Color Me Nostalgic
By Christina Schmid
A few days ago, the news became official: electronic book sales have topped those of paper books. Does this mean that the era of the book as a material object is over? No longer economically profitable, no longer needed for the proliferation of ideas, questionable in light of the environmental terms of its production, the book is on the verge of becoming an obsolete object, steeped in nostalgia, a fetish cloaked in an excess of meaning.
Let me be clear:
I am a lover of books. The heft of a hardcover, the pliable spine of a paperback never fail to attract me. I savor the feel and smell of books and am unapologetically picky when I have the luxury to choose between one edition or another. Coming upon a good book—whatever your idiosyncratic definition of good may be—is a gift: a feast for the mind, a treasure for imagination and intellect alike, and also, always, a sensual experience. But more than the object’s sheer appeal, I am fascinated by the duration of engagement good books demand: whether it’s a story you devour in one sitting or a book that becomes your companion for months on end, only to be revisited later, year after year—good books demand their own kind of commitment and time.
But taking time is a tricky business in a day and age where not having time seems to be a marker of importance: “Read a book? Who has the time?” a recent commercial asks—as if having the time, taking the time, made you somehow suspicious, you know, NOT busy, hence probably a good-for-nothing person. A good Protestant work ethic requires you to be busy all the time, right? Even less religiously predisposed, the busier you are, the more important and indispensable you probably are… so, books? Who has the time indeed. Who dares take the time?
Let me dare you to take the time to think about the book, its recent evolution into audio and e-book, and, earlier this month, its much praised transformation into an app; to consider the disembodied digital file-as-book in light of the rise of book arts in the 20th century—a rise, it seems, precipitated by the increased ease of mass production and, later, digital proliferation of information. But does it make sense to frame book arts as a stealthy, curiously obstinate art form holding on to traditional means of making? What would it look like if artists of the digital generation engaged with book arts in the changed technological landscape of the 21st century?
Past the Digital Divide
Professing one’s love for objects with pages of ragged-edged or smooth paper rather than sleek tablets outfitted with touch screens reeks of hopeless nostalgia, that obstinate longing for another place, another time. After all, we happen to live in the age of the screen, as Nicolas Bourriaud, the godfather of relational aesthetics, kindly informs us: ubiquitous and seductive, glowing surfaces, whether billboard-sized and public or intimately smart-phone-sized, habitually lure our gaze, conditioning perception and ordering the visible world.[i]
Reading, in the first decade of 21st century, seems to be a worthwhile activity only when it involves technology: an audio player or screen, typically marketed with suggestive names–hide away in your nook, kindle your imagination. (Chances are, you are reading these words on a screen.) No longer does the book as object convey the cultural importance of reading, and the reader: 19th-century American portraiture is riddled with subjects posing with books, demonstrating that they had both the education, smarts, and leisure to read. But not anymore: now, the gently mocking question has become, who has the time? And to convey status, well, you’d need at least the latest generation of gadget. The elegance and convenience of such reading devices is indisputable and makes liquid-crystal-clear that it is not reading per se or the electronically enabled engagement with a text that has gone out of fashion: the ad mentioned above promotes audio books.[ii]
The time spent listening to an audio book or immersed in an e-book still deserves notice, as David Pogue’s recent review of Al Gore’s Our Choice, released as an app by Push Pop Press (note the nod to the old-fashioned idea of a press in the company’s name), illustrates. According to Pogue, the New York Times’ technology columnist, the book app offers a wealth of content, to be explored at will. Users get “to spend many hours with this ‘book,’ immersed and exploring.” The duration of engagement serves as a mark of quality, even if the app ultimately caters to the ever-shrinking attention spans of digital natives, whose elusive ability to focus has become the scarcest—and hence most prized—currency in the 21st century.[iii]
“The book feels more web-like; at your leisure, you can jump from the main river of text into one of the deeper dives. Yet there’s no fear of falling off the primary train of thought,” writes Pogue. But while Our Choice may simulate surfing the web, it is very un-web-like in that our attention does not get diverted and diluted and pointlessly distracted down countless virtual garden paths. Gore’s book still seeks to spread an idea, it has a clearly defined point and purpose: namely, alerting us to the pressing consequences of climate change and advocating for a change in our behaviors. But, perhaps more important is the form this book app takes: it promises smart customization—a semblance of choice indeed—that “really does exploit the touch screen, speakers and storage of your gadget to the fullest.”
The book may be on the verge of disappearing into the world of the virtual but, in contrast to other instances of dematerialization—say, when art went conceptual, prioritizing the idea over any tangible and commodifiable object—this particular dematerialization does not point to any resistance or alternative to the reign of the consumerism: the e-book is the ultimate commodity—easily purchased, conveniently portable, with downloadable content, and easily linked to dictionaries. No printing costs, no paper, no resource-consuming shipping muddy the appeal of mass-marketing the bestsellers of tomorrow as e-books.
Mass distribution and conveniences such as accessibility and easy-to-follow links, though, were never the goal of artist books and book arts. In fact, the rise of book arts, the art of book making, and of artist books historically coincides with the development of the means of mass production.
Tangible Matters
In her seminal study A Century of Artist Books, Johanna Drucker considers book arts the quintessential art form of the 20th century. From avant-garde experiments to DIY zines, from book sculptures to crafty book making, book arts defy any fixed definitions. Helpfully, Drucker opts for describing book arts as a “zone of activity,” located at the intersection of numerous practices. One of them, the traditional crafts side of book making, has notably flourished in the latter part of the 20th century. Others, such as books as containers of art made for the page, distributed in book form, have been popular throughout the 20th century. The appeal continues today, as, for instance, the Not-Book, a recent local example of the genre, shows.
