Liberation of the Page

High tension

Philip Zimmermann. High tension: Montage ’93. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1993.

Ken Campbell. Tilt: the black flagged streets. [Oxford?]: the Artist, [1989].

Johanna Drucker. History of the/my word: fragments of a testimonial to history, some lived and realized moments open to claims of memory. New York, NY: Granary Books, c1995.

Felix Martin Furtwangler. Exil des Bleibens. Berlin: Tyslander Press, [1988].

Tom Phillips. A humument: a novel after W. H. Mallock. [London: Tetrad Press, 1970-1975].

Buzz Spector. A passage. New York, NY: Granary Books, 1994 (Minneapolis: Hermetic Press).

The books in this case all represent various attempts by artists to extend the boundaries of the traditional book page. Their efforts interrupt and reinvigorate the act of reading. Each of these artists uses the book form self-consciously; the meaning of their work and of the idea of the book itself, is transformed through these practices.

In Exil des Bleibens Felix Furtwangler respects the standard boundaries of text and image (and in this context may look surprisingly conservative), but the emphatic nature of the printing, the visceral boldness of the type and heavily inked imagery depart from more traditional page presentations.

Johanna Drucker’s unexpected layouts of type and image in History of the/my word create fields of play where reading is not kept to a strictly linear, left to right process, but takes place within a range of space. This allows for a multiplicity of readings.

Ken Campbell’s book pages of over-inked and process-oriented accumulations are self-referential to the process of production. In Tilt Campbell’s slanted and shaped structure upends the proportions and containment of the traditional book form. Philip Zimmermann similarly distorts the pages of his book to emphasize his subject. Zimmermann’s High tension is a cumulatively shattering list of anxieties, and the prong-shaped pages underscore his message.

Tom Phillip’s The humument is an obsessive and exquisite re-creation of textual meaning through the deletion and revelation of words and phrases found in a 19th-century novel. (The human document.) His work references illuminated manuscripts and marginalia; his page paintings are, in part, a commentary on the original text.

Buzz Spector’s A passage offers a shockingly wedge-shaped text block of torn pages that (because the same text has been printed on each of the carefully torn pages) is ironically readable. The passage revealed refers to the Torah and a Talmudic scholar’s knowledge of the whole by each part of every page; Spector’s work is a kind of mnemonic for the idea of the Book itself.