For a large print version please contact the engage office: [email protected]
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Book Art
• Issue 12 – Summer 2002
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Book Art Issue 12 – Summer 2002
Editorial
Making and Unmaking Books Stephen Bury Artists’ Books Alec Finlay And so books entered our lives... Howard Hollands, Victoria de Rijke, Rebecca Sinker Book Burning David Petts Nothing that’s not a book
Between Image and Word Vincent Gille Painting and Books: a difficult partnership
Martin Thomas & Sarah Norrish Words
Pam Meecham Picturing Relationships: working with words and pictures in the gallery
Kimberley Foster I boiled a book for three hours and the pages stayed the same
Karen Eslea Beyond Words
Producing and Circulating Mark Beever of ‘Book Lab’ in conversation with Victoria Hollows Tanya Peixoto bookartbookshop
Reviews Emily Pringle Private Views and Ian Breakwell’s Derby Days
Social Inclusion Revisited Andrew Brighton Kaija Kaitavuori Ian Lawley
Editorial, Book Art
Karen Raney
In everyday use books have a highly standard form. They are made of rectangular pages, attached together on one side, and covered with words and images which are intended to be read in sequence. Books have come to stand for contradictory things: the essential means by which culture is preserved and the suspect means by which cultural discourse is controlled; freedom from brute survival, and avoidance of real life; the fertile, live imagination, and sterile, dead convention. It is these two facts - that books have a conventional form, and that books represent powerful and contradictory things - which render them rich ground for making art.
This volume is about the book as an art form and related questions. In the first section - ‘Making and Unmaking Books’ - the artist’s book is theorised, and reflections are made by the leaders of different book making projects. Stephen Bury of the British Library gives a brief history of the artist’s book. Artist and publisher Alec Finlay moves from poetic reflections on the nature of books to the great ‘circulatory system’ of making, publishing, selling and collecting. Researchers from Middlesex University consider to what extent destroying books can be a critical, creative act; with BAEd students they explore the meaning of ‘revelation’ through making and analysing art books. Visual poet David Petts finds the book to be a powerful art form when used with a wide range of participants, from primary school pupils to mental health service users.
Section two, ‘Between Image and Word’ is concerned with questions about the interplay between visual and verbal modes of expression. Vincent Gille reflects on the problems of integrating books into a display of visual art, the Tate Modern’s Surrealism exhibition (2001). Martin Thomas and Sarah Norrish describe the planning of the exhibition Words (2002) and the education programmes devised for it. In a project at the Chisenhale Gallery, students take a book as a starting point for visual invention. Artist Kim Foster sets out to make an object which would stand for someone else’s verbalised responses to a book. Pam Meecham describes two gallery-based projects which use children’s literature as a way into exploring works of visual art. What comes through each of these accounts is the complex symbiosis of image and word in art practice, in exhibiting and in learning.
In ‘Producting and Circulating’ we hear from the directors of two ventures which operate between and across boundaries. Book Lab is a company that produces books in collaboration with artists and writers. The aim is to provide a more comprehensive experience of an artist’s work than can be had from exhibition catalogues or artist’s books. Bookartbookshop is a London venue where one can look at and buy limited edition artists books: a cross between a library, a shop and a gallery. The reviews section considers two art events in which words figure prominently: Private Views at the London Print Studio, and Ian Breakwell’s diaristic art publication, Derby Days. The conventional form of the book provides a field of expectations which can be played around with, inverted, or used as metaphors. Susan Hiller, for example, makes an analogy between the rhythm and repetition of page- turning and waves (Rough Sea, 1976). Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975) uses the recto/verso of the page format to refer to the fronts and back of things and people. Books are in a sense pushed toward the condition of objects and images. Often this is a matter of shifting the focus onto things which had previously been peripheral or taken for granted. In Howard Hollands’ Book of Revelations, the light falling on the pages is raised from a necessary but transparent condition of reading, to the very mechanism through which this book-like object functions. In book making as an art, images are freed from their subservient place as illustrations to a text, and words are freed from their subservient place as titles or captions to an image.
