Simultaneous Journeys: Thematics in the Curating of Booknesses: Artistsâ Books from the Jack Ginsberg Collection
The year 2017 marks the 21st anniversary of the first exhibition of artistsâ books from the Jack Ginsberg Collection ever held in South Africa.1 At the time, it was purportedly the second largest exhibition of artistsâ books to have been held in the world. In 2015, Ginsberg was one of the featured collectors on New Yorkâs Center for Book Artsâs Behind the Personal Library: Collectors Creating the Canon. This exhibition and symposium considered the influence of private collectors on critical dialogue in the field of the book arts.2 Of the 13 invited collectors, Ginsberg was one of only three non-Americans. Given the extraordinary scope and depth of the collection not only in African but also, now, in global terms, it seemed timeous and fitting to hold another exhibition.
The second was to go back to Castlemanâs catalogue in which, mostly, livre dâartistes,6 fine press books and artist-illustrated publications were featured, to see how many of her chosen books7 can be found in Johannesburg. Given the depth, scope and importance of the Ginsberg Collection, Jack and I found 15 items from Castlemanâs Modernist selection8 for the MoMA exhibition. To these we added another four items from the Ginsberg Collections which, in our opinion, Castleman could well have included. Remarkably, we found 26 items from Castlemanâs postmodern selection,9 to which we added a further three items which, in our opinion, filled appropriate gaps in the MoMA exhibition. The inclusion of these 48 historically important books is especially significant given that both the Ginsberg Collectionsâ and this exhibitionâs major focus is on contemporary artistsâ books.
La Fin du Monde, reflecting a darker sensibility born out of Cendrarsâs experiences as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War, begins with God seated at his desk, smoking a cigar and signing documents. He visits every conceivable plague upon humankind, all in the name of maximising profits (i.e. souls). Cendrars intended that after God had destroyed the world, the film would be rewound, so that the story ended at the beginning (Princeton University Art Museum 2013).
This pair of books highlights the relationship between image and text: typography and the visual tropes of early Modernism and are accompanied by Vladimir Mayakovskyâs and El Lissitzkyâs Dlya Golosa [For the Voice] (1923) [Fig. 3/008]; Iliazdâs Lidantiu Faram [Lidantiu as a Beacon] (1923) [Fig. 4/035]; George Groszâs Ecce Homo (1923) [Fig. 5/012], Alexander Calderâs Fables of Aesop (1931) [Fig. 6/006]; Max Ernstâs famed Un Semaine de Bonte [A Week of Kindness] (1934) [Fig. 7/013] and Gilbert Seldesâs Lysistrata by Aristophanes (1934) [Fig. 8/0138] which is illustrated by Pablo Picasso. To this selection we have added two remarkable publications: Firstly Die Nibelungen dem Deutschen Volke Wie Dererzahlt von Franz Keim (a 1920 reissue of the original 1909 edition) [Fig. 9/0205] in which Carl Otto Czeschkaâs designs and illustrations for Franz Keimâs texts are described as âan elegant, jewel-like survival of the Vienna Secession, Wiener WerkstĂ€tte and Jugendstil styles ... The eight double-page spreads, coloured in clay block technique and rare gold prints, in particular, contribute to the volumeâs fame ... it is quite simply one of the highest achievements of book illustration everâ (Worthpoint 2016).
When Jack and I curated the first exhibition of artistsâ books in South Africa from his collection in 1996, [Fig. 11] we considered the exhibition design and its layout in terms of âchaptersâ, some of which were suggested by the chapter headings of Johanna Druckerâs 1995 book The Century of Artistsâ Books.10 The 1996 exhibition did not feature âhistoricalâ work at all, focusing only on current international and South African trends in the book arts: The vast majority of the books were produced in the 1980s and 1990s with Ronald Kingâs Bluebeardâs Castle (1972), Walter Battissâs Fook Book 1 (Male Fook Book) (1973) and Phil du Plessisâs Hulde Uit 1970 (an addendum to Wurm 12) (1970) being the oldest books chosen.
On this exhibition however, Castlemanâs postmodern selection encouraged us to âmatchâ her choices with examples from the Ginsberg Collection. Our choices forge connective tissue between what might be considered MoMAâs contemporary or postmodernist canon as it exists in Johannesburg and, what is the true focus of this exhibition, contemporary artistsâ books, a theme to which I will return.
It seemed crucial to curate an exhibition which did not simply continue from the end of the 1996 show11 and thus, major, internationally recognised examples which moved Castleman to include them on the 1994-5 MoMA exhibition â and which form part of the Ginsberg Collection â also warrant an opportunity to be seen more widely for the first time in Johannesburg. Such examples include Walasse Tingâs 1Âą Life (1964) [Fig.12/025] in which 28 artists associated with the Pop Art movement and its historical relatives produced 62 lithographs
⊠unlike anything published before. âŠ. It was a compact visual manifesto of the sixties â bright, psychedelic and pulsating, a collaboration of artists who came together under Walasse Tingâs poetic street magic. ⊠Tingâs poems are jarring, mystical street-life incantations, sometimes epic and soaring, screamed out in all-capitalized letters or whispered in lower-case (The Book Beat 2014).
Works which take very different paths in folding imagery into and out of the texts which they accompany are, firstly, Jasper Johns and Samuel Beckettâs Foirades/Fizzles (1976) [Fig.13/027]. Beckett provided an English and French version of the text which allowed Johns an opportunity to contribute 33 etchings and one lithographic illustration of the five prose fragments. Perhaps the most exhaustive analysis of this work is Colin Richardsâs Drawing on Words: Jasper Johnsâ Illustrations of Samuel Beckettâs Foirades/Fizzles (2004) in which he carefully pieces together evidence for Johnsâs ârobust and radicalâ (2004:ii) illustrations of Beckettâs textual fragments which âfizzle out shortly after they have begunâ (Knowlson & Pilling in Richards 2004:3).
Secondly, Barbara Krugerâs and Stephen Kingâs My Pretty Pony (1988) [Fig. 14/028], like Johnsâs illustrations, opens up the semiotic relationship between images and texts as enigmatic perceptions of the passage of time. Movement and stasis are conjoined with words taken from Kingâs text and stopwatches in the pagesâ images, whilst the covers are sheets of stainless steel upon the front of which is affixed a small digital clock.
Thirdly is Francesco Clementeâs illuminations of the 48 text folios of Alberto Savinioâs autobiographical saga The Departure of the Argonaut (1986) [Fig. 15/029]. The images parallel as well as directly illustrate the narrative, changing in every chapter, by reflecting the mood and geography of the text. By covering the words with brilliant colour or opposing them with ominous compositions in deep blacks from which his portrait often emerges, the imagery responds to Savinioâs 1917-18 published diary of his journey from northern to southern Italy aboard a troop-filled passenger train during the First World War. The pattern of his tale was inspired by the third century BCE Argonautica, which chronicles the heroic voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece. For Savinio, heroism is related to the battle against the boredom, tedium and futility of military life (MoMA 1986).
That Delaunay and Cendrars could conceive of such a work in 1913 is remarkable ⊠No private reading experience had ever assumed such dimensions, and the explosion of the book into pieces of this size is a dramatic conceptual as well as formal achievement.
Typically, the work consists of four sheets glued together in a grid, and this large sheet of paper (2m long) is folded in half lengthwise. It is then accordion-folded 10 times to reach a conventional book size and replicate âa railway map, fitting its subjectâ (Watson, James & Bryant 2015:157).12 The entire print run of 150 copies13 was carefully planned to reach a height of 300 feet (over 91 meters), the height of the Eiffel Tower.
Delaunayâs watercolour painting, created with the pochoir method14 on the left hand side of the work, guides the reader towards and through the text on the right hand side as well as dramatically sweeping up and down the length of the folded pages, allowing one to take in the work as a whole.
On the right hand side, Cendrarsâs letterpress text consists of vividly coloured type with Delaunayâs colour âmore lightly painted outlining, floating and supportingâ (Drucker 1995:50) the passages of prose poetry. Cendrarsâs poem ostensibly describes his experience as a young boy on the Trans-Siberian express, which runs from St. Petersburg to the Sea of Japan. His companion on the trip is Jeanne, a French prostitute, and while the landscape rushes by him on the train, he thinks back in fragmented recollection to his childhood in Paris and imagines trips to tropical paradises (Kelley 2013).
Shingler (2012:7) argues that, for Cendrars, simultaneity was neither a psychological phenomenon nor a profound collapsing of semiotic differences between reading and viewing. Rather it was pictorial as in the paintings of Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert, where the colour theories of French chemist Michel EugĂšne Chevreul attempted to find a way of producing colours as vivid and as pure as possible by juxtapositioning complementary colours and maximising contrasting colours. Gordon Hughes (2007:311) quotes Cendrarsâs (1914:257) description of the effect of simultaneous contrast in Delaunayâs paintings: âA color isnât a color unto itself. It is only a color in contrast with one or more colors. A blue is only blue in contrast with a red, a green, an orange, a grey and all the other colorsâ.
For Cendrars, elements in contrast are also attracted to one another, like magnetic opposites, or indeed like the two sexes; hence, poem and painting contrast but are also intimately linked, even interdependent. The two modes of expression interact and modify each other, just as according to Chevreulâs theory complementary colours modify each other. In fact, it is only when they stand in such relationships of contrast that the full vividness of colours is revealed.
<>Shingler (2012:12) reminds the reader/viewer that, here, âsimultaneity means a dialogue between two modes of expression, and a fundamental premise for that dialogue is differenceâ. And thus the reader/viewer âshould not expect to see a complete collapse of the boundaries between visual and verbal modes of expressionâ.
Worth (2013:12) describes such dialogical contrasts as âa poetryâ made up of both images and texts in which âjuxtapositions of themes, ideas, colors, feelings, startling vocabulary, incantatory motifs, and unorthodox versification ⊠result in a dazzling flow of images moving seamlessly down the length of the pageâ. Despite such âseamlessnessâ, however, Perloff (2008) reminds us that
what is not always remarked upon in discussions of the Cendrars-Delaunay simultaneous book is that poem and painting exhibit a very different tonality. The pochoir is predominantly abstract, with rainbow-colored balloons, discs, spirals, and fuzzy triangles cascading downward to the little red tower and wheel. The colors, both on the left and on the right, where they frame the text, express the joie de vivre of fluid motion. But even as both Delaunayâs images and Cendrarsâs poem celebrate energy, the poemâs tone and mood are strikingly different from its visual representation.
Worth (2013:12) continues: âFor todayâs reader, the work is an exuberant celebration of invention that incorporates the sounds, emotions, dreams, and frustrations of the nascent avant-garde. Associated with these are pulsating currents of electricity and the speed and movement characteristic of novel modes of communication and transportation (telephone, train, airship, ocean liner)â.
