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?
Handscapes (2016) Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton Casebound, hand sewn and bound with doublures and two ribbon bookmarks. H260 x W310 x D30. 80 folios. Edition of 12, of which this is #9. Acquired from the artists, 19 October 2023. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.
Like its title Handscapes, one half of the inspiration for this work of book art comes from the tools and material in the artists’ hands; the other, from Western Australia’s varied southwestern landscapes that the artists walked. Even its table of contents signals this dual inspiration with a single large wood type ampersand joining up each of the five section titles. The way the colors of ink move from dark to light and back across coasts & dunes, heath & ridge, thicket & forest, banks & brooks, caves & cliffs promises a rich journey for the eye. The shift from textured flyleaf to the Somerset paper of the contents promises the same for the hand.
Hand-crafted from a variety of papers and printed using collagraph, etching, linocut, leaf prints, metal and wood type (both printed and blind embossed) and illustrated with watercolor, pencil and tinted wax, the sheets in landscape profile deliver on the offer made by the table of contents. The same textured paper used to open and close the book takes on different colors when it is used to open and close each of the sections. Perhaps it’s something to do with the change of colors from recto to verso, but somehow the feel of that leathery, elephant-hide-like paper seems to vary from section to section — sometimes rough, gritty, bristly or slick, sometimes warm or cool.
Each section’s opening recto page (above) relies on the text laid out like a concrete poem and playing with a blind debossed image to signal the landscape to follow, while completely different papers (below) give real shifts of touch in keeping with each change in landscape.
Clockwise: A foamy white cotton paper from “Coasts & Dunes”; a linen wove from “Heath & ridge”; several fibrous papers from “Thicket & Forest”; a vegetal paper from “Banks & Brooks”; and a loose weave so porous it mimics pumice from “Caves & Cliffs”.
Within each section, the pages also play off one another in ways that reflect the section’s landscape. Look at this sequence from “Coast & Dunes”. First comes a watercolor and acrylics with the colors of Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralias) and Tucker Bush or Coastal Pigface (Carpobrotus virescens) and a painted, blind debossed print of Sea Spurge on the right — all in the foreground. In the distance, tide and strand meet.
When the painted page turns, the strandline shows through the reverse and carries over into the torn edge of the white cotton paper on the right. Is that edge the crest of a white sand dune with a dark blue ocean in the background? Or is it the crest of a breaker crashing down the recto page?
When the torn-leaf is turned to the left, it does become a dune over which the debossed Sea Spurge now peeks, and we are looking beyond the dune’s crest into a cloudy white sky. The revealed dark blue recto page becomes something else altogether. The figurative has been abstracted. The debossed and gold-ink lines are the traces of the tideline and the dune crest.
Several pages later on in the section, this is confirmed when the other half of the dark blue sheet appears with new tracery labeled “tidelines” and “shifting dunes” in black ink and initiates a new sequence ending with another painting that looks at the earlier scene from a new perspective.
This magic as the recto page turns to verso is performed in many different ways. From “Thicket & Forest”, strips of paper woven into a sheet present one image on the recto and another on the verso.
From “Coasts & Dunes” again, the simple turning of a passe partout and other cutouts transform the images preceding and those previously framed or masked. The blue and brown pattern in the square of marbled paper (suminagashi from the Awagami factory in Japan) evokes tidelines and strandlines while the layers on the right suggest fish, eels or seaweed rippling under dark green water. When the first layer from the right (the passe partout) turns left, the suminagashi sample becomes a framed print, and the image on the right grows into a larger expanse of green water. When the next layer (the fish or grass cutouts) turns, the green water is replaced with blue, the cutouts become whitecaps or porpoises breaking the surface, and, on the right, the letters tumble in a wash from left to right.
Moving through Handscapes is like a walk through an open-air gallery. You see the art with your ears as well your eyes and hands. Some Australian composer should offer to be the artists’ Moussorgsky to this exhibition. Anne Moeglin-Delcroix’s Ambulo Ergo Sum (2015), however, makes a more interesting foil for appreciating Handscapes than Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Addressing several works by three other celebrants of nature — Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and herman de vries — Moeglin-Delcroix concludes her essay neatly:
The three artists studied here through some of their books offer three ways of coming closer to the experience of nature unfiltered by the artistic tradition: nature as experienced, felt. In this process of deconditioning, walking plays a vital role: it enables them to overcome the limitations of a visual and cultural experience, involving the whole body in contact with nature itself. The artists examined here replace the “point of view” presupposed by all landscape and the conventions of artistic representation with the more neutral and more objective approaches of the collection and the inventory, as if seeking to efface themselves before nature itself. That these approaches are governed by protocols, though summary, or reintroduce the mediation of an explicit or implicit method is not inconsistent with the quest for a more immediate relationship with nature. It is that, like automatism among the Surrealists or (a reference much more familiar to these artists) emptiness in Buddhism, the immediacy or evidence lost requires, in order to be regained, self-discipline, even an asceticism of subjectivity: discipline and asceticism are visible in how their books are constructed. P. 30.
