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Twelve O' Clock Wood

Twelve O' Clock Wood

Assignment 4

Assignment4 is the ongoing visual database I'm keeping. A large PDF file can be downloaded, rather than printing over 170 pages:
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assignment 3

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Key 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.

Assignment 7

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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.

Assignment 6

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Assignment Six: Prepare a Case Study

Helen Douglas

In devising these notes I want to set out a number of the themes I have picked out in Douglas' work. Rather than looking at the visual aspect of her books exclusively, I have decided to quote extensively from the artist's writings on her practice, since they are unusually lucid and helpful. Since my research will bring me into contact with Douglas, I have looked on this case study as preparatory research to inform a critical position to her work which I can use in an interview situation.

I have set out my study under a number of related headings that express important themes in Douglas' work, proceeding very often from the ways in which the artists herself has described her practice.

On Inside and Outside

"Nature, landscape and the book surround me.

They are out there and they are all absolutely within me too.

Inside and out. I Live them." 1

The subjects of Douglas' practice also inscribe points in her artistic hermenuetic. The inside and outside are part of her metaphorical gear for drawing material into her practice. The concepts of inside and outside are mediated by the book, which makes concrete the work of enclosure and release that Douglas’ investigation is involved with. The inside and outside involved here are very particular, though: “I live them” the artist tells us, so her involvement is not merely with space in an abstract sense, but with place. The relationship that her practice engineers is between her environment in the Scottish Borders, and the places poetically constituted in her books.

" 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 the Book come together."2

The book is the external site of the process, of the hermeneutic, of all that thought and action. The visual hermeneutic, working on 'nature, landscape and the book' , shows itself as

• questioning spaces, presentation
• the book as an arena for spatial understanding. In its metaphorical enclosure place is transformed into identity and vice-versa.
• as connecting spaces and times in 'woven'/gathering movements.
• punning on 'bookness'= investigating, ironising and metaphorising its forms through narrative.

Douwe Draaisma's Metaphors of Memory

I'm reading Metaphors of Memory by Douwe Draaisma just now. I was excited to hear about it. I had been reading a couple of other vaguely related books about consciousness and media: Guy Claxton's The Wayward Mind is about how the changing consciousness of humans can be reconstructed from the various artworks (including books) left behind by particular cultures. Claxton look at the various ways people have addressed the idea of  'the unconscious' (to use the general term that Claxton employs), so I might describe Claxtons work as relating to Metaphors of Memory by renaming it Metaphors of the Unconscious. The other book is Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built, which is an examination of the formation of certain aspects of contemporary consciousness (as exemplified by the expressed contents of Mr Spufford's head) through reconstructing the child's passage through the books they grow up with. As one might expect, various psychological references emerge, amongst the most telling being those to Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. Both books include material about how books themselves affect and reflect consciousness. For Claxton, books contain material that are the expressions of Romantic or Freudian (to give two examples) images of the unconscious. For Spufford, learning through books of the concept of the city or the forest, they are the building blocks in fathoming an extended understanding of the world. In both Spufford and Claxton's works, books are channels through which new ways of understanding the world and the mind are expressed.

Draaisma's Metaphors and Memory is a history of the ways in which memory has been expressed and explored through different metaphors. These metaphors are often linked to the emerging technologies of the time, be they wax tablets, books, the discovery of phosphorous with its 'light-recording' properties, or those of photography, and so on. Perhaps the most useful areas for me are the sections on Draaisma's approach to metaphor itself and the section on The Book as Memory, the Memory as Book.