Specific artistsâ books have been selected for the exhibition in response to the provocative theme of colour as found in their subject matter or content. The sensory, optical and even alchemical experience of colour is one thematic strand which we have explored in Barbara Hodgsonâs and Claudia Cohenâs remarkable devotion to unravelling the mysteries of colour. The Temperamental Rose (2007) and Around the World in Colour (2014) [Figs. 17-18/0146 & 0147] are part of a series of four books in which Hodgson and Cohen follow colour from Isaac Newtonâs 18th Century investigations into its nature, to the present-day and the attempts of colour forecasters to control and predict our colour choices: they âplay with colour and work with itâ (Milroy 2013).
The Temperamental Rose was born during the collaboratorsâ first meeting, in the summer of 2006, when they discovered mutual passions for colour wheels and other systems for charting and codifying colours. Inspired by centuries of colour studies, including those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Chevreul, the artists reproduce existing colour wheels as well as create new and fanciful ways of seeing colour (Heavenly Monkey 2016a).
In the fourth and last book by these book artists, Around the World in Colour circumnavigates the globe, focusing on colour sources, including annatto from Brazil, lac from India and indigo from southeast Asia and Nigeria. The book is divided into six sections: Asia, the South Pacific and Australia, the Near and Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Interleaved throughout the bookâs 23 short essays on the raw materials of traditional colours are 19 sheets of paper using some of the materials discussed. The pages of text are embellished with swatches of European ochres and authentic vermilion, cinnabar, lapis lazuli and Alexandrian blue accompanied by two hand-coloured maps and a bibliography (Heavenly Monkey 2016b).
The theme of colour as sensory, optical and alchemically experience is continued in Sarah Bryantâs Biography (2010) [Fig. 19/038]. This prize-winning book26 is an exploration of the chemical elements in the human body and the roles they play elsewhere in the world. Each spread is a diagram describing the elements as they exist on the periodic table, the earthâs crust, a variety of man-made weapons, medicines, tools, sea water, etcetera. Each element is identified as a specific coloured rectangle and these rectangles continue through the diagrams which are often difficult to decode and are interrupted by blind stamped organic shapes and pressure printing (Bryant 2013).
In collaboration with biology professor David Allen, Bryantâs Figure Study (2015) [Fig. 20/055] is a compelling comparison of population data for every region on earth. Using data from the United States Census Bureauâs International database, Bryant creates population pyramids for every region on earth. By pairing them, human-like forms are created. This imagery, printed in different colours on drafting film from linoleum, can be layered by the viewer and interpreted using a grid and accompanying booklet. The vast and critical differences between the basic equations of life in different parts of the world are starkly revealed by comparing one shape with another (Bryant 2013) and where colour is an index of these fundamental differences.
South African artist Ilka van Schalkwykâs Reading Colour (2009) [Fig. 24/0241] is a powerful example of âminimising the gapâ in which she translates each letter of each word of Salman Rushdieâs text Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin Edition, 1990) into blocks of colour. Van Schalkwyk is drawn to Rushdieâs explorations of the dichotomous nature of life and its (lack of) freedoms: silence vs expression, dark vs light and the continuous vs the layered. Reading Colour, however, is not an illustrative rendition of Rushdieâs text in colour equivalents, it is van Schalkwykâs haptic exploration of her personal experiences of grapheme synaesthesia, a neuroanatomical condition in which a person experiences words and letters of the alphabet, numbers or days of the week as very particular colours. Van Schalkwykâs work translates Rushdieâs text not only into her own colour language, but remarkably, a language which is accessible to other synaesthetes. Having scanned each page of her copy of Haroun, van Schalkwyk painstakingly transposes every letter, word and sentence into her colour alphabet leaving blocks of colour of various sizes and heights as an index of Rushdieâs original typographic structure.
Toward the bottom of the panel, we see black and brownish cloud shapes that look somewhat ominous: a storm, perhaps, is heading for the tower. But the little red phallic tower, inside the orange-green wheel remains childlike and witty: one wonders why Delaunayâs lovely rendering of the poem is so serene, so pretty. In the end, this artistâs book is thus a study in contrasts. Just as the pochoir juxtaposes primary colors, so image and word present a contrast between the joie de vivre of the poemâs opening and its odd mix of buffoonery, high spirits, and a deep-seated anxiety.
Delaunay29 herself described the painting, as a ârepresentation of the journey in a style of pure forms between the original vision of Moscow and the final of Paris (recall the âWheelâ and âTowerâ). Not pictures, or objects in the traditional sense, but in colours, lines, sensations, feelings. Pure inspirationâ.d And thus the painting is not truly illustrational, providing only schematic visual forms such as the domes of Moscow from the start of the poem and the iconic red tower at the poemâs ends. âIn betweenâ, states Shingler (2012:20),
poem and painting seem to go their separate ways, with Delaunay refusing figuration in favour of abstract forms intended to evoke the poetâs journey in a looser, more suggestive way. Once again, any expectation of a close correspondence between visual and verbal meanings is frustrated. The painting is not there simply to âillustrateâ the poem â or to fix its sense in visual form â but rather to contrast with the poem, and thereby serve as a kind of sounding-board for the poetâs reflection on the relationship between visual and verbal modes of expression.
Shingler (2012:20) goes on to remind us of âCendrarsâs yearning for the raw pigments that are the currency of the painter â the upshot of which is that his own words are seen as regrettably lacking when it comes to the representation of visual experience in all its colourful intensityâ.
Delaunayâs refusal of figuration in favour of looser, more abstract forms which evoke and suggest the poetâs journey is to be poetically found on the exhibition in Debra Weierâs reworking of Pablo Nerudaâs Las Piedras Del Cielo: Skystones (1981) [Fig. 25/091] in which intaglio imagery in earth tones, purples and mauve-blues evoke land, horizon and sky in a spatial dialogue with the printed texts which the reader has to find through folding out and revealing the poems from their hiding places. This relationship between image, poem and colour is the subject of Hayden Carruthâs poem Aura (1977) [Fig. 26/0226]. Carruth, a poet, novelist, editor and critic spent much of his later life in Vermont and his poem âdescribes the light and space created by the evening sun on a Vermont mountain landscape at duskâ (Vanderbilt n.d.).
The poem is visualised by artist and book maker Claire Van Vliet, herself a resident of Vermont. In collaboration with hand-papermakers Kathryn and Howard Clark, Van Vliet worked with 12 variously coloured paper pulps across a range from reds and oranges to blues and violets to create this brilliant unfolding and majestic landscape. Because of the handmade nature of the paper, each book in the edition is unique.
defines its modernity by virtue of the tension between its opposing poles: the unifying thread of the poem is the train journey ⊠and yet this journey is interrupted by other real and imaginary excurses. As it shifts with cinematic regularity between different temporal and spatial levels, the poem fuses the everyday with the esoteric, alternating images of childhood innocence and exuberance with those of corruption, violence and despair. The trainâs last stop is Kharbine, but the poem terminates in Paris: the abrupt, quasi-cinematic change of location prompts us to question whether the journey has taken place at all. At this point the entire journey is revealed as an exercise in memory recall on the part of the narrator/poet, the purpose of which is to help him understand his own past and in turn point him towards a new poetic goal (Robertson 1995:891).
Shingler (2012:11) refers to the metaphoric journey in which a âtravelling selfâ may absorb and learn from its encounters but also âemerges from the encounter with the foreign other with a firmer sense of its own identity, reinforced through knowledge of what it is notâ. As a compelling theme for the exhibition, the idea of travel â physical, metaphorical and in memory â might also prompt a viewerâs consideration of the journey that the artist as well as his or her book might have taken from the genesis of its initial idea to its final fabrication and binding. Such a journey would also prompt the question of a viewerâs emergence from viewing the exhibition â as a possible foreign other, given artistsâ booksâ relative obscurity in South Africa â as a journey along thematic paths of discovery.
Sol Lewittâs Fotografia (Autobiography) (1980) [Fig. 27/056] is a biographical journey through the objects â often quotidian and commonplace â with which the artist surrounded himself. Over a thousand photographs document the artistâs studio on Hester Street in Manhattan, where he lived and worked for 20 years. The book takes both the artist â and us as voyeurs â on a journey of discovery through a process of mundane archiving and documentation not dissimilar to the way in which holiday photographs quote the day-to-day events of the experience.31 The bookâs ability to visually order and organise makes for a remarkable rethinking of the objects with which one might surround oneself, as Dyment (2015) describes it:
The notion of possessions-as-self-portrait feels entirely contemporary. ⊠Alongside his books, records, artworks, clocks and keepsakes, are kitchen utensils, balls of twine, tools, empty jam jars, plumbing fixtures, electrical outlets and light switches. Presented uniformly, and without textual exposition, this detailed personal inventory reveals very little about the artist. The mystery and aura of the artistâs studio is removed, usurped by mundane images of towels and houseplants. With the photographs all a uniform size, âno object in his space more important than another ...â
The banality of contemporary life is contrasted on the exhibition by James Trisselâs Daedalus (1993) [Fig. 28/065] which explores Ovidâs account32 of the eponymous artist and craftsman, who created the Cretan Labyrinth and who was shut up in a tower to prevent knowledge of his labyrinth from spreading. In order to escape, Daedalus made wings of wax for his young son Icarus and was granted a set of wings for himself by the goddess Athena. Their journey of escape resulted in the death of Icarus, as the sun melted his wings, but not of Daedalus.
Another example of expansive travel is provided by Shirley Sharoff who takes the viewer on a literally unfolding journey in The Great Wall (1991) [Fig. 29/067]. As the spiral-bound book is unfolded to a length of 7m, so the Great Wall is constructed. In order to read Lu Xunâs (1881 to 1936) texts on unbending, traditional thought patterns amongst his peers as well as on the actual Great Wall of China as a symbol of the ancient Chinese traditions, the book first must be rolled out. According to Sharoff, and seemingly in dialogue with the content of Daedalus, when stood up straight and viewed from above, her work forms a wall of paper that resembles the labyrinth inside the Ancient Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) outside Beijing (Koninklijke Bibliotheek n.d.).
The concept of being âtossedâ by both war â a theme to which we will return â and modernity recalls Cendrarsâs words: The train somersaults and falls back on its wheels â It falls back on its wheels â The train always falls back on its wheels (l.160-162).e
Other books in the Ginsberg Collection which feature Japan in their content and which are on the exhibition include a fine example of a Japanese Shunga print in book form. Most Shunga are a type of Ukiyo-e,33 usually in woodblock print format. Translated, literally, the Japanese word shunga means âpicture of springâ, where âspringâ is understood to be a euphemism for sex.
