Assignment 6

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Assignment Six: Prepare a Case Study

Helen Douglas

In devising these notes I want to set out a number of the themes I have picked out in Douglas' work. Rather than looking at the visual aspect of her books exclusively, I have decided to quote extensively from the artist's writings on her practice, since they are unusually lucid and helpful. Since my research will bring me into contact with Douglas, I have looked on this case study as preparatory research to inform a critical position to her work which I can use in an interview situation.

I have set out my study under a number of related headings that express important themes in Douglas' work, proceeding very often from the ways in which the artists herself has described her practice.

On Inside and Outside

"Nature, landscape and the book surround me.

They are out there and they are all absolutely within me too.

Inside and out. I Live them." 1

The subjects of Douglas' practice also inscribe points in her artistic hermenuetic. The inside and outside are part of her metaphorical gear for drawing material into her practice. The concepts of inside and outside are mediated by the book, which makes concrete the work of enclosure and release that Douglas’ investigation is involved with. The inside and outside involved here are very particular, though: “I live them” the artist tells us, so her involvement is not merely with space in an abstract sense, but with place. The relationship that her practice engineers is between her environment in the Scottish Borders, and the places poetically constituted in her books.

" I have decided to speak from the book, the place of my making, the place where my expression is made concrete and where all three Nature, Landscape and the Book come together."2

The book is the external site of the process, of the hermeneutic, of all that thought and action. The visual hermeneutic, working on 'nature, landscape and the book' , shows itself as

• questioning spaces, presentation



• the book as an arena for spatial understanding. In its metaphorical enclosure place is transformed into identity and vice-versa.



• as connecting spaces and times in 'woven'/gathering movements.



• punning on 'bookness'= investigating, ironising and metaphorising its forms through narrative.

Speaking of her book Real Fiction, she expresses her project to create artworks that express these strategies,

" Here from the inside, the interiority of the book, the
outside world is embraced... to make concrete this fusion of inside to
outside that I found. This is the narrative. Its expression is found
and constructed in the making of the book. It is the Book." 3

The narrative of the book is about drawing-in nature, landscape and
the book, into the physical codex- as in 'creating a magic space'. What
kind of space is this?

Here the artist writes of the space in her book Chinese Whispers,

"Within the making I found the internalised cupboard.
The book located this place and enable the safe expression of something
within me. Safe because like myself and the cupboard the book not only
opens but also closes...But there is another. Through the published
form...the book is opened.. and what is contained, the thoughts and
feelings, are expressed to others, to the viewer one to one." 4

The space created is a safe one, one in which thought and feeling
can be built up, and subsequently shared. It is a space that shelters
intention, shelters story, and it opens out onto a wider world mediated
by our understanding of its content.5

On Enquiry:

Douglas’ work with Telfer Stokes Real Fiction is 'an enquiry
into the Bookeresque': a quasi-experimental investigation. Douglas and
Stokes are investigators: gathering and interpreting. Books in this
sense are seen as enquiries, excursions into the ‘data’ of practice
that test hypotheses. (Or, better, as, perhaps, essentially, mysteries:
not pressing to be solved, but asking to be interpreted for the
richness they bring forth.)

"As well as the book as place, the book's open-

ness in sequence enables me to;

EXPLORE

whether it be the nature of the water mark,

word as image

Be lief-

-The leaf sublimated to the leaf/folio of the book, or

the willow herb plant disseminated leaf by leaf and

revealed layer by layer within the book/box

It enables me to

INQUIRE

as in MIM, inquiring into the concept of mimicry,

revealed on different levels within pattern, texture,

facade, clothing, text, interwoven stories, text as

texture and as textured paper itself.

It enables me to

PEEL

&

FIND... The Cabbage Heart,

The pod within the body of the book

The stell within the landscape"6

Douglas offers descriptions of her inquiry and exploration in her
essay for the 1996 artists' books yearbook, quoted above, that seem to
link the rhetorical processes of - on the one (inquiring) hand-
repeated viewing that takes us deeper, and on the other (exploring)
hand, work that forges identity in pattern and abduction of metaphor
that weaves formal elements together. These two currents of
investigation exploit aspects of books' ability to hold and narrate
inquiry and exploration simultaneously through story, which crosses
syntactic with paradigmatic function in a way that seems linked to,
respectively, the crossing of exploratory and inquisitive function.
Such activity enables Douglas to "Peel & Find" the heart of the
book- the identity of the book which is the key to its' poetic logic.