Book making as an art tends to give readers an active role, allowing or obliging the reader to intervene and complete the work. A book described by Peixoto, for example, can only be read by blowing up a series of balloons. The reader is also pushed down certain paths, as conventional narrative is played with or sabotaged. Stephen Bury describes the different devices artists use to frustrate or delay narrative closure, such as changes in type or unusual presentation of text. These devices render opaque what is normally transparent in the mechanics of reading, making the book more object-like, changing the normal idea of what a story is. Yet what comes across as well is the persistence of narrative. Given a random collection of objects or texts, says Bury, we can’t help looking for a story in them. Kim Foster’s book- boiling experiment is emblematic of the stubbornness of narrative: the print refused to disappear.
There are many reasons artists choose the book as an art form, from the practical desire to reach more people, to the wish to sidestep the gallery system, to the desire to explore philosophical or aesthetic questions which books raise. In our postmodern era, images, sound and text increasingly overlap and complement one another and this provides a natural role for book art. Collaboration emerges as crucial in many of the projects described here, because of this multimedia emphasis and because of the nature of publishing in which editors, illustrators, researchers, designers and printers, as well as authors, all have a hand in the final result.
If a book’s standard form means there is much to play around with, the huge cultural significance of books means that there is much to push against. Hostility to books is a theme that runs throughout this issue. Books are gleefully scribbled on, their pages are torn out, correct spelling is changed and obscenities inserted. The burning of books is considered a creative act. What is the origin of such hostility and what can we make of it? In education, rigid teaching methods may make people suspicious of books, seeing them as foes rather than friends. They then relish the chance to have control over books, to pass judgement on them, even to deface or destroy them.
In broader terms, aggression toward books might represent a conflict between different modes of thinking. According to Freud we think in two opposed but complementary ways. Primary process is the fluid, anarchic thinking of the unconscious mind where ideas ceaselessly combine and recombine, time is not sequential, opposites are not opposed, and minor details are invested with great intensity. Secondary process is the mode of thinking of the conscious, rational mind, where logic prevails, the past, present and future are in their rightful place, things are separated into categories, and outer reality is taken into account. Hostility to books might signal an attack of the more anarchic kind of thinking on those processes which impose structure and authority, which seek to name and tame. A special case is artists who ridicule or transform the work of revered art theorists. In John Latham’s Still and Chew of the 1960s, a book by the art critic Clement Greenberg was chewed and fermented, and returned to the art school library in a phial labelled ‘essence of Greenberg’. In other works, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is stripped of words and reduced to its punctuation (Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Reality, 1972), and an iconic Balzac text is put through a series of transformations which erode its meaning (Sarah Jacobs, Unknown Masterpiece Drawing Book, 2002).
Destructiveness can be the first stage of a creative process from which new forms and meanings emerge. In education, the transforming of books might be part of a strategy to render the strange familiar and the familiar strange. How far can you transform a book until it ceases to be a book? What is a word? What is an image? What is a work of visual art? The participants of projects described in these pages find it liberating and exhilarating both to alter books and to invent book forms of their own. Freed from its constricting associations, the book is a flexible and evocative structure, a vehicle for themes which are both personal and rooted in the history of particular cultures.
