Dec 012013
 

Paul Forte 2013

Paul Forte is a fascinating artist and thinker. “Visual Thinking and Cognitive Exploration” is a major essay on the theory and practice of Conceptual art, also a short history of the tradition, also a lesson on how to appreciate art, and also a Cook’s tour of Forte’s own amazing art (dwell on the images, meditate upon them). Steeped in the history of art and philosophy, Forte sorts out definitions and vectors of influence, does not lean on jargon but explains it, and is above all infectiously passionate about his subject. Note also that the essay is dedicated to the late Arthur C. Danto, a hugely influential philosopher (whom I have myself read assiduously now and then over the years), Forte’s friend and mentor.

dg

For Arthur C. Danto 1924 – 2013

The international Conceptual art movement that swept the art world in the late 1960’s emphasized the primacy of the artist’s thoughts or ideas in the art making process and forever changed how many artists think about and make art.  Reaching its peak in the late 1970’s, the movement was eventually overshadowed by the resurgence of more traditional art forms, but not before sowing the radical seeds of a new consciousness, at least where art is concerned.  Almost a decade after Conceptual art passed from the scene something interesting happened: in the mid 1980’s the movement seemed to resurface in what was touted as a revival called “Neo-Conceptualism” (also referred to as “Neo-Geo”). While roundly dismissed by Conceptual purists at the time as lacking in critical value, Neo-Conceptualism nevertheless signaled a significant turn for contemporary art.

In hindsight it appears that Conceptual art began evolving in the late 1970’s, and Neo-Conceptualism was one outcome of this evolutionary process.  The curious thing about this supposed revival was its acquiescence to the importance, indeed necessity of perception for expressing or communicating ideas along with the return to more conventional materials and methods of art making.  While an implicit acceptance of the centrality of material form in art didn’t necessarily negate or displace the predominance of the idea, it did give material form equal weight or footing, rendering the most controversial theory of the 1960’s, “de-materialization,” highly problematic.  Even so, much of the work that resulted from this supposedly renewed Conceptualism seemed sensationalist and facile.  In this sense the purists were right, and yet the reintroduction of perceptual concerns while adhering to the basic principle of Conceptual art concerning the primacy of ideas was highly significant.  Thus the stage was set to usher in a post-Conceptual era: art, or at least, Conceptual art, seemed to be evolving in a cognitive direction.  “Visual Thinking and Cognitive Exploration” attempts to make sense of this far reaching development and hopefully contribute something to our understanding of aesthetic experience.

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Desert Parcel (book fragments)

Desert Parcel (book fragments)
Paul Forte, 2013
Collage on canvass made from the fragments of an illustrated volume titled: Picturesque Palestine, Egypt and the Sinai, published in the late 19th century
39 3/4 x 54 3/4 inches

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“Artists today are an especially serious group of what one ought properly to think of as visual thinkers.”[1]Arthur Danto

Arthur Danto’s observation about artists, expressed in a review of the Whitney Biennial over a decade ago, seems prescient given the ubiquity of art made along ostensibly conceptual lines today.  Writing for savvy readers of The Nation in 2000, Danto was concerned about what he saw as an erosion of aesthetics for the sake of imparting moral meanings. He was not objecting to art that raised social awareness, only work that might do so at the expense of aesthetic value, as he understood it.  There are many competing concepts of aesthetic value, making the subject contentious to say the least.  And yet, the notion of visual thinking seems generic enough to have some bearing on a host of ways in which art might be valued.  I believe that Danto felt that by focusing on contemporary art as a form of visual thought we might renew the discussion of aesthetic value and perhaps rediscover just what it was about the experience of art that we find so engaging.  Danto’s basic point about artists as visual thinkers remains sound and was never at odds with the possibility of art being used as a vehicle for moral posturing.  His concern over the advancement of moral agendas through art at the expense of aesthetics carries little weight today, because most artists, critics, curators, and others understand that there was never an issue between aesthetics and socially committed art, although a fundamental change in attitudes about the use of aesthetics has taken place, something that Danto may not have anticipated: the aesthetic practices of many contemporary artists have become, for lack of a better term, conceptualized.  In other words, aesthetic properties such as line, form, and color, for example, are often not explored for their own sake as it were but are used as indices or signifiers, elements of visual thought perhaps best understood in terms of the artist’s intentions.  This outcome is one legacy of Conceptual art, that radical re-visioning of art begun by Duchamp and championed by Danto.  There is no little irony in the fact that the undermining of aesthetic attitudes that troubled Danto should come as a result of this legacy.

