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

Sampler, with an essay by art historian Francis
Pound. 16 Copies are used (eight years later) to
accompany an exhibition of mainly earlier,
figurative, work by the artist. 17 By applying
labels over the ‘original’ title, photographic
labels over the ‘original’ illustrations, and
running a new text on labels over the earlier
text – while leaving some of Pound’s text as a
kind of frame around the new essay –
productive cross-references emerge, and
conventional notions of the artist’s
‘development’ and of time are challenged. The
particular way this artist can use the archives of
his own practice (and its criticism) as fertile
ground for his current practice are particularly
cleverly exposed and further constructed in the
form of the book itself. A ‘catalogue’ – of
what, when, and which works, exactly? The
ingredients of two exhibitions of work
produced at different times are all there, in the
‘same place’, ‘at the same time,’ even if some
is only partly visible: a particularly provocative
conflation – and confusion - of catalogue and
‘artist’s book’.
So understated it’s easy to overlook is Julian
Dashper’s small, grey, simply titled Reviews. 18
It contains twenty-seven reviews of solo shows of
this (internationally exhibiting) neo-conceptualist
artist’s work from 1981 – 2001. The reviews
are all by the same critic. They are all pretty
negative. Some very. ‘The objects in the
Dashper exhibition are blindingly dull.’ They
make for hilarious reading. Not an artist’s
book? But, as a collection published by the
artist, together, in book form, they shift the
writing from its original, occasional, newspaper
context into a domain which has the effect of
productively interrogating the role of the critic,
and exposing the role of this particular critic in
relation to a strand of recent New Zealand art
practice. So framed by the artist, this little book
of rather poor critical writing, becomes,
ironically, a rather good…artist’s book. What
else?
That things are not quite what they seem is
almost an axiom of some artists’ books.
At first glance A Little Book of Relics teases, it
seems just like itself: a child’s school exercise
book, opened out flat (see opposite page).
Anne Noble, better known for her photographs
of places and people, uses here a photograph
22
of the book’s cover as the outside of the package
of ‘pages’ – photographed double-pages –
from the book she retained from Form III.
The delicacy of the work is partly achieved by
the reduction in scale from the original and it
nicely matches their intimate secretions: pages
with little tufts of hair, collaged pictures of
saints. It is an autobiographical work delving
into childhood memories, which while directly
based on a book, is not one. But it is of course
an ‘artist’s book’. Tom Kreisler’s Private and
Confidential also is and is not what it appears,
with its ‘ready-made’ plastic ‘Note Pad’ cover
(see opposite page). It also explores the
viewer’s curiosity regarding the ‘secrets’
concealed within the ‘book’, here the ‘secrets’
of an artist’s mind at work in his notebook, the
general concept reminiscent of Oldenburg’s
Notes in Hand. But Kreisler’s photographed
pages of pages are concerned with the playful
layerings of meanings possible through
combining these with surprising additions, all
within the tacky plastic cover. Not quite a
reproduction of a notebook, so it must be that
something else, then. Something private,
confidential…and available to the public in
multiple copies.
Also apparently not an artist’s book is Megan
Jenkinson’s hardback Under The Aegis, The
Virtues. In conventional academic format, here
is a book of scholarly essays by various writers,
Marina Warner among them, on the theme of
the Virtues in western art, with illustrations. 19
Under The Aegis
Megan Jenkinson, Fortuna Press, Auckland, 1997
Yes, superbly produced, but what makes it
appropriate to this essay? A number of factors,
as the reader may guess. Firstly the
‘illustrations’ in the centre of the book. These
constitute forty pairs of images, forty double -
page spreads. They are taken from an
exhibition of the same name.