In our image-saturated culture we get more and more of our information through visual images. We feel at home with the visual; it is direct, transparent, fun. And yet in art galleries, we gravitate to the captions and text panels like so many life rafts. We are afraid of being shut out of an image or drowning in it; explanatory words seem to guide, reassure, contain. This is a paradox, one of many to be found in our relationship with words and images. Dynamic art education makes use of the tension between what is sayable and what is imaginable, exploring, as artists have done, the ways in which image and word live inside of one another. The symbolic field of image and word is, in W.J.T. Mitchell’s view, ‘a space of intellectual struggle, historical investigation, and artistic / critical practice. Our only choice,’ he writes, ‘is to inhabit this space
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email [email protected]
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Book Art
• Issue 12 – Summer 2002
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Book Art Issue 12 – Summer 2002
Editorial
Making and Unmaking Books Stephen Bury Artists’ Books Alec Finlay And so books entered our lives... Howard Hollands, Victoria de Rijke, Rebecca Sinker Book Burning David Petts Nothing that’s not a book
Between Image and Word Vincent Gille Painting and Books: a difficult partnership
Martin Thomas & Sarah Norrish Words
Pam Meecham Picturing Relationships: working with words and pictures in the gallery
Kimberley Foster I boiled a book for three hours and the pages stayed the same
Karen Eslea Beyond Words
Producing and Circulating Mark Beever of ‘Book Lab’ in conversation with Victoria Hollows Tanya Peixoto bookartbookshop
Reviews Emily Pringle Private Views and Ian Breakwell’s Derby Days
Social Inclusion Revisited Andrew Brighton Kaija Kaitavuori Ian Lawley
Editorial, Book Art
Karen Raney
In everyday use books have a highly standard form. They are made of rectangular pages, attached together on one side, and covered with words and images which are intended to be read in sequence. Books have come to stand for contradictory things: the essential means by which culture is preserved and the suspect means by which cultural discourse is controlled; freedom from brute survival, and avoidance of real life; the fertile, live imagination, and sterile, dead convention. It is these two facts - that books have a conventional form, and that books represent powerful and contradictory things - which render them rich ground for making art.
This volume is about the book as an art form and related questions. In the first section - ‘Making and Unmaking Books’ - the artist’s book is theorised, and reflections are made by the leaders of different book making projects. Stephen Bury of the British Library gives a brief history of the artist’s book. Artist and publisher Alec Finlay moves from poetic reflections on the nature of books to the great ‘circulatory system’ of making, publishing, selling and collecting. Researchers from Middlesex University consider to what extent destroying books can be a critical, creative act; with BAEd students they explore the meaning of ‘revelation’ through making and analysing art books. Visual poet David Petts finds the book to be a powerful art form when used with a wide range of participants, from primary school pupils to mental health service users.
Section two, ‘Between Image and Word’ is concerned with questions about the interplay between visual and verbal modes of expression. Vincent Gille reflects on the problems of integrating books into a display of visual art, the Tate Modern’s Surrealism exhibition (2001). Martin Thomas and Sarah Norrish describe the planning of the exhibition Words (2002) and the education programmes devised for it. In a project at the Chisenhale Gallery, students take a book as a starting point for visual invention. Artist Kim Foster sets out to make an object which would stand for someone else’s verbalised responses to a book. Pam Meecham describes two gallery-based projects which use children’s literature as a way into exploring works of visual art. What comes through each of these accounts is the complex symbiosis of image and word in art practice, in exhibiting and in learning.
In ‘Producting and Circulating’ we hear from the directors of two ventures which operate between and across boundaries. Book Lab is a company that produces books in collaboration with artists and writers. The aim is to provide a more comprehensive experience of an artist’s work than can be had from exhibition catalogues or artist’s books. Bookartbookshop is a London venue where one can look at and buy limited edition artists books: a cross between a library, a shop and a gallery. The reviews section considers two art events in which words figure prominently: Private Views at the London Print Studio, and Ian Breakwell’s diaristic art publication, Derby Days. The conventional form of the book provides a field of expectations which can be played around with, inverted, or used as metaphors. Susan Hiller, for example, makes an analogy between the rhythm and repetition of page- turning and waves (Rough Sea, 1976). Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975) uses the recto/verso of the page format to refer to the fronts and back of things and people. Books are in a sense pushed toward the condition of objects and images. Often this is a matter of shifting the focus onto things which had previously been peripheral or taken for granted. In Howard Hollands’ Book of Revelations, the light falling on the pages is raised from a necessary but transparent condition of reading, to the very mechanism through which this book-like object functions. In book making as an art, images are freed from their subservient place as illustrations to a text, and words are freed from their subservient place as titles or captions to an image.