Lois Morrisonâs Japanese Babies (1992) [Fig. 31/077] is a fabric book with onlays and various needlework techniques to resemble complex Japanese fabric patterns. The book is also Japanese bound and thus, somewhat with tongue-in-cheek humour, evokes the âmysteries of the Orientâ for western culture. As a handmade fabric book it is also a unique, one-of-a-kind object.
Veronika SchĂ€pers first went to Japan on a scholarship after her graduation, and she joined a paper shop in the Bunkyo ward of Tokyo for an internship. Attracted to both the refined materials and tools she could find there and the fast changing and glittering aspects of modern Japan, SchĂ€pers uses specific texts as the starting point of each of her bookworks, collecting materials which could be used to illuminate these texts. One such example is the award-winning34 26°57,3âN, 142°16,8âE (2007) [Fig. 32/0217] the content of which is explained by SchĂ€pers (in Booklyn 2007) as follows:
At this location in the northwestern pacific [sic] the Japanese marine biologist Tsunemi Kubodera took the first pictures of a living giant squid in its natural environment. ⊠Inspired by a note in the Newspaper about this discovery, Durs GrĂŒnbein wrote a poem entitled Architeuthis. Fascinated by his seven-verse text ⊠this project about deep-sea fish emerged. We chose two further poems to be printed: one â which was already published â about the bizarre shapes and behaviors of these creatures living in such deepness entitled Sous les Mers, recalling Jules Verneâs Capitain [sic] Nemo; and a third about the legendary fish Remora which GrĂŒnbein wrote specially for this book.
When we met, Kubodera also showed me pictures and short films of squids he recorded at depths between 600 and 1 000 meters. The unpracticed spectator sees only dim silhouettes of the squids in these images, but at the same time begins to sense the diversity of life in such darkness. This gave me the idea to work with the interaction of transparent and opaque pages.
Judith Klau (n.d.) likens negotiating the reading of 26°57,3âN, 142°16,8âE to undertaking an uncertain journey:
Folding back the parchment, what looked like a horizon is now revealed as a page divided in three. Layers of tissue-like paper have been engineered to create pages that move from transparency to opacity. The bottoms of the pages have a deep inky blackness. The tops of the pages begin to tell a story in silhouette â a shoreline? Nautical map? The colors are aqueous, greens and greys, there are images suggesting soundings, depth indicators, and at last some language â I can tell by the way the language is presented in lines that Iâm looking at [a] poem, in German, which I do not read, and in Japanese, ditto. But at last a clue in French, a language I know: Sous Les Mers, Under the Seas. I was traveling blind, but the artist led me in the right direction, down, down, into the sea.
In contrast to SchĂ€persâs exquisitely printed dark brooding transitions of blue-greys and blacks and letterpress texts in German and Japanese on fine 50-year-old Toashaban-Genshi Gampi paper, but fully in keeping with her love for the âvery ordinary or non-valuable materials and techniques taken from daily life which evoke a new visual and haptic experienceâ (Booklyn 2007) in Japan is Frantichamâs Tokyo Umbrella (2008) [Fig. 33/052]. This book describes the experience of collecting the materials that inspired its own making: âfive days walking the street of Tokyo, taking photographs of posters, advertisements, street signs, manhole covers, stickers, wall graffiti, shop windows, neon signs, packaging graphics ⊠with our umbrella, expecting rain which never cameâ.35 Such a journey of discovery and misplaced expectation is found in Erica van Horn and Simon Cuttsâs Nearing Arcueil (2002) [Fig. 34/0203]. The bookâs 17 nearly identical photographs of a house in Arcueil (a section of Paris), document what the authors believed was the house of the composer Erik Satie (an acquaintance of Cendrars). At the end of the books is a section of prose in which the authors, upon their return to the United Kingdom, reveal that they have documented the wrong house.
Mikhail Karasik is part of a vibrant contemporary artistâs book community in Russia37 and he describes vividly his experiences of official portraiture whilst growing up in the USSR. In the introduction to his work Doska Pocheta [Board of Honour] (2004) [Fig. 36/0129], Karasik states:
I was born on 27 March 1953 â twenty-five days after the death of Stalin. I had the good fortune to avoid his reign of terror, arriving three weeks too late. By the end of the 1950s, his portrait had disappeared from childrenâs publications. The bewhiskered grandfather no longer adorned the opening pages of kindergarten and primary school books. I do recall a relief of Maxim Gorky, however, standing in our bookcase for many years ⊠But Stalin vanished into thin air. Whenever he did materialise, in some corner or cupboard, as a plaster bust or as a picture in a book or old magazine, he was hastily removed or hidden sealed over with the help of rectangular pieces of white paper â rather like he himself did to enemies of his regime. Other portraits soon began to appear and disappear in books and on the streets.
Doska Pocheta refers to the traditional board of honour, which was a âform of visual agitation intended to encourage increased productivity and participation in public activitiesâ (Zemtsov 1991:32). Melanie Emerson (2008:62) states that, during the Soviet era, âartists could only produce work within established unions; thus much of their output was in the form of official portraits such as those decorating boards of honourâ. Here, Karasik presents his own personal version of these boards divided into three sections: the first features the government officials Leonid Brezhnev, Joseph Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov; the second includes his mother, father, grandfather and a self-portrait as a child; and the third section is a dedication to Karasikâs favourite artists and writers, including Nathan Altman, Marc Chagall, Daniil Kharms, Vladimir Lebedev, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich and Boris Pasternak.
Just as we might find in Kentridgeâs earlier film Shadow Procession (1999), procession is one of his great themes, a symbol of humanityâs journey through life (Quod Gallery 2013) âeven as it avoids pinning the work to any specific time or placeâ (Lenfield 2012).
A second South African book focusing specifically on journeys is The Ultimate Safari (2001) [Fig. 39/0234]. It is based upon a short story by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, which is about a young girl who flees Mozambique with her family and walks through the Kruger National Park to a supposedly better life in South Africa. The writing is complemented by hand-printed lithographs drawn by Dorah Ngomane, Aletah Masuku and Alsetah Manthosi, who have all made the dangerous trek on foot to South Africa, and who have recalled their journeys in print form (The Artistsâ Press 2001).
Gordimer explains that the story was germinated during one of her visits to a refugee camp in the late 1980s with a BBC team interviewing refugees from Mozambique. Soon after, she read an advertisement in the London Observer, selling African adventure as the âultimate safariâ. Gordimer thought âwhat Iâve just seen is the ultimate safariâ (Misra 2008).
Keith Dietrichâs books often explore complex journeys across space, place and time. Three such books appear on the exhibition, one of which is his multi-faceted Horizons of Babel (2004) [Fig. 40/0249]. Dietrich (2004) states that the concept underpinning this project is
framed against the background of a fascination with the topography of South Africa that dominated the interests of cartographers, illustrators and artists from before the colonial period up to the present. The site of the project was randomly located on a semicircle between Cape Columbine, the most north-westerly point on the West Coast of the Cape, and Cape Agulhas, being the southern tip of Africa, with the centre falling on the hill Babelonstoring (Tower of Babel) in the vicinity of Paarl/Simondium/Franschhoek. Seven co-ordinates were identified on this semicircle at 30-degree intervals, and each co-ordinate was systematically documented (Cape Columbine, Verlorenvlei, Hottentotsberg, Roosterberg, Anysberg, Napkei and Agulhas).
Dietrich (2004) continues by discussing how images construct knowledge and investigates the relationship between the centre and the periphery:
The concept of the panorama lies at the centre of this project, and its particular relationship with the panopticon, where the privileged position of the perceiving consciousness has been disrupted by not giving the viewer access to the centre. In this respect the association between the centre (Babelonstoring) and the place names along the periphery (such as Hoedklip, Matroozefontein, Nieuwe Gift, Bakovens Kloof, Touwsfontein, Middel Drift and Paapekuils Fontein) acquires metaphorical significance. The project has been informed by a Western construct of Africa and the complex processes of converting what was seen as an empty space through surveying, charting, recording, and filling the land with names and places.
Thus the exhibition offers different viewpoints on various forms of travel and journey both real and imagined â some by sea, others by road or train.
Edward Ruschaâs famous Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1962) [Fig. 44/033] is considered to be one of âlandmarks in the development of artistsâ books as a formâ (Drucker 1995:71). It is often cited as âthe founding instance of artistâs bookmaking ⊠[making] books visible within the art world in a way which would not have been possible for literary based endeavors or even cross-over trade published photo booksâ (Drucker 1995:76) and sets in place the concept of the democratic multiple in the broader practices of artistâs bookmaking. Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations de-aestheticises the photograph at the very time in which it was trying to establish its status as legitimate fine art, taking the reader on a haphazard journey with
a flat-footed photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist notions of repetitive sequence and seriality. The title describes the contents of the book which is both absolutely banal and very precise (Drucker 1995:76).
In Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1962) [Fig. 45/0181] Ruschaâs minimalist, sequential aesthetic uses the leporello structure of the book in order to achieve its task: to take a journey down that (in)famous Hollywood boulevard and document the totality of buildings there. The top of the foldout page documents the journey in one direction and, in turning the book upside down, the return journey is documented. By folding out the bookâs structure to its total length, the viewer is able to undertake Ruschaâs journey in both directions.
On the Road Too. Book1: New York â Las Vegas â New York (2007) [Fig. 46/0143] is another road trip in which Dutch artist Peter Spaans drove the return journey of 11 000km with his American friend Dan Schmidt, who contributed the texts. Inspired in part by Jack Kerouacâs novel On the Road (1957), they travelled as much as possible on older national highways and on state roads as this would afford them views of cities and towns, as well as of rural America, that one would not see from the interstate highways. Of Spaansâs original 11 000 photographs, always taken from the car, 1 080 were selected, one image per page of the book. On the Road Too is
an extended, raw, uncensored, and uncommon visual report and study of America seen 19 days in a row. ⊠Day in, day out [Spaans] focused on fixed points such as the grandness of the natural countryside, or electric and telephone wires, petrol stations, motels, churches, restaurants; he pointed his camera at houses and factories either empty, boarded up and abandoned, or inhabited (Deumens n.d.).
Despite the documentary nature of the project as âa visual reportâ and its image of a gasoline station on its cover, On the Road Too does not attempt to achieve Ruschaâs deadpan objectivity, instead, it attempts to document the transformation of the landscape by successive generations of Americans in which âcreative destruction is heralded as the vital energy of American capitalism; the old and inefficient are constantly being replaced by the newâ (Deumens n.d.).
A train journey is documented in Peter Kingstonâs An Indian Train Journey (2007) [Fig. 47/0102], in which 28 linocuts dramatise, as the opening print reveals, â⊠the story of a pilgrimage to South India to ride on the legendary Nilgiri Mountain Steam Railway to witness how it survived for over a century in a progress mad world.â
At one point, a herd of elephants on the train tracks next to the small blue train awaits both the travellers and the reader (Juvelis 2016a) evoking Cendrarsâs image: And in Khailar a caravan of white camels (l.395) [Et Ă KhaĂŻlar une caravane de chameaux blancs].
