{"id":111980,"date":"2017-06-22T11:35:52","date_gmt":"2017-06-22T15:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111980"},"modified":"2017-06-23T10:43:36","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T14:43:36","slug":"bookness-not-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/22\/bookness-not-books\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bookness of Not-Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Kiki (Kiki O.K.) Kogelnik, Orange Naked Woman<\/em>, page from the book 1\u00a2 Life<\/em> by Walasse Ting. (Bern: E.W. Kornfeld, 1964). The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Ryda Hecht Levi Collection of Illustrated Books, Bequest of Ryda H. Levi, Baltimore, BMA 2009.42.21 \u00a9 Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and \u00a9 2017 Estate of Walasse Ting\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I once owned a hardback edition of Somerset Maugham\u2019s The Moon and Sixpence<\/i> that had served time at the top of a bedside pile; its cover and spine had acquired several islands of melted wax from the candle it helped support. Running my fingers from the smooth dollops to the grainy fabric\u2014an illegible but sensual braille\u2014always afforded a small pleasure, even if the reading itself offered much less. That long-ago volume came to mind recently while holding a copy of an artist\u2019s book by Deborah Dancy titled Winter Morning<\/i> in the rare-book room of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Dancy\u2019s slim book is made from wax-impregnated paper into which snippets of found text have been pressed. Light as wafer, the book almost hovered in my hands, and turning its stiff, deeply yellowed pages felt like exploring a precious archaeological artifact.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate to handle this rare and fragile objet<\/em> at the invitation of Rena Hoisington, a curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she mounted the current show \u201cOff the Shelf: Modern\u00a0and Contemporary Artists\u2019 Books<\/a>.\u201d The extensive range of artists and writers includes, among many others, Grace Hartigan, Picasso, Frank O\u2019Hara, Ed Ruscha, Kandinsky, Susan Howe, Mayakovsky, Barbara Kruger, Robert Creeley, Kiki Smith, and, of course, the master of the artists\u2019 book, the Swiss Conceptualist Dieter Roth. Equally wide is the breadth of approach: from Ruscha, there is an edition of Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations<\/i>, the photos printed on an accordion-folded sheet in the order they appeared on Route 66, going west to east; from Barbara Kruger and Stephen King, a large-format volume with a stainless-steel cover and an embedded digital clock; from three authors\u2014Pasolini, Luisa Famos, Andri Peer\u2014and the artist Not Vital, a series of poems written in Rhaeto-Romansh (the national language of Switzerland) and printed on pages custom made from cedar bark that sport attached objects, such as\u00a0a saw blade. The rich variety of constructions and materials, as well as the methods of representing text\u2014thickly rendered in paint, printed in chaotic typefaces, scrawled across images\u2014beckons the viewer to reach out and touch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If there is a single operating instruction for any book, it has to be \u201cTurn pages.\u201d But the art part of an artist\u2019s book makes exercising that common function a privileged experience. Like most paintings, prints, or sculptures, these books are inherently delicate and typically produced in limited editions. Curators can\u2019t just set them out on table with tiny chains like they often do for exhibition catalogues; museumgoers are restricted to one or two (presumably well-chosen) pages under glass, with no opportunity to touch, for instance, the woody grain of that paper made from cedar bark or graze the metallic coolness of Kruger\u2019s cover. One of the books on display is a beat-up suitcase that Dieter Roth filled with six enlarged and laminated lithographs based on postcard images of London\u2019s Piccadilly Circus that were silkscreened over with his abstract designs. Straightforwardly titled 6 Piccadillies<\/i>, the piece obviously possesses qualities of a series of prints, but also sculpture (one is overlaid with iron filings), a book (you open the case to find \u201cpages\u201d), postcards (meant to be written on, stuck on walls), and, well, luggage (the bag is ID-tagged for travel). These elements compete within our response, suggesting as they do both ready utility and restrained regard, even as we are guided by the artist\u2019s comic intent, a joke about the function of art that reaches back to Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Fountain<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Francesco Clemente and Alberto Savinio, pages from the book The Departure of the Argonaut<\/em>,\u00a01983\u201386, published 1986. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Ryda Hecht Levi Collection of Illustrated Books, Bequest of Ryda H. Levi, Baltimore, BMA 2009.23. \u00a9 Franceso Clemente\/Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

A similar jest emerges from an encounter with another book in the show, a collaboration between Francesco Clemente and the Italian author Alberto Savinio titled The Departure of the Argonaut<\/i>. Clemente\u2019s lithographs cover the entire page, often obscuring Savinio\u2019s translated account of his experiences in and around the Mediterranean during World War I. The text references the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, and the imagery\u2014at least the spread on view\u2014depicts a seemingly heroic human figure who bestrides the pages, the gutter neatly bisecting the body. Even if not encased in a vitrine, the book would be a difficult one to peruse: it\u2019s enormous, measuring more than three feet in width when open and more than two in height. Surely not intended for the beach or bedside, the book calls to other employments: the corporeal image and overall capaciousness may invite you to slip into its pages and wrap them around you like a cloak. But reading\u2014in any typical sense of the activity\u2014isn\u2019t easily accomplished; this book subverts its very nature.<\/p>\n

