Standing at the junction of Bethnal Green Road and Shoreditch High Street on one of those cutglass mornings when the sky doesn’t so much hang above our heads as appear to career away from the earth chasing a platonic ideal of infinite blue, looking left at the new railway bridge then right at the post-industrial chic of the Tea Building, and enfolded by lanes of sun-dazed vehicles boulevarding about, a visitor to London might be forgiven for assuming she was somewhere near the banks of the Hudson rather than Old Father Thames. Sticking to the thoroughfares, the Meat-Packing heart of our recently-minted creative district pounds with modish boutiques, eateries for the zeitgeist gourmet (a species of Malthusian food fetishist) and avant-garde hairdressers, and one quickly becomes accustomed to the idea that the only surprising thing one is likely to discover around here is what the urban sophisticate is prepared to pay for a T-shirt. But tucked into the crook of all this are two rows of dilapidated shopfronts skulking darkly at each other across a narrow cobbled alley.
Redchurch Street’s time came too late for the developer’s massaging hands and for now this strip of real estate is held in abeyance, much of it let out cheaply to a parade of ad hoc exhibition spaces. Mostly, they have the chaotic tang of the degree show about them, but standing out at 23-25 is a pleasingly polished and professional artist-run space. Kaleid Editions was founded in September by Victoria Browne as a project room for the exhibition and sale of contemporary artists’ books. It functions as gallery and bookshop, selling an ambitious range of existing pieces but also commissioning new work to accompany its programme of exhibitions. To the casual passerby, it can all appear rather mysterious at first. There are artworks on the walls, but the space itself is dominated by a table, a plans chest, and a display shelf by Lars Frideen arrayed with publications of all formats and sizes.
“Some people come in and they know exactly what they’re looking at,” says Browne, “but others who aren’t familiar with artists’ books often look completely bemused, almost as though they don’t know if they’re even allowed to enter, or whether they can just pick something up and handle it.” I meet Browne at the workshop at East London Printmakers’, where she is printing the 150 boxes for the gallery’s first commission, Peter Suchin’s Index, Scribble, Snapshot, Tract. An artist herself, she is excited about the opportunity that Kaleid gives to fellow artists to present the kind of works they rarely have the opportunity to exhibit, but which for many forms an important part of their practice.
The history of artists and books can be traced back to medieval illuminated manuscripts, through Williams Blake and Morris. Around 1900, Parisian dealers started commissioning artists such as Bonnard and Matisse to make illustrations to accompany collections of poems, producing livres d’artiste in deluxe limited editions as an accessible way into collecting. This relative affordability remains one of the chief attractions of artists’ books, but as the twentieth century progressed, the form and function of the book itself became a focus for investigation. Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha are credited with having given a new impetus to the book as a category of innovation for the contemporary artist, and artists’ books today evolve within the fertile ground laid by all three of these approaches.
Roth in particular, over the course of his career anatomized every facet of the book, deconstructing and reconfiguring it with single-mindedness and conceptual wit. An early example, 2 Bilderbücher (1957) is two square books, one ring-bound and one wire-bound, featuring a series of geometric patterns printed and cut into the pages. The visual experience of these patterns changes not just from page to page, but with the layering and unlayering process involved in the physical action of turning. The die-cut squares, circles and semi-circles are like a series of windows through the book, multiplying vistas and conflating the notion of looking and reading into a single action. It can be “read” not only front to back, but in reverse; as a set of individual pages laid one upon the other, or a sequence of double page spreads. In the accompanying book, this approach is modified by the use of coloured acetates interleaved with white card. Here, the momentum through the book creates not only new patterns, but entirely different colours, as primaries and secondaries assert themselves layer by layer. By 1961, Roth was making Literaturwurst, books or newspapers pulped and stuffed into sausage skins with onions and aromatics.
Alongside this physical testing of the object, Rusha was advancing a case for the artists’ book as a democratic form to bring art to an even wider audience than the still rarefied group of collectors who visited galleries. Throughout his career he has published books in unlimited editions, distributed widely and cheaply. The first of these, Twenty-six gasoline stations (1962), featured a series of photographs of gas stations along Route 66 from his home in L.A. to his parents’ in Oklahoma City. Artlessly taken and framed, some of the photos look like they were shot on the move or at a distance, the aim being not to create a work of art predicated on the polish of its content, but on the cumulative effect of looking: the artwork is not primarily a vehicle for the reproduction of photos, but for the production of an effect. The original edition of this book was sold at the gas stations themselves, bypassing the artworld altogether.
Whilst it’s tempting to draw causal connections between and amongst artists working creatively with books, the artform eludes the continuities favoured by historians. It is a field whose boundaries are passionately contested by the enormous variety of practitioners working within it, from book-binders through illustrators, graphic designers and printmakers, as well artists. Even within the latter category there are those who consider themselves to be primarily book artists and those for whom they are just one aspect of a much wider practice; those who are happy to work collaboratively with independent publishers such as the venerable Book Works or Kaleid, and others who prefer to remain in control of every aspect of production, making an exploration of the artform exciting and endlessly surprising. Whether sumptuously produced and bound, in exquisite papers, lithographed, photocopied, or laminated, concertina or fold-out; whether your interests run to wordplay or narrative, image or text, politics or aesthetics, the book offers an endlessly accommodating form within which to innovate and experiment.
“When we started back in 1984, no one wanted to distribute these kinds of books, so we decided to do it ourselves,” says Jane Rolo, Founder and Director of Book Works. As a pioneers and champions for the artform, they have worked with some of the most respected artists of the past thirty years, commissioning approximately eight new titles each year. Widening the audience for contemporary art is a priority for them, and they seek to price the books accessibly at around £20 each for their main print runs, often producing accompanying Special Editions priced at £ 200 – 500. As with so many similar individuals and organizations, they continue to find the most receptive pubic for their output is to be found in museum and gallery shops and specialized artists’ book fairs, and increasingly the internet is allowing them to connect directly with enthusiasts around the world. With money in the artworld tighter, there appears to be a growing interest in the medium, and perhaps it is no coincidence that New York too has recently seen the arrival of Central Booking in DUMBO, another gallery dedicated to artists’ books.
The material and conceptual versatility of the book is coming into its own as its traditional primary function as a vehicle for the written word enters a period of reevaluation. In connection with developments such as the Kindle, one will often hear it said that “people will always want books.” I like to think this may be true, but perhaps with time this trend towards the virtual will give the book more scope to reveal itself in its full protean potential, as it is already doing, quietly, and in the most unexpected ways.
Isabel Vasconcellos works independently with artists and galleries, and is presently writing her first novel, Olivier on the Cowley Road.
Originally published in December issue of Grafik magazine.