Let us return to Douglas’ assertion that nature, landscape and the
book exist inside and outside of herself. Douglas’ practice moves from
one to the other: from the book to the environment and back, from the
body to the world and back. Douglas’ verbal images of the stell
(enclosure) in the landscape, and the pod within the book are telling.
They tell of her ideas’ relationship to a larger reality. Each is an
enclosure that is germane to the greater world, a construction that is
the heart of the world around it, but also a retreat from it, a
meditation on it, and a miniature of it. They have the twin
capabilities of taking salient features from the landscape in one case,
or from the wider awareness of practice in the other, mediating and
metaphorising it into a construction that bears the weight of purpose,
whether it be shepherding or storytelling. In both cases, the presence
of these structures gestures towards a wider landscape, an ongoing
practice. The inside again moves to the outside.

On Dancing and Looking

Movement as a conscious theme is something Douglas has often spoken
about. In interview with Cathy Courtney she gives us a glimpse into how
movement , with its sensual awareness and sense of unfolding truth
informed the production of the (at that point in time nascent) Wild Wood.

“…I’m interested in trees and would love to do a book
with them…I began to dance in 1992 and, recently, have been doing
Authentic Movement, and I’ve consistently found a link with trees… I
have a sense of twist within myself… I would like to get the energy and
twist and turn of a tree into a book…”7

and latterly, writing of her practice’s involvement with nature and landscape,

“Dance was a revelation: I discovered that narrative
resided in the body and really did not need to be put into words. I
learnt to trust my visual making, how, like in dance, one thing/one
movement could lead or be set next to another to create sequence. To
make sense.”8

"through my experience with Movement I have learnt to
listen to the 'wisdom of my body as an original text'- and this has
influenced the way I work with the camera and the book.”9

The experience of movement has become part of what Douglas is
‘listening to’10 in her practice. In her work with her environment she
begins, through the expressive grammar of dance, to tune into what the
landscape is telling her body as well as her mind. The sense of flow
that bodily movement can have, the different rhythms knitting together
become an assurance that one’s visual work can likewise flow. Douglas'
identification with the landscape is not one merely of looking, but of
feeling bodily, and her movement into the landscape is not merely
mental but physical. Accordingly, there is a sense of unfolding
understanding that proceeds from the physical. A syntax of movement
that is informing the visual construction of her books. Rhythm,
movement, travelling, unfolding just as the body does, the truth in
movement becomes a trusted part of Douglas' artistic vocabulary. In
1999 she wrote,

“Over the past five years my experience of dance and
movement has helped me, through following my body impulse, to
understand how narrative resides not only in the head, but also within
the body. This has encouraged me to trust in a new way, the unfolding
and peeling of narrative within book... [working on Between the Two in
1997] I worked on and across the floor and let the areas of feeling
unravel in both directions. In this way I found the narrative journey
as I had in dance.”11

In the same article, Douglas goes on to explain how in her book Chinese Whispers,
she has begun to apply this understanding of movement to the way she
uses the camera. Contrasting with the static, setup work of her early
books, the camera is not a fixed, all-seeing panopticon, but to an
extent a moving being, a proxy for dance.

“the camera movement was conceived in three panning
loops...moving up with each pan...[describing] the form of a
spiral...the movement of the camera creating a spiral journey through
the book was fundamental to the narrative of Life in Chinese
Whispers...”12

The way in which movement traverses and invests structures has been
expressed through the movement of the camera across and into the
pictorial space, a space further articulated and arrayed by its
sequential enclosure within the book.

Douglas wrote of the sort of 'informed looking' she was doing with her camera,

“It was through the physicality of dance that I realised
I could open the aperture of my camera lens to move closely with my
subject,
to follow, be drawn and draw the images into the camera and
the gatherings of the book. I felt this was a female bodily language I
was discovering, it had nothing to do with phallic projections and
shots.”13

This camera is not a prying, incisive presence, but one that
conducts its enquiries just as Douglas herself, examining and entering
into a relationship with the world around it. It is a practice that
gains by embracing its subject rather than making off with it. Douglas'
visual language in Between the Two (the book she is discussing
in the above quotes) goes a long way towards expressing a sensual
aspect to this looking. It is a looking informed by the body, by dance.
If Douglas has a relationship with the subject that is not a sort of
visual rapine through the omnivorous camera lens, what could it be?