In his section on metaphor, Draaisma explores various definitions of what metaphor is, starting with classical definitions and moving towards more contemporary definitions that describe metaphors as the combining of two semantic fields. (Ironically giving us new ways to think about metaphors by employing new metaphors for their description). Draaisma also pays attention to the heuristic properties of metaphor: that is, how the modelling of metaphor gives us clues in the production of hypotheses. This is how, for example, metaphors used to explain neurological functions set up models that inform hypotheses bridging gaps in our knowledge about the positively observable mechanisms of neurological function. My interest in Draaisma's work has been to see if I can use any of his ideas to inform my own about artists' books. It seems to me that the heuristic function of metaphor- its tendency to form useful structures that can enable further hypothesis- has something in common with the heuristic function of working-with-books. In my view, this doesn't simply stop short at being a comparison between two heuristic tools. I think that there are further correspondences too. I have written at other times about how artists using books are using them to solve problems of practice, amongst which is the problem of the representation to oneself of what one is up to, what one's work means. It seems to me that the form of the book as an enclosure, as a narrative, as a structure, is not only a physical medium with certain properties, but also a condition of practice that artists could employ as a metaphor for their work, with the heuristic benefits that accompany metaphors. The identity of being a book artist, then, sets up the possibility of structures of identity that belong to the metaphorical structure of the book. What do I mean by these 'metaphorical structures'? Briefly, and obviously, the book is a physical enclosure, but it is also an enclosure for ideas. It is a sequence of pages, but it is also a sequence of metonymic and metaphorical relationships- a plot both physical and temporal and narrative-  that the artist can exploit. It is possibly a form which combines different media, and which combines different roles for the artist, and these too have internal echoes where the artist can compartmentalise and cross-fertilise different parts of practice. I've characterised Claxton's book as Metaphors of the Unconscious, Draaisma's work is entitled Metaphors of Memory. I might characterise my interest in artists' books as an interest in them as a Metaphor of Practice. Artists frequently discuss their practice in terms of strategies: ways in which they see their work, organise their work, challenge themselves. I think that each of these strategies will be found to be explained via a metaphor, whose mechanisms and heuristic potential are exploited to some extent by the artist.

Draaisma also includes a section on the book's own heyday as a metaphor for memory. Memory's place in terms of what was regarded as intelligence is discussed as well. In St Augustine's day, memory is regarded as the wellspring of intelligence, with imagination taking a back seat- a reversal of our contemporary evaluation. Nowadays we depend to a great extent on external means of capturing and organising memory and prize flexibility , quickness of mind and 'inspired genius' most highly. It was not always thus, as Draaisma's extensive quotes of people praising the memory of St Augustine attest. Contrasted to this, the intelligence Einstein exhibits is far more to do with originality and imagination. Succinctly, Draaisma puts the difference in views of memory thus; in St Augustine's day we would say 'I must remember this so that I can write it down.' Today, we would be more likely to say that we would write something down in order to remember it. Draaisma notes the transience of human memory. The magnificence of St Augustine's mind would have died with him if it were not for his writings and those which attest to his brilliance. Books harbour and preserve that brilliance to an extent. In an age where generations succeeded one another far more quickly than is today the case, a book- most likely a family bible, would span many generations and form a link between one's ancestors and one's own time. The book is a metaphor of continuity, and a very real ark through time for the intelligence of the writer. Draaisma tracks the decline of the book's cachet too, as they became more widespread and less valuable, and as the wilderness of writings became vaster and vaster, more secular and more various. I don't entirely agree with the simplicity of this diagnosis. There is still something about books which gives one cause to believe their contents will be preserved somehow, even if only temporarily. This accompanies the physical setting-aside that enclosure within covers gives, and, I think, cannot be wholly explained by the book's physical seperateness. They are still arks of intention to some extent, an idea I hope to examine in greater detail as my research progresses.

Draaisma's other chapters (so far- I'm about half way through) deal more explicitly with various metaphors of memory that occur as new technology and paradigms of though sweep through culture. I think that my main interests in his book have already been addressed, and that further reading will only inform my ideas about memory, rather than about books. I've also benefited from his early discussion of metaphor. However, I will continue, since there are chapters on, for example, the metaphor of memory as photography that will be of interest simply for their relevance to visual culture at large.

Creating Artists' Books

I finished reading Sarah Bodman's Creating Artists' Books today.

This book is described as a handbook for the "student or practised printmaker who is experimenting in a new area." As such, it's an overview of the main points of the medium (if we are to describe artists' books as a medium), surveying briefly its immediate art-historical antecedents (livres d'artiste, livre de luxe, the Kelmscott Press, et al), and spending longer on a thematic survey of contemporary practitioners. Bodman's descriptions of these illuminate her subject headings:  using text... collaboration between artists and writers...printmaking process for artists' books... digital output... making book with limited materials and equipment..multiples and 'zines, et cetera. Under each of these headings she has elaborated descriptions of the work of book artists. For instance, John Bently's collaborations with five Dundee residents provided the text for A Handful of Memories, Dundee, is given as an example of artists  working with others who have textual input (and who often provide materials, handwritten or otherwise- including ephemera, photographs) which complicate the artist's role as a collaborator, editor and as a designer for material which already exists. Bodman's chapter on unique books looks at (among others) the work of Guy Begbie and Miriam Schaer, with descriptions of how these artists use unusual materials and interrogate the notion of the book. The chapter on digital book production includes work by myself, Andrew Eason, and by Douglas Holleley, Underpinning the organisation of the chapters, and culminating in chapters on display, marketing and exhibiting, is an undercurrent of the artists positioning themselves vis a vis the difficulties, (both technical and financial) of production using the various media, establishing a working practice, and ultimate intentions for the book.