If these last four journeys document real places, a very different journey is exhibited in Helmut Schulzeâs illuminations of Xavier de Maistreâs 1825 Die NĂ€chtliche Reise um mein Zimmer [A Nocturnal Journey Around my Room] (2010) [Fig. 48/0153] which offers a set of 15 diverse gouaches and 15 pen and ink drawings on handmade paper or tracing paper. These illustrations as well as the text, which is completely written by hand, are a visual response to de Maistreâs 1794 thoughts about the deeper meanings associated with travelling down a philosophical path of sociopolitical and personal change.
A book which takes the reader/viewer on a journey which is celestial rather than terrestrial, and which also bridges into the next sub-theme of the exhibition is Nora Lee McGillivrayâs Mapping the Great Book: 7 x 7 Celestial Scenes (2001) [Fig. 49/0156]. McGillivrayâs interest lies in the physical universe, the moon, planetary systems and in pondering and celebrating the relationship between the âuniverse and the self, inspired by the artistry and science of ancient celestial mapsâ (Biblio n.d.). The book is presented using Cyanotype on Masa and Arches papers, with a French doors format, opening vertically. At the centre of the book is a separate semi-circular star map book sewn onto the main structure. Her Cyanotypes are printed without artificial light. The bookâs colophon states that it â⊠was printed by the Sun at 45â03â North Latitude, 93â08â West Longitudeâ.
In an interview with Joshua Heller Rare Books, McGillivray states that â[t]he old astronomers, including Galileo, referred to the universe as a bookâ and thus for her, the book becomes a symbol for universe and its pages help connect and map the celestial elements (WorldCat 2001).
Gilles Deleuze (1989:206-7) draws together beautifully the synergy between a territory, its map and the phenomenological experience of this relationship in the body when he states: âLandscapes are mental states, just as mental states are cartographies, both crystallized in each other, geometrized, mineralizedâ. Such experiences are indeed crystallised in the books which follow.
According to Eliasson (2006), âthe book is based on a computer-generated model of the house, sliced vertically into 454 even parts. Each of the corresponding 454 hand-bound leaves (or 908 pages) is individually cut and corresponds to 2.2cm of the actual houseâ (Eliasson 2006). The effect on the reader as they work their way through the book is the illusion of negotiating oneâs way through the various rooms of the house thereby constructing a mental and physical narrative. âThe result is an intensified sense of space, dimensions, materiality, and time ⊠[and] exploits the narrative and sequential possibilities of the book form and examines the perceptual and spatial experience of domestic architectureâ (Eliasson 2006).
Your House âmapsâ the physical world in such a way as to create a disorienting illusion of a portable home which is also inhabitable as a particular territory: a book-form and Elliasonâs âreal lifeâ home.
Maps are peculiarly semiotic creatures: they index a very particular territory â as a photograph indexes the read subject â but they are also highly symbolic, reducing the real world to a manageable scale and set of icons which a user would have to learn or with which they would need to be culturally familiar. They also do not discriminate, providing equal amounts of information whether required or not. It is in our use of maps which determines their particular character as useful or not. Their scale might provide too much or too little usable information and it is in this space of negotiation: useful information vs unhelpful or unnecessary information that the map becomes a provocative subject for the book artist, appearing as they do as books or book-like objects, to be unfolded, paged through, negotiated and âreadâ as a set of visual/verbal symbols.
Robbin Ami Silverbergâs Subterranean Geography #1 (2011) [Fig. 51/0201] is an artistâs book which literally maps a territory in ways which ordinary maps cannot do. As part of what the artist calls âpsycho-geographyâ, Subterranean Geography uses a cut-away subway map to explore particular feelings and emotions associated with and defined by specific spaces negotiated and travelled through in New York City. Silverberg unpacks the relationship between symbolic map and emotive connotation explaining that:
the book is divided into two parts, each with a text about movement: the first is an ambulatory mapping of my walk to the âLâ subway station; the second is a subway trip loaded with emotions and memory. The layered filigree paper of subway lines/bus routes/roadways creates the seemingly fragile pages which contrast with the directness of the text and remind the viewer of the complexity of both described space and of feelings (Silverberg 2011).
Both Eliassonâs and Silverbergâs books employ cutting into and through the page substrate thus forming a visual dialogue between the information on the recto and verso pages. If there is a logical cutting associated with specific symbolic data on one side, this logic is made implicit on the other side compounding and confusing the reading of its symbolic data.
In Eliassonâs Your House, the blank page simply facilitates a visual and haptic forward and backward movement through the house, but in Silverbergâs Subterranean Geography, the existence of both printed matter and cut shapes on both recto and verso complicates the way in which the reader might read and negotiate the information which is viewable, imparting an emotional layer upon the denotative data. Thus the readerâs pragmatic relationship with maps is shot through with the artistâs experience of those spaces.
The exhibition explores the cut page in various book forms, each of which offers a different relationship with its resulting recto/verso dialogues and, in particular instances, with the activation of light. An example of a light-activated book is Mauro Belleiâs Cent Mille Petits Points [Hundred Thousand Small Points] (2013) [Fig. 52/0212] which maps a seeming constellation of stars on the black paper of the heavens.
The book, which originally accompanied a sculptural installation at the Library Gallery, Les Trois Ourses, Paris, in 2013, in which the floor of the gallery was âmapped outâ with black dots, red string and white pebbles, seems to have become a celestial equivalent of the terrestrial installation, activated and made visible only when each page is lifted and turned, allowing light to illuminate the thousands of laser-cut holes.
Other books which deploy cutting of the page or paper engineering as strategies for meaning making include Stephan Erasmusâs Diepe Water 2 [Deep Water 2] (2007) [Fig. 53/0254] in which texts, sampled from various love song lyrics, are carefully handwritten onto the paper in wave-like elements cut in circles on each page. The delicacy of the paper and the intimate texts which seem buffeted on waves and lost far out to sea, recall Cendrarsâs image: There was only Patagonia left, Patagonia suited my immense sadness, PATAGONIA and a voyage in the South Seas (l.156).i
Stephen Hobbsâs Be Careful (2014) [Fig. 54/0252] uses 11 double spreads, six pop-up spreads with variable moving mechanics, five silkscreened pages (one with reflective tape) and one pull-down page with seven moving pieces. Encompassing Hobbsâs established conceptual practice of engaging the field of architecture as a site for visionary thinking, the work is a form of paper engineering or architecture, concealing within its two dimensions surprising three-dimensional structures and mechanisms. The spreads include found text and handwritten mind-maps, stylised networks and city grids, scaffolding and empty billboard structures, blocked patterns and optical illusions symbolic of the âimagined space in which we liveâ (Nurse 2013).
Sjoerd Hofstra and Karen OâHearnâs Raising Water (2013) [Fig. 55/044] is a movable book, which photographically documents the throwing of a stone into water, its splash and the resultant ripples each as a set of six images which open out across the page openings. By lifting the interleaving card pages between each set of images, the three visual elements (throw, splash and ripple) can be experienced as complex paper-engineered and constructed mechanisms. In contrast to the cool black and white images on clean white paper presented horizontally without any other distracting visual or textual elements, the paper engineering seems to be rough and without finesse, held together with card tabs, tape and string: seemingly revealing a crude and makeshift analogical world operating below the slick and sanitised digital presentation of the world above.
Max Marekâs Fluesterbuch [Whisper Book] (2011) [Fig. 56/0215] seems to combine the strategies seen in the works of Eliasson, Silverberg and Erasmus in that the workâs geophysical, sculptural form grows and recedes as the blank white leather pages are turned whilst at the same time, anchored by a lace-like set of cut bridges which hold the integrity of each sculptural page in place. The work makes three dimensional the flat symbolic contour lines of a topographical map.
Books which make central the idea and semiotic load of the map include Barry Lopez and Charles Hobsonâs The Mappist (2005) [Fig. 57/058]. Lopezâs story is about its narrator, Phillip Trevinoâs eventual finding of the writer of a travel book which, in Trevinoâs opinion, had conveyed the soul of the capital of Columbia, BogotĂĄ. Trevino had never given up his search for the genius behind the books which had become a touchstone for his own work and world view. In a bookstore in Tokyo, Trevino finds a set of elegant hand drawn maps in a map cabinet, all unmistakably by the author of the books and all signed Corlis Benefideo. And the master mapmaker indeed turns out to be the reclusive writer. The book design and images have been created by Hobson and each book in the edition has been assembled using original United States Geographical Survey maps for the concertina binding which, when opened, creates its own vista of mountains and valleys representing the maps that figure so prominently in Lopezâs story. Covers are made of boards over which have been pasted paper reproductions of a 1911 map of BogotĂĄ from the collection of the Library of Congress. Images of hands emulating gestures of a mapmaker at work have been reproduced as digital pigment prints on transparent film. The slipcase has been covered with wood-grained paper to suggest the map cabinet which plays a pivotal role in the story.
Priscilla Juvelis (2016b) describes the complex interplay between Lopezâs multi-layered story embodied in Hobsonâs constructed and illustrated book:
Themes of hidden identities searched out and deciphered, hidden intentions coded in seemingly disparate actions, and the tantalizing possibilities of bringing order to a chaotic history are beautifully served by the combination of maps that are the subject of the story and, literally, hold the story together ⊠The reader is challenged with images thrown up by the author and artist: bits of map interspersing text, bits of map as fore-edge and gutter outside edge on any turn of the page, a phrase full of possibilities ⊠are preceded and followed by a page of transparent film with the image of a map being passed from one hand to another. Turning the film page, the reader is confronted with the act being completed and the hand-off accomplished. ⊠We are left wondering, where will we find our maps â and will we be able to read them â or remember what weâve read?
An equally ambitious mapping, but this time a mapping of the whole world as a geospatial phenomenon is Annesas Appelâs View on the World Map: Vols. 1-4 (2013) [Fig. 59/0125]. In this series of works Appel unpacks her passion for human projections of knowledge into maps by means of representations and classifications. Appel âextracts, separates, eliminates, measures, adds and re-interprets projections of the world mapâ (Deumens 2013) â in four accordion fold books â composed of central point co-ordinates of all countries of the world to a scale of 1:6 550 000 and each represented by green lines on paper, an index of all countries and their individual green colour and executed in reversed alphabetical order.
