Books On Books Collection – Anouk Kruithof

2021/07/192021/10/17Books On BooksLeave a comment

Universal Tongue (2021)

Universal Tongue (2021)
Anouk Kruithof
Paperback with fore-edge printing. H100 × W170 × D75 mm, 2008 pages. Edition of 500. Acquired from Art Paper Editions, 15 May 2008.
First two photos: Courtesy and permission of the artist. Third photo: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

If ever a book danced, it is this one. It is a tango between Anouk Kruithof‘s images and Jurgen Maelfeyt‘s design. It is a global line dance with a team of 50 researchers from across the globe. It is a rave, sourced from 8800 online dance videos. It is a still point in motion against Kruithof’s choreographed four-hour eight-channel video version.

Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Video displayed with permission of the artist.

From the artist’s and publisher’s description: This book shows how dance can be a way of knowing about the world. It is by no means exclusive, final, or academic. It is a statement. Organized in alphabetical order by the first letter of each dance style, it confirms the horizontality of Universal Tongue, by erasing typical categories of the world order, such as country, continent, or culture. Instead, it points us towards a more inclusive world with a limitless exchange—a world where simply everyone is a dancer.

Universal Tongue also neatly uses the vertical surfaces of the codex. The bottom-edge printing of name and title calls to mind Around the Corner by Ximena Pérez Grobet. The fore-edge effect of the full-page bleeds calls to mind Irma Boom’s Strip (2003). Both techniques evoke the book form’s ability to embrace. As the physical and haptic constant alongside the digital sourcing, production and video installation, Universal Tongue as book shows that traditional dance and the book remain undiminished in cultural relevance.

AUTOMAGIC (2016)

AUTOMAGIC (2016)
Anouk Kruithof
Transparent acrylic box holding 10 booklets without covers. Box: H235 x W173 x D53 mm; Booklets: H228 x W170 mm each; 768 pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from the artist, 14 April 2017.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Unlike Universal Tongue, which is based on found images, AUTOMAGIC is drawn from a database of images created (and still being created) by Kruithof herself over the years. With a skill in book artistry as much as photographic artistry, she has curated, edited and montaged the images into nine differently colored booklets, bound by a transparent acrylic shell. As with Universal Tongue, the work is a collaboration, this time with Piera Wolf, the Zurich half of W-E Studio, on the design, and Iñaki Domingo, photographer and professor at the Istituto Europeo di Design, on the text. Domingo’s interview of Kruithof for the book provides the content for a tenth booklet. It is the purple one, edges color sprayed, bound with exposed purple thread and placed like a colophon looking back over the other differently colored nine “chapters” as Kruithof calls them. Laid out in order, the ten front covers spell out “AUTOMAGIC”. The way the individual letters lap over to the back edge of the next cover nods toward the unity the artist intends as well as the metaphorical unity residing in their database source and acrylic box binding.

The tenth booklet lies open under the other nine spelling out the work’s title; its purple cover can be seen in last position in the acrylic box underneath.

AUTOMAGIC is the first work by Kruithof to come into the Books On Books Collection. Its color and bright materiality continually urge taking it down from the shelf and selecting one of the nine “individual chapters” of this long visual work to re-read (re-see). There is, however, a rhythm to the whole work, so they are best read in pairs or trios.

Chapter A (blue), below left, starts the nine-part work with underwater photos and Kruithof’s signature montages on glossy paper.

Chapter U (orange), below right, shifts to portraiture on plain paper, with montages created by laser-printing photos on top of photos, and interspersed with photos of the blank side of the montages with the edge of the picture frame showing. This movement between the portraits and blanks gives Chapter U an easily detectable inner rhythm, all the better appreciated in its contrast with the preceding and following chapters.

Left: from Chapter A (blue). Right: from Chapter U (orange) front and back.

Chapter T (aqua) shifts back to nature, but a “visually psychedelic” one as Kruithof puts it, achieved with layering photos and editing in Photoshop. It also shifts back to a glossier paper like Chapter A, but the paper is thinner and so saturated with ink that the pages must be carefully separated, slowing down the reader/viewer’s movement through the booklet.

