reading the library | artists’ books and art worlds
ONE
In many writings about artists’ books, there is a tendency towards history, identifying art histories and practices that converge on the artists’ book and signify artists’ books as art. It’s as if that history, or that interpretation of history, calls this practice into being, shapes it. In The Century of Artists' Books , an extensive survey of artists’ books to the mid 1990s, Johanna Drucker identifies artists’ books in every modern period of art. If historical narratives and the alternatives they pose can shape these practices, so too can collecting or ‘the collection’. Collections of artists’ books trace a complex of visual connections. Two publicly owned and accessible collections of artists’ books are housed in Queensland: in the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) and in Artspace Mackay, the Tate Adams Collection having been resituated from the city’s public library. Libraries and private collectors are the most active collectors of artists’ books with most state libraries and many university libraries holding collections of artists’ books.
More recently, as an advocate and critic of artists’ books, Drucker is calling for a ‘canon’ of artists’ books that provides a point of reference for collections and for criticism. Drucker is too well read and too critical to approach such an idea without having considered discursive formation. Even so, her approach manifests as a kind of historicised and critical typology. Initially, she proposes an extended cataloguing system for the library, one that should be assimilated readily into the library catalogue. For Drucker, this kind of structure or construction – a system of differentiation, another way of knowing – is almost a matter of critical responsibility that brings modality into sharp register.
In the last few years, there have been several public forums and investigations of artists’ books in Australia (various multiples, print and paper fairs notwithstanding). Artspace Mackay, under the directorship of Robert Heather, has presented two national forums. A multitude of practices attempt to explain to us what artists’ books are and confer status on them as art, as book, as artists’ books. Artists have produced, published and distributed books to serve multiple aesthetic ends and processes, not least of which was to provide a critical intervention upon the art world and art object. The Mackay forums have been attentive and inquiring, inviting critics, historians, curators, artists and collectors to talk through some of the more sticky questions. As these questions and propositions of art form, medium and genre proliferate, there are expectations that such notions can do something for artists’ books. And that they can do something for the patterns of the collections of said works. Such discussions might also indicate an anxiety about artists’ books. Anxieties erupt as a result of naming just as they might erupt from open-endedness.
There are sound reasons why artists’ books accumulate more readily in the library. Both SLQ and Artspace Mackay maintain their collections in ‘reading rooms’ in which visitors or viewers can interact with these works. David Carrier points to two ways of coming to know artworks – direct experience and by reading about them. Even though the library contains much art writing, these reading rooms provide only one way of knowing these works in an overtly direct and experiential way. With only a catalogue entry for information, the viewer is on her own. Encounters with these works can seem or feel incomplete because our eyes do not move between work and written commentary. In this sense, the logic of Drucker’s emphasis on the catalogue becomes apparent. Galleries and museums are spaces that we move through and this movement forms another kind of narrative. Galleries collect and exhibit artists’ books differently, in a different way and for a different purpose, to libraries. Galleries collect and exhibit artists’ books, it seems, when they are part of a broader oeuvre such as Fluxus or under the rubric of ‘Prints and Drawings’. These contingencies raise questions of how we come to know these works as artists’ books topologically and typologically. An articulation of types is not tantamount to an articulation of spatialised relationships.
In permitting the works to be permanently available in reading rooms, the library reinforces a kind of bookishness that, in turn, is consistent with the role of the library. We sit. We handle books. We read them. Matthew Battles argues one of the central tasks of the library is to efficiently dispense books into the hands of readers. In galleries artworks never or rarely stand alone – they are exhibited in sequence and in relation – but in libraries, even though linked with other art through its housing as a collection, artists’ books are ordinarily experienced on their own, as individual works. Yet exhibition spaces and practices in libraries render other experiences possible. The works then have the task of reinforcing or disrupting habituated experiences of books and patterns of reading. This involves handling and the haptic in ways that implicate a corporeal necessity. Our ontological relationship with books and art is shaped through various cognitive, critical and somatic capacities. Questions of the everyday and the relational seem to have some import here. Relating is a type of knowing or getting to know and through those processes or exchanges, akin to tacit knowledge, we might arrive at a reading. This tacit experience, a kind of intimacy, calls for a form of sensory knowledge or critical perception.
