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A place in the total library: artists' books between art and literature

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A place in the total library: artists' books between art and literature

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A PLACE IN THE TOTAL LIBRARY: ARTISTS’ BOOKS BETWEEN ART
AND LITERATURE

CATERINA CRISCI

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Comparative Literature

University of Southern California
Los Angeles
December, 2012

2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AKNOWLEDGMENTS 4

ABSTRACT 5

INTRODUCTION 6

CHAPTER 1

1. Figures of the Disaster: The Word, the Image, and the Body of the Witness 22

1.a What is a testimony? Experiencing versus Participating 31
1.1. The Memory of the Book /The Book as Memory 35
1.1.2 Impossible Memories and Possible Witnesses: Holocaust Art
and the Book of Memory 41

1.1.3 Impossible and Interstitial Narratives: Reconstructing and Filling
the Gaps of Memory 43

1.1.4 Figures of Disaster: Iconic Images and Visual Evidence 69
1.1.5 Becoming Witnesses: Material and Bodily Evidence 78
1.1.6 The Book is an Open Body 87

CHAPTER II

2. Rogue Books: Language and the Subversion of the
Encyclopedic Project in the works of Emilio Isgrò and Luigi Serafini 93

2.1 Unknowing knowledge in the un-cyclopedias
of Luigi Serafini and Emilio Isgrò 103

2.2 Contagion, Authority, and the Collapse of Language: Rogue Encyclopedias
and their Authors 111

2.2.a Collisions and Contaminations: The Proximity of Extremes
in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus 121
3

2.3 Erasing the Past, Rewriting Reality: The Italian Avanguardia
and Conceptual Art, 1960-1980 132

CHAPTER III

3. The nature of the book: Materials, Materiality, Readers, and Users of Artists’
Books 155

3.1. The body of the book: Materials and Materiality 163

3.1.1 From Static to Dynamic: the Body of the Book from Tool
to Narrative Object 166

3.1.2 Physical and Textual Hybridity: The Mutant Nature of the Artist Book 172
3.1.3 Readers and Users: Multi-media Artists’ Books,
Readership, and Pleasure. 180

3.1.4 The Voice of the Book: The Palaver by Gad Hollander
and Andrew Bick 187

3.1.5 Dynamic Book Disruptions: Julie Chens’ Full Circle
and Karen Bleitz’s Mechanical Words. 194

CONCLUSIONS 208
BIBLIOGRAPHY 211

4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to first and foremost thank my adviser Professor Karen Pinkus. Without her steady
guidance, patience, and intellectual insight this dissertation would not have been the same.
Additionally I must also thank Professor Panivong Norindr for his generous comments, practical
advices, and enthusiasm. This dissertation owes a great deal to Professor Alice Gambrell, her seminar
in 2007 brought me to this topic and her openness and willingness to be a member of my committee
has been invaluable. I have been very fortunate to have the privilege of being a part of the Comparative
Literature department to which great faculty members I am forever indebted.
I wish to also express my appreciation to Professor Margaret Rosenthal whose support and
encouragement in the hardest and final stages of writing has been key. My most sincere thanks goes to
my colleagues and coworkers in the French and Italian Department, Antonio Idini, Francesca Italiano,
Alessio Filippi, Cristina Villa, Francesca Leardini, Valentina Stoicescu, and Patrick Irish for their
moral support and generous lending of time to help me manage my teaching while writing this
dissertation, and a heartfelt thank you also to Katherine Guevarra for handling all my administrative
queries with grace and kindness. A word of thanks also to the many special collections librarians who
have shared their expertise and passion with me in selecting the works for this research.
I would like to express my most profound gratitude to my mother Margherita for her unabated
support, to my father Santo for his restrained enthusiasm, and to my friends and colleagues Zlatina
Sandalska, Shaoling Ma, Colin Dickey, Nada Ayad, Lindsay Nelson, Stephen Coleman, Orazio
Cappello, Teresa Schaefer, Dieter Lebbe, Bram Coppens, Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Nicole Giulia
Giannella, Sabrina Ovan for their humor, for feeding me and providing air-conditioned space, for
treating me to drinks and coffee in my darkest hour, and for lending a compassionate and thoughtful
ear to my gripes, uncertainties, and to my ontological and grammatical doubts.
This dissertation is dedicated to the loving memory of my late grandparents Bolesław and
Barbara who have shown me the meaning of unconditional love and taught me that the only thing that
nobody can ever take away from you is knowledge.
5

ABSTRACT

A Place in the Total Library: Artists’ Books Between Art and Literature

This dissertation is an analysis of artists’ books not only as works of art, but also as
works of literature. Artists’ books have long been at the center of a debate about both
their nature and their future. One of the goals of this dissertation is to explore how
throughout their history artists’ books have expressed the interactions between
narrative, language, and materiality.
This dissertation is an exploration of the evolving and hybrid nature of the
book as a cultural object in its engagement with the concepts of memory, power, and
multi-mediality in the iteration of artists’ books. This research offers a reading of,
among others, Deborah Davidson’s Voce (1995), Carol Rosen’s The Holocaust
Series. Book X, To Ashes (2000), and Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence-Eva and
Eugene Kellner (1992) to address the representation of memory and witnessing. Luigi
Serafini’s visionary Codex Seraphinianus (1981) and Isgrò Enciclopedia Italiana
fondata da Giovanni Treccani e cancellata da Isgrò (1970) engage instead with the
concepts of power and hegemony and are read against the works of Michel Foucault
and Jorge Luis Borges. The Palaver (1999) by Gad Hollander and Andrew Bick is
instead both an example of interactivity and multimediality showcasing an iteration of
the artist book as an object that is defined by a hybrid nature.
One of the aims of this dissertation is to shed light on how artists’ books
engender a disruption of the “habits” of reading and engaging physically with the
book form, and how this disruption calls for a set of new interpretative instruments.
6

INTRODUCTION

THE READING
In order to read the old art,
knowing the alphabet is enough.
In order to read the new art one must
apprehend the book as a structure,
identifying its elements and
understanding their function.
. . .
In the old art all book are read the same
way
In the new art every book requires a
different reading.
. . .
The new art appeals to the ability every
man possess for understanding and
creating signs and systems of signs.
U. Carrión, The New Art of Making
Books

When the narrator in Jorge Luìs Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” declares
that, as established by a genius librarian, the Library contains “all that is given to
express” he means the following:
Everything; the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’
autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and
thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those
catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the
Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the
commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your
7

death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations
of every book in all books.
1

If indeed the Library contains everything would any visitor or one of the inquisitors,
the tireless researches of precious books, find an artist’s book on any of the five
shelves containing thirty-five books placed on each wall of every hexagonal room in
the Library? Would the artist book, thanks to or in spite of its hybrid nature find a
place in the total library? And if so, would the artist book be catalogued as a
“fallacious counter-book” to a normative book or merely as an “interpolation” of the
codex form? While these questions may prove impossible to answer and indeed
nonsensical, I remind myself and my reader that like the “impious” invoked by
Borges’ narrator who dare say that “[…] nonsense is normal in the Library and that
the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous
exception.” I too, maintain that.
2

What I hope will be reasonable and coherent in the present research is the
reading I offer of artists’ books as artistic and literary practice. This dissertation
concerns itself with the need to open the use of texts and concepts applied usually to
literary and visual texts to the artist book. Thus an exploration of the evolving and
hybrid nature of the book as a cultural object exemplified by this very unique iteration
of the book itself (an iteration that is still in the process of finding its definitive home
in both the literary and artistic worlds) is the focus of this dissertation.

1
Borges, Jorge L, “The Library of Babel” in: Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths:
2
Idem, p. 57
8

Among the questions with which the present research grapples are some that
relate to the physical nature of the artist book. For instance, what characteristics
define an artist book? Narrowly speaking, artists’ books can be identified as objects,
or artifacts, “made” by artists and not literary authors (although exceptions of this
kind are not as rare as one may think). These objects, while relying on the book form,
do not engage readers in traditional ways. They engender, in fact, a relationship and
interactivity between the human and the book different from the one taking place
between the reader and a mass-produced printed edition of any narrative work. While
the degree of interactivity that artists’ books demand can be greater than that of
standard books, they can also make it impossible for the reader to engage with them
as with standard books. This research offers a reading of works that, for instance, are
not supposed to be leafed through but are quite literally an “abstraction” of the very
idea of the book. Alternatively, artists’ books can deceive the reader by appearing like
“normal” books but in reality, once opened, can reveal a profoundly modified text
(often a preexisting one as done by Tom Phillips in his A Humument).
3
This
dissertation considers also artist’s books made of media other than paper, such as
wood or metal, as well as books that combine text with the use of disparate typefaces
and different techniques including—among many others—collage, assemblage, and
etching. Some of the artists’ books referenced in the present dissertation are made
simply of illustrations or photographs, use minimal to no text at all, are handmade,
one-of-a-kind editions, or are printed with the use of modern printing technologies.

3
Phillips, Tom, and W H. Mallock. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1980.
9

Most of the artist’s books mentioned in this research appear in limited editions
distributed by independent publishers or in unique editions self-published by the
artist.
The debate on the “essential nature” of artists’ books taking place in the art
world, while far from being over in 2012, has been brilliantly summarized by Stefan
Klima in his Artists Books: a Critical Survey of the Literature (1998). Although he
was writing in the late nineties Klima’s analysis is still one of the most acute
observations of the phenomenon of artists books both in the context of contemporary
art and writing. While I am aware of the aforementioned debate I have opted to
consider it an ancillary discussion to my research, preferring to concentrate on a
reading and exploration of both the intrinsic limitations and the boundaries pushed by
artists’ books. Thus, here it will then suffice to say that the debate is a fragmented and
idiosyncratic one. To give a concise idea of it I will follow Klima’s chronology which
sets as a stepping stone the 1973 exhibition of artists’ books at Moore College of Art
in Philadelphia. In the critical essays that accompanied the catalogue of the exhibit
the germ of a now three-decade-long controversy began. Two essays by Lynn Lester
Hershman and John Perreault acknowledged that something new was happening in
the art world and sought, with degrees of success, to define it. From then on, Klima
suggests, definition has been a key question. Among the many contributions to the
“definition issue” the most relevant were provided by MoMa librarian and curator
Clive Phillpot, writer and curator Lucy Lippard, and by artist Ulises Carrión. Phillpot,
who was as passionate in his wish to define artists’ books as he was frustrated with
10

their slippery nature, tried not to blur the line between the space of art—in which he
ideally placed artists’ books—and that of literature—towards which he was afraid the
artist book would stray. However, as reported by Klima, Phillpot stated in 1993, in
one of his latest contributions to a field in which he had played the part of both the
skeptic and the enthusiast, that: “[…] works which are not (visual) art, are simply
‘Literary books.’ Works which are not books, are simply sculptural ‘book objects.’
[…] So ‘artists’ books’ embrace these two categories, as well as the core concept of
the ‘bookwork,’ the art-work that is dependent upon the book structure to articulate
its content.”
4
Phillpot’s definition, which is inevitably being updated with every
evolution of the form,, seemed, despite its best efforts still characterized by restraint,
particularly when contrasted with that of Lucy Lippard. Initially inspired by the
ferment generated by artists’ books as a “new” form of art around the time of the
Philadelphia exhibit, Lippard called the artists’ book “a work of art on its own.”
5
She
emphasized the possibilities opened up by its verbal and visual combinations and the
autarchic aspects of its publishing and distribution. Interestingly, in the 1980s,
Lippard’s vision had somewhat changed; she had come to believe that the experience
of artists’ books was one of either missed opportunities, or great successes still to
come. Klima’s survey illustrates with clarity and insight how the great excitement
(and initial confusion) that had energized and accompanied the discourse on artists’
books between the sixties and the early seventies—when the term was actually
coined—managed to quickly dissipate, only to be revived in the 1990s. It was only

4
Klima, Stefan. Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature. New York: Granary Books, 1998.
5
Idem.
11

then and thanks to the seminal work of artist and author Johanna Drucker that artists’
books were finally the subject of a debate with a much larger scope than their mere
categorization. It is mainly thanks to her groundbreaking critical and theoretical
approach to book art that the debate on artists’ books has come out of its taxonomic
impasse.
In her writing Joanna Drucker has often called for more theoretical readings of
artists’ books. When I first approached this topic this was precisely my intention, to
use theoretical texts that I believed could illuminate the multilayered and
multidimensional nature of the artist book. The present research does not aspire to be
an exhaustive investigation of the artist book from either a historical or aesthetic point
of view. I have purposefully avoided venturing in the terrain that I think is more
appropriate for an art historian. This is, first and foremost an attempt to apply a
reading methodology to what is still ambiguously defined as an artistic practice, but
that I hope to show in my dissertation is also very much a literary experience.
Thus I have divided my research in three sections. The rationale behind such
division reflects the need to approach artists’ books first and foremost through the
book’s function as symbol, its connotation as an agent of meaning, and lastly the
book as a poly-mediatic object. Specifically I have chosen to explore the book’s
symbolic function of memory bearer in the context of the memorialization of the
Holocaust, the function of the book as an agent of meaning in the context of the
encyclopedic project, and the mechanical and abstracted book as an intersection of
different media. The critical work that appears in the present research reflects my
12

personal interest in specific strands of phenomenology (and specifically of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s writings and his definition of the schèma corporel), in the trauma
theory emerging in the mid eighties and early nineties as well as more theoretical
writings appearing in the aftermath of the event such as the one by Maurice Blanchot,
and the post-structuralist writings of authors such as, among others, Michel Foucault,
Jaques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. At the same time this critical apparatus functions
also as a framing that speaks to the time of production of numerous of the works
presented here and to the crosspollination of influences between the literary, the
artistic, and the critical realms that I hope to make more evident in the present
research.
In chapter one I have selected a number of works that show the complex
interplay between memory and the book as an object of memory. My initial
inspiration for this chapter came from a work that was ultimately not included, but
that I think is worth mentioning here. It is a work by Jewish-Polish artist Erna
Rosenstein, titled Księga Wiecznej Pamieci (The Book of Eternal Memory, 1995).
During WWII, Rosenstein was imprisoned in the Lwów ghetto. Fortuitously she
escaped, and spent the war years in hiding using false documents. Unlike many Polish
Jews who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust, Rosenstein decided to remain in
Poland and continue her artistic career there after the end of the war. However, she
was forbidden to show her work until 1956 due to censorship imposed on Jews by the
socialist regime. Much of her work is informed by her wartime experiences and deals
with the trauma of losing her family and her identity as a result of the years spent
13

hiding her Jewishness in order to survive. Finally in the 1990s with the end of
communist rule she was able to openly address and reflect upon the many years of
silence imposed by the regime. In her work Rosenstein finds a place where she is able
reflect on the erasures operated on national memory with respect to the death of three
million Polish Jews during World War II. The Księga itself is a recovered object, one
that exists in the past (when understood also as being a Jewish “cultural object”) as
well as in the present—a present that needs to be inscribed on it as way of stating a
will to openly remember from that moment on. While Rosenstein’s work was
extremely powerful in terms of being an artist book that functioned as a tool to
recover the memory of a lived experience, I decided to ultimately concentrate on
works that would allow me to explore the concepts of removed witness and the
participatory nature of recovering memory through the interaction with a physical
object.
The works selected for chapter one embody and showcase different
approaches to the experience of inherited trauma and the use of text and imagery to
evoke the event of the Holocaust. For this purpose I have selected works that range
from relying heavily on a three dimensional materialization of trauma to works that
instead rely on more subtle ways of evoking the event an engaging with it. The work
of Tatana Kellner titled Fifty Years of Silence-Eva and Eugene Kellner (1992),
consists for instance of two crates/volumes containing the arms’ casts and the written
testimonies of the survival in internment camps of Kellner’s parents—Eugene and
Eva Kellner. Kellner’s work represents both the act of collecting traumatic memories
14

and that of attempting to come to terms with inherited trauma. I suggest that in the
process of gathering the experiences of her parents Kellner becomes a witness and in
turn asks the user/reader to implicate him/herself in the testimonial act by forcing an
interaction with the book itself. What Kellner does is deliver evidence, an
unequivocal and immanent proof that is materialized by the always-present cast of the
arm with the inmate number tattooed on. Carol Rosen’s extensive Holocaust Series
(1990) aggregates instead a variety of images and text in an unbound codex of
memory. Rosen’s approach, while also rooted in a materiality that seeks to make
memory and testimony very much a physical experience, is instead one that draws on
the idea of multitude as opposed to individual experience. In her work Rosen takes
part in the memorial endeavor through a process of accrual rather than of sifting, as
Kellner’s instead may be defined. The third artist considered in this chapter, Robin
Ami Silverberg, attempts to fill instead in the interstices of what is ultimately an
impossible memory in her Just Thirty Words (2005). Silverberg’s book explores the
idea of restricted language in the context of a fictitious postcard sent from a camp
suggesting that the sender was vacationing and not being imprisoned. I propose that
the restriction of language—only thirty words are granted to the sender—with which
Silverberg engages is not merely taking place in the postcard. I argue that such
restriction is to be seen as a larger one and a metaphorical one that indeed speaks to
the impossibility of articulating a certain type of trauma.
The theoretical framework employed to situate the artists’ books by Tatana
Kellner, Carol Rosen, and Robin Ami Silverberg range from the research on trauma
15

and visual representation conducted by Marianne Hirsch to the more specific study of
survivors and second generation responses to trauma by Dora Apel, Barbie Zelizer,
and Dori Laub among others. In this chapter I also mobilize the work of Susan Sontag
on the relationship between viewership and suffering in relation to the use of
photographic images by Kellner and Rosen as well as Jaques Derrida’s concept of the
revenant to speak of the specter and the spectral nature of the Holocaust as event.
Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, this chapter in engaging with the materiality of
the book relies on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body as a way of
connecting the physical experience of interacting with artists’ books to their content,
an approach that ultimately informs this research as a whole.

In chapter two I explore artists’ books that via acts of conceptual and physical
erasures engage, either at a visual or linguistic level, with the idea of the relationship
between the transmission of knowledge and power through the encyclopedic format.
Chapter two considers the works of artists Emilio Isgrò and Luigi Serafini and
through their works engages with the ideas of language manipulation, language
erasure, and the deconstruction of power structures. In chapter two I hope to show
how artists’ books lend themselves particularly well to the concept of erasure and
disruption, both from a material and conceptual point of view.
Both Isgrò’s erasure of the Italian Treccani Encyclopedia as well as Serafini’s
visionary Codex Seraphinianus (1981), engage with the encyclopedic genre as a mean
to question taxonomical hierarchies and dispel the idea that language must be
“comprehensible” in order to generate meaning. Thus, one of the central ideas
16

explored in chapter two is that of the erasure of language both at the material and
conceptual levels. My hope is to show in this chapter how erasing language, whether
physically as Isgrò does using a black marker or conceptually as Serafini does by
using asemic writing, does not equate with erasing meaning but is instead an act of
reclaiming agency upon the written word. For this purpose I also briefly engage with
the work of Vincenzo Agnetti, a conceptual artist contemporary of both Isgrò and
Serafini, whose work while not being connected to the encyclopedic project still
engages with the ideas of erasure and negation of language.
From a material standpoint the works of the artists explored in this chapter do
not disrupt the codex book as radically as for instance is done by Tatana Kellner or
Julie Chen in chapters one and three. Instead, I propose, Isgrò, Agnetti, and Serafini
stay strategically close to the codex form to enhance the jarring sensation engendered
by the proximity of extremes that is experienced by the reader once the content of
their works is “metabolized” by the reader.
This chapter is informed by the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and by
the narrative of Jorge Luis Borges since both authors have dealt with the issues
surrounding the encyclopedic genre and its ways of organizing taxonomies of
knowledge, as well as engaging with the issue of language and the principles of
exclusion/inclusion. I see the interaction between Foucault’s reading of one of
Borges’ short stories featuring the encyclopedia as a departing point for the
investigation of the encyclopedia as a specific cultural symbol (for Isgrò in the
context of Italian society, for instance) as well as an example of the function of the
17

book as a means by which culture attempts to structure reality. A brief passage in
chapter two also suggests some possible readings of Isgrò’s work in the light of
Antonio Gramsci’s writings, albeit briefly this passage gestures towards lines of
inquiry that deserve a more substantial engagement in future research endeavors.
Chapter two concerns itself also with the concepts of contagion and hybridism
which I propose as defining traits of the artist book per se (the artist book is in my
view the hybrid object) as well as central themes being worked out in the two artists’
books by Isgrò and Serafini analyzed here. In chapter two I propose that both artists
implicitly suggest with their work a form of radical engagement with the idea of
received knowledge advocating for a more delinquent, to borrow from Borges,
engagement with the encyclopedic project. An engagement that I propose is
predicated on the ideas of inclusion, intervention, and contagion. Lastly this chapter
hopes to on the one hand showcase precisely how contagion and hybridism manifest
themselves at the level of the text and not necessarily only at the level of the physical
body of the book as shown in chapters one and three.
The main objective of the last chapter of this dissertation is to work as a
counterpoint of sorts to chapters one and two. Chapter three aims to show examples
of extreme departures from the codex form and extreme book hybrids which
demonstrate how in modern and postmodern times we have become accustomed to
identifying as “books” objects that have a very loose physical connection with the
book as understood in pre-modern terms. Thus the focus in chapter three is on issues
pertaining to the possibility/impossibility of “reading,” the possible/impossible
18

pleasures derived from interacting with these objects, and the very concept of
readership. This chapter is very much informed in this respect by the writings of
Roland Barthes, and specifically by The Pleasure of the Text (1975), which is
instrumental for the understanding of textual pleasure applied to artists’ books. In the
light of Barthes’ writing I suggest in this chapter that the “mobile edge” of which
Barthes speaks is precisely the physical body of the artist book, an edge that is in
constant flux. Such flux is hopefully illuminated by the works selected in this chapter
which range from artists’ books that have very little in common with the codex form
explored by the artists selected in chapters one and two. Flux and dynamism are some
of the core concepts shaping chapter three. For this reason the Italian Futurists’
experimentations with book works were selected to show the “mechanical” book as
an embodiment of an aesthetic that was very much defined by the ideas of dynamism
and change. Through works such as the Futurists’ litolatte, book objects produced on
tin pages, I observe the meshing of the modern/technological with the codex form and
how the Futurists’ re-engineered book was understood as a vehicle and an
embodiment of a specific ideology and aesthetic.
The aim of chapter three is not to establish a lineage between the Futurists’
experimentation with books. Instead I propose here that the impetus behind a radical
transformation of even the basic materials used to produce books to convey a sense of
change and detachment from the past is not altogether different from the “material”
motion forward that defines many contemporary artists’ books. Thus chapter three
considers works that either break radically from the codex form as done by Julie Chen
19

in her Full Circle (2005), which cube-like appearance is the most evident departure
from the traditional book, or works that employ some form of a
mechanical/technological component that adds only partially to the experience of the
book. The Palaver (1999) by Gad Hollander and Andrew Bick is an example of the
latter—a photographic text-enhanced book that is accompanied by an audio CD and
more recently a video as well. Hollander’s and Blick’s work is read in the light of the
writings on “audio-visuality” by French composer and filmmaker Michel Chion in his
seminal text Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen (1990). Lastly Karen Bleitz’s work The
Mechanical Word (2005), a set of five “volumes” in which levers and cranks pulled
by the reader change the shape and the position of the text on a plastic “page,” offers
a combination of mechanical addenda as a way of involving the reader/user in the
process of making language dynamic.
My suggestion here is that these radical departures, which try to make the
book “other than” what it is, suggest that the codex form is not the only “space” that
can be inhabited by text or that allows for a reading experience. While this chapter
does not delve too deeply into the concept of interactivity it acknowledges that the
interactive nature of the artists’ books taken in consideration here could be, and
should be, investigated vis-à-vis the interactivity of a certain type of performance art
and even of virtual technology.
Ultimately, although this is not an explicitly declared intent in all of the
chapters of the present dissertation, one of its aims is to show how artists book engage
both as an artistic practice and a literary experience in the narrative effort. In a lecture
20

delivered in 1983 at New York University under the title The Written and the
Unwritten World, Italo Calvino spoke of human life as being programmed, much like
a computer, to read. In his view reading is not merely a visual exercise, but a process
that brings together vision and intellect. For Calvino reading was not just the reading
of text—a set of familiar signs; in fact it extended to the reading of the
phenomenological world, and therefore, of the long standing idea of the “book of the
world.”
6
A year later in 1984, at a conference in Buenos Aires, titled this time The
Book, The Books, Calvino returns to the subject of a book that could contain the
world while speaking of it. In his intervention this time Calvino includes observations
on language citing Galileo’s theory that the whole world can be contained in the
alphabet, the combination of which letters accounts for all the things in and of the
world, and the mean of communication that truly connects those who are far in space
and in time, “the dead with the living.”
7
It is this power of combining, marking
(through language and its various iterations) and consigning all the endless
possibilities of the instances of the world to the book form (or perhaps better-to the
book-idea, one that is not tied down by a specific form) that resonates through
cultures, religions, and periods of history. The absolute book that the men of the
Library looked for in vain in Borges’ Library of Babel is ultimately an impossible
object. As Calvino notes multiplicity is at the very foundation of knowledge; there
cannot be a book of the world, but many books, many narratives, many different

6
Calvino, Italo, and M Barenghi. Mondo Scritto E Mondo Non Scritto. Milano: Oscar Mondadori,
2002, p.121
7
Idem, pp.128-132
21

iterations of forms, contents, and structures that narrate the world. It is this wondrous
multiplicity that, I propose, artists’ books seek to embody.

