User:Inge Hoonte/Structure of the visual book

Keith Smith, The Structure of the visual book, Keith Smith books, Rochester, New York, second printing of the expanded fourth edition, 2005

Dos-a-dos binding: book cover, two books, turn over.

p67: work in return, made as a thank you, containing imagery of the book he gave to a friend, suggestion/reference to other page in his book own book.

p66: some books emit sound -> incl. tape player, CD player, or use sound emitting materials.

p71: turning a heavy cover of a book onto the lectern it's displayed on, activates a sound track

book as object, architectural space.

look at collections Museum Meermanno DH, Samson publ Alphen a/d Rijn, Women's Studio WOrkshop Upstate NY, Visual Studies Workshop Rochester

p94: the experience of turning a page. the page, hovering, relates to what comes before or after.

p97: turning transparencies. Moment itself only exists in mid-air. Inspired by Reich's music. Musical structure as motif for reading experience.

p107: Conversation as (music) notation.

p119: a codex can never be seen, experienced as one. only page by page, and it reverberating in the mind.

p128 repetition in fragments: dream sequence

p129 "This is improvisation; it is not variations on a theme. (...) -- it is like jazz."

p130 the content of a book, all its fragments and pages together compose a "compound concept. Oneness."

p132 you can create a sequence of images that are spread out pages apart

p134 "Accumulated fragments don't usually make sense in themselves. They are like a paragraph of syllables rather than complete words." transpose the way cinema works with sequences/scenes to books.

p138 words within words words can be split up in ways that are not their syllables. they get an entirely new meaning. beaches contains be & aches. together = to get her, tog ether.

p155 DISPLAY
On sheet: One-sided paper display vs two-sided. The rectos start to play together, the versos (recto=right hand side, verso=left). The book is ephemeral, yet it's a physical object requiring touch to experience it. You can display it on a mount, ceiling, wall, table. Hung from wires, displayed around a light source.

Peter Madden, Mental Notes, 2000. 30.5x183cm. Presented on spool. Alison Knowles, Keith Smith, others -- exhibited the book on screens. Barbara DeGenevieve, Narcissistic Disturbance, 1985 -- pages are 3x7ft. Photos & text.

p182 Keith Smith, Book 127 (incl picture) -- 25 volume, floor displayed. Each volume only shows part of the image, which is comprised of 25 images, one in each volume. Turning the page in all volumes of the grid will display the next image.

Also keep in mind the distance of the viewer to the object.

p190 David Horton, Luminous Perceptions, 1986-7. A book with 'rooms.' Pamela Spitzmueller, Preserved Book Series #14, 1989: a book in a jar, sand.

Installations made with books as building blocks.

But this is actually the artist that caught my interest the most: Janet Zweig - great installations with printers, printed matter, books. Public art installations, sometimes interactive, or generated by the public.

p216 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTENT
(I'm changing his use of pictures/images to content, for my own use) Random referral: free association by viewer, unintended by maker. (Directed) referral: intended by maker.

Content amassed is a

group: common denominator is theme, subject, composition, source. Collection or compilation. Example: One, by Ken Ohara. As soon as the maker creates structure, curation, the group becomes a series or sequence.
series: linear, successive, linking movement.
sequence: constructed, contingent, conditional movement, responding to individual parts but not in specific order. Cause and effect.

Confusion when using these terms, as in the world, literature, filmmaking, they're used interchangeably and with different meaning.

With internet searches, the "detours become the path. This represents a sequence." p233 "... in a sequence, the pictures are not independent, and no one picture or two-page spread represents the book." p234 "a sequence, like poetry, is layered"

Okay, so then I don't think my book is sequential, in his terms. Or maybe a chapter of it, a new writing, will be. The separate pieces up until now are independent, and start to mean something new in relation to one another.

Gertrudes & Trucks by Betsy Davids, Alisa Golden, Val Simonetti, is made from paper bags that are stapled together, and written/printed/stamped on.