Hanne Hagenaars (n.d.) states âAppel shows the known world in a new formula, like the long line of provinces, page after page, in which measurement and direction are essentialâ. She adds:
A map is interpretation; each map is a snapshot ⊠Humans divide the world up, draw boundary lines, assign capital cities, classify and rule. Science seems to show something about the world but, equally, it creates a truth. At the time of the voyages of discovery, the user realised that the map was a suggestion, a possible picture of what the world looked like. Today, knowledge is presented with so much certainty, as if it is a truth. Appel concurs with the truth of science, she uses its facts, but then she goes further with the data, she entices people into her system. Appel interferes with the contemporary cartographerâs map. His certainty is given an abstract look. What follows is a piece of music, a dance, a new high-water mark. Doubt.
A book which demonstrates the polar opposite of Appelâs fastidious and exacting taxonomy is Scott McCarneyâs homemade maps, number #4 from the Autobiographies series (2009)43 [Fig. 60/082]. This snake-fold book is generated from material gleaned from the artistâs filing cabinet and, together with other similar books in the series, reflects the artist as collector and his acts of collecting as much as the objects collected (McCarney 2009).
Autobiography #4 consists of reproductions of maps people have drawn for the artist to help get him from one place to another. At some point, the artist might have found these maps helpful in achieving their desired aim, but in collecting them and reprising their sometimes perfunctory rough and ready quality, he has transformed them into an index of the artistâs movements and habits â rather than their function and purpose as maps.
Doug Spowart (2013) describe this as the artistâs inability to âthrow anything away and [adds] that he makes collections from things like name badges, rejection letters from galleries and grant applications, to-do lists and mud maps. This body of work provides an insight into the trivia and ephemera of life that escapes disposal through its transformation into his artâ and thus the books maps these moments of escape.
A book which seems to want to insert itself in a territory somewhere between Hobsonâs use of USGSâs topographic maps, Appelâs exacting and particular taxonomies and McCarneyâs highly personal collections of material is 43, According to Robin Price, with Annotated Bibliography (2009) [Fig. 61/0148]. Robin Price (2009) states that the text excerpts for her book were derived from 86 books significant to her, most of which were other artistsâ books. Being 43 years old at the genesis of the project, Price gathered her texts using formulas based on the number 43. Simple formulas, using modular arithmetic with the number 43, were applied to categories such as page number, paragraph, sentence and line of poetry (Vamp & Tramp 2007).
In the prospectus for the book Price states:
The text is grouped by subject matter into sixteen page spreads. Titles of spreads include âWaterâ, âCountingâ and âFloraâ. Each is considered as something equivalent to an encyclopedia slice, in a manner directly inspired by the fifty-volume Zweite Enzyklöpadie von Tlön, by Ines v. Ketelhodt and Peter Malutzki. Visually flowing through the accordion-bound text sheets is a river image, borrowed from the Ninja Press book The Real World of Manuel CĂłrdova. Paper maps, gathered from locations around the world that run along the 43rd parallels, form the background accordion that structurally supports the main text accordion, made of semi-translucent graph paper. Excerpts are identified by book title, printed in the margins, with a symbol that indicates the counting method used to retrieve it. A key for the symbols is printed on the Legend Card, found in a library-style pocket on the front cover of the book. A supplemental 32-page Annotated Bibliography, housed in a facing pocket within the case, provides personalized information on all titles. The pockets and the booklet cover are made of paper maps, mostly USGS topographic maps, and vary throughout the edition.
Cendrars abruptly translocates his reader to New York: Paris to New York â Now I make the trains run the length of my life (l.152-153) and The giant bell of Notre Dame â The sharp bell of the Louvre that marks the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre â The rusting carillons of Bruge-la-Morte â The electric chimes of the New York Public Library (l.303-306).j Thus, many books on the exhibition have New York as their locus.
This includes David Andrewâs Sketchbook (2008) [Fig. 62/0239], which charts his time spent on an Ampersand Foundation Fellowship in New York in 2008 â a theme picked up on by Silverberg in her essay on the relationship between South Africa and New York in Chapter 4. The translocation of a South African artist to the artistic and cultural flow of New York is the aim of the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship and in his journal, using maps of Manhattan, Andrew marks a number of shifts: from South Africa to New York, grappling with his own artmaking (his exhibition Misc. (Recovery Room) at the Standard Bank Gallery was to follow upon his return to South Africa) and also the abstract shifts in physical and mental processing, recovery and creative gestation which such an experience facilitates.
Andrew would have travelled along the Brooklyn Bridge in order to make his way from JF Kennedy Airport to the Foundationâs apartment in Tribeca, and his ubiquitous gold pen which blocks out sections of the Manhattan grid on his map44 sets up a dialogue with Donald Glaisterâs metallic Brooklyn Bridge: A Love Story (2002) [Fig. 63/068].
According to Glaister, Brooklyn Bridge includes five abstract âportraitsâ of the bridge, painted on sanded aluminium pages. Jean Feigenbaum (n.d.) describes the work as a âhybridâ object; in which Glaister writes the poem, paints the bridgeâs âportraitsâ and constructs the bookâs assemblages45 which resonate with the turning of each thin aluminium page, like âthe wind makes flashing through the bridgeâs vast suspension cables.â
Feigenbaum (n.d.) continues: âIn materials that are not what one would expect for a book â but completely in keeping with the subject matter â the limited edition is definitely about a torrid affair between the artist and his subjectâ (and thus also a most appropriate foil for Cendrarsâs torrid affair with both his physical as well as his artistic lovers) and in which the abrasions on the aluminiumâs surfaces carry the imagistic load of the bookâs atmospheric content.
According to Eliasson (2006), âthe book is based on a computer-generated model of the house, sliced vertically into 454 even parts. Each of the corresponding 454 hand-bound leaves (or 908 pages) is individually cut and corresponds to 2.2cm of the actual houseâ (Eliasson 2006). The effect on the reader as they work their way through the book is the illusion of negotiating oneâs way through the various rooms of the house thereby constructing a mental and physical narrative. âThe result is an intensified sense of space, dimensions, materiality, and time ⊠[and] exploits the narrative and sequential possibilities of the book form and examines the perceptual and spatial experience of domestic architectureâ (Eliasson 2006).
Your House âmapsâ the physical world in such a way as to create a disorienting illusion of a portable home which is also inhabitable as a particular territory: a book-form and Elliasonâs âreal lifeâ home.
Maps are peculiarly semiotic creatures: they index a very particular territory â as a photograph indexes the read subject â but they are also highly symbolic, reducing the real world to a manageable scale and set of icons which a user would have to learn or with which they would need to be culturally familiar. They also do not discriminate, providing equal amounts of information whether required or not. It is in our use of maps which determines their particular character as useful or not. Their scale might provide too much or too little usable information and it is in this space of negotiation: useful information vs unhelpful or unnecessary information that the map becomes a provocative subject for the book artist, appearing as they do as books or book-like objects, to be unfolded, paged through, negotiated and âreadâ as a set of visual/verbal symbols.
Robbin Ami Silverbergâs Subterranean Geography #1 (2011) [Fig. 51/0201] is an artistâs book which literally maps a territory in ways which ordinary maps cannot do. As part of what the artist calls âpsycho-geographyâ, Subterranean Geography uses a cut-away subway map to explore particular feelings and emotions associated with and defined by specific spaces negotiated and travelled through in New York City. Silverberg unpacks the relationship between symbolic map and emotive connotation explaining that:
the book is divided into two parts, each with a text about movement: the first is an ambulatory mapping of my walk to the âLâ subway station; the second is a subway trip loaded with emotions and memory. The layered filigree paper of subway lines/bus routes/roadways creates the seemingly fragile pages which contrast with the directness of the text and remind the viewer of the complexity of both described space and of feelings (Silverberg 2011).
Both Eliassonâs and Silverbergâs books employ cutting into and through the page substrate thus forming a visual dialogue between the information on the recto and verso pages. If there is a logical cutting associated with specific symbolic data on one side, this logic is made implicit on the other side compounding and confusing the reading of its symbolic data.
In Eliassonâs Your House, the blank page simply facilitates a visual and haptic forward and backward movement through the house, but in Silverbergâs Subterranean Geography, the existence of both printed matter and cut shapes on both recto and verso complicates the way in which the reader might read and negotiate the information which is viewable, imparting an emotional layer upon the denotative data. Thus the readerâs pragmatic relationship with maps is shot through with the artistâs experience of those spaces.
The exhibition explores the cut page in various book forms, each of which offers a different relationship with its resulting recto/verso dialogues and, in particular instances, with the activation of light. An example of a light-activated book is Mauro Belleiâs Cent Mille Petits Points [Hundred Thousand Small Points] (2013) [Fig. 52/0212] which maps a seeming constellation of stars on the black paper of the heavens.
The book, which originally accompanied a sculptural installation at the Library Gallery, Les Trois Ourses, Paris, in 2013, in which the floor of the gallery was âmapped outâ with black dots, red string and white pebbles, seems to have become a celestial equivalent of the terrestrial installation, activated and made visible only when each page is lifted and turned, allowing light to illuminate the thousands of laser-cut holes.
Other books which deploy cutting of the page or paper engineering as strategies for meaning making include Stephan Erasmusâs Diepe Water 2 [Deep Water 2] (2007) [Fig. 53/0254] in which texts, sampled from various love song lyrics, are carefully handwritten onto the paper in wave-like elements cut in circles on each page. The delicacy of the paper and the intimate texts which seem buffeted on waves and lost far out to sea, recall Cendrarsâs image: There was only Patagonia left, Patagonia suited my immense sadness, PATAGONIA and a voyage in the South Seas (l.156).i
Stephen Hobbsâs Be Careful (2014) [Fig. 54/0252] uses 11 double spreads, six pop-up spreads with variable moving mechanics, five silkscreened pages (one with reflective tape) and one pull-down page with seven moving pieces. Encompassing Hobbsâs established conceptual practice of engaging the field of architecture as a site for visionary thinking, the work is a form of paper engineering or architecture, concealing within its two dimensions surprising three-dimensional structures and mechanisms. The spreads include found text and handwritten mind-maps, stylised networks and city grids, scaffolding and empty billboard structures, blocked patterns and optical illusions symbolic of the âimagined space in which we liveâ (Nurse 2013).
Sjoerd Hofstra and Karen OâHearnâs Raising Water (2013) [Fig. 55/044] is a movable book, which photographically documents the throwing of a stone into water, its splash and the resultant ripples each as a set of six images which open out across the page openings. By lifting the interleaving card pages between each set of images, the three visual elements (throw, splash and ripple) can be experienced as complex paper-engineered and constructed mechanisms. In contrast to the cool black and white images on clean white paper presented horizontally without any other distracting visual or textual elements, the paper engineering seems to be rough and without finesse, held together with card tabs, tape and string: seemingly revealing a crude and makeshift analogical world operating below the slick and sanitised digital presentation of the world above.