From their title onwards, Coy and Bolton are very much filtering nature through their art. Nature does not seem any less experienced or felt. It is experienced and felt through the variety of their art. And vice versa: nature filters their art. As Coy describes it in her correspondence. “We started every individual section by (sitting, walking, talking) immersing ourselves in a specific environ, taking photos and collecting plants, then back to my studio and the project’s visual diary.”
For Handscapes, collection and inventory as an approach apply as much to the Coy’s and Bolton’s conventions, tools, techniques and materials of artistic representation as they do to nature itself. They throw their art into nature, and nature into their art. Look at the vegetal detritus in the papers. Look at the leaf prints. Look at the play with perspective — from the landscape point of view to the underfoot point of view. There’s little self-effacement before nature here. As the page-turning magic demonstrates, there’s a profusion of perspectives, colors, shapes, textures and techniques — as if to celebrate the profusion of nature.
Dried specimen of Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralis) used for Handscapes. Photo: Courtesy of Molly Coy.
This is not to place Fulton, Long, de vries, Coy and Bolton in some sort of hierarchy. Rather it is to draw attention to differences in quests to express a relationship with nature and art. And to appreciate how Coy’s and Bolton’s approach is visible in how their book is constructed.
Further Reading
“Claire Bolton“. 27 January 2024. Books On Books Collection.
“Helen Douglas“. 24 February 2020. Books On Books Collection. The work of Helen Douglas offers another interesting foil to Handscapes and Fulton, Long and de vries. Like Bolton and Coy, she draws our attention to the paper, handcraft and techniques used. Like Fulton, Long and de vries, she leans on photographic representation. Yet her works’ proximity to nature differs from that of the others. A topic worth closer study or even an exhibition.
“Helen Douglas“. 3 February 2015. Bookmarking Book Art.
“Shona Grant“. 20 October 2019. Books On Books Collection. Shona Grant’s works provide additional candidates for an extended study or exhibition on artists’ books and their representation of, and interaction with, nature.
Where to go to compare and contrast the book art in Germano Celant’s pioneering “catalogue” of the Nigel Greenwood Gallery exhibition in London (1972) with that of the last half century?
Being a sort of small and portable catalogue and curator’s explanation for the gallery’s exhibition of ca. 300 works, Celant’s Book as Artwork is arranged chronologically and then alphabetically by artist. Presumably it was organized to match the exhibition’s organization (note the year 1967 in upper left of the photograph below and the distinctive Hidalgo cover, fifth from the left). With no photographs of the works, Book as Artwork gives no easily accessible visual sense of the 300 works in that exhibition. If we had that starting visual touchpoint, it would be easier to “place” the period or individual works in relation to book art from the 80’s onward.
Book as Artwork 1960 – 1972 – Exhibition Nigel Greenwood Gallery B, 1972.
Stephen Bury’s Artists’ Books: The Book as a Work of Art, 1963 – 2000 (2015) includes, by design, only a handful of the artists and works selected for the Celano/Greenwood exhibition.
Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (1973, 1997) — a “bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically” — comes as close as one might hope in black-and-white print for a starting visual touchpoint. Lippard’s scope, however, ranges beyond book art, so the number illustrated limits systematic visual comparison and contrast with the book art of the ensuing decades.
Phaidon’s Artists Who Make Books(2017) provides good coverage and bridges the 1960s to the 21st century. The essays and descriptions bring the book art off the page and into the mind’s hands.
Best of all is Lynda Morris’s mini-memoir of her role in organizing the Celant/Greenwood exhibition.
Germano had sent Nigel [Greenwood] a wonderful, arty handwritten letter in pink capitals … on December 22, 1970:
DEAR PUBLISHER I AM PREPARING FOR A NEW INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE A COMPLETE ANTHOLOGY OF BOOKS MADE DIRECTLY BY ARTISTS.
