My work will examine book artists’ practice and show how they use books as a strategy to ‘metaphorize’ their practice: that is, how they use books’ capabilities and effects as a physical medium and as a social construction, to produce an interface between certain shifting terms that are brought together in their work. This is the ‘metaphorical’ work that books do through their physical form and in the significance they take on as a signifying social form. Amongst other things, I will be alert to ways that books allow book artists to bring together different media, different roles, different awareness and voice, and other forms of integration in the book form. In this way my work studies the practice of book artists to produce a compendium of effects that the book as a strategy produces in practice.
I admit to the prior intention in this study to show that books, in encapsulating a method of relation between radically different spheres of communication and action, provide a concourse on which discourse relevent to contemporary life can take place: that is, that book art itself is still, potentially, socially relevent, despite what I am increasingly viewing as its somnolent state over the last couple of decades. (I will work on criticism to support this) This suspicion centres around the work I see most often: that of artists who are committed to producing book art in preference to (and largely exclusive of) other work. It seems on the surface to me that many of the artists working most exclusively on the book do so with some intention of insulating themselves from the wider world. This does not have to be the case. Besides this, there is a competing critical sense that the works of these artists is no less worthwhile simply because it exhibits the concerns of ‘a certain world’ and no other (this is the case anywhere, including the ‘avant-garde world’). Such work can be and often is poetically complete and satisfying. I merely state that something of the engagement with the world and with the avant garde has seemingly fallen away, to be replaced by a comfortable state of creative reverie. Although we can perform feats of critical analysis on this output, they remain based in a very particular place. From such reverie originality has been known to come, and I hope the same will be true for book artists. I would iterate, again, that I do not make a judgement about the value of book arts that tread this ground (one all too familiar to my own practice, anyway)- but I do see unfulfilled potential in the way that books can draw together many threads of experience in the metaphorization of practice. Unfulfilled in that books reserve privately what would be valuable in a more public realm. I admit that I find the notion of reworking book arts practice into a more public, and to my mind more contemporary setting, is uncongenial. I am persuaded that it would be worthwhile however. The structure suggested by ‘public’ and ‘private’ is, moreover, inaccurate. But I am trying to point towards a way of working that is perhaps less introspective, and more obviously related to the critical concerns of the moment.
What I had not hitherto considered about the possible outcomes of my study was that I might succeed in pushing myself and possibly others, away from book art as a more or less exclusive practice. By reverse-engineering the ways in which book art provides a heuristic framework for practices that work on the world in various tactical/rhetorical ways, I am reacquainting myself (and my imaginary reader) with the tools they had subsumed under the mantle of books. The problem of practice that books solved under their encompassing rubric, understood in this newly reflective way, affords an understanding of the metaphorical practice books make use of. The engineering of the book medium, its staging as intermedia and as a social construction, are incidental to the metaphorical practice itself, which might take place in other media. It merely happens that I (and the reader) have in the past found in the artists’ book a congenial constellation of situation, strategy and tactic. Once we have understood these, we may be tempted to push away from books as a home base.
What about artists’ books made by artists for whom book art is not a central practice? In conversation with Julian Warren the other day, who is currently sorting through the Arnolfini’s archives (including a vast artists’ book collection), I found that he thinks the most interesting and most successful books are made by these artists. My thought, which I haven’t entirely abandoned, is that these books tend to be made by established artists who have attracted the services of publishers such as bookworks who are keen to work with them. Simply because they’re established (and therefore, we hope, ‘good’ artists), there tends to be more interesting output.
Notwithstanding my partial argument, I wonder if Warren is not correct, and that more interesting work is done by artists who don’t see books as ‘home’ but as a situation much like any other to which they can bring their practice. There are physical forms, rhetorical possibilities, and the significance of the book, sure. But these are seen not as the identity of one’s practice, but as part of the tools tactically available at the time. These artists remain in touch with the world, rather than taking on books as a turtle does its shell.
This sounds harsh. I don’t mean to criticise book artists so strongly, nor to generalise as thoroughly as it sounds. However, I know from my own experience, if from no other, that books are a persuasive cocoon. Like certain other cocoons though, they are made of valuable stuff, and with drawing out, can be made to go far.
Making books can teach us, as artists, useful things, and provide many useful solutions. But it is becoming important to me to see if there is not more that can be done with these tools. Whether this means abandoning books as an exclusive practice, or whether it means adapting my practical methods of production is not clear. But I want to be in touch with the world. I want the same for other book artists too,, and I wonder if, by collecting the ways in which artists’ book practice works, I might not persuade some of them that there is more that could be done.
I come to these thoughts wondering if I am not enacting a supplement in the sense of a ‘pharmakon’ that at once works as a remedy and as a poison to the thing it supplements and usurps. To say so is to exaggerate the potency of my study. But certainly I seem to have reached a point where these questions- which, it should be remembered, come from my efforts to ratify book art- start to question whether it is the solution it thinks it is, and whether it is not, in fact, a way of doing things that potentially blocks me (if no one else) off from further development. It is equally persuasive to me that this is not the exclusive conclusion one could come to. The ways and means embodied by book art and criticised here could be transformed by reflection and bring about the rapprochement with the world that I seem to believe is necessary.
1 Sept, 2007.
