Book as material object

Artists' books as a culture are generally self-aware and self-referential. In some ways, they benefit from a sense of novelty inherent to their form: when an artist chooses to make a "book" instead of a "sculpture" or "a series of paintings" or "drawings", they've already made a choice that significantly affects the nature of their creation, separates it from our general idea of how capital-A "Art" is experienced. By choosing to specifically make “an artists’ book” instead of “a novel”, “a monograph” or “a zine” they are making yet another choice, fine-tuning the nature of the object into an in-between space of “art object” and “functional object” that is intended for an active audience.

Because it inhabits that in-between, accessible place, artists often use bookworks to create an object that speaks intimately to the relationship between objects and people. Pictured above is one such book, Ben Denzer's "20 Slices", published under Catalog Press. This artists' book is composed of 20 slices of Kraft American singles, bound traditionally into a palm-sized hardcover book. The SMFA's copy is one of 10 ever made, and is held in a special display case in our library. Once bright yellow-orange like the fabric-lined cover, the slices have turned black and green with mold due to years of continuous interaction by students. 20 Slices is often the first Artists' Book that visitors to the SMFA are introduced to, and it's become iconic of our collection. The way it plays with the minimum necessary visual cues that turn something into "a book", as well as the ironic way that 'reading' it has caused the piece to decompose and lose a major part of its identity (the iconic American cheese color, the popular concept of this product as an indestructible food that never goes bad) makes use of something essential to contemporary art: materiality.

When artists talk about 'materiality', they're generally referring to the literal material that makes up an artwork. Marble, canvas and pigment, brass, gold, plaster or American Cheese. Each of these raw materials carries contextual meaning, and the processes they require to be shaped into works of art do too. This is particularly relevant when considering works in media that have been historically considered 'craft' disciplines, blocked out of spaces dedicated to 'fine arts'. Fields like weaving, ceramics, goldsmithing, and in fact, bookmaking and papermaking. While '20 Slices' sweeps this foundation out from under your feet with its materiality, creating meaning through an unexpected combination, there are other bookworks that play with materiality in ways more connected to craft processes too.

Bookmaking is historically a craft process that involves many different disciplines-- papermaking, typesetting, print, binding, and more. Paper is the base material of traditional books. It determines your touch relationship, has historically determined what can be printed and how it can be printed. It is the unseen foundation of the entire object, its scaffolding.

In Uniform Paper, Heidi Neilson centers the materiality of the paper, telling a story entirely through the presence of each page and descriptions of the paper's material makeup. "100% wedding dress" paper is bound up into the same book as "100% prison jumpsuit", only a couple pages from "100% diapers". Our senses take in the product, physically flattened and unfamiliar but deeply immediate as a part of the object in our hands, and our brain fills in the gaps with associations, narratives, personal understandings we come to the book with of what each 'uniform' says.

It is experiences with bookworks like Uniform Paper that best convey that a book is not just its text. A book requires a reader, and to guide the reader, its physicality becomes essential. A handbound book is different in meaning to a stapled stack of pages, a miniature book is different from an oversized book. Your experience with it changes. Physical interaction with artists' books is deeply important to their existence-- even though this is a digital exhibition, there is simply no way to effectively digitize the experience of interacting with a bookwork.

One-of-a-kind books are a rare object nowadays, but they have a lot of history: you might get an immediate image of illuminated manuscripts produced by scribes for wealthy patrons. However, uniqueness is not always prestigious: after all, a diary is also one-of-a-kind. In making an artists' book, material richness can do a lot to reposition an object from something "mundane" to something "precious."

In 'Common Threads', Candace Hicks painstakingly transforms her daily diary entries into hand-embroidered canvas books in the format of a cheap composition notebook. In the project statement for the series, Hicks states: "There is an implied narrative in everything, even… in the seemingly pointless mental wheel-spinning that is a part of daily life." To her, despite each book being completely unique and made only once by her own hand, the series "acknowledges the unavoidability of simulation and the impossibility of originality." The object itself contains the irony of a one-of-a-kind, unreproducible and yet simultaneously totally quotidian object, and the visible presence of the artist's hand forces the reader to sit with the understanding that Hicks' "pointless of the artist's hand forces the reader to sit with the understanding that Hicks' "pointless mental wheel-spinning'' has taken hours of work to become the object in their hands, repeatedly read and reconsidered by the artist as she produces the work.

