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.

 

Assignment 5

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Assignment 5: curate virtual exhibition of five artists including me.

 

---

Borders of Identity

 

In creating this exhibition I have employed criteria that have come
from my ongoing critical engagement with my practice. I'm always asking
questions of it: What am I doing? What is its place in the world? What
are the characteristics of the artworks? This is an ongoing process
that takes place all the time, in every decision I make, to a more, or
less-conscious extent. It is a hermeneutic process that continuously
informs my sense of myself as an artist. It can take a more formal turn
when I write about my work as I am doing here, and elsewhere in my
studio journal, but I'm conscious of its place in the way I approach
individual pieces of work, individual drawings. That critical
judgement, and the interpretive bias that emerges as a result of my
concentrating on the things I find useful and informative to my
practice exists equally in the things I choose to look at, and in the
things that I read. What strikes me other's work is that which strikes
a chord in my own practice, in sympathy or in contrast. The ongoing gap
between what I respond to and what I do
is the gap of the hermeneutic process of working-through-practice. It's
why I keep doing it: there is always something un-done to respond to.

 

What I have done to create this virtual exhibition, with its
intention of providing a basis for a comparative analysis in the form
of a catalogue entry, is produce a number of statements about how I
currently characterise my work. I've used these to select artists whose
work I think reflects on some of these same criteria, either
sympathetically or critically.

 

  The criteria I have employed are:

 

• 
      historical/literary sources- there is a use of historical/literary material or background
   



• 
      interpretive- there is a conscious effort being made to interpret the found and historical imagery and situations
   



• 
      gamespaces- there is a sense in which the work establishes a place of operation within which the play of the interpretation works out
   



• 
      identity- the work deals with questions of identity: postcolonial, gender and sexuality, etc
   



• 
      narrativity- the works use character and plot to allow meaning to unfold with the effect of narrative
  

 

 

The artists whose work I have chosen to explore these critera with are:

 

• 
      Helen Douglas: Illiers Combray
   



• 
      Roni Horn: Doubt by Water
   



• 
      Peter Greenaway: Luper at Compton Verney
   



• 
      Isaac Julien: Vagabondia
  

 

  Finally, I have chosen my own book The Remembrancer as a representative piece of my work for comparative analysis.

 

Before discussing how these criteria or themes work across
the exhibition, I will take the works one by one, saying how they
feature some of the criteria, and exploring some of the links between
them. The sections below are my 'catalogue entry'.

---

Helen Douglas

Illiers Combray

  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 refision, a shifting world.

 

  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". 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 alonside 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"

  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.

I
earlier referred to Douglas' bracketing of her seeing by reading: in
this case, that bracketing her seeing in the remembrance of past
things. Tacita Dean, writing about the experience of reading Roni Horn
(the next artist to feature in this virtual exhibition), quotes Emily
Dickinson's lines:

  "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 and of
fiction. In Roni Horn's work we will see a version of personal identity
constructed from similar contradictory sources, but where Douglas shows
us a narrative of different, but woven-together realities, in Horn's
work meaning is always melting in and out of focus.

 

 

Roni Horn
Doubt by Water

Roni Horn's Doubt by Water
consists of 30 two-sided prints mounted on aluminium stands. The prints
show the face of an adolescent on one side, and water, or blocks of sea
ice on the other. A stuffed owl also features. As one goes through the
pictures, the obverse of the print seems to echo the gradually changing
expression on the person's face. Later, the situation changes, and one
is comparing the face to a slowly melting block of ice, then to the
repetition of the head of a stuffed owl.

 

  Doubt by Water fits into Horn's oeuvre
by way of its use of repetition, its narrative potential and its
tapping in to themes of identity and change. The installation itself
spills out of the rooms it's housed in, like meltwater seeping away
from a central block. Who is this person whose face is repeated across
these dispersed images,barely changing expression (but changing
perceptibly nonetheless)? This adolescent face is probably (I think)
male, but it's somewhat in doubt. Here is a person of a mutable age,
whose character is still relatively unformed. Pubescent, neither a
child nor an adult. The decidability of identity is as changable as the
ice or the play of light across our features: it may seem sharply
defined, but it melts away, it shifts, and we are left with something
other than what we started with.

 

  Doubt by Water is the work of an artist who has often used books as a way of presenting her work, as in Still Water or An Index of Water.
I am intrigued by the way in which she has used these stands to
distribute the experience of change, repetition and metaphor across a
physical space whose demarcation is uncertain, but which is activated
by the presence of the pictures in the stands. What are the dimensions
of the work? Unknown: the stands appear in several rooms. Is every room
affected? Is there a story being told? The work wants to support some
interpretation. Something appears to be happening. But what? Horn
offers a distributed play on repetition, change and the metaphor of ice
as an unknowable shape, always changing into flowing, changing water. Doubt by Water.

 

  Peter Greenaway

  Luper at Compton Verney

 

 

 

 

 

  Greenaway's Luper at Compton Verney is one of several manifestations of his ongoing project, the Tulse Luper Suitcases,
which has so far produced three films and several exhibitions.
Greenaway's ambitious plans for it include further film and television,
amongst other works.

