GUEST POST: The Book as Utopian Object (Sally-Shakti Willow)

For my practice-based PhD in utopian poetics and experimental writing at the University of Westminster, I’m researching the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch and the artist books of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.  I’m coming towards the end of my first year, and the first fruit of creative practice is the project called The Unfinished Dream, a collaborative work with illustrator and animator Joe Evans.

The Unfinished Dream began as an experiment in applying Ernst Bloch’s utopian theory to creative writing practice, inspired by the text works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.  Both Bloch and Cha explore the relationship between subject and object (self and other).  Bloch suggests that the experience of non-alienation, where the subject (the individual) experiences itself as not-separate from the object (the world/the other) is the essence of the utopian.  Cha embodied this desire to create an experience of non-alienation between the subject and the object in all of her major text, film, and performance works.  The Unfinished Dream experiments with these ideas and has developed into a collaborative project that keeps growing and shifting – an unfinished and unfolding creative process.

For Bloch, the utopian function of art and literature is to facilitate the ‘self-encounter’ (100), the recognition of oneself in and through an encounter with the other.  For Cha, as for Bloch, the art object becomes a space of encounter between the artist and the audience where each fulfils the roles of both subject and object in their interrelationship with one another through the work.  One of the forms used by Cha for realising this connection was the artist book.  The book is an object of intimacy, a space in which the reader and writer are drawn together through the page.  The book, as an object, is designed to be held and engaged with in a one-to-one relationship between the writer/maker and the reader.  Cha uses scriptovisual techniques to create a relationship between text and space, words and silence, self and other in her artist books.

I’m interested in exploring this strange relational space between artist and audience, writer and reader, self and other as an experiment in the kind of non-alienation that Bloch ascribes to the utopian function of art and literature.  I’m interested in the ways that the book form can facilitate this kind of an encounter between subject and object, self and other.  What kinds of spaces need to be opened up within the text for the reader to project herself into?  How might the relationships between text and space / word and silence / text and image / image and space engender a performative experience of non-alienation for a reader encountering the book object? 

To experience something, we often need to encounter it physically, via our sense organs.  In this sense, and in others, the physical relationship between the book and the body is integral to the project.  I’m also deeply interested in the physicality of the book form, its materiality and its function.  Below, I describe some of the processes and ideas behind the creation of The Unfinished Dream, the first part of my creative practice for this three-year PhD.

The Unfinished Dream illustration details

 ‘May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve’. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

  
The Artist Book:

The physical object of the book is a central concern of The Unfinished Dream.  The experimental writing collection explores the ways that the materiality of the book is often ignored and made invisible at the expense of the words and ideas it contains, in a similar way perhaps to the relationship between the physical human body and the concepts and ideas that are generated by the mind.  The Unfinished Dream explores writing, drawing and creative practice as embodied, physical processes – processes that take place in, of and through the body, and which may be experienced physically, viscerally and emotionally by those who come into contact with them.

Similarly, the general invisibility of the book form means that culturally we take for granted the codex structure which has become synonymous with what a ‘book’ is.  Historically though, and across geographical and cultural spaces, different forms such as scrolls, wrapped papers, and now digital platforms have provided alternative ‘book’ forms with different relationships to structure, linearity and temporality.  The codex form developed with Coptic Christianity and encodes the linear, teleological (end-focused) structure of the biblical narrative.  What happens when we question these invisible assumptions that structure the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell of ourselves, so implicitly?  The Unfinished Dream explores the human relationship to the codex form and the teleological narrative it encodes and embodies.

