State of the Art: ‘Books are museums without walls’

Call me old-fashioned, but there’s nothing I love more than a real book.

I relish the tactile experience of creasing the edges with my thumb, the sweet musk that lingers with every turn of the page, the annotations and scrawls that will come to decorate the margins, the weight and physicality of the characters and stories.

Even in 2018, I can’t imagine reading an e-book, which lacks the spatial memory and gravitas of a print book you can grip and peruse. Not only do I own and collect more physical books than American Airlines will reasonably allow me to fly out from home, I’m a handwritten note-taker by choice and a devoted journaler. The only break I get from my antiquated ways is writing, editing and producing the Daily Trojan every night — and even then, I’m a forsaken slave to the print medium.

Maybe I truly embody the platitude of being born in the wrong generation, or maybe I’m onto something here. They say print is dead, its eulogies delivered to the dispassionate masses. But there will always be something about its tangibility that’s worth cherishing and protecting. In a world of zeroes and ones, beeps and clicks, pop-ups and push notifications, print books hold a reassuring sincerity and simplicity that remind me of simpler times — when I read books in a moving car until I was dizzy, by the light of a flashlight under my blankets, on the swingset behind my neighbor’s house at dusk.

I could be an idealist for what’s real — or just optimistic about the precedent set by the resurgence of vinyl records. I’m definitely far from a Gen-Z poster child for all things digital and capitalistic, but the power of print over branding and statement-making may in fact be growing as print objects increasingly feel more expressive compared to their two-dimensional alternatives.

Artists have tapped into this technological countermovement for decades now by creating works called artist’s books — art objects that imitate or challenge the traditional book form. Out of a climate of social and political activism in the 1970s, artists came to regard books as democratic “alternative spaces” to display artwork.

Notoriously frustrated poet-turned-artist Dieter Roth is largely credited as the founding father of the artist’s book, pioneering the idea that a book is an independent vessel for presenting art. By creating books like “Poemetrie” out of dissected plastic envelopes pressed with urine, Roth reinvented books by deciding that they don’t need binding or images or text or any semblance of order. Artist’s books separate books from the narratives they are expected to tell and become sites of struggle between the past and present.

Each one tells a story through both content and design. Whether they take the form of codexes, collapsible boxes or gilded manuscripts, artist’s books are original works that tease the line between literature and art, the aesthetic and the thematic. Maybe they are a manifestation of our desires, then and now, to cling onto the raw tangibility of the past through objects that paradoxically demonstrate both tradition and progress.

In the end, I’m fascinated by artist’s books because they combine the inexplicable experiences of reading a novel and being in an art museum. Each page or iteration of an artist’s book is a fresh viewing experience, which I like to think of as a miniature gallery neatly packaged into a conveniently digestible medium. Just as a physical book can be artful by nature, art can tell a story or teach a lesson as well as any book.

Famously, novelist and art theorist André Malraux mused, “An art book is a museum without walls.”

Artist’s books are yet another way I find comfort in art because they combine the beauty of so many visual practices and demonstrate that the old and new are not mutually exclusive — or at the very least, they reassure me my devotion to print is not hopelessly romantic.

Catherine Yang is a junior majoring in communication. She is also the associate managing editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “State of the Art,” ran every other Tuesday.