Thomas Vogler

University of California, Santa Cruz
tom_vogler@macmail.ucsc.edu

 

Dressing the Text exhibition, travelling in U.S. through 1998, catalogue available by mail.

 

It is impossible to begin a discussion of the artist’s book without entertaining the issue of definitions. This is not the case with more well-known productions in the book art world, like the Fine Press Book, with its established aesthetic and practice based on high standards of craftsmanship and materials and attention to detail, usually in the service of an “important” text, printed with letterpress typography, in tastefully sumptuous bindings, with restrained illustrations that don’t upstage the text. Nor is it the case with the Livre d ‘Artiste that echoes the craftmanship of the fine press book, but usually has its production and design organized around the work of an artist (preferably a well-known one) who may also take part in the design of the book.

 

In our time something called the “artist’s book” (or perversely “the artists’ book”) is earning itself the status of a separate category, continuing a movement many think started in the 1960s in the U.S. Still developing, it seems at times like a hybrid version of the other two, but one that is open to a much larger range of design and content, as well as untraditional modes of binding and packaging. It is usually produced by a small independent press, hand-made or hand-assembled in small editions, or perhaps even produced as a unique object. These books and book-objects are the work of artists who are actively resisting the assimilative force of publishing and distribution by creating works that defy easy reproduction, creating a realm where the “contents” of a “book” do not have to be made to fit the printing and packaging norms of trade and university press book production. Such works pose a potential threat to the cultural iconicity of “the book” by challenging conventional category distinctions. This may sound like a definition, but what “book” means in this emerging art form (or medium? or genre?) is still not much more than a hand-held interactive object. Some practitioners and critics claim that the term “artist’s book” has a signification comparable to that of “painting” or “sculpture.” But with the still-limited exposure in galleries and museums, and the paucity of critical writing on the subject, it is impossible to achieve anything like consensus on a single definition.

 

We now complacently speak of “Greek Tragedy,” as if Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all doing the same thing. But if we think of the century-long development of that genre, every new production would have been a test case, stretching or confirming each aspect that might help define its form. It was only towards the end of its development that Aristotle sat down to consider the theoretical task of defining it, looking at all the tragedies he could find and inductively coming up with a definition. How did he know what works to look at in the first place? He must have had an adequate working sense of tragedy already, as did the judges and audiences who presided over the institutionalization of the genre. To define something is to announce its limits, or to limit it–to draw a conceptual line or boundary that implies it has reached full development and its borders are secure. In the case of the artist’s book the limits have not yet been reached or recognized, hence critical agreement is lacking. This is altogether appropriate and exhilarating, giving every artist’s book event, whether panel discussion, gallery exhibition, or museum collection, a special importance as part of the process of encouraging, defining, and publicizing this new thing. I recently had the opportunity to be present at the opening of 187 submissions for the Dressing the Text exhibition in Santa Cruz, and to spend a whole day in a hands-on encounter with the 48 works selected by the jury, including one work by each of its four members. In my comments here I’d like to suggest how that exhibition itself will function in its three-year travels across the country, as part of the process of defining what the artist’s book is, seeking a definition by practice rather than by theory or edict.¹

 

These works were responses to a call for submissions that announced a “national, juried competition and exhibition” of “The Fine Press Artists’ Book.” In the call an initial gesture is made to “an exciting period of experimentation” during the past twenty years, in which “both the structure and the traditional uses of books have been scrutinized and re-evaluated. Conceptual book-objects have shattered conventions through exaggeration, distortion, elimination, or substitution of the book’s various aspects, and have opened the entire nature of the book up to new and exciting investigations.” This exhibition is to represent “the fine printers’ response to both the technical and philosophical challenges generated by this exploration.” But the next paragraph defines the “fine press artists’ book” in opposition to this “exciting period.” It is not “a random collection of fractured bits…but rather…the thoughtful amalgam of text, image, paper, binding structure, typography, and meaningful content…[it] remains preoccupied with content.” Then, in an attempt to have it both ways: “Fine press artists’ books carry on the centuries-old tradition of fine printing while participating in the evolution of the book form.” The meaning of “printing” is implicitly defined by the exhibition requirement of an edition of at least ten, to avoid being “precious” in the bad sense, which is implicitly the status delegated here to the unique object. The call thus represents a rather restricted definition of the artist’s book, but a good definition of the aesthetic criteria of the jurors. All past students of William Everson, the members of the Printers’ Chappel of Santa Cruz (Ruth McGurk of Peripatetic Press, Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press, Peter Thomas of Peter & Donna Thomas: Santa Cruz, and Gary Young of Greenhouse Review Press), are technically skilled and highly creative artist-printers, trying to maintain their dedication to the highest principles of the “fine press” tradition while participating in the evolving identity of the artist’s book.