On Gathering

Douglas’ use of gathering puns on the two meanings of the word. One
refers to the gatherings of sheets that go to make a book, and the
other to Douglas’ now habitual ways of collecting material14. This
aspect of her practice depends on suspending interpretation,
contextualising rather than analysing at once. This gathering has a
historical aspect. It is not a lancing, lightning strike of insight
(or, at any rate, not that alone), but a relationship, a gathering that
implies accumulation, over time. This is an aspect that is true of the
artist as a person, gathering personal relationships to the place, and
also of the way in which this relationship drifts into the body of
practice. It is also true of the small time, the small relationship,
the small gathering of the book itself. As viewers, we echo (in just
such a small way) the work of the artist as we take the time to work
through the book, to make the movement from ourselves to the book and
back, relating to it, and in this way performing our own gathering. We
echo Douglas’ work:

"And yes also to Book

That is the place of my making

where I can gather all within the gatherings

and weave my visual narratives as text to the page"15

Our work as viewers is, like Douglas’, not only to gather the syntax
of the relationship through time, (as Douglas does with the landscape’s
ongoing presence) but also to weave significance into our relationship
to it. We draw it into our interior worlds, our practice, our stories,
our culture. We draw threads from the world and weave them.

Douglas, writing about her work with Zoë Irvine on the book Illiers Combray, writes of Proust,

"his embroidered effect, his interjected detail, all
brilliantly observed with his eye and bodily understanding of his text.
All this was part of my own exploration and that of Zoë Irvine who made
the two soundscapes) of the town Illiers Combray and its surrounding
countryside. On foot, on bicycle:

Allowing for associations to be realised overtly as part of my looking and gathering.

Tapestry"16

What this weaving is, what this tapestry is, is something Douglas addresses explicitly.

On Weaving:

"It is in the countryside that my being and seeing is
Interwoven with nature. And here I allude to weaving, something also
inextricably connected with the border landscape: tweed being both a
rough woven fabric and the main river that flows through the Border
countryside.

(I myself worked for 19 years at the Scottish College of textiles a
place that grew out of the Tweed industry. I did a PH D looking into
woven fabrics and the developing aesthetic taste for texture).

Textura, the Latin word for the woven web is also the root of the
word texture. When I saw the thickets in my gathering for Wild Wood, I
was excited and perplexed by them, and wondered how I would ever sort
them to the book, and then finally understood within the narrative of
Wild Wood, that began [to] emerge, that their intricate interwoven
beauty should be sorted and laid to the page like tapestry"17

The ideas of inside and outside above, and of investigation, are
encapsulated in the metaphor of a heuristic weaving: one which seems
evident in how Douglas describes her work as a mixture of things from
outside and inside, things brought together and assembled, interpreted
in new contexts... what this means is that these things are, in a way,
interwoven. The texts of the textile are historical, natural, personal,
in both the tweed textile and the books. They have common roots in the
landscape and in the hands of their creators who live in this
landscape. The books’ texts also derive from the books’ material
presence and qualities, which are part of Douglas' contextual analysis,
but in an ironic turn, also part of the presentation. Douglas' real
world, and the boundaries between herself and her world, are worked
into her books. This theme is touched on in the sense of movement
between inside and outside I wrote of above, with its continuous
movement between inclusion and exclusion, and the way in which this
movement reflects the cognitive process of mediating the landscape and
practice that I touched on in the section about Enquiry. These themes
recur in the section On Borders.

On Borders

Helen Douglas' Illiers Combray is a long accordion-fold type
book full of pictures of the countryside around the town of Illiers in
France. Combray was Proust's name for the town in his celebrated
extended novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Much of Proust's
remembering takes place in the environs of the town, and so a trip to
the real-life location (even though actually conflated with instances
drawn from the real life town of Auteuil) would be a must for any
devoted Proustian.

Douglas' work has long been concerned with notions of place, and in
particular with border lands, zones of doubtful demarcation. We can
take her books Wild Wood: A Border Ballad, and Unravelling the Ripple , dealing as they do, In Wild Wood's
case with the wood as a metaphor for the disputed (or at any rate
outlaw) history of the Border country between Scotland and England
(where Douglas lives and works). The wood's untamed quality comes to
represent something of the history that informs the identity of those
who live there: untamed: unclassified, and carrying the influences
(scars?) of historical conflicts in their nature.

