“Russell’s work with books began during an artists’ residency in Paris while she was a student at the Royal College of Art. Old books have always seemed to her like sculptural objects ‘representing the many hands which have held them and the minds they have passed through’. She says that she has always chosen something which ‘holds within it a sense of its own personal history, an object which has a secret life’, and wants to resurrect her fragile materials and give them ‘a new life and new meaning’. There is a simultaneous sense of loss and preservation in each construction, as she wants to retain and reclaim the past as much as her techniques attack it.”
Like the phenomena in our transition between analog and digital, Russell’s shredded books and the other instances of book art or “bookworks” bookmarked here constitute another form of “creative destruction” to stretch Schumpeter’s economic concept.
The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), p.83
Of course, without the old print book industry’s output, our Scottish artist and her kith and “ken” will eventually face a scarcity of raw material for their new art industry. A sure sign of a misapplied economic theory, however apropos and paradoxical the misappropriation of the paradox may feel.
This image of Thomas Allen’s book art appears along with the story about fellow-North Carolinian Hugh Howey‘s self-published novel WOOL in the 7 March 2013 edition of The Wall Street Journal but only in the iPad App version. Go to SECTIONS, then ARENA.
Click on the image to the left to go to Allen’s website to see more of his work and find out how to purchase it. If you can find the Fall 2006 issue of Zoetrope: All Story, you can see more of Allen’s work, but click here to read Chip Kidd’s comments on Allen’s artistry.
The Secret Books is a dialogue between the photography of Sean Kernan and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. It contains tritone photographs, short stories, poems and quotations as well as an essay by the artist. Kernan explains how the dialogue began:
“There was an old book out on a table. I went to put it away, but instead I just opened it and gazed. I looked at the way the sharp metal type cut into the paper, at the blooms of foxing in the margins. I smelled its slight odor of papery rot, caught Latin words here and there and made out that they said something about the spirit and devotion. I stood there for the longest time. The book had stilled me.
On an impulse, I went to the closet where I keep a compost heap of props and got four black stones from a Japanese river. I set them out carefully in a line across the pages of the book. And suddenly it looked to me like…a poem. Or a kind of poem, at least. Maybe a Haiku or something by one of the Imagists, something that didn’t narrate or argue but just placed a few simple things before you and invited you to complete the work. This book with its stones was a pure image, the kind that can move from one mind to another and root there in some mysterious panspermic process. Joining things that didn’t logically go together–Latin meditations and Japanese rivers, black stones and creamy paper–broke apart some notion of what these things should say and set my imagination free to work. I had always wanted my photography to do this, and now I saw this wonderful composition open on the table before me.
I took a picture of this poem. And that was the beginning of these books.
After a while there were enough of them to suggest that they might themselves make a book, and indeed had to be a book. So I began to think about what might be necessary to make this happen. Perhaps it needed the armature of a text, but what that text might be and how it might work to unite the whole wasn’t clear. Then a designer friend, Lana Rigsby, saw the pictures and said they reminded her of Borges.
Of course! …
The Secret Books doesn’t attempt to illustrate Borges, and it doesn’t aspire to be a collaboration–as an artist I couldn’t hold his coat. I have simply found some instances in which he speaks directly about books and have put them with my images of books to make a kind of sequence, or perhaps a dialogue. And navigating thus under the star of Borges, I look at this book–words and images, side by side on the table before me–and find myself looking down dark, unfamiliar paths across the plane of the world with a rising sense, both exciting and ominous, that everything is about to change.”
The Secret Books was published in 1999 by Leete Island Books to coincide with the centennial of Borges’ birth and, by happenstance, with the start of the long journey to the EPUB standard. The month before The Secret Books appeared the Open eBook Forum (now the IDPF) released the Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) version 1.0. A coincidence Borges would have relished.
English: The poem El apice of the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges on a wall of the building at the Groenhovenstraat 18, Leiden, The Netherlands. Nederlands: Het gedicht El apice (De top) van de Argentijnse dichter Jorge Luis Borges op een muur van het gebouw aan de Groenhovenstraat 18 in Leiden, Nederland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Further Reading
“Lizzie Brewer“. 4 July 2023. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
“Ines von Ketelhodt“. 1 February 2021. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
“Peter Malutzki“. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
“Aurélie Noury“. 9 November 2020. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
“Hanna Piotrowska (Dyrcz)“. 13 December 2019. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
“Benjamin Shaykin“. 3 December 2022. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
“Rachel Smith“. In progress. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
“Sam Winston“. 18 May 2023. Books On Books Collection. For another related alphabet work.
Frate, Kathryn Shank. 2019. “Tower of Babel Exhibit“. Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice. Accessed 28 June 2023.
