Assignment 7
The tables charting my full bibliography and plan of work don't work properly here, and are not included so you may want to
where they are included, or read on for the text alone...
Project Proposal
Metaphorising practice: artists’ books as artistic strategies.
1Aims:
- To undertake a series of artists’ books as a form of reflexive research in parallel to and informing other research methods.
- To derive understanding of artists’ books practice through a reflexive comparison of my own artistic practice with data from case studies.
- To propose novel understanding of the field of artists’ books as artworks and as a form of artistic practice, in complement to the existing critical material.
2Background
2.1Theoretical/methodological background
2.1.1Key theoretical concepts
There are some key theoretical texts informing my research which I refer to in greater detail in the assignment called ‘Key Texts’. Briefly, the research picks up on themes that run through the work of Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Bourdieu to examine questions of intention and legitimacy in artists’ book and asks if books enable a certain conscious manipulation of legitimation and intention.
Ricouer’s thought on hermeneutics informs my propositions regarding how artistic practice uses books. Books are seen as allowing a site on which reflection on practice can be performed. (My notes on Practice and Cycle of Intention on my Taxonomy of Terms expand on this) and this has significance in the ways in which artists configure their reflection on their practice, by way of the character of books. Books contain narrative discourse, and they have a particular cultural identity (supplied partly through this narrative capability, and partly through their own status as a culturally significant form) that allows artists to employ metaphorising discourse within the book, and about the book (and their work on the book). This metaphorising refers not only to the narrative content of the book, but to the narrative content of reflexive practice. The metaphor of the book has a heuristic yield in producing identities for artists because of its intermedia qualities of being neither one thing nor another, but both, and work on it occasions the participation of people acting under a multitude of roles as poet, artist, author, and so on. Ricoeur sees narrative interpretation as the most important work we do in establishing our identities vis a vis the world, since he sees both the interaction we have with others and the reflection we perform on ourselves as varieties of narrative. Within this, new meaning, new configuration arises through new metaphor. The argument my research pursues involves looking at artists’ books as just such a site of new metaphor, allowing fresh meanings to filter into artistic practice.
Bourdieu writes of fields, practice and habitus, and my use of Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics to describe artistic practice feed into this. However, where Ricoeur usually sees practice and especially habitus as less-than-conscious influences on the outward forms of social identity, (as well as forming the component activities that define a field) I would argue that reflexive practice on the part of artists is explicitly about being conscious of behaviour and positioning, and the strategies one pursues in one’s practice. This is not to say conscious at all levels of all things, but certainly there is an awareness of how legitimacy can be negotiated in its various forms. Artists’ books, because of their widespread set of valencies, operate across a wide area of the field of cultural production, and as I have said, they occasion the work of people adopting a wide variety of different roles. I would argue that to some extent that book artists deliberately exploit the many faceted character of their medium to create roles for themselves and to slip between roles (from printer to poet to publisher, etc) and between visual syntaxes, as when two concurrent books employ different print media and approaches.
Books have, I will argue, a metaphorising power that informs their meaning in artists’ practice. Of course, this metaphorical capability continues on into the contents and physical presence of the book, an analysis of which tends less towards an ethnography of book artists and towards an art historical or narratological exegesis. However, my research will move from the effect of books on artists’ practice, to their effect (or effectiveness) towards viewers, and critics. I hope to trace the intentions that artists’ place on their work on towards the reception accorded them by the public and in the formation of critical opinion on the artists’ works. This plan reflects the three sorts of legitimacy Bourdieu describes of approval from one’s peers, of mass appeal and of the consecration bestowed by elites (in the case of critical approval, this is an academic elite). It also traces the journey of the book from the artists’ hands out into the world and, as news of its success or otherwise reach the artist, back again, feeding into the artists’ practice once again. This recapitulates themes repeated in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of prefiguration (the work’s existing meaning as part of the artist’s practice: artistic intention), configuration (the work’s narrative, visual and physical signification, also its reception and configuration into critical narrative) and its refiguration (its return to the artist who takes stock of their practice and intentions anew). In following this plan I hope to present a more complete portrait of how I believe books to function as metaphors with a heuristic yield to offer practice. I hope to outline their effects as tools for introducing new metaphorical means for creating approaches or roles that pursue intention and legitimacy.
