When art and literature converge, the result is a unique and compelling aesthetic experience
by Lynn Stegner
For someone who writes books, it’s a little disconcerting to discover that there are book-like objects out there whose literary content is not their raison d’être. Sometimes text is merely equal to other components, or it serves to inform image. And sometimes text, however meritorious, is ornamental, a fate actually worse than not being present at all. When is a book not purely a portable delivery system for an intellectual or aesthetic experience through language? When and how does the book become art unto itself?
Delicate paintings on rice paper illustrate the 16th- and 17th-century Nara picture books from Japan.
What’s important and consoling to realize is that the operative word is narrative, and narratives do not rely exclusively upon words, although frequently books and words are mistaken for the same thing because they reside together within the same holding environment. The Nara ehon, or Nara picture books of 16th and 17th century Japan, are stunning early examples of this broad characterization. Nara ehon is an illuminated otogi zoshi, a genre of fabulous short narratives popular in medieval Japan. The authors were anonymous and the illustrations unsigned but thought to be the work of Buddhist painters. Graceful, fluid calligraphy alternates with vividly pigmented, delicate, and meticulously painted interpretations on rice paper embellished with gold and silver foils. Vermilion and a particularly intense turquoise-green were favored colors, while most often the bindings were navy blue, with designs of autumn grasses in gold. Nara ehon are theatrical in both intent and presentation—indeed, some of the tales whose themes concern the origins of shrines and holy places were believed to possess talismanic powers; reading the book was analogous to making a pilgrimage.
Of course, there are thousands of rare old volumes going back 500 years whose textual contents have long since been rendered completely—and, in some cases, comically—wrong, but whose historical importance, artistic beauty, or sheer virtuosity of craftsmanship elevate them to the status and capacity of art. Quite often the most talented artists of the time were hired to contribute to the book, so that the illustrations and woodcuts tended to preserve the book’s value, while time and scarcity worked their cumulative monetary magic.
Fore-edge paintings of Emily Brontë and John Milton add beauty and value to these popular volumes.
In today’s pixeled, digitized, disposable culture, there is something refreshingly atavistic about 21st and its commitment to the slow, handmade, hard-earned path to beauty.
Fore-edge painting, a novelty embellishment cultivated among the British around the middle of the 17th century, was briefly popularized during a 60-year period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Initially, fore-edge markings served a practical purpose: Because they were often considerable in size and bulk, medieval books and manuscripts were stored horizontally, with the title or owner’s name recorded on the fore-edge to spare the librarian undue exertions while hunting down a specific tome. With better bindings, the books went vertical and the title migrated to the spine, leaving the fore-edge for less functional matters, like delicate watercolor paintings. The technique was deceptively straightforward: The artist fanned the edges of the book, slightly and evenly, securing them in that state with a vise; he then painted the image on the fanned edges, let them dry, released the book from the vise, and made flush its pages. The last step was gilding the edges, which effectively concealed the painting.
Codex Espangliensis brings together text and collage imagery to create a performance piece.
Santa Fe resident Susan Foote collects these intriguing books, among them single, split, double, and the remarkable panoramic fore-edges, in which the miniature painting wanders from top to fore and around the bottom edge. The double is considered the most collectible, Foote explains, as it reveals a painting when the pages are fanned one way, and an entirely different scene when fanned in the opposite direction. Nearly half of all the fore-edges produced were volumes of English poetry, though the paintings did not always relate to the book’s content—“a golfing scene on a book of poetry, for instance, or even erotica”—and these Foote finds far less compelling than watercolors that articulate aspects of the narrative within. “Some of them were mass-produced, pastorals, for instance. The secret picture was a novelty, maybe intended to increase sales. They even had people sitting in shop windows painting fore-edges.”
Toward the end of the 19th century, a French art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, contrived a hybrid presentation known as a livre d’artiste, which sought to promote the careers of Parisian artists, some of whom went on to become the 20th century’s most celebrated modern painters—Bonnard, Matisse, Miró, Chagall, Ernst, and Picasso, to name only a handful. Vollard was joined by other publishers, among them famed art connoisseur Henry Kahnweiler, and the deluxe editions strengthened and expanded the art market from which they had evolved. The books featured alternating text and image, and though they may have been complementary in a somewhat detached manner, there was no deep communion between the two; in fact, more often than not, the artist and writer never met. The structural components of the books themselves were made according to the editor’s impeccable taste, with high-quality materials. But there was nothing that took into account the form of the book itself as integral to the overall artistic expression, and that is what distinguishes these productions from the “creations” of what are known today as “artists’ books.”
Artists’ books bring together several major traditions and trends among bookwrights: fine printing (letterpress, handset type, and limited editions), livres d’artistes, bookbinding and other structural elements of the codex, serious literature, serious photography, and sometimes even musical accompaniment. Probably the earliest artists’ books were created by William Blake (1757–1827). For instance, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he wrote the text, made the illustrations, and printed and hand-colored the pages. In doing so, Blake was a hundred years ahead of his time. Today, there are countless fine presses and publishers around the world making books that are unmistakable objects of art and that sell for commensurate prices. Typically, they are intensely synergistic projects involving collaborations among author, translator, artist, typographer, printer, and binder.
