Art to be h(e)ld: The allure of the artists’ book

Mon 7 Oct 2024

Despite their enduring popularity since the 1960’s, artists’ books remain an elusive concept requiring some disambiguation. As Lucy Lippard, American writer and longtime champion of the artist’s book, notes, artists’ artists’ books are not books about art or on artists, but books as art^[142]. Artists’ books can be read as conceptual artworks, with the book form enabling artists to experiment with concepts related to temporality, materiality, signification, reproduction and the (often ambivalent) relationship between image and text. While artists have prized the book form for its affordable production costs, portability and reproducibility, artists’ books have also functioned as a means for artists to reassert autonomy over their artistic practice by circumventing the traditional presentation and reception models embedded within the commercial gallery system. Instead, artists place the responsibility of reception and critique (quite literally) in the hands of the viewer.

Over the years, the QAGOMA Research Library has built a small but richly varied collection of artists’ books, connected to various art movements and international avant-gardes.

Yoko Ono ‘Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions’ 1970

While Yoko Ono’s name needs little introduction and despite her long exhibiting career of over 70 years, Ono’s artistic practice has often both bewildered and eluded audiences. Originally self-published in Tokyo in 1964, Grapefruit is a compilation of some of Ono’s earliest instruction-based artworks – artworks that instruct the viewer via verbal or written instruction to perform certain actions, as well as to imagine scenes and scenarios to actualise or produce an artwork. For Ono, mental and physical activity are equal; activating the imagination is just as important as performing a physical task. This second edition (1970) includes the instruction works from the original first edition as well as an abstract written by John Lennon.

The instruction artworks included in Grapefruit vary widely in both complexity and feasibility; one work instructs the viewer to ‘Hit a wall with your head’ (WALL PIECE FOR ORCHESTRA to Yoko Ono 1962), while another more esoteric, meditative work instructs the viewer to ‘Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in’ (CLOUD PIECE 1963). Ono’s instruction artworks were inspired by the work of both George Brecht — specifically Brecht’s ‘event-scores’, verbal scores comprising of lists and instructions conceived to illuminate and accentuate perceptual experiences — as well as the work of avant-garde composer John Cage. Ono’s instruction artworks have also been interpreted as expressions of Ono’s Japanese heritage; with art historians noting that the works are inspired by aspects of Zen Buddhism, specifically the literary tradition of kōan, as well as the Japanese literary form the haiku.^[143]

John Baldessari ‘Brutus Killed Caesar’ 1976

Like Ono, the late American artist John Baldessari was also interested in the ways in which viewers can ‘read’ artworks. Born in California, Baldessari (1931–2020) was one of America’s preeminent Conceptual artists. Baldessari is most well-known for his idiosyncratic use of found imagery and text, largely appropriated from 20th century popular culture, often juxtaposed in inventive and incongruous ways. Brutus Killed Caesar is an artist’s book created by Baldessari in 1976. Inspired by Susanne K Langer’s essay ‘The logic of signs and symbols’, Baldessari’s book uses the structure of grammar, namely subject–verb–object (SVO) order, to unify a series of seemingly disparate images (or what Langer refers to as symbols) into an implicit, connoted relationship.^[144]

This connoted relationship is established on the title page which bears the text, ‘Brutus Killed Caesar’. As the reader flips to the first page, they are confronted with a triptych image: on the left is an image of a side profile of a young man, in the centre is an image of a knife and on the right is an image of a side profile of an older man. As this triptych neatly replicates to the grammatical logic of the titular sentence of ‘Brutus Killed Caesar’, the reader immediately establishes that the young man on the left is Brutus, while the older man is Caesar. This triptych of young man/weapon/old man is repeated on each page of the book, but the central ‘murder weapon’, as well as the direction it is pointed, changes. While many of these weapons have overt violent overtones, such as a gun or an arrow, other ‘weapons’, such as a banana peel and a clothespin, seem largely improbable to inflict death. This tension between repetition and variation problematises not only the apparent relationship between the figures (i.e. who is Caesar and who is Brutus?) but also the relationship between image and text – as viewers may ask themselves, did Brutus really kill Caesar with a wilting houseplant?

Robert Jacks ‘Robert Jacks vertical & horizontal, hand stamped Melbourne 1978’ 1978

While Baldessari used the book form to problematise the relationship between text and image, for late Australian artist Robert Jacks, the book form served a different purpose, namely the artist’s book was an extension of the artist’s painting practice. Jacks was one of Australia’s leading abstractionists. Beginning his career in Melbourne, Jacks later moved to New York, where he became part of the artistic community that included Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, both leading proponents of the American conceptual and minimalist movements.

During his tenure in New York, Jacks began producing a series of artists’ books, building upon an earlier experiment with the book form that he had undertaken in Melbourne.^[145] Robert Jacks vertical and horizontal, hand stamped, Melbourne 1978 was created after Jacks returned to Australia in 1978 to accept an artist residency at the University of Melbourne. The book consists of twelves pages, with each page printed with a small grid composed of two colours. The grid motif is central to Jacks’ oeuvre, with the grid being the primary focus of Jacks’s work during his years in America. Jacks produced his grid works by experimenting with unorthodox painting and drawing methods such as using cake cooling racks and prefabricated stencils, as well as making rubbings of metal floors and wall grates.^[146] In Robert Jacks vertical and horizontal, hand stamped, Melbourne 1978, there is a tension in the juxtaposition between the hard rigidity of the grid and the intimate, tactility of the hand-sized book. While the book aligns with Jacks’ broader interest in the grid, it is the medium of the artist’s book that affords the work its intimacy, offering the viewer an alternative way to engage with the grid.

These artists’ books, as well as many others, are available in the QAGOMA Research Library by appointment. Appointments can be made by phoning 07 3842 9557 or emailing library@qagoma.qld.gov.au. The Library is located on Level 3, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and is open to the public from Tuesday to Friday, 10.00am to 5.00pm, closed Mondays and public holidays.

Savana Woodley is former Librarian, QAGOMA Research Library

Endnotes

1. ^ Lucy Lippard, ‘The artist’s book goes public’ in Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons, Gibbs M Smith Inc. Peregrine Smith Books, Utah, 1985, p.45.
   
2. ^ For discussion on the Japanese influences in Ono’s work see; Bruce Altsuler, ‘Instructions for a World of Stickiness: The Early Conceptual Work of Yoko Ono’ in Yes Yoko Ono, eds. Reiko Tomii and Kathleen M Friello, Harry N Abrams, New York, 2000, pp.64–72.
   
3. ^ Coosje van Bruggen, John Baldessari, Rizzoli, New York, 1990, p.97.
   
4. ^ For the complete history of Jacks’s engagement with the book form, see Peter Anderson. ‘Conceptual and perceptual: The early artists’ books of Robert Jacks’, La Trobe Journal, no. 95, March 2015, pp.77–92.
   
5. ^ Paul Anderson. ‘Unfinished work: 1968–78, in Robert Jacks: Order and Variation, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2014, p.44.