 

  The material I have chosen was an installation at Compton Verney
, a large country-house gallery in Gloucestershire, which Greenaway
practically filled with a selection from the 92 suitcases the work
revolves around. These were accompanied by film and various sculptural
manifestations.

 

The number of
suitcases- 92- corresponds with the atomic mass of uranium. Greenaway
has described the project as “a personal history of uranium”, or,
alternatively “the autobiography of a professional prisoner”. The
suitcases contain collections of objects: dolls, letters, clothing,
books, etc. Many contain metaphorical elements: blood and ink, ice, and
so on. The contents suggest, variously, the autobiography mentioned,
and a survey of a significant part of European history ( which
coincides with the emergence of the modern world through the Holocaust,
the development of nuclear weapons and the global character that
emerged). The continuous reconsellation of these elements made by
viewing and the coincidence the viewer finds in one and another of the
possible stories being constructed points to the project’s overarching
form: as a system of memory. The suitcases are a mnemonic net: each
fragmentary node reaches out to others in myriad combinations. In this,
Greenaway’s collection resembles the table of elements: necessarily
finite, but nonetheless encompassing the past and present. The
suitcases also recall the many fragments of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.
Benjamin’s unfinished work sought to capture the vanishing world of the
Parisian street. It too depends on a network of fragmentary material
(here on thousands of index cards and notes) in its attempt to conjure
and preserve memory.

    

Does the net
accomplish its task? Can the suitcases contain the world? Criticisms of
structuralism shed critical light here: Luper’s world cannot be a
complete logic of the world. Whatever these nodal points represent,
their symbolic coherence is liable to deconstruction. We sense this
ourselves, in the slippery abduction of one pattern by another in our
attempts to understand what is being referred to. Such an effect is
Greenaway’s intention. The creation of formal systems is something that
reoccurs in Greenaway’s work, but they are seldom, if ever, intended as
a coherent whole. Rather, they are often an armature for a playful
echoing of the main text, frequently  threatening to overwhelm it.

 

The
spatiality of this installation reflects the work’s supposed
distribution through space and time (each suitcase representing a point
on Luper’s journeys). The suitcases are assembled here as a collection
of Luper’s life: one could imagine them as a series of chapters of his
life. As we make our way through the various rooms of the installation
we are in the process of creating, as if through a process of
investigation and reconstruction, a narration of Luper's life (or the
life of uranium, or any of the other possible 'lives' the installation
refers to). Who was Luper? He is a fictional character, but also a way
of exploring a loss of identity: he is not so much the sum of his
parts, as expressed here, as much as he is the vehicle for them. He is
lost in the superabundance of his own evidence and its significance.

If we compare the ice that Greenaway deploys as the contents of one of the suitcases, with that implied in Roni Horn's work Doubt by Water,
we are looking on the one hand at a substance whose properties are
reported and constrained in a system that gains its life from its
continual reexamination by the viewer as a table of combinatory
possibilities. This ice, is fixed, and does not melt. Rather its
capabilities (of freezing, melting, coldness) are signified and
deployed (albeit that we are invited to doubt the stability of the
signification so deployed). Roni Horn's ice, however, is under
observation. It melts. changes, flows. Roni Horn's ice is not part of a
collection, it is part of an observation. Isaac Julien's work Vagabondia shows another way of encountering a collection.

Isaac Julien
Vagabondia

 

  Vagabondia  (which
means 'realm of the vagabonds') is a video installation by the artist
Isaac Julien. Its setting is the bafflingly replete house of John
Soane, the architect. It's now a museum
, left to the nation by Soane, on condition that its original state not
be altered. It has remained a treasure house of Soane's mania for
collecting antique sculpture and assorted other material. The house
itself was designed and continuously altered by Soane to house his
collection. Consequently it is riddled with views through to other
spaces; there are many skylights and unexpected twists and turns. A
room built to house his collection of Hogarth paintings has fold-out
walls that double the space available for showing. One wall
unexpectedly swings open to give a view of another floor. All the
surfaces of the house are covered in bits of sculpture, paintings and
other evidence of Soane's collector's mania, This is the setting for
Julien's artwork. Julien's work has previously examined issues of
sexuality, race and identity. This is an opportunity for him to produce
a contemporary reflection on how these issues crop up in the colonial
collection of the Soane museum.