22

CHAPTER I

2. Figures of the Disaster: The Word, the Image, and the Body of the Witness

We feel that there cannot be any experience of the disaster,
even if we were to understand disaster to be the ultimate
experience.
This is one of its features: it impoverishes all experience,
withdraws from experience all authenticity; it keeps its vigil
only when night watches without watching over anything.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

The works I consider in this chapter, Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence, Carol
Rosen’s Holocaust Series, and Robin Ami Silverberg’s Just Thirty Words speak to
the idea of corpus in several ways. Already an interesting demographic in terms of
their gender and status as secondary witnesses, these female artists offer, among
others, an interesting perspective on both the topography of the witness as well as the
relationship between memory and the book.
These artists’ books insert themselves in what can be considered the
corpus/body of testimonial literature (be it in the form of narrative or historically
framed works) in that they either mirror survivors’ memoirs as in the case of
Kellner’s work, or use narrative, testimonial, and historical works about the
Holocaust to evoke it via the material form of the book as a platform. There is also a
third dimension to this “bodily” presence of the artist’s book, and that is in the very
nature of the book as an object that is meant to be touched. The works that appear in
this chapter all structure a proximity with the bodies of their (per)users. These books
23

are meant to be touched and interacted with in ways that cast them as evidence—a
material and undeniable one—while including the user and even implicating him in
the testimonial effort.
This chapter focuses its attention on artists’ books that take up the challenge
of dealing, often from controversial perspectives, with the processing, witnessing, and
remembering of the Shoah. The intersection, or perhaps better, the crosspollination of
art and literature that takes place in artists’ books and in the books’ byproduct, the
material meta-narrative of the book as artifact, are the core concepts explored in this
chapter.
While the experiences of survivors and second generation authors and artists
constitute if not polar opposites, then at least two different stages of proximity to the
traumatic event, I have chosen to make them converge in this chapter in their
testimonial capacity. In other words, witnessing and the aesthetic endeavor behind the
output of witnessing, that is, the testimony (literary and material) are the common
threads to diverse relationships to the Holocaust and to its representational
constraints.
To witness an event is to implicate ourselves in it through vision and bodily
presence; our gaze and the space that our bodies inhabit with regards to it delineate
the perimeter of our experience while shaping our narrative of it. While I do not fully
espouse Ellen Fine’s statement that to listen to the witness is to become a witness, I
certainly believe that listening to the witness is part of a search for proximity to the
event; a wish to “become” a witness that manifests itself in many different forms. The
24

controversial nature of the position of the witness and of his/her testimony demands
an immediate engagement. In this chapter the concepts of making testimony visible
through the artistic practice of artists’ books will acknowledge, without however
taking as its starting point, the issue of representability vs irrepresentability. With
respect to debate that posits the possibility of representing the horrors of the
Holocaust against their purported irrepresentability my thinking is informed by the
groundbreaking work conducted by scholars such as Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub,
Dora Apel, and Barbie Zelizer on both the representation of the Holocaust and the
figure of the witness.
8
Their works, which are not necessarily a cohesive whole, point
toward an understanding of the complexities of the representational and testimonial
universes as shaped by the individual’s judgment on the very possibility of bearing
witness and representing. While acknowledging the large and important body of work
that structures my theoretical framework it is necessary for me to state my own
position with respect to witnessing and representation. I shall not ask here whether the
Holocaust is representable because I understand the experience of the individual—the
survivor/witness—as indeed representable.
9
On the other hand I maintain that the
individual’s horror of the event itself and the trauma resulting from the experiences of
survival can be merely suggested (both by the survivor and the witness by proxy).

8
As well as Lawrence L. Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991), the contributions collected in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism
and the "Final Solution," edited by Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1992), and Peter Hayes’s Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World,
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.
9
An experience that can be broken down as feature films and literary works have done in a structure
engaging primarily with the chronological aspect of the individual’s experience that usually follows
the pattern of persecution/deportation or alternatively hiding/liberation.
25

Given the large corpus of scholarship pertinent to the debate on representability that
however is not central to the reading I offer here, I have preferred to not fully engage
with it at this stage of my research. Instead I propose to investigate here a medium-
specific approach to the “visualization” of the Holocaust.
I am specifically interested in the manifestation of trauma in the material form
of the book understood as evidence and testimony. My aim here is to explore material
textualities that engage the thematic universe of the Shoah and complicate the
relationship between writing, witnessing, and aestheticizing the event. While I am
aware that using the word “event” further complicates the discussion of trauma and
witnessing, I also acknowledge that my work is not concerned specifically with
further probing the notion of what an event is. It is however impossible to avoid at
least touching on the ongoing debate that surrounds the very idea of the Holocaust
being a very specific, epoch-defining event. I understand the event as a temporal
proposition in which past and present converge (in this respect my formulation
reflects as well the notion of trauma as initially developed by Freud). Thus the
Holocaust forever fixed in the past, never to be repeated is also persistently “being” in
the present with its haunting presence. With the temporal proposition “event” the
Holocaust is isolated in a chronology of its own, an occurrence whose repetition is
forbidden but whose ethos needs to be reiterated against denial and against forgetting.
I suggest here that what makes the Holocaust an “event”—if not THE event of the
twentieth century, whose scale and impact prompted Adorno to state that literary and
artistic production was impossible after Auschwitz—is precisely the size of its
26

testimonial universe and the numerous efforts that have been made to represent it and
consequently comprehend it. Primo Levi himself speaks in the Drowned and the
Saved (1986) of the Holocaust as an “event”—that is to say a number of facts
witnessed by the individual that must be reported and for which an audience of
listeners is necessary.
10

It is thus in a sense the very presence of a witness and audiences that shapes
what an event is, and indeed if there is an event to speak of. The Holocaust, however,
inhabits a geography of its own in the context of eventuality precisely because of the
charged presence of the witness/survivor. The relationship between the witness and
the event is perhaps more crucial, at least for this research, than establishing what
makes the Holocaust an event. Among the most radical statements made with regards
to the very position of the testimony/witness vis-à-vis the events that in their sum
constituted the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe, are those made by
scholar Dori Laub. Laub has claimed that the Holocaust is virtually an event without
witnesses:
[…] it was not only the reality of the situation and the lack of
responsiveness of bystanders or the world that accounts for the fact
that history was taking place with no witness: it was also the very
circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the very

10
It is important to note here that defining the Holocaust as an ‘event’ or perhaps better as a series of
events seems to be a common practice among scholars of the Holocaust. It is however, also necessary
to note that what we speak of is a traumatic event, that benefits from a psychoanalytical reading rather
than a strictly philosophical one. If we consider for instance the works of Alain Badiou (Being and
Event, 2005) and even Frederic Jameson (Sartre: The Origins of a Style, 1961) on the concept of event
it would impossible not to notice that the conceptual matrix being used is unsuitable for the specifics of
the Holocaust.
27

notion that a witness could exist, that is someone who could step
outside of the coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of
reference in which the event was taking place, and provide an
independent frame of reference through which the event could be
observed. One might say that there was, thus, historically no witness to
the Holocaust, either from outside or from inside the event.
11

Laub’s perspective, while certainly extreme, brings forth a relevant notion for the
present study—that is to say the “being in the event.” This chapter seeks to explore
through the medium of the artist book the different ways in which the being in the
event is explored by figures removed from the event. Moreover here I will explore the
attempt to take part in reconstructing and recovering memory of facts that have
crystallized in the collective mind according to specific representational codes and
iconic combinations of images and texts.
As Laub further suggests the coexistence in one individual of both the
survivor and the witness figures generates two perspectives that often collapse into
each other. While saying that the Holocaust is an event that has virtually no witness
might need more fleshing out than necessary for the purpose of this dissertation,
bringing up this perspective is necessary to begin thinking about those who standing
already at the margins of the event have sought a frame of reference suitable for their
own becoming witnesses and being in the event. Thus, this research considers
witnessing through the making of testimonial artifacts and the aesthetic approach to

11
Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in: Caruth, Cathy. Trauma:
Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p.66
28

such making in artists’ books. It is necessary to clarify here that the aesthetic
approach and the “making of” are not separate but complementary and reflective of
the constant dialogue between the testimony and the visual library of the event—a
library of very specific icons organized by a strict process of inclusion and
exclusion—that conjures up the very idea of the Holocaust. I suggest here that the
“making of,” that is the act of constructing and creating the artifact itself, addresses
the idea of materializing a “piece of evidence” that fits specifically into the secondary
witness testimonial effort. The survivor embodies the proof, both with his physical
presence (consider for instance the writing of the horror on the body made material by
the tattooed number on the arm) and his testimony of the event. The secondary
witness instead, removed physically from the event but not psychically is compelled
to “create” a material proof of it.
The literary realm, in the form of the post-factual testimonial narratives of the
Holocaust, has provided post-war society with the necessary venue to reconstruct,
reenact, and work through the trauma of the Shoah. Yet with its great contribution to
the preserving of memory and answering the call to never forget, the canonical body
of testimonial Holocaust literature is the product of a very selective process. This
process of inclusion and exclusion has sought to respond to the principle of realism
and linearity, a guiding principle that at least in the early phases of the
memorialization of the event had come to be seen as the most appropriate response,
one that would have taken in consideration the feelings of the survivors while at the
same time leaving room for the historical effort. More recently, this very approach
29

has however come to terms with the profoundly mediated and fragmented nature of
witnessing.
As I have already noted some scholars have argued the virtual lack of a true
witness to the event. The witness is a very real but also often metaphorical figure,
indeed a gatekeeper of sorts, still a departure point for any epistemological approach
to the narrative of the event.
12
The witness is a solitary figure in the landscape of a
crime’s aftermath. Even in the multitude the witness is alone with his own experience
of the event. The witness is alone on the stand, alone with his conscience, and
whichever truth he is called to validate. This is true of witnesses of both heroic and
criminal acts. The Holocaust, more than any other event, has constantly demanded
that we confront and define the figure of the witness in ethical terms. But when we
speak of, and for the Shoah the physical body of the witness is also part of the
testimony. The witness is also a victim, the victim a survivor, the survivor an
“evidence” of the crime perpetrated. The witness speaks—both literally and
figuratively—of his own individual experience as well as of those whose
disappearance he has witnessed. The witness is asked to give his account of the facts
and restage for the audience, acting almost as a hidden camera, the angle from which
the witnessing took place—a topographical space of truth. What is demanded in
exchange for this truth is that we believe in the testimony. The witness offers a body,
a surrogate that might allow us, through an empathic process, to attempt a proximity

12
Laub Dori.”Bearing witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg.
The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
(originally published in Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1991.) Pp. 221-226
30

to the event. And yet this process is doomed to fail, the illusion that being exposed to
the narrative of the witness allows for an experiential “being in the event” is
dispelled.
Yet a mantle of sanctity has enshrouded the testimonies of survivors and first-
hand witnesses and while they have not always been privileged as the ultimate
historical proof they certainly retain a high status in the hierarchy of evidence. The
idea that direct testimony of the event should not be disputed holding the almost
sacred status of last word on the subject, as championed for instance by Elie Wiesel,
is challenged by the production of outright false testimonial accounts on the part of
survivors and by the belated testimonies of the so-called second generation of
survivors. These accounts come in different forms; in this chapter I will explore the
figure of the belated witness (the artist who produced the book) who uses as a
primary medium the codex form, the artifact itself, thus probing the testimonial
implications of being a reader/user of the book/artifact. This type of analysis hinges
upon the use of both a phenomenological approach—the bodily experience of being a
book user and how that structures our understanding of it—and a psychoanalytical
one, which takes in account the unique psychic space inhabited by the belated witness
of trauma. In combining these two perspectives I hope to shed further light on how
the aesthetic and materiality of the book intersect with the bodily experience of
being/becoming witness.

31

1.a What is a testimony? Experiencing versus Participating

We understand as historical evidence of the Holocaust and the persecution of the
Jewish people any kind of document that confirms the intent and the carrying out of
actions to discriminate, displace, intern, murder, and ultimately annihilate Jewish
citizens of Germany and the countries occupied by the Third Reich. The totality of
these documents is together with the testimonial universe the foundation of our
historical and experiential understanding of the event. Among these documents are
different formats and mediums of firsthand testimonies of individual and collective
experiences of the Holocaust. These testimonies typically consist of autobiographical
memoirs, visual recording of the witness relating his own survival story, and written
testimonies gathered by agencies investigating war crimes committed during WWII.
Parallel to this testimonial universe, one defined by the fragile and fragmented nature
of remembering, exists a dimension of secondary witnesses. These secondary
witnesses experience belatedly the Shoah with the intention to both understand the
event for and in themselves and relate it to others. These are observers, for a lack of a
better word, of the event who seek to find out more or expose some of its specific
aspects. As Gary Weissman has pointed out the removed-from-the-event observer’s
related terminology is rather vast; he notes that some of the most common terms are
32

the following: secondary witness, vicarious witness, retrospective witness, witness by
adoption, and witness through the imagination.
13

The choice of which term to employ reflects in my view our own individual
understanding of the very possibility of a proximity to the event. Proximity is
possible and enacted through an empathic process determined by the degree of
personal relation of the secondary witness to both the survivor and the event itself. I
suggest that the degree of relational proximity (be it a second or third generational
one) to the survivor may indeed decrease the inhibition of the subject to attempt a re-
presentation of the event. Still, I propose that a close proximity to a survivor is not the
sole trigger of interest and even desire to re-work for oneself the trauma associated
with the event and engage in the post-memorial testimony.
With respect to this particular concept I agree with Marianne Hirsch’s idea that:
The work of postmemory defines the familial inheritance and
transmission of cultural trauma. Still, I believe that this form of
remembrance need not to be restricted to the family, or even to a group
that shares an ethnic or national identity marking: through particular
forms of identification, adoption, and projection, it can be more
broadly available.
14

In the present chapter I will use the term secondary witness to describe individuals
with close proximity to survivors, as for instance are children and grandchildren of

13
Weissman, Gary. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2004, passim.
14
Extremities, p. 77
33

Jewish survivors and partial witness to indicate observers who are not attached to the
event by familial, ethnic, or national proximity to the traumatic event.
15
In a sense
then, I speak of several kinds of proximities, one to the event, one to the survivor of
the event, as well as the proximity that both the artifact and book structure with its
reader/user. Because the book is more than just a physical object, as noted by Georges
Poulet, and it is not “[…] shut in by its contours, is not walled-up as in a fortress. It
asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you exist in it. In short, the
extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you
and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside.”
16

It is only natural that artists’ books who bring together narrative and art would
become an important site of investigation.
I view the artist book as, to borrow from Umberto Eco, being open “[…] to a
virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to
acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal
performance.”
17
It is in this that I find a key element in the investigation of belated
witnessing and the unique way in which the artist book structures the experience of
witnessing as its dual nature, material and literary, comes in to play pushing even
further the already emotionally wrought experience of reading. Poulet, for instance,
further notes that reading engenders a transformation in the reader who experiences

15
I am using here Dominick LaCapra’s definition, which implies that the secondary witness gains both
secondary trauma and memories.
16
Poulet, Georges, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority” in Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio
Donato. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972, p. 57
17
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. London: Hutchinson, 1989, p. 21
34

the vanishing of the material world around him (including the object supplying the
text) and their replacement with “[…] a congeries of mental objects in close rapport
with my own consciousness.” According to Poulet such transformation poses at least
one complex issue: the reader has as the object of his own thoughts “the cogitations
of another.” The subjectivity of the reader is now taking on the thoughts of another.
Poulet goes as far as saying that the invasive nature of the other’s thoughts leads to a
mimetic process in which the consciousness of the I reader behaves like the other.
However, the survivor of the Holocaust is a radical other, and his experiences are so
utterly inassimilable from the point in history at which we stand that we must ask
ourselves is it truly possible to let that specific “congeries of mental objects” into our
own consciousness? The proximity that Poulet describes is profound, and takes a
much stronger stance when he states that “[T]o understand a literary work, then, is to
let the individual who wrote it reveal himself to us in us.”
18
Poulet’s discourse is
indeed about literature, but the idea that understanding a text is indeed a visceral
experience one taking place in us has very much shaped my analysis of the
relationship between grappling with the event and witnessing it through a textual
artifact such as the artist book is.

18
Poulet, Georges, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” pp.58-9
35

1.1. The Memory of the Book/The Book as Memory

The literature of the Holocaust proper (memoirs and historical texts relating the
event) as well as the literature haunted by the Holocaust (works of fiction directly or
indirectly referencing the event) certainly demonstrate a preoccupation with the
recording of the event that goes beyond the historical endeavor. The book as a
medium and symbol of the continuation of memory, the desire to bear witness, and
the possibility and indeed necessity to provide a narrative for the event is thus my
point of departure. While not unique to Judaism the relationship between books and
the cultural identity is a dominant phenomenon in Jewish culture. Among the many
ways in which this relationship has manifested itself there is one that stands out and
showcases the relationship between memory and the physical book, I am thinking
here both of the traditional and modern versions of memorial books or yizkor books,
where ‘zkr is the Hebrew root for the verb “to remember.” Yizkor books circulated in
Jewish communities in Europe in two distinct phases and with different purposes. The
older versions date back to the late 1200s and have their origin in central Europe,
where their function was to record, for the benefit of the congregation gathered in
prayer at the synagogue, the names of those community members who had been
murdered because of their faith who were to be remembered during the service. This
function resurfaced after the Holocaust, slightly modified and with no liturgical
connotation, when memorial books were privately printed and distributed in Israel
36

and the United States, mostly between the 1950s and the 1970s, by groups of
Holocaust survivors.
These often lengthy yizkor books contain both photographs and text—mostly
encyclopedic entries of sorts, as well as personal recollections—composed in Hebrew
and Yiddish (seldom in English) by spontaneous committees of survivors who
detailed the prewar history of the community up to its destruction. They
memorialized both the history of the many Jewish communities in Central and
Eastern Europe, and provided complete and definitive lists of community members
who perished during the war. In their own rough, nostalgia filled, but very immediate
way, these books could be viewed as one of the very first endeavors of the
community of survivors to memorialize and record from within itself the parable of
survival. To record the history, the destruction, the names of those who perished, to
write it all down is the first crucial step, but to disseminate it and make it available to
a listener/reader is perhaps even more relevant; self published, self distributed yizkor
books ensured that at least within the community those two important steps were
taken.
19

In modern times the book as a physical object with its endless capacity for
reproduction ensures that the writing of the disaster, to borrow from Blanchot, and
those attempting the arduous task of providing knowledge through the writing of the
disaster, continue to have a viable and valuable platform in the book. Within the

19
They rarely include the most dramatic details of the experiences endured by some of the
community’s survivors; often because its editors and the majority of the community itself was able to
escape Europe before and at the early onset of the war.
37

realm of book produced to engage with this subject a very unique space is occupied
by the artist book. Certainly its position is, like much art that engages with the topic,
one that generates both positive and negative responses. The argument that art
aestheticizes the event, thus devaluing and cheapening its resonance, has in fact
dominated the perspective of the field of Holocaust studies with respect to Holocaust
related art. I would argue here that to dismiss and not take into consideration all
efforts to remember, memorialize, and represent the Holocaust is both dangerous and
unproductive.
The search for a language is inevitably part of the inquiry of the disaster,
therefore no language (be it a tongue or a code) can be ignored. I see the uniqueness
of the topographical position of artists’ books both as an artistic and literary practice
in that it reaffirms by working on a variety of material, narrative, and semiotic levels
the necessity to interrogate the event. But it would be rather superficial to highlight
only the ability of an artifact to interrogate the event, it is therefore necessary to also
consider that as the generation of survivors slowly begins to fade away the works that
are being produced as works of testimonial memory are the ones that will contribute
to not only preserve but shape the memory of the disaster for the generations to come.
Before moving towards the analysis of the artists’ books selected for this
chapter it might be productive to reiterate the three aspects with which this research
concerns itself, which should be visualized as separate but intertwined strands of a
rope. First and foremost I consider here the narrative position of the author and that of
the reader/user as witnesses; I understand positioning both from a psychoanalytical
38

perspective as well as a phenomenological one relating to the physical body.
Secondly, because the body—and specifically one limb—is central prominently
(literally and figuratively) in Tatana Kellner’s work, I take into account the bodily
experience of the survivor (one of the subjectivities addressed in the book), that of the
secondary witness/artist, and the one of observer/user of the book. Lastly the unique
materiality of the artist book, both codex and artifact, plays a central role in my
understanding of the object as both evidence and site for the retrieving of memory.
However, before we move on to the analysis of the specific works selected to
illustrate the issues teased out so far it is necessary to consider the rather fraught
relationship between art, aesthetics, and the representation of the Holocaust. Liliane
Weissberg has noted in her essay “In Plain Sight” how the aesthetic instances that had
defined art were affected by the disruptions caused by the Holocaust, when “[…]the
bond between pain and beauty, suffering and pleasure, which gave birth to aesthetics
in the first place, was seemingly broken by an event whose ‘completion’ exceeded
human imagination.”
20
Weissberg’s observation points toward an important
conceptual node: excess, and excess which brutality could not possibly engender any
pleasure. As Brett A. Kaplan points out in Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in
Holocaust Representation (2007) one of the central issues in the representation of the
Shoah has been precisely that of the aesthetic pleasure, or perhaps better said, the fear
of experiencing pleasure while confronting an artistic representation of the horrors
that have defined the events of the Shoah. Kaplan, summarizing, identifies three main

20
Weissberg, Liliane “In Plain Sight,” in: Zelizer, Barbie. Visual Culture and the Holocaust. New
Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2001, p. 18
39

arguments that in his view have been the early catalysts of the interdiction against
beauty: the propagandistic use that fascism and Nazism made of beauty, Adorno’s
claim that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be nothing but barbaric, the impact
of the event itself on writing and the arts in general, and lastly the historical
uniqueness of the event claimed by survivors and “cultural theorists.”
21
However,
more and more artists, historians, and critics in general have began to take more
compromising stances than Adorno’s on the subject of representability and the modes
of representation of the Holocaust. While in its aftermath it seemed impossible to
access or even attempt to interpret this event, the need to remember and comprehend
the Holocaust, which was aptly defined by historian Saul Friedlander as an “event at
the limits” grew inevitably, shifting the discourse from the impossibility of
representation to the need of representing within a framework of “sensibility.” Thus,
in recent years an increasing number of historians and scholars of the Holocaust have
conceded that representation and interpretation are possible and the ‘limit event’ is
indeed accessible.
22

Although not specific to art, the issues raised by the possibility of
experiencing aesthetic pleasure in conjunction with a traumatic event certainly
resonates with numerous artists working within the confines of the representability of
the Holocaust. Film and literature have provided good (and bad) examples of what
probing the limits of an event ‘at the limits’ means. Controversial and complex works

21
Kaplan, Brett A. Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2007, pp.2-3
22
On this specific theme see Hayden White’s “The modernist event” essay in: Sobchack, Vivian C.
The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. New York: Routledge, 1996.
40

from Lanzmann’s epic documentary Shoah (1985), Aaron Appelfeld’s allegory of
Jewish denial in the face of deportation Badenheim 1939 (1978), Art Spiegelman’s
graphic novel Maus (1986), to the serialized early 1990s TV fiction Holocaust and
even the slew of contested and hoax memoirs, such as Binjamin Wilkomirski’s
notorious Fragments (1996), all come to show the persisting haunting of
contemporary culture with the Holocaust as well as the varieties and modes more or
less effective and sensible through which the event is still interrogated. Similarly in
the realm of art controversy and admiration seem to proceed hand in hand. It would
be enough to mention for instance how controversial has been the reception of the
works of prominent contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski,
and Shimon Attie, who using different media and approaches ranging from
installations to sculptures and drawings, have touched on the subject of the Holocaust.
Post Holocaust art exposes the multilayered nature of memory and functions
as a site of its retrieval, and in that respect the works of artists like Boltanski and Attie
are an impossible coming together of beauty and “disaster.” While it is not possible to
univocally state which are the most salient features, or the more common ones for
that matter, of those works of art that deal with the Shoah there certainly are
approaches and themes that tend to recur. Among the many definitions of what
characterizes the approaches of postwar artists toward representations of the
Holocaust is the one provided by scholar Dora Apel who has described Holocaust
related works as “non-narrative, polyvalent, metaphorical, enigmatic, and
41

ambiguous.”
23
This string of adjectives to define the art of the Holocaust, while not
exhaustive, is in my view very well suited to introduce the works selected in this
chapter, and it is with those adjectives in mind that I will try and tease out their
specificities both as artifacts and as literary works.

