A Different Kind of Book Art

Being the week before spring break, today’s Monday to Friday was pretty hairy-scary, as the saying around here goes. People had too much homework and not enough time to do it, I had to theoretically be in three places at once on Thursday night (although I’m glad I was where I was at the end of the night) and everyone’s freaking out about how we’re going to get through the projects due on the flipside of break.

Not a lot of time for the blogging, in other words.

But now it’s Friday morning, I haven’t got to be anywhere for an hour and then all I have to do is finish my essay for Writing essays on my revelation on the nature of life, the universe, or anything and I’ve got two days before I go on retreat at the Monastery here at Saint Ben’s.

Ah, blog, how I have missed you.

I got to participate in two cultural activities this week I’d love to share with you, but I think I’ll save the first one for tomorrow morning. On Monday night I went to the movie theatre and saw Percy Jackson and Olympians: The Lightning Thief with a good friend of mine, and on Wednesday, I ate lunch with Buzz Spector, a reknowned book artist, art critic, and currently the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Percy needs a whole other post – Buzz I can talk about here.

If you EVER get a chance to see this man’s work or hear him speak at an event, GO. He is one of the most insightful, depth-filled and honestly funny men I think I’ve ever met. And he’s succinct, too. I honor and respect people who can be succinct without trying. He doesn’t look like much when he walks into a room, kind of a mad scientist type with curly gray hair that’s going everywhere and anywhere, but get him talking and it is a thing awesome to behold.

Buzz (I’m friends with him on facebook, I think I can call him Buzz; Mr. Spector sounds a little strange) is, as I mentioned, a book artist. He does things with books. Yes, that could sound dirty, but he also writes about how the rest of us do things with books as well – in his article “Going Over The Books” re-published from the magazine Dialogue in his collection of essays The Bookmaker’s Desire, he talks about how books, unlike any other artwork, are a medium consumed when we are at our most vulnerable –

“The space of reading is intimate; only the beloved’s body comes closer to that
of the reader than the book, held in the hands, resting on the chest, or nestled
in the lap…we dress up and go out to look at art. Undressed, in bed, we read.”

Buzz also addresses the physical presence of the book as an erotic thing – open a book to the middle pages and set it out on a table. Do the spread pages remind us perhaps of spread legs? Do we not say after we have read a book that we “know” it?

I thought it was a beautiful image. The rest of my book arts class was a little wierded out by that one.

In our tour of the gallery exhibition Spreading The Word (which I had to help set up in exchange for good grace to be somewhere else other than the opening on Thursday) Buzz brought up the idea of surplus meaning when we read a book, and in order to explain this, I think we have to expand on the word 'book.'

BOOK in the book arts sense can, I think, be broken down into three elements. First we have Book as Concept, the ideas we get when we think of the word Book. A repository for knowledge, a way to communicate experience. Historically and conceptually, a scroll is a book, just not one we recognize. Book artists explore these ideas when they create books that at the end of their process don’t look like the second concept at all, Book as Object. This category intersects with element One a little bit -- Covers, pages, spine, words maybe, pictures maybe, story maybe, a particular book, paperback, hardback, no back at all. And third, we have Book as Text. Now that Kindle is removing the physicality of covers and paper pages, reading a book is coming back to reading text in a different vehicle. When we ‘discuss the text’ in English class, we don’t care about whether your copy is hardback or paperback – as long as it’s not abridged and you have THE TEXT, we’re fine.

The surplus meaning that Buzz was talking about comes when the book as text and the book as object work together to convey meaning. A less obscure example than the one Buzz gave us is Harry Potter’s textbook in Prisoner of Azkaban, the Monster Book of Monsters, a book about magical creatures that is itself a creature – attempting to pacify the book enough to read it is also to experience in the anger and power of the creatures portrayed in the book.

One of Buzz’s concepts as an artist is altering books – he tears out pages, removes text, adds elements like spindles to the middle of books. He feels bad about this process sometimes, as he grew up in a family of committed bibliophiles and is technically taking apart someone else’s piece of art. “The book came to me a finished product,” he says, “and I have unfinished it, yet when it leaves my hands as an artwork it is once again finished.” (On a side note, this reminded me of the quote from DUNE – “Arrakis practices the attitude of the knife – chopping off that which is incomplete and saying ‘It is complete because it ended here.”)

As I look at Spector’s work online, I can’t help drawing some connections between the art of physically altering the book and the less physical process of fanfiction and the way it alters the way we experience books. Can’t we say that attempting to make two characters love each other in a non-canonical way is the same thing as putting a knife through the text in an attempt to create “space”?

I’m not saying all fanfiction rips out pages and gouges prose. Certainly some of mine does. The Rose re-write, for instance, is akin to taking a tractor-trailer through Tolkien’s original concept and brutally running it down in the middle of the road, a blatant disrespect in some eyes. But some of it is a different type of book art, the kind that gently pries apart the spine of the book and gently attempts to wedge another page, another character, another scene inside, something that expands the experience of the text at the same time it alters it.

Fanfiction is also different from book art in another way – it’s far more accessible on the internet than most galleried art works. But does it loose something as Text when we don’t have the physically comforting prescence of the Book-Object to find it in? Is there a way to incorporate fanfiction as part of a Book-Object-as-Art-Experience?

An interesting thought.