Exhibition Opening
Welcome
Michael Piggott
Manager, Cultural Collections
University of Melbourne
Alan Loney
Melbourne-based artist and poet
Electio Editions
Response
Nicki McLaurin Smith
Director, Information Management
University of Melbourne
Exhibition Launch
It is a particular and very great pleasure to me to launch this exhibition - Art Bound: A Selection of Artists Books. This is the very first exhibition of Artists Books by the Baillieu Library and I personally hope it is a foretaste of things to come in this particular field of creative endeavour in Australia.
I want to begin by quoting a paragraph written by American book artist and critic Johanna Drucker. Her essay is titled 'The Artists Book as Idea and Form', and it's reproduced in A Book of the Book, edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Steven Clay, published by Granary Books, New York 2000.
She writes: 'There is no doubt that the artist's book has become a developed artform in the twentieth century. In many ways it could be argued that the artist's book is the quintessential twentieth-century artform. Artist's books appear in every major movement in art and literature and have provided a unique means of realizing works within all of the many avant-garde, experimental and independent groups whose contributions have defined the shape of twentieth-century artistic activity. At the same time, artist's books have developed as a separate field, with a history which is only partially related to that of mainstream art. This development is particularly marked after 1945, when the artist's book has its own practitioners, theorists, critics, innovators and visionaries. Among the many individuals to be mentioned here there are literally dozens whose achievements belong almost entirely to the realm of artist's books and whose work could sustain the in-depth discussion accorded major painters, composers, poets, or other artists who work in more familiar forms.'
For most of us, the history hinted at by Johanna Drucker is for the most part invisible. It is almost totally absent from art criticism and art history as practiced in Australia and New Zealand. To my knowledge, there is no ongoing forum in this part of the world where the book as art is even traceable as part of our cultural history and social practice. It seems to me therefore that occasions such as the present exhibition and the splendid Symposium held this afternoon are critical, absolutely critical, in the growth of our understanding - not only of the work of a few artists who are doing unfamiliar things with the form of the book, but also of the role of the book in our total socio-cultural life.
For many of us, the book as art, on the rare occasions we get to see it, is often fascinating, or intriguing, or even beautiful, but we have few if any guidelines by which to assess it, or compare one work with another, or understand how on earth it was put together - how was it made or who did what - and nor do we even have an agreed language or vocabulary which allows us to talk about it, as if we and others would know what we were talking about. In my own long experience in the field of the book, I have met many people who like what they see, but have no confidence that they know enough to feel that what they are looking at either has anything to do with them, or that these books might be purchased by them and become part of their own household. How many times I have almost despaired on hearing some someone say: Ah yes, it's very beautiful, but these are for collectors, aren't they? And the purpose of this small act of quotation is simply to register that somehow we might not have done a very good job of either what is often called 'educating the public', or of keeping the door open to individuals when it comes to public registration of what we book people do. I sincerely hope that this exhibition will have taken some steps towards conveying to us that these books, and these kinds of books, do have a relevance to our situation and can have a place in our lives and in our homes, as well as in the major institutions like the Bailleau Library or the State Library of Victoria. And of course institutional capacity for collecting, while usually larger than our own, should not tell us that we have therefore no capacity for collecting at all. In the words of great artist Piet Mondrian: 'It is open to everybody'.
The book, in the culture of the West, is ubiquitous and elusive, familiar and strange, cheap and expensive, ordinary and spectacular. Why does this particular object hold such power for us? Books are everywhere around us and we take them for granted, as readily as that we live in houses and expect that someone will make roads on which to drive our cars. But for centuries the book has been treated as a simple or a complex carrier of stories or messages or information or instruction and from well before the birth of printing in the fifteenth century they have included not only images but images drawn and painted with extraordinarily high levels of skill.
From the birth of printing the art of the wood-cut, wood-engraving and copper engraving flourished in the art of the book. And many of these early images were also colored by hand after printing. Yet the inter-relations of text and image that were able to be intricately interwoven in the handwritten book were not available in the printed book, in which text and image were of necessity separated and printed on different parts of any page. In theory, the birth of the computer can change all that and text and image can again become interwoven in ways that letterpress printing didn't allow. And there are a few books in this exhibition that reflect that. One or two others are completely handwritten and hand-drawn throughout. Letterpress printing and its overwhelming role in spreading literacy has clearly an ambiguous place in the life of the artists book.
One of the important purposes of the artists book in the twentieth century has been to question the book, its validity, its concept, and its form. Questioning the book, both by writers and book artists, has become a normal part of the processes of making books itself. In creating a book structure that actively denies our normal experience of books - and there are examples in this exhibition - even to the point of being unrecognisable as a book at all, is totally reliant on our normal everyday understanding and acceptance of the usual and standard conventions of the mass-produced book. So, much of our grasp of what is before us in this exhibition relies on our being able to simply distinguish what we already know perfectly well from what we are seeing.
Of course, in this respect we have a problem. We are looking at these objects under glass. There is a prohibition working here, a necessary one to be sure, against handling the merchandise. We may not touch these things, at least on this occasion. But the value, the usefulness, the delight, the terror (and there is terror, here, in more than one of these books), the textures and the pleasure in simply turning pages can only be found in handling them. And for me, this is the best and most powerful reason we can have for owning artists books - that they may become part of the sheer physicality of our experience. For it's not just about looking, not just viewing alone, but also about holding, feeling the weight, whether the fingers slide or rasp across the page, the knowledge that you have a piece of calf-skin or kangaroo skin or canvas or photocopy paper in your hand that is cupped around the spine of the book, whether the stain on the page is ink or some other substance that the subject-matter suggests - all these things enter the experience of handling an artists book - even when it is produced by the very mass-production techniques of the cheap paperback it parodies (and there's some of them here as well).
These works are technologically various, conceptually different and formally radical as any collection I have seen. The Bailleau Library in its Manager of Cultural Collections and University Archivist Michael Piggott, the Head of Special Collections Pamela Pryde and her Staff are to be thoroughly congratulated on this very fine exhibition, which I now have the greatest pleasure in declaring launched.
Thank you.
Alan Loney
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