1 Headstone (Laying NO to Rest)

Headstone (Laying NO to Rest)
Paul Forte 2005
Black Slate, 42 x 22 x 2 ½ inches
Collection Yale University Art Gallery

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Arthur Danto’s view of artists as visual thinkers prods us to re-examine our aesthetic experiences in light of what they can tell us about cognition. Danto’s perspective, shared by a number of his contemporaries, is important because in supposing that many contemporary artists are basically engaged in visual thinking, he suggests a fundamental reevaluation of art.  This reevaluation can be summed up in terms of the potential that art has for deepening our understanding of cognition or cognitive processes.  Certainly such understanding is as important as the moral or intellectual purpose of one’s artwork, if, indeed, that is the intention of the work.  In fact, it could be argued that it takes precedence over any moral or intellectual purpose, however lofty or urgent, because art that explores how we know and understand, however implicitly, can at the very least reveal new and engaging ways of communicating ideas.  Palpable realizations about knowing and understanding are not simply byproducts of one’s social or political messages, rather, they are the very things that make these messages effective, enduring, or even possible in the first place.  If we consider the potential of art in light of this basic value, surely its “moral or intellectual purpose,” whatever it is, will be preserved by virtue of the deeper ways the work has changed our hearts and minds.

7 Ringing silence

Ringing Silence
Paul Forte 2012
Alarm bell, map and biology text in found box
13 ½ x 16 ¾ x 12 ½ inches

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The idea of artists as visual thinkers gained currency in the 1960’s and 70’s through the advocacy of visual thinking by the psychologist, Rudolph Arnheim.  But visual thinking, according to Arnheim, is hardly limited to the activities of artists.  It is a capacity that we all share, artists and lay people alike, and may be the only form of thought capable of engendering productive understanding on a broad scale.  “Visual thinking is the ability of the mind to unite observing and reasoning in every field of learning.  Whether people spend their days on using the physical forces of their bodies as garage mechanics or surgeons or dancers or whether they labor quietly at their desks as mathematicians or poets, the principal instrument on which their minds rely will always be the same.”[2]  That instrument, of course, is the eye.  The practice of one’s discipline forms the connection between observing and reasoning, something that results in the give and take or back and forth of one’s art or activity.  One does, observes and evaluates the results, and then proceeds to adjust the doing as is necessary.  The work of either artist or garage mechanic involves a dynamic interaction between doing or making and observing.

8 Facade Compendium Wall

Façade (Compendium Wall)
Paul Forte 2013
Encyclopedia covers (1893) on wood
42 x 52 ½ x 1¼ inches

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But art making, certainly for the creative artist, requires open observation and careful reasoning.  The mind is always implicated in what and how we see, so the challenge for the creative artist involves sustaining an imaginative approach to both observing and reasoning without succumbing to solipsism or sophistry.  An imaginative mind combined with a critical eye seems to be the key.

2 Compact Record of Discarded Thoughts

Compact Record of Discarded Thoughts
Paul Forte 2005
Wadded paper (artist’s writings), glue, varnish
12 x 12 x 12 inches

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Our knowledge of self and world is in constant flux; there is an ongoing interrelation or interaction between what we know and what and how we see.  Visual thinking in this regard seems more fundamental than abstract thought; thought seemingly divorced from qualitative features of perceptual states that determine what something is like, or to employ a philosophical term: its qualia. The artwork of artists exploring the interrelations between the phenomenal properties of their materials and ideas is often provocative and unusual, calling for a more demanding set of interpretive skills; skills beyond at least aesthetic judgment that puts great store in absolute distinctions between perceptual and conceptual concerns.  When this dichotomy is guiding appraisal of the artwork it is often misunderstood and subsequently misjudged.  For example, critics, curators, and the art viewing public often overlook or underestimate the cognitive value of contemporary art seemingly indebted to some tradition or another, assuming that such work is primarily concerned with furthering that tradition and little else. If, on the other hand, such art is presumed to simulate a tradition and have a conceptual intention, then it is usually viewed as a matter of either pastiche or parody.  The presumption in the first case is that the work is primarily the result of formal concerns, to some extent or another, in the second, that the work is either a matter of critique or gamesmanship, and essentially conceptual.  It appears that much like the apparent opposition between aesthetics and socially engaged art, absolute distinctions between the formal and the conceptual, eye and mind, are overstated if not illusory.

9 Book of Maladies

Book of Maladies
Paul Forte 2013
Sealed book, crystals and mixed media on painted base
16 x 22 x 3 inches

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While visual thinking is commonplace, it is nonetheless a mainstay of creativity.  For artist and audience alike, artwork that engages visual perception and thought on an equal footing can imbue aesthetic experience with clarity, depth, and passion.  Artwork that delivers in this way may even lead to a new attitude toward aesthetics in general.  In my view, such engaging artwork precedes or makes the new attitude possible.  Thus Danto points the way when says that contemporary artists “portray themselves as engaged in conceptual exploration, calling boundaries into question, seeking to bring to consciousness the way we think about many things.”[3]  This is all well and good, and yet, it seems that artwork that both results from visual thinking and requires it in order to be properly understood or appreciated will implicitly call into question the limits and efficacy of conceptual exploration.  This is a reasonable assumption supported by a diverse yet coherent body of contemporary art practices, regardless of how those practices might be characterized (i.e., as “conceptual or conceptually oriented”).  It is my contention that the primary factor underlying these practices is not conceptual exploration, but rather, cognitive exploration.

