Artist’s books are not only books with art in them or books about art, but art objects in and of themselves. They come in as many forms as an artist can imagine. They can look like painted over books, words obscured or revealed by the artist with color or collage. They can be sculptural with carefully cut out shapes out of the pages forming three dimensional images. They can be bound or folded in different, innovative ways. Or they may not be bound at all. The book could consist of loose leaf pages kept together in a special envelope or box. Artists’ books are meant to challenge and push the idea of the book. They are meant to question what it takes for a book to be considered a book. Must it have written content? Must it be bound? Must it be made of paper? The artists’ answers to these questions determine the look and feel of their creations.

Different artists choose different approaches for their books. I chose to research two distinct book creators. First, Dieter Roth, who essentially created artists’ books. Second Su Blackwell, a contemporary artist with a distinct sculptural approach.

Dieter Roth’s approach to experimentation with books and art slowly evolved from slightly unusual in binding and content to entirely unprecedented, perhaps eccentric. Kinder Buch or Children’s Book (1954) is a good example of the former. The book’s pages are decorated with colorful shapes either printed or cut out of the paper, but it has no text. The book can be flipped through in any order, and the reader must interact with the book, creating different compositions out of the pages with cut-outs in order to “read” it. However, if read linearly the shapes on the pages decrease in size and increase in number as one flips the pages, creating a sense that the compositions evolve or grow as the book reaches its end.

Later, Roth experimented with ephemera and all sorts of non-traditional materials for his books. Such as in Daily Mirror (1961) for which he used pages of the London newspaper to create a tiny 2cmx2cm book which he bound together. Or in Snow (1964), a book he created by gathering together things that had caught his attention on a certain day, photographs and sketches and bits of paper he had touched, then binding them together into a book. Snow is filled with typography experimentation and with different notes on Roth’s process.

Roth (or Rot as he sometimes signed his work) was also fascinated with entropy and decay, with the fact that things break down and end. In Snow there is a note “wait, later this will be nothing”. Roth used unusual materials for his art to drive home this point, such as chocolate, sausages or cheese. One of these works is the Literature Sausage or Literaturwurst (1969). The work was created by following the recipe of a traditional sausage, using the appropriate spices and binding agents, however instead of using meats he used ground up pages of periodicals or books, he finished the piece by stuffing the mixture into a sausage casing.

Literaturwurst (1969)

The Book Collector (2018)

Su Blackwell’s work is a little more specific. She does not build books, rather she creates art using already existing books. Her pieces are delicately formed sculptures, made of paper, carboard, glue and wire, which rise from the books themselves. Some are even affixed with light sources inside their especially constructed boxes, in order to bring the whole sculpture to life in a whole new way.

She mostly works with fairy tales and children’s stories, such as her book The Fairytale Princess (2012) illustrated using images of her sculptures. But her work also extends to advertising, theatre set design, commercials, designing art fabric, and regular illustrations for magazines.

My new collection of paper was not too dissimilar from the first, because the options were not all that varied. I have collected more clear plastic sheets to experiment perhaps with cutting rather than printing. I have also collected several types of colored or patterned paper, cardboard, thick, textured cardstock, and more of the same. I still have several types of drawing paper, in varying shades of white and off-white. I also found some recycled paper, though it was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Fortunately, I have made a habit of collecting ephemera (junk) though I was not in the habit of doing so before joining OCA. I have a variety of paper objects ranging from museum tickets and art exhibition pamphlets to paper bags and wax-paper candy wrappers. Some papers have are shiny and smooth textures, like the pamphlets, while others are dull, like the cardboard from the tea boxes. Some, like an old conference pass are laminated with plastic. I also have a pile of paper bits that I was in the habit of keeping before joining OCA, usually made up of scraps of paper cut off from other projects, since I prefer buying large sheets of paper and then cutting down to the size I need. This results in a growing stash of oddly shaped bits of drawing paper, which I sometimes use for scrapbooking or small sketches.