Each chapter also includes advice on the pitfalls and positive characteristics of different production routes. The organisation of the chapters, from the history of the form, to chapters dealing with collaboration and content, to those on design and output method, then through sections on design intention (eg 'zines or those works intended to avoid the usual art institutions) describes what might be seen as a journey through an artist's encounter with the book form. Moving from contextualising the book by historical references, to the practicalities of production involving medium and content, and finally to the fate of the book in exhibition and distribution, it presents all the various aspects of the form someone with minimal knowledge might need to begin: there is even included a chapter on simple binding methods, with the redoubtable Tom Sowden demonstrating stitching methods in a series of detailed photographic steps. Lest I should imply that Creating Artists' Books  is organised in a simply programmatic way, let me also note that despite its' modest length at 128 pages, the complexity of the relationship between material, technical/financial capability, intention and design is indicated from the outset in the chapter entitled Form Follows Function. Thus the arc of the chapters, whilst describing the evolving interest one might take in book works does not neglect the relationship that's constantly moving backwards and forwards through the medium between materials, history, content and intention. As an introduction it does not lean too heavily on the theoretical checks and balances this implies, but it is nonetheless evident in the identification of the different strands of book working identified in the chapter headings.

Creating Artists' Books has a good balance of instructional material, introductions to techniques and processes, and examples from contemporary practitioners. The book is illustrated in colour throughout, with many excellent examples shedding light on areas of contemporary practice that would be difficult to describe in words alone. Bodman's use of illustrations for this purpose is strikingly effective- no less than one would expect from someone whose own artists' books are such good examples of careful and engaging design. Unfortunately, Bodman has been too modest and has denied us the chance of seeing examples of her artworks here, but Creating Artists' Books is nonetheless a richly rewarding introduction to the form.

Finally, appendices include  substantial material on galleries, shops, collections and websites relevant to the subject of use to anyone with an interest in the subject.

Mallarmé

I've been rereading sections of Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books and wanted to articulate a few marginal notes I had made on her description of Mallarmé and Jabès conceptualising of the Book.

In "Action Restricted" Mallarmé collapsed his posing of the dilemma of how it is possible to act (in the broadest and most metaphysical sense of conceiving of an action and performing it) with an investigation of the act of writing.

This seems to me to bear some relation to the ideas I  have been entertaining along a more psychological axis on the ways in which the qualities of the book medium are employed by artists in order to make it possible for them to act. The roots of my interest lie in the crucial moments of conception for the artist, who has to decide on how to act, how to create. There is always a crisis of decision when something is to be produced, and a crisis on deciding where the limits of it should or can be. The special space that is enclosed within a book can aid this process by way of providing a temporary structure. A space where ideas can be explored and limited, without having to try to make every point of conception join with that of the real world: it is a space where the suggestive power of metaphor is completely respected, and where the interpreting role of the reader to make the book complete- to make it approach its potential as anything resembling Mallarmé's conception of the Book as a spiritual instrument, capable of embracing the cosmos- is already implicit.

I am exploring this in terms of amplification of the artist's intention: the book can continue to hold the structures the artist has assembled in a space that has an implicit right to be considered critically as containing a system complete in itself. This is the framing aspect of books. More than that though, the book form itself has certain priveleges that allow it a certain authority: each book might be said to partake of the form of the book.

“A book [has] the capacity to use its form to establish “some nameless system of relationships” through which its strengths could be realised.”

However, I am framing this relationship in terms of the social construction of the book ( the book as an idea held in common by society, with causal force based on a shared assumption of the intentions the book-idea represents), and the presuppositional framework of the book ( the set of socially implicit assumptions that give rise to behaviours associated with books). Basically, I see the artist choosing to use books as a vehicle for their action because they want to tap in to some of these assumptions and behaviours, and because this priveleges their creation as a book. (There are myriad other considerations to do with seriality and structure, but for now I am concerned with the book's ability to contain and promote action). Another interesting and important aspect is the hybrid nature of artists' books, which baffles and loosens-up the social constructions and presuppositional frameworks they allude to, by being neither one thing nor another, by being a hybrid medium. Inasmuch as this changes the reading of the work, it changes the parameters of reading, and at a more extreme attenuation of the process, of the cognition of media and thus of consciousness.