3 Small World

Small World
Paul Forte 2008
Magnetized globe with metal objects on wood stand
20 x 12 ½ x 12 ½ inches

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Many artists, critics, and curators continue to use the terms “conceptual” and “cognitive” interchangeably.  One reason for this indiscriminant usage may be related to the orthodox understanding of cognition as a domain consisting of “logical reasoning, awareness, and judgment, and the rational structuring of sensation and perception.”[4] This understanding relies on or is in keeping with presumptions concerning mental processing and the formation of ideas. But cognition is essentially a matter of knowing and understanding, which certainly involves thought and ideas, but thought and ideas, in daily experience as well as in the art making process, are never fully independent of sensory input or emotive aspects, at least indirectly.  A fuller understanding of cognitive processes entails apperception and the emergence of new consciousness.  Consciousness of the integration of thought, sensation and feeling merits mentioning because it has bearing on understanding the basic distinction between the cognitive and the conceptual. Consider for a moment the fact that a good many of our ideas and concepts are first expressed metaphorically, expressions that were originally based on some manner of sensory experience. Consider also the deep relationship between thought and emotions. Feeling may be ultimately inseparable from thought, however subtle the thoughts or manifest the feelings.  Think about the feelings that often accompany ideas that give rise to strong religious or political convictions.  The person holding such convictions may not be aware of his or her feelings, but others often are. There is even a question as to whether the “rational structuring of sensation and perception” is possible in any definitive sense because it seems that sensation and perception are never entirely free of unconscious factors.  Briefly put, knowing and understanding are intertwined processes that involve more than just thought and ideas.

4 Artist's breath

Artist’s Breath
Paul Forte 2008
Sealed bottle on brass stand
13 x 4 ½ inches

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The late philosopher, Nelson Goodman, made a lasting contribution to our understanding by clarifying the distinction between the cognitive and the conceptual, as well as prodding us to reconsider the nature of aesthetic experience.  “In contending that aesthetic experience is cognitive, I am emphatically not identifying it with the conceptual, the discursive, the linguistic.  Under ‘cognitive’ I include all aspects of knowing and understanding, from perceptual discrimination through pattern recognition and emotive insight to logical inference.”[5] Thus it seems clear that the cognitive encompasses the conceptual, not the other way around.  That memory, knowledge, and imagination, as mental capacities, to some extent all determine what and how we see is beyond dispute.  But the point is to see anew.  Cognitively effective art can have an impact on our lives because it enables us to, in Goodman’s words, “See what we did not see before, and see in a new way.”[6] I think that Goodman’s main point here is that such art can be instrumental in developing visual acuity, thus enriching our daily experience.  I believe that some of this artwork can do even more.  Cognitive discoveries, finding new ways of seeing things, are, ultimately, discoveries about cognition itself. The new experiences that art can provide lay the groundwork for how we come to understand ourselves and the world and how we eventually conceptualize that understanding.

6 Nest egg

Nest Egg
Paul Forte 2010
Bird’s nest, glass globe, photo and map in found box
10 ½ x 13 x 7 inches

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“In metaphor, symbols moonlight.” [7]—Nelson Goodman

There is a mode of reference that has bearing on the notion of visual thinking.  This is metaphor; something that occurs primarily in verbal form, but is not limited to the realm of letters.[8] I accept the supposition that metaphor is an essential component of language, in both its literary and everyday usage.  Metaphor animates language in complex and subtle ways.  It makes words breath, adds color and interest, and generally makes reading pleasurable.  But it is more than an ornamental or humanizing gesture.  In instances where, for example, denotative language falls short or is nonexistent as a means of describing a particular phenomenon, metaphor serves an invaluable function. Thus, in science, for example, metaphor has an indispensable role in the advancement of knowledge.  Catherine Elgin comments on the value of metaphor in this regard.  She maintains that while it is true that scientists, unlike artists, “strive for literal, univocal, determinant symbols,”[9] it is wrong to assume that metaphor and other indirect forms of reference are alien to science.  Elgin states her case eloquently: “Inasmuch as metaphor is a device for drawing new lines and for redeploying conceptual resources that have proven effective elsewhere, it is an immensely valuable tool at the cutting edge of inquiry.  Where there is no literal vocabulary that marks the divisions that scientists want to recognize, they resort to speaking metaphorically of strings or black holes or central processing units.  But as inquiry progresses, the talk becomes increasingly less metaphorical.”[10] I think that visual metaphor has an equivalent value for the visual arts.  The practice of appropriating images and or objects from everyday life for metaphorical ends could be considered analogous to a redeployment of conceptual resources as it occurs in the theoretical language of science.  Just as it is wrong to assume that metaphor plays no essential role in the advancement of knowledge through science, it is equally wrong to assume that visual metaphor in art is not essential to our understanding of aesthetic experience. Indeed, it may be essential to our even having an aesthetic experience.  If aesthetic experience is cognitive, as Nelson Goodman contends, then visual metaphor in art is also a very valuable tool at the cutting edge of inquiry.  That metaphor in general connects disciplines or domains, at least in principle, indicates more than versatility.  Given its reach, it may be an instrument that combines thought, imagination, sensation, and feeling in ways that lead to new knowledge.