Concrete poetry stands between art and literature. A concrete poem, sometimes called a visual poem, does not focus on regular linguistic devices for expression. Rather, it borrows such devices (words, syllables, letters, punctuation) and uses them to create an image. This image can be read, because the words themselves do have meaning, but it is also experienced (“read”) as artwork would be. Eugen Goringer describes this arrangement as a constellation in his manifesto From Line to Constellation, written in 1954.

“The constellation is the simplest possible kind of configuration in poetry which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster. The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed dimensions. The constellation is ordered by the poet. He determines the play-area, the field or force and suggests its possibilities. The reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play, and joins in. In the constellation something is brought into the world. It is a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other. The constellation is an invitation.”

Forsythia Mary Ellen Solt 1966

(The words form the image of the forsythia flower.)

Greatly influenced by contemporary movements such as Minimalism and Dadaism, concrete poetry seeks to strip down the original methods of poetry until nothing remains but what is most essential, then using unconventional methods and materials, it reframes them to express a new idea.

Poetry traditionally requires literary elements such as rhyme or meter to arrange words and ideas in a pleasing way, and is meant to be both read and recited. In concrete poetry, the poem is not the words, but how the words are arranged, and the space between them. The words and their placement cannot be separated from each other and expected to make sense any more than lines or negative space can be pulled out of the context of an illustration.

Eugen Gomringer flow grow show blow, 1960

For example, in “She loves me” Emmet Williams placed the words in a spiral mimicking flower petals, and as the spiral curls down the words start disappearing like plucked petals. And as the words become fewer, the “not” is the first to disappear, perhaps indicating that the person plucking the petals has come to the conclusion that “she loves me”. But as the poem ends with the last word/petal floating apart from the rest, we do not see the expected “me” but rather “she”. This may indicate that the person is indecisive and the last “she” is meant to be a wandering thought showing that they are contemplating “her” and the possibility that she does “love me”, or perhaps it means that the person has simply concluded that “she loves she” and therefore there is no space for “me”.

“like attracts like” is a more straightforward poem. Two columns of the word “like” progressively creep to the center, pulled together by the word “attract” until they overlap.

Mary Ellen Solt  ZigZag 1976

oil Hansjorg Mayer 1965

The typewriter can be credited with creating the possibility for concrete poetry. While concrete poetry frees itself from the constraints of language, it (mostly) embraces the constraints created by typing. The precise distance created when spacing and when starting a new line replaces rhyme or meter, but not repetition, which is one literary device that is frequently used in concrete poems. Many concrete poems are simply patterns created with letters and spaces, such as in “Zigzag” by Mary Ellen Solt.

Manuscript Poems by Pedro Xisto, 1967

Niikuni Seiichi, Kawa mata wa Shū (1966)

(Translated as “River/Sandbank”. The poem plays with the two ideographs for “river and “sandbank” which are similar but for a few extra lines, creating a visual representation of the boundary between the water and the shore.)

One of the beauties of concrete poetry is its potential to be used in any written language. All languages can use the devices of letters and space to create images, and each language has its own specific quirks which can make unique images.

Eugen Gomringer Silencio 1952

Eugen Gorminger’s “Silencio” is a example of a poem which can gain new life with translation in another language. “Silencio” was already impactful originally, by packing together the word “silence” only to leave a blank space in the center, creating visual silence. However when reinterpreted by Harry Warschaurer with the Hebrew letters for “sh”, it gained new meaning. Especially in a world still raw from the horrors of the Holocaust.

Silencio Hebrew Characters trans. Harry Warschaurer 1960

Visual Task

Kamenskiĭ, Vasiliĭ, 1884-1961, Tango s korovami (Tango with Cows)

To try my own hand at a concrete poem, I was assigned “Tango with Cows” by Vasily Kamensky. It is a fun, slightly bizarre poem about living in the moment, or perhaps being optimistic about the future. Kamensky was a Russian Futurist, so that seems rather likely.

