While I was writing about my interpretations of Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book, I wrote about the effectiveness of the authorial mode in requiring readers to perform mimetic tasks of narrative imagery (using the tools Scarry sets forth, or otherwise: perhaps visual tools in the case of artists’ books). I also wished for a similar way to discuss the effectiveness in creating the arena for such guided cogitation inaugurated by the book form (something Scarry does not attend to greatly, though she has opened up points of reference for me to look at the notion from).
Reading the introduction today of Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan, the subject of authorial effectiveness in contact with the reader/viewer came up again in Ryan’s early coverage of the lineage of VR notions of interactivity versus immersion. How do book artists relate to this?
In the first place I feel that no matter how happy they are employing authorial modes to engage their readers more closely, more immersively, book artists will not happily accept the role of authorship that Barthes has told them must be killed off. Besides which artists are also busily and more or less consciously adopting roles as authors alongside that of publisher, printer, poet and so on, to activate different modes of creativity and access different modes of legitimation. They are hardly likely to accept a single identity.
In the second place, reading is a far more complex and subtle activity than the mere following of instructions, as I have learned from diverse sources, (Ricoeur and Kearney and Brooks and Searle, for example). Artists’ books play with this activity in a knowing way that echoes high modernist deconstruction of the realist style in literature. However, as Ryan points out, such literature ironically depended on the realist mode for its substrate material and as the source of the idioms, cliches and styles which it employed in various decontextualising ways. The same is true of artists’ books. They use authorial techniques in ways that often ‘draw attention to the canvas’ as it were. (Though this is by no means a universally strong practice in book art, it is part of the artistic project that artists’ books mount). Thirdly, artists’s books are of course composed very often of word and picture. Artists’ play with the shifting covalency of the images disposed in image and text to produce bivocal works that help to produce an alienation from the text and textual practices. (This while piling on lavish imagery. One cannot help but think that book artists want to have their cake and eat it too). Even when an artists’ book contains no words, it is very often carrying on another dialogue with the book form, or with the artists’ oeuvre. Which suggests my fourth point: artists’ books can often be considered as nodes in the wider, more rhizomatic form of the artists’ oeuvre. We often find book artists working in series and reprising themes. This is certainly important to my work in artists’ books, and a recent comment on my work by Lindy Clark, that I was ‘building a little world’ between the stations my books held down, certainly rings true. It rings true for me also in the work of John Bently, Helen Douglas and Andi McGarry- all artists I want to interview. (This is a point I should try to discuss). These books are not simple authorial chunks (neither, really is a Barthesian response to authorship ever the whole story, in my opinion, despite the intellectual tool Barthes bequeathes us. Not authorial chunks: not dead language, either, to move things into a Ricoeurian sphere. The activity of meaning that artists’ books embody is turbulent and lively.