1.1.2 Impossible Memories and Possible Witnesses: Holocaust Art and the Book
of Memory

Among the many efforts to remember and make sense of the Shoah, perhaps the
more controversial still remain, as I mentioned earlier, those made by surrogate or
secondary witnesses. In the following sections I shall explore how this specific group
of witnesses has made different Holocaust narratives (possible and impossible),
iconic images, and the materiality of witnessing converge in the form of the artist
book.
Two of the artists selected for this purpose where part of the 1997 traveling
exhibition called “Women of the Book: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes,” which
crossed the United States for almost four years, bringing together a number of unique
works. The exhibit displayed artists’ books by visual artists who interrogated their
relationship with Judaism through an array of themes, including family relations,
women and/in the Bible, myth and reality, and the Holocaust. All the artists in the

23
Apel, Dora. Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing. New Brunswick,
N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2002. p.4
42

show dealing with the Holocaust were, (with very few exceptions) second or third
generation, that is to say children and grandchildren of people who directly
experienced the Shoah. My focus will be here on two of the exhibit’s artists in
particular, Tatana Kellner and Robbin Ami Silverberg. Kellner took part in the exhibit
with two volumes Fifty Years of Silence 71127 and Fifty Years of Silence B 1126
(1992) and Robbin Ami Silverberg with Mourning Prayer (1994). In this chapter,
however, I will analyze another work by Silverberg, her 2005 Just Thirty Words. The
third artist I will consider in this chapter is Carol Rosen (who was not included in the
“Women of the Book” exhibit) by exploring three of the twenty volumes that
constitute her Holocaust Series (2000).
This specific group of artists/witnesses has partaken in a remembering of the
Holocaust that scholar Marianne Hirsch defines with the term postmemory. Hirsch,
whose work centers on the relationship between photography, narrative, and memory
suggests that postmemory is “[…] distinguished from memory by generational
distance and from history by deep personal connections. Postmemory is a powerful
and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or
source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment
and creation.”
24
Hirsch rejects the notion that memory itself is unmediated and
stresses instead, that it is the distance from the past that defines the experience of
remembering. In this respect postmemory identifies the experience of individuals who
“[…] grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated

24
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1997, p.22
43

stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic
events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”
25
The “imaginative investment
and creation” is in my view precisely what the artists’ have responded to in their
quest to make sense of the event. However, I propose here that it is the impossibility
to recreate, suggested by Hirsch, that propels the need to reconstruct on the artists’
own terms his/her relationship with the memory of the event; a memory that is
inevitably “shaped” by an acquired memory—that is, the experience—of the survivor.

1.1.3 Impossible and Interstitial Narratives: Reconstructing and Filling the Gaps
of Memory.

Witnesses’ testimonies of the Holocaust have been collected predominantly as either
video (for instance the visual testimonies gathered by the Fortunoff and the Spielberg
Shoah foundation, two of the biggest testimony archives in the United States) or
written testimonies such as as autobiographical memoirs or official reports given to
the authorities investigating Nazi crimes shortly after the end of WWII. As I have
pointed out earlier, survivors’ testimonies while being an invaluable resource for both
historians and the larger public interested in the events of the Holocaust present also a
number of issues. While important these issues have been already fleshed out by
numerous scholars of the Holocaust, thus I will not dwell on them any further. In this

25
Idem, p. 23
44

research I will instead concentrate on three distinct ways of using the testimonies and
traces of those who survived to weave, reconstruct, and to fill the gaps of
postmemory.
Tatana Keller’s two volumes Fifty Years of Silence 71127 and Fifty Years of
Silence B 1126
26
stand out as an example of the limits pushed by artistic
representation’s of the Holocaust in its interaction with the book form and the
grappling with the ambiguities of narrativizing the event through the use of survivors’
testimonies. As the artist herself reveals in the “Women of the Book” exhibit
catalogue, she was aware from an early age of her parent’s experience in the
concentration camps and recognized growing up how the effects of those experiences
shaped her parents’ perspectives on life. However, it was only later in her life and
after having read other Holocaust testimonies that she understood how limited her
knowledge of what her parents went through really was. Thus the impetus behind
Fifty Years of Silence was, in her words, to satisfy a personal necessity “to know” as
well as to provide through their recollections “[…] evidence against the revisionists
who claimed the Holocaust never happened.” The secretive nature of her parents’
internment experience is however, as for most secondary witnesses, precisely the key
to the beginning of their quest. Kellner writes in the Preface to FYS of recalling a
persistent atmosphere of fear in her household; her parents thought that the children
should not know anything about what the two of them had experienced in the camps.

26
Since both works share the first part of the title as well as a similar material structure I will use
simply Fifty Years of Silence when speaking of that specific aspect, but will distinguish using the serial
number when relating the events and images specific to each.
45

The parents’ concern was that if the children would know they would also share it,
and sharing would mean revealing that the Kellners were Jewish, a piece of
information that in communist Czechoslovakia was best kept secret. The need to keep
secret both the knowledge of the tragic experiences endured by her parents, the
erasing of her Jewishness in the outside world created a sense of isolation in Kellner’s
childhood. Parallel to this sense of alienation was however, her great curiosity for her
family’s experiences. Unable to ask her grandmother about her experience, an adult
Kellner came to the realization that she did not want her parents’ story to remain
unknown and therefore began working on gathering information from them. Kellner
acknowledges that initially Eva and Eugene resisted talking about their past, but they
eventually agreed to write down their memories in their native language. And this is
precisely how we find them in the booklet, handwritten in Czech, translated, and
typed into English by Tatana. From a structural standpoint both the testimonies of
Eugene and Eva conform to the fragmented narratives typical of survivors of
traumatic events, an aspect that Kellner’s typed version (and translation) mirrors
faithfully. Yet from a visual point of view Kellner’s work makes visible the
difference between the first person writer of the testimony (her father and her mother)
and the witness to the witnessing (Tatana herself). The handwritten testimony flows
filling the page, a stream of a pleasant old-fashioned calligraphy, allowing for an
intimate connection with the witness and his testimony, while in the typewritten
English translation there is a very obvious division of the text in paragraphs,
conveying a sense of an official document being presented to the reader.
46

It is important to note here that Kellner acknowledges in her preface a very
important aspect of her elaboration of her parents testimony, and that is the issue of
accuracy. While she felt the need to ask her parent’s to be as specific as possible (and
as much as they can both Eva and Eugene try to provide dates, quantities, and
measurements of all sorts) she still was not able to fully talk about the event with her
parents. Indeed accuracy is what the witness to the witness, the observer, the
interviewer, and often the interrogator (I think here for instance of the Nuremberg
trials) demand from the survivor; a request that is often frustrated precisely because
of the fragmented nature of memory. In her journey of witnessing Kellner visited
Auschwitz, Terezin, and Bergen Belsen, an overwhelming experience that she
describes as a “very sad, ominous, and awesome pilgrimage;” an experience,
however, that “will stay with her” for the rest of her life—but that in effect as a child
of survivors has already been with her all her life. As I mentioned earlier both
volumes of FYS function as the repositories of Kellner’s parents’ testimony of their
imprisonment in several labor and concentration camps. Like the majority of
testimonies gathered in archives such as the Fortunoff and the Spielberg, they are
spontaneous, unedited (if not mentally by the witness himself/herself) accounts of the
events as they unfolded from the onset of the war in 1939 until its end in 1945. The
controversial use and nature itself of testimonies as a proof of historical evidence has
been debated before, therefore I shall not dwell on it any further here. Yet it is
important to understand which kind of evidence Kellner’s works speak of. FYS is
evidence of the event as experienced both from the subjective point of view of the
47

victim/survivor while becoming evidence for those—both secondary witnesses by
proximity and interested spectators—who stand outside of the experience and seek
access to it. What is relevant here is that FYS is an example of both the non-narrative
aspect of Holocaust art, as noted by Dora Apel, and the narrative qualities of both the
quest for memory and the facing of memories from the subjectivities of both the artist
and her parents. In this respect Kellner’s work allows the fragmented nature of the
testimony to coexist with both an overarching narrative (the artists’ own journey
through memory) while making the materiality of the book work as a powerful non-
narrative meaning maker.
The testimonial narrative in FYS fits very much the structure of testimonies
collected both orally and in writing. The fragmented nature of testimony becomes
manifest in the handwritten testimonies of Eugene and Eva Kellner; in them evident
gaps, the breaking downs of violent memories too painful and often hard to
comprehend, punctuate the text.
27
Eugene’s testimony, for instance, opens quite
literally mid-sentence “…visit his family in Thringen. He was mad as a dog. As a
revenge 20 of us had to empty the septic tank with our bare hands on Christmas eve.
The stench was awful, we smelled pretty bad. Upon our return to Terezin, there was
no running water.”
28
And right away the reader has the impression of having walked
into a conversation he/she not only is not supposed to hear but that implies a listener
familiar with the facts. Whose family is being visited? And by whom? Who are the

27
Eugene and Eva’s ways of relating the events are significantly layered, and are poignantly reflected
in the material nature of the book that alternates, using different types of paper, transparency to
opacity.
28
FYS, p. 1
48

“20 of us”? What and where is Terezin? Following this metaphorical ‘encroachment’
of the reader upon his memory, Eugene, as if prompted, provides a date to situate the
events; it is September of 1943, when his first son Edgar Viktor was born. Eugene’s
testimony shows, among other things, the ability of the victim to absorb regardless of
the duress of his/her condition numerous details about the environment in which they
find themselves. While this may seem counterintuitive to a trauma-induced “shutting
down” it is indeed what Eugene’s testimony demonstrates. Precisely because trauma
is an event of belatedness, a realization of a dangerous situation taking place one
minute too late, it is possible for survivors like Eugene and Eva as well to access with
clarity those details which normalize (and perhaps help suppress the pain of) their
relationship with the memory itself. When I say that Eugene’s testimony is not strictly
about himself or his family is because he often provides information on what took
place around him in great detail, for instance the conditions of the elderly population
of Terezin, the so called “model camp.”
In more general terms Eugene’s testimony betrays the attempt to reconstruct
the past and the wish to organize it in a coherent narrative which are however,
frustrated by the “interjections” of the very streaming of memory. Often Eugene’s
recollections are punctured with few ‘interruptions’ of details unrelated to the
Terezin’s camp. For instance, Eugene remembers a conversation he overheard
between two SS regarding the gassing of the Jews— and chronicle Eugene’s
memories leading to the transport to Terezin in 1942 (and again not chronologically
ordered) up to its liquidation and Eugene’s arrival to Auschwitz where he is subjected
49

to Mengele’s selection.
29
His recollections are a sum of brief episodes related to each
other by the common thread of brutality, which highlight Eugene’s present and past
feelings of impotence in the face of a staggering, unrelenting bouleversement of
ethics.
I mentioned earlier that the literature of the Holocaust and the testimonial
often overlap. It is hard no to think here of Primo Levi’s work first and foremost, who
absolving both the role of survivor and writer, has shaped much of the direction taken
by the literature of the Holocaust. The importance of Levi’s work should not be
underestimated but here I do not wish to address it directly. I will merely note how
Levi, much like other survivors presents us with one of the more haunting figures of
the disaster that populate the desolate landscape of the camps that is to say, the
Muselmann.
30
Levi speaks of the Muselmann, the remnant of a former human being
emptied of thought and merely the phantom of a body itself, while never calling
himself one, although he like many other camp prisoners might have come close to
being one. It is, however, rare for a survivor to call himself/herself in his/her
testimony directly a Muselmann, a resistance that speaks in my view of the wish to
dissociate oneself from the idea of total dehumanization, the lack of thought that Levi
speaks of—a state of pure biological being that would obliterate the ability to bear

29
Here he provides as many numerical figures, weights of things allowed, and km for the distance
between places, revealing an almost fastidious preoccupation with accuracy.
30
Perhaps one of the most interesting contributions on the subject of the Muselmann remains still
Giorgio Agamben’s one in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone
Books, 2000. Agamben identify the Muselmann as “ […] the absolute impossibility of bearing
witness.” For Agamben if the witness is capable of witnessing for the figure of the impossibility to
witness, if indeed the witness succeeds “[…] in bringing to speech an impossibility of speech—if the
Muselmann is thus constituted as the whole witness—then the denial of Auschwitz is refuted in its very
foundation.” p. 164
50

witness. It is with respect to this figure and the relationship that the survivor/witness
has with it that makes Eugene’s testimony quite unique. On page twenty-nine of FYS
we learn that due to a rather severe infection Eugene’s health deteriorated to the point
that he literally saw himself as a Muselmann, in his own words “a human ruin, a
person without the will to live or die, at 25/30 looking like an 80 year old man.”
31

Eugene was in fact the victim of the experiments involving the infection of healthy
limbs, carried out by a butcher (not a professional doctor) with an “interest in
anatomy.” The experiments ended in 1945, when Eugene was informed that there
would no longer be use for them and that therefore he was going to be moved to
Auschwitz. In the tragic and impenetrable catalogue of brutalities in which Eugene
casts himself as a Musselmann (thus making his survival even more impressive)
perhaps the most ghastly is the cannibalism one. This memory is particularly
interesting because Kellner herself mentions it in the Preface to FYS as being one of
the most shocking story she had overheard from her (otherwise secretive) father.
It was about the fourth night when I heard a terrible scream and
discovered that some of the prisoners, led by their survival instinct,
began to kill the weaker prisoners, drinking blood and devouring their
raw meat. The next day I spoke with another prisoner and told him
how horrendous this is: the Nazis are killing our wives and children
and we are killing each other. I had the feeling that I’d be the next
victim. The prisoner I spoke with had a vehement debate with the

31
FYS (Eugene), p.33
51

cannibals. They chose another victim. The fifth day, when they slept
the three of us Czechs crawled to a corner of the boxcar behind the pile
of bodies and this is how we escaped their cannibalism. Hunger and
thirst had different effects on people.
32

The brutality of this event of which we know relatively few details and whose effect
on the young eavesdropping Tatana one can only imagine, is otherwise not a very
well documented phenomenon in Holocaust historiography. Still, the reader can
certainly sense that both for Eugene and Tatana, this anecdote touches on an
important theme, one that is much present in general in Holocaust literature, that is to
say the grey areas of moral relativism in times of great distress. On the other hand, for
Tatana (both as child and artist) the episode is a signifier of the ‘unspeakable’
horror—an horror that has to be kept secret from her as a child—but also of an horror
than can only be spoken between people who have witnessed it—Eugene ‘forgets’
that Tatana is there and shares the episode with a friend who was also a survivor.
In contrast to a fairly cohesive first part the second part of Eugene’s testimony
is characterized by a lack of linearity, we find in close succession the following
events: the arrival on the thirtieth of January at the Brinnlitz camp where he is given
food, disinfected, and his wounds cured. It is there that the passengers of the
Eugene’s transport find out that Oskar Schindler had saved them from “further

32
FYS (Eugene), p.58
52

wandering from camp to camp and that he also saved 3,000 Austrian Jews” by having
them work in his factory.
33

This portion of Eugene’s testimony veers from rather technical or factual
details about operations in the camps to the impact of Schindler’s attempt to save as
many Jews as he could. Yet this anecdote, which has become an iconic episode
attesting to the fact that not everyone partook in the annihilation of European Jewry,
is “interrupted” by a very personal memory. Eugene ‘inserts’ the story of how his
first child died, thrown in a pit and dowsed with gasoline because of a shortage of
cycklon B, the potent pesticide used in the gas chambers. It is a note in a sense that
Eugene seems to insert within a much larger “historical” context, not an afterthought
but a memory that cannot be central because it is too painful to be so. It history being
made the night of Schindler’s speech to the prisoners, right before the liberation (the
famous “I’ll stay with you until 5 min after midnight, please don’t believe that all
Germans are animals”) that encapsulates and ultimately swallows the death of
Eugene’s child.
34

The striking contrast between the memory of horrific episodes and the few
instances of happiness as well as details pertaining to the ways in which the
persecution and extermination of Jewish people were carried out is replicated in
Kellner’s mother’s testimony. Unlike Eugene’s, Eva’s testimony begins with

33
FYS, p. 62
34
Eugene’s testimony ends with his liberation from the camp and return to Prague with a
friend (he notes his appearance: he weighed only seventy pounds). Upon returning to Prague
Eugene learns that his first wife and child perished in the camps and that his brother was
murdered two days before the liberation of Dachau, the only two survivors in his immediate
family are him and his mother.

53

memories of her upbringing in Prague in a well-to-do family, the end of the family’s
wealth, and the 1938 change of fate for the Jews of Czechoslovakia due to racial
persecution culminating with her move into the ghetto. Even though Eva is writing
her recollections as a grown up woman her descriptions and perception of the facts
she relates seem to belong to the young girl she was at the time.
The brutal episode of Dr Hoffmann’ summary execution is followed, for
instance, with no time continuity, by her falling in love with a young man called Egon
and their love, which Eva duly notes, “[…] lasted only three months; he was
transported to Terezin and even though I saw him later in Auschwitz, the different
surroundings and circumstances changed our mutual feelings.”
35
The next few pages
are filled with overlapping details of life before and after the war as the deportation
approached, the “mundane” encroaches on the brutality of deportation as Eva
describes how they prepared to leave hiding money and prized possessions in shoes
and belts. But yet again we see how the ‘young’ Eva is the dominant witness here,
invested in telling her story of survival as much as injecting her testimony with the
person she was “before.” Thus Eva writes about Sepp, her sister’s German boyfriend
with whom she used to take trips in the car, describing with feminine coquetterie the
clothes she wore during these excursions.
36

35
FYS (Eva) p. 7
36
FYS (Eva) In describing her sisters Eva sketches two very different portraits: one sister so beautiful
that she was nicknamed the Jewish Madonna and the other less attractive married to a German Jew, the
pair got pregnant but ultimately opted for an abortion “because of the political situation.” As the
testimony progresses we find out that one of the sisters managed to live with false documents for a
while but that she eventually told someone whom she believed she could trust and by whom she was
subsequently denounced p.11
54

In 1942, Eva was transported to Terezin even though her name was missing
from her parent’s paper. Eva notes in her testimony that she had decided to go
voluntarily even though her sister’s German boyfriend was trying to get them false
passports. A detail that points out to both Eva’s naïveté as a young girl and her
current persona: the survivor who looking back wonders how things could have been
different “if only” her life was not so brutally interrupted. Compared to Eugene’s,
Eva’s testimony lacks conspicuously dates, therefore after the information she
provides about her family shortly before her deportation we find her quite abruptly
elaborating on life in Terezin where she worked as a gardener and dental assistant.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Eva’s testimony is the way in which she weaves
horror and the mundane in a solution of continuity that is incredibly unsettling for the
reader but that must have seemed entirely “normal” to Eva at the time. She recalls for
instance, one of the “bright moments” in the camp when a boy brought her a bunch of
lilacs, a tender moment of which the reader is immediately disabused when Eva notes
that the boy did not survive. Eva’s testimony is punctuated by such stories of gentle
gestures that clash stridently with the brutality she speaks of with equal levity and
ease. In her testimony the retrospective idea of “we were lucky not to know” defines
the most crucial instances of survival. In December of 1943, Eva volunteered to
follow her mother, not knowing if she would ever see them again. As she was herded
with the rest of the prisoners on a train to Auschwitz she ‘realized’ that they were not
going to a work camp but to an extermination one. In relating this event the post-
factual certitude of the survivor takes over the process of remembering which turns
55

into a being in the moment, evidenced by Eva’s use of the present tense; her arrival at
Birkenau is described as follows: “I’m 16 years old and when I ask “Why” no one
answers. This is when I lost my faith in humankind and my character was changed for
the rest of my life.”
37
Upon arriving at the camp Eva is taken into the fold of the
regimen of death: she is tattooed, shaved, and searched for jewelry in her intimate
body parts, she is no longer a woman, let alone a human being. Eva sees the chimneys
and smells something, when she asks: what are they doing there? Are they burning
bones? Yes, humans somebody tells her. Her questions however don’t belong either
temporally or emotionally to the past. Eva seems to be still asking them while writing
her testimony. It is in these brief passages of Eva’s testimony that the reader can
begin to see the void of meaning and answers of which Shoshana Felman and Giorgio
Agamben speak about.
Still, testifying is indeed engaging in an archeology of remembrance that is at
play in the intersection of both Tatana’s and Eva’s urge to participate in the archiving
of memory.
38
This archive is not merely one of factuality but one that is open also to a
personal reflection on and interpretation of the erasure operated by the Nazis of
fundamental ethical stances. The witnessing of such erasures inevitably demands an
engagement of the reader at a level that transcends the mere co-witnessing of facts
and events.