5 History lesson

History Lesson
Paul Forte 2009
Collage and mixed media on board
32 x 40 inches

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10 Beckett's Notes

Beckett’s Notes
Book covers, postcard, map and compass on board in artist’s frame
26 ½ x 30 ½ x 1½ inches

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Of course not everyone agrees that art is a form of inquiry.  Those who balk at the idea that art can teach us something fall into two general categories: those who cannot take it seriously, and those who resist its seriousness.  Art is as serious as science, and just as the results of scientific inquiry need not threaten our well being, understanding and accepting the seriousness of art need not undermine the spirit of art.  Some people maintain that they love art and that it is possible to enjoy it for no other reason than the pleasure that it affords.  Some people take it seriously for the moral instruction or social message that it conveys.  Whether we treasure art as a way of refining our sensibilities or as a tool for consciousness raising, in either case we gain immeasurably when we can better understand why we consider a particular work of art pleasurable, important, or both.  The point is that understanding the artwork from a cognitive perspective can both deepen our pleasure in the work and or our respect for its moral or social message.  Moreover, artwork with the primary purpose of exploring cognition through visual metaphor can be both pleasurable and socially relevant.  Just as the metaphorical language of science can broaden our understanding of the world, the metaphorical images and objects of art can deepen our understanding of ourselves.  As understanding grows, the metaphorical language used to express the theoretical advances of science gives way to more literal or denotative forms of expression.  Something similar may be happening as the investigation of cognition through art progresses, although it is the nature of the visual metaphor that is changing, not the underlying metaphorical orientation through which the exploration advances.

— Paul Forte

Author’s note: Arthur Danto was a wonderful philosopher and critic as well as accomplished print maker. I am very fortunate to have known Arthur, a mentor of sorts, and someone who genuinely cared about art and never shrank from offering his support and encouragement to those artists that he deemed worthy of attention. He gave a talk at the Yale University Art Gallery on my “Headstone” in 2005. It was a great evening and Arthur was in fine form. He will be greatly missed.

Arthur & Paul

Arthur & Paul

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Paul Forte’s career as an artist began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s.  The Bay Area in those days was a crucible for social, political and cultural change, and Forte managed to play a small but vital part.  Like many artists at the time, he was interested in the experimental possibilities of art and, like many others, believed that the changing nature of art still had the capacity to enable new visions, new voices.  Art and politics were always an uneasy combination for the artist, although he understood perfectly well that how art is received, or enabled is largely contingent upon politics and economics, perhaps especially in a capitalist society, which tends to marginalize those artists who cannot or will not meet the demands of the market.  This realization led to an interest in Conceptual art, and to one of its principle mediums: the “artist’s book,” of which he self-published a number of works in small editions.  Throughout the 1970’s Forte’s work explored the subjective and aesthetic dimensions of conceptual approaches to art making through a variety of media that would later become the basis for what the artist calls a cognitive approach to art making.

A resident of Rhode Island since 1987, Paul Forte has exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California  (1975,1983); A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1978); 80 Langton Street Gallery, San Francisco, California (1981); The Center for the Visual Arts, Oakland, California (1986); The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut (1991); the Kim Foster Gallery, New York City (1998); and Francis Naumann Fine Art, New York City (2007 & 2008).  Forte’s work is included in the Sol Lewitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (artist’s books); and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among others. Forte has lectured on his work at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Rhode Island; The University of Rhode Island; The Rhode Island School of Design; Brown University (Honors Program); Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York; The California College of the Arts in Oakland, California; and the University of California at Berkeley.  Paul Forte is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Fellowship (1978), and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1990).