The connection Drucker makes between the rise and proliferation of book arts and the means of mass and digital production suggests that book arts are an obstinate form, unconcerned with obsolescence and convenience alike.
Indeed, the preciousness of the time spent to complete the virtuosic labor of love that effectively transforms the book as object into a work of art is reminiscent of other highly prized, rare objects—think of the mystique of the hand-made suit, the hand-sewn gown, hand-knitted sweater, hand-crafted shoes, and, last but not least, that mysterious presence of the artist’s hand. In other words, isn’t an artist book simply the more rarified cousin of any well-made and carefully designed book, one that pays particular attention to the relationships between making and material? And, while carefully considering these relationships in terms other than broad marketability, artist books come with the high price of any precious luxury object.
Art’s linkage to luxury, the umbilical cord of gold, is not new—and neither is the resistance to it. (For a discussion of the other end of the spectrum of book arts, zines–devoted to the punk ethos of DIY and the nonchalance and wit of good street art–see Lacey Prpic Hedtke’s essay in this constellation.) At the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA), a whole range of what happens when artists and publishers who care engage the medium is on display.
Jeff Rathermel, the executive director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, defines a book as a “contained narrative whose content unfolds over time.” So, to call something a book, we need a container, a story, and an unfolding over time. Some books at MCBA take “folding out” quite literally, such as David Pelham’s Trail. Paper Poetry, an elaborate and astonishingly detailed fold-out book. On the other hand, zines bubbling with creativity jump off the shelves, while the lovingly designed editions of Milkweed Press showcase that a well-designed, carefully edited book can be just as artful—albeit in a different way. But in light of the openness of Rathermel’s definition—a claw-foot tub filled with water whose surface is covered with floating, slowly fading images—the widespread submission to the conventions of the book is curious indeed.
For a declared bibliophile like me, the MCBA with its devotion to preserving the traditional means of book making is a treasure trove for looking, touching, sniffing, and cracking open these art pieces with something resembling reverence. But the art lover kept hoping for something—someone—to engage with the cultural situation of the book more head on, to take issue with the tempestuous relationship between digital and tangible. So I went looking for art that conveys an understanding and appreciation for the cusp the book is on—for book art that does more than cater to my nostalgia.
The Book Meets Facebook
In a recent show at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, I encountered a series of beautifully hand-sewn hardcover books, resembling nothing so much as an old-fashioned encyclopedia set: the Facebook Visual Reference Collection. The books, elegantly uniform, give Facebook, the ubiquitous social networking site, a physical, literal presence. Each of them is devoted to a themed stream of photos, mostly faces—profile pictures, to use the appropriate terminology—that the artist Jessica Henderson had gleaned from the site. The book of dogs showed page after page of people happily posing with their canines. Another book is solely devoted to wedding pictures, another to people posing with various guns, another to outsized mustaches—and, after leafing through them, the stupefying uniformity of the poses and expressions was both fascinating and slightly revolting. Is this how we demonstrate belonging to a community, a “tribe,” in the age of information overload?
In The Facebook Visual Reference Collection, ‘we’ act the same, ‘we’ even curiously, frighteningly look the same. The books’ physical appearance not only furthers the impression of uniformity but serves as a reminder that, in a traditional multi-volume encyclopedia, the uniform look of the books masked the depth, wealth, and heterogeneity of content. Yet these books do not strike me as exercises in nostalgia. They flaunt the impossibility of endeavoring to contain, in book form, a digital data stream and point to the limitations of the form, the failure to reliably contain, in their paper-bound fixity, the ever-evolving visual language of the web. They offer an archive of identity performances, outdated the moment the stream of images is interrupted.[iv]
The images themselves, utterly mundane in their familiar Facebook habitat, take on an undeniable foreign-ness when encountered in book form: they appear out of place, weighed down with an aura of permanence (and hence importance), yet unable to hold their own individually. They ask to be consumed in bulk and are relevant only en masse, as part of and sorted into a pattern. Devoid of any speculation or explanation for the patterns that emerge, The Facebook Visual Reference Collection in the end withholds as much as it reveals.
In the age of information overload, ruled by the economics of attention, the book can withhold and trip up the expectations of instant, unlimited, and up-to-date information. Rather than succumb to promising quasi-eternal authoritative truths, the book recognizes its necessary finitude, perhaps even its obsolescence, which, rather than doom it to the dustbin of history, could well lend itself to novel articulations of intent and purpose.
And while the bibliophile in me never seems to tire of getting to know books, intimately and lastingly, the art lover craves unpredictability: containers who fail to hold, refuse to unfold, who taunt and tease with playful unreliability; books that, by withholding, ask us to step up and fill in the gaps, to read the white spaces, in-between the lines, and through the textures and dents at our fingertips.
[i] The idea that technology conditions our perceptual apparatus is not a new one: see, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducability.”
[ii] Credit goes to Lea Sorrentino for pointing out this ad to me.
[iii] Richard Lanham builds this case persuasively in The Economics of Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
[iv] Thanks to Jessica Henderson, whose writing I first encountered when she was in my graduate seminar in 2010, for sharing her artist statement with me. Here is what she writes about The Facebook Visual Reference Collection: “The Facebook Visual Reference Collection consists of 26 hand-sewn hardcover artist’s books ranging in length from 76 to 412 pages. The books contain page after page of a single Facebook profile picture. The pictures were gathered through random searches and arranged into emerging themes. These themes define the content of each book and include people taking pictures of themselves in mirrors, middle fingers and people with exaggerated mustaches. Through this project I was exploring identity performance on Facebook. Why are these specific themes, actions, and images so prevalent? How does the individual fragment—that is one profile photo—participate in larger sociological and cultural discussions of representation, individuality and homogeneity?”
All images are of David Pelham’s Trail. Paper Poetry.
Post a Comment