What is an artist doing when they produce an artists’ book? What can we read from the book itself about this process of making, and how would we combine it with what we would glean from talking to the artists themselves?

I want to emphasise the importance to me of combining these two
sources of information. This is because I am not trying to produce a
pure critical study of artists’ books themselves, in which case it is
arguable whether the artists’ intention is of any importance or not.
Rather, I am trying to understand what artists’ books are to artists,
and perhaps after that I may be able to concern myself with how they
seem to work in the world on their own. My angle of enquiry is not,
therefore, to look at individual artists’ books with a view to defining
characteristics, be they physical, stylistic, or aesthetic, that place
them in the category of ‘artists’ books’, or even ‘artists’ books from
period x’. When I look at the books, I will be trying to reunite them
with what their creator seems to have intended them to be, and to do
this well, I will need to have it from the artists’ themselves what
they meant to do.

One uncomfortable question that has come up is about how I would
define the field I’m going to look at. What are artists’ books? How
will I know when I have got one? Flustered, my reply has been that,
since lots of other people have failed to give any concise answer to
this question, that I would not try to either. But buried in my
earliest motivations for trying to look at books in the way I have just
been describing was my suspicion that the way to define the field was
not to try to define the objects, but to try to define, or at least
explore, the practice that produces them. I have not yet answered the
question of “what are artists’ books?” by standing up with this idea-
but I think it may be possible for me to construct an answer through my
research.

My belief is that artists who make books do so for reasons they
could express themselves: they wanted to have the various capabilities
that book forms offer. That is, (to scratch the surface, and in no
particular order), they want to have the ability to exploit books’
distributional power, their egalitarian qualities; that on the other
hand they want to use the book’s aura of luxury and the rich materials
associated with it; perhaps they wanted to have access to the familiar
narrative constructions offered by books, or perhaps they wished access
to this only to attempt to deconstruct it. And the artists who want
these powers of the book want them for two reasons: for themselves, to
assist them in the artwork’s making, and for their audience, whose
experience of the artists’ work is profoundly affected by the
connotations of the medium itself. I’ve indicated above that I have but
scratched the surface of the different reasons that artists want to use
the book medium, and perhaps for this reason of multiple points of
departure, I’m no closer to a definition than those who would take a
more historical or anecdotal approach to the quest for definition. But
on my side I have the thread, common to all works described by their
makers as artists’ books: that they all share the intention to use the
book as a way to work and a way to present intentions: as a way of
making intentions concrete.

What is an artist doing when they produce an artists’ book? What can
we read from the book itself about this process of making, and how
would we combine it with what we would glean from talking to the
artists themselves?

The above are the questions I asked myself when I began this short
essay, to guide me through it. I’ve begun by making a kind of preface
to the first of those questions: what I think artists are doing when
they produce an artists’ book. I even gave, in rough form, a couple of
examples of the sorts of power I thought artists wished to tap from the
book medium. I was careful to say that these were just a couple of
examples from a whole spectrum of uses and leverages artists got out of
books. Here, I want to enumerate how I would go about looking at how
those uses are set out and expressed. But I have a logistical problem
to face.

‘Uses’ is an inexact term in these circumstances. More apt might be
the term ‘heuristic tactics’, which patches in more effectively with
the idea that there is a whole frustrated train of intention piling in
behind what an artist actually gets round to making, and that agrees
well with my view that books are used by artists as a way to implement
their ideas, as a route through the problems of practice. What I want
to do in the paragraphs below is chart out a few of the more obvious or
accessible ‘uses’, and give a flavour of how I will access them, how I
will read them. Note at this point that I am now midway between “what
is the artist doing?” and “what can be read?” I cannot say with any
conviction what an artist was doing without verifying their intentions
with them, and I can only surmise what my well-or-ill-informed reading
might seem to suggest to me. I have returned, here, to the importance
of synthesizing my two types of information. My logistical problem is
that I have knowledge of only one artist’s intentions and practice
regarding their artist’s books, and that artist is me. I must therefore
begin with certain tastes and prejudices that are inherent in my own
practice and my own point of view: my hope and conviction are that
other book artists share at least some of these tastes and prejudices,
or they would not be working in the same medium as myself. I think it
likely, but whether or not it is true remains to be seen. The problem
can be mitigated by collecting information from artists in parallel
with my readings of their artwork, but not wholly obliterated. At the
moment, all I can do is advertise my particular areas of interest, in
the hope that it may be possible for others to see what I have
emphasised from my own particular point of view. What I have learned
here is that it is of importance for me to prepare to collect and apply
information from artists about their practice parallel to my own
readings. (I will be writing more on this shortly). Similarly, I am but
one reader of these books, and my reading of them reflects my own
encounters with them rather than those of an audience in a larger sense.