"[The] Book was not the means to counteract the ephemerality of human action, nor was it to be used against the existential fear of identity, adequacy, or existence: it was instead to be recognised as a realm unto itself, capable of containing "certain extreme conclusions about art which can explode, diamontinely, in this forever time, in this integrity of the Book." This idea of the book is not rooted in a psychological function for the artist, nor a cultural function for the writer. Instead "The Book" functions as a metaphysical investigation which focuses on the possibility that form (in the most abstract and philosophical sense) might be realised through "The Book""

My investigations into the uses that books are put to by artists turn in quite a different direction. Respecting what Mallarmé says about the book as a "realm unto itself", my interpretation of the book's ability to proclaim totality is precisely as the "psychological function for the artist", and the "cultural function for the writer". Where Mallarmé proceeds from action to Being, to a spiritual function for the book, I think that my research is leading me more from action to presence in a less sweeping sense (than being) that would interrogate the book's potential as an amplifier of artistic intention. Rather than set out a spiritual agenda for The Book, I am instead setting out how artist’s books relate to ideas about The Book, and how they radicalise our conception of The Book and, by extension, other parts of culture.

Later… the interpreting reader… Edmond Jabès and the limits of narrative completion…Midrash and cycles of intention…cycles of intention and the hermeneutic cycle (Ricoeur) compared… the artist and the reader… returning to the temporary structure… the openness of the book

bachelard notes

p 155, the chapter on miniature:

"...the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all  worlds, contains the attributes of greatness.

Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness."

p 161

"Why should a metaphysician not confront this [miniature] world? It would permit him to renew, at little cost, his experiences of "an opening onto the world," of "entrance into the world."...Such formulas as: being-in-the-world and world-being are too majestic for me and I do not suceed in exoeriencing them. In fact, I feel more at home in miniature worlds which are, for me, dominated worlds. And when I live them I feel waves emanating from my dreaming self. For me, the vastness of the world has becomme merely the jamming of these waves. To have experienced miniature sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world and helps me to resist dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere."

My thoughts on temporary structures, meaning, for me in this study, books, would tend towards enclosure, but also towards a miniaturisation of the life-support-systems of cultural operation (the systems pertinent to the ontology of making artworks, if you will). I relate strongly to Bachelard's words here, and his words later on the commerce between inner and outer that is a containment, a predicate, a problematic that encloses the miniature whenever it occurs- for it occurs as a virtual world within a real world. But that does not mean that the phenomenology of the miniature is altered. It still harbours imaginations like Bachelard's and the poet's (and the maker of books) in a nurturing, enabling structure.

I want to mention a thought that occurs to me now on Tarot. That the world of relations in the Tarot is a miniaturisation of the real world, a schematic of an individual's understanding of his surroundings, past present and future. But the Tarot paradoxically asserts that it has not only a miniature view, but a wider view than that afforded by reality. It purports to be a window onto a universe with further dimensions. So the Tarot asserts a triple identity:  as a miniature, as a comprehensive scheme of the real, and as an indicator of something beyond normal reality. My understanding would be that these identities are furnished by imagination rather than by some supernatural force (unless one allows that imagination itself is super-natural). I wonder if the Tarot's model of input and output, and its agglomeration of an identity by our questing interpretation of it, by our interaction with it, can tell us something about how we encounter artists' books. There are many differences to be sure, but I want to note this observation to myself.

p 184 "intimate immensity"

"Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world which is immense, Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet  daydreaming."

Isn't reading a way of producing this state of aloneness? Isn't the book's act of enclosure tantamount to the study of Saint Jerome: a paradoxical immensity and openness achieved by enclosure and miniaturisation. A comparison, also of the differences in presence of a panorama or virtual reality artwork and one which is actuated by a reader through a narrative immersion. Different immersions. One is foisted on the sensorium of the viewer, the other depends tenuously on the quiet daydreaming intention of the viewer and is all the more immense for it, since it enlists the imagination, the inner senses.