 

The catalogue continues and intensifies the conservative (I use the word in a non-pejorative sense) rhetoric of the call for submissions, and backs it up with a formal structure or format that is at times contradicted by the objects it presents.² In it Gary Young states that “the fine press artists’ book” is “characterized by a devotion to text,” and that “printing a book dresses a text.” This antiquated metaphysics of “dressing” a text almost distracts one’s attention from the equally tendentious emphasis on printing as essential to the genre, and from the subsequent emphasis on “narrative” and “page.” A final quotation from scripture (“In the beginning was the word”) is offered as the “philosophical conceit” that “infuses” every book, making it a “tale of incarnation” in which the “written word is speech incarnate,” and “the printed page allows utterance to become corporeal, and grants it a physical milieu.” But surely spoken utterance is corporeal, even though conventionally and metaphysically troped as “spirit.” And surely most of the printed (and not-“printed”) pages (and not-“pages”) of works in the exhibition were not spoken utterance before they were written.

 

The quotation from scripture and the rhetoric here sound more like a defensive stratagem than like the manifesto for a bold new swerve in the art/book world. This is not at all surprising, since the values and skills represented by the fine print tradition are beleaguered from all sides. The tone is similar to that in the 1995 Fall Schedule of Programs from the University of Iowa Center for Book Arts: “With the support of numerous foundations, corporations, individual contributors, and over 800 members worldwide, the Center for Book Arts ensures that the ancient craft of the book–that container which preserves the knowledge and ideas of a culture–remains a viable and vital part of our civilization” (3). But in this case there is also a genuine desire to embrace the new, to expand artistic and creative horizons–if it can be done without going to extremes. The artist’s book evolution potentially threatens the aesthetic hegemony of fine printing and binding, so it is not surprising that some aspects of the exhibition are more than a bit inconsistent, with a number of the accepted entries not even trying to meet one or more of the announced criteria in the call for submissions and the catalogue. To accept such works equivocates and undermines on one level what is being proclaimed on another, continuing and repeating a process that is already evident in the call and catalogue.

 

I turn now to a brief consideration of the harvest produced by the call, and a look at how that harvest is represented in the catalogue, where each item is photographed and described by means of basic categories that include author, artist, printer, binder, edition size, and dimensions. The photographs (by Don Harris) show the books for the most part in what we might call the codex display equivalent of the missionary position: leaning back or flat, open to the gaze (if not the embrace) of the spectator, presided over by a photograph of William Everson’s regal and monumental edition of Robinson Jeffers’ Granite and Cypress. An intriguing feature of the catalogue is its inclusion of sample text from each work, printed above or at the side of the photograph of the work, seeming to suggest that the words can exist free from their material embodiment, equally themselves and not themselves in any merely material form. Taken from the inside of the book, the sample texts testify to the existence “in there” of the essential text commodity, reminding viewers–like the glimpse of a piece of slip under a dress–of how much of the work we are not seeing, either in the photograph or the exhibition itself. These excerpted texts are all printed in the same italic font, with justified right margins. One implication of this gesture may be that the text of a work can exist in some representable naked form, separate from its “dressed” version in book form; but this would trivialize the difference of materiality that is supposedly the raison d’etre of the artist’s book. The one exception to this practice is worth noting: an Arabic text is not extracted for quotation, suggesting a surplus of materiality that exceeded the available fonts. Other examples obscure the illegibility or the non-semantic nature of their texts, displaying features that challenge or subvert the transparent representability of textual elements. In one case, however, the gesture does demonstrate that illegibility when a Greek quotation is badly garbled. Since the bookmakers were probably using the Greek primarily as a visual design element rather than a phonetic/semantic one, the difference between lower case sigma and omicron may be negligible; in either case, the effect of Greek will be produced in the majority of readers who do not know the language. At any rate, the few works that do raise the issue of the aesthetics of illegible documents are assimilated into the norm through typographic representation.

 

There are a few exceptions to the missionary position norm in the photographs, where codex books stand up to show off their covers, but the most interesting exceptions are the numerous folded entries. These raise questions about the meaning and significance of the category “Binder” listed for each entry. Perhaps “Folder” would be a better term, with “Box maker” replacing “binder’ for the entries that chose that mode, since another exception to the “binding” category is the predictable assortment of boxed sets of prints. There are several boxes with “loose” contents that are quite pleasing, both in construction and content. One of these must be a contender for the world’s most artistic (and expensive) CD container: for $425 you can purchase one of the 55 “editions” of Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder/Four Last Songs, recorded by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf (with Georges Szell conducting) and packaged by Michael Alpert along with a beautifully printed libretto in German and English.