In large part, and by necessity, as Jorge Luis Borges observes, the library is unlimited and periodic and, as contemporary observers note, libraries suffer as a result of limitations such as funding cuts and lack of space. With more funding and more physical space, a library can appear to expand like a fold across the cosmological and labyrinthine perplexities of knowledge, information and experience. When libraries expand they do so virtually and physically, internally and externally. The library, says Borges, is a universe. Collections are vast. Catalogues are infinite. Not in a Euclidean sense but in their forking and folding. Libraries, like other collecting institutions, come to shape our understanding of artists’ books. How can or do we read the library?
Through a field such as artists’ books, the particularities of collecting practices of art galleries and libraries can be plotted. If the majority of artists’ books are collected by libraries, as artists’ books, then perhaps this propensity speaks to the ways in which libraries, as Battles proposes, have been a battleground of competing notions of what books mean to us. A question, in this context, might not be whether these works are artists’ books but how the broadly defined purpose of the library implicates these works. This purpose, in turn, produces an art for the library – an art of the library – that signifies, is exchanged and is collected within the logic and economies of books. As Battles says,
any collection of books contains the seeds of nearly numberless alternatives and contradictions. Although a canon is a constructed thing, the universalising tendencies that oppose canonisation are themselves no less constructed. Ultimately, even the universal library is less a true compendium of the totality of human knowledge – less a model of the universe – than simply another kind of ritual representation of collective wisdom.
To have a history is to know through a particular kind of narrative or discursive practice. Drucker appeals to the power of discourse and the orders it can produce. Artists’ books take shape in the library in ways they cannot or do not in the gallery. For Drucker, what can be produced is a realisation of the space of the book and the book as media - more so than art form or genre although Drucker has made claims to both - and of media fluency, materiality and media specificity. Subsequently, having identified a field of ‘book-related activity’, Drucker adamantly proposes that book-like objects or altered books are not artists’ book even though the libraries catalogue them as such. This materiality suggests that, like other art forms or media-based inquiry, an artist’s book is integrally and critically of its medium, as a book and as a medium where many media and technology converge.
TWO
If a book is no longer the sum of its parts, then, in matters of books, questions emerge in relation to sign. In this context, such questions might follow the paths of the resemblance and representation. As the most prolific collector of artists’ books, the State Library of Queensland did something unprecedented when it partnered with Craft Queensland to commission artists’ books by women artists to commemorate Queensland’s centenary of (non-Indigenous) women’s suffrage and the 40 th anniversary of Indigenous people’s suffrage. Curator Jacqueline Armitstead, who is better known as a public art curator, was commissioned to develop the brief and curate the project, Sufferance, which featured work by 11 artists. With press materials that included statements such as ‘breathing new life into a little known art form’ and ‘pushing boundaries’ coupled with curatorial statements that referred to artists’ books as a format some intentions were made clear as if a corrective was on its way. Despite the pejorative language, this project possibly makes a point about how the library itself collects and catalogues artists’ books. At its most simple and efficacious, in much the same way that an art museum or gallery confers the status of ‘art’ upon a work, so too, the library might confer the status of ‘artist’s book’. Having commissioned artists’ books and having written artists’ books in the title, artist statements, press materials and the essay, the works just are artists’ books.
