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Key Texts (Research Methods Assignment 3)
Presenting a limited number of texts has forced me to hinge my arguments on just a few core ideas. This ‘stripping-down’ introduces a certain amount of mental mobility into my understanding of and presentation of my ideas, in the same way that speaking from basic notes rather than from a prepared statement makes for more lively presentation. Having a smaller range of tools to set up makes me think about what to do with them a bit more clearly.
I have chosen five short quotations from three key texts. Two of
them are from theoretically useful sources, namely the essay On
Interpretation1 by Paul Ricoeur, and the essay The Field of Cultural
Production2 by Pierre Bourdieu. My third text is from a talk given by
the book artist Helen Douglas as part of the Arcadia id Est exhibition
and conference organised by the U.W.E., Bristol, on the subject of
‘Nature, Landscape and the Book’3 as it pertains to her work.
My first text, Ricoeur’s On Interpretation sets out in brief
form his thought on how the functioning of metaphor in narrative
produces the meaning of texts through interpretation. This
interpretation, Ricoeur says, is a hermeneutic relationship between the
text and its producer, the text and its audience, and the text and its
relation to its cultural milieu. I have selected a pair of quotations
from this essay to support my use of Ricoeur’s ideas in my development
of a project interpreting artists’ books. My reading of the existing
writing on artists’ books has shown a tendency for texts to describing
artists’ books to to concentrate on the characteristics of the object
and its effect on the viewer, with some attention to the
historical/cultural placement of the artwork. Despite the existence of
works devoted to interviewing living artists4, the first site of books’
meaning (the first area of the hermeneutic interpretation of texts),
that of artistic intention, remains obscure.
At this point I will cite the first of my quotations. Ricoeur here
presents three events or sites where text (here I interpret this as
being applicable to an artwork as a cultural text) exists as a
discourse that is amenable to interpretation and analysis.
Thanks to writing, discourse acquires a threefold
semantic autonomy: in relation to the speaker’s intention, to its
reception by its original audience, and to the economic, social and
cultural circumstances of its production. It is in this sense that
writing tears itself free of the limits of face-to-face dialogue and
becomes the condition for discourse itself becoming-text. It is to
hermeneutics that falls the task of exploring the implications of this
becoming-text for the work of interpretation.p151
In short, existing work on artists’ books tends to concentrate on what
an artists’ book is. This includes criticism of what it is as a work of
art as well as its physical characteristics. There is also, as I
stated, attention paid to the historical development (and hence the
cultural engagement) of artists’ books, but this tends to produce,
again, taxonomies of physical description and critique over time ,
rather than a set of really ‘inward’ artistic practices over time.5 The
question of ‘Why produce artists’ books?’, and thus one of the crucial
areas of artists’ books as meaning-producing texts has not yet been
adequately examined6.
My further quotations from Ricoeur and from Bourdieu, attempt to
provide a framework for questioning why artists make artists’ books.
The insight informing my choice of this framework come from my own
experiences of what seems to be going on in the production of artists’
books.
Ricoeur’s thought examines meaning as arising through a hermeneutic
relationship of the self with other things: other texts, other selves.
His thought ultimately presupposes an objectivity which answers
empirical enquiry, but an objectivity modified by the liveliness of
interpretation. The world and its meanings are alive in living
metaphor, which bears the weight of interpretation for every novel
experience, every work of imagination where two or more terms are
freshly combined. Ricoeur sees the fully-fledged metaphor at work in
narrative, which he sees as the site both of fiction and of historical
testimony. Ultimately our sense of self is limited and articulated by
the powers of narrative, but these limits and articulations are far
from restrictive: they are productive. The human is, before all, an
interpreter. Here is Ricoeur on narrative. Note particularly his
comment on how narrative destroys ordinary consistency and allows new
interpretation to arise.
…Metaphor constitutes a work on language consisting
in the attribution to logical subjects of predicates that are
incompossible with them. By this should be understood that, before
being a deviant naming, metaphor is a peculiar predication, an
attribution which destroys the consistency or, as has been said, the
semantic relevance of the sentence as it is established by the
ordinary, that is the lexical, meanings of the terms employed…
[comparing the theory of narrative and the theory of metaphor]
Both indeed have to do with the phenomenon of semantic
innovation…In both cases the novel, the not-yet-said, the unheard-of
– suddenly arises in language: here, living metaphor, that is to say a
new relevance in predication, there, wholly invented plot, that is to
say a new congruence in the emplotment.
p144
What might this mean in terms of artists’ book production? I take
Ricoeur’s explanation of metaphor in narrative as a cue to begin a
description of the metaphorisation of practice. Like Ricoeur, I see
metaphor as operating at several points: (1)in the artist’s intention,
(2)in the medium, (3)for the audience, (4)in the work’s cultural and
historical relation. The first and second of these sites are held
within the hermeneutic of artistic practice, I have elsewhere their
relation as what I termed the ‘cycle of intention’. there are undecided
qualities of ‘yet/also’, of Keatsian negative capability in the book
artist’s use of his or her medium. The identity of the medium itself is
undecided. It has intermedium characteristics. The character of the
intention within the artwork has narrative characteristics, but the
narrative’s autonomy as a text and as an artwork are similarly in a
state of constant interpretation, between the challenges of artistic
intentions and the social construct of the book. (Between what the
artist wants it to be and what the viewer expects to see). Artists’
books are full of narrative metaphor, but also engaged in an ongoing
ironic contest as metaphors-for-books. They are viewed, read, as-if
they were books, and at the same time as-if they were artworks. They
coin legitimacy from both their appeal to, and their critique of
tradtional book forms. The third and fourth sites, that of the
audience’s viewing of the narrative artistic object, and of its
historical disposition are often seen in other work on artists’ books.