2.1.2Key methodological intentions/structure
2.1.2.1Presuppositions, hermeneutics
The research is based on hermeneutic principles of investigation, acknowledging my intimate involvement in the subject, and includes my own work in the planning of the research and reflection. By planning a structure that creates a point of departure based on my presuppositions about the subject, and designing work that seeks actively to criticise these presuppositions, it is hoped that a certain amount of transparency as to my initial agenda can be achieved, so that the character of my interpretation of the data can be more readily assessed. Secondly, it may prove necessary to change my mind about key presuppositions: this is, indeed, likely to prove the most fruitful area of investigation. The research is planned as a number of ‘turns’, from artist, to audience and back again, with potential for reference and comparison to my own work throughout. I conceive of this structure as a staging that can capture changes in the argument as it progresses, with multiple layers of reflection within the structure of the inquiry outlined by the theoretical boundaries described above. See also my discussion of my intended methodology, below.
2.2The Field
2.2.1Critical characterisation of the literature
The above theoretical framework is not well-answered by the existing critical literature on artists’ books.
However, this research can only be meaningful if it relates, critically or otherwise, to the material the existing critical framework is composed of. This research can function as a supplement to the existing critical work carried on in book art. Critical work on the subject is growing gradually more complex as it moves from assessments of artists’ book history, towards an arguably more useful fusion of taxonomical framework-finding and a greater focus on the judgement of the ‘interestingness’ of artists’ books in specific terms. I think this is leading critical practice away from historicising artists books and more towards an interest in how they function as documents of practice. That is to say, away from identifying artists’ books with their history and more with how they reflect the contemporary milieux of interdisciplinarity, curatorial practice in artists’ lives, and so on. It is hoped that the research offered here can function as a point of departure for debate about how best to set out the scope of such an interest, and how one might develop the theoretical framework and critical reflexivity of the same.
My criticisms of the literature are based on my readings of the key critical works. For example, I have written critically elsewhere on works by Johanna Drucker, Cathy Courtney and Clive Phillpot. Although in each case I have found writing that continues the active pursuit of critical development, the overall impression gained was that book art criticism tended to emphasise the biographical and historical milieux of artists, rather than looking deeply into their practice and asking ‘why’ questions that opened up practice. One felt more that what these critics got out of artists was a good deal of ‘how’ they made their work in terms of setting up and doing things, but not how the book form became central to their work. This is a big generalisation of course, and there are exceptions, (I am also aware that much of what I have read could be regarded as ‘foundation’ critical work: unfair, therefore, to expect it to elaborate on the present. The Century of Artists’ Books by Drucker has a whole century to deal with after all. In Drucker’s case, to give one example, more current work is more centred on the present) However, the direction of most of the published critical work tends away from assessing the artist book’s impact on practice (the ethnography of artists’ books), and more towards artists’ book history, whereby a critical canon is evolved and a taxonomy of judgement applied. My research offers a critical direction that concentrates on the artists as much as the books, a direction that I increasingly see in more recent work by many writing in the field.
2.2.2Breadth of practice
Part of book art criticism’s fascination with the history of the form has to do with its astonishing variety. It is little wonder that books must be written setting livres d’artistes apart from artists’ books apart from book art apart from bookbinding apart from editions deluxe apart from zines apart from fluxus (and so on). This breadth of practice continues to amaze, and continues to make the work of defining the form difficult. However, this difficulty itself served as the main inspiration for developing the approach this research has taken. The only things I think all book artists have in common are present not in common material concerns but in common use of ideas rooted in the book form’s significance as a socially-constructed cultural form, conferring a legitimate place of practice to those working to produce it. Artists work at varying removes of consciousness of this, and with varying (reverential, ironic, destructive) attitudes towards it, but all art made with books in mind gestures towards this idea of the book. In devising a plan of research I wanted to capture as wide a spread as practicable of this practice, in order to test my propositions about what I suspected to be the areas where practice involving books was affecting how artists conceived of themselves, their intentions and how they negotiated legitimacy for their work with peers, audiences and critics.