‘Sufferance’ is a word – which appears to be borrowed from Janine Haines speech referenced in the catalogue - that sits obliquely across double meanings. It refers to both tacit permission and reluctant acceptance. This suggestion of something not freely given, somehow coerced or begrudged rather than deserved. Something so tenuous that it might also be taken away, granted only in kind, by empty words rather than meaningful actions. Given the emphasis of this project on artists’ books, there is surprisingly no critical attention paid to ideas about books. The texts and statement associated with the exhibition reiterate that they are artists’ books, ignoring the critical attention that has been paid to these works. In fact there is little in the catalogue and the writing that surrounds the exhibition about artists’ books as if the works are self-evident. If the exhibition and the works therein are object lessons, then perhaps that in itself warranted investigation and communication beyond the art/craft tensions that Christine Ballinger refers to in her brief introduction. The result of these comments is to point out that these works are not books (in a normative literary sense). The project presents a conundrum of its own internal logic, of whether the works are or are not books, with a degree of ambivalence. As Ballinger herself asks, reiterating that ambivalence, ‘does it really matter?’. Here our critical perception and sensory knowledge might start twitching because ambivalence about books is not symptomatic of our times.
Anxieties surround books, anxieties stemming equally from their impermanence and permanence. While, for decades, a biblioclasm has been foretold - predictions of the end of books - there are other anxieties too about the proliferation and commodification of books. Perhaps these anxieties extend to artists’ books as the Artspace Mackay Forums seem to attest. In negotiating the end of books, and McLuhan argued for books to be put to new purposes, perhaps one of the paths of reinvention is to exhort the art object, in apparent contradiction to the drive of dematerialising the art object through multiples, new technologies and the exploration of books as an anti-gallery/exhibition strategy. While there is more to books than the codex – for example, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s writing about the book as arboreal root systems, filiation and linear dualist unities - the works in Sufferance seem disinterested in books.
In the topologies of change or transition, inequalities are reproducible by many means. As part of the project, artists from practices including video, installation, textiles, photography, ceramics and jewellery, undertook research in the library, investigating documents such as books, diaries, maps, speeches and legislation and the forms of books. The intention was for the artists to ‘extend their artforms into artists’ books’ or to ‘practice as you practice but call it a book’. Curatorial and exhibition practices are narrative and locative acts too that tell through their own inclusions and exclusions, competition and judgement. So there are possibly more stories here than there are books. There are likenesses to books. There are signs of books. There are extracts from books. There are pages. There are folios. There is interleaving. There are readings. There are biographies. There are histories. There is linearity. There is textuality. There is interiority. There is memory. There are signatures. There is stitching and binding. There are margins. There is slowness. There is openness. Indeed, there are some physical codex-like books. While that’s probably sufficient in this period of assemblage, simulation, signification, discontinuity, cynicism and remediation, this was not addressed as a curatorial inquiry.
Devoid of subversion or performativity, reiterations of the sensuous-domestic-craft-feminine as representative of the traditional role and spaces of women do not convincingly negotiate or symbolise the transitional personal and political powers that are bound with the franchise. New gender regimes overwrite the historic, rendering it remote and unreadable. As women became involved in public life in this very public way, exchanges between public and private were destabilised, technologised and rearticulated and women moved more readily between those spaces. P ositing ‘consistent artistic practice’ as an allegory of suffrage or activism, as the ‘expression of interest’ document had, does not resonate with the underlying drive to create conditions whereby women, as various histories seem to indicate, could have more pleasurable lives beyond the confines of home, the reliance on male providers and compulsory child-bearing. Mona Ryder’s installation, Trust Me, and Barbara Heath and Malcolm Enright’s sculptures, Freewheeling, reference the tenuously screened or curtained spaces that divide those realms, while Heath and Enright make purposeful references to the bicycle as a technology that enabled women’s movement – mobility and mobilisation – picking up speed into those public spaces.
In the recollection of historical events, this eventual granting of the vote included some women, while excluding others in the pursuit of the modern state or imagined community. For all the importance of suffrage and other movements, a voice (or vote), and its implication of orality and oral traditions, for one woman is not a voice for all nor could it ever be considered as such. Speaking to the discontinuous nature of history, whiteness and nation, Debra Porch’s installation, Magnified Memory – New Meanings, considers the significance of ‘having a voice’ in relation to Asian historical and contemporary experience. Ryder has stitched ‘trust me’ on the flag encapsulating some dissatisfactions and cynicisms with and within the polity but also pointing to the profound lack of trust in women to participate in political life.