…Nigel had met Germano and had his telephone number in Genoa. I was sitting beside him when he phoned and proposed Book as Artwork exhibition for September 1972. Germano immediately agreed.
For sources of book art since the close of the Celant/Greenwood exhibition, we are spoilt for choice. Print and digital, image-rich aggregations of book art abound. We can return to the Phaidon and Bury books. We can turn to the well-illustrated print and online publications from the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of Western England, online library collections such as the MassArt Library or Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, the websites of dealers such as Zucker Art Books displaying their wares, the dozens of websites for recurring book art fairs such as International Artist’s Books Triennial Vilnius (1997 – present) and CODEX International Book Fair (2007 – present) and community sites suchas Artist Books 3.0. In the future, the Getty Research Institute‘s processing of the Steven Leiber Basement archive should also yield a rich source of images of works by the artists selected for the Celant/Greenwood exhibition.
Present-day online access challenges Mallarmé’s dictum: ”Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.” Now it seems:
Everything in the world exists to end up on the web.
As far as that premise holds, this annotation and rearrangement of Celant’s bibliography — a “webliography” — offers an online starting point for connecting the book as artwork 1960/1972 with the book as artwork since. In providing some images of the works and links to images, the webliography offers anyone interested in book art the means to gain a more colored impression of the period’s book art. That the primary impression is still black and white underscores the impact of xerographic technology on artists then as well as that of conceptualism driven by text or photograph. A webliographic approach also offers the opportunity to link the book art of the Celant exhibition with book-oriented Web-art or Net-art such as that of Amaranth Borsuk, Taeyoon Choi, Gunnar Green, Johannes Heldén, Bernhard Hopfengärtner and many others referenced below.
The reorganization here of Celant’s and Morris’s list — by artist alphabetically then chronologically — makes it easier to see the curators’ tendencies in selection as well as the influence of practical factors. The curators’ selection is obviously more Western, less Eastern European and even less Middle Eastern and Asian. Individuals’ prodigality surely played a role in whom and what was included. As Morris’s essay in the Phaidon book reveals, the geographical proximity of works available to be chosen played a role; so, too, the influence of the then-contemporary art network played a role (Atkinson, Beuys, Celant, Dwan,Greenwood, Hansjorg Mayer, Walther König, Maenz, Siegelaub, Sperone and the many other personalities of the Art-Language, Arte Povera, Conceptualist and Fluxus movements); and even the size of suitcases and availability of transport for bringing the artwork into the UK played a role.
Generally the online links for the artists’/authors’ names lead to biographies, either in their official websites, Wikipedia or other news sources. Where an artist/author is listed multiple times, the links vary from instance to instance to provide a wider range of information about the individual and, in some cases (such as Dieter Rot’s), more images. The links behind the publishers’ names go to publishers’ websites or Wikipedia entries about them. The links that follow each entry resolve to images of the work, videos, audio, interviews or essays relevant to the work. For selected entries in Celant’s list, a compare/contrast takes the user to websites or works whose juxtaposition might shed light on the similarities or differences between the item in Celant’s list and book art of the subsequent decades.
The webliography also supports the haptically as well as digitally inclined. The links behind the titles of the works provide information on the nearest library location of the work (although not all titles could be located). Be sure to enter your own location and refresh the results.
Bochner, Mel. The Singer Notes. New York: Self-published, 1968. [Images] [Compare/contrast Bochner’s notes and drawings resulting from conversations with scientists and engineers at Singer Labs in New Jersey with the Smithsonian Libraries’ online exhibition Science and the Artist’s Book, 1995]
Gregory, Kathe; Landis, Marilyn; Lewis, Russell; Crane, David; Kahn, Scott. Stolen. New York: Colorcraft Lithographers/Dwan Gallery, 1970. [Images] [Compare/contrast with Andrew Savage’s Stolen White Goods, 2006, and then Cristina Garrido’s intervention White Goods, 2011]
Lole, Kevin; Smith, Paul. Handbook on Models. Coventry: Self-published, 1972. [Unable to locate a work of this title in WorldCat, but one with the title The Relativism of Emotion Handbook to the Model and same date of publication is described in Paul Robertson‘s “A Collection of Rare Art+ Language Books and Internal Documents – Many Unknown in Literature”, Gorebridge, Midlothian: Unoriginal Sins/Heart Fine Art, n.d.]
