 Thoughts and Sentences Dedicated to Artists'
Books
I'm
far from using the language of structuralists, semiologists and
hermeneutic specialists for arranging and expressing my thoughts.
Poetic experience, lyrical sensation, space of associations - these
are the terms not really "professional", nevertheless, from
my point of view, sufficient.
Clearly
visible drama of a form, its tension and visual meaning
conveying deeply human sense, sign of searching, touch of painful
labyrinth - this is enough for me who practises fine arts and is
experienced in such a practice. In their esoteric stratum, in
their substantial recording the pages of Finnegans Wake manuscript
can be a potential element of artistic structure of a book.
The content is of less importance to me, since I can learn it
from a translation - the most salient here is, noticed earlier,
extremely expressive look of the text. One can evoke Antiwritings by
Barthes, Movements by Michaux, or On the grave of Dominique the
Greek, a glorious painter handwritten by Picasso, on one hand
and on the other, to keep balance, beautiful, light rhythm of Rome
Triptych poetry written down by John Paul II. Finally, it is worth to
remind here the etymology of Greek "graphikos" (relating to
writing).
The
typography applied nowadays, used consciously and intently,
"organizing" the content in a clear form, can be
amazing too, although its beauty is of somewhat different origin than
the one of letterpress, and so far from a certain state of
attempting to draw letters, words, sentences, text of a book and
ultimately maybe an entire library.
I
have been practising for almost thirty years this not easily defined,
somehow exotic art and I say, I the author of more than one
thousand works belonging to this realm ("classic" books,
book-objects, objects with ready-mades, book-like works, space
arrangements, almost installations using books), I say this
realm has always been for me a mystery and always very touching
intellectually. Only "ex post" some of those imponderables
have become a bit more clear: intuitions, hypotheses and
interpretations - only some of them are as if out of use. This
situation make no obstacles in my work. Specific eclectism and
syncretism of this fascinating form are open, ambiguity and
incoherence of the definition of a book - as a "vehicle"
for text - has been constantly inspiring. This is proved by the
increasing number of new authors, although they often work
half-heartedly and without a command from inside, produce
numbers of tautological and reiterated entities, create situations of
clear redundancy. But, does anybody today ponder about raison d'etre
of surrealistic objects, for example? And if so, one considers their
exegesis and not their defined substantial shape. We're dealing with
a discipline "in statu nascendi" - there are more
question marks than satisfying answers.
Tens
of years ago not many painters and graphic artists were involved here
in creating unique artists' books - they were mainly personalities
from the borderland between literature and visual arts. According to
me Zbigniew Makowski takes priority over the others, an erudite and
wonderful visioner, author of one-off, autonomous books of rare
beauty of form and rich, multilayer, esoteric content - in this very
moment I'd like to thank the artist for thrills and raptures that
I could experience for so many years. I can notice now less
interest in this type of hand-made, painted, reflective book existing
only in one, unrepeatable copy - definitely the new means of copying
and reproducing, photography, computer, digital printing, multimedia
influence strongly both the way artists articulate their thoughts and
a different sensual shape of art pieces.
I
remember some difficulties to find right terms to describe this
phenomenon; anyway, probably the first text about my books published
in 1979 (at that time I had the "output" of 50-60) and
written by Cecylia Dunin-Horkawicz used the term "graphic
books". Looking back we can say now that this term refers
properly only to a certain type of books, usually of very
limited edition and composed of a set of prints, mainly woodcuts
and other relief prints (think about the connections between woodcut
and book history, please do). Quite instinctively, not anticipating
the future vastness of the phenomenon, I worked applying various
graphic, drawing and painting techniques, collages, assemblages, even
a kind of "actionism", recording real and imagined
experiences, sharing my works with some other persons and so on -
searching everywhere "an idiom", my own "hand-writing".
It was the beginning of the way with no well defined aim. We knew
nothing about postmodernism, all the more about virtual reality. As
far as I remember I felt quite free and independent from
the regulated circulation of artistic values, yet official and
existing objectively. This somehow ambivalent feeling of isolation,
separation and alienation, a paradoxical guarantee of freedom
inspiring and sufficiently durable, I owe to my instinctive turn
towards artist's book, that autonomous, mysterious and integral,
simultaneous space.
The
origins of artist's book are quite distant, however it has been
present for not so long, including the experiences of art and poetry
avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century. Later experiments
of so called (more or less accurately) progressive artists, as well
as of the word and image artists writing down the text figuratively,
of those ones coming form the realm of postconceptual art and so on;
all these elements make clear and convincing presentation of the
history of the not well defined but vital phenomenon. With no doubt
Polish and foreign critical researches explain a lot, however
they are rather useless - artist go on doing their own things. In the
texts, critical papers, scientific researches, in articles mentioning
my individual works written by Roman Artymowski, Stanisław
Fijałkowski, Lucjan Hanak, Irena Jakimowicz, Jaromir Jedliński,
Krzysztof Jurecki, Janina Ładnowska, Leszek Rózga, Piotr
Rypson, Grzegorz Sztabiński and Janusz Zagrodzki I can find the
abundance of various points of views and opinions, in each case
separate and independent, but always bringing interesting elements of
description and interpretation. The nature of things is obviously
very diverse.