37
FYS (Eva) p. 33
38
Which I think speaks poignantly to the ‘archival’ pain that Derrida speaks of in Archive Fever: A
Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
56

A sense of profound unsettlement and anxiety related to the sense of
uncertainty and precariousness fostered in the camps emerges from Eva’s description
of daily life in the camp, a life (if one can even call it that) defined by the different
tasks she was called to perform in her block, by continuous selections, and showers,
which for Eva represented a constant threat given that there was no way to predict if
gas or water was going to be coming out of them. Amidst the predominant sense of
fear that permeates those specific memories is an insight on Eva’s concern with trying
to make sense of what she experienced and witnessed both as the events took place as
well as in the moment of writing (and re-collecting) her memories. When transferred
with the general population, Eva claims to have truly experienced how prisoners,
despite their common situation were still able to be cruel to one another. Again when
asking the questions to which perhaps Eva still has found no satisfactory answers, she
switches to the present tense as if she was still there; thus she asks: “How can one
woman be so cruel to another? Survival instinct takes over. We are no longer human.
Any remnant of human dignity is beaten out of us.”
39
Subsequently she is transported
to Hamburg for prison labor. Eva’s testimony ends after relating of her surviving the
bombings, a brief stint as a prison laborer in Hamburg, and her subsequent
deportation to Bergen-Belsen, with her return to Prague. As I mentioned earlier the
testimonial effort of both Eugene and Eva shows the struggle between the desire to
provide a cohesive narrative of the events in which both survivors were involved and
the ultimate impossibility of doing so. Kellner’s work (compared to the other two

39
FYS (Eva) p. 58
57

texts considered here) is intensively text heavy, although the text is not the direct
product of the artist but yet another mediation. Marianne Hirsch has noted, with
regards to this specific issue of the narrative structure of FYS, how: “Kellner’s work
is an attempt at translation, from Czech to English, from the past to the present, from
the camp world to ours. And in that process of failed translation, the second
generation daughter can hold the memory with which she has been entrusted.”
40
The
idea of an entrusted memory complicates further the narrative aspect of FYS as what
it suggests is that it is now Tatana’s responsibility to carry on (with) the testimony, a
challenge that is fraught—as most post-memorial narratives are—with numerous
issues, the most prominent one being that of the sheer possibility of ‘taking on’ both
the memory and the subjectivity of the survivor. As I will show later Kellner’s way of
dealing precisely with this issue expresses itself in the materiality of the book in a
successful attempt to reconcile both the search and the recovery of memory across
generations.
An entirely different narrative mode that still engages with the testimonial
effort, is the one adopted by artist Carol Rosen. Her Holocaust Series is made by
twenty separate volumes each titled by the artists with a word associated with the
events of WWII. Each book contains both text and visual images, mostly collages of
photographic images; however, in contrast with Tatana Kellner’s work Carol Rosen’s
employs documents from the period as well as literary texts by authors and survivors

40
Hirsch, Marianne “Marked by memory: feminist reflections on trauma and transmission” in Miller,
Nancy K, and Jason D. Tougaw. Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2002. p.83
58

of the Holocaust. In this respect Rosen’s work represents a further degree of
testimonial removal from the events. Unlike Tatana Kellner, Rosen did not grow up
looking and trying to make sense of a trauma metaphorically and literally written on
the body of her parents. In a private conversation with the artist Rosen revealed that
her mother’s family was originally from Germany. Rosen’s mother tried to help the
family emigrate from Germany to the US prior to the beginning of the war and
successfully brought to the country four family members. Rosen’s mother language
skills were instrumental in her work for the US government for which she translated
correspondences from prisoners of war. Through her work Rosen’s mother was able
to be privy to classified information that revealed the atrocities perpetrated against the
Jewish population by the Germans. Despite that Rosen’s mother never shared that
information with her daughter, instead Rosen familiarized herself with the history of
the Holocaust through literature that she came in contact with as a teenager. It was
however, a visit to the memorial of Holocaust victims in Israel, the Yad VaShem, that
impacted Rosen’s art more than anything else.
41

While the artist’s immediate family was not affected personally by the
Holocaust it is safe to say that Rosen was certainly haunted by a desire to understand
and partake in the knowledge that her mother shared with her. Despite this difference
Rosen and Kellner share both an important aspect—that is to say a “pilgrimage,” to
borrow from Kellner, to sites that stand as memory or willingly memorialize the
events of the Holocaust. Kellner’s journey took her through the places where the

41
Rosen, Carol. “Questions” Message to the author. email, November 2010.
59

figures of memory (her parents) once stood whereas Rosen’s lead her to a site of post
factual memorialization, the Yad VaShem memorial in Jerusalem. Both Kellner and
Rosen however, engage in travelling to either the site of collected memories or the
actual “remnants” of the “ashes” of memory, to borrow from Cathy Caruth, engaging
thus in an archeology of memory. The metaphor of the “archeological dig” which
Freud had used in his 1907 essay “Delusion and Dream in W. Jensen’s Gradiva” is
well suited to begin thinking about the archival value of the book, and indeed of
literature as archive as well. In revisiting what makes memory possible (the museum
and the remnant) the unspeakable is spoken in and through the language of trauma,
which I propose here, is the language of returning.
Yet the return to trauma as well as the uncovering of memory (a memory both
specific to the individual and collective) operated by Rosen allows for a narrative
approach that is inevitably less intimate than Kellner’s, making her artist book an
Holocaust hypertext of sorts in its bringing together literary, historical, and visual
“evidence.”
A variety of different literary genres as well as documental evidences which
come both in the form of text as well as photographs (I will say more on these latter
in the next section of this chapter) appears in Rosen’s work. Vol. 1/ The Others, for
instance, features poems by Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky who despite not being
Jewish was interned in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, Polish born poet and
Jewish Holocaust survivor Yala Korwin, American poet William Heyen, and
Romanian born Nobel laureate, author, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. When
60

asked what guiding principle she used in her choice of texts to accompany the
photographic collages in the books, Rosen shared in a private conversation that her
original goal was to produce a work composed only of images. Ultimately, following
the suggestion of a friend Rosen decided to research literary and documentary pieces
to complement the images. According to Rosen each book was conceived without a
set theme, instead the guiding principle was that of a correlation between images that
once put together with be complemented by text.
42

Rosen’s approach reveals a very crucial aspect of the intricate web of
connections between visual images and literary text when it comes to both private and
‘collective’ post-memories of the Holocaust. As the artist notes, text in her work has
been a secondary aspect to the visual and, I would suggest, to the emotional response
elicited by the images she chose. Indeed the post-memory of the Holocaust seems to
be largely constituted by images more than by the ‘words’ of those who survived. Yet
it also appears that the image on its own, that is to say the image of disaster in itself is
still lacking something and only text can provide the necessary meaning to begin
accessing the traumatic event. Rosen’s choices in this respect are compelling in that
they bring together different subjectivities of witnessing. Consider for instance the
inclusion in Book 1 of poems by Jewish survivors, Yala Korwin and Elie Wiesel,
contrasted with poems by non Jewish concentration camp survivor Janos Pilinszky

42
Rosen, Carol. “Re: Questions” Message to the author. email, November 2010.
61

and by William Heyen, the latter an American non Jewish author with no personal
connection to the Holocaust.
43

Carol Rosen’s is in a certain sense a bearing testimony to the witnessing, an
impersonal narrative of standing before a removed other (not a parent or a relative)
bearing witness. In this respect Rosen’s position is not entirely different from
Kellner’s. They both engage in the double role of ‘listener’ to the narrative of pain
and ‘aggregator’ of testimony. Kellner’s proximity to the event and to the witnesses
to the event (her parents) is however greater and is further deepened by the acts of
translation and the re-creation of the limb that makes the trauma forever inscribed on
the body. The close bonds between the survivors and the secondary witness explain
the triangulation of witnessing that defines FYS. I suggest here that the secondary
witness embodied by Kellner is not the same as the secondary witness in Rosen’s
work and that is because Rosen is performing an act of “selecting” witnesses whose
function is to provide a textual grounding to what would otherwise be “ambiguous”
images. In other words in Rosen’s work the text is “telling” the story of the images
and in her selecting process Rosen seems to suggest that there is no such thing as the
idea of “appropriate” witnesses or “possible” vs. “impossible” witnesses. The
inclusion of “Riddle,” a poem by William Heyen, an author who cannot claim any
cultural, emotional, or ethnic connections with the Holocaust, forces the reader/user

43
Heyen was interviewed by the literary magazine “Artful Dodge” and questions of cultural propriety
came up with regard to his poems about Native Americans and the Holocaust. Interestingly the
interviewer, in asking how could Heyen be writing about the experiences of Native Americans and
Jews while not being either, seemed to assume that the prerequisite, or the ‘cultural propriety’ of the
Holocaust, was to be Jewish and not a survivor of it. Brady, Philip. "Interview with William
Heyen", Artful Dodge, 2003. http://artfuldodge.sites.wooster.edu/. Web. 2003

62

of the book to grapple with the idea of a witness by proximity who engages the
testimonial universe through its tropes and symbols. Heyen’s poem is particularly
interesting because it references iconic image sand tropes, both literary and visual,
that are associated in the collective imaginary with concentration camps: “From
Belsen a crate of gold teeth, /From Dachau a mountain of shoes, /From Auschwitz a
skin lampshade.” In enumerating the perpetrators, in the following stanza, Heyen
speaks of the petty officers who brutally killed his friends’ father, of those who stood
guard, of those who helped in the gas chambers, and of those who simply stood by—
passive bystanders and silent witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust and asks:
“Where they Germans/Were they Nazis/ Were they humans?”. In merely two stanzas
Heyen’s poem brings into play a pool of images and figures that belong in my view to
the somewhat limited albeit popular representational universe of the Holocaust. It is
through these “figures” of the disaster among the others included in her books that
Rosen’s narrative, while not being her own, tells the story of the images that she
ensembles as collages or manipulates graphically.
In a sense it is possible to say that Rosen’s work is both an example of the
non-narrative quality identified by Dora Apel in Holocaust art while at the same time
representing in its postmodernity THE narrative (one constituted by a multitude of
voices and perspectives) of the Holocaust. The poetics of Rosen’s work operate
against the mere aggregation of testimony and narrative works about the experience
of the Holocaust—her books are not an anthology of Holocaust literature. Rather
they draw a map of disparate perspectives that reflect different ways of being haunted
63

by the event itself. Moreover Rosen’s book series more so than Kellner’s FYS shows,
precisely because of the assemblage of texts which despite their individual coherent
narratives do not allow for an overarching one when taken as a whole in the series,
how it is the reader’s own performing act that determines and shapes an individual
experience of secondary witnessing through narrative.
A narrative, either a projected one or one resulting from an accrual of text, is
at the heart of the desire to access—regardless of whether that is possible or not—an
event. Thus a perspective worth contrasting with Kellner’s and Rosen’s is the one
taken by the Robbin Ami Silverberg in her book Just 30 Words: Interlineary which
showcases from a different angle, one that concentrates on a more limited feature of
the event, the desire of the secondary witness to engage in (and often impose) a
narrativization of events they have not personally experienced.
44
Silverberg’s work is
particularly concerned with carving out and showing through a limited amount of
language the very limitations that language encounters when speaking of the disaster
(and once again for the disaster). In JTW the narrative nucleus is a documentary proof
of the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish population. As it is well documented in
the historiography of the Holocaust deception was often used by the Nazi regime to
ensure that deportations and killings were carried out with as little resistance as
possible from the Jewish population. The postcard used by Silverberg is an example
of such practice.
45

44
Silverberg, Robin A. “Re: Questions” Message to the author. email, November, 2010.
45
It is worth noting here how Silverberg’s use of postcards and fragments of letters is gesturing
towards the practice of “postal art.” This specific practice, which can be traced to the Italian Futurists
64

In 1944 a large number of Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz and
forced to write ‘reassuring’ postcards to their loved ones, even though at the time
there was little knowledge of the reality of life in the camps the Nazis were still very
concerned with giving the impression that people were being sent to work camps and
not to camps in which they would find their death. These specific postcards required
their writers to convey their message in merely thirty words, lying about their
conditions and the places they were being taken too.
46
The return address was in fact
always and only that of the Association of Hungarian Jews in Budapest.

and specifically to the work done by Ivo Pannaggi (for a comprehensive study of Postal Art and the
futurists in Italy see Giovanni Lista’s L'art Postal Futuriste. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place,
published in 1979 as well as the anthology curated by Chuck Welch: Eternal Network: A Mail Art
Anthology. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995) consists of works that at its inception
incorporated or “travelled” through the mail. Pannagi’s work as noted by Lista was a Dada-like
assemblage of postal material in which “[…] postal office workers collaborated unknowingly by
adding their postal stamps.” (“Futurist Photography” in: Art Journal , Vol. 41, No. 4, Futurism
(Winter, 1981), p.362). In the 1960s the collaborative art movement of Fluxus engaged also in forms of
“mail art.” While the postal service was instrumental for the physical transmission of artifacts, Fluxus
artists like Robert Watts saw the possibilities of using both the service itself as well as playing with it.
Watts for instance, created a whole series of stamps (Safe Post / K.u.K. Feldpost / Jockpost. 1962.)
which iconography went from close-ups of bare female breasts to collages of objects superimposed on
female faces. In its later incarnations, and particularly since the advent of the internet, the term
“postal/mail art” has come to encompass works exchanged via email and any other electronic
communication system.
46
JTW, page 28. Text by Robbin Ami Silverberg of an imagined return postcard sent back to Waldsee.
In the back of one of the postcards that act as a colophon of the book we learn the following: “600,000
Hungarian Jews perished in WW2. In the Jewish Museum and Archive in Budapest, postcards have
been preserved that were written by some of the deported to their relatives. “The deceptive operation
continued even in Auschwitz. “they gave us postcards and a pencil” Márton Földi testified.’ And they
ordered us tow rite to our families. I wrote to my sister in Budapest. The text was dictated by an SS or
‘kapo’. It went like this: I’m well and I’m working. They ordered us to write that we were in Waldsee.
This is a resort in Austria. The postcards had no stamps.’ The postcards were taken to the Gestapo, and
were forwarded from there, Freudinger said in his testimony: “I examined one of the postcards and I
noticed that its sender wrote Auschwitz in front of the date, but it was erased and Waldsee was written
instead of it… I went to Krumey and showed him the card. “Look, Freudinger, you’re a smart man,” he
said, “You don’t have to notice everything.” They obviously wanted the Jewish families to receive
handwritten, reassuring messages. Afterwards, there were no more “Waldsee postcards” either. There
was no one left to write.” Excerpt form Verdict in Jerusalmen, the Eichmann trial by Gideon Hausner,
as quoted by R.A. Silverberg.

65

The central piece of text in Silverberg’s work is the postcard itself, with on the
one hand the narrative of deception prominently displayed on it in the form of the
instructions to only use thirty words, and on the other the fictional narrative imposed
on the writer of the postcard which reads as follows:
June 18 1944

My love!
I am very happy that I can again make contact and I hope that my card
finds you well. My thoughts are always with you and I hope that we
will have many beautiful days together.
You know how much a card from you would mean to me so please
answer me soon.

With many kisses your Margit.

While the information about the addressee is real and the postcard itself is
evidence of a very real occurrence—that is to say the deportation of thousands of
people to Auschwitz—what is unequivocally false is the information provided in the
postcard. It is around the incontrovertible proof offered by the very presence of the
postcard, a lie that speaks of and for an inaccessible reality, that the ‘interstitial’
narrative of JTW takes place. I would suggest here that the interstices in which the
alternative narrative to the one expressed in the postcard takes place are at least two.
The first interstice is the negative space between the lines written by the sender. Here
the unspeakable truth that hides underneath the written words allows both the reader
66

and the artist to imagine an “alternative,” “unsaid” text. The second interstice is the
space occupied by the myriads of disparate testimonies made by secondary witnesses
that inevitably contribute to shaping of the paradoxically expanding realm of the
memorialization of the Holocaust. While Kellner and Rosen present the reader with
an account of what has been through the figure of the witness/testimony, Silverberg
chooses a different strategy. On one hand she provides evidence of deportation and
thus likely of death, her witness is not a survivor but likely someone who perished.
Margit, the woman who wrote the postcard is, if we agree with Primo Levi, the only
true and indeed possible witness of the event.
She is drowned, not saved, and yet with her words she bears witness to the
disaster. On the other hand Silverberg forces the reader to engage not with
“testimonial truth” but instead with the truth of the deception to which many were
subjected and thus she asks to experience vicariously (by weaving an alternative
narrative) the attempt to erase the tragic reality and indeed the truth of what was
taking place behind the gates of the camps. Thus, Silverberg’s narrative hinges upon
an alternative account of the facts as much as it does on the purported truth expressed
in the postcard. Her works allows in fact for a number of possible narratives, each of
which changes with each reader of the book. In other words, every secondary witness
can perform a different act of ‘reading between the lines’ as the artist herself does in
the book where on the reverse of the postcard we find two versions of Silverberg’s
own interstitial narrative:
67

1. My love I must warn you that all is not well, that the transport goes
elsewhere and Waldsee is a myth! And although I would love to be
with you I must say goodbye.
2. I’ve thirty words to say don’t worry ask you not to imagine reassure
you I’m well. Imagine all I need to say with hopes that-----you read
between the lines. As if coming from Waldsee.
Similarly to Eva Kellner’s retrospective testimonial question “what if” which gesture
toward the many alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have taken place had
Eva had the possibility and foresight to make different choices, Silverberg points out
in the colophon/artist’s statement of the book that:
To consider the words that were not written is an absurd or perhaps
meaningless exercise: it is the road not taken, the novel before its
revision, the life that could have been but was not. […] This artist
book sets up several scenarios that are each limited by the same dictate
attached to those very postcards of 1944—any communiqué must be
maximum 30 words. This is part of a continued exploration of
language cognition—what words can actually communicate and their
limitations. Each time, the reading between the lines offers more than
what can actually be read.
Once again we can observe here another narrative, or perhaps better said an un-
narrative which reflects the long held idea that it is indeed impossible to ‘tell’ the
Holocaust, to come even close with language to the horror that it generated. It is
68

however worth noting that the exercise of which Silverberg speaks, not that of
considering the words that were not written, but the more significant one, that of
reading a text born out of a restriction is entirely worth doing. In her book Silverberg
attempts it by providing excerpts from texts other than the postcard, which always
contain thirty words. Thus in the book we find the following passage: “Washington—
the Federal Government spent at least $ 5.6 billion last year keeping secret documents
secret, a document classification system stuck on autopilot, indiscriminately stamping
‘top secret’ on thousand of documents.” and on pages ten and twenty-five
respectively a photocopy of one fragment of Ilan Ramon’s diary, the Israeli astronaut
who perished during the 2003 re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere of the space
shuttle Columbia, and a similar fragment followed by thirty words extracted from a
New York Times article: “Forensic scientists have restored paper that survived the
conflagration of the space shuttle Columbia. Eighteen pages handwritten in Hebrew
were recovered. She could not piece it together without understanding it.” Restraint
and restriction, being those imposed by the perpetrators of crimes or by the survivors
themselves, are indeed what defines much of the experience of witnessing and
remembering the Holocaust. Perhaps more evident in the realm of the visual, consider
for instance the resistance in the early postwar period to represent visually the event
through a creative act (as opposed to using archival images). Silverberg allows the
reader by formulating an alternative narrative, and in a sense giving a voice to the
specter, to investigate the limitations of what can be said in thirty words but also, and
more importantly, to become witness to the witnessing.
69

1.1.4 Figures of Disaster: Iconic Images and Visual Evidence

As I have briefly mentioned earlier, text is very much tied to images (both literary and
visual) in each of the three works explored in this chapter. In this section I will
explore precisely how images, and specifically iconic images of the Holocaust, an
example of which are for instance the gate to Auschwitz and the “Arbeit Macht Frei”
sign, are used in the artists’ books explored in this chapter. I shall note right away that
of the three works only two make a “visible” use of iconic images, namely Kellner’s
FYS and Rosen’s Holocaust Series, while Silverberg’s JTW is virtually image-free,
preferring to evoke the event rather than showing it.
The narratives of the inherited memory of the Holocaust, as the works of
Tatana Kellner, Carol Rosen, and Robbin Ami Silverberg show, draw from different
testimonial positions. While they do reveal different angles and personal elaborations
of the event they also tend to employ ‘figures’ and tropes that have become symbolic
of the Holocaust. Standing at the intersection of art and literature artists’ books rely
heavily on the combination of text and images. Thus, artists’ books that address the
Holocaust, unlike regular books, provide us with a very unique example of the
contentious relationship between text and image, a relationship that is even more
fraught precisely because of the nature of the subject.
Certainly the effect of the Holocaust has been visually represented and dealt
with in more or less subtle ways through a variety of visual representations. Although
70

exceptions to such statement can be made I suggest here that a large number of visual
representations of the Holocaust, specifically in the realm of figurative arts, have
made use of iconic images—that is to say images that have come to signify and
represent the event in the collective imaginary. These powerful images can and
should be considered as key evidence of the horrors of the Shoah, but it is equally
important to remember that their mere physical presence is not enough to access (if
that is indeed possible) the event either historically or emotionally.
It is safe to say in this respect that perhaps the most powerful visual ‘proof’ of
the horrors endured by the victims of the Holocaust is the one generated by the
photographic medium. It is the imagery constructed from a relatively small pool of
images taken as the events unfolded by the perpetrators and the larger pool of images
taken by the liberating armies in the final phase of the world conflict and the use
artists have made of it that is still the most compelling and controversial aspect of the
memorialization of the Holocaust. While the artists selected for this chapter may
come from different testimonial topographies they all have chosen to include to
different extents photographic and iconic images of the Holocaust. By iconic images I
refer to in this context to images that promptly structure an association with the
Holocaust, for instance photographs of the barbed wire surrounding the camps or the
heaps of naked, emaciated bodies thrown in common graves. Their use of such
images speaks directly to Marianne Hirsch’s suggestion about the existence of a
group of “[…] very few images, used over and over again iconically and
71

emblematically to signal this event.”
47
In the artists’ book considered here the use of
iconic images ranges from the very explicit, as in the images of piles of dead bodies
found in the camps for instance, to the more subtle photographic manipulation of the
railroad entrance to Auschwitz. These images I suggest take part in what Marianne
Hirsch calls a “[…] specifically generational response to memory and trauma,” that is
to say in the very act of postmemory. According to Hirsch the repetitive nature of
postmemory, the repetition of representations that are acquired through the memory
of a subject other than the self, allows for a connection between generations.
48
It is
precisely this connection that I suggest is sought and woven through the text, the
images, and the material nature of the book in the works of Kellner, Rosen, and to a
certain extent Silverberg. However, it could also be argued that the use of iconic
images is a “visual aid” for the user/reader’s (particularly in the case of Rosen’s work
given her aggregation of Holocaust texts) ability to enter the space of the testimony
from a “familiar” vantage point that is capable of evoking an emotional response “on
command,” precisely because the user/reader has been exposed to it through various
media so consistently. This strategy however, I propose, does not lessen the
emotional impact that these works make on their readers nor does it fit the axiom that
equates overexposure to the images of annihilation with a progressive numbing to the
horrors of the Holocaust.
Carol Rosen’s project, for instance, was initially conceived as containing only
images; as the artist herself has noted “I have no problem with the concepts of

47
M. Hirsch, in B. Zelizer, Visual Culture and the Holocaust, 2001, p. 217
48
Idem, p.218
72

“unreadable” books, books which are solely visual, or other means of extending the
concept of “book” as a means of communicating an idea.”
49
This is certainly a
peculiarity of the artist book, a key concept for the understanding of it as both an
artistic and literary practice. What artists’ books seem to suggest is that there are
ways of “reading” images and “seeing” text that call for a more flexible
understanding of the traditional book as a vehicle conceived, borrowing from Rosen,
to communicate an idea rather than “telling” an event.
Earlier when addressing the relationship between text and image I spoke of a
fraught relationship. This specific relationship has been addressed in depth by W.J. T.
Mitchell, who posits in his study of the relationship between image and text
Iconology: Image, text, Ideology (1986) that the “border” between an image and a
text is a “war-torn” one. Mitchell proposes that in order to better comprehend the
reasons behind such struggle would be to “[…] study artistic practice in relation to the
embattled boundary between texts and images.” and ask the following crucial
questions: “How is this struggle manifested in the formal characteristics of texts and
images that are designed to confirm or violate the boundaries between space and time,
nature and convention, the eye and the ear, the iconic and the symbolic? To what
extent is the battle of text and image a consciously articulated theme in literature, the
visual arts, and the various ‘composite arts’ (film, drama, cartoons narrative cycles,
book illustrations) that combine symbolic modes?”
50
I would suggest here that these

49
Rosen, Carol. “Questions” Message to the author. email, November 2010.
50
Mitchell, W J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986,
p.154
73

two questions are particularly relevant for this research because of the nature of the
iconic images and the textual output that the Holocaust has generated. Moreover, I
propose that in the works selected here, and specifically in Tatana Kellner and Carol
Rosen, the battle between the text and the image is very consciously articulated and
reflects the struggle between the becoming witness (through text) and recovering
memory (through the image). In Kellner’s and Rosen’s work the visual kernel is the
photographic medium, but more often than not in both books physical photographs
are only the departure point as both Kellner and Rosen manipulate them graphically
to absolve specific functions within the economy of artifact.
It might then be productive, before considering some specific examples from
the two artists’ books to very briefly consider some specific points about the status of
the photographic image with respect to the Holocaust. As I mentioned in the opening
to this section the photographic records of the event come mainly from two sources:
perpetrators and liberators; these images have come to build a visual archive that to
some extent a large part of humanity is familiar with. It is always clear that such
pictures were not taken with the aim to produce anything other than criminal evidence
or record for the perpetrators the stages of the extermination process. However, in the
artists’ books by Tatana Kellner and Carol Rosen the boundary between record and
aesthetic element is irremediably blurred.
Consider, for instance, how Tatana Kellner travels to the sites of concentration
camps and takes pictures of the barbed wire, which then is reduced to a graphic
element on the page (although it is both an icon and a symbol of the necropolitics at
74

work inside the camp) serving as a background for a number of photographic
assemblages throughout the book. Kellner’s journey, which is indeed an expedition
into the archive of memory more than an archeological dig of sorts, puts her behind
the camera to record and recover experiences that belong to her parents. While on one
hand we could say that merely collecting, recording in writing, and translating her
parents’ memories is already an act of intervention onto the past when in the “place of
the disaster” Kellner can no longer intervene. She cannot, despite being physically
immersed in the locus of memory access it like her parents did. By being behind the
camera Kellner is in a sense “unable” to intervene, but to record and attempt to access
the disaster through the lens of the camera is a position that I would say, is arguably
safe. Her “intervention” is thus not the photographic gesture per se but the elaboration
of it within the framework of the book and in relation to the testimonial text. Her
photographs of the entrances to the camps, the crematoria, the open fields where
barracks once stood and all traces of which have now been erased are printed on
matte and semi-transparent pages. These photographs repeated over and over in both
of Kellner’s books and enlarged to fill the page entirely serve as a background for the
textual testimony and are often blurry, so much so that the contours of the people,
places, and structures they depict can be barely made out. Yet they are unequivocally
images that we could not associate with anything but the Holocaust precisely because,
as observed by Cornelia Brink, “[R]elics of the camps—barbed wire, entrance gate,
watch towers, barracks, the crematories’ chimneys—and photographed scenes […]
75

became new symbols for something hitherto unthinkable and unimaginable […]”
51

that however, we are asked to think of and at the very least begin to imagine. Still,
Kellner’s manipulation of images in the very act of blurring, splicing, and
manipulating photographs could be interpreted in its most literal sense as a visual
representation of remembering as an inherently hazy act of retrieving experience. But
I might add that the material blurring of the image hints also to a much large
repetitive use of the iconic image which leads to its “consumption” a consumption
that could be both understood as “use” and “wearing out” which inevitably affects not
only the physical nature of the image but also the meaning that we extract from it.
Meaning in its relation to photography and iconic images is certainly the most
complex aspect to address in these artists’ books. While Kellner’s method of using
the photograph as a background to the text allows her to incorporate the pool of visual
images associated with Holocaust (which certainly contribute to a much more vivid
experience of Eva’s and Eugene’s testimony) without making them the focal point of
the book, Carol Rosen approaches the intersection of the image and the text of the
disaster in a quite different way. While Kellner’s pushing back of the photograph as
background instance shifts the focus from the image to the text and the three
dimensional object at its center (the cast of her parent’s arm) Rosen’s texts works in
my view as a caption of sorts to the photographic collages throughout the book.
Rosen for instance, in Book1/The Others provides no captions to the photographs
used in her work, unlike Kellner does in FYS so as to make clear for the reader that

51
Brink, Cornelia, “Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps” in
History & Memory, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2000, p. 136
76

she is the one who took the image and thus physically positioned herself in the
memory of the event. In a sense we might say that the textual excerpts from literature
and memoirs are Rosen’s captions and that the excerpts have the specific function of
“explaining” the pictures, which would otherwise in their mute ambiguity, be
impossible to interpret. However, the images used by Rosen belong also to the iconic
pool discussed earlier, so that an educated reader coming across a yellow Star of
David juxtaposed to an image of children that has been obviously taken around the
time of WWII might gather even without a caption that the picture of the little girl
holding her dead brother must have been taken in the ghettoes, or that the pile of
corpses might be those seen by the Allies upon their entrance in Bergen-Belsen. Still,
Sontag suggests, a degree of ambiguity is inevitable. Similarly ambiguous is the
figure of an ideally educated reader capable of making correct assumptions about and
correct connections between the images. After all, the image of piled on corpses
could be associated with mass murder taking place much closer in time to the present,
Sontag notes. In her meditation on the relationship between viewership and suffering
with a focus on photographic imagery titled Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Susan Sontag, speaking specifically of war photographs and the ambiguous nature of
captioning observes the following:
[…] when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper
bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era
of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of
77

apprehending something and a compact form of memorizing it. The
photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb.
52

The photograph, however, according to Sontag is chiefly “[…] supposed not to evoke
but to show.”
53
In the artists’ books considered so far however, this proposition does
not seem to hold true. The way in which the images are manipulated is in fact
precisely a way to evoke the event and to mirror the process of summoning a memory
that is not connected to a first person experience. The images used in Kellner’s and
Rosen’s works are not showing instances of the event and within the limits of the
page they are at best loosely connected with a text that does not necessarily explain or
even reference the image itself. I propose here that it is possible to read this type of
disconnection between the text and the image as a strategy that materializes for the
reader/user of the book the experience of the removed/second-generation
survivor/witness. The survivor’s testimony is proof that the image is indeed real and
could be used as evidence of the event and vice versa—that is showing the event. For
the secondary witness weaving the image and the textual testimony, whether gathered
or assembled is evoking the event.