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Arthur C. Danto, “Art of the Free and Brave.”  The Nation, May 8, 2000, p. 45.
  2. Rudolph Arnheim, The Split and The Structure.   Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996, p. 119.
  3. Arthur C. Danto, op. cit., p. 47.
  4. Herbert Kohl, From Archetype to Zeitgeist.  Little, Brown and Company, Boston Toronto London, 1992, p. 179.
  5. Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 84.
  6. Nelson Goodman, ibid., p. 85.
  7. Nelson Goodman, Ibid., p. 77.
  8. Whether or not verbal metaphor is related to visual thinking is an open question, one involving an understanding of how mental images are the bases of associations underlying most verbal metaphors.  If most verbal metaphors are the result of making associations based upon mental imagery, does that make such metaphors inherently a matter of visual thinking?  It seems self-evident that visual metaphor is a matter or form of visual thinking.
  9. Catherine Elgin, “Reorienting Aesthetics, Reconceiving Cognition.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 58, No. 3 2000, p. 223.
  10. Catherine Elgin, Ibid., p. 223.
Jun 062013
 

transformed volumes final

The book is disappearing into the ether, becoming electrons assembled on screens, or maybe not — you never know with books. The obituaries might be premature. But the mere threat of the disappearance of books has prompted a fascinating surge of art related to books, not images in books or book cover art, but books as objects converted into works of art. All of which connotes, yes, a vast nostalgia amongst thinking people for the book and a multimedia inquiry into the meaning of the book.

Numéro Cinq is carving out a niche for itself in the field of book art (hybrid text and art, conceptual art, art using typography, typesetting and media, books made into objects of art) and hence it only seemed just and fitting when Paul Forte asked me to use NC as a venue to announce and promote a major new show of artist’s bookworks, Transformed Volumes, scheduled to run at the Hera Gallery, Wakefield, RI, June 15 to July 13. Forte has assembled a stunning, surprising, witty, gorgeous collection artist’s books by six artists, also provided us with a short essay on the concept of the artist’s bookworks along with mini-essays by each of the artists, a trove of  art and information. Who can resist Doug Beube’s self-description as a biblioclast? And Donna Ruff’s use of the word scarify, relating her work to scars and script? These are smart, wonderful artists. The work dazzles.

dg

§

The “artist’s book,” as publisher and poet Dick Higgins once defined it, provides a good basis for understanding what artists are doing when they use a book format to make art. In the preface to Artist’s Books: A Critical anthology and Sourcebook, Higgins writes: “It is a work. Its design and format reflect its content – they intermerge, interpenetrate.  It might be any art: an artist’s book could be music, photography, graphics, intermedial literature.  The experience of reading it, viewing it, framing it – that is what the artist stresses in making it.” [1] Higgins points out that the artist’s book is nothing new, that it has a venerable history that can be traced to the work of luminaries like the 18th century Romantic poet, William Blake, a master printer and bookmaker who was also an accomplished visual artist.  Books by artists–whether the livre d’ artiste of the late 19th and early 20th centuries or the experimental works made since the mid 1960’s–have long provided a kind of portable venue for the dissemination of art.  But it wasn’t until the mid 20th century that artist’s books gained mainstream recognition as a legitimate genre.  There have been countless exhibitions over the years devoted to the artist’s book, but much less attention has been paid to a more recent development: the artist’s bookwork.[2] Artist’s books and artist’s bookworks are not the same thing.  Whether considered something distinct from or a sub-genre of the artist’s book, the bookwork–or art object based upon some formal or material aspect of what we recognize as a traditional book–departs from the medial concerns of both ordinary books and most artist’s books.  And it does so in a cognitively interesting way.  The defining feature of bookwork art is its “de-mediated form, which means that the basic function of the book to convey ideas or expression through its content (usually text and or images) is disrupted or suspended in some way.[3] The artist’s bookwork does away with or occludes content in any number of ways.  And yet, the most successful examples of this art form can still be read in some sense, not for what they contain, but for what they embody. While no longer acting as, strictly speaking, receptacles or vehicles for words and or pictures, bookworks can nevertheless rise above mere reduction to a formal or material basis and take on or acquire symbolic or semiotic functions.  Such unusual art objects succeed as significant or meaningful things when exhibiting an imaginative engagement with the material and or form of the book while also maintaining clarity of purpose embodied by that material or form.  This is exactly what makes the bookwork cognitively interesting.  Viewing and reading, sense and thought are brought closer together. The point, according to interdisciplinary scholar, Garrett Stewart, is: “reclaimed or fabricated, the de-mediated bookwork, as we will come to understand it, is a conceptual object: not for normal reading, but for thinking about.”[4]   

