Author Archives: Jason Alley

Artist’s Books

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The viewing of the artist book collection we have here at Lafayette was a lot more impressive than what I first thought it was going to be. When we first walked into the room, it looked like there were hundreds of colorful children’s books lying on the tables. At closer look however, it was apparently that the books were not mere printings of colorful pictures, but were hand-done pieces made by authors that took time and patience to make it such a beautiful work of art. The Hemingway piece stood out to me beautifully. The watercolor was so exquisite and the portrayal of the story was so vivid that it seemed as if the story was coming to life before our very eyes. As a huge Hemingway fan, it was exciting to see such a beautiful piece displayed for him.

Lab Assignment

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For today’s lab assignment, I watched the documentary The Making of a Renaissance Book.  While the demonstration in the Experimental Printmaking Institute made me more appreciative of the hard work that goes into printing, this documentary enhanced that feeling of appreciation immensely.  The documentary shows many clips of artists creating the individual letters of the typecast for printing by hand.  From setting the mold to carving the letters, these jobs took an enormous amount of technical skill and artistry that I was previously unaware of.

The filmmaker did an excellent job of portraying these artists as real people.  Many of the shots focused on the artist’s hands as they were working, but the filmmaker also made sure to focus on the faces of the artists as well.  The documentary also included diagrams of the various objects used in printing that explained the parts of those objects.  This aspect of the film helped demonstrate how these objects worked and arouse even more appreciation for these artists and engineers of book history.

Lorenz, You Have Given Me a Mighty Burden

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To begin, I must first say that this is one adorable essay.

When I first heard the phrase “artists’ books,” I thought that they would be a portfolio or journal of an artist’s work, like a series. However, after our time with them on Tuesday, I came to a better definition which reflects the first one given by Lorenz in her article. Artists’ books are really just another artists’ work. It is a piece of art, a stand alone piece. Though I would love to call whatever new craze as art, I was skeptical for once in my life about these books. They are not, in my opinion, works derived entirely by the artist alone. They are parodies, plays, and mutilations of former books. While I would still grant them their status as parody, the uniqueness of their creation seems blurred. Then again, that is essentially what art does. It comments on everything, including the history of art.

 

Altered Books

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I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday’s presentation in the library.  Every work we looked at was interesting and unique in its own way.  I was especially intrigued by the altered book on the last tabled titled Le Corbusier and Me.  This was an altered book, where the author takes a preexisting book and physically changes the book in some way to create a new work.  The author of Le Corbusier and Me cut portions out of the pictures of Le Corbusier’s art and architecture to give readers a new perspective on Le Corbusier’s works.  I was reminded by the book Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (the author famous for Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).  I absolutely loved Tree of Codes .  I read the book that it was altered from as well and found the connections (and lack thereof) incredibly interesting.

This article contains images of more altered books. They’re really cool works of art as well as different and interesting interpretations of texts that we may not think of.

Unique Books

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In class yesterday, I was fascinated by all of the different books.  Some books, more than others, stuck out at me.  When I went to look at the Alice in Wonderland book, I realized that if I hadn’t been told which book it was, or chapter for that matter, I would never have guessed chapter 5 of Alice in Wonderland. The artwork was so unique and I was blown away by the artists interpretation of that particular chapter of the story.  In Dr. Jekyll and Mr.  Hyde, I loved how the words became harder to read and more elaborate as the main character goes more and more insane. By the end of the book, I was unable to make out the story.  The Macbeth story also stuck out to me.  I found the little summary of the story to be quite comical.  This led me to do some internet browsing and I stumbled upon this website, which is by the artist of the Macbeth book, and shows some other stories done in a similar way.   In class, we asked the question, what is a book? After seeing all these different and interesting pieces, it has become much harder for me to answer that question.

What is a book?

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What is a book? Yesterday I would have agreed that this is an obvious question. However, after our book viewing today, I am not exactly sure what counts as a book anymore. Trying to make sense of all that I saw today and my previous schema of what a book is, I went to the Internet to find the definition. But to my surprise there were multiple, differing definitions to be found. Here are a few: def 1, def 2, and def 3. Although each definition has basically the same gist, there are small, yet important variations to them. As you can see, definition one includes blank bound pages to be books, while definition 2 does not. And definition three includes illustrated pages to be a book, while the other two do not.

One may think that by combining all those definitions you may get a solid definition as to what a book is, but I’m still skeptical. Judging from the range of books we viewed today, there are a lot of works that do not fall under those three definitions. For example, the skeleton book that cleverly only included text on the “skeleton” of the book (the covers- is that a book? The book essences- are those books? Or the unbound drawings of the turtles- are those books?…If such are not books, then what are they?

I think that these are hard questions to answer. And by no means do I think that there is even a correct answer. To me, this is a matter of opinion, so what do you think?

What if..

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It is interesting to look at the era before the printing press. These hand written books are so incredible unique and valuable because they come from a this time period. I wonder what would have happened had books only been published through the printing press. We would have lost these pieces of work that are literally impossible to duplicate.

 

The Gap Between the Future and the Past

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After all of the what if questions, I began to think of one of my favorite books, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Brave New World is a novel focused mainly on a society with advanced and new technology. The novel illustrates the complexity that technology brings to a society and how at the end of the day all of the new technology is to much for some people to handle. I think this is a really great what if question for the future. What if our technology becomes to advanced for us to handle at some point?

The concept of our technology being to much for us to handle can, also, be connected to the economic side of technology. We continue to invent new pieces of technology without debate, because to our society technology is a good thing. It makes life easier and brings us information we would otherwise never know, yet we never stop to think that maybe we are not always ready for new technology. We have some of the most sophisticated and advanced technology in the entire world, yet some of our laws date back to the time of Constitution. Maybe it is time to start allowing the law to catch up with technology rather than continuing to create new technology that has to ability to manipulate the meaning of our laws and take advantage of our economy.

Tuesday’s Class

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I was thinking about Tuesday’s class and I realized I was a little disappointed by the look of books today. All of the books we saw in class were so gorgeous especially the one with the gold and even the mass printed ones were still so nice looking. Today, I get my books on my electronic reader where I get to see the cover page in black and white. I do not even get to see binding of the book. Its just so interesting to see how I am actually missing out on an such an important aspect of reading by not seeing the bindings.