On Carrión

Ulises Carrión's The New Art of Making Books first appeared in 1980. It's a sort of manifesto for artists' books, made up of a series of statements contrasting the "Old Art" with the "New Art". It's split into a number of sections; What a Book Is, Prose and Poetry, The Space, The Language, Structures, and The Reading. It has a slightly polemical style, comparing the virtues and values of the new art to what are portrayed as the staid, static, didactic values of the old art. In this, Carrión is poising his arguments on the new art's ability to be inclusive, to be intersubjective- not to be dominated by its' author, not to be didactic. There is a thread running through this piece about intention, a notion which is one of those I'm using to examine artists' books myself. I have some of my own ideas about how it can give us a way to understand artists' books, and I have some other reading to bring to my relationship to it. However, though I've known about Carrión's text for several years, I only read it through for the first time a few days ago. I'm going to set out some remarks on it now to try to establish my relationship to some of the points in it.

Having read it, I think I can agree broadly with Carrión about the much greater role of interpretation in creating meaning in artists' books, (the New Art) and with the importance of structure in creating a space within which this interpretation can take place. However, Carrión implies a shift in the expressive qualities of media embodied in artists' books that I don't think I could agree with. I certainly see a sea-change in the role of the reader here, but stories, narratives, have always had an implicit structure that is made explicit in artists' books. Artists' books make concrete the metaphorical space of reading, they make concrete the containment of an artwork's notions, they make concrete the elaborate array of intention the artist is working with. I'm inclined to view the artists' book as having the properties of concretizing the metaphors that artists' use all the time to deal with the notions they manipulate to produce their work. Artist's work is informed by strategies: techniques of thinking about and doing their work: these are metaphors and the heuristic yield they produce. Which is to say, ways of seeing and doing. I think they have always been part of creativity and that books simply make some of it more obvious, more self-aware, more self-referential. Carrión would, I think on the basis of his essay, disagree with me, in my saying that there are- and always have been- multiple ways to read the old art, and that this is something that is multiplied and enhanced in artists' books, rather than being a different experience on the order of a paradigmatic shift, as seems to be implied here.

"A book is a sequence of spaces"

Comparisons with metaphors of memory come to mind: memory as a sequence of quasi spaces, with the artists' book making this metaphor concrete, and signifying consciousness' traverse of memory in the form of narrative recollection. The metaphor of the book form recapitulates the convolutions of recollection. St Augustine's remarks on memories as being

"retained in the great storehouse of the memory, which in some indescribable way secretes them in its folds".

Introspection, recollection, both take place in these quasi spaces: the reader has always had to construct them to understand the plot of a story or the abstract encounters of argument, played out on inner stages. Carrión's assertion that the book is "a series of spaces" fits well into this traditional metaphor, with the book transmitting the metaphor in concrete rather than strictly narrative form. The book is a series of constructions, too, each unfolding and blossoming from the last, like a series of logical connections, or the tangled connections of brain cells that must ultimately be the keepers of such spaces, in all their richness. Augustine himself wondered at this, holding in his mind the awesome scales of mountains and rivers and stars, all contained within the circumference of his own skull.

"Each of these pages is perceived at a different moment- a book is also a sequence of moments"

Again, much as memory unfolds as an episodic rebus, so books unfold their constructions in a sequence of representations. Books, as I have said, could be considered as similar to the model of memory as a storage space. To simulate the unfolding of memory, or of introspection of other sorts, we would want books to enfold a series of relations, a series of moments, happening in time as well as in space. As Carrión says, a book is "a volume in the space", it is also a span of time.

"Written language is a sequence of signs expanding within the space; the reading of which occurs in the time.

"A book is a space-time sequence."

But just as our memories and our store of impressions and thoughts remain available for us for purposes of introspection, just so are books: holding patterns, temporary constructions of idea. Where memory brings with it attachments, trails, traces of other recollections associated with what we have sought, the book will do the same, its allusions reaching beyond itself. In our minds our memories are in constant flux, each recollection, fading, changing, attached to new chains of recollection, altering and shifting. It is the same with all representations. We can look on memory as a representation, too: it takes consciousness to turn the biology of memory into meaning. And as for books, Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge says this,

"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. "

Just like memory, our book is part of life, subject to the same stresses and strains, the same changes in meaning. Our questions about what the book means are directed in two directions: what was the author's intention? And, what does it mean to me? We might ask our memories how sure we were of their accuracy, and try to be aware of the quality of our introspection in a similar manner. Books need be no more didactic than memory: we may trust it or not, we may interpret it one way or another, just as we wish. And this interpretation is, argue philosophers like Ricoeur or Kearney, a continuous process, one which constantly refigures identity and relationships to memory and outside materials. Identity itself is subject to emplotment, to entanglement in the stories (and, I think, to the structures of representation at large) which embody human culture. Artists' books make some of these processes concrete, they set out metaphors of interpretation and creation in their construction: in this they do something ordinary artifacts do not. They ask us for interpretation, and they model our processes of introspection in a structure.

