Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)
Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Richard Sadleir, trans.
Case bound, printed paper over board, with green endbands and matching doublures. H225 x W155 mm. 96 pages. Acquired from Book Depository, 21 August 2019.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

For her extended essay, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix selected six works by Hamish Fulton, seven by Richard Long and five by herman de vries to demonstrate “three ways of coming closer to the experience of nature unfiltered by the artistic tradition” of “landscape as an artistic genre” (pp. 5, 30).

As she puts it:

The analysis of some artists’ books … should make it possible to show how the emphasis has been progressively placed no longer on landscape but on the search for the best means, differing according to the various artists, of rendering an experience in the strongest sense of the word: a lived experience of the world, a personal practice, that is to say, a deliberate way of being in the world rather than before it. The walking body is the touchstone of this, because walking compels one to supersede the limits of a purely visual of nature to become the experience of the whole artist, with his body, in nature. (p. 6)

Along the way, Moeglin-Delcroix distinguishes between the walk being art itself (performance), the walk being a form of art (protocol driven) and the walk as being “simply one of the most favourable conditions for expanding perception and thereby consciousness and knowledge” (p. 28). In Fulton, she finds that the act of collecting and listing takes the place of the traditional landscape point of view, although views at a physical or temporal distance are present (p. 8). In Long, she finds that the act of collecting and listing is governed by protocol, an inventorying by purpose not mere encounter, and the “view of the close at hand” replaces the distant landscape view (pp. 19-20). But it is in devries she finds that the distant and the close, the whole and the fragment are complementaries that yield ambulo ergo sum (“I walk therefore I am”) (p. 28).

de vries is the most transcendental of the three. For de vries, in Moeglin-Delcroix’s words, “Art does not represent nature because nature is art itself” (p. 25), which leads to boxes or portfolios of loose items collected from nature that the reader has to contemplate as such and reconstruct the totality from which they were drawn (as in his catalogue incomplète), or to details from nature so close up that they can only have been collected by being in nature not by merely observing it (as in les très riches heures de herman de vries) (p. 29).

As philosophical as all this may be, the conceptual is not very far from craft in these artists’ works or Moeglin-Delcroix’s appreciation of them. But craft may be the thin end of the wedge that re-asserts a boundary between art and nature.

Consider Handscapes by Molly Coy and Claire Bolton. It, too, has been formed by walks, collecting, sampling, listing and related activities noted by Moeglin-Delcroix about Fulton, Long and de vries. It has the distant and up-close perspectives of Fulton and Long, respectively. It has de vries’ embedding of samples from nature. Albeit in landscape format, Handscapes is also a deviation from the tradition of landscape art. Consider also The Pond at Deuchar by Helen Douglas. It, too, has been formed similarly. It has the up-close perspectives of Long and de vries that replaces that of the traditional landscape, and it further deviates from that tradition by paradoxically calling on a structure associated with Oriental landscapes — the scroll. When contemplating these two works so different from those of Fulton, Long and de vries, are they any the less examples of “nature as experience in artists’ books”?

Yet, in Handscapes and The Pond at Deuchar, there is a presence of craft that draws the reader/viewer at some points closer to the nature experienced by the artists and at other points closer to the material nature of the artworks. As elements of craft, do plant-printed images or Chinese paper draw us closer to nature or push us further away in these artworks? Is it possible that paradoxically they do both?

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – Anne Moeglin-Delcroix

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

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Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

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