52
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, p.19
53
Idem, p.37
78

1.1.5 Becoming Witnesses: Material and Bodily Evidence

Becoming a witness, as I hope to have shown so far, may entail different entry points
into the experience of the survivor and the event to which he/she bears witness. The
artists’ books that have been selected for this chapter showcase not only narrative
points of entry but also material ones. Materiality is indeed an essential aspect of this
specific artistic practice in that it adds a layer of meaning to both its text and images.
But materiality per se and the meaning it structures are nothing without a body that
experiences them. In this respect my theoretical premise to the analysis of the
interaction between the physical body of the reader and the object and the meaning
that is structured in that encounter has its roots in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of
perceptual experience. Merleau-Ponty began to develop this specific concept in his
monumental work Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and subsequently enriched it,
while also attempting to overcome some of its issues, in his posthumous The Visible
and the Invisible (1964). Merleau-Ponty’s initial project as a philosopher is
condensed in a prospectus of his work he wrote in 1952, in which the author states the
following:
We never cease living in the world of perception, but we go beyond it
in critical thought—almost to the point of forgetting the contribution
of perception to our idea of truth.[…]My first works sought to restore
the world of perception. My works in preparation aim to show how
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communication with others and thought, take up and go beyond the
realm of perception which initiated us to the truth.
54

Similarly the strikingly precise title of one of the latter chapters of Phenomenology of
Perception —“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception”—introduces
and unequivocally states Merleau-Ponty’s position on the subject of the body: “Our
own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle
constantly alive, it breaths life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a
system.”
55

Already in these opening lines it is evident that Merleau-Ponty does not
conceive of an experiential I as distinct from the living body. I ask in this chapter how
the experiential I of the secondary witness relates to events that are presented to
him/her already mediated by a first experiential I whose experience is largely a bodily
one (internment, torture, tattooing, physical violence). Merleau-Ponty proposes that it
is precisely through the body that the experience of the world, and of the text as
suggested by Poulet, is available to us from our inside out. Merleau-Ponty refutes the
idea that the "external world" is somehow “printed” on the subject. Therefore in
Merleau-Ponty view, perception is not streaming from consciousness but is, instead,
affected by the body as a lived subject. With this in mind it seems appropriate to ask
if a secondary witness can become a lived subject of an event they have no direct
lived experience of through the materiality of the book or if that materiality is merely

54
Merleau-Ponty, M. The Primacy of Perception, p.3
55
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception, London and N.Y.: Routledge, 2002, p.235
80

a prop that makes for a different experience of image and text but not necessarily of
the testimonial event itself.
Merleau Ponty’s work on perceptual experience defines my work more than
his predecessors (and yet much like his my research is very much informed by the
work of Husserl as well) because of his focus on the relationship between the
functioning body—in the manifestation of motility—and the interaction with objects.
Since artists’ books have a distinct material quality that impinges and expands on the
literary meaning they are attached to, and require a physical approach—a primarily
manipulative one—Merleau Ponty’s work has been invaluable to structure some of
the most crucial questions that underlie this research. Consider for instance how
artists’ books, because of their nature, demand that we approach them with modalities
(physical and interpretative) both similar and different to those we might apply to
“regular” books. The body’s ability to shape awareness of the objects is called by
Merleau-Ponty the schèma corporel; the bodily schema is what allows the
“syntheses” of objects in the flesh and thus the making of meaning. It is important to
note here that habit formation as a means of interaction with the world is for Merleau-
Ponty what allows our bodies to be open and dilate our being in the world through the
constant appropriation of “fresh instruments”
56
that help the development of
meaning.
57
In interacting with artists’ books a series of fresh instruments is certainly
necessary. We first must ask ourselves when confronted with the object how to

56
Idem, p.166
57
It seems to me that the key word here is repetition, without which there would be no habit formation,
and indeed repetition is very much also at the core of the discourse of trauma.
81

interact with it, one of the most immediate issues being for instance how to relate to a
an arrangement of pages that differs from normative books—in other words which
rules is the reader engaging with, those of an object (evidence) or those of a book
(testimony)? But more importantly in the context of artists’ books that engage with
the Holocaust, how does one react to an object that is either trying to mimic a
traumatic bodily experience (and the experience of a body) or completely go in the
opposite direction and eliminate any physical reference to physical horror (an
expectation that any viewer or reader of Holocaust related material has)? What makes
it possible for the bodily experiences of seeing, reading, and touching evidence of the
disaster to resonate with the meaning-making, narrative-bound, experiential I?
Let me now give some concrete examples of what I mean by physical/material
evidence with respect first to Kellner’s and Rosen’s books and the erasure of physical
evidence in the work of Silverberg.
Earlier in this chapter, in describing Kellner’s FYS I mentioned that it also
entailed a three dimensional object, but I must correct that and say that it involves two
objects instead; one being the wooden crate and the other the arm at the center of the
testimonial booklet. I propose here that the crate, in essence a coffin in which the
testimony is buried, hidden, shut, stands for the erasure operated by the parents the
withholding of information about their experience in the camps. But I would add that
it is also a metonymy, a part, a morsel of the whole experience of being both a
survivor and a survivor’s child. Moreover the symbolic function of the crate as
container is to convey the idea of a continuous recovery of memory that renews itself
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every time a new user opens it or “returns” to it much like I myself did for the
purpose of this research. However, the crate is also an enigmatic object that speaks of
the ambiguity that defines much of Holocaust art. Is the artifact meant to be buried in
or dug up from the archive of memory? There may not be one good answer to this
question but regardless what is striking about FYS is in my view that it calls for a
very profound bodily engagement with its materiality. We can no longer maintain a
safe distance from the event, but are instead implicating ourselves in it by opening the
wooden crate, sliding the lid and immediately being confronted with the arm cast.
As Marianne Hirsch has noted “The arm is almost unbearable to look at in its
truncated presence […] Kellner has said that for her, visually, “it began with the
arms” and she built the books around them.”
58
So here we are faced with multiple
sensorial, perceptual, and bodily experiences. First we have the experience of the
artists’ as secondary witness—that is to say the fascination with the parent’s tattooed
arms, which in their capacity as symbols of oppression Kellner reverses in FYS by
molding the cast and re-inscribing it with the tattooed numbers herself. Second to that
is the experience of the user/reader of the book whose reading of the text is constantly
interrupted by the presence of the arm at the very center of the booklet. To this we
might add that the user’s interaction with the hand itself add another important layer
of meaning and certainly makes for an interesting perspective on the different degrees
of proximity that the individual might want to have with the object and thus with the
event. Here it is a personal choice, it is entirely possible to avoid touching the hand,

58
Hirsch, M., Extremities, p. 81
83

to probe its texture and to, in a sense attempt to repeat the experience of fascination
had by Kellner herself. In viewing multiple times FYS in different libraries I noticed
upon opening the crate and revealing to other library patrons its contents very
different reactions, ranging from curiosity to unease— certainly the most commonly
used adjective was “disturbing.” There is indeed something disturbing about the casts
but I would argue that it has little to do with their color or material, or even with the
fact that we are aware that those objects are in their deadness perfect reproductions of
a living being’s body part. I would not necessarily speak of the arms as an uncanny
object, but rather of a symbolic one that in its presence reminds us of the absence of
the millions who perished in the Holocaust. But in turning the pages of the booklet it
seems to me that it is when we look at the page opposite to the one where the cast is
embedded in—the page that while filled with text is interrupted by the gaping shape
of the cast arm—that we relate more to the idea of Kellner’s experience as a
secondary witness perpetually trying (and maybe failing) to fill the void of
experience. I suggest here that the level of interactivity that FYS demands of its
user/reader calls for an engagement that other types of media cannot provide and also
(perhaps unwillingly) shows the limits of interpretation posed to the body when
confronted with the disaster. Even though FYS in its multilayered materiality seeks to
engage us on a bodily level, with the more or less overt goal of deepening our
experience and making visible (through a body and for the body) what traumatic
memory has erased, it also irremediably highlights the complicated nature of the
testimony by proxy and the disruptions faced by the secondary witness. Disruption is
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indeed the operative word here. Consider for instance Merleau-Ponty’s more
important claim that the body escapes a more traditional subject/object division.
Because Merleau-Ponty draws from science, such as the notorious example of
patients missing limbs but still perceiving them, he is able to say that the division
between subject and object can be disrupted; when that happens the sense of the self
and even the consciousness of one’s being in the world are modified.
The idea of phantom limbs and phantom pain relates poignantly to the belated
witnessing of the Holocaust. I suggest here that for many secondary witnesses as well
as for the readers/viewers/users of their testimonial endeavors the phenomenon of
phantom pain well describes both sides’ witnessing condition. Spectrality is indeed a
term well apt to describe the presence of the Holocaust in the collective imagination.
Consider for instance Deborah Davidson’s artist book Voce (1995) in which both the
idea of spectrality and the evocation of the event through the denial of iconic images
are explored. Davidson’s work is a collection of eight poems inspired by and
formulated as an “ideal” response to the letters, fragments of which also appear in the
book, that her grandmother wrote, shortly before her death in Auschwitz, to the
family from the Italian interment camp of Fossoli in 1944. As the title Voce/Voice
suggests, Davidson endeavors to both return a voice to her grandmother, for her plea
to be answered, as well as to find her own voice in the process of “[…] burying her
[grandmother] properly.”
59
From a material stand point Davidson speaks with
Gemma’s by breaking up her brief communiqués with a stream of consciousness-like

59
Davidson, D. in Hoffberg, Judith A. Women of the Book: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes. Boca
Raton, Fla.: Friends of the Libraries, FAU Library, 2001.
85

text. The difference between the two texts is further marked by a different use of type,
whereby capitalized letters alternate with lowercase ones which represent the two
different “speakers.” Davidson’s book dispenses altogether of images of any kind.
The thick pink paper on which the text is printed is punctuated with blots of varying
depths of blue ink. Blurring into each other the blots seem to reference the porous
nature of the impossible dialogue attempted by Davidson. On page nine, for instance,
the word “ASHES” is set in uppercase (top of page capped different font) while “your
typewriter” is set as if floating on the page in a different font from the previous word.
On the same page appear the following scattered words:
“Mille di magnesia. Food clothes. Please sugar, bread, a basin, basin
kerchief sugar cubes.”
Here the voice of Gemma and her plea for basic goods is woven with what I suggest
is an “iconic” word—ashes—rather than an iconic image. Later on page thirteen the
words “thank you for everything” are set in lowercase whereas on page fourteen the
following sentences “Enough. Sometimes the light, and just looking at it is enough. I
bring back to the studio remnants of roots, and rests, a bundle. Of twice from a
rosebush, seven sunflower stalks. Rock complicit is attached to the rope found last
summer at the bottom of the quarry.” are set again in uppercase. On the same page the
sentence “This is the cache, the…[here the text is illegible as it ends into the color
blot] my dowry” is followed by the word “urgently” set in lowercase.
I propose that the ideal dialogue entertained between Davidson and her
grandmother can be seen as a “spectral” one, as the word is understood by Jacques
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Derrida. In the final paragraphs of Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida offers an
intriguing perspective on the relationship between humans and ghosts. Derrida
acknowledges that social constructs have made a prerogative of human beings (the
mortals) to be able to bury the dead and watch over them, with the stipulation that the
living cannot, nor should they be, watched back. Instead, according to Derrida, the
ghost, an entity that is present in a perpetual state of liminal existence and one that
must be engaged in ethical terms, can watch and is able to do so wherever “watching”
takes place. The exchange that Derrida pictures between the phantom and the living is
not one defined uniquely by sight. Ideally, according to Derrida, the mortal will talk
to, and let the ghosts talk but more importantly perhaps, he/she will strive to return
speech to the specter even if “it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself.”
60

Counter to at least two of the more popular understandings and representations of
ghosts—that is, the phantom of a dead subject that returns temporarily to be
“disposed of properly” or “rectify” and act performed in his lifetime—Derrida’s
identifies in the revenant (he/it who by returning begins to be) a sort of privileged
interlocutor that is constantly present.
Davidson’s work speaks to the multiplicity of subjectivities that the ghost can
inhabit when given, or returned a voice, through the very act of speaking to and for it.
More specifically I suggest that the Holocaust, and by extension the figure that is
chosen to represent it—in this case Gemma, the grandmother—is a suitable example
of spectrality and haunting that fits the paradigm of visibility/dialogue/ethics and

60
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. London: Routledge, 2006, p.221
87

constant presence elaborated by Derrida. Although I have merely sketched it in this
section I propose that Davidson’s book materializes and engages with Derrida’s idea
of revenant and of haunting, not only because of its subject, but because Voce is a
material and, and more relevantly, visual expression of the two. In this respect
Davidson’s approach shows how the intergenerational “transmission” of testimony
and the becoming witness draws in its book form from a variety of “iconic” loci that
are both visual and textual.

1.1.6 The Book is an Open Body

In conclusion to this chapter after having addressed the bodily aspect of the
relationship with artists’ books, I would like to briefly engage with the idea of
openness; an openness that throughout every chapter of this dissertation I understand
both in phenomenological and semiotic terms. For the time being I will concern
myself with the phenomenological aspect and return briefly to another relevant
concept explored by Merleau-Ponty who wished to demonstrate that the body cannot
be viewed solely as an object, or a material entity separated from the world (the
visible spectacle), but that it also engaged with it by “breathing life into it,” thus
creating a structure of reciprocity.
61
These and other ideas laid out in the
Phenomenology of Perception, paved the way for Merleau-Ponty’s more radical
concept about the body and perception developed in the Visible and the Invisible—

61
This concept was developed by Merleau-Ponty as a way of bypassing the problem that his division
between consciousness and object had set in Phenomenology of Perception.
88

that is to say, the idea of the flesh. The clearest definition of what the flesh meant for
Merleau-Ponty is formulated by Dastur: “[…] through this term, Merleau-Ponty is
really trying to conceive the openness of being, this coiling of being on itself or this
“specular phenomenon” internal to being by which the reign of visibility is opened.”
62

The flesh therefore stands at the core of the visible field for Merleau-Ponty, being
defined by an “openness” that is both outward and inward which erases bodily
boundaries: “[…] the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there
is a fundamental narcissism of all vision,”
63
a narcissism that certainly speaks more to
the tendency of the subject to project rather than introject, and attach itself to the
seen, rather than be a mere seer. Moreover, the idea of a reciprocity, or better an
encroachment of sorts, between object and seer understood as an exchange (or
encounter) of matters (after all the world is made of the same matter of the body)
leads to the idea of a visibility from the inside out allowing for the possibility: “[…]
of being seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced,
captivated. Alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one
another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.” It is this visibility in
which all subjects and perspectives seem to mesh that Merleau-Ponty dubs the flesh.
64

62
Dastur, F. “World, Flesh, Vision” in Evans, F. (ed. by) Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh.
New York: State University of New York Press, c2000, p.33
63
Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible And The Invisible, p. 141
64
Ibid. p. 139. For the purpose of this research the idea of the flesh, which Merleau-Ponty had already
observed in Signs (published in 1960 only four years before the Visible and the Invisible), that is the
act of seeing and “probing the texture” of the object does not belong to the realm of consciousness,
rather it is part of the field to which bodies belong; and the following assertion seems to prefigure the
idea of the openness of the body: “Everything depends, that is, upon the fact that our glances are not
“acts of consciousness,” each of which claims invariable priority, but openings of our flesh which are
immediately filled by the universal flesh of the world.” Merleau-Ponty, M. Signs, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964, p.16 Predictably, Merleau-Ponty’s reasoning on the flesh is
89

The projection of the viewer onto what is seen speaks to the projection of a narrative
on an object (the hand in the crate) that otherwise has none, but it is the flesh—this
merging of perspectives that encompasses different types of witnesses—that makes it
possible for the reader/user to not be entirely lost in his/her interpretation of Kellner’s
work. This coming together of perspectives and bodily perceptions is very much at
the center of Rosen’s Holocaust Series as well. Her books, unlike Kellner’s and
Silverberg’s, are entirely unbound and come enclosed each individually in a fabric-
covered casing. In a private conversation with the artist, Rosen noted that the use of
unbound page, removable from the box and easily viewable was as intentional as the
use of transparent paper. Both approaches would allow a great proximity with the
object as well as lending, thanks to the changing effect of the light on the transparent
page and the grain of the was paper resembling very much dead skin, a different
affect to the materials.
65

The transparent page has indeed a very unique texture, a waxiness and a
coldness that it certainly not a stretch of the imagination to see (and feel) as dead
skin. However not the entire book is made of this type of paper. As a matter of fact

complicated by the fact that the flesh cannot see itself seeing as a result of its coiling over itself in a
movement that splits it into the flesh of the world and the flesh of the body. His theoretical escamotage
is to postulate that the becoming one of these two fleshes (which already appears somewhat
paradoxical as they come and tend to oneness), that is to say— its reversibility (the chiasm)—is in fact
never realized. The complexity and ultimate incompleteness of the chiasm is more evident at the level
of visibility and tangibility; that which is seen and the seer, as well as the act of touching and what is
touched cannot be superimposed. For if such superimposition would be possible, seeing and touching
would hinder the opening toward one world.

The concept of the flesh therefore, encapsulates both the
ideas of continuity, and those of interweaving and reversibility complicating even more the rapport
between the seer, the seen and the flesh that sustains them both. However, it also poignantly speaks to
the idea of a persistent and uninterrupted flow of meaning and experience between the three, one that I
believe is central for the interpretation of what takes place when we become witnesses of an event
through a physical object.
65
Rosen, Carol. “Questions” Message to the author. email, November 2010.
90

the text that “accompanies” the images is printed on a very delicate yet heavy rice
paper that has almost the consistency of a woven fabric and that more often than not
one has to quite literally peel off the waxy pages. Again in Rosen book there’s a great
deal of intimacy and manual labor involved in approaching the book.
66
It’s the very
act of peeling off the layers, and uncovering images, memories, excerpts of texts that
I believe speaks very much to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of habit formation through the
motility of the body. In other words Rosen’s work, thanks to its unbound nature and
the ‘gesture’ that is required to move through it, allows the reader to reflect through a
bodily approach on the act of remembering, the meaning of recovering memory, and
the extent to which one is implicated in the process of witnessing.
In stark contrast to Rosen’s and Kellner’s use of materiality as a signifier,
Robin Ami Silverberg presents us with a book that defies all expectations about
Holocaust art. Although she had previously worked on the subject in her Mathausen
1999-2000 series, in which she chose not to address the condition of the prisoners in
the lager but looked instead: “[…] at the 186 steps of the "Staircase of Death" in the
quarry…” which prompted her to ask the following questions: “[…] and considered
what is the meaning of this number? What could it mean to those prisoners who were
forced to climb that staircase? And what is the meaning of this man-made form
which is designed to bring us 'up' but was built in Mauthausen to destroy life.”
67
In
Mathausen 1999-2000 Silverberg reproduced the staircase of death working within

66
When asked in a private email exchange, Rosen provided an interesting perspective on how she
envisioned the display and interaction with her work noting that she did not give specific directions to
the display of her work but that certain exhibits had favored the display of all volumes at once on the
backdrop of enlargements of several of the images present in the book.
67
Silverberg, Robin A. “RE: Questions” Message to the author. email, November 2010.
91

the chromatic scale of grey. In JTW Silverberg subverts instead certain
representational expectations associated with the depiction of the Shoah. First and
foremost as I have already noted in the previous section her book lacks conspicuously
any image (let alone iconic images) that might directly reference the Holocaust with
the exception of the “deportation” postcard and few other small images such as,
among others, a map of the lake Balaton, a chart showing the population numbers of
the Jewish community in Hungary. Silverberg explained that when choosing what
materials to use she preferred colorful papers to black and greys, which she felt, were
over-used in works that deal with the themes of the Holocaust.
The experience structured by Silverberg’s work is evidently much different
than the one might have in dealing with either Rosen’s or Kellner’s work.
Silverberg’s work in my mind is an exercise in subtraction, but is not less layered
than either FYS or the Holocaust Series. What is at stake in JTW is the idea of
fragment, and not merely the literal fragment made visible by the eggshell, but a
fragment of language, a fragment of memory, a tiny unit of the body such as a hair is.
So what is the body left to experience in Silverberg’s work? In JTW the reader is
forbidden to access to event through either vision or the body, but are instead called
to reflect upon language and the erasures operated through language on the being.
The reader is called to let go of that collective imagery that has in a sense
homogenized our inherited memory of the event and engage with the bearing witness
to and through the fragment, which is ultimately the base unit of memory.
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In conclusion, the focus of this chapter has been the exploration of the book’s
material nature and its existence as both an artifact and a “piece of evidence.” The
works presented so far have hopefully showcased how a specific type of materiality,
such as the incorporation of a three dimensional object as the cast arm in Kellner’s
FYS, structures meaning and informs a certain type of narrative such as the memorial
one. In the next chapter, as a way of contrasting the ideas explored so far, I will
consider instead artists’ books that engage heavily with the nature of text and its
relationship to power and order and to a lesser extent with the physical nature of the
book itself.

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CHAPTER II

2. Rogue Books: Language and the Subversion of the Encyclopedic Project in the
works of Emilio Isgrò and Luigi Serafini.

I’d like to begin by talking a little about the book
itself as a central archetype of our culture and
history because whatever you do with a book,
you’re working with it also as a symbol. It is the
implication and consequences that inhere in the
book as a symbol that make both the incentive and
also the terrible warp in your judgment as you
approach it.
William Everson, “The Poem as Icon,” April 16, 1976

What do an encyclopedia and a mirror have in common? At a first glance certainly
not much, and yet it is thanks to the odd proximity and conjunction of the two that the
narrator of one of Jorge Luis Borges’ best-known short stories “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius” embarks on a metaphysical journey through the notions of power and
knowledge. Two friends share a dinner and become soon involved in a lengthy
conversation on the merits of omissions and the disfiguration of facts as a device that
allows only few chosen readers “[…] to perceive an atrocious or banal reality;” the
mirror quietly spying on them. It is tempting to infer from Borges’ own words that the
discovery of the treacherous nature of the mirror which is “[…] inevitable in the late
hours of the night” is perhaps the result of either an altered state of mind or extreme
exhaustion from a probing and “vast [literary] polemic.”