How do I read an artists’ book? How do I analyse its content? It has
become obvious from the preceding paragraphs that I would want to make
a distinction between impressions gathered by my own activity as a
reader, and those informed through dialogue with the artist. I think I
have made the importance to me of achieving a synthesis of these two
sources pretty clear.

Settling down to enumerate the critical tools I use as a reader
then, (in other words, to show the workings of the ‘uses’ referred to
above), I explored various ways of laying out what I seemed to be doing
as I read. Various hierarchies and orders of separation evolved and
were discarded. Eventually I saw three sets of paired methods or ways.
I don’t see these as opposites, but as parallel ways of looking which
often inform one another’s outlook, but sometimes contradict one
another antagonistically. As you will see, the readings they create
account somewhat for the shifting, multiple reading that artists’ books
give us.

1: narrative analysis and structure analysis (structure in the sense of material, of sculpture)

2: things we can read in the book, and things we must infer from artistic intention.

3: authorial intention and reader’s experience (the book as method and the book as medium)

The first pair give us our first contact with the book. The syntax
of the imagery and its arrangement as an object are inseperable, but
are amenable to distinct ways of seeing the book. The melding of
narrative and iconography, and the way in which these are concretized
and expressed in the physical structure of the book and its materials,
are part of two indistinctly separate realms. That of the material
belonging to the book as a story, and that of the book as a physical
object. Artists’ books always develop these realms simultaneously, but
our analysis of them must draw them out separately, the better to see
how they relate to one another. One of the ways artists’ books are
often designated is in their self-conscious use of their form, and this
is partly what is being looked at here. Our task in analysing this, is
to apply the methods of narratology- whether textual or pictorial,
whilst preserving the vital importance of our physical- tactile and
spatial- experience of the book. We must always recombine our
impressions and analysis: not just because the artist’s book itself has
made a synthesis of them, but also because, in the book’s
self-conscious way, it will often compose antitheses and whip backwards
and forwards in its relationship of story, image and material. There
can be elaborate jokes and puns and ironies concealed at every level:
sometimes a book will mesh its materials so closely that every piece
supports another, and sometimes the material and the construction will
seem to snidely mock the efforts of the story. We must be aware of
this, and prepared to acknowledge it and express it in our analyses.

I have written above of “our impressions” and this leads me into the
second pair, things we can read in the book, and things we must infer
from artistic intention.

It’s not so much, I think, a question of very carefully wearing a
set of imaginary blinkers to bracket out my experience and inference of
artists’ intentions in my reading as it is of acknowledging my need to
verify them (the artist’s intentions) if I am to pursue my method of
describing artists’ books through the practice that produces them. I’ve
written already about my intention to join together my reading with
what I can gain from talking to the artists, so I will not repeat it
here. However, at this point in my discussion of my critical tools, I
am speaking of my reading. We are imagining an analysis of a book, and
what I am doing at this point is staking off areas where I seem to be
unearthing an archaeology of intention (“Does this structure correspond
to the text in the way I suspect?”,“Is this method of producing a mark
an allusion to Etruscan art, and therefore an allusion to this or that
political theme?”). The point of this exercise is to be able to return
to them and verify them, and to be aware of the tension, the
unknowingness, that becomes part of my reading, part of my discovery of
the book. This unknowingness and the experience it creates feeds back
down to my analysis of narrative and structure too.

The third pairing, artistic intention and readers’ experience, is
not immediately concerned with the analysis of a book on its own,
though it requires both personal knowledge of the book (reader’s
experience), and verification of the artists’ intentions. The other two
pairs are essentially synthetic: I am aiming in them to combine
impressions from distinct sources- from narrative and physical. from
personal reading and from the artists’ intention. Here, I am separating
out the material that has successfully become part of the book for the
reader, and that which remains inaccessible to the general reader, an
artifact in the mind of the artist. I spoke above of artists wishing to
make books for two reasons: for themselves, to assist them in the
artwork’s making, and for their audience, whose experience of the
artists’ work is profoundly affected by the connotations of the medium
itself. This separation of impressions should make clear which effects
belong to which reasoning.
For the audience. (The book as medium).