Felicia Rice, who owns and directs Moving Parts Press in Santa Cruz, California, notes that “things are really exploding in the artists’ book industry.” With 30 years’ experience as a typographer, editor, designer, and publisher, and with books in collections ranging from the Bodleian Library of Oxford, England, to the Whitney Museum in New York, Rice is considered one of the best. “People have been moving a long way from the traditional idea of a book, exploring structures and sculptural aspects. Often content is almost an aside. But,” she insists, “I’m a content person; I’m not ready to leave that behind. Structure is form plus content.”
James Drake’s City of Tells is an interactive installation that includes a book, a painting,
Historically in America there have been plenty of merely beautiful books—handset type, gilt edges, marbled pages, elegantly crafted bindings, and classic or literary texts. These books were about methods and quality of production, but not the exploration of what may be called the conceptual space of bookness. Rice’s most recent project, Codex Espangliensis, is a performance text revolving around the great Mexican crisis in California, taking up issues such as NAFTA, globalization, pop culture, and border identities and politics. Guillermo Gómez-Peña contributed texts and poems that were integrated with collage imagery by Enrique Chagoya, while Rice structured the book as an accordion-fold, using letterpress and photoengraving. “My job was to incorporate everything into a unified whole. The pages are dynamic,” she says. “The book performs the text.”
Farther north, in Berkeley, Julie Chen, of Flying Fish Press, focuses on the sculptural aspects of bookwork, playing with nontraditional shapes and laser cutouts that result in displayable books that she has both written and crafted. Though the books can be read, they land clearly on the form, rather than the content, side of the equation; many don’t even resemble books. Bon Bon Mots conjures a box of chocolates, but instead contains five bookworks, each distinctly shaped with letterpress text and images. Ode to a Grand Staircase, whose text is not words but an Eric Satie score, is constructed in a layered, vertical, French-door format, and sells for $525. These pieces—book sculptures, they might be called—while artistic in vision and design, are clearly intended to engage one’s fancy, if not one’s bank account.
Suzanne Vilmain, of Santa Fe, who worked in the field of graphic design for years, now makes one-of-a-kind objects in which books have been assimilated or merged with other media. “I want to turn book forms around,” she says, “to take found objects and transform them into booklike forms.” One of her pieces is a woman’s handbag that opens to the pages of a book; its base can be released as well, exposing another set of pages. “But content has to speak to form,” explains Vilmain. “I conceived of the purse as a woman’s psyche, her private territory. I used the actual contents of my own handbag, dumped them onto a Xerox machine, and made images. So there was interplay between what is traditionally off-limits or taboo—the private world of a woman’s handbag—and rendering it readable.” Vilmain has also created a chrome toaster whose sides fall open to expose a book made of old newsprint that is theoretically destined to be burned, a thematic gesture toward the book-burning scene in Fahrenheit 451. “It’s a performance piece,” she says. “Except it’s never performed, never actually burned.”
A 1930s toaster serves as a thematic representation of book burning.
When is a book not purely a portable delivery system for an intellectual or aesthetic experience through language? When and how does the book become art unto itself?
Photography is a latecomer to artists’ books for the simple reason that it is a relatively new technology. After Alfred Stieglitz’ Camera Work (1903–1917), there’s 21st: Publishers of Fine Art Photography Books, which began in 1998 as 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography. Intended to present a survey of the current status of photography in the world, the Journal anthology appears only every few years in order that it might “look at the larger sweep of things over time,” according to Lance Speer, a contributing editor and one of 21st’s three partners. 21st produces books that are “truly a synergy of three elements—photography, text, and bookmanship,” Speer states. They’re interested in “how a literary voice can resonate with a photographic voice,” and indeed, viewers of any one of these books can’t help but sense an intensity of thematic commerce among all the players.
Though they publish a trade version of the Journal, above all they’re dedicated to the creation of strikingly beautiful limited editions that sell for equally striking prices. The museum edition, which can take years to produce, is priced at $9,000. Of the collaborations and single-artist monographs, there are several levels, the platinum series being the highest, many of which sell out before they’re even available. These books offer not only an aesthetic experience but a sensual one. “When you open one of our books, the room is filled with the smell of ink, leather, paper,” Speer explains. “There’s a tooth to fine paper, a feel, a sensibility to it.”