Yet, regardless of the reason
behind the state of mind of the two friends what matters is that the mirror suddenly
appears to be a monstrous object, capable of reproducing reality without making it
quite real. What the two men see in the mirror is a counter image to the image of
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reality. The reflection is a multiplication—an increase in the number of men—an act
that the narrator’s dinner companion recalls being considered, together with
copulation, as an “abomination” by the heresiarchs of the little known country of
Uqbar. Needless to say, the statement of the dinner companion piques the curiosity of
the narrator prompting him to ask where one would find the origin of such a
“memorable observation.”
68
Well, where else other than in an encyclopedia? In
Borges’ story the reader soon learns though, that the encyclopedia is not a guarantee
of accuracy or truth, but that in fact there exist pirated, rogue, delinquent
encyclopedias planting knowledge-red herrings. Not to mention that there appear to
be encyclopedias belonging to other worlds, other universes that can be only seen in
the depths of a mirror, and are themselves a reflection of reality but are not quite real.
Jorge Luis Borges, together with Michel Foucault, has shaped much of my
thinking in this chapter and it is with the aid of some of their notions about power and
the encyclopedia that I will approach the works of artists Emilio Isgrò and Luigi
Serafini. Albeit in different ways both Foucault and Borges have provided
commentary and criticism on the constructs of knowledge and culture intersecting
with the encyclopedic project. This chapter seeks to show how a modified book and
an illustrated book, both taxonomically ruled under the definition of artists’ books,
appropriate the encyclopedic genre as a platform to take apart and challenge concepts
such as taxonomy, relevance, language, and authority.

68
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Labyrinths, ed. by D.A. Yates and J.E. Irby,
New Directions: N.Y., 2007, p. 3
95

As I pointed out earlier a defining feature of the artist book in general is that
such challenging would entail both the manipulation of language and the disruption of
the material nature of the book. Artists’ books have engaged with a variety of genres
in the course of their evolution from a niche artistic practice to becoming a
phenomenon connected to some of the most important artistic and literary movements
of our time. As noted in the previous chapter artists’ books have engaged, with
different degrees of proximity, with both the idea of the testimony as a narrative
genre as well as that of the book as an object of testimony. It would be impossible to
catalogue here the many iterations of the artist’s book, but it is safe to say that as an
artistic practice it has not shied away from any genre and very few formats have
remained unexplored. Perhaps it is no surprise then, that the encyclopedia as a genre,
too, would catch the attention of book artists, writers, and assorted lovers of the book.
I suggest in this chapter that the encyclopedic project, while not inherently linked to
artist’s book per se, is challenged and its conceptual shortcomings as well as its
ideological stances, are exposed by this artistic and literary practice.
By encyclopedic project I mean the endeavor to systematize, present, and
disseminate the sum of what is considered “useful” and “available” knowledge,
indeed what has proven to be the over-ambitious attempt to construct a book that
would be able to collect and contain—and to a certain extent delineate—the
knowledge available in the world. The history of the encyclopedia as a cultural
object, one that has perhaps more and better than others mirrored political, social, and
technological changes connected with the dissemination of knowledge has been
96

investigated in depth.
69
It is therefore not my objective to further expand on it here.
What I believe has made this genre compelling to academics, authors, and artists is at
least in part, as Richard Yeo puts it in the introduction to his study of two less popular
encyclopedic works of the Enlightenment, the fact that great expectations and equally
great disappointments have characterized the evolution of the encyclopedia. The
impossibly vast breadth of knowledge that the encyclopedic vision, to borrow again
from Yeo, tried in its early inception to encapsulate and disseminate is perhaps to be
seen as its conceptual downfall. From the issues pertaining to its inner
systematization to the audiences it hoped to reach and the timeliness of the ideas it
hoped to spread (specifically technological and scientific discoveries) the
encyclopedia has come short of many of its objectives. Yet despite the controversies
that have challenged the relevance of the encyclopedic format per se it is perhaps
thanks to the immediacy of access to knowledge it promised and still promises, that
the encyclopedia has maintained its status of enduring cultural presence.
70

69
See among others, for a well-rounded analysis of the epistemology of the encyclopedia and the idea
of a failed “completeness of knowledge” North, John “Encyclopedias and the Art of Knowing
Everything” in Binkley, Peter. Pre-modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Groningen, 1 - 4 July 1996. Leiden:
Brill, 1997; Kelley, Donald R. History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early
Modern Europe. Rochester, N.Y., USA: University of Rochester Press, 1997.
70
Yet, the idea that knowledge can be organized and connections made into a searchable format and a
specific “space” together with the idea that the encyclopedia still bares some form of authority have
shaped and still shape our expectations for this genre. In the age of the Wiki and the other various -
pedias it is increasingly harder however, to believe in a standard of authority and accuracy when it
comes to the knowledge that enters this post-encyclopedias. In the present chapter the works which I
consider speak of a time in which artists and authors in general could have not anticipated the
possibilities opened up by the web and of artists and authors who were invested in challenging forms
of knowledge transmission that were perceived as oppressive. In this respect the encyclopedia with its
“tentacular vision” (to borrow here from the Stoic school of thought) had in a sense foreshadowed the
coming to existence of the Internet in its hyper-textual connotation.
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As a testament to the evolving nature of the encyclopedic format, which
somewhat paradoxically compensates the gravitas of its authority, the formats and
systematizations of the encyclopedia have changed in time to reflect the different
visions of the ways in which reality is ordered. Additionally, in its attempt to
crystallize and distill knowledge the authors of encyclopedias have also had to cater
to the need to update its information in a manner that would be able to keep up with
scientific progress without having to reassess and reformulate its entire structure.
71

It would be however, both unfair and inaccurate to paint a picture of the
encyclopedic project as one seeking to merely enforce a specific worldview or
knowledge of the world itself in its phenomenological manifestation as the history of
this genre is far more complex and interesting than the sketch I have offered here. In
this chapter, I am specifically interested in the taxonomical and the “social”
dimension of this genre, that is to say the place that the encyclopedia occupies in
culture. In summarizing and establishing connections the compiler of the
encyclopedia inevitably weaves a culture-specific vision that reflects among other
things his own idea of relevance (what deserves to be included) as well as his
underlying assumptions about objectivity in the relating of facts. Another important
factor in the organizing of the encyclopedia pertains to the cultural specificities of the
readership. Gavino Musio and Franco Cardini observe in their work on historical

71
Early “users” of encyclopedic dictionaries and encyclopedia needed to know exactly what to look for
or were willing and even wishing to merely peruse the encyclopedia “to learn from it.” Again, this is of
course no longer true of contemporary digital –pedias as they have achieved the true goal of the
encyclopedia, that of allowing the user to make connections and be privy to enormous amounts of
knowledge on one “virtual” page without discriminating between arts, sciences, history, popular
culture and so on.
98

anthropology that readerships based in different countries have different expectations
with regards to what they “look for” in an encyclopedic volume. Musio and Cardini
show how, for instance, the Enciclopedia Einaudi, published by the eponymous
publisher, who worked with Italo Calvino, choose to derive its inner systematization
from the “French” formula. As the two scholars point out this formula, which
presupposes on the part of the reader a certain degree of prior information with regard
to the “culturally relevant” headword/lemma to be sought. This in turn allows the
reader to derive from the text what one may call secondary information. Such
approach reveals, according to Musio and Cardini, a readership (in this case
specifically the French one) that approaches the encyclopedia to further deepen their
knowledge as opposed to gathering a distinctly new one. Musio and Cardini proposed
that, in adopting a format similar to the French one, the Enciclopedia Einaudi had
failed to acknowledge an important cultural difference. A difference that Musio and
Cardini suggest had instead been “better interpreted” by the Italian philosopher
Giovanni Gentile who coordinated the research and production of the Enciclopedia
Treccani, which to this day remains still a sort of “iconic” encyclopedia, a name with
which indeed most Italians would associate a “quality” educational product. Giovanni
Gentile, according to Musio and Cardini:
99

[…] interpreted much better Italian culture and the mental-formulas of
the average, more or less educated Italian who demanded from the
encyclopedia a scholarly, essential, and detailed type of knowledge.
72

Musio and Cardini suggest thus, that the Italian reader was substantially more
inclined to look for items that he/she had no prior knowledge of rather than the
French reader who seemed more willing to look for items with whom he/she might be
already somewhat familiar.
While it is safe to say that the concern with readership and the general
audience of the encyclopedia certainly contributed to defining its structure in both
early and later editions of the encyclopedia, the relevance of the compiler’s own
Weltanschauung in the systematization process is much more central. Consider how
systematization employed in encyclopedic dictionaries and summa of knowledge
reflected, in medieval times for instance, discrete hierarchies provided by philosophy
or religion. When these systematizations based on religion and philosophy were
eventually dismissed they were replaced by the more “democratic” and modern
alphabetical classification. This latter, which employed a system not influenced by a
specific hierarchy, allowed for the coming about of two very important changes in the
way knowledge was presented and received. The first change reflected the idea that
the encyclopedic compilers no longer needed to explain to their readers how things
were connected to each other and thus create specific categories in which to organize

72
Musìo, Gavino, and Franco Cardini. Storia E Antropologia Storica: Dalla Storia Delle Culture Alla
Culturologia Storica Dell'Europa. Rome: Armando Editore, 1993, p.79; my translation: ”[…] si rivelò
migliore interprete della cultura italiana e dunque della media formula mentale degli italiani, colti o
meno, che richiedevano all’enciclopedia una informazione dotta, essenziale e capillare.”
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and place phenomena, objects, events etc. The second transformation, and perhaps the
most relevant one, was that the introduction of the alphabetical system no longer
enforced a specific reading strategy; both changes resulted in the reader acquiring an
unprecedented freedom in terms of his interaction with each of the physical volumes
of the encyclopedia as well as with the knowledge offered by the encyclopedia.
73
The
implications of these two important evolutions cannot be underestimated in terms of
how both redefined the position of the compiler and that of the reader. Particularly the
former, divested from his structuring role appeared to have lost a certain amount of
intellectual power and cachet. However, as Richard Yeo among others has argued, in
spite of the major evolutions within the encyclopedic genre that took place during the
Enlightenment the personal vision and ideological orientation of the
compiler/institution publishing any encyclopedia has continued to shape the final
product. One of the most intriguing and complex questions that this genre brings forth
is thus whether it is indeed possible to not invest the encyclopedic work with a
specific authorial view or bias and thus, on a macroscopic level what are the effects
on the transmission of knowledge and its relation to the readers that it hopes to reach.
An example of the complex nature of knowledge transmission and of its organization
within a culture-specific structure is the one offered by encyclopedias reflecting the
political orientations and agendas of a regime, for instance. A case that comes to mind
is that of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in the mid 1920s and then
subsequently reprinted after WWII and again during the Cold War. The goal of this

73
This perhaps is the aspect that it has in common with the artist book in a sense, that there is indeed
no reading strategy.
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specific encyclopedia was to be a comprehensive summa of Soviet culture that would
unify “culturally” the motherland with all satellite soviet countries, which were
however presented with their unique specificities. It is safe to say that most
publications of the time spanning between the mid 1920s including the encyclopedia
and its editions published shortly before the fall of communism and the disintegration
of the Soviet Union do indeed reflect party ideology in their way of presenting
information about both general and Soviet culture—in this respect the encyclopedia is
considered not merely as a format but as yet another genre of writing to be
manipulated for party purposes.
The artists’ books selected here engage, precisely with the question of
manipulation among others. Mimicking obliquely the encyclopedic format or
disrupting its physicality the works included in this chapter try to expose the
limitations of the encyclopedic project. In this respect the bridging of a subversive
voice with the deconstruction from the inside of a cultural object which has not yet
ceased to fascinate society, emerges as what is perhaps one of the most salient
features of the artist book in general, and one I hope to highlight here.
In a press release from 1972 land artist Robert Smithson wrote that “The
power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context [in which] it is placed, in
the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates […] A word fixed or a
statement isolated without any decorative or "cubist" visual format, becomes a
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perception of similarity in dissimilars - in short a paradox. ”
74
suggesting that the
strength of words is lost when isolated from the visual dimension. The word is not
merely an utterance it is also a physical matter; in print the word is a typographic
instance the physical materialization of an abstraction. What Smithson proposes is
that the materiality of the word always contends with a “tension of disparates” that
could be understood both as materiality vs. abstraction, format vs. genre, and text vs.
image. It would be impossible to ignore the willingly provocative nature of a
statement like that, especially in the context of the burgeoning conceptual art
movement. Yet what is relevant for this research is not so much the provocative
stances taken by conceptual art on the material aspect of language and
communication but the challenging of the idea that a specific format or genre imparts
authority or validity to the word itself. The use of words such as “power” and
“placed” cannot but draw attention to both dimensions of language, the physical one
that manifests itself in the materiality of the book-the place of language-and to the
connotative one which moves across the spectrum of relevance. In the present chapter
these two concepts will be woven into the analysis of how the encyclopedic format
engages with and is engaged by artists’ books and what are the outcomes with respect
to power and presence that can be expected from these engagements. It is relevant at
this point to note that I understand the encyclopedia primarily as a format—and by
format I mean the serialization in volumes and the use of a taxonomical/alphabetical
order—and not as a genre, although this latter could be defined by a specific style of

74
Dwan Gallery press release, June:1967 in The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt,
New York, New York University Press, 1979.
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writing, that is to say a factual-non narrative one. The line of inquiry here is certainly
blurred, as I see the possibility of a case being made for the encyclopedic endeavor to
be considered a genre in its own right, but in the present research I have chosen not to
investigate in further depth this matter.

2.1 Unknowing knowledge in the un-cyclopedias of Luigi Serafini and Emilio
Isgrò

In opening a book, the reader holds a number of (not always) conscious expectations
and assumptions. The most common ones are those that pertain to the expectation of
being able to “navigate” a book, an understanding that usually is in first instance
based on language. In picking a book that has a title, which the reader “understands”
to be in Spanish because of his/her knowledge of it, the expectation will be that its
content may be in Spanish as well and therefore approach the text with a certain
disposition. Another common expectation is that one will be able to navigate the book
in its physicality, that is to say be able to interpret the system of signs that indicate a
logical progression. This in turn conforms to yet another expectation—the book
progresses consecutively and logically from its first numbered page to the last.
Another assumption that may naturally occur is that the reader is able to recognize a
certain “type of book” for instance a graphic novel as opposed to a novel, or a
dictionary versus the volume of an encyclopedia. The knowledge of these specific
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books, or better said perhaps, of the “form” of the book does coincide with
expectations about its contents, and that in itself is a form of knowledge that is often
challenged by artists’ books.
The encyclopedic format is certainly one of the most recognizable ones in
terms of both physical appearance as well as content organization. When conjuring a
mental image of an encyclopedic volume among several possibilities the most
common one would be that of a multiplicity of volumes, usually bound in quality
cloth or leather with each volume carrying on its spine the title of the encyclopedia
itself, the number of the volume, and ultimately an alphabetical sequence. In this
chapter I will explore the works of Luigi Serafini and Emilio Isgrò, specifically
Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus and Isgrò Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni
Treccani e cancellata da Isgrò to show two very different approaches not only to the
materiality of the book-object but also to the deconstruction of the encyclopedic
“vision.”
Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus published in 1981, a remarkably
illustrated pseudo-encyclopedic work, presents perhaps one of the most compelling
approaches to the challenging of our assumptions about readership, language, and the
very idea of the transmission of knowledge. The Codex is modeled upon the idea of
an encyclopedic dictionary of sorts yet one of its outstanding peculiarities resides in
the fact that the book’s text portion is written in an entirely artificial, fictitious, and
therefore indecipherable language. The Codex Seraphinianus is, as a matter of fact,
an example of, as Peter Schwenger has defined it, glyptolalia—or the “[…]
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inscription of imaginary languages in a text, where it is the glyph (sign, character)
rather than the glossé (tongue) that babbles (lalein).”
75
I will go into greater details
with regard to the contents and the peculiar “babbling” of the written characters of the
Codex. For now I will merely sketch the three main areas of content that allow the
reader to mentally map the book, although I must confess that I apply these categories
with a certain hesitation and will explain why later on. The illustrations of the first
three sections present (here I am employing familiar categories that however reflect
only in part what is represented in the illustrations) what we may define as animal,
floral, and humanoid life belonging to a world that resembles but that certainly is not
“ours.” Three chapters that illustrate scientific practices, mechanical objects, and
“anatomies” of humanoid bodies follow these three initial sections. Relying solely on
the illustrations the reader can assume that the latter portion of the Codex engages
with, for a lack of a better word, the social sciences (specifically history, linguistics,
and cultural anthropology) ending with a section on architecture/construction.
As I mentioned earlier the encyclopedia is not merely recognizable by its way
of structuring and presenting knowledge. Its physical body is in fact as defining as its
contents are, and this in many ways is true of all books not just books made by artists.
The Codex, specifically, is a pricy volume printed in limited numbers, a feature that
places it in its own sub-category of artists’ books. Since the physical body of the
Codex was not “built” by Serafini it might be objected that this work is merely an
illustrated book. However, throughout the history of book arts there are many

75
Schwenger, Peter. The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 121.
106

examples of works not physically made by the artist who produced them. Consider
for instance Edward Ruscha’s seminal work by the title Twenty-six Gasoline Stations.
Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, a distinctly photographic work, was a “lo-fi”
printing job made by Ruscha’s own printing press. The print numbers of the book
were increased only over time to prevent it from becoming too rare and therefore too
precious (a defining feature of early works that many artists’ books no longer
espouse). The Codex, on the other hand, was printed on and bound in high quality
materials by an established publishing company (even though when the Codex
acquired a fair amount of status more affordable reprints were made available). In
comparing these two works what comes to mind is a quote from Johanna Drucker,
one of the pioneer scholars in the field of artists’ books, who has repeatedly noted
how “not every book made by an artist is an artist’s book.” Admitting however, that
making a sustainable argument for what is definitely not an artist book is extremely
hard, Drucker has stated convincingly that “[…] an artist’s book has to have some
conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be a book in order to succeed.”
76
For
this precise reason I saw Serafini’s work as fitting for this chapter. I will show here
how in fact no other format could have succeeded in embodying the narrative of
knowledge subversion spun in the Codex.
Emilio Isgrò’s performative piece/altered book Enciclopedia Italiana fondata
da Giovanni Treccani e cancellata da Emilio Isgrò stands on the other end of the

76
Drucker, Joanna “The artist’s book as idea and form” in Rothenberg, Jerome, and Steven Clay. A
Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing. New York: Granary Books,
2000. Print, pp. 383-4
107

spectrum from the Codex. Its performative nature combined with the use of a
preexistent “book body” stands as an example of a prominent stylistic iteration of
artists’ books that while substantially different still brings forth few of the same
issues posed by the Codex. Isgrò’s erased encyclopedia is generally defined as a
“modified” or “altered” book much in the vein of Thomas Phillips’ 1970 A
Humument, a book, in other words, that is not physically made by the artist himself,
but that instead relies on an already existing one. While Phillips’ modifications
consisted of the super-imposition of drawings and alterations of the pages of a
published novel, Isgrò’s works involved the erasing with a thick black marker of
encyclopedic entries found in what is considered the most prestigious and
authoritative “national” encyclopedia in Italy, the Enciclopedia Italiana di scienze,
lettere ed arti, popularly known as “La” Treccani from the name of the textile
industrialist Giovanni Treccani who in 1929 provided the funding for its inception.
L’Enciclopedia is considered to be the first “national” endeavor to provide the Italian
general public with an original systematization of knowledge that focused both on
specifically Italian personalities and facts as well as world sciences, arts, and letters.
In terms of its cultural cachet this specific encyclopedia is both the symbol of a
national vision of cultural relevance and a certain social standing. To own the
expensive thirty plus volumes of the Treccani bound in the publisher’s signature
green and gold represented, I suggest, on the one hand the belonging to a specific
class as well as a sign of upward mobility. The Treccani had also however, come to
represent the compromises made between the cultural elites of the country and the
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political establishment during a specific period in Italian history, that is to say the
Fascist one. At this point in my research I am not interested in further investigation
this specific aspect, but I would like to point out here that the Treccani’s association
with the Fascist regime shaped greatly both the type and the content of the entries
(consider for instance how in the first edition the entry for Fascism was allegedly
written by Mussolini himself). While in the following editions much of the material
produced at the time of its first publication was expunged and obviously updated, I
believe that the connotative aspects of this specific encyclopedia as both a bourgeois
and “establishment” symbol are very much present for Emilio Isgrò.
From a visual standpoint Isgrò’s “interventions” on the page look like the now
iconic redactions made on official documents released to the public by the
government where names and/or sensitive information is blocked out. In one of the
encyclopedia’s volumes containing a genealogical tree Isgrò chooses, for instance, to
leave only the entry name “Albero Genealogico-Genealogy Tree” and seven female
names which appear in it. The reader will never know to whom the tree belongs and
what relationship exists between the women. In another volume Isgrò erases the entry
for mathematical roots (radici in Italian), this time the reader knows that it is not the
botanical element that Isgrò is playing with because at first glance everything on the
page is blacked out except for the word “radici” and a string of mathematical
symbols. However, since roots are a mathematical expression, a physical object (roots
of plants), and a metaphor (one’s family roots, for instance) it is fitting that Isgrò
would throw a sort of poetic “wrench” onto the page and to the reader. In leaving out
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of the erasure the words “tenendo conto delle (keeping in mind) radici (roots)” Isgrò
shows how discrete are the connections the reader can make in a visually modified
context. On the front cover booklet for Isgrò’s exhibit which took place between
December 10, 1970 and January 20, 1971 at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan a red
asterisk was placed next to the catalogue title. Right below six lines of “redacted” text
is the following footnote: “Regalatevi QUESTA Treccani per Natale (literally: give
yourselves the gift of THIS Treccani encyclopedia this Christmas)” and on the back
cover is a picture of Isgrò holding one of the volumes of the encyclopedia much like a
door to door seller would.
77
Isgrò clever booklet, which may be seen as an artist book
in its own right, proposes a different model of encyclopedia, one where knowledge is
to be found under-erasure; in plain sight, but hidden. In inviting the reader/buyer to
purchase his encyclopedia and mimicking the advertisement pitch “gift yourself the
gift of…” Isgrò exposes the commercial nature of knowledge distribution while
showing the discrete nature of meaning making within the encyclopedic project. The
booklet, which I believe could also be seen as a colophon of sorts to the erasing
performance, contains an intervention to the 1970 “Arte per Arte” symposium in
Florence by Isgrò. Here the artist claims for himself (and other artists as well) the task
and the merit of having broken down barriers “that divided art from art and opposed
language to language.”
78
According to Isgrò “literature no longer exists [...] In the
same way, painting, music, sculpture, etc., no longer exist. If anything, techniques of

77
The slogan including the word “Regalatevi” is typical of TV commercials and it conveys the idea of
making one self a gift of something at opposed to “purchasing” something. The booklet contains Isgrò
intervention at the symposium “Arte per arte” taking place in Florence in June 1970. The translation in
English is by Rodney Stringer.
78
Exhibit booklet, Isgrò E. Florence: 1970.
110

approach-reality exist [sic]-techniques that often have nothing in common with
language in the traditional sense.” It is precisely this idea that with the disappearance
of traditional art forms the use of language as a mean of approaching reality would
also change, and indeed a new language both in terms of techniques and semantics
would emerge, that both Isgrò and Serafini wrestle with in their works. Emilio Isgrò
has expressed a particularly strong point of view on this matter, going as far as
claiming that “Language itself as a collection of conventions and regulations, has
failed, except when it rises up out of its own ashes whenever fresh conventions and
fresh regulations are accumulated […].” Even though Isgrò acknowledges the failure
of language in his statement he leaves open the resurrection of it by means of novel
ways or communicating, which I would add, must not necessarily dispense of
tradition in a broad sense. In stating that “The word is dead, but there are people who
do everything in their power to resuscitate it, together with the book, Literature, and
the Law. The issue, therefore, is no longer an aesthetic issue. It is a political one […]”
Isgrò indicates three fundamental elements of social discourse, and it is interesting to
note how the book and literature are not one and the same.
79
In the following section I
will consider which new strategies of communication are mobilized as a reaction to
the collapse of language, vehemently advocated by Isgrò, and how the concept of
contagion informs the alternative taxonomies employed in Isgrò’s erasures and in
Serafini’s Codex.

