Some of my favorite movie moments involve a swimming pool, a character and a pause in storytelling. In The Graduate, Harold & Maude and Rushmore (just to name a few), a character walks to the pool’s edge where they drop, splash and quietly float for some several long, uncomfortable seconds. The camera’s indifferent, slow pan mollifies any sense of alarm—narrative concerns like “drowning?” fade into the background. These scenes are different than the others. They are voluptuously sensory experiences, which provide a surreal moment of sympathetic sensation within the otherwise plot-driven medium of film.

Lutz Bacher’s series of eighty-five prints entitled The Celestial Handbook, now on view at the Whitney Biennial, is obviously not a graphic design project. But the set of works, which are nothing more than framed pages from a forty-six-year-old, self-published book about astronomy, poignantly address the gap that sometimes occurs between the visual and verbal articulations of an idea—a gap that has both inspired and plagued the field of graphic design.