This is the proposal I submitted for the Action/Interaction conference…
On Being Allowed To: What does the combination of different roles within book art practice enable?
Because book art incorporates numerous possible means of action it acts as a matrix for practice that seeks to slide between easily-recognisable forms. The practice of negotiating between the different possible roles we can adopt is characteristic of work across the book art spectrum. A critical discourse inspired by roles and practice rather than the identification of formal elements of value within artifacts would provide a framework to engage with issues not specifically limited to book art but of potential importance to the field.
For example: How do notions of book art practice open up consideration of hybridity and intermedia? If we consider the roles we adopt in relation to these topics, rather than the book-artifacts alone, we have a richer set of attitudes, modes of engagement, and a wealth of ethnographic qualitative data which we can apply to the issue. Approaches such as this tend to break down the sense of essentialism of the field which a purely formal/aesthetic consideration endows it with. If we can consider the changing face of practice (characterised by me here as the changing relationships of artistic roles), then we can take snapshots of how practitioners deal with the potentials of the book form, informing our view of the artifacts themselves.
To give another example: How does book art engage with work-as-process, work where the artist’s action in engaging with the world is the artwork, rather than the artifact itself? How can a field which is seemingly clustered around the appearances of its artifacts engage with this notion? If we choose to look at book art as a field comprising practices rather than artifacts, then the possibility opens up. By admitting a discourse based around our interaction with book art roles, we create a template for examining how ‘new’ roles can slip into the matrix.
This view is open to a wide range of discussion, and touches on themes that help to engage book-art-specific discourse with wider cultural concerns. I will give a few examples in the form of potential‘conversational arcs’:
1: “Roles aren’t significant. We must base our critical view of the medium on the artistic output. Intentional fallacy, etc”
“But that can never tell us why we make books. It gives us just one version of what they are”
“How, then, do we decide what is good?”
“Good for art or good for the artist?”
2: “The scope of book art practice still depends on what I, the artist, define as book art. Duchamp, artistic intention, etc.”
“But when can your peers start to particularise intention so as to learn from it? How does your intention relate to books? Through the phenomenology of ‘bookness’? Reading? Printing? The book as a social phenomenon? What relation does your intention have to books? What role do you adopt to enact it? Just artist? Or not?
3: “For some of us here the process is more important than the outcome. What you propose about using roles as a platform for discourse isn’t nearly flexible enough to capture the range of processes, of strategies for engagement.”
“So invent new roles. The point of discussing roles is to see how we always interrupt them anyway. The point Drucker makes about books as the quintessential C20th art form discusses this formally and historically, but I think it’s because books incorporate so many possible practices (rather than outward forms) that they work this way.”
These ‘arcs’ aren’t intended as an exhaustive map of the possible outcomes, just the briefest trawl through some of the issues raised.
To reflect on the title of the conference, books as a site for action and interaction invoke both artist and reader in the interplay of intention and agency that books can create a platform for. The consideration of book art as a field of roles and practice allows us a way to examine the possibility for action that the book arts represent. The reception of books and the agency of readers/viewers/visitors in encountering them iterates the same staging of the book form as a matrix for intention and emplotment. Both action and interaction are informed by the roles we as artists and as audience will allow ourselves to play.
Andrew Easonaeason@gmail.com