By separating out my analyses in the manner I have done, I now have
a series of impressions of narrative and pictorial constructions, and
how they relate to physical constructions in the book. I have a number
of notes on materials and styles employed, and I have chased these down
to their referents in several cases by asking the artist what they
meant by them. I have also collected some blunt material on the
artist’s method of working, on how they collect and refine their ideas,
of how a book takes shape, and their responses about why they have
chosen this way to produce their work. What I aim to do now is to sort
these things into materials which show up in the reading of the work,
and that which has been constructed and inferred with help from the
artist. There will also be material- impressions from my reading, and
material from the artist’s comments- that doesn’t say very much about
the content of the book, but says a lot about how it is made, and why
it is made the way it is. They’re the idea equivalent of tool marks, or
of the discarded chippings that tell you how something was made. Some
of this will become my evidence for the heuristic power of books.

For the artist. (The book as method).

My discussions with the artists would be supported by my own
impressions from their work. Here I am searching for material about
what the artist’s aim was in adopting the form they have. This harks
back to my earlier note about my belief that artists have adopted the
book form because they want to have access to the book’s various
capabilities. So here I am looking for admissions that they wanted to
distribute material, that they wanted a way to deal with a complex
metaphor that needed the particular staging of a book, that there were
particular materials they wanted to work with. Perhaps books were a way
to set out the boundaries of a project. Perhaps the limitations imposed
by the covers set up a logical space within which certain ideas could
be worked on. And so on. I hope I will find artists telling me as much,
and I will find other evidence in what I will call the arbitration of
the book. By this I mean its boundaries- the choices of expressive
material and style, the physical construction and the chosen methods of
producing poetic and narrative effects. These are the “tool-marks” I
wrote of above. Joined to the material I hope to collect on artists’
aims, I hope to be able to put together their aims with the way they
have achieved them, and show how the book has been used as a tool to
achieve them. It is worth noting, that while this is often going to
show how the book form helps to achieve certain physical effects (of
distribution, of material, of form, for example), it will also, I hope,
show how effective forms of practice are engendered here. For example,
how an idea is carefully arranged within the logical space of the book,
or how competing agendas are set against one another using the book’s
ability to contain multiple media and multiple vocalites. There is also
the ability of the book to contain and separate ideas, and this has
bearing on the artist’s method of working: how they relate to their
sense of a continuing life’s work. Managing complex ideas within the
discrete spaces allowed by books might allow freedom otherwise hard-won
outside. These examples are effects whose appearance in the book is of
course physical, but whose existence is owed to the fact that the book
form makes their arrangement, and the thought that goes into it,
possible.

Looking at these three pairs from a slightly different angle, it is
possible to tabulate the various strategies and analyses that become
accessible through them.

Firstly, our narrative/structure pair allows us to use textual and
narrative analysis, allows us to break up plot and poetic device and
the deployment and expressiveness of imagery. We can follow the
structure of the form and of the story and track the relationship
between different vocalities as the book progresses.

Next, we turn to the relationship between what we can read and what
we can verify. This allows us to separate and later combine the
experiences of the reader and the intentions of the author. Amongst
this is our experience as a reader of stories, our reader’s involvement
with and emplotment in the situations and structures evoked. we start
to glimpse some of the intentions of the artist to enclose and enfold
us in the experience of the artwork, to produce constructions within
which ideas can be unfurled, and we can verify this intention by
application to the artist themselves. Here we have a sort of critical
distance emerging, where we have started to set aside our engagement
and put it next to the intentions we want to glean from the contact we
have with the artists themselves. When we put them back together again,
it will be less subjectively.

In our third pairing we can set the effects of the book aside
separately from its’ makers reasons for making it so. Our aim is to
expose strategies of making here, and strategies that we glimpsed
before of enclosement, of temporary construction, of logical space, of
distribution, etc, can here be set out more or less literally, because
we are now looking at intentions and at the symptoms of planning and
constructing (the “tool marks”) that we can find in the books. But the
book’s importance here is eclipsed by the intention that brought it
about. Here, we are trying to find out what the artist is doing when
they make an artists’ book, just like we were at the beginning, only
now we have far more of an idea of what they have achieved and how they
have achieved it. We are far closer to finding out why they are doing
it than we were.