Ernst Bloch describes utopia as ‘in the process of being’ (15).  For Bloch, utopia is a process rather than a destination and as such it is non-teleological.  Cha’s major artist book Dictee embodies a non-teleological structure in that there is no temporal narrative development throughout the book, and her use of repetition to return to key thematic images and ideas gives the book a cyclical or circular structure, despite its codex binding.  The Unfinished Dream embodies a similar structural rhythm in an attempt to disrupt the teleological structure of the codex form via its content. 
The book also explores the relationship between words and silence as represented by the spaces between words and phrases on the page; the relationship between words and images; and the relationship between parts of words through the non-standard use of the square bracket.  Each of these relationships has the potential to generate multiple possibilities through the gaps in between two elements and/or the dissonance generated between two or more contradictory parts placed together.  This is intended to have a twofold utopian function in that it disrupts teleological structural development by offering a profusion of possible pathways through the book as well as situating the reader as a co-creator of meaning, as each person encounters and experiences the book differently.  In this way the boundaries between writer and reader become more permeable.  The  co-creative relationship between the reader and the writer/artist is at the heart of The Unfinished Dream, as the reader must complete and interpret the work of the writer and illustrator from the multiple possibilities that are offered both within and beyond the text.

When making The Unfinished Dream we also wanted to question some of the invisible assumptions which suggest that artist books must be artisan products, requiring specialist skills, materials and equipment to produce and displaying the skills of fine craftsmanship.  We love those kinds of artist books of course.  But we were interested in a kind of democratic creative process that didn’t fetishize the book as an object, that embraced real life physical processes and that aesthetically embodied the ideas contained within the book.

 

 A4 school exercise books, hand illustrated, cut and pasted

Binding with Sally’s hair

The Unfinished Dream – artist book

The Unfinished Dream – interior pages

The Unfinished Dream – interior pages

The final poem is left unfinished, with space for the reader to complete the work

      

In addition to the artist book, The Unfinished Dream is also a short film and a performance.  Click here to watch the film (90 seconds; contains nudity).
To find out more about the project, including the film and the performance, please click here.

A still from the film, projected as part of the performance

The Unfinished Dream is a project by [Sub]Atomic Books: Sally-Shakti Willow & Joe Evans

Bibliography:
Bloch, Ernst (1988). The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg.  Cambridge Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung (2001 [1982]).  Dictee.  Berkeley, California: University of California Press

GUEST POST. David Bomberg’s "Russian Ballet": a new beginning for English artist’s books? (Richard Price)

When David Bomberg published his slim artist’s book Russian Ballet in 1919 he was saying a fond farewell to the abstraction he had developed before the First World War.

Here was a booklet developed from sketches he had made before the War, using printing skills he had learned at that time, too.

The cover of Russian Ballet. The lettering is astonishingly ahead of its time: more 1960s
than 1919, and the large, all-capitals title, as well as the use of the artist’s surname (only), at a
perpendicular to the title, has a swagger, challenging conventional notions of ballet and asserting
the artist’s authority. (Image source: Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RussianBalletBomberg.jpg)

It is as abstract as anything he had produced in those Cubist-inspired days but it is not a ‘resumption of normal service’: he would soon entirely change direction, painting recognisablelandscapes and cityscapes pretty much for the rest of his life.

An image from Russian Ballet, c.1914/1919. As well as incorporating images into the artist’s
book, Bomberg seems to have made the lithographs available separately, as here. (Image source: ©Tate,
used here for strictly non-commercial purposes. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bomberg-vip07013/text-catalogue-entry)

There are many reasons why he might want quietly to assert the abstraction of what must have seemed like a bygone era, just five years ago. 
 
An independent artist rather than working through a movement or school, he had nevertheless flourished in the pre-War company of various kinds of literary and artistic avant-garde, admired by but at armslength from Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticists, and part of a loose grouping of men and women associated with Whitechapel, London.

It wasn’t just that he had been so excited by Sergei Dhiagelev’s company Ballets Russes, whose modern approach to dance had created such a sensation when it came to London in 1911. Other artists, such as August Macke, had also been stimulated by what they saw (in Macke’s case, seeing the ballet in Paris).