Moving into black and white, Chapter O (black) turns more to human forms and activities, depicted in a mix of straight photos, sometimes layered and some re-photographed analogue photo montages, all printed on the heavier glossy paper used for Chapter A.

Chapter T (aqua), Chapter O (black)

Chapters M (lavender) and A (green) move back into color on plain paper. They are two of the thicker booklets. Both are a blend of the human and nature, both have frequent carefully constructed arrangements of evidence of human impact on nature, with Chapter A building this theme more intensively.

Chapter M (lavender), Chapter A (green)

Chapter G (white) has a frenetic almost violent quality in its images and their manipulation. It alternates images of objects (broken windows, destroyed brick walls, melted candles, a partly erased blackboard) with those of humans contorted by awkward poses, layered photos or editing. While the chapter has shifted back to the thicker glossy paper of Chapter A (blue) and Chapter O (black) and has picked up the black and white rhythm of Chapter O, a burst of melted colored candles interrupts that BW rhythm half-way through before letting it return. This frenetic Chapter G feels like a build-up to a distraught Chapter I (red).

Chapter G (white)

Chapter I (red) juxtaposes self-portraits of distress (on matte paper) with images of a hurricane’s aftermath (on glossy paper). The even division between subjects and type of paper individualizes this chapter and drives home the alternating rhythms of the work as a whole.

Chapter I (red)

Chapter C (yellow) consists of “re-photographed analog photomontages of mausolea and images of color smoke bombs in abstract architectural settings”. If the previous eight chapters have expressed a sense of being in the world, this one expresses a sense of exiting it — a sense that is complicated by the fictive enhancement of the brightly colored Mexican mausolea and the fictive smokescreen attempt to impose a ritual and architectural structure on that exit.

Chapter C (yellow)

Pixel Stress (2013)

Pixel Stress (2013)
Anouk Kruithof
Softcover booklet stapled, enclosed in a set of 15 single-fold folios held together with an elastic cloth band. H320 x W200 mm, 100 pages. Acquired from RVB, 12 June 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Remove the elastic cloth band and the 15 folios of glossy prints (H320 x W407 mm) folded in half start to slip and slide. At the center of the inmost folio lies a stapled booklet. The booklet’s front cover serves as the title page, its back cover explains the event that yielded this book.

Single-fold folios slipping apart, front and back covers of the booklet enclosed by the glossy folios.

The booklet’s photos and montage pull the reader into the event — busy New Yorkers brushing by and hurrying away, or stopped in their tracks, intrigued and lingering, heads shaking, edging away or absorbed and brightening, then walking off with their prize. Selected comments on the day complete the scenario.

Only the folio that forms the front and back cover presents a complete version of one of the prizes that a New Yorker might have taken away. The print is a detail enlarged from the thumbnail image “WOMAN_IN_STRESS.JPG”, reproduced on the back of the print.

Clockwise: Front of the folio that is the front and back cover of the book. Back of the folio.
Upper right of the book’s “inside back cover” showing the jpeg.

All of the other prizes are transformed in the book into beautifully aligned verso and recto pages. Thus the recto page of the glossy white-on-black grid in this double-page spread below is a bundle of single-fold, gathered folios. The least nudge shifts the bundle to the right exposing the underlying folio: half white-on-black grid, half umber-to-gold enlarged detail of the image “STRUGGLING-WITH-STRESS.JPG”, which appears on the reverse of the enlargement.

Fifty-two color photographs and photo-montages make up the content of Pixel Stress. Glorious as they are in their photographic language, it is the language of the book, spoken fluently by Kruithof and her collaborator Rémi Faucheux of RVB, that makes Pixel Stress a work of art.

Becoming Blue (2009)

Becoming Blue (2009)
Anouk Kruithof
Paperback, sewn. H275 x W205 mm, 102 pages. Limited edition of 750. Acquired from the artist, 12 June 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Being the product of a design house (Kummer & Herrman) and photo book publisher (Revolver Publishing), Becoming Blue seems more a showcase of photography rather than of book artistry. It nevertheless reflects Kruithof’s playful investigation of color, creative interaction with strangers (hers is the extra hand, head of hair or shape peeking out from behind the subjects) and love of the quirky and awkward.