They too, inform the cycle of intention, but from outside the artist’s
own creation. This is a two way street, however. Returning an analysis
of artists’ intentions and the factors by which the artists’ book
metaphorises (and thereby mobilises) practice, cannot but inform our
view of books’ meaning for audiences and in historical context.
I mentioned above how artists’ books’ inter-medium identity allowed
artists to ‘mint legitimacy’ from several sources. Bourdieu’s essay on
The Field of Cultural Production is useful as a framework for
theorising how book artists use their medium to exchange the
capabilities of various artistic ‘roles’ in their practice. (I might
also have mentioned Robert Darnton’s essay, What is Book History?7, in
which he outlines a ‘circuit of production’ for books, thus following
(ordinary) books through the various roles necessary to their
production). Artists making books have vastly differing relationships
to their medium. Some are responsible for the whole process, including
publishing and distribution, others arguably produce artists’ books in
something approaching the role of an illustrator hired by a publisher.
Others are, in addition to being artists, poets, writers, musicians and
publishers. My thesis expresses the view that all book artists seek
access to two things: first, the metaphorisation of practice amenable
through working on the loosely-defined but multi-faceted (if not
knife-edged) medium of artists’ books. Secondly, they seek access to
the modes of production (and thus roles) of book making. Thus they
garner the legitimacy of publishers, designers, writers, and so on,
retaining (to varying degrees) the flexibility and undefined status of
the fully autonomous artwork. his hybrid form wants to cross
boundaries, wants to keep its freedom whilst gaining the legitimacy of
stricter or less autonomous forms.
Here are two quotations from Bourdieu. In the first he sets out the
diversity and instability of roles available in the field of cultural
production. In the second, he notes the general areas from which
legitimacy is sourced.
In no field is the confrontation between positions and dispositions
more continuous or uncertain than in the literary or artistic field.
Offering positions that are relatively uninstitutionalized, never
legally guaranteed, therefore open to symbolic challenge, and
non-hereditary (although there are specific forms of transition), it is
the arena par excellence of struggles over job definition.p87
…we find three competing principles of legitimacy, i.e., the
recognition granted by the set of producers who produce for other
producers, their competitors, i.e. by the autonomous self-sufficient
world of ‘art for art’s sake’, meaning art for artists. Secondly, there
is the principle of legitimacy corresponding to ‘bourgeois’ taste and
to the consecration bestowed by the dominant fractions of the dominant
class and by private tribunals, such as salons, or public,
state-guaranteed ones, such as academies, which sanction the
inseperably ethical and aesthetic (and therefore political) taste of
the dominant. Finally, there is the principle of legitimacy which its
advocates call ‘popular’, i.e. the consecration bestowed by the choice
of ordinary consumers, the ‘mass audience’.p83
It seems to me that book artists gain a capability for movements
amongst artistic roles and forms of legitimacy, through their creative
use of the book medium.
I will close with a quotation from Helen Douglas, a book artist whose
own work, as well as that made with Telfer Stokes, has been widely
exhibited and written about over the past two decades.
"Rather than speaking in the abstract, I have
decided to speak from the book, the place of my making, the place where
my expression is made concrete, and where all three Nature Landscape
and Book come together."
…And yes also to Book
That is the place of my making
where I can gather all within the gatherings
and weave my visual narratives as text to the page
in and out
teased to the surface
inside to out
expressing this to my viewer in an intimate and contained way
published
Douglas’ identification of books as the ‘place of her making’ is, for
me, an example of one of books’ several features being used by an
artist in her practice. Books are a place where narratives can be
assembled and presented, a ‘gathering of gatherings’. They are a place
for these things to be thought about and assembled by the artist. They
are a place for ruminations on how the work will affect the viewer- how
the work brings ‘inside to out/ expressing this to my viewer in a
visual way’. Elsewhere I have written about my notion of artists’ books
as forms of ‘temporary construction’: something between a temporary
abeyance of deconstruction in order to produce something worth
deconstructing, and a petit récit, stepping away from the legitimation
offered by the orthodoxy of grand narratives. These polarities, or
nodes, seem both to answer to the temporary but powerfully liberating
character of metaphor. Artists’ books metaphorise practice.
1 Ricoeur, Paul, On Interpretation, in The
Continental Philosophy Reader, pp138-155, Eds, Kearney, R and
Rainwater, M, Routledge,London and New York, 1996.
2 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production,
in The Book History Reader, pp77-99, Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair
McCleery, Routledge, London, 2002.
3 Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, accessed online at
4 See Courtney, Cathy, Speaking of Book Art,
5 See Drucker, Johanna,The Century of Artists’ Books, Granary Books, New York City, 2005
6 This criticism is why I am not citing a text from
Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artist’s Books in the limited space
available. I need to concentrate on articulating my own argument,
whilst acknowledging its meaning in terms of its critique of existing
work. I would, had I space, include a more detailed critique that
showed how my ideas build on directions suggested by Drucker’s scope
and the attitude taken by her work; it points towards the gap I want to
explore.
7 Darnton, Robert, What is Book History?, in The Book
History Reader, Eds, Finkelstein, D and McCleery, A, Routledge, London
and New York, 2002