With this breadth of practice in mind, as well as the theoretical guides I outlined above, my intended methodology is outlined below.
3Methodology
3.1Interview/Questionnaire
3.1.1Work into presuppositions informs list of statements to test,
tends towards elucidating a structure that is altered by contact with
data
In a document presenting the process of creating questions that would lead towards a series of interviews and questionnaires, I wrote,
The questions I am now working on are an attempt to interrogate [my] assumptions by working with other artists. The data, doubts and further questions raised thereby I plan to take back into my artwork and understanding for further interpretation. I expect to arrive not at an answer to my questions, but to gain interpretive insight from the exchange of understanding and the interpretation of empirical data in the form of artworks, interviews and written questioning.
This outlines my broadly hermeneutic approach of continuous reflexive interpretation. In the case of the questions I have written to start my research proper off with, they form a document of my preunderstanding of the subject, They were worked up from a series of written propositions detailing my unproven assumptions about artists’ book practice. These propositions and questions in turn seemed to belong to more basic areas of query:
1) propositions about the enabling character of books.
2) propositions about the roles offered by books
3) propositions about the narrative and discursive function of books.
4) the fourth ‘group’ is the criterion of selection across a range of types of book production. I want to test my propositions with [to give two examples]book artists making one-of-a-kind books, as well as with printer-publishers collaborating with artists to produce editioned works that come closer to the livre d’artiste. But the manner of my questioning would be influenced by the nature of the work produced. In the one case, any questions about editioning are irrelevant, in the other, questions about collaboration and design would be informative.
These areas of inquiry themselves suggested that I might challenge them by trying to select case studies whose practices would present a wide range of engagement with these areas.
Currently I am involved in improving my research into my case studies and preparing more general questionnaire material with a view to tailoring questions more exactly to the practice of those under study, but retaining the challenges to my propositions that their practice represents.
I will use a similar strategy for viewers of the books (whose views I intend to gather through a specially-produced exhibition), through a process of elucidating presuppositions and challenging them through questions directed at the people I will be studying.
In both situations, the extent and quality of my reflection on the answers I obtain will be crucial. I intend to relate the results to the presuppositions I will have written about, and to the results I obtain in producing and exhibiting my own artwork. In this way I will have not objectivity, but a datum of my presuppositional framework, repeatedly revised as my research turns through its different foci.
3.2Exhibition
3.2.1Reflexive and Comparative practice
As I mentioned above, I plan to produce an exhibition featuring work by my case study artists, as well as work by myself exploring and reflecting on the material gathered in my research to date. In curating this exhibition, I will be basing my work on the structure that informed the questions I have outlined above, that is to say, my presuppositional framework. However, these presuppositions and therefore the framework will be newly informed by my work in interviewing and reflecting on these artists, and modifications will be introduced to the framework informing the exhibition. What will remain will be my intention to present artists’ books to the public as a way to make work: by curating a show of varied material practices, I hope to show what they (I suspect) have in common in the way their disparate practices encounter books.
I will use this exhibition as a setting to ask viewers what they understand about these books and what they think the artists are doing with books. I cannot be too specific about my exact goals in doing so yet, as the framework which will inform these questions awaits my analysis of what my artist interviews reveal. However, I plainly wish to examine what happens to artists’ goals in using books in art when they put them before the public.
3.3Critical studies
The material I gather from the preceding two sections of my research will form the basis for a critical study that will form the third part. In producing material that will point towards artists’ intentions and viewers’ receptions I will have gathered together material I can use to examine how criticism of artists’ books relates to these two areas. If artists’intentions and books’ effects can be characterised, how does the literature address them? What would an appropriate framework be? What sort of criticism would be helpful to artists? To viewers?
I cannot speculate further as to exactly what questions would be posed in such a critical study, but I plan to allow the material I gather in the first two stages to inform it, with a view to returning the significance of artist’s practice in book art back to the critical framework- or, rather, vice-versa.
3.4Reflexive practice
3.4.1Reflexive artworks
I have written a good deal above of my reflexive practice as regards my research, both in its written and artistic forms. What does this mean?
Largely, it will mean the production of written and artistic documents that present cogitations and investigations of the argument as it progresses. In the case of written material, I plan to review each interview as I transcribe them, including insights and reflections that occur to me along the way which will help form the basis of my analysis of the interviews as a whole.
