Introduction
Symposium Chair, Alan Loney, Melbourne based artist and poet
To my knowledge, we do not have a published forum in Australia or New Zealand where the issues and matters regarding the Artists Book can be aired, argued, analysed or even simply registered. So it is with a particular poignancy that I welcome the present Symposium and its discussion to come.
It presents a rare opportunity for us to hear first hand about the work of some of our most important currently active book artists and, by me at any rate, it is hoped that today will not be an isolated public instance of discussion in the ongoing private processes of making books by artists and writers in the State of Victoria and in the Commonwealth at large. In any event, the Director of the Baillieu Library Michael Piggott and the Staff under Pamela Pryde in Special Collections are to be congratulated on putting together the fine exhibition to which our discussion today I have no doubt will be a welcome accompaniment.
The Artists Book is, in historical terms, a fairly recent phenomenon. And because it's recent, it has had to work hard to distinguish itself both from other sorts of art and from other sorts of books, with which we are of course more readily familiar.
One of the tasks of scholarship, and there's been a flurry of scholarship on the subject since the mid-1990s, has been to define both the possibilities for and limits to what we might take an artists book to be. In large part, this has involved a series of close readings of an incredible range of individual items, but also an examination of the very notion of the Book itself.
What is a book? Is it only and always a codex - and 'codex' is the technical name we give to a collection of bits of paper joined down one side - or a scroll - which is a collection of bits of paper joined on both sides and then rolled up - or simply a collection of separate bits of paper held in a box or a bag. In this sense, we are looking at the book as a thing, or an object.
But what if we took the word 'book' to be more of a metaphor? That we might use the word 'book' to mean any object at all that requires reading or viewing in order to interpret or understand it. If you are reading tea leaves or tarot cards or chicken bones strewn over the ground because you are a shaman in a tribal village - are you reading a book, simply because you are reading, or interpreting signs? And what can we make of the work of American Alison Knowles, whose The Book of Bean is an assemblage installation in the form of a very large book thru which one has to walk and climb and turn corners instead of turn pages? Is it a book? Or has the word 'book' here been pushed too far and lost any literal force it might have had?
In this exhibition, to which our Symposium is an accompaniment, is a long metal thread with metal leaves hinged along its length - leaves of a tree, leaves of a book - where the metaphor has been made visible in ways we do not usually expect when it comes to the book, though we do when it comes to art.
But getting back to the artists book as an object, recent scholarship has sought to spread a wide net in its search both for examples and for ways of understanding the field as a whole. And in my view the present exhibition reflects something of the wide net cast by the scholarship very well. It allows us to ask, What counts as an artists book in general terms, and is this or that item a valid instance of that overall description?
One of the sharpest dilemmas for the maker of artists books in critical terms has been articulated very nicely by American book artist and commentator Johanna Drucker. She writes: "The challenge ... was to develop a critical method which was not derived exclusively from either literary criticism or visual arts theory and which would build on the sources and positions that had informed the original ... work" (from The Visible Word, University of Chicago Press 1994).
It might be useful at this point to say a little, or hint a little, about just what it is that a maker of artists books actually does. It's clear for instance that some of the artists whose works are on show in the exhibition did not bind the books that they have otherwise 'made'. They would not have had, nor do they need to have, the brilliant craft binding skills of Nick Doslov (for books by Peter Lyssiotis) or of Norbert Herold (for the books of Bruno Leti).
To extrapolate from the history of printing, there is a splendid working definition of the term 'typographer' offered by the Englishman Joseph Moxon. His Mechanickal Exercise on the Whole Art of Printing was published as a series of pamphlets in 1683 and 1684. There he says "By a typographer I mean such a one who can either perform, or direct others to perform, all the Handyworks and Physical Operations relating to Typography". Now if we replace 'typographer' with 'book artist' we get "By a book artist I mean such a one who can perform, or direct others to perform, all the Handyworks and Physical Operations relating to the making of artists books".
So while the artist may make the whole book, and some books in the exhibition are of this order, the artist does not have to do all the making, and indeed there are instances of artist not making any part of the physical book at all, yet their books are still legitimate artists books; I am thinking here particularly of the artists books of Ed Ruscha.
And the crucial part of this, to my mind though others may very well disagree, is that it is the artist who is directing the whole process, and not someone else, like a publisher for instance, or a fine press printer (which is what I am and have been since 1975).
If we were looking at books made in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, we are unable to question Johann Gutenberg, Nicolas Jenson, Erhard Ratdolt, Aldus Manutius or Anton Koberger about their processes and their thinking about the works they made at that time, the beginnings that is of the hand-printed book. But we are today in the happy position of being able to hear and question current practitioners in the field - Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Angela Cavalieri, Peter Lyssiotis and Alex Selenitsch - who will talk and likely question their involvement in this extraordinary phenomenon, the artists book. Or, to put it another way, four current artists and writers whose sense of the depth of their work is extended and enriched by the book as a locus for something other than literary or art practice alone.
Nevertheless, the question is, and always is, of any book whatever: What are we seeing, what are we reading, and how do these apparently different experiences interact with each other in the artists book? My own hope for the present discussion is that it will both illuminate and complicate the questions we have as well as the responses they generate.