SESSION: Book-objects: Bookness and artmaking
From early illuminated manuscripts to the tradition of editorial design, words and images have long found in the book a locus for creative encounters. In the 20th century, however, a different kind of phenomenon emerged: the global boom of the book-object. Defined by Italian art historian and artist Mirella Bentivoglio as “plastic-poetic expressions” that move beyond language by merging materiality, colour, shapes and words, book-objects are sculptural works that explore bookness. While the wider idea of book art has been explored curatorially—most recently at the Warburg Institute—as well as addressed in some academic texts, particularly in the late 20th century through historicized accounts, the subject has yet to receive the depth of scholarly attention it deserves (Liberty 2023, Paton 2012, Stewart 2011, Drucker 2004). This panel is interested in research that approaches bookness both materially and theoretically, focusing on books as sculptural spaces and creative objects. An emphasis on the objecthood of books as artworks will be prioritised over reflections on the relationship between text and image or of a typographical nature. I encourage the submission of papers exploring the following questions: Why did artists, especially in the 20th century, increasingly find in books a creative outlet for their sculptural work? What happens to writing and reading when bookmaking becomes a sculptural form? Which aspects of bookness do these works reject or embrace? How do they problematize our understanding of books? And what questions do they raise about the epistemological and ontological dimensions of artmaking and bookness?
Session Convenor:
Giulia Schirripa, University of York
Speakers:
Hilary Robinson, Loughborough University
From Craft to Art: the bookwork of Ivor Robinson
For bookbinder Ivor Robinson (1924-2014), the book was first and foremost a three-dimensional visual entity. He was deeply immersed in the craft of binding, having left school at 14 becoming apprenticed to a local bookbinder; he was later prominent in the modernist movement in fine binding, and first president of the international organisation Designer Bookbinders. He had a deep commitment to teaching, first at the then London College of Printing and Technology, thereafter at College of Technology, Oxford, 1959 on, through its changes to Oxford Polytechnic and to Oxford Brookes University, before retiring in 1985. When the Poly introduced modules (early 1970s), Robinson implemented the module ‘Bookworks’. Aimed at students from different forms of visual practice, it focused on the book as a 3-D sculptural object. One student, Jane Rolo, later developed the organisation Book Works. This paper addresses Robinson’s view of the book as artform from the perspective of me, his daughter: through the 1960s-90s while he had a studio at home, and I was a teenager, then art student, then art-worker, writer, teacher, researcher, I had prolonged, in-depth, observation of all stages of his practice, from first conceptions, through thoughts about the relation of text to the visual, to finished objects. I will focus on particular works and his visual responses to initial stimuli. The Keatley Trust at the Fitzwilliam Museum has over 12 of his works, exemplars of his use of restless gold-tooled line and sculptural black leathers, and I hope to focus on one or more of these.
Giorgia Basch, BilderAtlas
Messengers of Desire. Bookness in the Art of Barbara Bloom and Claire Fontaine
This paper examines bookness in contemporary art by exploring what grants books their allure and their capacity to act as carriers of meaning and desire. What if we were to regard these objects not merely for their aesthetic or symbolic value, but as intermediaries between people – agents of relation, memory, and exchange? Both conceptual American artist Barbara Bloom and the Italy-based artistic collective Claire Fontaine use the book as a generator of relationships, constructing a visual and conceptual system that intertwines and disrupts the authorship of writers, the ownership of readers-spectators, and more broadly the idea of books as vessels of knowledge.
Through sculptural facsimiles and by foregrounding the material and visual language of book covers, their practices reconsider the ontology of the book – its function, form, and symbolic charge – while subverting its structure and replenishing it with new figures and notions. Bloom’s works, such as Lolita Carpet (1998) and Nabokov’s Collection (2020) – both devoted to Vladimir Nabokov –, Barthes’ Exercises, Austen’s Pins, and Sad Grey Story: Marilyn (2020), transform literary artefacts into decorative or fetishised objects, shifting the book from a site of reading to one of viewing and inhabiting. Claire Fontaine’s Brickbats series (2004-ongoing), including La société du spectacle Brickbat (2005), Sputiamo su Hegel: La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale Brickbat (2015), and Towards New Expression Brickbat (2024), reconfigures the book as a weapon and critique, a tool of resistance and, at times, of protest.
Drawing a parallel between the two practices, this paper will argue that by transforming books into re-materialised and relational objects, artists redefine what it means to become informed, to possess, and to desire through art.
