Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

A Chocolate Journey
Isabell Buenz
Isabell Buenz’s A Chocolate Journey is beguilingly
packaged in dark & mysterious black and
purple. One uncoils the purple satin ribbons
from their fastening places and takes a peek
into the dim underworld of chocolate -
fixated womanhood.
“If you had a box of chocolates all to yourself,
what would you do?” I asked my girlfriends.
“What, all to myself?” would some of them say,
with shining eyes.”
What follows is a vox pop, as it were, of various
slightly-but-not-really-guilty pleasures. A series
of pastel-hued commentators pop up airing
their confectionary-based foibles alongside an
equal number of pictures of chocolates in their
gaudy wrappers.
I’d expected more, really. The quality of
workmanship on the box containing the book
is good, and approaches its model - the
industrially-produced chocolate box.
I’d expected someone lavishing this degree of
care over their selection and use of materials
(correct weight of card, lovely-but-not-toosnooty-construction-quality,
satin bows,little bed
of faux-chocolates inside for the book to nest
in) to have made something more of the
content. Granted, if these are real interviews,
then one is drawn away from possible answers
to the question (“I run off to my tower in the
woods and feed them all (except the strawberry
cream) to the corpse of my murdered lover
whilst my mad sister plays the organ in the
crypt”) and drawn towards the mundanity of
the actual answers “I only like sharing
chocolates with my husband because he likes
the ones I don’t” ( a statement whose veracity,
at least on the husband’s side, I (unreasonably)
156
doubt.) Rather than the roiling turmoil of guilt
and sensuous abandonment that could have
been frothed up out of the subject, we get;
“I will probably ration myself to a few a night”
Which dry response might play well in a more
documentary setting, but we’re camped out in
Black Magic territory and the liner-pages
between the pages are sighing “ecstasy...delight
... satisfaction...fulfilment...luxury...paradise”.
I want to grab the book by its lapels and shake
it to demand more... more dammit!
My friend has just walked through and said that
Anthony Worral-Thompson is preparing a
sumptuous repast of pickled scorpions and
black ants on his TV show. A fact I’m including
merely for contrast.
Unfortunately this book doesn’t extract very
much from its subject matter. I can’t fault
the presentation, though, and while the
photographs of the chocolates themselves are a
bit same-y and miss out on the obvious trick
of whittling a pile of them away as one goes
through the book, they’re excellent
photographs.
Maybe I’m missing the point a bit with this
book. It has a series of these unprepossessing
confessionals whose effect is to swaddle what
doesn’t seem all that horrifying a sin in yet
more layers of innocuous cameraderie and
harmless ritualisation. Perhaps that’s the aim.
Certainly there’s no particularly convincing
sense of journeying into private pleasures, nor
is there a sense of identity carried over the
book’s development. Rather, it’s a continuation
of the themes already prevalent in the way the
product (chocolate) is advertised: it’s a tiny bit
naughty. It’s a tiny bit luxurious. It’s a tiny
gratification. I wish there had been more of an
attempt to tease out the further uses, abuses
and anxieties chocolate engendered in the
respondents.
The way that the posited “Chocolate Journey”
might have gained depth would be, I think,
through a reading from one character to the
next. How they use chocolate. How it affects
them. In short, to ask more questions. I think a
dialogue between word and image would have
been fruitful too, rather than the (nicely
composed) repetition that dominates the book.