Our reaction to these artists\u2019 books moves along the continuum between seeing and reading. Included are Barry Moser\u2019s wood engravings for Lewis Carroll\u2019s Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/i> and Mark Twain\u2019s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/i>, both of which could be said to fall into the more common category of illustrated books. These images serve to enhance the text, to make our reading experience more literal, more detailed, and perhaps more comprehensible. (Of course, many argue that such visual aids, like film adaptations, in fact encumber the imagination.) This sort of book\u2014at least in its mass-market edition\u2014is meant to be handled and read, its images checked against our own visualizations. When the art part of the book\u2014the possessive in artists\u2019 books is telling\u2014becomes increasingly salient, the experience of the text can become subordinate to the experience of the visual and even end up almost incidental. (In The End of the World as Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame<\/i>, Blaise Cendrars\u2019s words, when exploded in a variety of typefaces and colors, are hardly distinguishable from Fernand L\u00e9ger\u2019s colliding shapes, which appear throughout the collaborative\u00a0volume.) These are books and pages intended to be seen but not necessarily read.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Left:<\/strong> Fernand L\u00e9ger and Blaise Cendrars, page from the book The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame<\/em>, 1919. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Ryda Hecht Levi Collection of Illustrated Books, Gift of Ryda H. Levi, Baltimore, BMA 2001.444 \u00a9 Fernand L\u00e9ger\/Artist Rights Society (ARS). Right:<\/strong> Pablo Picasso and Pierre Reverdy, page from the book La Chant des Morts<\/em>, 1948. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Nelson and Juanita Greif Gutman Fund, BMA 2002.568. \u00a9 Pablo Picasso\/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

That the volume produced by Picasso and Surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy\u2014Le chants des morts, po\u00e8ms<\/em> (Songs of the Dead, Poems<\/i>)\u2014lands somewhere in the middle of this continuum probably has much to do with their collaborative process. The poems were handwritten by the author\u2014and elegantly so. Picasso, after seeing a sample of the text, remarked that the cursive was \u201calmost a drawing in itself.\u201d His brushed additions of bright red nodules, looping shapes, and circles occupy the empty areas of the pages, rarely trespassing on Reverdy\u2019s script. The poems are legible, and the artist\u2019s approach to the text could almost be said to mimic that of an undergraduate annotating their textbook: Picasso underlines and parenthesizes with bold strokes that respond to the emotional tenor of particular lines. He said he avoided figurative imagery so that he wouldn\u2019t interfere with the \u201ccurved quality\u201d of the poetry; in doing so, he deferred to the bookness of the collaboration.<\/p>\n

Alas, those eminently readable pages go unturned in their case. But in the library with Rena, I was able (carefully, my potentially messy pen replaced with a pencil) to page through a luxurious volume that combined Robert Motherwell\u2019s art and Rafael Alberti\u2019s poem \u201cMotherwell\u2019s Black.\u201d The book is complexly built with foldout pages and irresistibly touchable deckle-edged parchment and thickly inked with swaths of color; its material essence is palpable and therefore meaningful. Turning each page involves removing a protective slat of paper and slowly unfolding the sheet to full size. The ritualistic quality of our \u201creading\u201d suggested occasions in a distant past when books were rare and one-of-a-kind, when reading was done at a podium in cloistered circumstance (think depictions of Saint Jerome) or in churches with high ceremony. We moved through the book enthralled yet deliberate as its allures evolved from page to page. Later, back in the gallery looking at the beautiful array of barely opened volumes under glass, I felt even more forlorn wondering about the unseen pages, the unfelt textures. But knowing myself to be the sort of person who has stained nearly every tie I\u2019ve owned, I was also glad these beauties were out of harm\u2019s way. Spilling wax on a two-dollar used book did make for a homey talisman. I doubt some errant contribution to Picasso would cause as much delight.<\/p>\n

Albert Mobilio\u2019s book of short fiction, <\/i>Games and Stunts<\/a>, was\u00a0published last\u00a0spring by Black Square Editions.<\/i><\/p>\n


\n\u201cOff the Shelf: Modern and\u00a0Contemporary Artists\u2019 Books<\/a>\u201d is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through\u00a0June 25, 2017.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I once owned a hardback edition of Somerset Maugham\u2019s The Moon and Sixpence that had served time at the top of a bedside pile; its cover and spine had acquired several islands of melted wax from the candle it helped support. Running my fingers from the smooth dollops to the grainy fabric\u2014an illegible but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[29275,29276,35,29268,29273,15831,8789,17,9519,29272,11052,9371,29277,15360,29274,971,25766,29278,594,696,1766,29269,4919,11822,13612,29271,10182,10013,9393,9464,29270,29279],"class_list":["post-111980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alberto-savinio","tag-argonauts","tag-art","tag-artists-books","tag-baltimore-museum-of-art","tag-barbara-kruger","tag-blaise-cendrars","tag-books","tag-braille","tag-deborah-dancy","tag-dieter-roth","tag-ed-ruscha","tag-ferdnand-leger","tag-fountain","tag-francesco-clemente","tag-frank-ohara","tag-grace-hartigan","tag-kiki-kogelnik","tag-lewis-carroll","tag-marcel-duchamp","tag-mark-twain","tag-not-vital","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-pierre-reverdy","tag-postcards","tag-rena-hoisington","tag-robert-creeley","tag-somerset-maugham","tag-susan-howe","tag-the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn","tag-vladimir-mayakovsky","tag-walasse-ting"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe 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