 

A reflection is literally what Julien offers. His installation is
set up with two touching screens, twinning each other as a mirror
image, which plays on the repetion and symmetry of forms echoing each
other across the visual space of the screen. This is also an
opportunity for Julien to show difference from this repetitive rule:
when it is not obeyed, we really notice it. It ruptures the harmonious
order of the reflection. Julien has set the the Soane house as a scene
which becomes an echo chamber of time and space for us, the viewers,
and for the people he shows us moving about inside. A black museum
attendant sees ghosts: sees aspects of the houses' history, sees,
perhaps, versions of herself. Soane, along with white and black
characters in contemporary eighteenth century and modern dress move
about in the museum, each involved in reflecting upon themselves. Soane
looks gloomily into one of the house's many distorting mirrors; a lady
puts on pearls, stroking them as if unfamiliar- as if this is a sort of
'dressing up'- something out of the ordinary. Julien also includes a
dancer figure, whose movements, choreographed by Javier de Frutos, seem
suited to the vagabond of the installation's title. This figure is the
representation of the intersection of the realm of the vagabond and the
ordered classical world the house aspires to. The vagabond is free, but
tortured. His movements flow where the house stands implacable, but he
is also prone to gestures of apparent agony. There is an interface
between these two worlds, but it is not an altogether comfortable one.
Our reflections, shown by Julien in the formal aspect of the
finstallation, and again through the narrative device of the museum
attendant's reflection, correspond to just such an interface. We
reflect the the history of the Soane museum in ourselves. It is a
wonderful kind of dressing up for all of us, white or black, but it is
the product, inescapably, of a colonial past that affects white and
black identities alike. This is a potentially productive interface, but
one fraught with attendant agonies: free, but tortured.

 

The vagabond/dancer bounces off the walls, flows through the
spaces, seems trapped by them. Are they a prison? (And this is a
strange prison, full of mirrors, unexpected spaces and communicating
passages). Is the chaotic served by the order of the classical space?
Or merely oppressed by it? Certainly they derive identity from one
another. The vagabond haunts the space: it is at once a true spirit of
the place and a being trapped in the space. It is surrounded by cool
stone, but it seems to speak more in the erotics of the flesh: dance
rather than sculpture.

 

The way in which Julien has employed a space to contain his
narrative, its historical interpretation, and its meditation on
identities are aspects of his practice which I relate to strongly.

 

 

 

  Andrew Eason

  The Remembrancer

 

 

 

 

The Remembrancer, like Luper at Compton Verney and Vagabondia,
is based on a collection set in a particular history. Like them, it too
unfolds an emerging identity that likewise questions what it means to
fashion an identity from the interpretation or critique of historical
sources. This same space for doubt is also seen in Doubt by Water and Illiers Combray. The Remembrancer
is based on a cache of original photographs from what was then British
India, taken in the early 20th-century. These photographs were signed
and numbered, the apparent record of a trip through the Indian
subcontinent, showing a wide variety of lanscape and urban subjects,
but steering clear of portraiture. A stray photo shows a man in
colonial khakis surrounded by cameras, tiffin tin and his Jack Russell
dog (who appears in several photographs as a dot amongst the gigantic
scenery of mountain passes and waterfalls). Accompanying these was a
letter from the Remembrancer of the Lord Mayor's office, inviting a man
(presumably the photographer) to the Lord Mayor's Banquet in 1933. I
began to imagine this event taking place, and began fashioning a story
around the idea of the photographer's reminiscences of his time in
India. He reconstructs the journey he took earlier in the career which
has culminated in this banquet, journeying again in memory. He imagines
a remembered place, one essentially unreal, though supported by his
photographs. In a sense he acknowledges this himself. His recollections
are of a place and time he cannot return to, cannot touch, one he can
only corrupt. He yearns to contact, but finally wants only to exorcise
his ghost from this remembered land.

We as British
viewers (of all ethnic origins) have a chance to reassess these images
and daydreams and reconstruct and revisit our attitudes to our shared
colonial past. Like Julien's Vagabond character, the photographer seems
to haunt an unreal world, one with which he continues to interact, but
one with whom his interactions are perpetually under reassessment. This
is no less true in our own world: our history is one which is
continually written, continually re-membered in the ongoing
interpretation and refashioning of our individual and collective
identities.

In the overtly character-narrated form of The Remembrancer
I am suggesting the permeability of stories: we can find the present in
the past, the past inside the present. Our contemporary meaning for
these pictures is not actually that spoken by my narrator, nevertheless
he is involved in a process of interpretation similar to our own, one
which ongoing.

---

What
has been striking in writing about this collection of work is the
different ways in which they have explored their common grounds of
identity, history and narrative. The two books shown use different
strategies to explore what are in some ways similar subjects. The
border between memory and reality and the journeys we make traversing
it are the subjects of Illiers Combray and The Remembrancer
alike. Yet despite similarities due to the book form of both, they
remain contrasting works of art. Douglas' work is wordless (in fact it
is accompanied by a soundtrack designed by Zoë Irvine) and there is no
overt narrator (perhaps perambulator
is the correct term). Yet there is a bracketing of the work by the
presence of the reader, and the figure of a dreaming subject occurs in
the book. There is a narrative force, a framing subject, despite the
work's subtlety in including this. My own work, The Remembrancer, is
quite specific in identifying a narrator who provides a textual
narrative. However, because he is clearly a character placed in a
historical context, whose views and presuppositions are presented as at
least as circumstantial as the imagery he reframes, I think that the
story he tells remains open to our fertile reinterpretation. There are
differences in metaphorical structure, too. Douglas' tapestry is not
the same as my journey. (Which seems to occur in a series of stacatto
sections. Perhaps, as the narrator consumes each new recollection, we
might come to see it as a banquet, with a series of courses.)
Nevertheless, we are both undertaking journeys into memory and
imagination.