While the ‘bookness’ of many works in this exhibition might be questionable, several works visualise history and the library – its vastness and voluminousness. Works by Judy Watson, Judith Kentish and Leah King-Smith and Duncan Smith and Health and Enright have foregrounded this research trajectory and relationship to the archive as a kind of visual archaeology. In the DVD Matrices, King-Smith, having taken on the role as artist/researcher, is like a hacker who has permeated the archival grid to reshape and interleave multiple narratives of history. King-Smith and Smith, with a notable absence of books, have discarded it for more dispersed approaches and media, emphasising other traditions of history. In doing the work of history and commemoration - Kentish’s dyed, bleached and stitched textile, from pages of longing … the abstract diarist, labours its history and marks its time - most of these artists have visualised history by mapping the past, evoking subjectivities, power relations and discontinuities. With history wars upon us, Watson’s folio of copperplate prints, A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood, explores the governmental scrutiny and surveillance of ‘caste’, an obsession inextricably bound with genocide and assimilation and that saw generations of children stolen and saw Indigenous women and girls forcibly interred as ‘domestics’ (perhaps the domestic environment isn’t the sensuous traditional place of women). In noting the preponderance of Aboriginal blood, the destruction of familial and tribal bloodlines. Stolen land, stolen children, stolen women, stolen histories.
Even though Sufferance communicates ambivalence and uncertainty about books, perhaps predicated on the fact that only one of the artists had produced books before, in the library these works become books. And this will be more evident in the way that the works are held and stored, the way we encounter them in the reading room. The exhibition catalogue shelved. Kentish’s flat textile rolled like a scroll of Alexandrian antiquity. A plastic case for King-Smith and Smith’s DVD that opens like a book. Judy Watson’s folio of prints stacked like so many pages. Heath and Enright’s radiating bicycle spokes disassembled and nested like a book signature. So, as for the end of books, the library itself, in its infinite forks and folds, stacks and shelves, proffers its own answer – there is certainly no end of books.
NOTES
Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books. 1995
See Helen Cole , ‘TO [G]LOVE AND TO HOLD: Artists’ books in Australian
libraries’, First National Artists’ Books Forum. Artspace Mackay.
February 2004.
http://www.artspacemackay.com.au/artists_books/first_national_artists_book_forum_papers/helen_cole_paper
See http://www.artspacemackay.com.au/artists_books/artists_books_collection
Having inherited the collection, Robert Heather discusses some of the
issues associated with holding it within the gallery. ‘Welcome’. First
National Artists’ Books Forum. Artspace Mackay. February 2004.
http://www.artspacemackay.com.au/artists_books/first_national_artists_book_forum_papers/robert_heather_paper
Johanna Drucker, ‘Critical Issues/Examplary Works’. Bonefolder. Vol 1. No 2 2005. http://www.philobiblon.com/bonefolder
David Carrier , Writing About Visual Art. New York: Allworth Books co-published with School of Visual Arts. 2003. 20
‘ Aesthetics after the end of art: an interview with Susan Buck-Morss -
Aesthetics and the Body Politic’. Interview by Grant H. Kester. Art Journal, Spring, 1997. Accessed 1 September 2005. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n1_v56/ai_19827690/pg_2
Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2004. 210
Janine Haines , ‘Suffrage to Sufferance: 100 Years of Women in
Parliament’. Paper from the series ‘Trust the Women: Women in Federal
Parliament’. Papers on Parliament, no. 17. Department of the Senate,
Parliament House, Canberra. 1992.
There is much airing of these tensions of late. For example, see Susan
Ostling’s curatorial rationale for ARC Biennial,
http://www.arcbiennial.com or Jacqueline Millner, ‘Conceptual
Crochet/Conceptual Beauty: The revitalisation of craft and aesthetics
in Australian Contemporary Art’. Eyeline. No 57. 30 - 32