Unravelling the Ripple consists of images of the seashore,
the zone between sea and land which teems with life that must survive
across the differences offered by the twin elements. Here, too there is
a zone whose definition is constantly under revision, a shifting world,
a littoral truth.

Here in Illiers Combray, Douglas seems to be examining
another kind of border country in tandem with Proust's own traffic
between the actual and the remembered. Proust's readers encounter
Proust's world at least partly through his books: they encounter books
as places, and the places they visit as Proustian tourists, they
encounter at least partly through the books. Our experiences are
mediated through the remembrance of cultural experiences we've had,
reading being one of them. That, in Douglas' own words, is why the
book's visual journeys are bracketed at the begining and end by images
of women reading:

"I wanted to bracket my seeing, and immersion in this place through these women reading"18.

There
is a real town, Illiers, and a fictional one, Combray: the experience
of one coincides partly with the experience of the other.

Proust's reflections are part of the subject Illiers Combray embraces.
These perambulations through the town and country are marked by their
reference to the real and the imaginary: in their conscious referencing
of Proust, they refer to an imagined, rather than real world alongside
that which actually exists. Similarly, the work exists between a
present and a past time: the presence of historical stained glass
figures and tapestry testifies to the continuing presence of the past
haunting the spaces the book traverses. The glass, the tapestry, the
legends seem woven into the landscape which erupts into fresh spaces as
if manipulated not by the rules of topography but by the metaphysical
camera of reverie: here we're back with the experiences offered by
Proust.

If Douglas' work is often about 'beating the bounds' of border
spaces, there is a pathway to be trodden in such cases: through a wood
or along the seashore for example. In this case we walk two 'ways':
Swann's way and Guermantes' way, typified by the town and the country,
and existing on either side of the long straight track of the
accordion-folded book:

"I conceived my book as a long concertina strip with two
sides in reference to his [Proust's] two ways and long flowing
sentences"19

Each of these walks or ruminations contain visual equivalents of what Douglas refers to as Proust's

"embroidered effect, his interjected detail, all brilliantly observed with his eye and bodily understanding of his text."

something Douglas achieves herself in the digital interpolation of
imagery woven together into one long continuous textile in which one
horizon merges seamlessly with the next. Douglas explicitly
acknowledges this technique of visually weaving things together in the
digital medium, comparing the matrices offered by digital imagery to
those offered by Jacquard looms. But there is more than visual weaving
taking place: in Illiers Combray, Douglas is weaving together the real,
the imaginary, the remembered in a traverse through the space and time
of a book form.

A famous couplet of Emily Dickinson’s reads:

"There is no Frigate like a book/to take us Lands away/Nor any

Courses like a Page/Of prancing Poetry"

When we travel in a book we affect any travels we might make in real
life. Can we ever experience France's Illiers for its own sake having
first encountered Proust's Combray? Douglas seems to be saying that the
experience is always one woven from the contradictory realities of the
world as experienced and of the structures that reflection (here gifted
in the form of À la recherche du temps perdu) informs our experience with.

Illiers Combray is an example that drafts these relationships
in a context away from Douglas’ previous ‘home’ territory of the
Scottish Borders, site of Wild Wood, for example. But what
Douglas has shown in both these works is a meditation on place and
practice, one that enfolds personal place and history, into practice.
This is a practice of gathering, which I have referred to above.
Douglas’ work weaves her gathering into books which express her journey
across her subjects, in processes of inquiry and exploration, inside
and outside: crossing borders all the while.

1 Douglas, H. Nature, Landscape and the Book, accessed online at  http://www.uwe.ac.uk

2 Ibid.

3Ibid.

4Douglas, H., Why the Book?, pp30-36, in The Artists' Book Yearbook 1996-97, Ed. T. Peixoto, Middlesex, Magpie Press, 1996

5 This bears comparison with the notion of ‘refrain’
examined in a currently unpublished paper by Iain Biggs, The Cultural
Politics of Re- and Dis-Enchantment” Place and ‘Visual Refrain’ in
Recent Work By Helen Douglas. Biggs discusses aspects of Douglas’ Wild
Wood with reference to concepts of ‘Attachments and Refrains’ set out
by Jane Bennett, who in turn draws on work done by Deleuze and Guattari.