The Remembrancer shares with Luper at Compton
Verney and Vagabondia, a grounding in events of historical and
political significance. But the three artworks are very different. To
speak only of their subjects, Julien's work with the historical
backgrounding of the Soane museum has a particular connection with
Black British experience and identity, and Greenaway's work seems cast
in the direction of presenting (at least in part) connections of Jewish
identity , with Europe's engagement with its post-war future defined
powerfully by nuclear weapons and its historical coincidence with the
establishment of the state of Israel. My own work with a collection of
material pertaining to  India does not reflect  any particular
involvement with Indian history and identity. Instead, I am approaching
issues of British (and in my own case White British identity).  None of
the three present their examinations of identity as a polemical
project.  All three share the characteristic of using the viewer's
reaction to a collection of artefacts to show how all identities are
continuously constructed, that all interpretations from history, and in
that sense all identities are potentially shared. At any rate all the
historical material we can muster cannot close the borders of identity
to traffic. The uncertainty of The Remembrancer is the uncertainty of an identity that cannot reliably reconstruct itself through its own extant stories.

This
open border is seen again in Helen Douglas' work and that of Roni Horn,
both of which reference identity in terms of interpretation. Other
works by Douglas refer to lansdscape as an influential force in
creating identity which would lend them greater coincidence with
Horn's. On the other hand, other works of Horn's feature more literary
references. As it is Horn's work Doubt by Water
is an installation, but it features certain pagelike qualities. Each
individual image is part of a whole. The sequencing of the images is
very much more fluid than that of a book, though there is a perceptible
sequence to them. Douglas' book, on the other hand, occupies its
virtual space. Its perambulations through the imagined and actual
worlds of Proust and the Proustian tourist are physically realised in
the very long accordion format of the book. (This feature, especially
with the sound piece that accompanies it, is very tunnel-like. It seems
very much a passageway, with incidental sounds from off stage informing
the space to either side, as well as the spaces of imagination and
remembrance they spark off). Horn's and Douglas' spatial references
have certain affinities with Julien's use of the  Soane  museum as an
enclosing  space and a collection.  Greenaway's space is defined
wherever he sets his suitcases down, and the collection referenced is
that which the suitcases themselves express and contain. The spatial
metaphor of The Remembrancer is less strong. The book itself presents
the narrative as an enclosed space, even going so far as to be sealed
with wax and ribbon in reference to the original invitation to the
banquet to which the photographer is invited. Within this, the
photographer's journey takes place 'on the road' in India, which is too
large a remit to be considered enclosing. Nonetheless it is an
exploration of the borderlands between memory and actuality:  the
enclosure in question is the one that defines him in actuality, in
identity and in society. Can he cope with his dreams and remembrances.

This exhibition Borders of Identity, shows
how several artists have found ways to explore the unclear differences
between states of identity: real, imaginary, remembered, historical,
literary and so on. They have found several ways to present their
meditations: as a tapestry, as a banquet, as a net, as a journey, as a
collection, a dance, a room, a house, a book.

Meeting notes

Work done on creating questions and shortlists was time well spent.
    • structured the methodology
    • showed complexity of thought going into subject
    • sets the stage for prog exam
    • criticisms arising are constructive: mostly about couching terms/sensitive interviewing
    • will knit well with assignment materials

As regards assignments:
    • Iain will get hold of the new, simpler set of instructions for me.
    • It's expected that some work I have done will fit in quite well (in particular, my assumptions about the taxonomy of terms exercise seem to have been more or less corresct)
    • It's important that my advisors can say that I will have this work done, but it may not be essential that it is done now, though clearly I'd like to get it sorted out anyway.
    • There seems to be more leeway about providing work that obviously fits the intention of the assignments without adhering to the letter of the law. This is good news because I've done a lot of work on the relevent areas: maybe just not the specified work.

On the artwork:
        • General agreement with my self-criticism. Work has lacked material and expressive richness of late because of time constraints and production capabilities. My stated aim of spending more studio time doing autographic work (versus digital production chipped away at inbetween my research studies) seems well received as a proposed remedy. I just need to make that work! However, no complaints about my work. Quality could be better, but I'm obviously doing what I can under the production circumstances.

Some points not covered:
    • joining art practice to my case stufy methodology: I've a pretty decent idea of how my writing and researching is going to perform self-reflexive/hermeneutic research, but as yet, I've only pencilled-in how I intend to examine issues in the research in my artwork. Although I'm clearly relating my own work and its' accompanying propositions (my understanding of what book arts are and my work's place in it), to the work of others, and stating an aim to scurry backwards and forwards between my assumptions and what I glean from other folks' practice, this is more about comparing theory. I'm not really comparing the work itself that clearly here. So it's not comparative analysis, this reflexive process that the work is supposed to take up. It's more, I think, going to be about finding understandings of issues raised through art means... Obviously I'm unclear here. How can I make work that forms part of my investigation. Do I have to wait and see what I start finding out?

