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Thursday 4 December 2008

Presentation over content

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book
V&A, until 29 June

The illustrated book has occasionally been a focus for some of Europe’s greatest artists, particularly the French, as witnessed by the ‘livre d’artiste’ tradition. In these collaborations, an enterprising publisher would bring together an artist who liked literature with a piece of writing susceptible to visual interpretation, and hope for the best. Some remarkable works of art have resulted. But there have always been those artists who didn’t want their work tied to anyone else’s words, and either made a book solely of images, or else wrote the words themselves. (The unsullied purity of the idea or the ultimate self-indulgence?) From there it was but a step to the contemporary artist’s book, in which the form of the book itself has been brought into question, and books are made from bricks or plastic or fur or matches, or whatever takes your fancy (if you’re an artist, or rather a book-artist). In the artistic free-for-all that exists today, the book has become just another object, a form of sculpture, that only occasionally resorts to employing text.

I think that’s a pity, since I am a writer who loves both art and books, and who takes delight in the discovery of a new combination of text and image that has the power to move me. I love innovation, but I am enough of a traditionalist to prefer the use of paper and some form of practical container (if not a standard binding) to keep the book together. I have worked with a couple of artists to make such books (my texts, their images), and copies of these publications are now in public collections such as the Tate and the V&A libraries. So it was with some excitement that I greeted the news of a major exhibition at the V&A called Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book (showing until 29 June).

Displayed in rooms off the main hall (Cromwell Road entrance), the exhibition is an unrestful installation, with hundreds of projected white and red words jostling each other on the upper walls. This digital light projection is by Charles Sandison, and it’s matched by an underwater soundtrack by that master of ambient music, Brian Eno. (I remember how his lacklustre soundscapes used to be collectively known as ‘music for lavatories’.) The visitor is greeted by a lead book by Anselm Kiefer, its leaves akimbo. Various flat cabinets are set around the walls containing such classics as Matisse’s ‘Jazz’, Picasso’s ‘Deux Contes’ (both 1947) and Giacometti’s ‘Paris sans Fin’ (1969). The last was not completed before the artist’s death in 1966, and was published posthumously. It seems to have set a dangerous precedent.

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