way of getting at the truth.’
Other films include the music group Betty performing an excerpt of Bleu’s 2002 epic-length rant I Am Not an Issue, and beat box artist Chesney Snow reciting the poem If This Scar Were a Ladder from Bleu’s final book, Cell By Cell. He also created animations of some of the works like Bleu’s first children’s story How Bad People Go Bye Bye, a pull-out, pop-up book on the history of capital punishment.”
The Atlantic Steven Heller

 


Lehrer’s illuminated novel A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley sits at the center of a multimedia project which includes:
                • Performance/Reading Tour
                • Bleu Mobley Traveling Exhibition
                • Animations, Animated Spots, and Short Films

In his performance/readings, Lehrer presents an overview of Bleu Mobley’s life and work with projections of his book cover designs and other biographical materials including animations and video performances of Mobley book excerpts. A Life In Books presentations are funny, entertaining, and thought provoking. They focus on: the creative process (how life events and the life of one’s times influence an artist’s work, and vice versa); the future of the book; and the lines that separate and blur truth, myth, and fiction. Whenever possible, Warren likes to engage audiences in a Q&A afterwards, and sign books. In some venues, he combines an A Life In Books performance/readings with an overview presentation of his own 30+ year career as writer and artist. Workshops for writers and artists are also possible.

Lehrer began his performance/reading tour of A LIFE IN BOOKS as Keynote Speaker at the 2013 NY Art Book Fair at PS1 MoMA and has since presented it at over 50 venues throughout the U.S. and Canada. Inquire about booking a performance/reading and/or artist talk by Warren Lehrer.

The traveling exhibition presents itself as a retrospective survey of the extraordinary publishing career of Lehrer’s protagonist, the prolific and controversial author/book visionary Bleu Mobley. It includes all 101 “first edition” cover designs accompanied by “original” catalogue descriptions. It also includes Mobley’s earliest books, “composed” in the letterpress shop of his junior high school, as well as “reproductions” of select interior spreads, and Mobley’s book-like objects. There are videos of filmed performances (of Bleu Mobley book excerpts), and animations of pop-up books, and ‘spots’ featuring individual Bleu Mobley titles. There are also artifacts such as letters, notebooks, flyers, articles, and the actual microcassette tapes that became the narrative foundation of A LIFE IN BOOKS. The book serves as an exhibition catalog.

While the book presents a very personal and complex portrait of Bleu Mobley and the wide array of characters who inhabit his life and books, the exhibition “celebrates the creative output of an American master who, in so many ways, and for so long, helped us better understand our own lives, relationships, institutions, and a half-century of American/global events.” The exhibition can also function as a resource for colleges and classes using the book as a text and point of departure for creating their own works of visual literature. The exhibition is designed to travel easily and inexpensively. It is ideal for museums, non-profit galleries, university galleries, art and literary centers, libraries and bookstores with exhibition spaces.
Inquire about booking the exhibit.

 

Here are photographs from the [April 2016] premiere installation of the A LIFE IN BOOKS exhibition at the O’Kane Gallery at the University of Houston, Downtown. Photos by Warren Lehrer and Mark Cervenka.

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A LIFE IN BOOKS won a CBAA Exhibition Prize at the College Book Art Biennial Exhibition—“particularly for the way animation and video is used as an extension of the physical book.”

Videos, animations and other electronic branches of this project were made with the help of an Individual Artist Grant in Electronic Media + Film from the New York State Council on the Arts.

The performance was developed in part with help from a LaGuardia Performing Arts Center 201 Lab Residency Grant, and direction from Claire Lebowitz.

“A genre-defying night that fuses art and literature, prose and design into a multi-media presentation unlike any other.”
Skylight Books

“Lehrer delivered a dynamic performance based on selected episodes of the life of the “controversial author” Bleu Mobley. The articulation between the script and the projected animations, designed to augment the print version, was carefully choreographed. As a result, Lehrer’s presentation was a compelling experience for the audience.”
Materialidades da Literatura Samuel Teixeira

“Warren Lehrer has built a career collapsing the boundaries that most of us take for granted. Blazing a new path, A Life In Books proves that motion design and literature (among other things) need not be strangers… Creating an “illuminated novel” today could be interpreted as nostalgic, but the hardcover book, enhanced by animations and a multimedia performance is decidedly high-tech, a hyperlink mosaic of multimedia.”
Motionographer Justin Cone

“Warren Lehrer has spent a decade writing and designing a book that is way more than a book. A blend of writing and design, which extends to performance art… A Life in Books is a typographical and design tour de force.”
Print Magazine Ellen Shapiro

“Meet the Biographer of a Man Who Never Lived. Warren Lehrer is touring the country with a multimedia presentation of his meticulously illustrated chronicle of the fictional fiction author Bleu Mobley… Lehrer’s performance begins with an audio recording of Bleu whispering into a microcassette recorder from the darkness of his prison cell. Lehrer animated the words through kinetic typography so audiences get a visual feeling of what it’s like inside Bleu’s insomniac mind. The audio quality is poor, but even so, ‘Some people have remarked on how similar Mobley’s voice is to mine, and that we have other things in common, too,’ Lehrer says. ‘But in a lot of ways we’re very different. He never had a father, for instance. He wrote 101 books. I’ve only written 10. I may be obsessed with my subject, and bursting with all things Bleu Mobley, but I’m not confused about where I end and he begins.’
     A Life in Books is a bit like a Russian Matryoshka doll. Nested within the tale of Mobley’s life are 101 book covers and 34 excerpts that read like short stories. ‘Mobley claims to have never written about himself,’ Lehrer says, falling into his voice as third-party biographer. ‘Yet in this juxtaposition of memoir and monograph we discover him and the people he loves sluicing through all his books, however obliquely.’
Since he cannot afford to tour with an entire cast, Lehrer has produced short video vignettes. In the filmed version of Bleu’s 1998 novel No More Mrs. Niceguy: Confessions of a Nice Catholic Girl, actress and performance poet Caridad de la Luz, a.k.a. La Bruja, plays Paula Martinez. A dutiful daughter, wife, mother, and church member, Paula is diagnosed with cancer and soon discovers her own voice through the transformative power of hard-earned rage. The novel grows out of the experience of Bleu’s daughter Frida being diagnosed with a rare and potentially deadly blood disease. After three years—going to scores of doctors, dozens of labs, too many clinics, treatment centers, and hospitals—Frida becomes an expert at waiting her turn, but impatient when it comes to being bullshitted. ‘Paula isn’t Frida, just like Bleu isn’t me,’ Lehrer says, ‘but La Bruja’s moving performance helps demonstrate Bleu’s use of fiction as way of getting at the truth.’
Other films include the music group Betty performing an excerpt of Bleu’s 2002 epic-length rant I Am Not an Issue, and beat box artist Chesney Snow reciting the poem If This Scar Were a Ladder from Bleu’s final book, Cell By Cell. He also created animations of some of the works like Bleu’s first children’s story How Bad People Go Bye Bye, a pull-out, pop-up book on the history of capital punishment.”
The Atlantic Steven Heller