Art Class: Art Book

First, let me just bitch and moan for a bit about just how hard it is to hunt something down in the vast and trackless space of interconnected tubes we like to call the internets. Especially when you have a mind that works like mine does and constantly refers to various objects and devices as “thingy” or “whatsitsnameagain?”. In so many words, I don’t think – on a certain level, anyway, - in proper-like nouns. So, when I know what I’m looking for but don’t know what it’s called googling can be akin to playing Russian Roulette. Well, something like putting a gun to my head anyway.

All of which is to say, sorry, I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but I’d like to have had some research and resources behind me to back it all up. Hence, I’ve made the mistake of looking to my own sorted past. Because with nothing else to prop me up, all I’m left with is myself. Alone up here on the stage, tapdancing like mad, and hoping to keep you from noticing the scary things waiting in the wings. No, no, don’t look, don’t look, eyes up here please. Because today, class, we’re going to be talking about a little thing I like to call an art book. It might be that only I and a few choice others have stumbled across this little device as, from what I can tell, the electronic nets around us have yet to catch this particular fish. But, eh, so I’ll propagate an undergrown meme today, then.

Art Book.

One line definition, if you’d be so kind: An attempt to treat a work as much like a piece of “fine” art as it is a text. Wrapped up in a form reminiscent of the stereotypical book.

When you make an art book everything from what the pages are made of to how the book is bound to the way the words move around the page is up for grabs. All churned into the creative process. The result is a lovingly handcrafted piece of art that people can interact with. It’s a book, after all, and people can walk up to it, crack it open – somehow – and read whatever’s inside. It’s a fascinating concept, for me, as it stands as an excellent example of the idea of mixed media. In fact, to me, it goes a bit further into the realm of what I’d like to call – so I think I will – mixed medium. Unlike a painting or a sculpture, say, it’s impossible to get the impact of the whole work with just a glance. You have to hold it in your hands, so to speak, and move the parts around and sample and explore. It’s at once a deeply personal and intimate experience and a bit of a dissonant one that rings strangely false as most people think of books as a mass produced, industrial thing. It both lifts and separates, so to speak, and that gives you a crack to slip your meaning into. That’s what artists like to do, anyway, most people spend a disturbingly short amount of time in a gallery or a museum looking at each piece of art. So, when you have something that all but requires people to pay attention for more than a few seconds it’s a nice way of telling them your own little story.

As I can find no examples of famous works of this type, I’ll have to resort to anecdote and tell you about the best one ever made – mine. I’ve been hunting for it as it’s been buried away in storage somewhere (Along with my scanner. Which I really should drag out sometime to add another tool to the blogbox. But it’d be pointless with my art book as I doubt you could fit five pounds of rusty metal into a scanner without scratching it. I’d just like to hold it in my hands again. And feel the coldness of well chilled metal. Again. After all, it’s been a while.) and I’d rather like to find it. It had a lovely introduction by an amazing person – whom I should really see about checking in on one of these days – that I can’t quite remember at present and it’s bothering me that I’ve forgotten it completely. Not the art book, of course, that’s seared into my memory. And, ahem, another one of my hard drives, so to speak. So, if you’ll be so kind, let me spin you a little yarn about my art book.

I’m afraid that the fact that I’m a rather well-educated individual, having at least attended college, is well and truly out of the bag. And I can hear the collection agents’ footsteps even as I let my mask slip just a bit further. Ah, the existential dread of the student loan. And it would probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading up on me that I indulged myself with a creative writing class or three. After all, what better way to spend that tuition than by having some fun, right? One year or semester or term or whatever they happen to call it at the University of Michigan because that’s where this took place, I happened to be talked into attending a poetry class, by myself if no one else. You see, I’m not that big a fan of poetry. Writing it, that is. Reading it, I love. But I’m just never considered myself a poet so I hardly bother to write them. My mistake, probably, and I’m sorry for all the stillborn poems that have crossed through my brainpan. But, I’m glad I allowed myself the chance to grow for this class because the idea appealed to me. The whole term we’d be writing a series of poems and the final project would be to collect those poems in an art book. The class was by invitation only[1]. So I cobbled together what poems and scraps of poems I had and submitted them in a portfolio and, well, there’s not much suspense here because there wouldn’t be much of a story if she hadn’t recognized a faint glimmer of something within.

