Heidi Trautmann

332 - PALIMPSEST 2 at the ArtSpace in Nicosia South
4/2/2012

By Heidi Trautmann

 

This was my second direct experience with the art project Altered Books or as the title is correctly ‘PALIMPSEST 2’ which means ‘scraped to be used again’ derived from the old Latin and Greek times when parchment could be scraped off to be used again for a new ode.

 

The project was organized by the artist Horst Weierstall from ArtSpace and Ruth Keshishian from Moufflon Bookstore with a sponsorhip by the German Embassy, and displayed at the ArtSpace in Nicosia from March 30 to April 11, 2012 and will be transported to and displayed at the ArtSpace Dusseldorf in September 2012.

 

There were 28 artists who followed the invitation to “scrape off the obvious” and create a new meaning to the volumes they had mostly been given by Ruth Keshishian for this purpose. Ruth is fascinated about the artistic process of altering books; I watched her regarding the objects with pride in her eyes.

 

Book Art or Altered books have become an art branch by itself all around the world and the most fantastic art objects have been created. Just go and ask Mr. Google and let him introduce you to this new/old form of art.

When I read the comments by the artists participating in PALIMSEST  2,  the thoughts they had when planning and creating these objects, I realized that most of them approached the project philosophically, for example:

Arshak Sarkissian – Flowing Book: Whenever I open a book to read, I first approach the printed page as an art work. Here, I have added lines flowing downwards from the words.

Or Electra Petrou – Untitled:

I decided to cut out the sentences of the book and just throw them and stick them in the middle of the book because I thought that they are the ideas of the author, and he put them in a series in order to make the novel. The title of the novel is Romeo and Juliet so I tried to make this visual.

Or Alev Adil: A Federal State: Facts are as changeable as feelings; a palimpsest of memory and desire collaged in a lover’s gift, a volume from an encyclopedia from 1953.

Or Heidi Trautmann: Sailing with Literature: Books are the most important vehicles for travelers, and I am a traveler.

 

ArtSpace is close to the Lokmaci crossing in the South of Nicosia, as you go along, the first road to the right and you find the studio on your left, right at the end of the street.

 

Holger Briel of Cyprus University, a friend of Horst Weierstall and Ruth Keshishian, and already involved in the last Palimpsest Event, opened this year's exhibition with a retrospect and a researched glimpse into our literary future which meets with my total approval. Here is the full text which offers us among others a very reasonnable explanation why things develop as they do, as much as we regret it.

 

Introductory words by Holger Briel

 

It is fair to say that books and the book trade are undergoing rapid changes today. The arrival of digital texts and their easy transmission has altered the marketplace irreversibly. Kindles and other electronic “book” readers are popping up in ever increasing numbers, preempting physical manifestations of books, newspapers, magazines, and other older media. And while many may still find solace in physical books and especially their tactility, their sales figures reveal a different story. For 3 years now, since 2008, Amazon has sold more e-books than “real” ones. And indeed, when talking to people in the industry, the only segment carrying any growth is the coffee table book. But even this is not quite reason for jubilation as such; here, language, the skeleton of most books, if not their body and soul, is typically not the focus, images are. This “visual turn” is still in full swing, supported by advanced technologies supplying us with images as if they were “mere” texts, whereas the reading of actual texts is increasingly marginalized.

But platform changes always bring with them social changes as well. These might be good or bad: One might think of the 19th century portrait painter who is losing his job because photography has taken over and the middle and upper classes of the day preferred the newly found verisimilitude of the photographic portrait over the artistic impression. On the one hand, and certainly on an individual basis, this was a problematic development; on the other, it allowed painting to reinvent itself and jettison its need for reality. Thus, without photography no Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon!  Without photography, no abstract, no concrete art! And what a loss that would have been!

One might compare this with the relationship between the computer and literature. While at first sight it does not become immediately clear what the two have in common, upon further inspection they do interact in many ways. On the one hand, the invention of computers has allowed for new ways of producing, disseminating and consuming text. On the other, it has set the material book free to pursue other goals.

In the beginning of digital writing, in the 2nd half of the 1980’s, this typically involved HyperText or similar programs, which are an old hat these days when we live on Google and its hyperlinks This technology allowed for a radical change in reading: multiple roads, infinite endings. It freed the act of reading from its former dictate of linearity. Examples are Michael Joyce, An Afternoon (1987), Jane Yellowlees Douglas’ I Have Said Nothing, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden(1992) and others. More recently, Spanish literature has taken up digital literature with a vengeance and especially in Central America has produced some amazing narratives. The literary theorist Bolter speaks in this regard of the “remediation” of books into another medium. One other feature of digital literature is also important here: the ability to co-operate, to co-create. While this is not necessary new (think Dada’s Ecriture automatique), many sites nowadays offer a chance to be part of an ongoing collaborative writing experiment and thus independent of the participants’ locality.

