First Person, Very Singular
Maybe I wasn’t listening, but it took me a long time to realize that confusion and pleasure can coexist.
The world of artists’ books baffles me. A wonderful and invigorating bafflement, but a state of confusion all the same. I read Johanna Drucker and Betty Bright, and marvel at their ability to analyze and categorize, to see the big picture. I sometimes think I understand their words. But rarely am I satisfied. Granted, they have other concerns, but they don’t make things clear for me.
I am content in pleasure. And I feel guilt only infrequently about being comfortable with allowing personal pleasure to forge my taste in artists’ books.
The thing about artists’ books I find most enchanting—and valuable—is their infinite variety, their resistance to definition, that very human capacity for endless variation. No wonder the struggle to rein in the protean genre has been ongoing. It starts with the book, my personal sense of bookness. Then the fun begins: different materials, different structures, different patterns, different sequences, different differences. Not merely containers of story and information; singular works of art in which the physical—the materials, the structure, the manipulation—becomes integral. To expand Barry Lopez’s image about books: with the artist book the goblet does become the wine.
This variety is disorienting, but this confrontation with the new enlivens me. For me, it’s the difference between works X and Y that is vital. I find the similarities between them much less compelling, or interesting.
The moment of aesthetic focus is, I think, individual and ultimately personal. And artists’ books are the consummately personal art form. One individual turning, unfolding, and revealing allows access to their secrets. Artists’ books are made (mostly) for laps, not walls or pedestals; they reward engagement, not display. Not that I enter the encounter without predispositions. I bow to experience, genes, culture, language, and other things I can’t imagine. But almost inevitably I’m in strange territory, the signposts vaguely familiar but unreadable: I must learn anew how to proceed.
Alberto Manguel, in Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Books, Reading, and the World, declares that “…viewers [of art] must turn away from the explicative labels, dismiss the helpful historical and geographical notes provided by the curator, forget the criticisms, the catalogue copy, the reviews, and stand in front of the work of art ready to not understand everything, in that half-comprehension of an aesthetic or emotional reaction, recreating, as far as possible, the mystery of creation.”
I’m not sure about recreating the mystery of creation, but I do think definitions, however necessary, infect.
Not knowing what I am holding, looking at, and manipulating is a privilege, a blessing akin to free will. It allows and requires me, the single individual before the unfamiliar, to make it my own. I may not be better, but I am changed.
I can only admire those who work to name a canon, to provide consistent terminology, to present a coherent front. But I don’t think they will help me the next time I look at Tim Ely’s work. The accomplishments of criticism will, for me, always pale before the frisson of the artist book experience, the disorienting Wow! That disturbs me, unruts (unroots) me, and centers me at the same time. There is probably an evolutionary reason for our dis-ease with ambiguity—fight or flight doesn’t allow for reflection—but toget beyond surviving, to get to Faulkner’s prevailing, perhaps the disorienting confrontation with the new provides a path?
Too many powerful forces tell me who I am, who I should be, what I should crave. I take solace and refreshment from the moments of personal challenge and engagement when I am urged to create and understand at least part of my own world. At the very least, artists’ books are a vehicle for that.
So I remain happy and wandering, comfortable with ambiguity, hopping from bafflement to bafflement, sensing that not knowing is a luxury.
What pleasure.
n
~ Bill Stewart
Vamp & Tramp, Booksellers