• I also want to figure out how I am going to construct my thesis. I was reading about Ricoeur this morning, about how the studies in the Rule of Metaphor gradually unfold the different levels of R's theory of metaphor. From a stylistic point of view, I think I'd like to take up something similar, I think. I haven't read the Rule of Metaphor yet, so I can't say what this unfolding means in terms of R's methodology (one presumes, in setting out to writew, that he already knows what his theory is, and is using these 'layers' as illustrations rather than as hermeneutic experimentation) Nonetheless, my existing metaphor of 'back and forth' or of 'repetition' could easily make for dull reading if there is no 'dramatic structure' to how my understanding unfolds. The problem is, that I don't know what I'm portraying. So I can't decide in advance what to unfold, what bits will unfold in different case studies, etc. Perhaps it won't be possible to do this. Or, perhaps, I will discover a story in the course of my research which I will later be able to edit into something readable. A hermeneutics of continuous repetition or fractious back-and-forth could be very trying, and I aspire to something less dull. Fingers crossed for a good story! This would be an interesting point to discuss another time.

tangled

Tanpit Woods 2, originally uploaded by aesop.

Today is going to be all about setting down some of my ideas into the structures already in place for the progression exam writing I'm doing. There are plenty of ideas and sufficient theoretical framework in the background, even though the more I see of it, the better I would like to delve into it more fully. In particular the theoretical articulation of how studio parctice is a form of research. I'm reading Graeme Sullivan's book on this just now, which is ever-so-slowly peeling away layers of theoretical grounding: I'm waiting for the chapter where he begins his exposition of the theoretical heuristics that allow the richness of research within artistic practice to be examined critically. As I say, I'd rather know more about my application of this at the moment. Beyond a certain hermeneutic program of interrogating and instigatingmy work through the selfsame questioning matrix that I will be bringing to my case-study data, I'm not too specific about how cog 'a' will mesh with gear 'c'. I suspect it's something that by definition will work itself out in the hermeneutic process.

Be that as it may, I'm now writing so as to have a locus to edit, to add ideas to. At the moment, I'm conscious of having many different vectors of thought on and around my research interests and in tandem with several interpretations of the web of theoretical and other 'outside' references.

David Byrne on Architecture

Link: David Byrne's Journal

In my opinion there is nothing inherently wrong with tall buildings. A limited number of anything is like genetic diversity; it’s of value to the species as a whole. I can, however, see that these residences are definitely top-down design — there is no room for the evolution and mutation of function, form, use — it’s all planned in advance. The creators all assume the inevitable victory of science, reason and logic over messy instinct, intuition and impulse.

David Byrne is writing about the riots which have been going on in France, and points out part of the problem is that same one that affects doldrum housing projects everywhere. I think the text highlighted above is the heart of his argument, and also the caveat that saves it from being just another blunt critique of Modern architecture: it's not the architecture that's the problem, it's the fact that it's designed as part of an all-encompassing system. Byrne is critical of architects and city planners who think they can see everything that needs to be seen (I'm sure those people would understandably wring their hands andreply that they never thought they could see everything- they just did their best). At the same time, Byrne opens his piece like this:

A quote from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961):

“To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a dissected rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are understood as systems of order, they actually look different.”

I think that the new understanding that informs his suggestions is of the same order. Aren't we potentially trying to plan freedom again by trying to contrive solutions like 'build more heterogenous cities' , or 'implement project xyz to integrate immigrant populations'? Not to cast stones on his suggestions though- they seem- at least in the present time, like good ideas. indeed they seem like needs and principles I wouldn't want to try to run any kind of city without. Isn't there a risk that making the architectural answer something along the lines of 'heterogeneity' is just making the problems and their effects more complex, more heterogenous, and thereby defering and componding their solution? Or, conversely, does it offer a chance to make responses and identities much more fine-grained on the scale of the city, with much smaller solutions happening much more frequently?

                               

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.

How Art Made the World

Link- How Art Made the World
I just finished watching the first three episodes of this series which was on BBC earlier on this year. I'd wanted to see it for a while because it seemed to tie in with some of the other reading and thinking I've been doing about artwork, intention and intentionality, consciousness, and artists' books. (Phew! It's a big net, and I'm tring to haul it in on my own).

I was delighted to see Vilanor Ramachandran turn up as the
presenter's very first talking head. Ramachandran's theories on the
neurological foundations of art are still a bit scientistic for my
liking when they appear in their 'raw' state, but the sorts of
modifications and elaborations on similar themes which crop up in some
things like Draisma
, Claxton, et al, are a bit more promising, and form a sort of
hovering, unconnected background to my preparations to try and talk to
book artists about what makes them tick and why they do books at all (
my latest addition to the motley family of theories clustering like
flies... is to do with Robert Darnton's essay What is the History of Books where
he talks about the circuit of  readers, producers and distributors that
make up the field of book history's study. It's a model of
interdisciplinary interaction that tries to bring together some of the
many strands of book history. I'm currently  involving it in a
spirited  mashup with Johanna Drucker's notion of the Artists' Book as
the 'quintessential 20thC art form and the bits of Ricoeur I know via
Kearney's book On Stories.)