“Bennett [discusses] song as both ‘shelter’ and ‘borderline’.”

p.8

Refrain is described as

“sung, hummed or chanted sound [which
generates] qualities of “shelter” and [gestures] towards “the uncharted
territory beyond the wall” that such shelter “has just built”

(Bennet, 2001,p. 167)”p.8

Biggs goes on to relate this to the subtext of Wild
Wood: A Border Ballad, where the cultural refrain of the Border Ballad
remains just such a shelter that indicates a world beyond itself.

If books create a space that indicates a world beyond
itself, but also creates an enclosure for performative utterance in the
form of narrative (written narrative being before all else the common
form of repeatable performance), then they share many features with the
concept of refrain as a shelter and borderline in their enclosure of
intention and their function as intermediary between living and telling
in the practice of the artist.

6 Ibid.

7 In Courtney, Cathy, Speaking of Book Art, p128, London, The Red Gull Press, 1999

8Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, op.cit.

9 Ibid.

10 If Douglas is listening to her body, is she
listening for a voice quieter than that of conscious, mind-based
narrative? Is there also a quality of music to it? When Douglas is
asked by Cathy Courtney in an interview about Between the Two (Art
Monthly, May 1998), whether her work alone was silent, because there
was no verbal interplay with Telfer Stokes, Douglas reply relates the
element of ‘discussion’ to the place of dance in this new solo work. Is
there a song the body is singing? Is it a refrain, in the sense that it
is both a refuge and an interface?

11 Douglas, Helen, Narrative and Book, JAB (Journal
of Artists' Books), no. 129 Fall 1999. Accessed online at
http://www.uwe.ac.uk

12 Ibid.

13 Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, op.cit.

14 In contrast to her earlier work.

“…in the very early books it wasn’t so much a system of gathering material so much as scripting a book and then creating sets.”

In Open Book: Publishing Art in Scotland, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2002.

15 Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, op.cit.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19Ibid.

 

Holden's silence

a slideshow of the images used in my book Hoden's Silence.

Poisonwood Bible

Link: Poisonwood Bible
I just finished this book in order to be able to talk to the guy who runs the ferry I catch to work in the morning. What a great book. Far too complex and emotional for me to offer my opinions on, unfortunately. It was, for some time, popular with reading groups, which tended, to my contrary misanthropic side, to register as a mark aginst it. I'm glad I got over that prejudice to read it. Worth (I think) all the time I spent reading it when I should have been sleeping or working.

coptic stitch

coptic stitch, originally uploaded by aesop.

A how to diagram for Guerilla Bookbinding which will be happening at Spike Island in February. I'm going to produce a whole booklet like this with the 6-10 different bindings I'll be teaching.

Click the picture to see at higher resolution (look for 'all sizes')

planning saturday

It's going to be the first Saturday in a while at home for me, and I'm looking forward to a day's farting around the place. Laundry will get done, tidying will happen, and all within reach of a never-cooling kettle.

I'm also going to treat myself to a job I've wanted to do for some time: drawing up my own diagram-guides for my guerilla bookbinding class. I've appropriated stuff from all over before, but I'm planning a sort of folksy handlettered booklet feel. I'll be able to devise it as a booklet in itself, too, which will be satisfying and give my students a nifty way to keep some record of the bedlam that might possibly be referred to. The least I can do after benfitting from other's work is to offer my own material for others: I'll post versions for download when I get them finished.

Lindy's invited me over for dinner on Saturday night, too, which will be cool.

Hugh & Andi at the LAB

Hugh & Andi, originally uploaded by aesop.

(Hugh Bryden and Andi McGarry)

At the London Artists' Books fair at the ICA this weekend. I had a really good, productive time 9even though I was surrounded by a superabundance of tempting artworks and all the expense that the metropolis can throw to a man with my modest tastes (I even order a cheap curry on a boozy night out)I took a lot of notes and made contact with a number of people whose work I'd like to find out more about. I came up with a couple of ideas whilst there, too, but they await a bit of further thought before I write them up. I was a bit disappointed in my own books. They looked a bit sad and unloved, and not really up to the standard I'd like to reflect. For the moment I'm putting it down to a bit of a flirtation with trying to make commercially-viable work, and a bit of aridity arising from too much computer work. Suffice it to say that at the moment my fingers are mucky with charcoal, and though I'm still a bit timid about feeling that my books are getting better, it felt good.