Book making as an art tends to give readers an active role, allowing or obliging the reader to intervene and complete the work. A book described by Peixoto, for example, can only be read by blowing up a series of balloons. The reader is also pushed down certain paths, as conventional narrative is played with or sabotaged. Stephen Bury describes the different devices artists use to frustrate or delay narrative closure, such as changes in type or unusual presentation of text. These devices render opaque what is normally transparent in the mechanics of reading, making the book more object-like, changing the normal idea of what a story is. Yet what comes across as well is the persistence of narrative. Given a random collection of objects or texts, says Bury, we can’t help looking for a story in them. Kim Foster’s book- boiling experiment is emblematic of the stubbornness of narrative: the print refused to disappear.
There are many reasons artists choose the book as an art form, from the practical desire to reach more people, to the wish to sidestep the gallery system, to the desire to explore philosophical or aesthetic questions which books raise. In our postmodern era, images, sound and text increasingly overlap and complement one another and this provides a natural role for book art. Collaboration emerges as crucial in many of the projects described here, because of this multimedia emphasis and because of the nature of publishing in which editors, illustrators, researchers, designers and printers, as well as authors, all have a hand in the final result.
If a book’s standard form means there is much to play around with, the huge cultural significance of books means that there is much to push against. Hostility to books is a theme that runs throughout this issue. Books are gleefully scribbled on, their pages are torn out, correct spelling is changed and obscenities inserted. The burning of books is considered a creative act. What is the origin of such hostility and what can we make of it? In education, rigid teaching methods may make people suspicious of books, seeing them as foes rather than friends. They then relish the chance to have control over books, to pass judgement on them, even to deface or destroy them.
In broader terms, aggression toward books might represent a conflict between different modes of thinking. According to Freud we think in two opposed but complementary ways. Primary process is the fluid, anarchic thinking of the unconscious mind where ideas ceaselessly combine and recombine, time is not sequential, opposites are not opposed, and minor details are invested with great intensity. Secondary process is the mode of thinking of the conscious, rational mind, where logic prevails, the past, present and future are in their rightful place, things are separated into categories, and outer reality is taken into account. Hostility to books might signal an attack of the more anarchic kind of thinking on those processes which impose structure and authority, which seek to name and tame. A special case is artists who ridicule or transform the work of revered art theorists. In John Latham’s Still and Chew of the 1960s, a book by the art critic Clement Greenberg was chewed and fermented, and returned to the art school library in a phial labelled ‘essence of Greenberg’. In other works, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is stripped of words and reduced to its punctuation (Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Reality, 1972), and an iconic Balzac text is put through a series of transformations which erode its meaning (Sarah Jacobs, Unknown Masterpiece Drawing Book, 2002).
Destructiveness can be the first stage of a creative process from which new forms and meanings emerge. In education, the transforming of books might be part of a strategy to render the strange familiar and the familiar strange. How far can you transform a book until it ceases to be a book? What is a word? What is an image? What is a work of visual art? The participants of projects described in these pages find it liberating and exhilarating both to alter books and to invent book forms of their own. Freed from its constricting associations, the book is a flexible and evocative structure, a vehicle for themes which are both personal and rooted in the history of particular cultures.
In our image-saturated culture we get more and more of our information through visual images. We feel at home with the visual; it is direct, transparent, fun. And yet in art galleries, we gravitate to the captions and text panels like so many life rafts. We are afraid of being shut out of an image or drowning in it; explanatory words seem to guide, reassure, contain. This is a paradox, one of many to be found in our relationship with words and images. Dynamic art education makes use of the tension between what is sayable and what is imaginable, exploring, as artists have done, the ways in which image and word live inside of one another. The symbolic field of image and word is, in W.J.T. Mitchell’s view, ‘a space of intellectual struggle, historical investigation, and artistic / critical practice. Our only choice,’ he writes, ‘is to inhabit this space
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email [email protected]
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.