30 x 21cm, 50pp (printed recto only) plus printed card covers. Xerox inner pages as issued. The first and only edition of this theoretical work based on a physical model (electro-shock, photo beams and electronic buzzers) acting as metaphor for analogue, theoretical and representative models. Cover is very minority marked on the front and back cover has a faint diagonal crease else VG++. From the archive of David Rushton who believes only 10 or fewer of this book was published.
Display of Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, at Pliure: La Part du Feu, 2 February – 12 April 2015, Paris. Photo by Robert Bolick. Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit 451; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s La bibliotheque en feu, 1974.
Pilkington, Philip; Rushton, David; Lole, Kevin; Smith, Paul. Concerning the Paradigm of Art. Zurich: Editions Bischofberger, 1971. [Last author’s name corrected from “Paul” to “Peter”] [From Paul Robertson, “A Collection of Rare Art+ Language Books and Internal Documents – Many Unknown in Literature”, Gorebridge, Midlothian: Unoriginal Sins/Heart Fine Art, n.d.
“30 x 21cm, 16pp (recto only). White card covers – with offset title. A text published by Bischofberger from a theoretical document written by Kevin Lole, Philip Pilkington, David Rushton and Peter Smith (formerly Analytical Art and by this time fully regarded as members of Art & Language) which applied Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift to art (the original theory by Kuhn being a view that revolutions in scientific thought only occurred when sufficient contrary evidence to the prevailing orthodoxy had mounted up and the original hypothesis could no longer explain the physical evidence emerging from empirical studies). It is worth noting that at this time Bischofberger bought a great deal of Art + Language material from the group and published other documents by them including some of the group’s rarest publications – storing many of the more three-dimensional works for later resale. Bischofberger did not print the books himself – rather Art and Language arranged design and publication in Coventry (for free using the University’s resources) and David Rushton drove the books over in a camper van to Switzerland (breaking down just on the edge of the city due to running out of petrol and having little money left, Rushton coasted the last mile down hill on an empty tank).
The limitations of these series of books are usually placed at c. 200 but Rushton remembers taking far fewer than that with him and this Analytical Art book was in fact only produced in 50 copies taken to Zurich plus a few retained by the artists in the UK.
That said this is one of ONLY 5 copies which were numbered in roman numerals (this one being III/V) and signed by ALL of the four writers in pencil on the first title page.”]
Pilkington, Philip; Rushton, David. Sample from a Topological Notebook. Coventry: Self-published, 1972. [Video] [From Paul Robertson, “A Collection of Rare Art+ Language Books and Internal Documents – Many Unknown in Literature”, Gorebridge, Midlothian: Unoriginal Sins/Heart Fine Art, n.d.
“30 x 21cm, 28pp carbon copy pages and printed cover. This was one of ONLY four copies made and published by the group – two copies being signed by David Rushton and Peter [sic] Pilkington and created from original typed sheets and two copies remaining unsigned and created (as here) using the carbon copies from the originals. These latter two examples were regarded by the group as artist’s proofs of the book. This is the only copy of this book available for sale anywhere as from the original four prices: one is in Paul Maenz’s archive and another two copies are in the hands of private collectors (who purchased them from ourselves). This copy is signed by David Rushton and Philip Pilkington and has been stamped on the inside front cover with the official Art & Language Stamp and also designated in blue ink “Second Copy”. Fine estate and clearly rare.”]
Magnet / Photo Series / Group 2000 / September 1968 / (4 Phase) / Continuous Photographic Photographs Continuously Photographs Up to 20,000 Shots / Run Time work / 10 years / annual series of 20,000 elements / technique / black and white photography / leafs / 3 M / K 203 3 / each 30 x 40 / constant time setting diaphragm / fixed tilt stand / 1969 / camera used maintains the original value and adds to the artistic market.
Ramsden, Mel. The Black Book. [Unable to find a work under this title in WorldCat]
Ramsden, Mel. Abstract Relations. New York: Art-Language, 1968. Edition of 5. [Unable to find a work under this title in WorldCat; the 5 images on the left in this photograph from the Philippe Méaille private collection at MACBA come closest.]
Rot, Dieter. Icelandic Leather. Reykjavik: Self-published, 1970. [Unable to locate by this title; may be referring to Volume 5, Bok 3 of the Collected Works]
Display of Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, at Pliure: La Part du Feu, 2 February – 12 April 2015, Paris. Photo by Robert Bolick. Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit 451; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s La bibliotheque en feu, 1974.
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