The bookworks assembled for this exhibition explore various facets of de-mediation through two related transformative processes: 1) the alteration of found volumes and 2) the fabrication of new objects based in some way on the traditional book.  This exhibition has two objectives as well.  The first is to turn the usual way that books convey ideas on its head and present the bookwork as a primary or immediate mode of thought, thus also distinguishing it from the better known genre of artist’s books.  As Stewart puts it: “One way or the other, to become book art, rather than an artist’s book in any sense, requires in the main a  surrender of pagination to sculptural form, message to sheer mass.”[5]  This is understood, although, again, the “sheer mass” of the book might be used in some way to convey ideas by acquiring a symbolic or semiotic function.  And Stewart agrees with this in principle because he made it clear to me that what was de-mediated (by occlusion or effacement) was text alone (although, I would also include images here as well) leaving the medium or material of the bookwork sculpture as a trope or metaphor; which is to say, a sign or symbol. The second objective is more nuanced and perhaps problematic: to mount a show that counters the prevailing notion that bookwork art is largely in response to the displacement of physical books by digital technology.  This is less a reaction to such a possibility and more a matter of offering an alternative view.  For those who believe that physical books are on their way out, bookworks are inherently elegiac.  But there is another way to understand the bookwork phenomenon, this recent development that deploys what appears to be a passing mode of cultural conveyance: bookwork is an art form that summarizes, encapsulates, and exemplifies a cognitive turn in the arts.[6] A half-century ago the arts took a conceptual turn.  In time we regained our senses, so to speak, newly informed by our conceptual bearings.  The phenomenon of the bookwork speaks to this cognitive turn in ways that other art cannot.  After all, books have always been the great repositories of thought and feeling. Now they and the objects that represent them have become vehicles of sense as well.

— Paul Forte

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Transformed Volumes

Doug Beube

“Fault Lines” 2003
Altered Atlas, 18 x 25 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

1. Doug Beube

Doug Beube: Why do I perpetrate acts against the book?  I have a love-hate relationship with the medium of my art. I love the collection of concrete words and ideas set in their fixed margins, the heft of its pages, the exposition, the narrative, the linearity and curvature of a story, the unfolding of a point of view, the simplicity, even the assumed preciousness, of this object, the codex. Yet, its technology in this digital millennium is outmoded, even frustrating, as a method for recording, preserving, and transmitting culture and information. On computer, I can delve into ideas with a series of clicks on a keyboard; I can drill down through websites into an almost infinite library of human expression. I can reshape, rearrange, erase, and restore, at will. All such acts, so intrinsic to digital technologies and so unnatural to books, is nevertheless what I am driven in my art to do. I view the codex with the span of its body and its spine, as a metaphor for the human form, and with its story, as a metaphor for human expression, on the one hand; and as an artifact of civilization, on the other. And, so like a physician or an archeologist, I am compelled to examine it, to dissect it, to cut it open, to dig into it, literally and otherwise. And, ever the biblioclast, I am compelled to unfix margins, make tomes weightless, empty volumes of their stories, and twist a point of view into its opposite.

Doug Beube is a mixed-media artist working in bookwork, collage, installation, sculpture and photography.  Since 1993, he has been curator of a private collection, The Allan Chasanoff Bookworks Collection: The Book Under Pressure, in New York City.  Beube has taught classes at Parsons The New School in artists’ books, collage, mixed media, and photography and given workshops at Penland School of Crafts, in Penland, NC, Haystack Mountain, Deer Isle, MN and The Center for Book Arts in New York City. He regularly lectures on his work throughout the US, Canada and Europe. Prior to receiving an MFA in Photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, graduating in 1983, he was a darkroom assistant to Minor White in Arlington, MA. Doug has exhibited nationally and internationally and his bookwork and photographs are in numerous private and public collections. In the fall of 2011 a monograph entitled, Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex: Bookwork, Collage and Mixed Media, was published by Etc. Etc. The Iconoclastic Press, Brooklyn, with an introduction by David Revere McFadden, chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.  The volume presents an in-depth overview of Doug Beube’s artwork over the past thirty years, with essay contributions from several well-known writers, critics and curators.

 

Claire Dannenbaum

“The Red Line” 2011
Book mounted on board, 10 x 6 1/2 x 6 inches

2. Claire Dannenbaum

Claire Dannenbaum: In this recent work I explore the conceptual life of the book.

My artwork is constructed from fiction, holy books, guidebooks, instructional manuals, and all types of books recycled from thrift stores, used book stores, and library book sales. In these pieces, I rearrange texts, disrupt, reveal, or obscure the narrative and the authority posed by the printed word. I use the graphic quality of text on the page to create a layering of visual narratives.  I have purposefully flattened the book so that it can be appreciated as a vehicle for associations, without even being read. For me there are many compelling contradictions in books. They are mass-produced yet precious; they are sacred, they are pulp. They can carry profound personal connotations as we carry our experiences into reading.  Books can be rare, lost, digital, or dog-eared, and still convey loaded meanings and conventions that fuel daydreams, revolution, the social imagination, and far-reaching historical dogmas.