Ballets Russes, by August Macke, 1912. Macke’s post-impressionist style shares the same rich
aubergine palleteBomberg would adopt, a testament to the velvety light of the theatrical
appearance, and asserts, too, the important role of the audience in the overall experience. Bomberg
differs by moving firmly into abstraction. (Image out of copyright. Image source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballets_Russes#/media/File:Macke_Russisches_Ballett_1.jpg)

The excitement was as much about possibilities of response as it was about new subjects. Remembering the exhilaration of finding new ways to praise, to affirm, of finding new ways to pattern celebration –Bomberg must have made Russian Balletfeeling all kinds of complicated nostalgia,including nostalgia for the idea of the good future. Russian Ballet even continues a theme he had addressed in bookform before the War: in 1914 he had provided a dancing image for the cover of Poems by the modernist John Rodker.
 
There had been so much loss since then. He had been at the Front and had seen the slaughter. Not a natural poet, he had yet been driven to write poems which tried to grasp the horror of the scenes he witnessed (these few poems would not be discovered until nearly the end of the twentieth century and contain some of the most violently explicit war poetry in English). Some of his friends, such as the artist and poet Isaac Rosenberg, had been killed in the War. He had suffered a devastating artistic shock, too, when, as an official war artist, the commission he had madehad been rejected by his paymasters, its anger and its relative abstraction surely the reason.

Caption: Further images from Russian Ballet, c.1914/1919. Image source: ©Tate, used here strictly for non-commercial purposes.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bomberg-iii-p07010

So this physically light-weight book, Russian Ballet, a pamphlet really, has far more emotional freight than its fragile frame suggests. Dance and in fact the human body are like that: people carry a density of experience which renders flat; in comparison to the emotional volume, presents weightless.

I think Russian Ballet is also one of the modern beginnings of the English artist’s book. The pamphlet form is part of this. You could say that one tradition Russian Ballet counters – though there are too many tributaries of the English artist’s book tradition to go into here – is that of the literally heavy religious work. The Lindisfarne Gospels is the prime example in its large lavishness, its huge, physical, sculptural presence. True, the stolidity of its scriptural ‘republication’ of the Gospels is set against the freer improvisations of its beautiful visual decoration, but Russian Ballet takes such abstraction and separates it entire. Figuratively speaking, the Gospels tries to ground its readers, but Russian Ballet encourages them to take to the air.

One of the ways it does this is by using a single, short, text and eking that text out across the whole book. The poem starts with an artistic explosion – “Methodic discord startles” - which is nevertheless described in distanced language, so that we don’t know exactly what is being disrupted and we also feel that a commentary is being made rather than a closer, realistic sally into whatever is actually happening. This strange relationship between an intellectualisation and an experience is maintained all through the book, and is in fact one thing that abstraction is: you may feel closer to the essence of something by being able to understand its reduced but heightened metanature, you come round to what you may think is essence by disengaging to a great degree from specific reality. 

Because each line of poetry is given a whole page to itself, the book emphasises either a contemplative role for the textor a speeding up of reading (the reader can decide). In the first interpretation the exposed short text slows the reader down: the page is saying, “dwell on this, I have place this sentence amid so much white-space in the way that I have placed a visual work on the other side of the opening”. Yet the whole book is about movement, the fast movement of dancers: in the early days of cinema Bomberg is giving us a slow motion effect while foregrounding the dilemma visual and literary art has in
the depiction of movement. The line that the book and poem conclude with – “The mind clamped fast captures only a fragment, for new illusion” – suggests that velocity, admitting that there cannot be a totality of interpretation, is also the book’s theme.

The language is highly unusual for the poetry of the day. It asserts unashamedly a place for theoretical observation in poetry, and yet places a premium on concision: a six line poem becomes a whole book. 