 

“Dimensions” is another specification called for in the catalogue, to indicate the book’s size when closed up and at rest. This works well enough for the conventional codex, where the contents are distributed on the visual field of a single page at a time. But for others it is a bit like measuring a fishing pole when taken apart and packed in its case, rather than assembled for use. A prime example of the problem is Karen Kunc’s

Mexican Gothic
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Mexican Gothic, listed as 4″x 8.” There is a hole at the top of this work, placed so that it can be hung on a wall in order to reveal its full 80″ length at one time. This is a work with text by Vinnie-Marie D’Ambrosio, designed both to be read sequentially, as its folds are negotiated, but also to be looked at as an elongated broadside or wall hanging. A horizontal example of the same effect is found in Joseph Krupczynski’s Marginal Notes, an oriental-fold book that resembles an accordion broadside. A more ambitious and cumbersome example is John Talleur’s Eurydice Unbound, designed “for those of you who take delight in both reading and looking.” Talleur goes on to explain that the full effect of his work requires at least 40 linear feet of wall space for display. Is this a book that can be “unbound” to become a mural, or a mural bound into the confines of a book? Or is it an interactive work, where the reader-holder-looker can participate Orpheus-like in the “unbinding” of the work?

 

This discrepancy is not limited to the folded books, for quite a few of the bound ones use the fully opened scope of two facing pages as their aesthetic mise en page. Other works engage the issue of size in different ways, testing the limits of how large–or how small–a work can be and still be an artist’s book. The average size “at rest” of all the books in the exhibition is 9.52″ x 8.79,” with the giant of the lot being Gloria Kondrup’s Extinctions at a monumental 22″ x 27.5.” There are also a few dwarfs, like Seth Kroeck’s

McCarty Street Matches
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McCarty Street Matches, a 2.5 x 3 matchbox, with 21 matches inside, each match printed with a line of text. The wit of this is that it plays parodically both on the “container” motif and on size. Since its 21 “lines” can be combined in an infinite number of textual/spatial combinations, it is arguably the container of the most text in the whole show. The smallest entry of all is Donna and Peter Thomas’s

A 1000 Mile Walk to the Gulf
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A 1000 Mile Walk to the Gulf. Another playful and skillfully made work, it too is a sneaky David among the Goliaths. When opened it turns out not to be a codex at all, but a scroll, with its text by John Muir printed on one long sheet of paper. The 1000 Mile Walk is a scroll-stroll, one long continuous sheet wound on wooden rollers. Other titles are misleading in other ways, like Mark McMurray’s Notebook Used along the New Jersey Coast, which is not a notebook at all, but the printed representation of text taken from a notebook used by Walt Whitman. This is a “fine print” production, quite busy and puffed up, in extreme contrast to its “notebook” source. Another codex that’s not a codex is Felicia Rice’s

Codex NAFTArt
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Codex NAFTArt, with text by Guillermo Gómez-Peña. This is a work still “in process,” and one of the more interesting and exciting combinations of visual and textual material in the exhibition. Another juror’s entry that combines wit and humor with superb craftsmanship is Ruth McGurk’s Cannibal Ants.

Cannibal Ants
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More obviously self-reflexive or self-descriptive titles grace other works. Martha Carothers’

Inner Room
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Inner Room is a three-dimensional meditation on the possibility of thinking of a book as room(s), exploiting the silent sculptural potential of the book’s physical form, with each kinetic page combination a marvel of creative precision. Its minimal text by Lynd Ward is impressed into the paper without ink, for still more three-dimensionality, and to produce a complete effect of blanc becoming. Meg Belichick’s Frosting and John Talleur’s Eurydice Unbound, Kitty Maryatt’s Mani-Fold Tales, Walter Feldman’s Quiet Words and Beverly Schlee’s

Texthypertext
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Texthypertext all play on the structure/content nature of their form. Coriander Reisbord’s Defensive Book has a text consisting of defensive imperatives (“Don’t trust anybody”) and pages embellished all over with straight pins, so that it is almost impossible to read it without getting stuck. A less obvious example of name play is Gloria Kondrup’s Extinctions, a work that seems to exist in large part to confirm the parodic aptness of Seth Kroeck’s McCarty Street Matches. This is a tome that presents itself as a tomb, a crypt for “the nameless or the unforgotten dead, whose faces we have never looked upon or voices ever heard.” These five giant slabs of charcoal gray paper are a bit like the Vietnam Veterans’ War Memorial in Washington, except that there the names are presented as live information about the dead, text to be read and touched, preserved and shared. Here the endless names printed in black on black are unreadable, as if already buried in oblivion along with the carcasses of their extinct namesakes.