I come to this topic from several vantage points. As a librarian I have, quite literally, built my professional life on the book form.  I see books as social agents: of inquiry, of personal fulfillment, of self-determination, and fundamental to the very fabric of knowing. Despite an onslaught of data, and routine access to trillions of bytes of information, there remains an enigmatic resonance to the book and the written page. Reading is a kind of magic one performs on oneself.  Every act of opening a book poses potential transformations:  of heroic escapes, of redrawn borders, of ecstatic pleasure, or a reconstructed sense of oneself in the world.  In my work I explore how the book is both inanimate and a living organism.

Claire Dannenbaum is an academic librarian and visual artist living in Eugene, Oregon.  Her current work explores the conceptual life of books through manipulation, destruction, reconstruction, and collage. Claire’s bookwork has been exhibited in Oregon, California, and Rhode Island.  She was awarded a Celebration Foundation grant in 2012.  Working as a librarian continues to be a rich source of inspiration for her projects.  Previously, Claire was a filmmaker and her work has screened internationally. She has participated in public panels, been a visiting artist, won a few awards, and has films in university libraries on both coasts. 

 

Paul Forte

“Liber Dermis (Skin Book)” 2008
Medical illustrations (human skin cross section) on sealed medical book, mounted on wood, 17 1/2 x 12 1/2 x 3/4 inches

3. Paul Forte

Paul Forte: My use of a book format to make art began in the mid 1970s when I produced a series of small booklets in editions of 50 in offset lithography.  At about the same time I was also making simple one-of-a-kind book objects, what were then called “unique volumes.”  The first book objects experimented with typewritten signs, graphic symbols and materials such as graphite and Mylar in an attempt to blur the distinctions between form and content.  Such early works were precursors to what are now called “artist’s bookworks.”  As with much bookwork today, the unusual content of these pieces was meant to be visually metaphorical.  By simply placing such “content” between the covers of a book, the material signaled intention, thus inviting the viewer/reader to explore it for significance. Visual metaphor is a primary vehicle of or for meaning in all my work, bookworks included. Philosopher, Noel Carroll, calls visual metaphor, “a device for encouraging insights, a tool to think with. This is not to deny that visual metaphors can provide insight, but only that they do so by way of having a meaning.”[7] An artwork that is visually metaphorical can elicit more than one interpretation, although, these readings are usually constrained by both the material parameters of the work and the context in which it is presented or understood.  Appreciating such art, much like creating it, requires focus and openness, judgment and imagination.  This conceptual attitude or orientation is in my view the key to opening a new chapter in our understanding of the relationship between art and the world. Liber Dermis is an illuminated manuscript of sorts, but one that celebrates the body or flesh instead of the Spirit. The color illustration on the book’s open pages is an enlarged image of a cross section of human skin. The implicit humor of the title is meant to create some tension by raising the specter of the sacred versus the profane. In keeping with those extravagant medieval works of piety, the surface of the open pages of Liber Dermis has an almost jewel-like quality. The skin image has been duplicated in reverse and both sides are rendered in low relief to provide an appropriate tactile experience.

Paul Forte’s career began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s. Primarily a visual artist, he also writes poetry and essays. Forte has exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California  (1975, 1976, 1983); A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1978); 80 Langton Street Gallery, San Francisco, California (1981); The Center for the Visual Arts, Oakland, California (1986); The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut (1991); the Kim Foster Gallery, New York City (1998); Francis Naumann Fine Art, New York City (2007 & 2008); and The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, California (2011). Forte’s work is included in the Sol Lewitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (artist’s books); and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among others. Forte has lectured on his work at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Rhode Island; The University of Rhode Island; The Rhode Island School of Design; Brown University (Honors Program); Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York; The California College of the Arts in Oakland, California; and the University of California at Berkeley.  Paul Forte is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Fellowship (1978), and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1990). A resident of Rhode Island since 1987, Forte lives in Wakefield with his long time partner, Laura Beauvais.

 

Donna Ruff

“Fanatic 2” (from Fanaticism Series) 2009
8 x 10 inches

4. Donna Ruff

Donna Ruff: Paper has a very real and tactile appeal for me.  I’m attracted to paper’s fragility and pristine beauty – yet my work involves scarring, incising, burning and puncturing its surface. These processes are simultaneously destructive and constructive, providing an image that confounds reductive comprehension as drawings. The word “scarify” is etymologically related to stylus and script, and creating works in this way developed from my interest in language, books and the written word. I’m inspired by geometric systems- celestial, fractal, graphical: the basis of visual language and the historical means of informative communication.