Anyway, I'm straying rapidly... I enjoyed the show, indulged myself
in a couple of soliloquies on how I would differ from the presenter
about how art enunciates intention and creates and is created by
culture (which is, I say, a thing explicable as much as needs be by
natural sciences when we find suitable models, which allows the
application of bits of the modified Ramachandran-stuff, too.) Virtuous
circles all over the damn place.

I'm sorry, I seem to have triggered an avalanche of brain dandruff,
here. Show was fine. Wanted to find out more about some stuff and
wanted to argue about some.

finger puppets

finger puppets, originally uploaded by aesop.

These here characters are part of my contribution to A-Mart, the art supermarket at Ale and Porter in Bradford-On_Avon. The opening will be at 6.30 on Friday, and there'll be lots of stuff there from dozens of artists, including ceramics in the shape of 'tupperware' type plastic containers, t-shirts and stuff by Mark Pawson, and artists books by me and Melanie ward, amongst others, all set amidst the engagingly bizarre cerise colour scheme dreamed u for the occasion. I was quite keen on the sock puppets which will be available, though there's also a range of pinhole camera-related stuff that looks good, too.

I was over there yesterday, having gotten a lift from Linda Clark, whose driving opened up a new chapter with this inter-town run, hooray. As always, everyone was very welcoming and sympathetic about my sore back. I'm in the wars again now, having managed to introduce a fragment of prawn cracker into the surroundings of my left eyeball, which swelled up a good deal. Sarah's liberal application of ice in a selection of rubber gloves kindly supplied by viki seem to have done the trick and staved off a monocular future for a while, though I'm typing wit the affected eye still closed and a bit itchy-runny, but well within acceptable norms. ( I can see fine through it if anyone's worried, though it still feels a bit crumby). Spoiled a game of scrabble that was shaping up to be enjoyably awful.

Making Intentions Concrete

What is an artist doing when they produce an artists’ book? What can we read from the book itself about this process of making, and how would we combine it with what we would glean from talking to the artists themselves?

I want to emphasise the importance to me of combining these two
sources of information. This is because I am not trying to produce a
pure critical study of artists’ books themselves, in which case it is
arguable whether the artists’ intention is of any importance or not.
Rather, I am trying to understand what artists’ books are to artists,
and perhaps after that I may be able to concern myself with how they
seem to work in the world on their own. My angle of enquiry is not,
therefore, to look at individual artists’ books with a view to defining
characteristics, be they physical, stylistic, or aesthetic, that place
them in the category of ‘artists’ books’, or even ‘artists’ books from
period x’. When I look at the books, I will be trying to reunite them
with what their creator seems to have intended them to be, and to do
this well, I will need to have it from the artists’ themselves what
they meant to do.

One uncomfortable question that has come up is about how I would
define the field I’m going to look at. What are artists’ books? How
will I know when I have got one? Flustered, my reply has been that,
since lots of other people have failed to give any concise answer to
this question, that I would not try to either. But buried in my
earliest motivations for trying to look at books in the way I have just
been describing was my suspicion that the way to define the field was
not to try to define the objects, but to try to define, or at least
explore, the practice that produces them. I have not yet answered the
question of “what are artists’ books?” by standing up with this idea-
but I think it may be possible for me to construct an answer through my
research.

My belief is that artists who make books do so for reasons they
could express themselves: they wanted to have the various capabilities
that book forms offer. That is, (to scratch the surface, and in no
particular order), they want to have the ability to exploit books’
distributional power, their egalitarian qualities; that on the other
hand they want to use the book’s aura of luxury and the rich materials
associated with it; perhaps they wanted to have access to the familiar
narrative constructions offered by books, or perhaps they wished access
to this only to attempt to deconstruct it. And the artists who want
these powers of the book want them for two reasons: for themselves, to
assist them in the artwork’s making, and for their audience, whose
experience of the artists’ work is profoundly affected by the
connotations of the medium itself. I’ve indicated above that I have but
scratched the surface of the different reasons that artists want to use
the book medium, and perhaps for this reason of multiple points of
departure, I’m no closer to a definition than those who would take a
more historical or anecdotal approach to the quest for definition. But
on my side I have the thread, common to all works described by their
makers as artists’ books: that they all share the intention to use the
book as a way to work and a way to present intentions: as a way of
making intentions concrete.

What is an artist doing when they produce an artists’ book? What can
we read from the book itself about this process of making, and how
would we combine it with what we would glean from talking to the
artists themselves?

The above are the questions I asked myself when I began this short
essay, to guide me through it. I’ve begun by making a kind of preface
to the first of those questions: what I think artists are doing when
they produce an artists’ book. I even gave, in rough form, a couple of
examples of the sorts of power I thought artists wished to tap from the
book medium. I was careful to say that these were just a couple of
examples from a whole spectrum of uses and leverages artists got out of
books. Here, I want to enumerate how I would go about looking at how
those uses are set out and expressed. But I have a logistical problem
to face.