Max Marekâs Fluesterbuch [Whisper Book] (2011) [Fig. 56/0215] seems to combine the strategies seen in the works of Eliasson, Silverberg and Erasmus in that the workâs geophysical, sculptural form grows and recedes as the blank white leather pages are turned whilst at the same time, anchored by a lace-like set of cut bridges which hold the integrity of each sculptural page in place. The work makes three dimensional the flat symbolic contour lines of a topographical map.
Books which make central the idea and semiotic load of the map include Barry Lopez and Charles Hobsonâs The Mappist (2005) [Fig. 57/058]. Lopezâs story is about its narrator, Phillip Trevinoâs eventual finding of the writer of a travel book which, in Trevinoâs opinion, had conveyed the soul of the capital of Columbia, BogotĂĄ. Trevino had never given up his search for the genius behind the books which had become a touchstone for his own work and world view. In a bookstore in Tokyo, Trevino finds a set of elegant hand drawn maps in a map cabinet, all unmistakably by the author of the books and all signed Corlis Benefideo. And the master mapmaker indeed turns out to be the reclusive writer. The book design and images have been created by Hobson and each book in the edition has been assembled using original United States Geographical Survey maps for the concertina binding which, when opened, creates its own vista of mountains and valleys representing the maps that figure so prominently in Lopezâs story. Covers are made of boards over which have been pasted paper reproductions of a 1911 map of BogotĂĄ from the collection of the Library of Congress. Images of hands emulating gestures of a mapmaker at work have been reproduced as digital pigment prints on transparent film. The slipcase has been covered with wood-grained paper to suggest the map cabinet which plays a pivotal role in the story.
Priscilla Juvelis (2016b) describes the complex interplay between Lopezâs multi-layered story embodied in Hobsonâs constructed and illustrated book:
Themes of hidden identities searched out and deciphered, hidden intentions coded in seemingly disparate actions, and the tantalizing possibilities of bringing order to a chaotic history are beautifully served by the combination of maps that are the subject of the story and, literally, hold the story together ⊠The reader is challenged with images thrown up by the author and artist: bits of map interspersing text, bits of map as fore-edge and gutter outside edge on any turn of the page, a phrase full of possibilities ⊠are preceded and followed by a page of transparent film with the image of a map being passed from one hand to another. Turning the film page, the reader is confronted with the act being completed and the hand-off accomplished. ⊠We are left wondering, where will we find our maps â and will we be able to read them â or remember what weâve read?
An equally ambitious mapping, but this time a mapping of the whole world as a geospatial phenomenon is Annesas Appelâs View on the World Map: Vols. 1-4 (2013) [Fig. 59/0125]. In this series of works Appel unpacks her passion for human projections of knowledge into maps by means of representations and classifications. Appel âextracts, separates, eliminates, measures, adds and re-interprets projections of the world mapâ (Deumens 2013) â in four accordion fold books â composed of central point co-ordinates of all countries of the world to a scale of 1:6 550 000 and each represented by green lines on paper, an index of all countries and their individual green colour and executed in reversed alphabetical order.
Hanne Hagenaars (n.d.) states âAppel shows the known world in a new formula, like the long line of provinces, page after page, in which measurement and direction are essentialâ. She adds:
A map is interpretation; each map is a snapshot ⊠Humans divide the world up, draw boundary lines, assign capital cities, classify and rule. Science seems to show something about the world but, equally, it creates a truth. At the time of the voyages of discovery, the user realised that the map was a suggestion, a possible picture of what the world looked like. Today, knowledge is presented with so much certainty, as if it is a truth. Appel concurs with the truth of science, she uses its facts, but then she goes further with the data, she entices people into her system. Appel interferes with the contemporary cartographerâs map. His certainty is given an abstract look. What follows is a piece of music, a dance, a new high-water mark. Doubt.
A book which demonstrates the polar opposite of Appelâs fastidious and exacting taxonomy is Scott McCarneyâs homemade maps, number #4 from the Autobiographies series (2009)43 [Fig. 60/082]. This snake-fold book is generated from material gleaned from the artistâs filing cabinet and, together with other similar books in the series, reflects the artist as collector and his acts of collecting as much as the objects collected (McCarney 2009).
Autobiography #4 consists of reproductions of maps people have drawn for the artist to help get him from one place to another. At some point, the artist might have found these maps helpful in achieving their desired aim, but in collecting them and reprising their sometimes perfunctory rough and ready quality, he has transformed them into an index of the artistâs movements and habits â rather than their function and purpose as maps.
Doug Spowart (2013) describe this as the artistâs inability to âthrow anything away and [adds] that he makes collections from things like name badges, rejection letters from galleries and grant applications, to-do lists and mud maps. This body of work provides an insight into the trivia and ephemera of life that escapes disposal through its transformation into his artâ and thus the books maps these moments of escape.
A book which seems to want to insert itself in a territory somewhere between Hobsonâs use of USGSâs topographic maps, Appelâs exacting and particular taxonomies and McCarneyâs highly personal collections of material is 43, According to Robin Price, with Annotated Bibliography (2009) [Fig. 61/0148]. Robin Price (2009) states that the text excerpts for her book were derived from 86 books significant to her, most of which were other artistsâ books. Being 43 years old at the genesis of the project, Price gathered her texts using formulas based on the number 43. Simple formulas, using modular arithmetic with the number 43, were applied to categories such as page number, paragraph, sentence and line of poetry (Vamp & Tramp 2007).
In the prospectus for the book Price states:
The text is grouped by subject matter into sixteen page spreads. Titles of spreads include âWaterâ, âCountingâ and âFloraâ. Each is considered as something equivalent to an encyclopedia slice, in a manner directly inspired by the fifty-volume Zweite Enzyklöpadie von Tlön, by Ines v. Ketelhodt and Peter Malutzki. Visually flowing through the accordion-bound text sheets is a river image, borrowed from the Ninja Press book The Real World of Manuel CĂłrdova. Paper maps, gathered from locations around the world that run along the 43rd parallels, form the background accordion that structurally supports the main text accordion, made of semi-translucent graph paper. Excerpts are identified by book title, printed in the margins, with a symbol that indicates the counting method used to retrieve it. A key for the symbols is printed on the Legend Card, found in a library-style pocket on the front cover of the book. A supplemental 32-page Annotated Bibliography, housed in a facing pocket within the case, provides personalized information on all titles. The pockets and the booklet cover are made of paper maps, mostly USGS topographic maps, and vary throughout the edition.
Cendrars abruptly translocates his reader to New York: Paris to New York â Now I make the trains run the length of my life (l.152-153) and The giant bell of Notre Dame â The sharp bell of the Louvre that marks the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre â The rusting carillons of Bruge-la-Morte â The electric chimes of the New York Public Library (l.303-306).j Thus, many books on the exhibition have New York as their locus.
This includes David Andrewâs Sketchbook (2008) [Fig. 62/0239], which charts his time spent on an Ampersand Foundation Fellowship in New York in 2008 â a theme picked up on by Silverberg in her essay on the relationship between South Africa and New York in Chapter 4. The translocation of a South African artist to the artistic and cultural flow of New York is the aim of the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship and in his journal, using maps of Manhattan, Andrew marks a number of shifts: from South Africa to New York, grappling with his own artmaking (his exhibition Misc. (Recovery Room) at the Standard Bank Gallery was to follow upon his return to South Africa) and also the abstract shifts in physical and mental processing, recovery and creative gestation which such an experience facilitates.
Andrew would have travelled along the Brooklyn Bridge in order to make his way from JF Kennedy Airport to the Foundationâs apartment in Tribeca, and his ubiquitous gold pen which blocks out sections of the Manhattan grid on his map44 sets up a dialogue with Donald Glaisterâs metallic Brooklyn Bridge: A Love Story (2002) [Fig. 63/068].
According to Glaister, Brooklyn Bridge includes five abstract âportraitsâ of the bridge, painted on sanded aluminium pages. Jean Feigenbaum (n.d.) describes the work as a âhybridâ object; in which Glaister writes the poem, paints the bridgeâs âportraitsâ and constructs the bookâs assemblages45 which resonate with the turning of each thin aluminium page, like âthe wind makes flashing through the bridgeâs vast suspension cables.â
Feigenbaum (n.d.) continues: âIn materials that are not what one would expect for a book â but completely in keeping with the subject matter â the limited edition is definitely about a torrid affair between the artist and his subjectâ (and thus also a most appropriate foil for Cendrarsâs torrid affair with both his physical as well as his artistic lovers) and in which the abrasions on the aluminiumâs surfaces carry the imagistic load of the bookâs atmospheric content.
War, death, fear and apocalyptic imagery
Cendrarsâs lines: A cannon sounded in Siberia, it was war â Hunger, cold, plague, cholera â And the muddy waters of the Amur River carried away a million corpses (l.43-45)k appear early on in the prose poem. Having barely established a coherent sense of place and time for his readers and having his own depreciating place in the world and in the narrative move between ambiguous time periods in a torrent of emotion and passionate vehemence, Cendrars pushes towards his readers both the immediacy and the horrors of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/5 as if a train is hurtling towards the reader.
Cendrarsâs train journey becomes a mode of experiencing, reportage-like, the terrors of war, on the move, deeper and deeper into its abyss as, towards the end of the prose poem, he most chillingly relates what he has seen and experienced:
I saw â I saw the silent trains, the black trains return from the Far East passing like phantoms â And my eye, like a lantern, still follows those trains â In Talga, 100 000 wounded in agony, left to die â I visited the hospital in Krasnoyarsk â And in Khilok we met a long convoy of mad soldiers â I saw in the infirmary gaping wounds and injuries bleeding furiously â Amputated limbs dancing about or flying up into the raucous air â Fire was in every face and in every heart â Idiot fingers drummed on all the windowpanes â And under the weight of fear, every glance burst like an abscess â In every station, the train wagons burned â And I saw â I saw trains, 60 cars long dashing away at full throttle hounded by rutting horizons and clouds of crows chasing desperately after â Disappear â In the direction of Port Arthur (l.370-385). l
Given that in Glaisterâs Brooklyn Bridge, âthe bridge still inspires, perhaps more so as the countryâs vision of one of their national monuments changed on September 11, 2001â (Abe Books 2002), themes of war, death, fear and apocalyptic imagery seems ever-present in contemporary art, not least of all in international artistsâ books. If Glaisterâs Brooklyn Bridge evinces a âtorrid affairâ on personal and national levels, the difficult and stuttering collaboration between poet Ted Berrigan and artist George Schneeman in producing the graphic novel-like In the Nam What Can Happen (1997) [Fig. 64/0161] is an example of the torrid affair between creative partners. Publishers, Granary Books (1997) state:
In The Nam was first made as a one-of-a-kind collaborative book in 1967-68. The original was passed back and forth between Ted Berrigan and George Schneeman for about a year, remaining in the hands of one or the other for weeks or even months at a time â poet and artist each adding, subtracting, working over words and images ⊠Produced when the Vietnam War was rapidly escalating, this work is by turns surreal, incisive, hip, outrageous, cartoon-like, flip, sinister, humorous, dreamy, sarcastic, witty â always right on target â a vivid evocation of the times and the broad range of emotional responses to the war.