Donna Ruff grew up in Miami Beach, and moved to New York to pursue a career in graphic design and illustration. She earned an MFA from Rutgers University, where she focused on printmaking and installation. In 2010 she moved to Santa Fe, NM. She has been chosen to create site-specific installations at the Eldridge Street Project on the Lower East Side of New York, PS 122, and for ArtSPACE in New Haven, Connecticut. Exhibitions include Speaking Volumes at the Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin; Fireworks at the Hunterdon Museum in New Jersey; Paper[space] at the Philadelphia Art Alliance; Qville, at the Flux Factory in Long Island City, NY; 4th International Graphic Trienniale in Prague; and Feedback: Artist to Artist at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, as well as numerous gallery exhibitions. Recently her work was purchased by the New Mexico Museum of Art. She has curated several exhibitions, including Off the Wall>Rethinking the Print at the NewArt Center; and Status Update at Heskins Laboratory at Yale University. Her work was recently featured in Book Art: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books, published by Gestalten.

 

Jacqueline Rush Lee

“Inside Out” (from Volumes series) 2001
Soaked, dried, book components, 21 x 22 x 9 inches

5. Jacqueline Rush Lee

Jacqueline Rush Lee: My work focuses on the book as object, medium and archetypal form. Working to reveal or transform the nature of a book, I’m interested in the aesthetic of books as cultural objects that come with their own histories of use and meaning.  By using books as my canvas or building block, I can transform their formal and conceptual arrangement through a variety of practices in which the physicality, and thus the context of the books have been altered. I’m also interested in creating evocative works that are cerebral with emotional depth.  Remaining open to the physical and metaphorical transformations that occur in my working process, these residual sculptures or installations emerge as a palimpsest – a document that bears traces of the original text within its framework but possesses a new narrative as a visual document of another time.

Jacqueline Rush-Lee is a sculptor from Northern Ireland who lives and works in Hawaii (USA). Jacqueline has been working with books for fifteen years and is recognized for working with the book form through artwork features in blogs, magazines, books and international press. Selected bibliography include: BOOK ART: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books; PAPERCRAFT: Design and Art with Paper and PLAYING WITH BOOKS: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Re-Imagining the Book. Jacqueline’s work will be featured in ART MADE FROM BOOKS, Chronicle Press, 2013 by Laura Heyenga, writer and former editor for SFMOMA. 

She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Ceramics and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, with a background in [‘O’ level] drawing and painting from Northern Ireland. She exhibits her artwork nationally and internationally and her work is in private and public collections, including The Allan Chasanoff Book Under Pressure Collection, New York City.  

Irwin Susskind

Untitled 1998
Altered paperback book (series), 8 ¼ x 7 x ½ inches

6. Irwin Susskind

Irwin Susskind: Books are tactile – computers are not.  I started working with books eight or nine years ago when I felt this impending shift.  I create these objects as if books have already passed into history.  As if they are archeological discoveries from another time.  They can no longer be read, but by means of tearing, cutting apart and re-assembling, concealing, revealing and other manipulation, I try to reveal the lives of these books.

Irwin Susskind has worked as a graphic designer at Lippincott & Margulies. Inc., a firm that specializes in developing corporate identities, where he designed logos for Fortune 500 in the United States and world wide.  His artwork has been exhibited at the Bertha Urdang Gallery in New York City and in the Members’ Gallery in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

—Curated and introduced by PaulForte

——————————-

Paul Forte

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Dick Higgins, Artist’s Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, p. 11. Joan Lyons, Ed. Visual Workshop Studies Press 1987.
  2. One of the earliest bookworks was Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade of 1919.  Bookwork art or “book objects” first appear in the mid 1970’s as a development with roots in Conceptual art.
  3. De-mediation is a relative matter, whether it involves text or images because the effacement, disruption, or occlusion of such content is often partial or incomplete. Instances of purely de-mediated bookwork are probably rare because, among other things, the refashioned material embodied by most transformed books and their surrogates could be broadly construed as image content.
  4. Garrett Stewart, Bookwork, Medium to Object to Concept to Art, p. 14. The University of Chicago Press 2011.
  5. Ibid. p. 97
  6. A good working definition of cognitive can be had from philosopher, Nelson Goodman: “Under ‘cognitive’ I include all aspects of knowing and understanding, from perceptual discrimination through pattern recognition and emotive insight to logical inference.”  See Goodman, Of Mind And Other Matters, Harvard University Press, 1984. p.84   According to Goodman, “cognitive” and “conceptual” are not interchangeable terms.  Cognitive is the more inclusive term, lending depth and breadth to how we know and understand.
  7. Noel Carroll, Visual Metaphor, in Beyond Aesthetics, Philosophical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 2001. P. 365