Book as narrative

Probably the most intuitive role for a book to take in our collective imagination is as a vehicle for communicating narratives-- literary stories, fables, real histories, personal confessions, theories and philosophical arguments, and more. Artists' books engage this tradition in a variety of ways, exploiting all possible storytelling tools in order to convey exchanges, scenes and characters vividly and uniquely. Artists' books do more than just serve as a midpoint between visual art and the text based book, however-- they question and analyze the nature of these traditional narratives and paths of expression, often subverting them visually and materially while textually recounting them.

Angela Lorenz's Soap Story tells a very typical tale (alluded to by its title's pun on 'soap operas') of a poor single mother's developing love with a rich gentleman who whisks her away into prosperity. It adds complexity to this stock narrative by turning the reading process into a performative one-- each page (made of silkscreened linen) is encased in a block of soap, and readers must patiently scrub away to access the happy ending, much like the protagonist of the story does in her humble job as a laundress. Furthermore, Lorenz introduces a meta-commentary element to the book through the use of vintage Italian women's magazines as wrapping paper for each element of the book. Recreated in acid-free paper form, the printed embroidery patterns and articles about domestic bliss remind the reader of the real-life priorities that undergird the popularity of these typical " soap stories."

This strategy of breaking from the traditional longform book helps book artists to break down and analyze pre-existing narratives from new and interesting perspectives. Lorenz is no stranger to responding to existing narratives or even specific authors in her work-- other pieces, such as 'Light Verse Magazines' and 'Balzaculator' function as notable homages to a diverse group of artists, writers and musicians, but one of her most radical responses is 'Seeding & Weeding – L. o. G. Construction Set'. Based on the long and complex publication history of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Lorenz creates a sweeping interactive garden of reclaimed materials for her (and by extension Whitman's) readers to take over the curatorial process of putting the book together. With more than 300 pieces, readers (now more aptly called players, editors, curators, constructors, or even poets) can experience firsthand the convoluted, creative, all-consuming project of 'pruning' a perfect creative product, and especially in the case of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, an image of a nation changing underneath one's feet.

There are also more personal ways of relating to these narratives, like in Clarissa Sligh's 'my mother, walt whitman and me", where she talks about her relationship with her mother through their shared relationship to the 1940s edition of 'Leaves of Grass'-- a book which her mother had once brought home after finding it thrown out on the street. In the book, Sligh speaks to the struggles in her mother's life, a highly studious and ambitious Black woman in an era where discrimination was rampant and worked against her finding lifelong professional opportunities. She also speaks to the strained relationship between her and her mother, due to tragic circumstances of her childhood, and the way Whitman's words became a place where she could share in her mother's life and passions without the tension of their direct interactions. Sligh asks herself immediately as the book opens: "Was I searching for her when I purchased a copy of the 1940s edition of Leaves of Grass from eBay?" By looking back into Whitman's poetry, this book emphasizes the ways that reevaluating these narratives helps us recontextualize our own experiences, the responsive narratives we've built around them.

At one point in 'my mother, walt whitman and me', Sligh says, on Whitman: "His was not a world I knew." Though Whitman's prose touched her and provided a connection with her mother, Sligh notes quite openly the extent of the distance between herself as a young Black woman from a working class family and Whitman, a celebrated White male author. Lorenz speaks similarly of her relationship to Whitman while creating 'Seeding and Weeding', stating "the way he was saying how great America was in the 19th century, was off-putting." It was through his prose that these "contradictory views", as Sligh calls them, were able to meet, at least one-sidedly, one of the great powers that literature can have. However, in bending the traditionally linear, single-voiced nature of a book, artists' books are able to create a new dimension in this relationship: a space where many voices and perspectives are simultaneously presented, placing them in a more direct form of dialogue that often exposes what their effects are on each other.

One such artist's book is Karen Chance's "Parallax". Published in 1987 by Nexus Press, Chance uses the accordion-book format to create a public space (in this case, a subway) which allows for a meeting of the perspectives of two men, one gay and one straight, on the social atmosphere of the United States during the AIDS crisis. Using comic-styled illustrations and strategic die-cuts, we can see the way the men "frame" each other's lives to create support for the formation of their narrative, decontextualizing and sensationalizing each other's experiences from afar.

Authority or perceived authority is another vital mode of positionality and one which has particularly visible hallmarks in the format of books. We often come into a book with a very clear idea of what an authoritative author writes like, what a 'respectable' publication looks like, and where we encounter them. In 'A Deeply Game Dog: The Sweet Science of Breeding Champions', Sara Press gives the trappings of authority to unconventional speakers, dogfighting forum users with oversized manifestoes on the nature of ''the game'', through the hallmarks of traditional bookbinding, typesetting and design, but she makes one essential exception. She does not doctor their words, their misspellings, their incoherence, or their unscientific ideas. In producing a quintessentially 'authoritative' book, both materially similar to many historical western tomes (HYPERLINK 'book as ennobling' in materiality) and pulling from historical imagery, with text that is broadly understood to be sensationally unacceptable, she creates a bookwork which questions authority inherently and exposes its most embarrassing paradoxes.