getting ready for LAB

I'm going to be at the London Artists' Book fair at the ICA tomorrow. I need to pack, obviously, but more important will be the scene-setting I want to do for myself. I want to use the event as a chance to make a few informal contacts with artists and survey work I think I will want to consider for possible case studies. Since my research is going to be about studio practice, I want to try to sound out how I will talk to artists about this aspect of things. It needs to be somewhat distinct from a regular critical discussion, and closer to something which looks at how ideas are managed and developed, nurtured even, through the enabling form of the book. My hunch, as I've written elsewhere, is that book artists all use books as an heuristic tool to get some conceptual leverage on their ideas. They give access to discrete qualities, particular sorts of media articulation and a full circuit of roles within the creative field. Anyway, I want to find a way to tal to artists about this, in so many words, to find out what it feels like to work on books from their point of view, and to what extent the y feel books are an enabling factor in their work.

It'll also be a chance for me to enjoy other's work and look at some of the best new books available. I've been feeling a need to return to my own work, in terms of quality and intensity, things having been on a bit of a commercial footing of late, and sacrificing something of the obsessive quality that makes the books tick. It'll be good to have this chance to be inspired.

Also, and no small thing, there'll be a chance to have a beer or two with some of my acquaintances from Wexford. I can't get too drunk (are you listening to me, Andrew?) but it'll be fun.

Tiercel Movie

Tiercel Movie (The link takes ages but does work if you've got Quicktime)

This has been kicking around for some time. I finally got around to putting on some kind of soundtrack music. I've found that  iPhoto's  pre-packaged web exports seem to do the best job of delivering a file of anything like acceptable size, despite my tinkering with various compression regimes/framerates/palettes/screen sizes. The only problem with this solution (which gives a filesize of about 9mB with identical-seeming quality to my next-best effort at 24mB), is that it outputs to the wrong screen size ( a 4:3 ratio, as opposed to my eccentric choice based on the size of the book pages the film was based on) Anyone know what settings I should use, or what ones have been used in iMovie's settings? Is there something inherent in the aspect ratio I've gone for that defeats the compression algorithms somehow?

Anyway, here, at last, is the Tiercel film on the web. It looks a lot better from here but I thought a 400mB QT was asking a bit much of my reader.

Lisle's Man

Lisle's Man, originally uploaded by aesop.

a mock up of the book I'm currertly working on.

The Remembrancer

Mountain pass

mountains4, originally uploaded by aesop.

This photo relates to The Remembrancer, an artists' book I produced several years ago, with the assistance of Richard Asplin, who salvaged these photos, (along with the invitation to the Lord Mayor's Banquet, 1933) from the trash.

from Southey diary

from Southey diary, originally uploaded by aesop.

 

A Discovery

I work at the Art Library here in Bristol, where we've made a discovery in the stacks.

Buried in a secure stack were about 250 paste-up cards with photos layed out for rephotographing for publication. They've got bits of retouching and printer's notes, and many of them are signed H. Robert Lewis or monogrammed H R L. I haven't been able to examine them all yet, but they are all from the 1920's, seeming to be mostly between 1923-28. There must be well over 1000 photos in all, all of them of West Country scenes and buildings. Anthony, the librarian, discovered them a few days ago. This library has seen several generations come and go, and it still has some secrets to yield. It looks as though this deposit was never catalogued. We've already seen it yield some results. Anthony had a visitor from Tyntesfield House (a National Trust property nearby), which was recently restored. Photographs discovered at random in this pile of cards were of Tyntesfield and yielded hitherto unknown details of the interior and the presence of a tennis court on one of the lawns. We've been trying this afternoon to research their provenance: they must have appeared in some local publication in the 1920's. We've found some trace of the photographer: he worked in Bristol as a photographer in the 1930's being last listed in local directories in 1940 (we idly speculate that he may have been killed in the Blitz). We'll certainly catalogue this collection, and hopefully go on to digitize it. It's been exciting and enchanting looking at these- I still haven't had a chance to peruse them at length- it's like something out of Shooting the Past. I'm sure (I think)no one will mind if I get a snap of a couple of the pictures next week and post them here.

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.

Creating Artists' Books

I finished reading Sarah Bodman's Creating Artists' Books today.