The âfinishedâ project languished in a drawer in Schneemanâs studio on St Markâs Place for some 30 years, possibly because of the fact that, according to Schneeman (in Diggory 2013), Berrigan âbullied his way into artâ and in this collaboration, âtexts and images messily contend for the same space, suggesting a more personal struggle than that of the Vietnam War to which the title refersâ.
Unlike Delaunay and Cendrarsâs collaboration which stresses the separateness of the visual/verbal forms, Berrigan and Schneeman seem to engage in an exquisite corpse-type exercise,46 blurring the limits of each discrete contribution and producing a visual text which illuminates the confused madness and blurred moral lines which the almost 20-year-long Vietnam War wrought upon the American psyche.
For the duration of the war, the United States saw the presidencies of Dwight D Eisenhower, John F Kennedy (who was assassinated in 1963), Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, as well as that of Gerald Ford who presided over the failing economy of the mid-1970s. And thus contemporary American artists, in particular, are heirs of this triangulated battleground between the people, their administration and the âtheatre of warâ.
Joan Iversen Goswell devotes enormous amounts of time and energy to critiquing, in the harshest possible terms, the political foibles and errors of both the Bush administrations in the United States. Christopher Calderhead (2011:16 -31) states:
Most strikingly, the subject of her work is often no holds-barred political commentary. Crusading, righteously angry, the work leaves none of us neutral. ⊠Goswellâs approach is one of biting satire; her collaged compositions recall the images of John Heartfield, the German artist of the early twentieth century who lampooned the rise of National Socialism with charged fury.
In her one-of-a-kind books Goswell employs her idiosyncratic collage, digital print and hand-cut rubber-stamp lettering, demonstrating her position as a strong political commentator with many of her books having politicised titles: Go to War for my Lies, The George Book, Another George Book, A Third George Book: A Userâs Guide, The Tongue of War, A Manual of Compassionate Conservatism and Saving Daddyâs War (2003) [Fig. 65/040]. This latter book concerns the abuses of the George W Bush administration and the war in Iraq, âa war based on lies and deceit and the thousands of deaths that that war causedâ (Goswell in Kenedi 2011).
Americaâs obsession with the War on Terror and its moral legitimisation is found in Caren Heftâs Female Shahida Martyr (2004) [Fig. 66/094]. This is a seemingly decorative book until the reader becomes aware of the content of the letterpress typeâs references to the first Palestinian female suicide bomber Wafa Idris and the inclusion of small electronic elements which, together, create an ominous sense of being in the presence of objects with which one might constitute explosive materials.
In the colophon of this contemporary Ars Moriendi, the following appears: âAn attempt to understand why a young woman would strap a belt bomb over her womb and set it off in a public place where victims could be children, elderly or pregnant womenâ. This sense of dis-ease is brought into equally sharp relief in Emily Martinâs Not a Straight Line (2011) [Fig. 67/0141] which commemorates the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, the centre of bookselling in Baghdad, on 5 March 2007.
The international al-Mutanabbi Street Artistsâ Book Project aims to re-assemble some of the inventory of the reading material that was lost. The work comprises 10 linked Coptic-bound books with one line of the text in each. To read the book, viewers must engage in a haptic process of finding their way through the linked books that turn this way and that, much as one would negotiate a meandering street (Vamp & Tramp 2015). The text is letterpress printed and stained with acrylic paint.
Martin concludes: âThe text I wrote is one of defiance; the written word can be damaged but will always prevailâ (UWE 2011).
Brian Borchardtâs, Caren Heftâs and Jeff Morinâs Crossing the Tigris I, II, III (2011) [Fig. 68/0155] is an equally defiant, emotionally charged document. Morin describes the work as: âA narrative in three books recounting soldiersâ stories from the Iraq War ⊠The collaborators each found stories in the media that recount horrific situations that are inconceivable to those who work regularly with current or former soldiers who happen to be students or artistsâ (Vamp & Tramp 2011).
During production of this work the artists and their press discussed the workâs meaning, asking of the viewer to consider whether,
[w]hen confronted with the grittiness of war, do these ill-prepared young men simply break with reality? Are they taught that they are above the law? Or do they learn to devalue what is not obviously American? ⊠This collaboration is intended to catalyze a conversation about the nature of change that allows potentially decent people to commit indecent acts (Vamp & Tramp 2011).
In Patmos and the War at Sea (2011) [Fig. 69/0251], South African artist Alastair Whitton explores battles which are fought on a variety of fronts in the world today; some actual, others internal but no less real. In conversation with Daniel Hewson (2009) Whitton contextualises the physical and spiritual significance of Patmos as his place of departure, being both the site of conquest and occupation at various points throughout its history and most significantly where the exiled Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation, and in which war is one of its central themes. Reference to the sea is equally layered, alluding to a territory and a domain, both physical and spiritual, as well as the war that ensues in the conquest thereof.
Whitton considers the way in which we, as human beings, see or rather fail to see by using archival images of the two world wars as a personal act of remembrance; homage to the courage and sacrifice of those who fought and died for the freedom that subsequent generations enjoy and take for granted. He concludes âthe images that I have constructed are intended to allude to âanother worldâ war ⊠Furthermore, the laser cut Braille âtextsâ function as a form of code and recall the World War II Enigma Machineâ (Hewson 2009).
the word/image difference is not likely to be definitively stabilized by any single pair of defining terms or any static binary opposition. âWord and imageâ seems to be better understood as a dialectical trope. It is a trope, or figurative condensation of a whole set of relations and distinctions, that crops up in aesthetics, semiotics, accounts of perception, cognition, and communication, and analyses of media (which are characteristically âmixedâ forms, âimagetextsâ that combine words and images). It is a dialectical trope because it resists stabilization as a binary opposition, shifting and transforming itself from one conceptual level to another, and shuttles between relations of contrariety and identity, difference and sameness.
Wendy Steiner (1982) however explores this relationship as one of perception. She writes (1982:36):
The much-vaunted simultaneity of the painting exists in the material artefact but not in its perception ⊠Modern science supports this criticism; the eye can in fact focus on only a relatively small portion of visible objects and must scan them in order to build a unified image. Pictorial perception is thus a matter of temporal processing.
What we can begin to accept in the dichotomous reading of images and viewing of texts is that, as it is the graphic symbols which construct both text and image, both viewing and reading become acts of temporal processing because they spring from the same source. Steiner continues (1982:36):
The usual temporal flow of verbal art is not perceived as such ⊠because of violent disruptions in narrative and logical sequence ⊠the reader is asked to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity. The text does not make sense as a sequence, but as a finished whole, and thus its perception is analogous to that of painting.
As stated earlier, the four coloured inks in a number of different typefaces employed by Cendrars is argued for by Shingler (2012:13) in both formal and metaphoric terms, also demonstrating âthe extent of Cendrarsâs tendency towards the visual, and his desire to capture visual experience, and the colours of that experience in particularâ.
Shinglerâs (2012:13) nuanced reading of Cendrarsâs ârough correspondences between colours evoked by the text, and the colours in which they are printedâ, threads its way through a number of instances, for example:
Such dialogue between visual and verbal meaning is humorously demonstrated in John Crombieâs pair of small books which constitute Fall & Rise and Fall (1984) [Fig. 70/0191a&b], echoing the changes of colour Cendrars and Delaunay deploy to mark moments of change in the text. In Crombieâs books, imagery is implied by shaped changes of colour in the text block marking, in one, the fall of leaves suggested by the titular âfallâ (autumn) and the resultant rise in the pile of fallen leaves on the ground. As the reader pages through the seeming bucolic narrative, the initial bright red ink gives way to a tawny-maroon, implying the changes of leaf colour characteristic of the advance of autumn.
In the other book, the font colour tracks a textual penis which becomes erect and flaccid in response to the narrative which is lifted from a cheap erotically-charged novel. Such typographic dexterity, given the intimate size of both the font and the text block on the page, is a âsurprise for the readerâ. Fall & Rise and Fall provides an example of an imagetext â in this case âword as imageâ â which Mitchell (in Nelson & Shiff 1996:53) argues, âdesignates their tendency to unite, dissolve, or change places. Both these relations, difference and likeness, must be thought of simultaneously as a vs/as in order to grasp the peculiar character of this relationshipâ.
Books which focus upon typography, although not specifically exhibited for their purest, instructional or didactic sensibilities, feature some particularly provocative visual elements, where typographies and their typologies generate specific visual meanings. A book which exhibits a rich dialogical relationship with Fortunato Deperoâs Depero Futurista 1913-1927 [Fig. 10], is Arne Wolfâs Genesis 5: The Generations of Adam (1996) [Fig. 71/074]. Although utterly different in their form and intent, both express their meaning through typographic/imagistic exchange in, as Mitchell would argue, their tendency to unite, dissolve, or change places.
For Wolf, fascination with the book form facilitates what he calls âan unfolding mystery, or a visual journey. What you have seen, you donât see anymore; what you will see is yet concealedâ (Center for Book Arts 1998). His visual journey is purely typographical, but through its complex (con)fusion of spatio-temporality, the visual âmysteryâ finally unfolds into a coherent form which Michel Foucault (1970:9) might describe as passing â ⊠surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks; in other words, to fold one over the other as if they were equivalentsâ.
Mitchell (in Nelson & Shiff 1996:55) describes such a process of unfolding into coherence in more dramatic terms: âWhen mute images begin to speak, when words seem to become visible, bodily presences, when media boundaries dissolve ⊠the ânaturalâ semiotic and aesthetic order undergoes stress and fractureâ.
Druckerâs The Word Made Flesh (1996) [Fig. 72/0163] seems to exemplify and embody Mitchellâs and Foucaultâs theoretical positions. For Perloff (1994), Druckerâs artistâs book âdoesnât boast a single illustration, a single pictorial equivalent to the text. Rather, it is the alphabet itself that is made flesh, the letter being seen in all of its visual potentialâ.
In similar vein to the way in which Wolf unfolds scripto-visual elements in Genesis 5, publishers Granary Books (1996) describe Druckerâs seminal project thus: âCalling attention to the visual materiality of the text, this book attempts to halt linear reading, trapping the eye in a field of letters which make a complex object on the page. The work both embodies and discusses language as a physical formâ.