In today’s pixeled, digitized, disposable culture, there is something refreshingly atavistic about 21st and its commitment to the slow, handmade, hard-earned path to beauty. Sally Mann, a recent offering, is, in a word, magnificent: Mann’s poems breathe into her photographs and seem to animate a subliminal impression of drapery actually moving against and around the natural fluidity of the human figure. The platinum prints are tonally so lush and soft, and yet so deeply detailed, that they resemble images from a dream just slipping away. From the Twinrocker paper ($8 per sheet) to the vellum spine to the signed archival prints, Sally Mann is probably a bargain at $10,000. The book captured a prestigious Lucie Award in October 2005 for the company, which was named Best Photography Book Publisher of the Year by the International Photography Awards Committee. The newly released volume will go to collectors, special-collection rooms of libraries, museums, and the like. “I’m not even my own demographic,” Speer admits. “Our blessing and our curse is that nobody really knows what our books are like until they stand in front of them. And when they do, they enter a kind of virtual museum.”
Moving away from both the physicality of the codex itself and the book as an artistic space containing image and text, there are new adventures with books that have broken boundaries to present “an experiential work of art,” as Frans Lanting describes it. Lanting has been called the world’s premier wildlife photographer, and with ample reason—16 books, two dozen international awards, including a knighthood from his native country of the Netherlands, plus inclusion on a list of best nonfiction books of the 20th century. The listed book, Eye to Eye: Intimate Encounters with the Animal World, is a large-format trade edition composed of full-page photographs. What makes the encounters “intimate” has to do in part with the sheer scale of the photos, the forced, in-your-face contact, and in part with Lanting’s marvelous ability to visually cross perimeters and reach into the personal space of the animal, to capture mood and individual personality. Lastly and most intriguing, there is the choreography of the book.
Signed archival prints, original poetry, and exquisite paper make Sally Mann a rare collectible.
“I hear music when these visual possibilities are before me,” Lanting explains. He carefully selected images on the basis of color and substance, then sequenced them in such a way that the very process of moving through the book, spread by spread, actively engages the viewer in what Lanting calls “a kind of cinematic, rhythmically unfolding experience.” Except for a few discreet captions, text was shifted to the back of the book so that there would be “minimum interference from the rational side of the brain.” The pages turn and pass, much as musical phrases, while the three major sections of the work function as symphonic movements in an overarching narrative about the continuity, the deep connectedness between humans and other animals. At the same time, Lanting tried to “develop a visual language. The images need to move people emotionally and aesthetically,” he insists.
In Lanting’s newest project, titled Life: A Journey Through Time, there will be audible music: Philip Glass is composing a one-hour score to accompany the viewing of the book, seven movements corresponding to the seven sections, which in turn correspond to the major eras of life. “Our sense of time is so short,” Lanting says. “I wanted to look at nature across and through time. My mission has been to separate the layers, from the Big Bang to the present.”
In spring 2005, SITE Santa Fe exhibited James Drake’s City of Tells. Drake is a widely known artist living in Santa Fe whose work over the past 30 years has evolved from postmodern welded-steel sculpture to multimedia installation art. City of Tells involves four large-scale charcoal-on-paper drawings, one of which is heroic in size and conceit—a 12′ x 32′ group study that takes in Drake’s family and friends as well as characters from art and history. Then there is a video triptych projected on the wall in a 15-minute loop that features, among other things, feral hogs ravening a banquet table groaning with holiday fare, which Drake set up and filmed in the wilds of Big Bend, Texas. Finally, a limited-edition book sits on a pedestal before the largest of the drawings. “It just made sense to do the book,” Drake remarks. “There is the expansive mural component of the experience. I call it ‘walking the drawing.’ The book becomes the intimate part of the experience.”
The edge between bookness and otherness has been grafted and pushed and blurred during the past 50 years to such an extent that, in some cases, the word book is an adjective and not a noun
So what is it exactly that makes a book an object of art? Its structure, the nature of its physical components, the quality and originality of its images, and the way these images converse with text; the paper, the ink, the boards, the typography; even the leftover space on the pages or spreads, and the way it articulates with used space. Also, the sequencing of the pages and the estimated rate at which they might be turned and, ultimately, the sensuous beauty of the thing itself—these are some of the criteria.
The edge between bookness and otherness has been grafted and pushed and blurred during the past 50 years to such an extent that, in some cases, the word book is an adjective and not a noun. Even lettering has morphed into other forms: Toko Shinoda, one of Japan’s master calligraphers and an internationally acclaimed artist, has for decades been making abstract paintings and lithographs based on Japanese characters.
Renowned photographer Frans Lanting explores the deep connection between humans and other animals.
The book has evolved from a relatively durable, low-maintenance, movable repository of knowledge, often artfully expressed, beautifully illustrated, or handsomely made and decorated. It has become a type of artistic space: like a canvas, though in some ways far more complex; like the orchestra pit of a symphony hall, though there are fewer players; and like a theatre performance, but private and endlessly repeatable. It is a place where art can happen, either individually or collaboratively. And while the fundamental, hinged, multiplanar structure of the book has proven to be fairly mutable, the vitality of bookness is irrepressible.
From the Winter/Spring 2006 issue
