Reading Room
Britt Knudsen-Owens, Luella Price, Robert Andrews, Kathy Mackay, Jo-Anne Hine, Lorraine Kitching, Natalie Billing, Cathy Siciliano, Perrie Bourke, Saul Kallio Edmonds, Danielle O'Brien, Terry Summers, Antoinette Edmunds, Katie Trott, Jenny Sawley, Kathryn Kerswell, Rachael Dunell, Dadada Sisters, Leigh Fagan, Pat l'Anson, Di Ball, Judy Anderson, Jane Gallagher, Soapbox Gallery, Brisbane, 2000

Each year for the past few, Soapbox Gallery has presented an exhibition of artist books and multiples. This event is one of the few that focuses on the artist book and each year, I am drawn into the pages and folds of those often delicate and uncanny works. This year, the exhibition, Reading Room featured work by 23 artists. I wonder why I have never written about this practice before.

As an exhibition, Reading Room does something interesting and is more like an installation than an exhibition. It displaces the comfort and certainty with which we read books. Rather than shelved or on tables, most of the 'books' are scattered on two, large plinths, no more than ten centimetres high. In order to engage and interact with these mostly folded works, I must fold my body; squat, kneel or sit on the floor. This reading room does not cushion the body from its edges. Those works that are suspended, shelved, free standing or hung seem peripheral. Unlike a library, this repository for books is random and hybrid. Perhaps this reflects the uncertainty of the artist book. Simon Anderson observes that artist books "are a hybrid form, neither quite object nor simply image, not necessarily textual but naturally serial; they offer individualised experiences but can do so within a standardised unit. This fascinating but hard-to-define state has affected their reception, and hence their fate in critical and historical formulation."

A pair of white gloves are supplied with each book except Britt Knudson-Owens' blue dyed concertina and stitched books, Blue phase without resist, are complimented with a similarly dyed pair of gloves. The mottled colour of these inky pages and fraying threads threatens to spill, spread and stain. The symbiosis of the book and the hand, like writing, drawing or making and the hand, is apparent in the marks, collage and folds of these works. Jane Gallagher's evocative Yr 2000 is both a rainbow and a sonata. A colour scaled series of 'spirographed' patterns are pencilled across the pages of a music book. Perhaps she is marking time. Jo Anne Hine's A shell can be a dangerous thing is also hand drawn and written. Smudged graphite and charcoal lines and marks contour and texture these folded, cartographic miniatures.

As Alberto Manguel writes, since Julius Ceasar folded a scroll to create pages, "readers demanded books in formats adapted to their intended use." While most of these artist books are intended to be handled and read, their diversity seems to negate the demand for form or 'object' that Manguel cites. Perhaps that is the perogative of the artist book. Several works appropriate or alter existing books. Di Ball's, My life continued is part of her often documentary-style, autobiographic project. Her old diaries provide a voyeur's view into her daily life. In Security Blanket, Pierre Bourke has coated several books with down and feathers. These books have been shedding in the summer heat and the flutter of feathers is like the breath of flipping pages. For Big Book by Dadada Sisters and Word and Nectar by Judy Anderson, hollows have been created in discarded books, their pages carved and emptied to recreate the contents, to interject alternative texts. Anderson has filled her book with flattened cutlery. In this allusion to orality, each piece has text engraved on it including "eating words" and "trust me I am telling you stories". In Dadada Sisters' Coloured Red a slice of carved wax is pushed into the pages of An Observers Book of Sculpture. This witty disruption wedges this authoritative text open.

It's unfortunate that the gloves deny the textures of some of the works. While they can be handled, they cannot be touched, somehow denying the possibility for corporeal rather than visual pleasure. For example, Kath Kerswell's felt covered books, ... conversations ... (absent subjects) seem to beg a more tactile encounter. A cartoonish metal voice balloon is pinned to the cover and the inner pages are printed with a voice bubble. There seems to be a struggle to speak within these pages, a struggle to find a voice, perhaps lost between written and spoken words. Other works, featuring handmade paper or heavily painted surfaces such as those by Pat l'Anson, Robert Andrews and Cathy Siciliano, are lost to the intimacy of touch.

I am now a little more aware of why I haven't written about this before. The uncertainty is mine and I cannot be sure of what I am writing about. Anderson claims that the artist book has its roots in the conceptual art movement. Sometimes this epoch seems like an epistemological vortex, both destroying and creating possibility. However, rather than having its origins in this time, it is more likely that the practice became more obviously widespread during this era. In The Bandaged Image: A Study of Australian Artists' Books, Gary Catalano proffers that "while it is true that most of [the artists' books in this study] cannot be said to be strict examples of conceptual or of post-object art, they certainly owe their existence to the pressures unleashed by those closely related movements." As Catalano asserts, the conceptual art movement is not without a history and a relationship to the past. For sure, the works in Reading Room also share in that past. Of that much I can be certain.

NOTES
1. Simon Anderson, 'Author/Authority', New Art Examiner, Nov 98, p 22
2. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, Flamingo, London, 1997, p 125
3. Gary Catalano, The Bandaged Image: A Study of Australian Artists' Books, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1983, p 11