Ephemera

Newsprint

The Daily Exhaustion (2010)
Anouk Kruithof
Tabloid format newspaper. H275 x W195 mm, 48 pages. Edition of 5000. Acquired from the artist, 12 June 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

A clever contribution to the Dutch self-portrait tradition. Kruithof reworks some of these photos in AUTOMAGIC.

NYC Typext (2013)
A2 poster, bw offset print on yellow paper, folded twice to A4.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

NYC Typext is associated with the solo exhibition “Every thing is wave” held in September and October 2013 at the Boetzelaer I Nispen Gallery in Amsterdam.

#EVIDENCE (2015)
A2 poster, full color newspaper print on recycled paper, folded twice to A4.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

#EVIDENCE is associated with the solo exhibition of the same name held from October through November at the Boetzelaer I Nispen Gallery in Amsterdam.

Poster-Set (2008-12)

Five posters. Edition of 50. Acquired from the artist, 12 June 2021. Photos of the works: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Fragmented Entity (2012)
Double-sided A2 associated with the solo exhibition of the same name held at the Boetzelaer I Nispen Gallery in London.

Front of poster and details from upper left and lower right.

Back of poster.

Untitled (I’ve taken too many photos / I’ve never taken a photo) (2012)
Double-sided A2 poster, color, first shown at Tour le Templiers, Hyeres, France.

Pictured above with Kruithof is Harrison Medina, who responded to the artist’s ad that read “Did you never make a photo in your life?” Kruithof wanted to engage someone with as little experience of photography as possible to co-edit a selection of photos from her archive. The result was an installation, a book and this poster, on the back of which is printed excerpts from conversations during the editing process.

Back of poster.

Off the Wall (2011)
A3 poster associated with the publication Happy Birthday to You.

Kruithof took photos of walls in mental health institutions then reduced them to color swatches or individual bricks in an unstable wall. Two years before, she had explored another set of color-combined metaphors.

Enclosed content chatting away in the colour invisibility (2009)
One-sided A2 Poster, color, on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien.

This sculpture consists of approximately 3500 used book obtained from bookshops or a recycling dump and then dyed. The constructed wall is rigged to collapse at some point during the installation, which has taken place in several venues.

Anonymous Poster (2008)
500 x 500 mm.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

This photo montage reflects the Kruithof’s early mastery of this element in the language of photography. As can be seen from Universal Tongue, AUTOMAGIC and Pixel Stress in particular, her working of this language, her engagement with friends and strangers, her crossing of borders in geography, media and format, and her fusion of all that into book art are what make her work distinctive.

Bookmarking Book Art – Ximena Pérez Grobet

2021/07/072021/11/01Books On Books2 Comments

Around the Corner (2020)

Around the Corner (2020)
Ximena Pérez Grobet
Japanese bound in slip case open at both ends. H200 x W175 x D70 mm. Edition of 20, of which this is # 2. Acquired from the artist, 1 December 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Since 2008, the AM Bruno coalition has sponsored artist book challenges. The one in 2020 was entitled “One and Many Pages” and challenged the participants to respond to the image below:

“One and many pages“, AM Bruno. Accessed 6 July 2021.

Clive Philpott reviewed the various proposals and selected twelve to go forward. Pérez Grobet’s Around the Corner was one. On the fore-edge you can see the whole image reproduced. As you remove the book from its slipcase, you are gradually astounded that, in fact, the image produces the book. Like a flip book, each page holds a segment of the whole image: “one and many pages”. As each segment appears as a full-page bleed, this image of a book un-builds and re-builds within and around the corners of the book in your hands.

While the video below conveys some of the visual experience to be enjoyed with this artwork, it does not convey the tactile and spatial experience of how the image of “a book” becomes “the book” in your hands.