‘Uses’ is an inexact term in these circumstances. More apt might be
the term ‘heuristic tactics’, which patches in more effectively with
the idea that there is a whole frustrated train of intention piling in
behind what an artist actually gets round to making, and that agrees
well with my view that books are used by artists as a way to implement
their ideas, as a route through the problems of practice. What I want
to do in the paragraphs below is chart out a few of the more obvious or
accessible ‘uses’, and give a flavour of how I will access them, how I
will read them. Note at this point that I am now midway between “what
is the artist doing?” and “what can be read?” I cannot say with any
conviction what an artist was doing without verifying their intentions
with them, and I can only surmise what my well-or-ill-informed reading
might seem to suggest to me. I have returned, here, to the importance
of synthesizing my two types of information. My logistical problem is
that I have knowledge of only one artist’s intentions and practice
regarding their artist’s books, and that artist is me. I must therefore
begin with certain tastes and prejudices that are inherent in my own
practice and my own point of view: my hope and conviction are that
other book artists share at least some of these tastes and prejudices,
or they would not be working in the same medium as myself. I think it
likely, but whether or not it is true remains to be seen. The problem
can be mitigated by collecting information from artists in parallel
with my readings of their artwork, but not wholly obliterated. At the
moment, all I can do is advertise my particular areas of interest, in
the hope that it may be possible for others to see what I have
emphasised from my own particular point of view. What I have learned
here is that it is of importance for me to prepare to collect and apply
information from artists about their practice parallel to my own
readings. (I will be writing more on this shortly). Similarly, I am but
one reader of these books, and my reading of them reflects my own
encounters with them rather than those of an audience in a larger sense.

How do I read an artists’ book? How do I analyse its content? It has
become obvious from the preceding paragraphs that I would want to make
a distinction between impressions gathered by my own activity as a
reader, and those informed through dialogue with the artist. I think I
have made the importance to me of achieving a synthesis of these two
sources pretty clear.

Settling down to enumerate the critical tools I use as a reader
then, (in other words, to show the workings of the ‘uses’ referred to
above), I explored various ways of laying out what I seemed to be doing
as I read. Various hierarchies and orders of separation evolved and
were discarded. Eventually I saw three sets of paired methods or ways.
I don’t see these as opposites, but as parallel ways of looking which
often inform one another’s outlook, but sometimes contradict one
another antagonistically. As you will see, the readings they create
account somewhat for the shifting, multiple reading that artists’ books
give us.

1: narrative analysis and structure analysis (structure in the sense of material, of sculpture)

2: things we can read in the book, and things we must infer from artistic intention.

3: authorial intention and reader’s experience (the book as method and the book as medium)

The first pair give us our first contact with the book. The syntax
of the imagery and its arrangement as an object are inseperable, but
are amenable to distinct ways of seeing the book. The melding of
narrative and iconography, and the way in which these are concretized
and expressed in the physical structure of the book and its materials,
are part of two indistinctly separate realms. That of the material
belonging to the book as a story, and that of the book as a physical
object. Artists’ books always develop these realms simultaneously, but
our analysis of them must draw them out separately, the better to see
how they relate to one another. One of the ways artists’ books are
often designated is in their self-conscious use of their form, and this
is partly what is being looked at here. Our task in analysing this, is
to apply the methods of narratology- whether textual or pictorial,
whilst preserving the vital importance of our physical- tactile and
spatial- experience of the book. We must always recombine our
impressions and analysis: not just because the artist’s book itself has
made a synthesis of them, but also because, in the book’s
self-conscious way, it will often compose antitheses and whip backwards
and forwards in its relationship of story, image and material. There
can be elaborate jokes and puns and ironies concealed at every level:
sometimes a book will mesh its materials so closely that every piece
supports another, and sometimes the material and the construction will
seem to snidely mock the efforts of the story. We must be aware of
this, and prepared to acknowledge it and express it in our analyses.

I have written above of “our impressions” and this leads me into the
second pair, things we can read in the book, and things we must infer
from artistic intention.

It’s not so much, I think, a question of very carefully wearing a
set of imaginary blinkers to bracket out my experience and inference of
artists’ intentions in my reading as it is of acknowledging my need to
verify them (the artist’s intentions) if I am to pursue my method of
describing artists’ books through the practice that produces them. I’ve
written already about my intention to join together my reading with
what I can gain from talking to the artists, so I will not repeat it
here. However, at this point in my discussion of my critical tools, I
am speaking of my reading. We are imagining an analysis of a book, and
what I am doing at this point is staking off areas where I seem to be
unearthing an archaeology of intention (“Does this structure correspond
to the text in the way I suspect?”,“Is this method of producing a mark
an allusion to Etruscan art, and therefore an allusion to this or that
political theme?”). The point of this exercise is to be able to return
to them and verify them, and to be aware of the tension, the
unknowingness, that becomes part of my reading, part of my discovery of
the book. This unknowingness and the experience it creates feeds back
down to my analysis of narrative and structure too.