"To make a book is to actualize its ideal space time sequence by means of a parallel sequence of signs, be it verbal or other."

The sequence is a sequence of relationships in syntagmic and paradigmatic array. This is the "plot" envisaged by Peter Brooks in his work Reading for the Plot: it is at once a series and a space. It is a series of events in syntagmic order, and a series of allusions and echoes in time in the paradigmatic order. And it is also a space: the arena within which the events take place. Read, take part in this story, and your life is part of this plot, the space and time of it are those of your life. Our relationships with plot are sympathetic because we feel that they are part of us, part of our memory and our future. This is because we recapitulate the space of the plot in our minds, in the space of introspection, to work with, to percieve and understand the ideas of the plot. Books actualize the space of the plot, making concrete the whole of the work, reinforcing the structured entity that is the work, holding, keeping, containing, enveloping.

"In the new art (of which concrete poetry is only an example), communication is... intersubjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real physical space- the page...

"A book is a volume in the space

"It is the true ground of the communication that takes place through words- it is here and now."

Books are both physical and refer to a mental space. The "ground" they offer is a concrete metaphor, made of paper and binding, of the semantic field that "grounds" all representations. As Foucault notes, and I have repeated above, such a ground is slippery at best: the ever-shifting labyrinth of allusion and connotation makes any construction into a shadow-play, lit by ever-changing lights. Nonetheless, we are talking here of temporary structures ( a notion I have brought into my writing before, and one which seems to gel with similar notions of social constructions (John Searle) and presuppositional frameworks. These are spaces to enact, to represent intention. The similarity to the "inner stage" of introspection, the "storehouse" of memory, remains striking. They are places where we can explicitly examine relationships between notions. When we stop to think of the implications of a scene in a novel, we jury-rig one in our mind's eye. Artists' books do something similar with the ideas they contain. They are spaces where our incredulity about the author's intention is set aside, where we pursue the meaning of the construction against the odds that we may never discover what it means. But simply trying to do so, simply understanding this freedom is, Carrión says, to understand the work,

"In the new art the reading itself proves that the reader understands."

Understands, that is, that one has been drawn into a perfomative space.

"In a book of the old art words transmit the author's intention.That's why he chooses them carefully.

"In a book of the new art words don't transmit any intention; they're used to form a text which is an element of a book, and it is this book, as a totality, that transmits the author's intention."

I would disagree with what Carrión seems to be saying about the "Old Art" here. He seems to be saying that there is no other order to the old art: that the transmission of intention occurred solely through the words, and that reading them creates no intersubjective occurrence. I would try to argue that one's involvement in reading is always intersubjective, and I would carry on with the ideas of emplotment of several paragraphs earlier. I would also allude to the performative space that exists literally in artists' books, and point to their function as a concretization of the metaphors of introspection. This introspection is going on in the old art, too. Reading demands it. Nonetheless, the new art makes it more explicit, and the new art turns in on this process consciously: it may not be about intersubjectivity and all that, but the subjects presented in an artists' book do presuppose a particular awareness in their readers, "the reading itself proves that the reader understands". I wouldn't draw a line between the old art and the new, here, though.

The book is a holistic entity, not a textual communication. How does it stack up against a notion like "story" which is performative, and intersubjective wherever it occurs. Kearney's book On Stories, is all about how they permeate our societies and our minds, indeed, they form the core of how we describe ourselves to ourselves- we have a life-story, after all. Story, too, is in the here and now, continually shuffling between teller and listener, author and reader, history and the present, and just as continually shuffling the meaning and the identity of all of these. What books can do is like the form of the story: they can contain it. Books can suggest a certain structure, a certain way of assembling the story, a certain metaphor for examining the notions contained, and an associated heuristic yield from that way of thinking. Bruno Bettelheim writes of "The Uses of Enchantment": how stories provide templates and ideas for dealing with life, for thinking about identity, for working-through one's emplotment in the real stories that comprise our human world. Artists' books place artists' work within similar boundaries, which may, as Foucault points out, be ever-shifting, but which allow the artist to work-through the story of their work as a maker of ideas.