Nowhereman Press 1994-2019 (2019)

The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ximena Pérez Grobet’s Nowhereman Press. To celebrate, she issued the catalogue below illustrating twenty-five of her works. (Books On Books declares an interest, having provided twenty-five words for the opening page and owning two of the works in the catalogue in addition to the one above.)

Nowhereman Press 1994-2019 (2019)
Ximena Pérez Grobet
Overlapping clothbound folder attached to Japanese bound book. H210 x W180 mm, 25 pages. Edition of 25, of which this is #2. Acquired from the artist, 1 May 2019.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The catalogue itself demonstrates this artist’s ingenious engagement with what the critic Gérard Genette called “seuils” or the “thresholds” of the book — its features such as cover, binding, edges, the page, title page, preface, index, colophon, typography, printings, etc., that make up “this fringe at the unsettled limits that enclose with a pragmatic halo the literary work” (quoted by Richard Macksey in his preface to Genette’s Paratexts (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. xvii).

For example, the catalogue opens right-ward rather than left-ward — despite the false hint to open it left-ward given by the “almost” quarter-paperbound appearance of the front cover. Inside is the catalogue’s true spine, with its externalised sewing. Turning the inner cover and first page to the left reveals that each recto landscape page holds a photo of a double-page spread from one of the twenty-five works.

These are the catalogue’s first reminders of Pérez Grobet’s playful embrace of the “book” as her chosen form of art. Only a few pages in, though, and her serious — political, thoughtful and philosophical —side shows itself. The page above shows the first and last pages from 2.10.1968 – 2.10.2018 (2018), which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre that occurred in Mexico City.

The work Dis-Cover (2019) pictured above and below exhibits Pérez Grobet’s play with the paratext of the book — in this case, select two- and three-dimensional aspects of the book: the cover, fore-edge and double-page spread. The title splitting across the French fold opening enacts one pun while the trompe l’oeil effect inside, done with the simplest of papers and bindings, enacts another. Like Around the Corner above, Dis-Cover is a response to an AM Bruno challenge.

Another and richer example of the depth of Pérez Grobet’s work — and another response to an AM Bruno challenge — is words (2016). In its colophon, she makes a statement that is both finishing touch and starting point to words: “The word is possible considering the space of the letter.” Rather than follow the tradition of the “fine press” edition, Pérez Grobet appropriates Wallace Stevens’ poem “The house was quiet and the world was calm”, breaks it into lines and letters, and creates an original work of book art.

In depicting a reader becoming “the book”, speaking its words “as if there was no book” and wanting to be “The scholar to whom his book is true”, Stevens’ poem seeks to lead us to “The access of perfection to the page”: a state of mind and situation. The state of mind is that in which the truth of meaning is as much a pose, perception and act of the body as it is of the mind. The situation is the threshold of object and subject, of being and the possibility of meaning, where the summer night we feel is “like the conscious being of the book” and where the act of perceiving meaning is simply being there, “leaning late and reading there”.

Pérez Grobet’s work challenges the reader/viewer to re-enact this. As the pages turn, the poem explodes into letters scattered across the recto pages. The letters “T”, “h” and “e” that first separately appear suggest a linear decomposition — a letter by letter representation of the poem. But “The” is followed by “o”, other random letters and even a comma — each dispersed in different patterns across its allocated page.

What’s more, the seemingly indecipherable book can be opened in more than one direction and read. Along the mountain folds of the open spine, the poem appears line by line.

Book or object, which way to read it? Which way to open it? Whichever way, the texture of the Cordenons paper combines with that traditional font of the periodic table (Helvetica) to provide a reassuring background for the mental and tactile challenge.

As an object — in its structure and its placement of text, especially Stevens’ text — words embodies both the sense of Pérez Grobet’s statement in the colophon and the sense of the poem. The possibility of meaning (the word) rests in the space of the letter and at the threshold between the physical and idealised fact of the cover, spine and page, on the one hand, and our physical and mental acts as readers/viewers, on the other.

The catalogue has twenty-two more works — equally engaging with different structures, colors, papers, type, techniques and content. More than enough to warrant another solo exhibition, and as always with book art, the challenge will be how to let the readers/viewers engage with the possibilities before them.

“Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Ram” – Or How to Enjoy Codex VII

2019/02/182022/04/16Books On BooksLeave a comment

The seventh biennial Codex book fair and symposium in Berkeley and Richmond, California have come to a close. Of what use it is now to explain how to enjoy them, you be the judge. Your first step is to read the story in Mark Twain’s Roughing It of “Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Ram”. Being the story of a story — book art being so self-reflexive and all — it is the best way to commence:

Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather’s old ram—but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless Jim was drunk at the time—just comfortably and sociably drunk.

Not to advise drink before the fair.

For the start of this Codex, rain and mist hover outside the hangar. The polished concrete floor looks wet but isn’t — so first-time visitors step to avoid slips that won’t really occur. The old-timers though stride from table to table arms wide, bussing each other on the cheek or humping crates around and placing and re-placing their works for the right effect. Arriving early to watch adds a certain enjoyment.

At last, one evening I hurried to his cabin, for I learned that this time his situation was such that … he was tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk—not a hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to obscure his memory. As I entered, he was sitting upon an empty powder- keg, with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command silence. … On the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light revealed “the boys” sitting here and there on bunks, candle-boxes, powder-kegs, etc. They said: “Sh—! Don’t speak—he’s going to commence.”

‘I don’t reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois—got him of a man by the name of Yates—Bill Yates—maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon—Baptist—and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west.

‘Seth Green was prob’ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson—Sarah Wilkerson—good cretur, she was—one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her. She could heft a bar’l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack. And spin? Don’t mention it! Independent? Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn’t trot in harness alongside of her. You see, Sile Hawkins was—no, it warn’t Sile Hawkins, after all—it was a galoot by the name of Filkins—I disremember his first name; but he was a stump—come into pra’r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary …

Which reminds me of Emily Martin and her politically biting King Leer —

*King Leer: A Tragedy in Five Puppets* (2018)
Emily Martin

There is plenty more somber work to go around: Lorena Velázquez from Mexico has followed up her powerful Cuarenta y tres with Exit, her hope in our turbulent times;

Barcelona’s Ximena Perez Grobet has 2.10.1968-2018 on display, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City; Sue Anderson and Gwen Harrison from Australia offer Phantomwise Flew the Black Cockatoo, an indictment of a cruel welfare system; and there is Islam Aly from Egypt with Inception, Bedaya, inspired by stories and journeys of refugees. Book art everywhere wears its heart on its cover.

Still, book artists are a convivial bunch and cheerful in their internationality. On Monday evening, Mary Heebner (Simplemente Maria Press) and her husband photographer Macduff Everton are in the Berkeley City Club’s off-limits members’ room settling down to a bottle of Santa Barbara red, and here come upstate New Yorker Leonard Seastone (Tidelines Press), Anglo-German Caroline Saltzwedel (Hirundo Press), Irishman Jamie Murphy (The Salvage Press) and Geordie David Esslemont (Solmentes Press). Macduff is launched on a tale about running into Queen Elizabeth on her horse-riding visit to Ronald Reagan’s ranch, when David remembers rounding down a path in the Lake District during an art residency to find Prince Charles legging it up the same — by which time Macduff has just returned from his room with a bottle of single malt — which reminds Caroline of a stormy weather hike along Hadrian’s Wall, where Macduff diverts onto a tale of nearly being blown off the same and making his shaky, near-death way back to a bed-and-breakfast for a hot bath and terrible food from the grumpy owners, which launches Leonard onto the story about his local Russian butcher/grocer/refugee who refuses to sell him salad but insists on providing chiropractic services one day and adopts Leonard as his only friend in the US with whom he can have true political debate. Jamie still wants to know why the Russian wouldn’t sell Leonard any salad.

Speaking of greens — Robin Price’s prototype for Witnessing Ecology: the agave plant book again displays that thread of social concern, but this work and Price herself draw attention to another thread of enjoyment to pursue: the recurrence of collaboration among book artists. One artist leads to another.

