Changing horses in Mid-Stream: The Making of Artists’ Books
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Art and books, yes. And then that odd term, artists' books. As wordsmiths, some of us at least, we should have thought of a better term by now. Let me propose, provisionally, printoscopes.
I don't think it will take on, though. Above all, it doesn't sound archaic enough. Our practice should have rather more in common with pottery, macrame and trad jazz; with chaps who drive vintage MGs.
But, as the elder child of Words and Images, I have come easily to this practice. Forty years ago, I used a stone-age photocopier to run off a series of what I called “poemprints”. They can easily be forgotten. Of, the paper - ugh! - not another word. Let me go back even further.
My father created hand-made books in his later years. Earlier he had produced woodcuts, linocuts, etchings. Ink was like mother's milk to me and the smell of good paper filled me with delight. The only kind of shop I really liked was the stationer/newsagent's. Massed notebooks and coloured pencils could even give a boy pleasure. And talk at home, in my teenage years, included the merits of different fonts. Some verged on wicked, others were admirable. Some were merely eccentric: Gill Sans was not our cup of tea, for example.
Our interest in books is, of course, far more than a word-and-sentence interest. Book covers are crucial to the sales pitch, sometimes symbolically powerful, as in that great image for Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Illustrations also play their memorable part: all the way, for me, from Edmund Dulac's haunting art nouveau images to Tove Jansson's little Moomintroll pictures.
Fair enough, especially in our formative reading years, but for some visual types at least (type was an accidental pun here) typography can play its real part in a book's enchantment. For me there was long-term magic in Faber & Faber's classically modern typography. In fact, I would buy volumes of Faber poetry just for the appearance, in some cases: even those of Richard Murphy and C.A. Trypanis, say.
These were some of the stepping stones leading me towards artists' books, or printoscopes. Perhaps I was also yearning for a more beautiful correlation to my father's faintly scruffy, frequently faulty, hand-printed booklets.
I did know something about the influence of William Morris. Like his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, Topsy Morris wanted to get back in behind the centuries of print culture, to produce beautiful texts which had something in common with hadwritten Mediaeval manuscripts. He couldn't produce handwritten ones any longer, in a modern economy which incorporated wages, but he could create books in which the hand of the master craftsman was everywhere felt. Thus we have his magnificent Kelmscott Chaucer, and associated works from the late nineteenth century, books that are a rare joy to see and to hold.
A generation or two after these, there come the books from Paris and Milan, from which we might at least have seen reproductions: famous books like Matisse's Poesies de Stephane Mallarme, the illustrations (can one say “illustrations” about an artist's book?) of which are so often reproduced.
Anyway, ideas about such matters were far from my mind - even though I was an occasional art reviewer - until I ran into Bruno Leti one afternoon on the corner of Barry and Pelham Streets, Carlton and he suggested that we get together some time for coffee and a chat.
As an acquaintance who worked close to my own office, busy Bruno had a bee in his bonnet. He nudged me into joining him in a first book, hoping that I would provide the right poem for the job. Indeed I did. To complete the magic circle, the printoscopic loop. I had a poem called “Drawing”, which was an attempt to recapture in words the nature of my own drawing, which is abstract, twiddly and biomorphic:
Perhaps
it will be a diagonal line curved at one
end. Could just be a parsnip with stripes
like a wasp or Queen’s Park Rangers. Maybe
a signal from some undiscovered language.
A coppice of cross-hatching/ Crowding dots?
Once we were under way, other opportunities presented themselves, not least because Bruno is a workaholic, so ideas came bubbling up like hot mud at Rotorua. Sometimes he had the images first; at other times I had the poem. There might be a full-blast book of some grandeur, or a smaller, more modest book which used the colour photocopier for its images. There was one absolute monster, Timber, printed by Raphael Fodde in Canberra and New York, employing no less than three artists, as well as my eponymous suite of ligneous lyrics. It’s a bit much for me, and far too heavy for a frail coffee table, but has its own kind of beauty in those handsome pages.
A favourite for me is The Alignments for which Bruno - an artist quite obsessed with horizontal lines - commissioned me to come up with something “liney”. Not only did this work for both of us, but it has generated a musical composition for experimental ensemble from the composer Damian Ricketson, which was performed at the Sydney Opera House Studio last year. Moreover, energetic Bruno finished up constructing two versions of the book: not adding a sequel to the first but what we might call its Other. So this co-operation generated other interactive works in its turn, the concert being a performance of considerable dramatic complexity.
Drawn into this crossover or collaborative art, I became acquainted with other works: the impeccably refined books of our New Zealand arrival Alan Loney, typically embodying his own texts (embodying is good for this art); Kristin Headlam’s dark collaboration with George Matoulas and the sombre poet Kevin Hart; also her role in desire and the brush, with Peter Lyssiotis.
All have their ways of crossing the stream, changing the horses, or galloping a deux.
In every case, as far as I know or can judge, curious negotiations have had to take place in time; and in the judgement, usually of the artist, or the printer. One of these two is usually driving the chariot, and having to think on his or her wheels, on the spot.
What this implies is that - unlike the case of a kids’ book, say - the visual artists have the say, not those ostensibly equal poets and storytellers. They should not be seen as illustrators, or hardly ever. Indeed, Bruno has written, “I am not an illustrator for I think in abstract terms - from the real thing or a real experience.”
These printoscopes are the output of artistic co-operation, of differing skills, of subtle collaboration. They have been real hard work. And at their origin they may provide a surprising commission, as when I was asked to translate a canto from Dante’s Divina Commedia, which became The Flowery Meadow, in Alan Loney’s exquisite design: early Renaissance Italian was a bit of a challenge, I can say. But challenges are what these co-operations are so often about: it’s the Other that is good for us.
As Kafka once wrote, “Work is a release from the longings of our dreams, which often only blind us and flatter us to death.” Making these luxurious objects is work, after all. It keeps us imaginatively alive, and socially co-operative. It keeps us laying our hands on physical materials, which are more solid than dream. Inter alia, it’s a joy to come across things which appear in such gorgeous colours.
But there are many labourers in the vineyard, many creators with the gift. It also falls to me to pay tribute to Norbert Herold, for instance: I hardly ever set eyes on him, yet he has produced such lovely slipcovers and bindings for our initiatives. He’s part of the team. Without him, we could never have changed our horses so successfully in midstream. After all, to speak alliteratively, bindings and boxes are the bark that sheathes and glorifies these books.
Ironically, Peter Lyssiotis has quoted a colleague as saying that “these books are not saleable”. However, they are far more substantial than the futures exchange or apartments sold “off the plan”. You can pick them up, feel their weight and delight in their texture. They appeal to touch, as well as they do to sight and textual joy. They embody a truly wise uselessness, and are well worth having.
The psychoanalyst Winnicott once wrote that
In the artist of all kinds one can discern an inherent dilemma...
the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.
I could say that this two-, or three-, or four-horse race gives the individual creative artist the greatest possibility not to be found. And hooray for that.
Moreover, hooray for something else: in few fields is there any more the opportunity, as there is here, to participate in the making of purely beautiful things. As for me, I sometimes like to think that the rusty concept of beauty is on its way back. What is more,I have a good deal of fellow-feeling for John Ruskin’s injunction to
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
These books, in their so tangible bindings and on their scrumptious paper, are perhaps our lilies and peacocks. Long live the printoscopes, and all those who play a part in them, thereby diversifying their own practice.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe,
May 2006