79
Isgrò E. Exhibit Booklet, Florence: 1970.
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2.2 Contagion, Authority, and the Collapse of Language: Rogue Encyclopedias
and their Authors.

In his preface to the seminal The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human
Sciences (1970)
80
Michel Foucault marks as a starting point for his book the reading,
and the consequent reaction of unstoppable laughter, of Jorge Luis Borges’ 1942
essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” in which the imperfections and
even impossibilities of the taxonomic endeavor are ironically and cunningly
scrutinized. It is in the persona of John Wilkins, a Briton who in 1664 sought to create
a universal language in which “[…] each word is defined by itself” and thus structure
a language “which would be general, organizing and including every human
thought,” that Borges encapsulates the madness of the total enclosure of knowledge
by means of language. More specifically it is the oddity of Wilkins’ idea that his
artificial language itself would function as a repository of knowledge that seems to
pique Borges:
The words in the Analytic Language of John Wilkins are not
awkwardly created arbitrary symbols; every one of its letters is
significant, just as the cabalists treat the letters in Holy Scripture.
Mauthner observes that children could learn this language without

80
Originally published as Les Mots Et Les Choses: Une Archéologie Des Sciences Humaines. Paris:
Gallimard, 1966. In the present dissertation I will be citing the English translation, although as I hope
to show the date of publication of Foucault’s work is significant in the context of the timeframe to
which the works selected for this chapter were also produced.
112

knowing it is artificial; later, in school, they would discover that it is
also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia.
81

Yet, Wilkins’ project according to Borges, was conspicuously burdened by a flawed
taxonomic system whose redundancies defied his idea of streamlining knowledge.
To the imperfections, redundancies, and impossibilities of Wilkins’s taxonomy
Borges compares those found in Franz Kuhn’s alleged translation of a possibly
fictitious Chinese encyclopedia entitled “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent
Knowledge” in which the German translator discovers a taxonomical order vastly
different from the one conceived in the western world. Where Wilkins represents the
individual’s attempt to systematize, the institutional attempt to do so is exemplified
for Borges by the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels. With its arbitrary one thousand
subdivisions of the universe the Bibliographic Institute seemingly implements and
embraces a taxonomic madness germane to Wilkins’ one. It is clear that each figure
presented by Borges represents a variation of the attempt to systematize the world in
vastly different ways, except for the one common denominator: the search for order.
What do we make then of Foucault’s reaction to Borges’ story? Foucault’s
hilarity and consequent self-confessed unease toward Borges’ piece stems, perhaps,
from discovering a book that ostensibly systematizes and yet does it in a way that
cannot be perceived by Foucault as such. The Chinese encyclopedia is a riddle, or
perhaps a cruel joke; it offers a knowledge that can be comprehended but at the same
time reveals a systematizing logic that is “alien” to its reader. What is pivotal for this

81
Borges, Jorge Luis, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, pp. 101-105
113

chapter is Foucault’s observation on the Chinese encyclopedia’s taxonomic order,
which connects categories of animals because they belong to someone, do something,
or can be defined by a distinctive characteristic via the logic progression of the
alphabet. Foucault notes that the jarring effect on the reader produced by the
incongruous proximity offered by that “alien” taxonomy which utilizes the familiar
and “logical” progression of the alphabetic order derives from a “[…] unusual
juxtaposition […] the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes, or quite
simply with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other.” The
juxtaposition of the alphabetic order and the “functions” by which the animals are
grouped do not reflect a familiar relational system, specifically this juxtaposition does
not reflect the cultural specificities with which Foucault himself identifies. In other
words we could say that the structure by which a society organizes and tries to
understand its reality is culturally specific, that a certain proximity of objects or
concepts may be jarring for a reader such as Foucault who has been educated in a
certain culture but entirely acceptable and understandable for the (real or fictitious)
reader of the Chinese encyclopedia raised in that specific cultural context. I suggest
here that what is at stake in Foucault’s reasoning is perhaps the most relevant issue
that encyclopedias pose as a genre. As I pointed out earlier in this chapter the greatest
evolution of the (printed) encyclopedia took place when Enlightenment compilers
introduced alphabetical indexing, a structure that allowed them to no longer have to
provide a system of relationships between the various entries. As Richard Yeo notes
in his introduction to the encyclopedic tradition: “ […] the alphabet did not
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necessarily mean liberation from the hard task of putting knowledge into categories
[…]”
82
while the urge to establish categories as well as that of making meaningful
connections did not cease after the introduction of the alphabetic system, as the
scholar goes on to argue in his work. Foucault too seems to suggest that an organizing
principle such as the one employed in the Chinese encyclopedia generates a chain of
complex reactions. The complexity of reactions is such precisely because the culture
from which the encyclopedia originates, being intrinsically different from the one of
its reader, establishes relations between ideas in a completely different way.
Moreover, Foucault’s observations about the coexistence and the proximity of
extremes inevitably extend to the issue of language. For Foucault language is the only
“non-place” where the proximity of extremes is possible—in other words it is only
within/through language that incongruities such as those presented by Borges can
exist. What the Chinese encyclopedia does, in Foucault’s perspective, is to “localize”
through its unique taxonomy the “power of contagion” and in doing so it exorcises
the possibility of “dangerous mixtures.”
83
Contagion is both penetration (a disease
entering a body and breaking a number of barriers to do so) and mutation. And if
breaking is what we are dealing with then we must see it as the breaking of certain
codes, those that Foucault defines in the following way:
The fundamental codes of a culture—those governing its language, its
schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques its values, the

82
Yeo, Richard R. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 27
83
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, And Archeology of the human Sciences, Vintage Books:
New York, 1994. pp. xv-xvi
115

hierarchy of its practices-establish for every man, from the very first,
the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he
will be at home.
84

If the existence of a code and familiarity structures a sense of belonging and comfort
the taxonomy at work in the “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” is
bound to unsettle its reader with its uncanny quality. While recognizing that
“uncanny” is a psychoanalytically charged word, I take the liberty here of using it as I
believe it to be the most appropriate adjective to describe the familiar idea of a
systematization of knowledge that cannot however be fully “grasped” since it does
not correspond to its reader’s cultural system of thought. I would like to suggest here
that is possibly anxiety, rather than the “distress” of which Foucault speaks, that is
experienced when the connections of a familiar taxonomy are severed and the reader
finds himself “outside” of language, that is to say—when compartmentalization is
taken over by contagion. In writing of contagion as a metaphor, Cynthia J. Davis
proposes that in more abstract instances “[…] contagion provides a more dynamic
image of cultural exchange, one that emphasizes contingency, circularity, process.”
85

And contagion is what artist Emilio Isgrò advocates in the booklet that accompanied
one of his erasure happenings’ in 1971:
I obliterate volume after volume, encyclopedias, newspapers. At the
Bologna Museum we are a group standing on a small stage—three

84
Idem, p.xx
85
Davis, Cynthia J., “Contagion as Metaphor” in American Literary History, Volume 14, Number 4,
Winter 2002Oxford University Press, p.831
116

men and a girl: we are obliterating. The spectators come into the hall
and find newspapers and felt pens on the seats. They start obliterating.
Crossing-out is elementary. Anyone can do it. The notion of
‘plagiarism’ must be eliminated from aesthetic research and the much
more honorable idea of ‘contagion’ introduced in its stead.
Obliterations serve of course to bring about an absence and to set the
onlooker’s cerebral cogs in motion for he always wants to know
‘what’s underneath’.
86

For Isgrò the knowledge that is spread by agents of culture such as encyclopedias and
newspapers, both having as a goal to inform and to “shape” and “organize” thought,
must be intervened upon. The order and control exerted by those two agents of
culture is thus attacked through a procedure or expunction to allow the space that
exists “underneath” to become manifest. It is in this space that, as noted by Foucault,
culture faces the “[…] stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous
orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain
unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists.”
87
It is in the face of this existence
that any “cultural” attempt to generate order that does not open itself to “contagion,”
such as the encyclopedic project, is doomed to be endlessly inadequate and therefore
elicit/stimulate an outside intervention.

86
Note from Booklet/Isgro
87
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, And Archeology of the human Sciences, Vintage Books:
New York, 1994. p. xx
117

As noted by Richard R. Yeo in his observations on the historical and social
dimension of the encyclopedic project:
In the western tradition there has been a conviction that it is possible,
and worthwhile, to collate knowledge that is representative of some
large whole. The ideal imagined here is a work that summarizes and
organizes the knowledge contained in many books.
88

As Yeo points out there are at least two polarized views of why the encyclopedic
project is indeed a meaningful one, finding their proponents in two very different
figures. One is the putative father of the “modern” encyclopedia Denis Diderot. The
other is, once again, Jorge Luis Borges. The two indeed championed quite different
takes on the validity and possibility of essentializing and gathering knowledge.
Diderot feared a catastrophic scenario: a sudden loss of all books, a loss that would
call for the existence of one text that contained the sum of all knowledge amassed by
humanity—a text that would guide in the “reconstruction” of lost knowledge. Borges
instead imagined in his short stories that the overproduction of books would instill the
desire in humanity for a book that in encompassing all knowledge would release us
from the fear of being denied access to it. At the core of Diderot’s and Borges’
perspectives stands the same preoccupation with knowledge, in my opinion, the same
feeling—that is to say, the anxiety of losing it. The encyclopedic format, particularly
in the taxonomic structures that the Enlightenment imparted to it, attempts a
systematization and distillation of information that appeases the fear and anxiety of a

88
Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. p. 2
118

possible loss of knowledge and that allows for the illusion of managing a concept as
vast as it is uncontrollable. What further complicates the encyclopedic project’s
mandate is that the encyclopedia itself, as I have indicated earlier, is all but an
impartial beacon of knowledge or a mere “record” of the knowledge amassed by
humanity; in that respect it is certainly not the book containing all the books in the
Borgesian total library ( a total library that is a place of anxiety, in my view, rather
than a place of knowledge).
In spite of his long fascination with encyclopedias and libraries Borges
appears to always be aware of the issues that the encyclopedic project is fraught with.
Issues that Borges masterfully engages with in his 1940 short story “Tlön, Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius.” As I noted in the opening to this chapter the encyclopedic volume in
which the entry about the land of “Uqbar” is allegedly located is to be found in an
encyclopedic tome that the narrator of the story describes as “[…] fallaciously called
The Anglo-American Cyclopedia, […] a literal but delinquent reprint of the
Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902.”
89
The encyclopedias which Borges relates of are
all defined by a certain roguishness. The narrator of the story speaks for instance of
having discovered “[…] in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial
description of a non existent country […].”
90
In using terms like delinquent and
pirated I propose here that Borges is breaking a taboo of sorts; he is in fact implying
that there are “other” encyclopedias--deviations of sorts from the “normative” and

89
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Labyrinths, ed. by D.A. Yates and J.E. Irby,
New Directions: N.Y., 2007, p. 3 Here I am tempted to also ask if is it mere coincidence that Borges
would use the archaic term ‘cyclopedia’? Or is it possible that it is a nod to the very first Cyclopedia
published by Ephraim Chambers in London in 1728?
90
Id., p.7
119

sanctioned ones. What is more these “false” encyclopedias describe a country and a
system of thought that is deemed non-existent. In spite of that Uqbar and its society
become in the story a real place precisely because of its inscription in the
encyclopedia and its contemporaneous negation in the same.
It is worth noting here how Borges seems to nod to the idea of the so-called
“mountweazel,” a term whose coinage is ascribed to Henry Alford, a columnist for
The New Yorker magazine in an article published in 2005. Alford speaks of the
“mountweazel” as a noun to indicate a fictitious entry in a dictionary or encyclopedia,
a practice that has been implemented for copyright purposes so that plagiarism can be
identified based on the copying of the “fake entry.” The noun derives from an entry in
the 1975 edition of the very real New Columbia Encyclopedia where the fictitious
“Lillian Virginia Mountweazel” is listed as “a fountain designer turned photographer
who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes
titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs,
Ohio, in 1942, only to die ‘at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for
Combustibles magazine.’”
91
Indeed we may argue that this is what Uqbar is in the
rogue encyclopedic volume described by Borges, a fictitious entry planted to protect a
rogue encyclopedia from being pirated (and here we can see at work Borges’ “mirror”
multiplication). But perhaps it would not be entirely incorrect to speculate that Uqbar
might have been conceived initially merely as a mountweazel and then taken on a life
of its own.

91
Alford, Henry, The New Yorker Magazine. August, 2005, access date February, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829ta_talk_alford#ixzz1gH9McpU5
120

In Borges’s story when the narrator views Bioy’s Volume XLVI containing
the mysterious Uqbar he cannot help but notice that the geographical section of the
entry ambiguously interpolates real locales such as Khorasan, Armenia, and Erzerum
while using the historical figure of Smerdis as a metaphor rather than a historical
figure.
92
Is it not the task of the encyclopedia to eschew ambiguities and metaphors?
The unreliability of the entry is further heightened by the narrator’s cross-referential
research bearing no fruits; no atlases or dictionaries speak of the elusive Uqbar.
However, more baffling than the rogue entry in the Anglo-American Cyclopedia is the
fortuitous unearthing by the narrator (perhaps Borges’ double) of the First
Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr.:
Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown
planet’s entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with
the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its
emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with
its algebra and its fire, with its theological ad metaphysical
controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible
doctrinal intent or tone of parody.
93

In holding the eleventh volume of the first Tlönian encyclopedia the narrator has the
perception of metonymically holding much more than a collection of facts about a
world; he is in fact holding the proof of its existence. From that one single volume

92
Smerdis is also known as Bardiya, according to ancient Greek sources the son of Cyrus the Great of
Persia, likely to have reigned in Persia in the 5
th
century b.c. whose modalities of death and
impersonation by a Magus are still disputed by historians.
93
Id., p.7
121

the narrator tries to make sense of a world that appears to be vastly different from
ours, a world which intricacies seems to be the product of a paradoxically systematic
inventiveness.
As I hope to have shown so far, while vastly different Borges’ and Foucault’s
approaches to and analyses of the encyclopedic project, converge on few essential
points. I propose here that the two most relevant aspects of this convergence are to
be identified in the idea that the proximity of extremes is possible only through and
in language and that contagion (which I am tempted to suggest is the condition sine
qua non for hybridism to take place) is the most radical form of intervention on the
hierarchies and structures of knowledge transmission. Contagion, and therefore
hybridism, I propose, is also a defining characteristic of artists’ books in their
materialization of numerous different contaminations between languages, formats,
materials, and genres. In the following section the concepts brought forth so far will
be explored by way of two very unique takes on the encyclopedic project.

2.2.a Collisions and Contaminations: The Proximity of Extremes in Luigi
Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus.

In this section I will examine how Serafini’s Codex could be seen as an iteration of
Borges’ fictional encyclopedia. Although there is no evidence pointing to the fact that
Serafini worked off of Borges’ short story, I hope to show here how the Codex is in
dialogue with the idea of the “delinquent” encyclopedia put forth by the Argentinian
author. The Codex offers moreover the chance to look at the artist as “compiler” of an
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uncontrollably inventive world through the creative process (a process that involves
also the creation of a language ex novo). This notion will be then contrasted with
Emilio Isgrò’s role as un-compiler, and indeed defiler, of the encyclopedic endeavor
via the equally creative and yet destructive process of erasure.
The Codex plays with many of the elements that both Foucault and Borges
mobilize. In it Serafini engages precisely with structure vs. order, language vs.
communications, cultural specificity vs. cultural discernibility. The most manifest and
most poignant issue in the Codex is that of language and how language and its codes
open up and close knowledge for the reader. The opening and closure of a text/text
object (which indeed is the defining physical interaction of the human with the book),
be it a metaphorical or literal act, must be seen in a larger context, one that includes
the symbolic level as well. In his essay included in the anthology A Book of the Book,
William Everson speaks of the book as:
[...] a central archetype of our culture and history because whatever
you do with a book, you’re working with it also as a symbol. It is the
implication and consequences that inhere in the book as a symbol that
make both the incentive and also the terrible warp in your judgment as
you approach it.
94

The maliciously misleading title of the Codex Seraphinianus, for instance, suggests
that the content may be in Latin. However, upon opening the book it becomes

94
Everson, William. “The Poem as Icon—Reflections on Printingas a Fine Art” in Rothenberg,
Jerome, and Steven Clay. A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing.
New York: Granary Books, 2000, p.50

123

immediately apparent that Latin is certainly not the language in which this curious
encyclopedia is written. While it may be interesting to speculate which language has
been of inspiration for Serafini’s glyphs at this stage it is not central for my
investigation. What is relevant is the fact that despite the impossibility of “reading”
the language it is still possible to “understand” the genre to which the book belongs,
that is to say the encyclopedic dictionary. The Codex has become a popular example
of an “imaginary language,” but more specifically it stands as an example of asemic
writing—that is, a writing that erases semantics, often barely “mimicking” writing
and language. Serafini’s work speaks directly to the idea of textual subversion
through his use of a constructed language that allows for a partial erasure of the
communicative function of the written word. I propose here that his work makes a
strategic use of signs and structures that underline the limitations posed to knowledge
by narrative conventions and taxonomic approaches. In doing so, I believe it seeks to
undermine the very concepts of interpreting, decoding, and making meaning.
The lack of a comprehensible language destabilizes the reading that one could
make of the Codex. The contrast between the familiarity of the object, a bound book,
and the jarring proximity of extremes, an impenetrable language that “explains”
equally complex beings and facts, forces the reader to fall back on a specific set of
assumptions. Still, unable to rely on anything but his/her knowledge of what an
encyclopedia is “supposed” to do—that is to say, collate facts and events—the reader
is asked to stretch his very understanding of what knowledge means. The open nature
of the Codex makes it impossible to discern if what is being recorded defines cultural
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instances specific to the world it speaks of and for. The inaccessible nature of the
language and reliance on surreal imagery leaves open to interpretation if the “entries”
of the Codex record the reality of that world, or if the objects, beings, and social
constructs it speaks of are what the Codex’s compiler wishes his reality would look
like. Still, some of the Codex’s sections are easier to interpret and engage with than
others; for instance it is clear that the first chapter of the Codex Seraphinianus
explores botany. The grotesquely shaped, bulbous, vibrantly colored, and even
threateningly sexual inners of otherworldly plants are meticulously catalogued and
“explained” by what appear to be captions. This section, as most in the book does,
plays on the idea of the hybrid, generated by a “collision” between objects and either
human or animal creatures. In the second chapter, dedicated to more complex forms
of organic life, bacteria-like forms and creatures that at least partially resemble
various mammals, birds, and fishes, the human and the animal collide. It is
impossible not to think in this instance of the Tlönian literature evoked by Borges’
narrator in which “There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and
another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a
bird.”
95
Take for instance the sequence of panels depicting a fish with a human eye
decorating his side. The fish’s tail extends and bends looking like a human brow
arched according to a specific facial expression. When in the last panel sequence the
fish “meets” another of the “same species”—one with a mirroring eye and tail—a full
facial expression is completed.

95
Serafini, Luigi. Codex Seraphinianus. Milano: Rizzoli, 2006, p. 9

125

In the light of these examples I propose here that collision and contagion are
the two shaping forces of the Codex. The creatures and the cultural elements explored
by Serafini are products of what appears to be both an unlikely, and at time violent,
collision of physicality and concepts, whereas the “language” may be seen as a
production of a contagion between disparate languages, of which there may even
exist and archeological/etymological matrix unknown to us and to Serafini himself.
Still, it is not impossible to uncover morsels of glyphs looking like ornate versions of
the Armenian script, or the flourishes of Arabic, and even perhaps of a cursive Latin.
It seems thus apparent that in the world of the Codex language is a fluidly running
stream across vastly different systems of communication.
The fluidity of language however, appears to be for Serafini a tangible
phenomenon firmly positioned in the physical world. In the third and fifth sections of
the Codex Serafini’s take on the materiality of language and of writing is presented
within sections that engage with mechanical, social, or otherwise anatomical concepts
of power structures. In this section Serafini portrays different “tribes” and their
homes, such as the “urban warrior” who carries a road sign as a shield and a black
shift dress with a dotted lane stripe; his home a nest perched on a streetlight. Here
again we find a hybrid humanity, men whose limbs are modified by hammers,
wheels, and more relevantly pens which hints both to the integration and the
dependence of the “society” it describes from tools. The idea of the communion
between the physical body of the writer/scribe and the tool with which the act is
performed is played out in a vignette in which a human absolving to the function of
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the writer has his hand turned into the tip of a fountain pen. The figure appears to
stare, either in awe or dismay, at a giant note pad while small heaps of words (here
we see the word as a three-dimensional object) lay scattered around him. The
impossibility of telling what the captions describe (ultimately that may not be their
function and mine is merely a reader’s projection born out of habit) leaves again the
reader to question the nature of the scribe as well as whether his existence is recorded
as a description of a “profession” or more as an event. The image of the man-pen
becomes even more puzzling when read against the immediately following vignette
portraying the scribe’s death by pen impalement. Is the world from which the Codex
comes rejecting the figure of the scribe? Or is it the scribe himself choosing to put an
end to his existence? Are the scribe and the compiler/compilers of the encyclopedia
the same genus? The answer appears to lie in the eye of the reader, which must
confront his own projections with the open nature of Serafini’s work, the very
openness and inherent ambiguity that Umberto Eco sought to define in the context of
the changes occurring in the literary and artistic realms of the early 1960s.
The Codex’s distinctly Borgesian conceit that could be summarized as
“everything and its opposite” becomes even more apparent in its fifth chapter. Here
the paradox of the ephemeral nature of language versus its materiality is further
fleshed out and played with and it begins with an exploration of the materiality and
three-dimensionality of punctuation. Much like an anatomist Serafini offers a vertical
cross section of two three-dimensional halves of an exclamation point and later in the
same chapter words are lifted from a page by balloons. Perhaps in the world of the
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Codex punctuation marks are decorations, physical objects instead of mere signs that
structure and organize writing; there is indeed more to them than meets the eye. The
suggestion here appears to be that writing is indeed a bodily experience that to some
extent is disconnected from language per se. The doodles-like, imaginary words made
of invented glyphs reveal that the nature of the written sign is far more open than we
are accustomed to believe. In the world of the Codex there is a bodily, organic quality
to words, proof of which is given by showing the fragment of a glyph under a
magnifying glass, which reveals fish floating in it as if in a river, human bodies
populating it, and even cars driving through it on a two-lane road. Language,
however, is not merely writing, it is also speaking—it is an utterance. We learn that in
the act of speaking words become visible by “appearing” in black, liquid, spilling ink
literally dribbling from the mouth of a speaker and leaking onto a bib. Intuitively
numerous readings of this and the other entries described here are clearly possible,
although they may not be “correct” with respect to the text that accompanies them. It
is in this space of equivocation that the Codex as an endlessly open work, to borrow
again from Umberto Eco, challenges the very idea of relying on familiar codes such
as genre and language to generate meaning.
As language in the traditional sense collapses inside the Codex the sense of
structure it would give to the book is replaced by the use of a unique taxonomy, a
taxonomy that has largely dispensed of sense. I propose here that the use of artificial
characters in the Codex indicate the desire to, on the one hand, disrupt the traditional
interaction between reader and text and, on the other, to exert a form of control over
128

that interaction. This, coupled with the incongruous choice of the encyclopedic
structure and a taxonomical order that becomes its own language, allows the Codex to
exist, as Michel De Certeau notes when speaking of glossolalia, in a “space of
equivocation” which is perpetually underscored by the impossibility of situating
conceptually, spatially, and in time the world described by the Codex.
96
Ultimately, as
the ambiguity of the Codex label hints and the images in it corroborate, the “space of
equivocation” in which the book exists is perpetually reconfirmed by the tension
between the impossibility of penetrating the written word/reading the sign. It is
instead in the signification that can be extracted from the structural and visual aspects
of the Codex that “a” meaning can be extracted.
The comprehension of language in its traditional sense is scoffed at by
Serafini, and yet in the fifth chapter, again, a man (perhaps Serafini himself) stands,
pointing to a Rosetta stone of sorts. Reminiscent of a Stonehenge monolith this object
is inscribed with the same impenetrable glyphs used in the text. These glyphs are
mirrored by an equally impossible and imaginary system of invented hieroglyphics;
once again the possibility of “decoding” and thus interpreting is given and
immediately taken away.
Ultimately it is possible that interpretation and comprehension in the
traditional sense are not the end goals of the Codex. The last illustration to appear in
the volume is still more perplexing than clarifying, portraying a page which slightly
curled bottom hides from the reader’s view the final (revealing?) lines of the Codex.