*Witnessing Ecology: the agave plant book* (2019)
Robin Price
Photo: Mike Rhodes

As with the now-famous The Anatomy Lesson by Joyce Cutler-Shaw, Price has joined forces again with Daniel Kelm on the agave plant book, Kelm also collaborated with Ken Botnick on the long-gestating Diderot Project on display here just a few tables away, Botnick collaborated with the novelist and translator William Gass on A Defense of the Book, who in turn with the photographer Michael Eastman — who lives over in Oakland — created the digital-only book Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time. Whatever the medium, the book just naturally encourages collaboration — and chance. As Price’s book Counting on Chance implies and as so many book artists echo — as does Jim Blaine —

‘… There ain’t no such a thing as an accident. When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk, or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man’s back in two places. People said it was an accident. Much accident there was about that. He didn’t know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. If he hadn’t been there the Irishman would have been killed. Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. Uncle Lem’s dog was there. Why didn’t the Irishman fall on the dog? Becuz the dog would a seen him a coming and stood from under. That’s the reason the dog warn’t appinted. A dog can’t be depended on to carry out a special providence. Mark my words it was a put-up thing. Accidents don’t happen, boys. Uncle Lem’s dog—I wish you could a seen that dog. He was a reglar shepherd—or ruther he was part bull and part shepherd—splendid animal; belonged to parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him.’

Chance, luck or accident — if you are to enjoy this book fair, you need to count on them, not just allow for them. How likely was it that in pursuit of Mary Heebner’s Intimacy: Drawing with light, Drawn from stone, I would be caught up with that crew in the off-limits members’ club?

*Intimacy: Drawing with light, Drawn from Stone* (2017)
Mary Heebner

Or if I weren’t staying a good walking distance from the symposium, how would I have come across a hummingbird in the cold of February after being delighted with Sue Leopard’s Hummingbird?

Hagar is a common Nordic name. But how likely was it that Twain would use that particular name in his California mining-camp story and that Codex VII is hosting “Codex Nordica”? Mark my words it was a put-up thing.

That not one of the symposium presenters introducing us to “Codex Nordica” is named Hagar should not be held against the organizers. Their choices — Åse Eg Jørgensen (co-editor of Pist Protta, Denmark’s longest running contemporary artists’ journal), Tatjana Bergelt (multilingual, of German-Russian-Jewish culture and settled in Finland), Thomas Millroth (art historian from Malmö) — are entertaining, informative and good humoured (proof at least for the Danes that they can’t all be Hamlet or Søren Kierkegaard). What they have to say and show speaks to book art’s uncanny rhyming across geographies and times.

With every issue the outcome of guest editing, artists’ contributions and a mandate to be unlike any previous issue, Pist Protta is a cross between Other Books and So, the collaborative, gallery-challenging venture of Ulises Carrión in the last century, and Brad Freeman’s US-based Journal of Artists’ Books. Printed Matter has faithfully carried every issue of Pist Protta, so there is little excuse to be unaware of it and its liveliness. Fitting for someone who thinks of herself as a collage of cultures, Tatjana Bergelt’s barfuß im Schnee-álásjulggiid muohttagis (“Barefoot in the Snow”) is a photo-collage of old maps, satellite maps, poetic texts, landscapes and portraits of the Sámi, the dwindling inhabitants of the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Murmansk Oblast. It reminds me of UK-based Nancy Campbell’s Vantar/Missing.

*Vantar/Missing* (2014)
Nancy Campbell
Digitally printed on Munken Polar, hand-sewn binding with hand-incised design, edition of 300

Both works delve into the vulnerable and disappearance — be it culture, gender or environment. Vantar‘s cold diptychs recording the mountain snow cover and barely perceptible signs of life in the ghost town Siglufjörður chime with Bergelt’s final slide:

“From Finland barefoot in snow”, Codex VII, 4 February 2019
Tatjana Bergelt

*barfuß im Schnee-álásjulggiid muohttagis* (2015)
Tatjana Bergelt
2 books in linen cassette, edition of 4, in each book 6 poems by Nils Aslak Valkeapää in Sámi, Finnish and German languages, translations P.Sammallahti, C.Schlosser