The third pairing, artistic intention and readers’ experience, is
not immediately concerned with the analysis of a book on its own,
though it requires both personal knowledge of the book (reader’s
experience), and verification of the artists’ intentions. The other two
pairs are essentially synthetic: I am aiming in them to combine
impressions from distinct sources- from narrative and physical. from
personal reading and from the artists’ intention. Here, I am separating
out the material that has successfully become part of the book for the
reader, and that which remains inaccessible to the general reader, an
artifact in the mind of the artist. I spoke above of artists wishing to
make books for two reasons: for themselves, to assist them in the
artwork’s making, and for their audience, whose experience of the
artists’ work is profoundly affected by the connotations of the medium
itself. This separation of impressions should make clear which effects
belong to which reasoning.
For the audience. (The book as medium).

By separating out my analyses in the manner I have done, I now have
a series of impressions of narrative and pictorial constructions, and
how they relate to physical constructions in the book. I have a number
of notes on materials and styles employed, and I have chased these down
to their referents in several cases by asking the artist what they
meant by them. I have also collected some blunt material on the
artist’s method of working, on how they collect and refine their ideas,
of how a book takes shape, and their responses about why they have
chosen this way to produce their work. What I aim to do now is to sort
these things into materials which show up in the reading of the work,
and that which has been constructed and inferred with help from the
artist. There will also be material- impressions from my reading, and
material from the artist’s comments- that doesn’t say very much about
the content of the book, but says a lot about how it is made, and why
it is made the way it is. They’re the idea equivalent of tool marks, or
of the discarded chippings that tell you how something was made. Some
of this will become my evidence for the heuristic power of books.

For the artist. (The book as method).

My discussions with the artists would be supported by my own
impressions from their work. Here I am searching for material about
what the artist’s aim was in adopting the form they have. This harks
back to my earlier note about my belief that artists have adopted the
book form because they want to have access to the book’s various
capabilities. So here I am looking for admissions that they wanted to
distribute material, that they wanted a way to deal with a complex
metaphor that needed the particular staging of a book, that there were
particular materials they wanted to work with. Perhaps books were a way
to set out the boundaries of a project. Perhaps the limitations imposed
by the covers set up a logical space within which certain ideas could
be worked on. And so on. I hope I will find artists telling me as much,
and I will find other evidence in what I will call the arbitration of
the book. By this I mean its boundaries- the choices of expressive
material and style, the physical construction and the chosen methods of
producing poetic and narrative effects. These are the “tool-marks” I
wrote of above. Joined to the material I hope to collect on artists’
aims, I hope to be able to put together their aims with the way they
have achieved them, and show how the book has been used as a tool to
achieve them. It is worth noting, that while this is often going to
show how the book form helps to achieve certain physical effects (of
distribution, of material, of form, for example), it will also, I hope,
show how effective forms of practice are engendered here. For example,
how an idea is carefully arranged within the logical space of the book,
or how competing agendas are set against one another using the book’s
ability to contain multiple media and multiple vocalites. There is also
the ability of the book to contain and separate ideas, and this has
bearing on the artist’s method of working: how they relate to their
sense of a continuing life’s work. Managing complex ideas within the
discrete spaces allowed by books might allow freedom otherwise hard-won
outside. These examples are effects whose appearance in the book is of
course physical, but whose existence is owed to the fact that the book
form makes their arrangement, and the thought that goes into it,
possible.

Looking at these three pairs from a slightly different angle, it is
possible to tabulate the various strategies and analyses that become
accessible through them.

Firstly, our narrative/structure pair allows us to use textual and
narrative analysis, allows us to break up plot and poetic device and
the deployment and expressiveness of imagery. We can follow the
structure of the form and of the story and track the relationship
between different vocalities as the book progresses.

Next, we turn to the relationship between what we can read and what
we can verify. This allows us to separate and later combine the
experiences of the reader and the intentions of the author. Amongst
this is our experience as a reader of stories, our reader’s involvement
with and emplotment in the situations and structures evoked. we start
to glimpse some of the intentions of the artist to enclose and enfold
us in the experience of the artwork, to produce constructions within
which ideas can be unfurled, and we can verify this intention by
application to the artist themselves. Here we have a sort of critical
distance emerging, where we have started to set aside our engagement
and put it next to the intentions we want to glean from the contact we
have with the artists themselves. When we put them back together again,
it will be less subjectively.

In our third pairing we can set the effects of the book aside
separately from its’ makers reasons for making it so. Our aim is to
expose strategies of making here, and strategies that we glimpsed
before of enclosement, of temporary construction, of logical space, of
distribution, etc, can here be set out more or less literally, because
we are now looking at intentions and at the symptoms of planning and
constructing (the “tool marks”) that we can find in the books. But the
book’s importance here is eclipsed by the intention that brought it
about. Here, we are trying to find out what the artist is doing when
they make an artists’ book, just like we were at the beginning, only
now we have far more of an idea of what they have achieved and how they
have achieved it. We are far closer to finding out why they are doing
it than we were.