Finally, Russian Ballet was one of the places where poetry and art were joined in physical performance, in theatre of a new kind. It is recounted by Bomberg’s biographer Richard Cork that David Bomberg and his then wife Alice Mayes pretended to be programme-sellers at an actual performance by Ballets Russes, selling Russian Ballet to unwitting attendees of the Ballet. Diaghilev, who was present at the performance, discovered the ruse and apparentlymade the buyers return their books. However, this was not before Bomberg had placed himself in the history of the arts as an innovator in no less than
three fields – the artist’s book, English poetry, and performance art.


There are a number of digitised versions of Russian Ballet available on the net, and free to use under US copyright law. Because of restrictions elsewhere, we have avoided directly linking to those, but draw readers attention to their existence. Of course, for artist’s books, it is usually better to experience them in person. In the UK, libraries which hold Russian Ballet include Birmingham University, The British Library, The V&A, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, and the Tate Library (Tate Britain).

References:
John Rodker, Poems, London: [Privately Printed], 1914.
David Bomberg, Russian Ballet (London: Hendersons, 1919).
Richard Cork, David Bomberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). See
especially: pp.122-126.





Coda
 
How a book could be 
by Richard Price
Bomberg’s Russian Ballet, 1919


This is how a book could be –
tonight it’s ballet, tomorrow
apply a different progression code
within the hyper lex transfer protocol.

There’ll be a future name for a flicker render, mimicking film.
It’s fine, you can theorise in poetry,
sing analysis in. There’s lyric in the language of the intellect –
lyric can be intelligent, breathing out a thought, attentive adoration.

This is how a page could be –
mostly whitespace for the text wall, and the windows varying in size, varied in
shape,
colour saturation, force of light.

It is all dancing and stage-build today, rich reds by design,
but you can still cherish resolving in the eye / hands.

Tomorrow this is how pauses work

This is how ellipses…
and now dashes –

           positioning, movement
                                         and you make it all a performance –
Would you like to buy this programme?

(The contents resemble everything I once wanted, worked for, resemble…
nothing you could have seen before,


                                                              and now they’re all alight.)





Richard Price’s poetry collections include Lucky Day, Rays, and Small World. He has collaborated with the artists Ron King, Karen Bleitz, Julie Johnstone and Caroline Isgar on various artist’s books. He is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library. More information about his work is gathered at www.hydrohotel.net

GUEST POST: I read to the middle (Seekers of Lice)

“today I would portray the world from an ant's-eye view 
and tomorrow as the moon sees it”     
Hannah Hőch