The bus from the symposium in Berkeley to the fair itself in Richmond is another chance for chance to play its role. One day I’m sitting next to Amanda Degener (Cave Paper), who delights in our common acquaintance with Ioana Stoian and Eric Gjerde; the next, it’s Jeanne Drewes (Library of Congress), who introduces me to Mark Dimunation (Library of Congress), who regales us and the collector Duke Collier with tales of the British artist Ken Campbell. But the terrible thing about chance is that it takes up so much time and, at the same time, shows you what you wish you had more time for.

You could listen for hours to Peter Koch (Peter Koch, Printers) and Don Farnsworth (Magnolia Editions) about their making of Watermark by Joseph Brodsky:

The conclusion to *Watermark* and Koch’s homage to Aldus Manutius

Or to Russell Maret discussing his work Character Traits and Geoffroy Tory’s Champ Fleury: The Art and Science of the Proportion of the Attic or Ancient Roman Letters, According to the Human Body and Face (1529):

Or to Gaylord Schanilec (Midnight Paper Sales) enjoying his work on a woodblock:

Or to Till Verclas (Un Anno Un Libro) explaining how his children helped achieve the effect of snow falling over Friedrich Hölderlin‘s words in Winterbuch:

Or to Sarah Bryant (Shift-Lab and Big Jump Press) revelling in the set up of The Radiant Republic, the result of her Kickstarter project:

Or to Sam Winston (ARC Editions) sharing his Reading Closed Books, which like Darkness Visible, sprang from his 7 Days performance in a blacked-out studio:

Sam is kind enough to introduce me to his colleagues at ARC Editions (Victoria Bean, Rick Myers and Haein Song). Individually and together, they are forces to watch. Myers’ An Excavation, which I’d had the pleasure to see previously in The Hague, can be partly experienced in these videos, and Song’s fine bindings and artist’s books must be seen. Bean’s symposium talk is on Check, her portfolio of typewriter prints featuring fifty writers, from Oscar Wilde to Joan Didion, and the checks they wore, and on Flag, the follow-up series of artist’s books that takes a writer from Check and uses colour, cloth and typewriter prints to explore an individual work by that writer.

Slide from “Flag”, Codex VII, 5 February 2019
Victoria Bean

Typewriter prints from *Check* by Victoria Bean

*Tess* (2019)
Victoria Bean
The red and black ribbons and white linen are drawn from images in Hardy’s *Tess of the D’Urbervilles* symbolizing Tess and critical events of her life and death.

Check and Flag illustrate that bright enjoyable thread that shows up again and again at Codex and book art at its prime — the integration of letter, image, material, form, process and subject in a way that self-consciously calls attention to them yet yields a work of art that simply is — on its own terms.

Which, if you have read “Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Ram”, ought to remind you that

… Parson Hagar belonged to the Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to ‘tend the funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece.

‘She wouldn’t let them roll him up, but planted him just so—full length. The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window. They didn’t bury him—they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument.

With its 222 exhibitors here weaving the threads of book art and the book arts, Codex VII is a monument to enjoy. As for that old ram, you will have to read the story — and prepare for Codex VIII.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Ximena Perez Grobet

Books On Books Collection – Anouk Kruithof

Universal Tongue (2021)

AUTOMAGIC (2016)

Pixel Stress (2013)

Becoming Blue (2009)

Ephemera

Newsprint

Poster-Set (2008-12)

Further Reading (and Viewing)

Videos

Bookmarking Book Art – Ximena Pérez Grobet

Around the Corner (2020)

Nowhereman Press 1994-2019 (2019)

“Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Ram” – Or How to Enjoy Codex VII

Universal Tongue (2021)

AUTOMAGIC (2016)

Pixel Stress (2013)

Becoming Blue (2009)

Ephemera

Newsprint

Poster-Set (2008-12)

Further Reading (and Viewing)

Videos

Like this:

Around the Corner (2020)

Nowhereman Press 1994-2019 (2019)

Like this:

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