In the case of artistic reflection, it will take the form of cogitation and study on the forms and practices I find other’s artwork: copies and studies. It will also take the form of comparative reflection that grounds my own practice against that of others- grounding that will make its way into other reflection.
A crucial form of practice will be to use artwork as a testing ground for my propositional structures, much as I use questions for the same purpose. This will mean using artworks to ask questions through its theme, through its content, and through using it as a test bed for further reflection on practice eg, “If I try out X’s way of working, what happens?”
Another form of artistic reflection, as touched upon above, would be as a setting to offer differently-couched ways of examining questions that occur in the research: not so much as tests, but as rumination and reflection in and of themselves. For example, my forthcoming work The Amber Room, about a famous cultural artifact that may or may not exist, touches on questions of interpretive practice and ontology through its themes and offers a further form of reflective practice informing my methodology.
3.4.2Studio journal
An important site in my reflexive practice, my studio journal will serve as the focal point for the various cogitations and documentation that I will be producing in the course of my research. It will document the work that goes into artwork, including something of the reflection that goes into their formation, and will also include ongoing material produced specifically for the research and tangential material that will continue to influence me from outside the research practice itself.
One of the most important aspects of the journal is the way it confers the probability of multiple versions, multiple drafts on everything. As, specifically, a journal, it presupposes development that grows and changes through time.
3.4.3Modelling of the project
I have mentioned above how I conceive of the research as a series of stages or turns. I have engineered this with the specific goal of providing points at which it is appropriate to formally reflect on the data gathered to date, and move on to the next stage in the hermeneutic process with a set of materials that one will bring into contact with the next experimental stage. I intend to produce reflective documentation throughout the project at a less formal level, but I wanted to build-in this reflexive part of the research as part of the structure of the project. The argument I will develop will not be a single unified polemic, but rather a narrative of test, investigation, failure and confirmation, characterised throughout by the interpretive character of my research. It is therefore appropriate, I think, to echo the developing meaning of the books themselves as they go from the studio into the world and back again, in the developing character of my interpretation.
4Key Texts (Research Methods Assignment 3)
Presenting a limited number of texts has forced me to hinge my arguments on just a few core ideas. This 'stripping-down' introduces a certain amount of mental mobility into my understanding of and presentation of my ideas, in the same way that speaking from basic notes rather than from a prepared statement makes for more lively presentation. Having a smaller range of tools to set up makes me think about what to do with them a bit more clearly.
I have chosen five short quotations from three key texts. Two of them are from theoretically useful sources, namely the essay On Interpretation1 by Paul Ricoeur, and the essay The Field of Cultural Production2 by Pierre Bourdieu. My third text is from a talk given by the book artist Helen Douglas as part of the Arcadia id Est exhibition and conference organised by the U.W.E., Bristol, on the subject of 'Nature, Landscape and the Book'3 as it pertains to her work.
My first text, Ricoeur's On Interpretation sets out in brief form his thought on how the functioning of metaphor in narrative produces the meaning of texts through interpretation. This interpretation, Ricoeur says, is a hermeneutic relationship between the text and its producer, the text and its audience, and the text and its relation to its cultural milieu. I have selected a pair of quotations from this essay to support my use of Ricoeur's ideas in my development of a project interpreting artists' books. My reading of the existing writing on artists' books has shown a tendency for texts to describing artists' books to to concentrate on the characteristics of the object and its effect on the viewer, with some attention to the historical/cultural placement of the artwork. Despite the existence of works devoted to interviewing living artists4, the first site of books' meaning (the first area of the hermeneutic interpretation of texts), that of artistic intention, remains obscure.
At this point I will cite the first of my quotations. Ricoeur here presents three events or sites where text (here I interpret this as being applicable to an artwork as a cultural text) exists as a discourse that is amenable to interpretation and analysis.