This book is described as a handbook for the "student or practised printmaker who is experimenting in a new area." As such, it's an overview of the main points of the medium (if we are to describe artists' books as a medium), surveying briefly its immediate art-historical antecedents (livres d'artiste, livre de luxe, the Kelmscott Press, et al), and spending longer on a thematic survey of contemporary practitioners. Bodman's descriptions of these illuminate her subject headings:  using text... collaboration between artists and writers...printmaking process for artists' books... digital output... making book with limited materials and equipment..multiples and 'zines, et cetera. Under each of these headings she has elaborated descriptions of the work of book artists. For instance, John Bently's collaborations with five Dundee residents provided the text for A Handful of Memories, Dundee, is given as an example of artists  working with others who have textual input (and who often provide materials, handwritten or otherwise- including ephemera, photographs) which complicate the artist's role as a collaborator, editor and as a designer for material which already exists. Bodman's chapter on unique books looks at (among others) the work of Guy Begbie and Miriam Schaer, with descriptions of how these artists use unusual materials and interrogate the notion of the book. The chapter on digital book production includes work by myself, Andrew Eason, and by Douglas Holleley, Underpinning the organisation of the chapters, and culminating in chapters on display, marketing and exhibiting, is an undercurrent of the artists positioning themselves vis a vis the difficulties, (both technical and financial) of production using the various media, establishing a working practice, and ultimate intentions for the book.

Each chapter also includes advice on the pitfalls and positive characteristics of different production routes. The organisation of the chapters, from the history of the form, to chapters dealing with collaboration and content, to those on design and output method, then through sections on design intention (eg 'zines or those works intended to avoid the usual art institutions) describes what might be seen as a journey through an artist's encounter with the book form. Moving from contextualising the book by historical references, to the practicalities of production involving medium and content, and finally to the fate of the book in exhibition and distribution, it presents all the various aspects of the form someone with minimal knowledge might need to begin: there is even included a chapter on simple binding methods, with the redoubtable Tom Sowden demonstrating stitching methods in a series of detailed photographic steps. Lest I should imply that Creating Artists' Books  is organised in a simply programmatic way, let me also note that despite its' modest length at 128 pages, the complexity of the relationship between material, technical/financial capability, intention and design is indicated from the outset in the chapter entitled Form Follows Function. Thus the arc of the chapters, whilst describing the evolving interest one might take in book works does not neglect the relationship that's constantly moving backwards and forwards through the medium between materials, history, content and intention. As an introduction it does not lean too heavily on the theoretical checks and balances this implies, but it is nonetheless evident in the identification of the different strands of book working identified in the chapter headings.

Creating Artists' Books has a good balance of instructional material, introductions to techniques and processes, and examples from contemporary practitioners. The book is illustrated in colour throughout, with many excellent examples shedding light on areas of contemporary practice that would be difficult to describe in words alone. Bodman's use of illustrations for this purpose is strikingly effective- no less than one would expect from someone whose own artists' books are such good examples of careful and engaging design. Unfortunately, Bodman has been too modest and has denied us the chance of seeing examples of her artworks here, but Creating Artists' Books is nonetheless a richly rewarding introduction to the form.

Finally, appendices include  substantial material on galleries, shops, collections and websites relevant to the subject of use to anyone with an interest in the subject.

moon drawing

moon drawing, originally uploaded by aesop.

A drawing I did some time ago, posted now in honour of this afternoon's meeting at Spike Island to talk about integrating my book arts teaching into the taster class they are organising across-the-board in August. Also in honour of Howard Plotkin's The Imagined World Made Real, a marvellous book that attempts to "marry the biological and social sciences". Fiercely attentive to critics that would accuse him of reductive reasoning that would throw the study of centuries of socil science, he sets out the landscape of these relationships and explanatory models with great emphasis on the detail and strangeness of culture. He's equally attentive to the necessity of using the explanatory powers of science to understand culture. One would expect the usual criticisms to hold true: clumsy, reductive, overly rational. Not so.

Very provoking, opening avenues of inference and speculation deep into my own thought on artistic practice and media.

Tin Drum

Not actually an American classic, but the second thing that caught my eye at the Montclair book centre. (The first was "The Baron in the Trees" by Italo Calvino, but I often find Calvino's flattened, heraldic style faintly annoying in anything but the most abstract of moods). I rejected several possibilities with New York or Jersey themes as perhaps over informative and maybe a bit touristy in the circumstances. A bit of vanity, to think that I am not immediately apparent as a tourist- and why would I want to fit in- nonetheless, I am going to spend parts of the afternoon in postwar Germany and Montclair in the winter sunlight simultaneously. Both the Baron and the Drum invoke themes of otherness and commentary on the generality of the world, so perhaps my choice reflects my mood.