MOVEMENT
Think about pacing, relationships between content. (dis)harmony. "Repetition is a way of learning. It brings clarity, reinforces, creates order." When you see an image for the 2nd time within the same book, it's different. It bears a relationship to other pictures that have come since, and are now next to it, and to its copy. p277 Time, pacing.

p302 Allison Smith, Handbound, 1987. Cover consists of her grandmother's gloves, which hold you in a way when you hold the book.

p323 elements of the book, all together comprise experience

binding (custom box set, structure, covers, etc)
pages: single, spread, foldbook
text/ pictures / content
turning pages
display

ALLOW SILENCE TO SPEAK -> empty space. A book is not just a house for words, the book can become part of the writing. OMISSION -> the gap of time, space, information betw pictures. "Omission is where transition occurs through context. Controlling the size of the gaps is a large part of ordering." TRANSITION -> conceptual, visual, physical.

STORY-TELLING AS STRUCTURE: In her book The Art of the Story-Teller, Marie Shedlock talks about how performers practice the art of timing, climax, building intensity.

My Father's Book, and My Mother's Book, Fifty Years of Silence, by Tana Kellner. There's an image of this book on p356. She included a cast of her parents' arms with their concentration camp number tattooed on it, and cut out each page around the arm. Book contains historical photographs, personal stories handwritten in Czech, translated in English, of their experiences in WWII and after.

The Art of the Book, the Book as Art, exhibit at Syracuse, 2007, from a college book art class:

How does the binding I choose relate to the subject? Historically? Regionally? Traditionally?
How does the ease (or difficulty) of viewing reveal or hide my subject matter? Is the viewer gaining full access to my content and, if not, why?
How does the size of my book affect the viewer's reaction to the content? Does it need to be gigantic or miniscule to tell the story well?
How do the materials I have chosen relate to the content? Is the cover material appropriate for the subject matter I am addressing? Is the text paper? The endpapers (if any)?
How fragile is my book? Will it stand up to many people handling it? Where will it be read? On a table? In a lap? On a pedestal?
How does the overall structure and feel of the book relate to the overall content? Does the form enhance the content?

ALTERING EXISTING BOOKS / NEW WORK BASED ON EXISTING WORK

Joyce Wieland, True Patriot Love, 1970. Photocopied version of "Illustrated Flora of the Arctic Archipelago", over which she collaged her own art, notes, plants, paper clips, and other additions. The pages are then rephotographed and reprinted. From http://angeleditions.com/blogs/sara-angel :

"These elements include photographs of the Canadian landscape, the artist Tom Thompson, the Parliament buildings in winter, and Wieland herself re-enacting Laura Secord’s heroic walk during the War of 1812. Also included are reproductions of Group of Seven paintings, the artist’s handwritten poems and songs, and manuscript pages for The Far Shore, Wieland’s first feature film. On some pages, Wieland left intact the original text and illustrations for Illustrated Flora of the Arctic Archipelago; on others pages she inserted handwritten marginalia in both French and English. A silk Canadian flag was sewn into every copy of True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique. They can be found in the front of the book, opposite its title page. At the back of True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique is an interview printed on a poster-sized piece of stock that is folded and neatly tucked into a pocket on inside of the book’s rear cover. Printed on the sheet is a conversation between Wieland, her husband Michael Snow, and Théberge. The dialogue, which takes place in French and English, is a three-way discussion on nationalism and art. In it Wieland is emphatic that about the goal of her book and exhibition: art must be used to unify the nation’s citizens. Then, as she puts it, “the energy in people coming together would release the country from its fate.”

Tom Phillips, A Humument, A Treated Victorian Novel, 1980

Altered by drawing, serve to decorate the page, as well as eliminate unwanted words as Phillips searches for words to use to form the text of his own novel. Entire book here: http://humument.com/gallery/tetrad/0/001010/index.html Now also available for ipad.

CONCEPTUAL BOOKS -> Investigate Something Else? printing press by Knowles & Higgins.

p382, as a comment on his own conceptual books, which are displayed throughout the book as descriptions of books: "if you heard these books on the radio, you would also possess them -- in your head."

DIETER ROTH -> everyday life flowed directly into his multimedia work.

Joan Lyons, Seed Word Book, 1981. Bean sprouts were placed inside a found book. The book was watered, giving growth to the sprouts. Theoretically, if they grew, they might turn the pages -- without hands.

JL, Twenty-Five Years Ago, http://www.joanlyons.com/25years.html