Rada Georgieva, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Material Agency and Ideological Waste: Guillermo Deisler’s Book-Objects
Printmaker, mail artist, and visual poet, Guillermo Deisler fled his native Chile in 1974, following the military coup of General Augusto Pinochet. After eleven years of exile in Bulgaria, he settled in Halle, Germany, where he worked as a scenographer and managed his most ambitious mail art project—the magazine UNI/vers. In 1988, Deisler began a new series titled Found Poetry. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he extended this project by recovering Marxist books discarded in the trash containers of Halle and transforming them into libros-objetos (book-objects). Dipping, binding, splattering, and nailing the volumes, he rendered them unreadable and contentless. Their ‘found poetry’ lay instead in the material remains of ideology and the collective memory of the former GDR. This paper examines Deisler’s book-objects—never before discussed in an Anglophone context—through a new materialist lens. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s theory of ‘vibrant matter’, I interpret these works as discarded yet agentic objects that activate questions of ideological refuse. Here, bookness emerges not from textual legibility but from the capacity of material form to generate affect and meaning. I argue that the trajectory of these books—from waste to rescued material, from violated text to sculptural object—constitutes their bookness. Conceived at a pivotal historical moment, Deisler’s libros-objetos reveal how memory, ideology, and matter persist and reanimate through the very debris of history, situating the book as a living and transformative medium of artmaking.
Barbara Caballero, University of Michigan
The Book in Motion: Performativity and Space in Julio Cortázar’s Ultimo Round
In art history and visual culture, corals have been imagined through radiant, stony forms that have come to shape Western consciousness – casting them as builders of worlds and as a resource bound to colonial and imperial ambitions. Expanding on the recent publication by Melody Jue, Coralations, which focuses on soft corals as a counter-figure to these dominant images, this paper explores how fleshy corals destabilise ways of knowing and making defined by distance, fixity, separation, and temporal linearity.This paper examines Julio Cortázar’s Ultimo Round (1969) as a paradigmatic book-object that redefines the relationship between reader and book through a unique conceptual design. Created in collaboration with artist Julio Silva, the book is divided into two halves that can be explored in any order (from top to bottom, from left to right and vice versa), proposing a combinatory reading that transforms the act of reading into a spatial and performative experience. The main question guiding this work will be how Cortázar’s hybrid book – part literary collage, part visual construction – reconfigures the ontology of the book and transgresses the traditional boundaries between literature, art, and performance. I will also consider the book’s materiality and spatial structure, and how the spatialization of the reading experience transforms the relationship between reader and book.
Through a meticulous examination of the book’s composition, its typographic rhythm, and the interweaving of images and texts, I will argue that Cortázar transforms the book into a space of shared knowledge and imagination, producing a new phenomenology of reading: one rooted in movement, gesture, and touch. The reader’s act becomes analogous to the artist’s creative process, blurring the boundaries between perception and production. Finally, by analysing this work within the context of 20th-century artistic experimentation – between conceptual art, collage, and performance – rather than solely from a literary-critical perspective, this article contributes to current discussions on the sculptural dimension of modern books and their capacity to generate new forms of artistic knowledge.
Fabiana Senkpiel, Bern Academy of the Arts
From Cookbook to Sculpture: Daniel Spoerri’s Recipe Folder Library and the Aesthetics of Offal
This paper examines the aesthetics and objecthood of recipes and cookbooks in the visual arts, thereby opening up a new research perspective at the interface between cookbooks and artist books, and filling a gap in existing investigations into Daniel Spoerri (1930–2024), the founder of Eat Art. The focus lies therefore on Spoerri’s so-called Recipe Folder Library (1984–1990) as a cookbook in sculptural form. Published by Francesco Conz in Verona (75 copies printed), it consists of a box with one of the artist’s Tableau Pièges attached to its right side (Fig.1). The box contains ten folders with illustrated cooking instructions by the artist’s colleagues, based on the nose-to-tail principle. These instructions artistically and, in Spoerri’s manner, playfully anticipate a trend that has been polarising and debated in society since the late 1990s in the context of sustainable valorization of the whole animal. Although Spoerri’s Eat Art has already been the subject of insightful analyses, the Recipe Folder Library has not yet been examined in depth. Based on archival research and material aesthetic analyses, that incorporate the complex interplay between form(at) and material, colors, font, and illustration, the paper examines how Spoerri adopted the conventional cookbook format and shaped the process of transformation in the artistic field: Which aspects of “cookbookness” are rejected or embraced by this sculptural work, why and with what goal? The paper argues that the case study opens up space for creative negotiation and critical reflection on (the) disgust associated with the topic of offal.