Basia Irland’s art project ICE BOOKS: receding/reseeding gives a formidably tangible and new meaning to “publishing as dissemination.” As Irland describes the project on her site:
River water is frozen, carved into the form of a book, embedded with an ‘ecological language’ or ‘riparian’ consisting of local native seeds, and placed back into the stream. The seeds are released as the ice melts in the current…
I carved a 250-pound book from clear ice and embedded it with a seed text of Mountain Maple (Acer spicatum), Columbine flowers (Aquilegia coerulea), and Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens). Four people carried the heavy book out into the current of Boulder Creek. As it rested between two large rocks, viewers cold see the water flowing under the ice. Ice Books. Accessed 17 February 2013 and 11 September 2014.
This is book art as performance art and conceptual art but with a twist: the performance yields results beyond the on-site viewers’ memories or any photography and video of the event replayed in galleries or museum installations. Whether the seeds that float downstream in local rivers do take root is uncertain. As there is at least a chance that it will happen, it is more than the concept that counts.
“Performed” across 18 locations around the world, Irland’s project has been going since 2007. Fittingly the first performance began with Lucy R. Lippard’s Weather Reportexhibition in 2007, but the concept has a rich heritage. With some further reading and the help of Peter Verheyen’s listserv BKARTS, I have tracked down some of that other “ramifying” or “ecologically political” book art.
Lucy Lippard, Six Years (1997)
Starting with Lippard herself, there is Six Years, the 1973 seminal, long-subtitled work that drew attention to Hans Haacke’s Wind in Water (1967) and other conceptual and environmental art. And then came Doug Beube’s pieces from the 80s and later such as Organic and The Chair of Censorship. In the late 90s, we had Ann Marie Kennedy’s Plant Dreams. In 2010, Maggie Puckett’s “Thaw“.
And now, this conceptual book art has revolved back into books:
Pequeño Editor, an Argentinian children’s book publisher, has published Tree Book Treewith ecologically friendly ink and acid-free paper embedded with jacaranda seeds. As the video explains, “Books come from trees. Today, a tree comes from a book.”
Tree Book Tree, 2015 Video published on 3 May 2015 FCB Buenos Aires
The act of reading then planting the book echoes the twist in Irland’s performance and conceptual pieces. The book as read (the performance) resides in the memories of the readers, the concept (books are made of trees) resides in the mind, and downstream in time, a jacaranda blossoms overhead.
The form of the book, the book as technological artifact, each of the book arts (design and layout, typography, illustration,papermaking, imposition, printing, binding, preservation and restoration) and even the book as an objet d’art attract memes — ideas, gestures, behaviors, methods, devices andpractices that have spread from clay to scroll, from scroll to book, from book to ebook and perhaps from ebook to “cloud book.”
As we try to preserve – with clay counters in clay containers, with 0’s and 1’s stored on floating disks in tablets – we have assumed we are progressing.
Guy Laramée is a book artist, a subversive book artist. His “artist statement” articulates the meme of erosion, entropy and the dissolution of culture and knowledge — what he calls the “cloud of unknowing.”
The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole – is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. Cultures emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might ask so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?
When I was younger, I was very upset with the ideologies of progress. I wanted to destroy them by showing that we are still primitives. I had the profound intuition that as a species, we had not evolved that much. Now I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination.
My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “what” we think, but “that” we think.
So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.
After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: to project us into this thick “cloud of unknowing.”
ADIEU (2013) Guy Laramée
Is that the book’s evolutionary destination – in the “cloud”?
Further reading
The Visual News review highlights the artist’s message that the theme of his art is the “erosion of cultures” and an inevitable dissolution into the “cloud of unknowing”. The more I see and enjoy Laramée’s work, the more transcendent I find it. It echoes the Romantic sublime and offers a Zen-like fusion of joy and sorrow.
“Guy Laramée’s (previously) new series Onde Elles Moran (Where They Live) captures the mystique of the native birds of the Brazilian region Serra do Corvo Branco (Range of the White Raven) through both portrait and carved landscape.”
Tever, Abdulkerim. “Guy Laramée: ‘Colors’ episode 1“, TRT2, 5 March 2020. Accessed from JHB Gallery, 19 March 2020. “The six-minute spot, which will air on TRT2, the cultural and educational channel of Turkey’s national broadcaster, follows Laramée as he works in his studio and traverses his native Montreal. The artist shares his thoughts on his work, the studio as a place of refuge, and on the daily processes of art-making as a unique form of knowledge—one that offers a radical alternative in our increasingly outcome-driven world. Directed by Abdulkerim Tever, the film includes some stunning close-up photography of Laramée’s unique book-landscapes—as they are being created, as well as in their finished form.”
If only this were blood red (read), one might call it “Butterfly Escaping Bertran de Born.” Click to hear a reading of “Sestina Altaforte,” Ezra Pound’s attempt to dig up Bertran.
By massofglass9 | Posted 4 hours ago, 09 February 2013 | Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts
CNN iReport
Accessed 09 February 2013
Not cold enough for you? Skate over to the artist’s web site for her stack of Ice Books. Sarah Cohen writes, “My books are usually made from ice and melt, referring to the melting icecaps, global warming, and the loss of books through newer technologies like the ereader. It’s all related. And just like ice, the snow books will also disappear over time- representing that permanence is always fleeting and that books may also disappear from contemporary culture.”
Books On Books 