 

The contents of many works in the exhibition fall into some fairly predictable categories, among them that of myth, the old standby source of text suitable for continuing the tradition of sumptuous editions of the “classics.” Another popular source of text for artist’s book production is the artist’s family, and there are a number here, ranging from the poetry of someone’s eight-year-old niece (Walter Feldman’s Quiet Words) to children’s books, to family album books, with more detail than one wants to know about people one doesn’t know (Kirsten Johnson’s Past Presences, Susan Lowdermilk’s

All My Relations
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All My Relations, to mild feminist protest (Rochelle Kaplan’s Daddy was King) to an eight-year old’s memories of cold-war paranoia and A-bomb fear (Russel Jones’ Overshadowed) and whimsical expressions of gratitude for learning how–and how not to–breathe (Jeri Robinson’s Inhale, exhale. These family-related works tend to favor bold, primitive techniques and materials, including coarse paper, handwriting, linoleum cuts, rubber stamps, and punched holes with wire ring binding.

 

There are several livres d’artistes in the classic mode, with the poet dead or translated (or both), and the artistic elements of the presentation tending to dominate the production. Raphael Fodde’s Motets has text by Montale in Italian, with an adequate English translation. The book is too large for convenient reading, and the text is all in caps, to make it fit the scale and bring it into a relationship with 11 powerful etchings by Virginio Ferrari. James and Carolyn Robertson’s The Bread of Days includes the originals and translations of 12 poems by 11 Mexican poets, translated by Samuel Beckett, who didn’t have any interest in the project but needed the money. In spite of the hackwork translations, this is an exciting work, beautifully printed, with etchings by Enrique Chagoya filling each page to its outermost limits with dynamic force-fields of design. These items are impressive works, but in spite of their “important” texts it’s clearly the visual art that is running the show. For me, that keeps them from joining the first ranks of this fascinating and challenging exhibition.

 

The largest single content/text category represented in the exhibition is poetry, and it is in this category that we also find some of the most impressive and aesthetically pleasing works, books that deserve a place among the best representatives of the fine print tradition. They are not necessarily elaborate, or sumptuous, or complicated, or even expensive. But they are superb examples of that complex and rare harmony of text, materials, design, structure, execution, and illustration or decoration that constitute a successful production. Claire Van Vliet’s

Night Street
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Night Street combines a suite of poems by Barbara Luck on urban themes with a dense, graphically rich, complex rush of textures and images by Lois Johnson that echo the experience of city streets. The pages are folded, composed mosaic-style from several different papers, with images printed on offset press and silkscreened. Each opening of this sophisticated work is like a different miniature cityscape. Gary Young is author, artist, and printer for

My Brother’s in Wyoming
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My Brother’s in Wyoming. In extreme contrast with Van Vliet’s work, this is an elegantly quiet, minimalist production, with what seems like as much open space as the state it represents. With four exceptions, each opening has a simple drawing on the right, with one line of print starting at the bottom right of the facing left page that continues across to the right. The exceptions are four drawings with a greenish background and no text. The overall effect is a brilliantly earned simplicity and harmony, without a single gratuitous feature. Inge Bruggeman’s Negation is one of only eight works in the exhibition priced below $100.00. In it she presents a poem by Hank Lazer, both in printed and tape cassette form. In this work, too, less is more. The interesting poem is enhanced by the tall pages that reinforce its form, and the combination invites repeated readings and handling of the work. K. K. Merker’s Manhattan presents poems by Amy Clampitt. One of the most striking pleasures of this work is the effective formatting of the relationship between Clampitt’s printed text and the abstract, colorful linear illustrations by Margaret Sunday. This is the second in a series of livres d’artistes published by the University of Iowa Center for the Book, and it is a delight to hold, to look at, and to read. One of the many reasons I single these four out is that they present contemporary poetry of high quality in such an intimate relationship with all the aspects of production. Even when the author, artist, and printer are not the same, the harmony is as effective as if they were. These are books one would gladly go back to again and again, and they represent an impressive fulfillment of the goals of the Dressing the Text exhibition. It is fortunate that the show is travelling widely, giving viewers across the country a glimpse of this perspective on the evolution of the artist’s book.

 

Notes

 

1. The exhibition will be installed next at the John Hay Library (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island: September 12-November 29, 1997) and at the Olin Library (Mills College, Oakland, California: January 12-March 6, 1998). It opened in Santa Cruz at the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County (April 15-May 28, 1995) and has been on view at the Clark Humanities Museum (Scripps College, Claremont, California: January 15-February 23, 1996); the Vernon R. Alden Library, Special Collections (Ohio University, Athens, Ohio: March 15-June 15, 1996); the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts (Minneapolis, Minnesota: June 29-September 14, 1996); and at The Davidson Library, Special Collections (University of California, Santa Barbara, California: October 7-December 20, 1996).

 

2. The catalogue for the Dressing the Text exhibition is available from Ruth McGurk, Santa Cruz Printers’ Chappel, 318 Rigg Street, Santa Cruz, 95060, for $12, plus $2.50 postage and handling. A panel discussion featuring Johanna Drucker, Marcia Reed, and Michael Davidson was held in connection with the exhibition; an edited transcript is published in Quarry West 32 (Fall 1995).