And think of the marvelous opportunities the scanning and digitalization of books opens up for literary and cultural researchers! As of March 2012, Google had digitized more than 40 million books, representing 12% of all books ever printed. This data trove is only now beginning to emerge and will be an important place for scientific enquiry.

However, and that is a big however, all the Googles and Amazons are of course unable to substitute a MOUFFLON, a Rizzoli or London’s Charing Cross Road, where quality books and expertise are available like nowhere else.  

But just like the “writing-with-light” technology, i.e. photography, had freed or pushed the painters during the time of its inception to specialize and/or embrace the new medium, the digital world has given books also another lease on life: The recent upsurge in artists’ books we are witnessing today bears ample testimony to this. Artists’ books have always problematised the book and took it onto their own turf in order to make one medium another, playfully, forcefully and   inventively.

When one examines the history of artists’ books, one is led to their beginnings, to William Blake and his illustrations. But also to many other, newer movements, such as the Futurists, the already mentioned Dada, Guy Debord, Fluxus, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha and others. Most of these though produced some kind of art and made it into a book. The present exhibition is different. Here, the artists were given existing books already and told to experiment with them and make them their own. As if to say: the function of the book as a fount of textual knowledge has ceased, long live the new book! The new book imbued with all kinds of new, artistic knowledge.

Within this exhibition, there is an amazing array of differing works, all of them contesting the boundaries of book and art and their relationship. Thus, one finds an old Argos catalogue, the symbol of British mail order consumers, made lisible, readable, in a new way by its exposure to  and metamorphosis by nature. There are books, whose insides have been altered, ripped out, fortified, rewritten, overwritten, painted over, augmented, repackaged and shredded.  Pages are jumping out at the viewer-reader, are folded in intricate patterns and thus drawing attention to the materiality of the book itself. The pieces turn insides out, sow pages shut and always already pose questions of authorship and property, one of the other great challenges of cyberspace vis-à-vis the book trade.  Some of the books become sculptures or paintings in their own right such as the Larousse Livre de Poche, its middle elegantly cut out and now functioning as a frame or, indeed, an inside of a frame, depending on which position one takes.

Another artifact taking up the challenge of the text is the book with photographs of a semi-clad male body, who becomes more and more fettered and bound up by strips of printed paper as the story continues. Here the complex relationship between the written and the photographic text is squarely put in the middle of the discussion and is challenging more traditional views attempting to separate the two.

If e-books lack tactility, our artists‘ books certainly do not, even invite it, material allowing. It is after all the pleasure of the text, as Roland Barthes has called it, this double fold of Plaisir and even more the Jouissance inducing quality of texts that brings us back to them time and again. And in many minds these still belong between the two covers of a real book. Our artists here play with these concepts and add their own art, thus commenting on the books’ inherent qualities, but also going beyond them and taking them to their next space.

But enough! I think it’s time to finally go and look, explore and discover for yourselves. Before you go and explore, though, I would like to thank a number of people and institutions without whom this exhibition would not have been feasible.

 

Our Thanks goes to:

All the artists, old and new, who have participated

Anja Klos and the German Embassy which funded a significant part of the exhibition

Ruth and Horst for their time and effort

Last but not least, Natalie Yiaxi for display and mounting and her own piece.

 

 


Heidi Trautmann - Sailing with Literature
Heidi Trautmann - Sailing with Literature


Christodouli Olympiou - Nomenclature
Christodouli Olympiou - Nomenclature


Alla Protasova - Untitled
Alla Protasova - Untitled








Marina Yerali - Insects
Marina Yerali - Insects


Holger Briel welcoming the guests on behalf of Ruth and Horst
Holger Briel welcoming the guests on behalf of Ruth and Horst





Mary Plant - One Pearl of Great Price
Mary Plant - One Pearl of Great Price


Elektra Petrou - Untitled
Elektra Petrou - Untitled


Ruth Keshishian from Moufflon Bookstore
Ruth Keshishian from Moufflon Bookstore


Arshak Sarkissian - Flowing Book
Arshak Sarkissian - Flowing Book


Holger Briel reading the introductory words to the audience
Holger Briel reading the introductory words to the audience






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