As we are so often reminded, we live in a digital age. The impending death of the printed book is probably announced as frequently as rumours of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s separation, with as much zeal as apocalyptic predictions made by Harold Camping & Co. None of these harbingers, however, probably imagined that the destruction of a book could ever be so literal, so imaginative, or so beautiful as the work of book artists.
An excellent place to begin a foray into the world of book art is Christine Antaya’s recently published Book Art: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books. The book highlights the paradox at the centre of the question of the importance of the printed book: published simultaneously with the advent of the e-book, and charting the work of artists who literally destroy the physical object, the book itself and the images it contains are also an open celebration of the potential of physical books for extraordinary beauty.
One artist featured in the book, Georgia Russell, perfectly encapsulates this contradiction through art in her haunting sculptures of cut-up printed matter. In ‘First and Last Things’ (2011), a book dissected and placed in a bell jar evokes the image of organs preserved and kept in glass jars: the object is both dead and destroyed and yet through dissection and preservation immortalised.
Another artist featured, Doug Beube, is particularly interested in the conceptual ideas behind books as art. He writes extensively on his interest in the physical form of the codex, stating that ‘It’s the structure of the book I’m interested in; it’s the mechanical aspects of the book as a technology, and how it functions as a container of information. I’m trying to solve the problem of experiencing the content of the book as a visual phenomenon, layering it and transforming it into a visual object’ (source: interview with Umbrella in 2002).
One recent work, ‘Facebook’ (2009), presents a self-portrait of the artist, his face masked by a reconstructed phonebook, that now obsolete but formerly household object becoming the focal point of a piece of contemporary art. He argues that ‘It is my personal take on a Facebook page’.
Insightful? Or silly?
I wouldn’t blame you if you found the whole concept a bit pretentious. But not all book art is as conceptually involved in the evolution of the book form. Some artists simply create stunning works that seem to express the imaginative inspiration of the medium they work with. Nowhere is this more evident than in the wide range of art delving into the mad world of Alice in Wonderland.
Abelardo Morell, for example, is primarily a photographer, but in his Alice in Wonderland series he combines photographs of the original drawings by Tenniel with Carroll’s text to create beautiful new art (see all here):
It Was Much Pleasanter At Home, 1998
It can be easy to reduce the book to simply the words on the page, rendering the physical form a redundant vehicle replaced by the faster, more indestructible missile of technology (as the presence of places like this blog demonstrates). But as these works of art show, part of the beauty of the book can be attributed to its simultaneous fragility and its concrete presence, the way in which we can physically take it apart, using our hands, a scalpel or even a power drill, rather than simply clicking on a small red button and closing a tab, window or file.
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