Thanks to writing, discourse acquires a threefold semantic autonomy: in relation to the speaker's intention, to its reception by its original audience, and to the economic, social and cultural circumstances of its production. It is in this sense that writing tears itself free of the limits of face-to-face dialogue and becomes the condition for discourse itself becoming-text. It is to hermeneutics that falls the task of exploring the implications of this becoming-text for the work of interpretation.
p151
In short, existing work on artists' books tends to concentrate on what an artists' book is. This includes criticism of what it is as a work of art as well as its physical characteristics. There is also, as I stated, attention paid to the historical development (and hence the cultural engagement) of artists' books, but this tends to produce, again, taxonomies of physical description and critique over time , rather than a set of really 'inward' artistic practices over time.5 The question of 'Why produce artists' books?', and thus one of the crucial areas of artists' books as meaning-producing texts has not yet been adequately examined6.
My further quotations from Ricoeur and from Bourdieu, attempt to provide a framework for questioning why artists make artists' books. The insight informing my choice of this framework come from my own experiences of what seems to be going on in the production of artists' books.
Ricoeur's thought examines meaning as arising through a hermeneutic relationship of the self with other things: other texts, other selves. His thought ultimately presupposes an objectivity which answers empirical enquiry, but an objectivity modified by the liveliness of interpretation. The world and its meanings are alive in living metaphor, which bears the weight of interpretation for every novel experience, every work of imagination where two or more terms are freshly combined. Ricoeur sees the fully-fledged metaphor at work in narrative, which he sees as the site both of fiction and of historical testimony. Ultimately our sense of self is limited and articulated by the powers of narrative, but these limits and articulations are far from restrictive: they are productive. The human is, before all, an interpreter. Here is Ricoeur on narrative. Note particularly his comment on how narrative destroys ordinary consistency and allows new interpretation to arise.
…Metaphor constitutes a work on language consisting in the attribution to logical subjects of predicates that are incompossible with them. By this should be understood that, before being a deviant naming, metaphor is a peculiar predication, an attribution which destroys the consistency or, as has been said, the semantic relevance of the sentence as it is established by the ordinary, that is the lexical, meanings of the terms employed...
[comparing the theory of narrative and the theory of metaphor]
Both indeed have to do with the phenomenon of semantic innovation...In both cases the novel, the not-yet-said, the unheard-of – suddenly arises in language: here, living metaphor, that is to say a new relevance in predication, there, wholly invented plot, that is to say a new congruence in the emplotment.
p144
What might this mean in terms of artists' book production? I take Ricoeur's explanation of metaphor in narrative as a cue to begin a description of the metaphorisation of practice. Like Ricoeur, I see metaphor as operating at several points: (1)in the artist's intention, (2)in the medium, (3)for the audience, (4)in the work's cultural and historical relation. The first and second of these sites are held within the hermeneutic of artistic practice, I have elsewhere their relation as what I termed the 'cycle of intention'. there are undecided qualities of 'yet/also', of Keatsian negative capability in the book artist's use of his or her medium. The identity of the medium itself is undecided. It has intermedium characteristics. The character of the intention within the artwork has narrative characteristics, but the narrative's autonomy as a text and as an artwork are similarly in a state of constant interpretation, between the challenges of artistic intentions and the social construct of the book. (Between what the artist wants it to be and what the viewer expects to see). Artists' books are full of narrative metaphor, but also engaged in an ongoing ironic contest as metaphors-for-books. They are viewed, read, as-if they were books, and at the same time as-if they were artworks. They coin legitimacy from both their appeal to, and their critique of tradtional book forms. The third and fourth sites, that of the audience's viewing of the narrative artistic object, and of its historical disposition are often seen in other work on artists' books. They too, inform the cycle of intention, but from outside the artist's own creation. This is a two way street, however. Returning an analysis of artists' intentions and the factors by which the artists' book metaphorises (and thereby mobilises) practice, cannot but inform our view of books' meaning for audiences and in historical context.