I read to the middle	objects put where	as she went out and in
the middle lye in bed	that contains them	brushed slight against it
sheets of clean newness	(envelope)	coat hung in the bed
papered and enveloped	light cuts them out	-room doorway she beneath
what do you want	meaning she had a diamond	would live forever
beneath the lamp	sold for a coat of fox fur	over forever sheets the
two fingers laid on your	coat a coat of astonishing beauty	the overcoat and the moon rose
skin with meaning	diamond became fox beauty	she changed the bed sheets each
each day a cough signed she was	make out self's feathers	odds and evens oddness added
there her heart beat faster	like air and habit	following breadcrumbs
(beating) under the covers	collapsing a mathematical room	undoing dangers
eating bread and butter	end papers oddness	each time tell something re
-vealing tearing dis	yawn and trail trying to be plain	wondering as she wore it
-traught clothes off	about what's not plain	at people in her mind who
as precedent of	what pretence of understanding	saw cruelty of beauty and
breadcrumbs laid trailing	of hardening steeled	(Larionov and Goncharova)
I'm beginning to see how it	what if it all turned in	it's strange nonetheless
might go don't talk what	-side out if skinned	accounting for things
of sonnets on shirts	fox cries for its fur	trying to keep fed a
of the skin of things	fox sharps monstrous fabulous	teleology each day
each day cleaning the filter	rubbish and cherish	hastening towards you
take out the rubbish	such dazzling beauty	now and now and now
accounting for things	could the fox be more	is that the true answer?
devious and interesting	undone without precedent	this now is a true story
how true in a sleepdream	parting and longing	striking like a match
writing around talk of ev-	it's strong and fond	the bread rising
erything quick jump the	more powerful than	strong and fond it's
lazy dog's back	lust which lusts of	soft like your inner thigh
& all the rising nothingness	in the cold yellowish sky	he loves even the dog on
a beetle walking	breaking the journey	the street his beloved lives
across the bed	or sky egg blue	there's a little spy hole
where there's no bedhead	returns to life a dead hero	and even the dog sees
should we be more	swan geese migrating odds	the yellow river the blue
at odds with one another	Mongol Daguur to Yangtze River	river the Yangtze river
	Poyong Lake and Fengsha Lake	afternoon light on the
	the wintering ground	jagged grey mountains
the fractured of days	pupin coils at the ready	no status flayed & visceral
dailiness of microfarads	resisting current resonance	sometimes the hero is cut to
light stray currents	monotonous whine	pieces and put together again
iron grey saturation	electric loneliness	only to read the story's feather
what the poet did or said	like a private letter	tonight the moon's so big
talking of nothing a clod ex	babbling beyond all measure	when pins & needles I sleep
empt our stories words et	hurrying on roses love flee	new phone needs no pupin coils
-iquettes touching	-ting passions eat now!	describe your muscle-thoughts
describe an ashtray	semolina lemon	the yellow beak of day
a heart a muscle	a stilt a letter	he says or so you've had the
a wound a suture	a structure a suture	say-so ten lines tenden-
a letter a stilt	ambition regret	tiousness of song or lilt
babbling beyond all measure	groin crotch and lap	we thinking we
lilt like a private letter	without one of us	know something hidden
I'm half-hearted half-	she wrote it on her groin	the wood grain laps
baked but rising like dough	the paper printed on her lap	& swells
within crystals particles	ultramarine peach slick	unfocused close up (lips) the
move like ants or flocks of birds	stroking the side of your ear	shape of heat bodies make
colloidal suspension	ear is lucent licking your lips	pleach parfait heliotrope flash
something blurted	cobwebs brush the floor	without the yellow beak of
strongest on earth	mysterious mould on the wall	I've come to tell you
a limpet's tooth	to pleasure flies you and me	the sun's warm no scores but
day still over-excited	still exercised still fantasizing	blossom on brick
eat what you're good at
blossom stutters stum	the nightingale's voice	I've come to tell you
-bles more like itself that	and nothing more	I've come to tell you
logic ends in	lucent liquid shivers falls	to seduce you
thumb's prick tongue	I dream your body	flurried particle on particle
my skull-bone flêche	dream of fleshly flesh and	chance alerts you to your life
thighs muscles of this	shivers flurried lead	vibrates along the line
we part and simultaneously	we part and simultaneously	embedded in such varietals
(bird cherry) he's lost &	(bird cherry) he's lost &	to the right of her groin
look what's come to light	look what's come to light	a golden hair
		rude mechanics of limbs
what touch or itch	you think of lips	canto della moscha
what hot and screech	and all around we	screech of lightness
inside outside ver	all around the	small things slip
-min apple-pink skin	we hone ourselves	hairs pollinate
apple-pink skin		palpable sun in an
thin insects' bodies	I've come to you	empty room you
moths combs dust		entering room and sunlight
so purposeless		waiting to be felt
	palpable she notes it
	withal and happy
	impatiently patiently tuned
	static blossoms to fizz

ABOUT:

seekers of lice is an artist and writer working with text through artist's books, poetry, interventions, exhibitions, installations and performance. Recent books include Encyclops. 2014 ( if p then q), and Fly-leaf, which is currently being exhibited in the 7th International Artist's Book Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania.
seekers of lice has work in many public collections including ten books in the Artists' Book collection at Tate Britain, and has published work in magazines including VLAK, Rattle and onedit.

→ STOICHEDON