There are some writer & publisher-related Tumblr blogs I follow and generally adore. But every so often, these sort-of, maybe, might-be tribes throw me for a loop. I have to step back and decide what I believe in. It’s a good exercise.
There’s this musing from Liana Brooks, about artists who ‘alter’ existing books: http://lianabrooks.tumblr.com/post/79549092120/do-not-destroy-books-confession-i-hate-book
Go check it out.
I think there are degrees of acceptability to this ‘artform’.
On the one hand, Somerset Studios and other altered-art publications are full of awkward, twee, and technically-stunted attempts at ‘altered book art’* that frankly make me embarrassed that these folks are part of my art genre. There are some lovely examples of altered book and text art, but every time I pick up a Somerset Magazine or similar publication, I find something to make me grit my teeth. I now run from art descriptions that use the word ‘whimsical’. Likewise with human heads and dollfaces, often image-transferred onto paper or fabric, atop distorted clownish bodies. And as with any artform, bad construction isn’t excused by great ideas.
*There are so many kinds of altered book art that whole dissertations have been written by people wiser and more obsessed than myself. The one that really grinds my gears is the type where ‘artists’ seek out existing books, gesso over pages, and paint or glue more stuff on top. Children’s books with already thick cardboard pages are prized for this. I’ve never understood it, when actual book construction from scratch (esp. with paper and cardboard) is just not that hard. Make the platform you want, from the start.
My first run-in with this type of clumsy repurposing was a Tarot-card artist of the mid-nineties, who worked in heat-bonded fabric prints of Victorian engravings and badly glued-down beads and trims. I’m not naming her and giving her free pingbacks. She gave me immense inspiration to strive for better skills.
So, yes, I’m not a huge fan of turning book covers into purses, or scribbling one’s deep dark YouTube confessions on a hapless book. It’s not really art. At best it is utilitarian craft, at worst a lazy attempt at hopping on someone else’s wagon. At least try a little calligraphy!
On the other hand, the publishing industry has been turning out some complete wastes of pulped trees over the last hundred years or so. And in the last decade, we’ve published more and more books. Are you really going to tell me that every single bowdlerized Reader’s Digest hardback, every apocalypse-porn ‘Left Behind’ sequel, or every ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ book is deserving of the same gentle treatment I’d give to a first edition Dickens or a Kelmscott Press book from William Morris? Textbooks go out of print when new information becomes available. While they are part of our shared history, they are also enshrined in places like the Library of Congress. When assembly artist Brent Bond turns thrift-store discard books into intriguing wall sculptures, or Brian Dettmer carves them into intricate fragile shapes, it may just be conferring new value and life onto these books that are already going into landfills or recycling.
Books have innate value. I’m not disputing that. I’m also not wringing my hands and saying ‘Every book is sacred!’
Books – old and collectible – are big business. I know book arts agents who go to major antique book fairs several times a year, to trade to the market. I worked for ten years for a private commercial art firm with one of the finest libraries of antique books in the Southwest. Not a single one of which was read by most of the artists who scanned the out-of-copyright images for adapting into art backgrounds, later meant to go on artwork selling for thousands of dollars.
Like an insurance actuary, a book dealer must rationally and coldly assign different values to different books. Part of that is scarcity: some Golden and Silver-age comic books are valuable now because they are rare, and few of them survived time and the comics purges of the fifties and sixties. The Comics Glut of the early 2000’s ensured that there are thousands of copies of some newer works – so I don’t cringe as much to see them re-used in other forms. Try it with an early edition Spider-Man, and I’ll sic Stan Lee on ya.
Home-decor experts already eviscerate hardback books by buying them in job lots from library sales and estates, drilling holes through the covers and text blocks, and running wooden dowels through to link them into a whole ‘decor’ piece that can be hung in a wall for instant heirloom chic. I’ve wept, seeing some of the titles and knowing the workmen who did it knew nothing of what they were killing.
Text itself, once culled from books, magazines, and print ads, becomes a valuable foundation for collage art projects. My first experience with that technique was a Vermeer-inspired still life I did in college, assembled from thousands of cut pieces from local newspapers. I’m nowhere in the same level as artist Richard Curtner, whose text collages have inspired and stunned collectors for fifteen years. I was recently privileged enough to make fabric art award ribbons based off his designs, for the Spring 2014 Tempe Festival of the Arts. I swear, I’d write a contemporary romance if I could afford to have Curtner design the cover for it.
My first real experience with appropriated-image book art came from a 2002 exhibition in San Francisco, organized after the San Francisco Public Library discovered some of its Gay and Lesbian Studies books had been vandalized beyond the point of repair. Rather than discard the books, library staff offered the tatters up first-come, first-serve to book artists who would pledge to rebuild them into topical art pieces. The show was named ‘Reversing Vandalism’.
This was my entry, The Truth Remains, which I’m currently rebuilding in a much more ambitious second version. This first fabric version took scanned images of damaged text and cover art, wove them together with scanned alchemical engravings and original text, into a free-standing plaint against censorship.
I’ve seen absolutely enchanting altered book art from across the world. I’ve also seen hipster-bait. I mostly have to side with Liana on the idea of desecrating a book, with this caveat: if you’re going to do it, try to make the corpse into something exquisite.