I mentioned above how artists' books' inter-medium identity allowed artists to 'mint legitimacy' from several sources. Bourdieu's essay on The Field of Cultural Production is useful as a framework for theorising how book artists use their medium to exchange the capabilities of various artistic 'roles' in their practice. (I might also have mentioned Robert Darnton's essay, What is Book History?7, in which he outlines a 'circuit of production' for books, thus following (ordinary) books through the various roles necessary to their production). Artists making books have vastly differing relationships to their medium. Some are responsible for the whole process, including publishing and distribution, others arguably produce artists' books in something approaching the role of an illustrator hired by a publisher. Others are, in addition to being artists, poets, writers, musicians and publishers. My thesis expresses the view that all book artists seek access to two things: first, the metaphorisation of practice amenable through working on the loosely-defined but multi-faceted (if not knife-edged) medium of artists' books. Secondly, they seek access to the modes of production (and thus roles) of book making. Thus they garner the legitimacy of publishers, designers, writers, and so on, retaining (to varying degrees) the flexibility and undefined status of the fully autonomous artwork. his hybrid form wants to cross boundaries, wants to keep its freedom whilst gaining the legitimacy of stricter or less autonomous forms.
Here are two quotations from Bourdieu. In the first he sets out the diversity and instability of roles available in the field of cultural production. In the second, he notes the general areas from which legitimacy is sourced.
In no field is the confrontation between positions and dispositions more continuous or uncertain than in the literary or artistic field. Offering positions that are relatively uninstitutionalized, never legally guaranteed, therefore open to symbolic challenge, and non-hereditary (although there are specific forms of transition), it is the arena par excellence of struggles over job definition.
p87
...we find three competing principles of legitimacy, i.e., the recognition granted by the set of producers who produce for other producers, their competitors, i.e. by the autonomous self-sufficient world of 'art for art's sake', meaning art for artists. Secondly, there is the principle of legitimacy corresponding to 'bourgeois' taste and to the consecration bestowed by the dominant fractions of the dominant class and by private tribunals, such as salons, or public, state-guaranteed ones, such as academies, which sanction the inseperably ethical and aesthetic (and therefore political) taste of the dominant. Finally, there is the principle of legitimacy which its advocates call 'popular', i.e. the consecration bestowed by the choice of ordinary consumers, the 'mass audience'.
p83
It seems to me that book artists gain a capability for movements amongst artistic roles and forms of legitimacy, through their creative use of the book medium.
I will close with a quotation from Helen Douglas, a book artist whose own work, as well as that made with Telfer Stokes, has been widely exhibited and written about over the past two decades.
"Rather than speaking in the abstract, I have decided to speak from the book, the place of my making, the place where my expression is made concrete, and where all three Nature Landscape and Book come together."
...And yes also to Book
That is the place of my making
where I can gather all within the gatherings
and weave my visual narratives as text to the page
in and out
teased to the surface
inside to out
expressing this to my viewer in an intimate and contained way
published
Douglas' identification of books as the 'place of her making' is, for me, an example of one of books' several features being used by an artist in her practice. Books are a place where narratives can be assembled and presented, a 'gathering of gatherings'. They are a place for these things to be thought about and assembled by the artist. They are a place for ruminations on how the work will affect the viewer- how the work brings 'inside to out/ expressing this to my viewer in a visual way'. Elsewhere I have written about my notion of artists' books as forms of 'temporary construction': something between a temporary abeyance of deconstruction in order to produce something worth deconstructing, and a petit récit, stepping away from the legitimation offered by the orthodoxy of grand narratives. These polarities, or nodes, seem both to answer to the temporary but powerfully liberating character of metaphor. Artists' books metaphorise practice.
1 Ricoeur, Paul, On Interpretation, in The Continental Philosophy Reader, pp138-155, Eds, Kearney, R and Rainwater, M, Routledge,London and New York, 1996.
2 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production, in The Book History Reader, pp77-99, Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, Routledge, London, 2002.
3 Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, accessed online at
4 See Courtney, Cathy, Speaking of Book Art,
5 See Drucker, Johanna,The Century of Artists’ Books, Granary Books, New York City, 2005
6 This criticism is why I am not citing a text from Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artist's Books in the limited space available. I need to concentrate on articulating my own argument, whilst acknowledging its meaning in terms of its critique of existing work. I would, had I space, include a more detailed critique that showed how my ideas build on directions suggested by Drucker's scope and the attitude taken by her work; it points towards the gap I want to explore.
7 Darnton, Robert, What is Book History?, in The Book History Reader, Eds, Finkelstein, D and McCleery, A, Routledge, London and New York, 2002
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