Visible Language

In this issue where critics, book artists, archivists and poets participate in defining the problematics of the modern artist’s book, production and reading emerge as the key issues. Contemporary artists have modified traditional practices to such an extent that their readers are hard pressed to give a suitable definition of an illustrated book. By undergoing spatial displacements, text and image exchange or relinquish their respective identities. Many barriers have been crossed and many oppositions have disappeared, notably between handcrafted and industrial artifacts, between theoretical and creative productions, between unity and multiplicity of media. Text and image alternate, combine or wage war on one another. Their various alliances and rivalries give rise to a variety of questions discussed in this issue. Do text and image upstage or enhance each other? Does the shape of the book translate or subvert its message or meaning? Is the binding more than mere decoration and can its absence be revealing? In view of many radical changes, the artist’s book assumes multiple functions: aesthetic, political, cultural and social. Frequently it provides a form of protest against either institutionalism or elitism even though it can cater only to an elite. The act of reading becomes complex, the reader, curator or librarian can no longer perform routine tasks, but must participate on another level in the creation or production of the book.

Because they are mixed modes (words and images), “artists’ books” have lacked an adequate theory relating them to other forms of cultural production. In order to understand these unique objects, one must divide them into two subgroupings: de luxe editions (usually limited, numbered, signed and sold to dealers and collectors), and “anti-books,” those which question the physical and conceptual foundations of the book, seriality, identity and the art marketing system. Mexican examples are presented because they highlight the explicitly political and social substratum from which the avant-garde emerges.

Walter Hamady’s combination of iconoclasm/craft, art/daily life, and sophistication grounded in physiology and earthiness set his work apart. “The Book as the Trojan Horse of Art” explores these themes while the article itself mirrors, in its form, Hamady’s attitude toward the book as a reflective vehicle in its ability to break and intersect narrative lines, play with syntax, integrate found materials, and convey enigma, paradox and information all at once.

Steve McCaffery’s poetic career had its inception in the northern England of the late sixties; his biggest influence was the concrete poetry/concrete art of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Emigrating to Canada in the early seventies, McCaffery worked both on sound-text poetry and on artists’ books, producing a series of remarkable illustrated books—Ow’ Waif, Dr. Sadhu’s Muffins, Intimate Distortions, Knowledge Never Knew—which combine word and image and, more important, treat the book as a composite whole, spacing, typography, arrangement, white space, letter size, etc. all working together to create a field of play. He is therefore all but impossible to anthologize and his work belongs more properly with artist’s books than with conventional poetry.

Deguy/Dorny Dorny/Deguy is a reflection on poetic stimulation of collaboration in the realm of space and materiality of words.

Different styles of book art collaboration are explored through fifteen vignettes of the author’s work with various contemporary artists including Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, John Baldessari and Jim Dine as well as the architect Robert Graves and photographers Michael Kenna and Lou Stoumen. These vignettes are anchored by an introductory description of collaboration at the Arion Press and the fact that the author was a given in each creative, interpersonal encounter.

This essay compares the form, function and experiences of reading and writing books with the utilization and creation of narratives on the computer. Topics include: hand-eye coordination, gestures and rituals which characterize computer use; the speed, accessibility and flexibility of computer tools; rules and assumptions which inform the relationship between human and machine; the structural, technical and psychological functions of the interface; the experience of navigation within an electronic narrative structure; the computer user as audience, reader and creator; signs and symbol, the intersections of visual and verbal language; the manipulation of icons, formats, metaphors and scenarios which support computer environments and simulations.

Experiments with typography proliferated in the early decades of the twentieth century in the works of poets and artists involved with the various movements of the early avant-garde. For artists of the Dada, Italian and Russian Futurist, and Vorticist movements, these manipulations were an integral part of their aesthetic and political concerns. The source which inspired these works and the central issues which motivated these visual pyrotechnics varied considerably from poet to poet. This article traces the relations among aesthetic principles, linguistic meaning, political strategies and visual representation in the typographic work of F.T. Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Wyndham Lewis and Ilia Zdanevich in the Period of 1909 to 1923.

Binders have long contributed an important material dimension to any consideration of the polysemy of the book-as-object, and the heritage of the livre de peintre, or artist’s book, has left its mark on the bookbinder’s awareness of interpretive strategies for approaching the text. This article examines the practices of five contemporary French bookbinders whose diversity of creative styles only masks fundamental common preoccupations: the creation of decors that are harmonious and not competitive with the text, and the need to ally aesthetic pleasure in the finished decor with a structural integrity that preserves the book as an object of reading, not an object for viewing.

Contemporary book illustrators have often experimented with mixed media. Roger Bezombes’ collage illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (Strasbourg: Less Bibliophiles de l’Est, 1985) exemplifies this experimentation at its best. The artist’s appropriation and juxtaposition of often disparate images from ancient to present day iconography shows the diversity of the text’s potential and points to the universality of Baudelaire’s poetic gesture. In his articulation of a new architecture for the book, Bezombes provides a robust visual plane whose intersections with the verbal register foster novel conjugations for reader/viewer reception and frame them within unprecedented paradigms of image-text inquiry.

Some contemporary books blur the distinction between book and sculpture, presenting three-dimensional objects that toy both with the shape of the book and its definition. Three exemplary “non-books” are examined in this study in order to show how the dimensions of the book have been expanded. As it blurs disciplinary boundaries, the contemporary “non-book” questions its own status as a “book,” thereby enriching and enlarging our definition of what a book might be.

This piece has been conceived by its author as a reading—or, more precisely, as a performance—of a small book by the contemporary painter Ida Applebroog, self-published in the late seventies and entitled Life Is Good: A Performance. As an artist, Applebroog has continuously sought to reveal what might be called the “underside” of everyday life. She “reads” the commonplace as an arena of deceit. She reveals in her reading what convention allows us to forget. In that spirit, this piece is a reading of the conventions of reading, with Applebroog serving as a guide.

As an avant-garde medium, the artist’s book challenges the expectations of the reader/viewer and violates the conventional distinctions between literature and the visual arts. Those expectations and conventions are institutionalized in the popular notion of the library as a repository for books and of the librarian’s role as custodian of that repository. This article rejects this conventionalized approach and posits in its stead the library as a sort of performance space in which the confrontation between artist and audience may occur. In this model, the librarian becomes an avant-garde performer who uses the library’s conventional cataloging system to establish a set of expectations that are challenged by the work at hand. As a kind of “straight man,” the librarian becomes as essential actor in the realization of the work.