The book I chose to write was an ambitious one. Of course, I was young and had no idea how to budge my time and my boundless energy at the time – not that I have that problem at all now, no sirree. But it was going to be all about the creative process. That’s right, I was going to make an art book about making art. In particular about a sculpture and its sculptor and how the struggle to make an idea a reality. I called the whole thing Untittled #7, I believe. How clever, I thought. How insightful. How sure to get me dates and win the respect and admiration of my fellow students. Might even be worth a B+ or so. So, anyway, over the course of the quarter I wrote and I wrote and I wrote (Sound familiar?). Some of my poems didn’t make the cut. But I was moderately pleased with the ones that did. And when the writing was done and it was time to bind a book with art, I really got ambitious. I used computers, I used graphics, I used metal, I used flame, I used paint, I used color and printers and everything else I could lay hands on to make it (I art. There were all nighters in labs across the campus. Many stimulants – of all different sorts – were consumed. Until finally, the class got together and showed off our books. It was a great big party with all our art books placed in their own little place of honor. Some were cute – lacey and frilly with decorations and touches every which way. Some were crafty – built like a carpenter makes a table and just as clever. Someone even sang their book. I’d like to think I did pretty well. My end result was a collection of delicately constructed and designed pages featuring my poetry. Illuminating my poems. Bound between two huge sheets of metal covered in flux and welding. It was solid, hefty, and imposing. I wanted it to look as if it was a rusty nail and anyone picking it up to read it would need a tetanus shot. Like I said, ambitious. I probably fell flat on my face. But I don’t care and I didn’t mind because it was a nice party and I met some nice people along the way.

Unfortunately, I’ve been looking over the poems I wrote for that class and I think I’m going to have to inflict one upon all of the few readers I have left at this point. Just to prove I’m not, you know, making this up as I go along or anything. I’m a bit hesitant as I’m certainly no poet. And it’s probably going to tell you a bit too much about where I’m coming from if not where I’m headed. But, eh, I wrote a poem for the first time in a long while today just by looking at this beast again, and maybe someone else will, too. I’ve heard of worse reasons to throw caution into the wind[2]…

Moth

Afterwards
my surroundings swim out of focus. Ambient
moisture clings until the air becomes soup.
The torch is warm. I can remember it;
the light even behind the polarized glass of my
shielded hood. The flame is hot.
Press close to the metal and it feels like
a blast furnace radiating heat, absorbing
me, singeing time away like beads of slag.
No matter how hard I press,
there comes a point to step away into the cold world.
To leave my sculpture looming to slowly cool.
Echoes inside my skull, a low growl, “You cannot
hold me. You are filth. You will not last.
I will burn through you.”
I could work until there would be nothing
left of me except a cauterized stump steaming
in pale sunlight and
it’ll never be right.
There’s no knee for me to gouge.
The metal is still warm
enough to suck the moisture from my hand. It
will scald me, if I linger too long on a good-bye,
but if I run my hand along the framework, feeling
the invisible pits and grooves and the cool air like
a sheet around my knuckles. “Run to your shower.
Douse yourself. Feel the water coating your flesh
and know that, even then, you are rotting. You will
be dust and I will never dull.”
In answer,
a curve bites me. Sinking into my thumb,
it splits the skin open to my own framework
and what I am made of dribbles down the length
of our arms. Boiling on the scorched metal,
the blood will run, milky and clouded,
but a part of it will stay.

[1] – From a wonderful and gracious professor, of course, and I’d be happy to pimp her latest book or project if I could only remember her name. Instead, let me direct you to her favorite book at the time. Hold on, let me pull it off of one of my many bookshelves so that I can loan it to you, so to speak. Here, “Open Closed Open” By Yehuda Amichai – which I’m pleased to see is out in another all new edition than the one I have with it’s book jacket placed on upside down. Go ahead and read it all the way through. At least that way one of us will have.

[2] - I just know I'm going to end up posting the whole thing now. Especially as my very carefully planned word/page placement seems to be lost on the blogging box I use...