The
open possibility to act in the field of artist's book, on one hand
intellectually vast and giving chances to accumulate the meanings, on
the other hand materially sensual and due to this attractive, in
spite of chaos because neglecting the function of printing (for
example) and in spite of unduly proliferating art pieces too similar
to each other - it articulates new questions and problems. When
leaving aside the verbal-pictorial notation on paper and
"conventional" but unforgettable library, the maxim "habent
sua fata libelli" [(and) books have their own fates] can be
understood in a new way. Maybe an artist's book, like
a digital
text recording is but next stage of this fate?
Questions
without answers, many answers consistent "ex definitione" -
these are the signs of the situation which can be define as
a territory with no relative variability. Changeability, lack of
homeostasis, characteristic "formalistic" and humanistic
feature of human attitude - these are essential qualities of artist's
book, whatever anyone would like to think this term means.
As
long as there is a delight and the prospect of a new and
new representation of serious spiritual experience is but expected,
the moment of explicit critique and really erudite conclusion is
postponed. Most probably its time will come, maybe it will be
a normative one, with no doubt it will come from outside - the
artists themselves, as if not knowing what they are doing and merged
in their own world, will be continuously affected by hypnotic state
contiguous to mystery.
The
7th edition of "Book Art" this time called "Wandering"
brings once again the great abundance of book forms - traditional and
having structures very distant from the accepted stereotype, of forms
that seem to have very little to do with the common image of
a book.
At the outmost they use some universal elements of form and structure
(for example rhythm) incorporating them in the semantic field of
a book, although - as universal - they refer to any art.
Among
the items sent to the organizers there are: tablets with inscriptions
(poetry), scrolls, ribbons and stripes, various leporellos (accordion
books), book-objects, space arrangements, "book-like"
objects, ready-mades incorporated in book morphology, manuscripts
(with quotations and texts written by the artists), typography games
(often using a computer), works referring to mutual relations
between the text (handwritten and printed) and image (drawing and
graphic both traditional and computer), truly artist's prototype of
the catalogue for the exhibition of artists' books, "ut pictura
poesis" kind of works looking like avant-garde visual poetry,
only covers ("from cover to cover"), book covers, academic
manuals, wise professional dissertations with pretty illustrations by
authors themselves, works applying Braille script in opposition to
perforation, portfolio with prints or rather collection of facsimiles
of historical prints, collages and assemblages, stick-in pictures and
applications, even similar to fumages, works filled with autonomous
pictures and illustrations to texts, made using different graphic
techniques for example embossing, a few small works called
"books animated with silicon stamps".
There
are books in codex form, also "in folio", with loose pages,
one-off, unique, in limited edition, memoirs, diaries, cadastres and
notes, thick and thin, mini-libraries, books of drawings, of prints,
of pictures, of texts, labyrinths, collections of photographs,
interferences of realistic, semiabstract and abstract pictures,
allusive to common look of the world and pictograms, books about
script (handwriting) and exploiting a kind of typography
referring to the essence of script, toy books, books for
manipulating, boxes, cases and suitcases, event a laptop (or its
dummy), miniature and huge, of different provenance and charm, with
reproductions and iconographic quotations, books referring do various
epochs, trends and styles.
They
are made with various manual, reproducing, copying, printing
techniques, on different media using great abundance of materials:
beautiful handmade papers lavishly coloured and decorated with
processed plant fibres, noble and ordinary papers, brought home from
long journeys and covered with incomprehensible foreign text,
cardboard, wood, textile, leather, tracing paper, plastic, foil,
metal, stone, sand, clay, rope, etc.
A
real "silva rerum". We are wandering through the forest of
things asking ourselves a question about the aim of our journey.
The landscapes are with no doubt picturesque and attractive, but are
they representative for the area called artist's book realm? It seems
so. However I feel the lack of certain radical art experiment
achievements; if they were, this interesting view would be more
intriguing.
Wandering,
journey, way, path, pilgrimage - these almost synonymous notions,
besides topographical-geographical sense, are deeply rooted in
symbolism, religion, mythology, history, culture in general. It's
enough to take a look in any dictionary and we can find there
a limitless space of senses, allegories, metaphors,
connotations. There are no reasons to discuss minutely this abundance
in this very moment.
We
are looking for the aim of our wandering tramping the road regardless
any obstacle and the aims can be different: spiritual and artistic.
If creating is the function of human spirituality, then art - any art
discipline - is a wandering. It is a toil, effort, striving
and desire of transformation - metabolism of one things into the
others and metabolism within a thing itself. Every true
creation, also the "book" one, occurs within a symbolic
space in spite of its mimetic achievements, but even they are
interlaced with a symbol.
While
selecting my books for the exhibition "Wandering" I was
surprised having noticed how many of them referred to this topic. In
various ways: sometimes naturally and directly, for example as an
account of distant and near journeys, sometimes metaphorically in
different times and spaces, for example unlikely unreal time of
a supposed encounter of two great poets Khlebnikov and Kavafis
on pages of one book thanks to a poetic rule of joining possible
with impossible.
Thus
- in the forms already mentioned and in those omitted - the book's
space-time is being filled with metaphorical wandering through
history.
Andrzej Bartczak
Łódź,
March 2003 |