I typed it up and did not use my sketchbook the way I usually do when I start a project because I wanted to rearrange the poem with relatively the same constraints that a typewriter would create. The book Kamensky put this poem in was not created using these constraints (it was something more similar to an artists book, printed on the paste side of a flowery wallpaper) but I wanted to mimic the look of the concrete poems above.

I first read it and looked for various words which stood out to me. In some versions I highlighted words that seemed important to the visuals of the poem, like drinking a glass of wine underneath a red comet, or being the king of an orange grove. Other times, I highlighted words which I thought I would emphasize if I recited the poem.

In the last example, I separated the words I thought I would emphasize when reciting, and moved them to the right to test the look of it.

Then, I played with the sizes of the words, with the arrangement of the stanzas and with separating the ideas of the poem, but I always emphasized those two statements. The option I started liking the most was putting spaces between all the letters, except for the central statements, and arranging everything in a neat square to keep the text grounded. I noticed that not doing that tended to make everything look messy because the rule of spaces is broken by those two statements. I experimented with italics, bold and caps with both the statements and the rest of the text, and then I experimented with different fonts. Until then I had only used Futura, because I thought it was funny, but I ultimately decided I wanted a different font.

The font I found was a bold, serifed font which reminded me of a stencil from a western, so I tested it, but the font did nor really look good with the separated letters, so I kept them together but then I really emphasized the central statements. I printed this option out on regular printer paper because the printer refused anything thicker, and then reviewed my work.

The result was not terrible, but it felt like I had lost the initial idea in the font so I decided to try again.

One of the previous ideas which had been promising emphasized the statements by both keeping the letters without spaces between them and by separating them from the text with entire blank lines. This is a more airy, elegant sort of concept so it did not really work with the bold text. I looked for a new font, but was not very pleased with most of my options. But then, I thought back to the research and tired out a serif font mimicking a typewriter. The concept seemed appropriate, so this was the option I ended up using. I printed this out on one of the thinner colored papers from a previous exercise which mimicked the yellow color of the original poetry book  “Tango with Cows” is from.

Concrete poetry is a fascinating subject. I love the idea of creating images with text, or creating feeling using the visual nature of text, rather just its meaning. It is rather more difficult to create visual poetry with the text of an already existing poem without compromising its readability, but I am sure it would be easier with something shorter. Most of the concrete poems I saw tended to either be of very few words or a single word repeated many times.

It is also interesting to think about how differently we think of text today. The concept of using text purely for aesthetic purposes was not a very common one in the 50’s when concrete poetry started taking off. Of course, advertising using text was something that designers did, but that is still not text purely for creating an image. It is functional. Nowadays, we see text for its own sake everywhere, mostly in the form of quotes or rote inspirational lines/words. They are not only on billboards and advertisements, but on t-shirts, desktop backgrounds, hats, telephones, travel mugs, wallpaper, and practically anything under the sun that you can use a sticker on.

Another thing to note would be the way we tend to use text ourselves when we type. The techniques these poets used to convey feeling using space between letters to indicate slowness, or fragmenting and misspelling words to indicate stuttering are things that many people use to communicate emotions on social media today.

I. Using an increasing number of question marks to indicate a progressively more perplexed and distressed person. Not using capitalization in order to show progression of thought despite the fact that the statements are separate.

II. Oftentimes using asterisk enclosed words to indicate an action.

III. Using punctuation to create figures and facial expressions.

IV. Using unpunctuated progressively larger words to indicate the loudness of the thought.

V. Deliberate bad spelling and random capitalization to show a frenzied, disguised thought.

VI. Using bold lettering with a different font to either show drama in the first example, and in the second, simply to increase the the volume. In both examples the next post must be both bold and italicized in order to increase the volume to indicate a different, if similarly determined, voice.

But by no means are these poetry, the point is that we have become so used to the typewritten word, that we have begun to create a code for how to express an emotion in the digital letters. Many people will recognize that writing

and?

and

aNd?

aaand….

AND?

will mean different things. I’m not sure what to think of it, except that it’s funny.