Not to be confused with 'endurance' performances, a durational performance is a work that involves the passage of time in service of conveying a particular idea, image, meaning. Books, as a sequential medium, inherently take up time. The reader must process the book (whatever that involves for a specific bookwork) and therefore unlike a more traditional, static piece of visual art there is a larger minimum time commitment built into them. Books take time to get through, are experienced firsthand, in the first person, immersively. They take up space. All of these qualities help them to drive home a greater understanding of the scale of experiences. Many artists play with this feature of the medium, creating bookworks that call attention to the process of reading, as well as the diegetic expectation of time passing between pages in a traditional book.

In 'Exquisite Pain', Sophie Calle makes use of this expectation to create a sense of dragging, endless memory. Recounting 92 days of her life leading up to what was at the time a major heartbreak, and then 99 days of reminiscing on the event to friends and chance encounters, comparing experiences with others of "when they suffered most". She states in the book that this is an intentional strategy to get over her agony-- "I decided to continue such exchanges until I had got over my pain by comparing it with other people's, or had worn out my own story through sheer repetition." The responses included range from family deaths, last looks, and thoughts of suicide, to small familial fights and romantic embarrassments. As these heavy contrasts pass page after page, Calle's story remains the same, rephrased but unshifting. In reading the book, the repetition of her banal pain drives home for the reader, as slowly as the genuine process of mourning, how ridiculous it is to suffer at all. As the days count down, her text becomes shorter and shorter, fainter and fainter, until, by day 99 her page is totally blank.

Another object relationship we have with the book is related to the visuals inside-- its layout and design. The commercial book format that we ended up with in the western world as the inheritance of the codex-- white or cream pages in rectangular bodies, serif fonts in black ink, hard and soft covers with hard being considered 'finer', is a designed, even engineered format, despite the way it feels natural to us. It is the job of innumerable people across the world to design each page you see, in order to create an invisible but specific experience for you as the reader. Because of its ubiquity, book artists must face this design convention when making their works, regardless of whether they choose to integrate it into their own pieces or completely set it aside. Books like Thomas Duncan's Dirty Ulysses and Heidi Neilson's 'Atlas of Punctuation' (seen above) address the inside of the book as a spatial object through typographic manipulations, making 'invisible' design visible, but there's a long history of other book artists who take a more radical stance against the format.

'La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France' is a collaborative artists' book made by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk in 1913, considered one of the most important early works in the field. When they produced the original book, both artist and author were fascinated by the idea of 'Simultaneity', inspired by a rapidly-changing technological and scientific understanding of the world around them, which the then-new trans-siberian railway exemplified. The work is an accordion book housing a poem by Cendrars, with colorful abstract illustrations printed in pochoir, a traditional French hand-stencil method, based on Delaunay-Terk's paintings. The text uses many variations in fonts to convey movement and emotion, changing colors throughout the body of the poem. These two elements are placed side-by-side on the page, intended to be fully unrolled and experienced as a simultaneous linguistic-visual narrative

The SMFA's copy is a re-production, made by Kitty Maryatt, a book artist, educator, and printmaker with a long history of working with handmade books. Aside from recreating the object of the book, Maryatt takes great pains to present to the audience the entire process of creating the facsimile, including color studies, progressive proofs, and notes on the research it took to complete the re-production. Both the unconventional nature of La Prose, and the amount of dedication evident in producing each copy in what was originally intended to be an edition of over a hundred (though Cendrars and Delaunay-Terk never managed to complete their original edition) convey the artists' dedication to re-imagining the book as an art object for a Modern era. Avant-garde artists like Cendrars and Delaunay-Terk wanted to push the limits of the book format permanently, and while they were unsuccessful in the mainstream, experiments like these opened the door to even more radical conceptions of what could count as a book.

When you first look at Sandra Jackman's 'Dearly Beloved', your first thought might not be to call it a book. In fact, it might not be your second thought, or third, or fourth. But as you interact with it, its narrative nature begins to become apparent. A one-of-a-kind object, this sculptural book is composed of a wooden cabinet with collage, papier mâché, ink, paint, resin, plaster, plastic sheets, paper, cardboard tampon applicator tubes, a miniature playing cards box, cotton thread, metal jewelry findings, a thumbtack, and a matchbox. Hardly textual, hardly legible, it plays with ideas of what a book is as an object-- a story, hidden under covers. Its "pages" are rolled into scrolls and placed in hidden compartments, each scene of the story divided spatially into different sections of the bookwork's body. Even though 'Dearly Beloved' is a unique piece, and most of Jackman's other work is also one-offs, they retain their relationship to the democratic nature of the book by being interactive, living primarily in library/archive spaces rather than galleries or museums. Thus, they become testaments to the collaborative power that artists' books can have, offering a work of art directly to its audience to hold in their hands, manipulate, and 'read', whatever that entails.