Perloffâs book Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1994) in which she discusses Druckerâs The Word Made Flesh, however, seems suffused with the presence of composer John Cage who seems to have understood, almost half a century ago, that âno word, musical note, painted surface, or theoretical statement could ever again escape âcontaminationâ from the media landscape in which we liveâ (Perloff 1994a).
Cageâs 1967 Great Bear Pamphlet edition shown on the exhibition, is part three of the eight-part set of publications which, together, comprise Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) (1967) [Fig. 73/0208]. Joe Biel and Richard Kraft (Siglio Press 2015) who in 2015 co-edited and published a full version of Diary, describe Cageâs panoptical view of his world:
Composed over the course of sixteen years, Diary is one of his most prescient and personal works. A repository of observations, anecdotes, proclivities, obsessions, jokes and koan-like stories, Diary registers Cageâs assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny portents about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from the domestic minutiae of everyday life to ideas about how to feed the world.
Biel and Kraft (Siglio Press 2015) note critical elements of the 1967 Great Bear
Pamphlet production of Diary from which parallels can be drawn with Cendrarsâs poem:
Originally typed on an IBM Selectric, Cage used chance operations to determine not only the word count and the application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per line, the patterns of indentation, and â in the case of Part Three published as a Great Bear Pamphlet by Something Else Press â color. The unusual visual variances on the page become almost musical as language takes on a physical and aural presence ⊠[using] chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of the red and blue ⊠as well as to apply a single set of eighteen fonts to the entire work ⊠[and] giving readers a rare opportunity to see how the text is transformed.
Transformation as a concept is rich, provocative and complex. It implies dialogues with and between past and future states, undermines orthodoxies and the expectations by which conventions are characterised. If Delaunayâs painting takes us on a temporal/spatial journey from the domes of Moscow to the tower of Paris, how we get from one place to another is through the movement of the eye, essentially downward, through a series of perceptual transformations. Delaunayâs pochoir, as Perloff (2008) has already reminded us âis predominantly abstract, with rainbow-colored balloons, discs, spirals, and fuzzy triangles cascading downward to the little red tower and wheel. The colors, both on the left and on the right, where they frame the text, express the joie de vivre of fluid motionâ.
1Artistsâ Books in the Ginsberg Collection: with some South African Books from Other Collections was hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Park, Johannesburg, 25 August to 27 October 1996. It was curated by Jack Ginsberg and myself. http://www.theartistsbook.org.za/view.asp?pg=exhibitions&ex=ex1_001 accessed on 11 January 2016.
2Behind the Personal Library: Collectors Creating the Canon (Center for Book Arts, New York) ran from 11 October to 20 December 2014. It was organised by Alexander Campos, Executive Director and Curator for the Center for Book Arts, with Johanna Drucker (UCLA), Jae Jennifer Rossman (Yale) and Tony White (MICA). The exhibition and its associated symposium considered the influence of private collectors on the critical dialogue in the field of book arts. Rather than curating the works around a central theme, the goal of the exhibition was to examine works in the selected private collections that have become seminal artworks in the field at large, thus becoming influential to establishing a canon.
The exhibition also analysed the collectors themselves: how they came to collect books, what drove them to continue collecting, whether they consciously built and curated their collections, and how these factors influenced and informed artistsâ bookmaking practices. The featured collections included those of Philip E Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons (New York), Mary Austin (California), Duke Collier (Massachusetts), Jack Ginsberg (Johannesburg, South Africa), Arthur Jaffe (Florida), Monica Oppen (Sydney, Australia), Barbara Pascal (California), Robert Ruben (New York), Marvin and Ruth Sackner (Florida), Julia Vermes (Basel, Switzerland), Francis H William (Massachusetts/New York), Martha Wilson (New York) and the estate of Tony Zwicker (Connecticut).
4 The Ginsberg Collection includes South African visual art, books on South African visual art, books on world art, international artistsâ books, South African artistsâ books and books on artistsâ books and the book arts. (See Chapter 5 for details of when Ginsberg started collecting this material as well as the subsections and size of the collection).
5 The controversy firstly revolved around the lack of an apostrophe in the title and secondly by the lack of artistsâ books in the exhibition. Johanna Drucker (1995:fn4) states: âThe misnamed exhibition, A Century of Artists Books, curated by Riva Castleman, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the winter of 1994-95, is a representative selection of 20th century livres dâartiste. There are a few anomalies in her exhibition, works which are artistsâ books, which probably found their way down the elevator from the MoMA Library collection of several thousand artistsâ booksâ. Drucker (1995:fn26) continues: âCastleman, ... seemed unable to distingush (sic) artistâs (sic) books from livres dâartistes or just plain old illustrated booksâ.
7 Or similar works by the same artist if the exact title is not in the Ginsberg Collection.
8 Early Modernist works consist of very late 19th Century books and 20th Century books created before the start of the Second World War.
9 Postmodernist books are understood to include work from the end the Second World War until about 1980, whereafter the term âcontemporary artistsâ booksâ is used.
10 Johanna Druckerâs seminal book was first published by Granary Books, New York in 1995. Given its importance to the book arts community at the time, Ginsberg and I curated the 1996 exhibition as a set of three prefaces, 14 chapters and an end note, loosely based on Druckerâs chapter outlines and headings. Three of her chapter headings were appropriated more closely: Chapter 4 (The Artistâs Book as a Democratic Multiple), Chapter 5 (The Artistâs Book as a Rare and/or Auratic Object) and Chapter 13 (The Book as Document).
11 Given the scope, depth and size of the Ginsberg Collection, it was decided that the current exhibition could comfortably exclude any book which appeared on the 1996 JAG exhibition.
12 Ginsbergâs copy is rare in that it consists of four flat, unbound and unfolded sheets with pochoir illumination by Delaunay. The parchment binding, hand-painted in oil by Sonia Delaunay, also remains unfolded. Accompanying these is the original and exceedingly rare prospectus announcement, coloured in pochoir, three original watercolours on vellum by Delaunay and the corrected proofs of the text on two sheets.
16 A radical journal and small press founded by Cendrars and his friend Emile Szytta. See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 1 passim.
17 Shingler (2012:3-4) cites the following elements of the terms complex reception:
Different literary, poetic and artistic movements â including the Futurists â put forward aesthetic theories which employed the term in divergent ways;
For the poet Henri-Martin Barzun, simultaneity in poetry meant polyphony, or the use of multiple voices speaking at once;
Barzunâs theory thus contrasts strongly with that of Guillaume Apollinaire for whom simultaneity was created on the page, through the pictorial arrangement of text; and
25 Shingler (2012:14 note 25) states that Cendrars did in fact try his hand at painting: see Miriam Cendrars, Jâai mĂȘme voulu devenir peintre, in Cendrars et les arts, ed. by Maria Teresa de Freitas, Claude Leroy and Edmond Nogacki (Valenciennes: Presses universitaires de Valenciennes, 2002), pp. 11-19.
26 Biography won the prestigious Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) Prize in 2011 and received an Award for Artistic Excellence at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair in November 2010.
27 Matisse said: âIf upon a white canvas I jot down some sensations of blue, of green, of red â every new brush stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I set out to paint an interior. .... If I paint a green near the red, if I paint in a yellow floor, there must still be between this green, this yellow, and the white of the canvas a relation that will be satisfactory to me. But these several tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary, therefore, that the various elements that I use be so balanced that they do not destroy one anotherâ Notes dâun Peintre in La Grande Revue, (Paris, 25 December 1908); as translated by Jack Flam in Matisse on Art (1995).p. 41.
28Franticham is an Portmanteau-like name derived from the artists Francis Van Maele from Ireland and Antic- Ham from Seoul.
31Autobiography employs a grid of nine square black and white images per page â not dissimilar to a photo album.
32 In Metamorphoses, VIII:183-235 Penguin Classics edition of 1983, translated by Mary Innes.
33 âPictures of the floating worldâ, is a genre of art that flourished in Japan from the 17th Century through to the 19th Century. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna and erotica.
34 This book won the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) Prize in 2009.
35 This description appears in the bookâs colophon.
36 Harbin is Chinaâs northernmost major city. Historically, the city has been influenced a lot by neighbouring Russia. The city was founded in 1897 as a camp for Russian engineers surveying the Trans-Siberian Railway. Labour demands brought in a collection of outcasts from across Russia, Poland and even from within Manchuria. The city eventually was captured by the Japanese during the Second World War and later was returned to China in 1946. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904â5), Russia used Harbin as its base for military operations in northeastern China. Following Russiaâs defeat, its influence declined.
37 By 2010, 102 contemporary Russian Artists were included in the British Libraryâs Russian Avant-Garde Artistsâ Books 1969-2010 collection. Of these, Mikhail Karasik (b. 1953), Sergei Sigei (b. 1947) and Leonid Tishkov (b. 1953) are the most prolific, joining the early 20th Century book artist Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (1905-1942) in international collections. See also www.bl.uk/reshelp/pdfs/Russian%20Avant-garde%20Modern.pdf accessed on 22 January 2016.
38 This repeated line and its âechoâ Blaise, dis, sommes-nous bien loin de Montmartre? appears in the largest font sizes, in bold, sometimes also in italics but always in a different visual register to any surrounding texts in the poem.
41 Italo Calvinoâs novel Invisible Cities was published in 1972.
42 The city names are arranged as a âmesosticâ, a term used by John Cage to refer to a vertical phrase that intersects lines of horizontal text.
43Collected Autobiographies was initially produced in 1999 as Autobiographies, a small edition of 10 using a variety of print media. This new collection was annotated and reformatted in 2009 as a digitally printed edition of 25, and part of a series of translations which re-imagines small limited editions as digitally printed bookworks. The four individual autobiographies were conceived between 1997 and 1999 after McCarney came across a series of file folders while cleaning up the studio. See http://scottmccarneyvisualbooks.com/Pages/LuluAutobio.html accessed on 1 February 2016.
44 In personal correspondence with Jack Ginsberg (March 2009), Andrew notes: âAll the drawings, collages, combinations and nonsensities in the notebook (except for the first few pages) were completed in and around the Tribeca apartment in response to the New York grid and the way histories, energies and delights surge through this strange and wonderful placeâ.
45 Each book is made from wire, aluminium tape, laminated polyester film and sand. The materials, while delicately assembled, echo the powerful industrial qualities of the subject matter.
46 Exquisite corpse was a parlour game invented by surrealist artists such as Yves Tanguy, Man Ray and Joan MirĂł. Itâs a collaborative, chance-based game in which each participant would consecutively draw an aspect of a figure.
47 Delaunay, S. 1978. Nous irons jusquâau soleil. Paris: Ăditions Robert Laffont. p. 54.
48 See GE Lessing, Laokoon, trans. by R. Philimore (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), p. 171. Here, Lessing states âSuccession of time is the domain of the poet, as space is the domain of the painterâ.