Artists' Books
Much of what is most interesting about the Arts is determined by where lines are drawn, both on paper and between genres.
Famed Canadian poet and book designer Robert Bringhurst asserts, for example, that the primary value of a book resides in its capacity to preserve and convey ideas. If we accept this, then objects similar in appearance to the book, but devoid of content must, by extension, contain little of worth, with scant claim to its name.
A physical codex, when well matched to its story, may be said to incarnate both body and soul; an artist’s rendering of the same thing, regardless of how magnificent, cannot embody this union because it doesn’t contain ‘content.’ As such it’s no more than a hollow body, ‘A scarecrow. A stuffed animal. ‘ as Bringhurst puts it.
On the flipside, a more generous definition of the book concedes that storytelling is, conceptually at least, a type of book because it serves to contain and convey essential life lessons; to transmit information that the genes can’t carry. Within this model, artistic works, despite lacking text blocks and bindings, may legitimately be called books. As Jordon Sonenberg at Art Metropole, a Toronto-based Artists’ Book seller, put it in a recent conversation, ‘an artist who uses the book form or any method, in fact, that utilizes the container concept to present ideas to an audience can reasonably be called a ‘book artist.’
Many bibliophiles and traditional Book Makers would disagree. Surely, this crosses the line. Yes, it’s easy to ‘get’ William Blake producing an ‘Artists’ Book.’ He was a talented engraver; an unmatched poet. He took what he had written, painted accompanying pictures, and bound them together in book form to produce some of the sweetest, most beautiful volumes ever seen. It’s also possible to ‘get’ Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy being used by John Balistreri to caption scenes from Grade B horror movies. But is it reasonable to call works of art that merely depict, or ridicule, challenge, examine, praise, denigrate or comment on ‘the book,’ books at all? Aren’t these efforts simply art that happens to use the book, in form or concept, as a vehicle to present its message?
‘Real’ books contain text, typically printed on paper or at least some substance which allows for legible words to appear, bound between covers whose spines, edges and endpapers are crafted in artistically appealing shapes, styles and materials. These objects don’t have to be made in any specific sort of way. The only thing that they ‘should’ have, at least to the bibliophilic mind, is content.
This is exactly what artists such as Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Wiener started to play with in the 1950s and 1960s. Credited by many as the father of modern artist's books, Roth (1930-98) produced a huge body of work that systematically deconstructed and challenged the codex’s authority.
Kinderbuch (1957) for example, is a picture book for children that’s full of holes which allow readers to see more than one page at a time. In the late fifties and early sixties he published various editions of his book Book using a similar technique. They weren’t however bound, which enabled viewers to arrange the pages as they wished. The British experimental author B.S. Johnson used this approach with his novel The Unfortunates.
Roth lived for a time in Reykjavík where he produced a series of Bok books which included material cut from Icelandic newspapers. Throughout the sixties he produced three ‘editions’ of Literaturwurst , where pages from ‘found’ books and magazines were cut up, mixed with spices, onions and lard and placed in sausage skins: a book, maybe, but with text entirely illegible. Another work involved placing cheese in a suitcase and letting it rot.
In America Ed Ruscha (1937-) printed his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1957. It documents, accordion style, a journey taken along Route 66 between LA and Oklahoma. By deciding to distribute it in the gasoline stations that he'd photographed, rather than through galleries and art institutions, Ruscha bypassed traditional means of getting his work noticed by the public. This turned out to be a genre-defining practice, as did the use of inexpensive, disposable materials and an emphasis on process. Lawrence Weiner’s first artists’ book, called Statements, consists of a series of instructions on how the reader can replicate the art that he was at the time creating. Weiner, known for his typographic texts, is famous for “Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole,” a phrase that graces the front of the Walker Institute in Minneapolis.
The work of Ruscha, Roth, Weiner and many others has torn the definition of what constitutes a book out of the dictionary, and scrunched up art and craft, object and concept into new and provocative formats.
Some of this tearing has had an impact in the library. Twenty years ago, Walker Institute Librarian Rosemary Furtak received a small endowment from artist Sol Lewitt. With this, and the careful husbanding of limited budgets, she has, over the years, slowly and stealthily gone about buying artists’ books. “It seemed to me that if an artist had work in our permanent collection and that artist also made books, we, the library, should collect those books. “In my mind I thought, we’ve got Sigman Polke’s paintings, why shouldn’t we try to collect some of his books because this will give our public a more complete picture of who this artist is. No one else was collecting them in the museum, and it just seemed like I should do it.”
Librarians have typically ignored artists’ books: no sympathy for them. The traditional view was that if an author’s text was there, it was valid and collectible, if not then the decision should be turned over in to the art curators. Furtak decided to stretch the boundaries of librarianship – by redrawing lines. She saw collecting as a neglected area in a community where a lot of people were making artists’ books and bringing and showing them to her.
Thanks to her pioneering efforts and a succession of supportive Directors, Furtak has built one of the world’s most impressive artists’ book collections. And while traditionalists may not be happy about it, such collections, whichever department they happen to end up in, provide not only a source of discussion and debate about the book and what it means, but also examples of ingenuity, aesthetic beauty and new ways of looking at old ideas.