96
De Certeau, Michel “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias” in Representations , No. 56, Special Issue: The
New Erudition (University of California Press: Autumn, 1996), pp. 29-47
129

Beneath the page appear the bones of a human hand resting inside an enclosed space.
As Schwenger suggests, this space—looking very much like a concrete box—could
be a “cell,” and the hand-bones a metonymy of sorts to define the compiler of the
Codex himself.
97
In this latter page finally appears a figure that has otherwise
remained somewhat hidden, but certainly present in the mind of the reader, that of the
“author” of the Codex. In “Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius” the narrator relates that
the frustration caused by the impossibility of finding the missing volumes of Tlön had
prompted famed Mexican author Alfonso Reyes to envision a “generation of
tlönistas” to reconstruct the missing encyclopedic tomes. This thought provokes the
narrator to return to the fundamental question regarding the “inventors” of Tlön.
Here, as I mentioned earlier, the narrator cannot possibly conceive of one single
author. In the spiral shaped image of the world that emerges from Borges’ story
authority and authority (the author’s claim to his creation) are both a site of curiosity
and questioning. If a whole encyclopedia could be reconstructed from one volume by
a group of people whose knowledge is based on that single instance, what faith can
one have in the original compilers? Moreover if encyclopedias are first and foremost
the reflection of a reasoned and discrete taxonomy that mirrors all the socio-economic
and cultural expectations and anxieties of the time at which it is produced, can the
tlönistas reproduce that too? The encyclopedia can be thought of in this respect as a
means for the articulation of power through knowledge by an authority that in more

97
Schwenger, Peter, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects, Minnesota University
Press, 2006.

130

or less covert ways promotes its own vision of what and who is relevant and how it
should be presented. Thus, the questionable nature of authority, an authority that
seeks always to order the often-uncontrollable inventiveness of reality itself, is at the
core of Borges’s and Serafini’s inquiries.
A different type of author and challenging of authority is instead present in
Emilio Isgrò Enciclopedia Italiana. Isgrò is in a sense an “over-author,” an author
that by erasing, rewrites what the original complier of the encyclopedic entry had
written. In the volume where the entry for Hitler is to be found, Isgrò intervenes on
the page (which covers entries comprised between the words and HIS-HITLER) by
erasing every line on the page with the exception of the following words: “His,”
“Wilhelm junior, medico,” “Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik –Califfo Omayyade,” “Hita
Arcipreste de –Poeta Spagnolo,” and “Hitler, Adolf-Uomo Politico Tedesco.” What is
immediately jarring about these two modified pages is the incongruous proximity
engendered by the narrow structure of the encyclopedia, where Hitler is placed next
to a Caliph, a poet, and a physician, and the scope of his monstrosity shriveled to the
rather bland definition of “German Political Figure.” Here Isgrò shows how the
power of the author to exclude and include information discretely shapes the readers’
understanding, making the artist’s statement about the political nature of the necessity
to revive language and the role of the book in society even more poignant.
I suggest here that the works selected for this chapter grapple with what
Foucault, in his 1977 essay on the identity of the author, that is to say that “In writing,
the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within
131

language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject
constantly disappears.”
98
Emilio Isgrò’s erased encyclopedia creates precisely this
type of space, a space where the materiality of language is constantly reaffirmed, but
where writing (now erased with a black marker) and the writer are a vanishing and
instead the intervention of the artist (which could also be seen as another vanishing
author) and the presence of the reader are what contextualizes and shapes the
meaning of the object and of the text. The aesthetic implications that further
complicate the idea of a vanished author however, should not be considered as a
byproduct of the fact that an artist book is also a physical object, an artifact where the
word “art” is not merely conveying the creative process but the also the technique
behind it. The texts considered in this section—and I refer here to the actual modes of
writing that each of the books portrays which range from visual denials of writing to
ideographic writing—demand that we understand writing and authority in a novel
way, one that is informed by our knowledge of what both reading and interpreting
mean, but that is also open to a confrontation with an authorial figure in flux, and one
that never fully recedes to the back.

98
Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. p.1
132

2.3 Erasing the Past, Rewriting Reality: The Italian Avanguardia and
Conceptual Art, 1960-1980

At this point it will be useful to briefly contextualize some more the literary and
artistic realms in which the Emilio Isgrò and Luigi Serafini produced their work.
While it is safe to say that Isgrò, whose work has spanned from art to literature to
journalism, has been to various degrees affiliated with the movement of conceptual
art from the 1960s to the 1970s, the same cannot be said of Serafini. Trained as an
architect Serafini has had, to say the very least, an eclectic career. Since the early
1980s Serafini has worked as an illustrator, painter, furniture designer, architect,
public spaces decorator, and book author. Yet his aesthetic (like his persona) is hard
to pinpoint to a specific artistic trend or field. Fittingly, Italian art critic and media
personality Vittorio Sgarbi has gone as far as calling Serafini a true “clandestino” of
the art world.
99
Sgarbi’s definition of Serafini as a “clandestine” is particularly fitting
especially in the context in which it was made. Having always operated in a
somewhat liminal space within the art world Serafini was invited to participate at the

99
Sgarbi, Vittorio, 2003, access date June 2012,
http://archivio.panorama.it/home/articolo/idA020001019191 : “Riuscirà Luigi Serafini, con un carro
etrusco, a espugnare Venezia? "Luigi Serafini, impareggiabile miniatore e instancabile artigiano,
all'arte chiede di essere un parco dei divertimenti, uno sterminato luna park, un paradiso per bambini.
Ma guai a chi pensasse che, in questo clima, egli si applichi con l'attitudine del dilettante" ha scritto
Vittorio Sgarbi presentando l'ultima opera di Luigi Serafini, una specie di carro di Tespi meccanico che
dovrebbe irrompere nella prossima Biennale come una pistolettata in un concerto. Negli anni Ottanta il
Codex Seraphinianus stampato da Franco Maria Ricci fu accolto come una felice sorpresa da Federico
Zeri. Eppure, pur continuando a lavorare "in bilico fra Leonardo ed Eta Beta", Serafini non è mai stato
chiamato a esporre alla Biennale. Ora nell'ambito della mostra Italian Factory organizzata dal giovane
critico Alessandro Riva, che aprirà nell'ambito della Biennale a Santa Maria della Pietà, Sgarbi ha
avuto l'idea di inserire proprio Serafini. Ma come? "Come un vero clandestino".
133

Venice Biennale art exhibit in 2003. The event, always marked by more or less
meaningful controversies about the appropriateness of the artists invited to showcase
their works, is often perceived as making choices that while supposedly avant-garde
always fall short of actually involving artists that lack “political” or “gallery” clout.
Ostensibly Serafini’s invitation marked precisely a shift from the expected to the
unexpected. In a sense thus, we could say that Serafini, who was and is still best
known precisely for the Codex represents a generation of artists that have engaged
with mediums, such as the book, which have not always found a wide audience or
high- exposure venues such as the Venice Biennale.
Despite their programmatic and technical difference I believe that both
Serafini’s and Isgrò’s artistic production reflect substantial social and cultural
changes that took place in the 1960s and between the late 1970s and early 1980s.
During the 1960s, Italian art, much like its international counterparts, was marked by
an impressive contact between visual artists and literary authors, who together fought
and succeeded in bringing forth a significant aesthetic reorientation of national art and
literature. These rather revolutionary decades were defined by the experimentation of
literary groups of the so- called neoavanguardia, such as Gruppo 63 which included
poets Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, and the author and future scholar of
semiotics, Umberto Eco. This emerging group of young enthusiastic literati,
influenced in part by Structuralism and Marxism, promoted a radical approach to
literature, rejecting the schemata of postwar narrative and rebelling against
established literary models of the 1950s. In the realm of visual arts the 1960s and the
134

1970s saw conceptual art in Italy on the frontline of similar innovations aimed to free
the artist from the obligation to produce an esthetically pleasing work, redirecting
instead the value of the work to its concept rather than its execution. With its focus on
ideas, conceptual art set out to redefine, among others, the relationship between the
artist and the book. The canvas was no longer the primary “place” of art nor did it
have to be “treated” as such. It is therefore not surprising that a similar
“dematerialization” of the traditional “support” of language—that is to say of the
codex book—reframed the very idea of display and circulation of text.
Art critic Luciano Caruso noted that the renewed cultural atmosphere brought
about by mutually inspiring conceptual art and innovative “heretic” literary groups,
such as Gruppo 63 and the interdisciplinary Gruppo 70, was instrumental for the
increased development of artistic practices that had until that point not being
mainstream. At this time “peripheral” artistic practices, the making of artists’ books
among them, which until that point had led an existence “in clandestinità” were
finally able to gain prominence.
100
Caruso’s observation about the clandestine nature
of the artist book is germane to the very idea that artists’ books are indeed a peculiar,
hybrid, and often hard to define practice (which therefore exists in a liminal state).
Moreover, I suggest that the artist book as a literary an artistic practice is defined by a
roguish, clandestine and even, as Borges would say, delinquent nature. This research
however, does not claim that artists’ books where voluntarily ousted by the artistic
mainstream. Instead I propose here that by virtue of their hybridity and their

100
Marziano, Luciano, and Luciano Caruso. Far Libro: Libri E Pagine D'artista in Italia. Florence:
Publ. by Centro Di, 1989, p. 20
135

subversion of textual and visual canons artists’ books have insisted in asking, at once,
what makes a book a book and what makes a work of art a work of art. It is perhaps
the difficulty of answering as well as the openness of the question itself that has made
it particularly challenging for artists’ books to occupy a specific space in either the
artistic and literary worlds. Although to claim that either realm satisfies or defines the
artists’ book requirement or nature would be at best reductive.
In this spirit of experimentation and renewal a reformulation of the
relationship between language, art, and the dissemination of knowledge via the book
was facilitated. A new sensibility that pushed the very limits of both the content and
the form of the book marks artists’ books of this period. While many artists chose to
abstract, disrupt, and even negate the traditional form of the book, others like Serafini
and Isgrò stayed strategically close to it making their subversion of language and
meaning even more resonant. Perhaps one of the most poignant examples of the
aforementioned new sensibility brought forth by the intersection of Arte Concettuale
and literary Neoavanguardia is personified by one of the early representatives of the
Conceptual art movement in Italy—that is to say, visual poet and artist Vincenzo
Agnetti. In the early 1960, at the beginning of his career Agnetti had identified art
with absence, an identification that ended in a rejection of painting altogether,
relegating his contribution to the artistic discourse of the time only to “written”
interventions. His works from 1967 mark the beginnings of a personal artistic search
based on an analytical and conceptual approach to ideas of space, time, memory, art,
and the displacement of meaning in language. La macchina drogata (The Drugged
136

Machine), an installation featuring an Olivetti mathematical calculator to which
Agnetti substituted numbers for letters, and Progetto per un Amleto politico (Project
for a Political Hamlet) in which Hamlet’s monologue is literally “translated” into
numeric ciphers are some of the most playful and yet insightful early takes on the
limitations of codes and their medium specificity. Much like Serafini and Isgrò,
Agnetti’s work disrupts the expectations of the user/reader with respect to its ability
of recognizing a medium and making an assumption about the “code” that it will
support. Where Serafini has, through the use of asemic writing, severed the
connection between text and image and Isgrò has through his erasures of an existing
text reformulated the notion of authority, Agnetti has instead subverted the idea that a
specific code must inform a specific medium.
Agnetti’s first code-disrupting interventions were soon followed by series of
book objects presented as installations, titled Libri Dimenticati a Memoria (Books
Forgotten by Heart, 1968). In these book objects Agnetti pushed himself to explore
the meaning of the book as a bearer of information that allows society to preserve the
memory of knowledge. In Books Forgotten by Heart the book is cut and hollowed out
in the center. Only the blank margins are allowed to survive the forgetting. While the
pages have lost the space otherwise occupied by words, several bookmarkers are
inserted between the hollow pages so as to invite the reader to an im/possible exercise
of memory.
In the negative space generated by the extraction of text, Agnetti made room
to reflect on the outcomes of both rejecting and deemphasizing the function of the
137

written word. As he proceeded to divest the written word of its ability to generate
meaning Agnetti also drew attention to the vessel that carries text/language—that is to
say the physical book. The absence of language, but not that of meaning, manifests
itself precisely because the book as a physical entity is there to structure it. Agnetti’s
conceptual erasure is not a Deriddean one, where both word and deletion can coexist
on the page. Only the deletion remains to stand the test of time, that is to say the act
of expunging the text remains albeit in its ephemerality. In Books Forgotten by Heart
erasure is a physical act, a precise mutilation of the book and the wiping off of the
possibility to remember and ultimately to know.
Agnetti’s work seems to suggest that culture is teaching us to forget in order
to progress, if that is indeed the case then I ask here: what is the role of the book and
of the artist book if the transmission of knowledge via a physical object and memory
are at odds? Agnetti articulated his perception of the artist as a rebellious conscience
of culture whose role is to intercept the very message of culture. In placing himself
outside the realm in which the messages of culture circulate, Agnetti underscored the
dogmatic stances of the transmission of culture—and specifically via the book as
“the” cultural object. Agnetti claimed for himself the gargantuan task of exposing the
limitations of structuring and regimenting the transmission of culture by engaging
with the novel form. It was with his conceptual anti-romanzo, literally an “anti-
novel,” poignantly titled Obsoleto (1968) published in a series aptly called
Denarratori (de-narrators or un-narrators) that Agnetti set out to accomplish his
mission. In this conceptual anti-novel Agnetti attacks the conventions of writing by
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making the plot impossible to decipher, further challenging and disrupting grammar,
punctuation, and narrative codes.
101
Obsoleto’s plot is entirely subordinate to the
perceptual and intuitive discovery of the limits of language and the conventions of the
literary form that the reader experiences. Each sentence is part of a string of semantic
negations. Dependent and independent clauses are an endless negation of the main
clause at the level of both meaning and structure (through the misplacing, planting
randomly, replacing, and eliminating of either words or signs of punctuation). Nouns
become imploding single units trapped between full stops. In the absence of the
fundamental logics of written communication and narrative coherence—which
structure the book as such—Agnetti leaves his readers in a negative space of
expression which resembles that of the Books Forgotten by Heart. In showing the
limitations of the written code by playing with its rules, as the manuscript progresses
Agnetti attempts a deeper disruption. Sentences are typographically manipulated to
become shapes and patterns, they progressively fade out and words are scratched,
eroded, and chipped away, making the materiality—and ephemerality—of language
suddenly manifest. We can no longer engage with the text at a critical and semantic
level but must engage post-cognitively at a purely graphic and aesthetic one.
Agnetti’s case further underscores the proximity and crossovers in this particular time
frame of art and literature (between conceptual/visual/concrete poetry and art).

101
This specific work is either catalogued under “novel” or “artist book,” fittingly it seems that since it
was published in a way not entirely dissimilar from that of Ruscha’s Twenty Six Gasoline Stations,
library and archives view it in different ways. Usually artists’ books because of their limited-edition
nature are kept in special repositories. At the University of California in Los Angeles where I have
consulted it, Agnetti’s work is instead kept on general consultation shelves.
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Agnetti’s work, although not formally affiliated with Gruppo 63 was certainly aligned
at least theoretically with its mandate. As noted by scholar John Picchione:
[…] Gruppo 63 aims at destroying the conventional literary
institutions without abandoning the linguistic medium; on the other,
various groups—although their methodologies vary widely—share the
desire to overcome the limits of poetry as a strictly verbal form of
communication, transforming it through iconographic and figurative
compositions of numerous kinds.
102

Doubtless the members of Gruppo 63 can be seen as the initiators (and instigators) of
the radicalization of the poetic avant-garde in Italy. By the same token, and as
exemplified by Emilio Isgrò’s own work, the literary realm of the time had also been
penetrated by the radicalization of the artistic practices. In the context of this
complex cross-pollination, as I will show in this section, the field of the visual is
constantly encroached on by the literary and vice versa. As Picchione sums up:
The poets belonging to Gruppo 70 […] make extensive use of extra-
linguistic materials coming from images produced by the mass media
(commercial photographs, advertisements, comic strips, photo
romances and so on). Defined as technological poetry this
experimentation shifts poetic research from an exclusively verbal
practice toward a general art of the sign.
103

102
Picchione, John. “Poetry in revolt: Italian Avant-Garde Movements in the Sixties,” in: K. David
Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker Experimental-Visual-Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the
1960s, (ed by) Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 101
103
Idem, p.105
140

For Emilio Isgrò this “art of the sign” manifest itself in the form of what I will call
here “black marker erasure.” This technique resembles visually what has become the
“iconic” redaction of government-issued files, where only what is deemed acceptable
to be read by the public is visible while the rest remains conspicuously blocked out.
Isgrò has been throughout his career a veritable “theoretician” of the teoria della
cancellatura on which he published numerous essays and staged artistic happenings
where he invited the audience to erase books themselves. Isgrò’s modified/erased
books, the Enciclopedia Italiana; fondata da Giovanni Treccani, cancellata da Isgrò ́
speaks clearly to the idea of the erasures of words as a way of claiming
simultaneously the necessity to intervene “upon” the said and the inaccuracy of what
is being said. Isgrò seems to suggest that a dialogue, albeit a rather confrontational
one, must be engendered with the type of ideologically inflected, top-down
transmission of knowledge structured by the encyclopedic system. There is, I
propose, a strong equalizing force in the encyclopedic project, one that by collating
knowledge seemingly without any commentary and following a discrete principle of
inclusion/exclusion and relevance/irrelevance, hides more than it reveals. Isgrò’s is an
archeology of negative space where meaning is possible, and indeed is found under
the erasure itself.
Isgrò’s work is an exercise in control, leaving out and erasing,
including/excluding knowledge and information for the reader, and yet is also an
unrestrained experimentation with the visual possibilities opened up by the word as a
graphic object and not merely as an agent of meaning. Isgrò’s experience is in this
141

respect not dissimilar from Agnetti’s as both have in one way or another engaged
with the restrictions of the traditional mediums of art and literature by intervening
physically on the page. As asserted by scholar and art critic Achille Bonito Oliva:
L’arte di Isgrò risponde attraverso la complessità della tecnica e lo
sconfinamento interdisciplinare, capaci di restituire quella totalità che
l’univocità di un singolo linguaggio difficilmente può dare. Soltanto
mediante la declamazione e la messa in scena esplicita dello
sconfinamento interdisciplinare è possibile fondare un evento capace
di pareggiare, in termini di accadimento reale, l’esistente.[...] Tutto
concorre perchè il poeta Isgrò senta la letteratura come insufficiente
nella sua linearità di scrittura e a restituire la complessità del suo
rapporto con la realtà. Da qui la deflagrazione della linearità della
pagina e dell’orizzontalità della scrittura tipografica.
104

Derrida had already shown the power of the inadequacy and yet necessity of the word
by crossing it out with a straight line so that it can still be seen while at the same time
its existence is negated materially on the page and conceptually as a unit of the
sentence.
105
For Isgrò, in adherence to the dictates of the conceptual experience, the
erasure instead is a totalizing experience. The complete covering of the word with a

104
Bonito Oliva, Achille. “Isgrò’s art responds with complex techniques and the crossing of
interdisciplinary borders. In doing so he is able to return the totality that the univocal nature of a single
language cannot give. Only through its declamation and the explicit mise en scene of crossing of
boundaries it is possible to establish an event that is capable of matching that which is real […].
Everything consorts so that Isgrò, the poet, may percieve literature as insufficient in its written
linearity and its ability to return its relationship with reality. Here we witness the deflagration of
linearity of teh page and of the horizontality of typography.”; my translation, in: “L’immagine Presa in
Parola,” in Dichiaro di essere Emilio Isgro’ ed by Marco Bazzini e Achille Bonito Oliva, Centro Per
L’arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci Prato-Mart Trento e Rovereto: 2007, p.21
105
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore [u.a.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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black marker both closes and opens interpretation through the projected expectations
of what “hides” under the dematerialized word itself.
The Codex Seraphinianus was published, about ten years after the
dematerialization of the art object with its extreme corollary of linguistic erasures and
negations had ceased to dominate the discourse of art. Yet, I would argue here,
Serafini’s ornate and highly stylized language was also a dematerialization of sorts,
albeit one that was taking places in a cultural context that was no longer focused on
the erasure of the medium of art nor was further interested in the issues with which
conceptual art had grappled, and often failed to solve. Thus, having situated the work
of Emilio Isgrò in the context of conceptual art it may prove useful to provide a frame
of reference for that of Luigi Serafini. As I mentioned earlier it is not easy to attach
Luigi Serafini to any particular artistic movement, or to a literary one for that matter.
Established art historians and art critics before me have experienced this difficulty;
therefore I will not take it upon myself to claim for Serafini any specific affiliation.
However, I would like to suggest that Serafini’s best known work to date and the
subject of this chapter, the Codex Seraphinianus,
106
reflects to some extent the trends
set by the so called Transavanguardia movement, to which it is at least
chronologically contextual. Although in my research I have not encountered any art
scholar or art critic who explicitly linked Serafini to this movement I suggest here that

106
As I briefly mentioned earlier in this chapter it was perhaps because of Serafini’s disengagement
from any specific artistic arena that initially more than one publisher refused to circulate the Codex
Seraphinianus; it was only thanks to the keen eye of Italo Calvino, then editor at the publishing
company Einaudi, that Serafini’s encyclopedia of the im/possible was finally published.
143

the Codex had been touched by the impetus to turn away from radical
conceptualization apparent in Italian art between the 1960s and 1970s.
While my intention is not to force an association between Serafini and a
specific artistic current it may prove useful to point out here the defining
characteristic of this artistic movement. The term Transavanguardia was coined by
art critic Achille Bonito Oliva (who is also credited in less supportive circles with
founding the movement itself in a self reflexive and self-promoting maneuver) in
1979, with the publication of what could be both seen as a manifesto of sorts and a
presentation of the artists involved in it. By no means a provincial movement
107
the
Transavanguardia fought to affirm itself against the rigidness and the rhetoric that
had begun to stifle art in the aftermath of Conceptualism and Arte Povera. As Achille
Bonito Oliva critically observed in his book/manifesto:
L’avanguardia, per definizione, ha sempre operato dentro gli schemi
culturali di una tradizione idealistica tendente a configurare lo
sviluppo dell’arte come una linea continua, progressiva e rettilinea.
L’ideologia sottostante a tale mentalità è quella del darwinismo
linguistico, di una idea evoluzionistica dell’arte [...] L’idealismo di tale
posizione risiede nella considerazione dell’arte e del suo sviluppo al di
fuori dei colpi e dei contraccolpi della storia. Fino agli anni Settanta,
l’arte d’avanguardia ha conservato tale mentalità, operando sempre

107
International “Post” Avant-garde movements that were the counterpart of the Italian
Transavanguardia are known as Neo-Expressionists and were widely represented in most European
countries as well as in the United States.
144

dentro l’assunto filosofico del darwinismo linguistico, di un
evoluzionismo culturale rispettosa di ogni genealogia con una
puntigliosità puristica e puritana.[...] In definitiva la neoavanguardia ha
inteso salvare la coscienza felice dell’artista tutta basata sulla coerenza
interna del lavoro, realizzata dentro l’ambito sperimentale del
linguaggio, contro l’incoerenza negativa del mondo.
108

Bonito Oliva argues, in other words, that the neo avant-garde (and specifically
Conceptual art and Arte Povera) has excluded to a certain extent the artist from his
own work, erasing the intimate dimension from the work of art and reducing to the
bare minimum the wealth of modes and materials with which the artist expresses
itself. More specifically in his manifesto Bonito-Oliva’s critique attacks the rejection
of painting and drawing. A significant absence that the Transavanguardia was about
to end and therefore, thanks to it, the ideological and tautological stances of both Arte
Povera and Conceptual art were to be “overcome” by a new attitude that no longer
privileged a specific artistic practice over another and that rediscovered:

108
Bonito Oliva, Achille. “ Avantgarde, by definition, has always operated within the cultural schemes
of an idealistic tradition which configured the developement of art as a straight, progressive line. The
underlying ideology to such mentality is that of a linguistic darwinism, of an evolutionstic idea of art
[…] The idealism of this position residings in considering art and its developement outside of
historical changes and adjustments. Until the 1970s avantgarde art has held onto this belief, operating
within the concept of linguistic darwinism, of a cultural evolution that respected every genealogy with
puritan obstinacy […] in short the neo-avantgarde has sought to save the happy soul of the artist based
on the internal coherence of the work, taking place whithin linguage experimentation against the world
negative lack of coherence.” my translation, in: Transavanguardia, Firenze: Giunti Editore, 2002, p. 6
145

[…] il piacere della propria esibizione, del proprio spessore, della
materia della pittura finalmente non piu’ mortificata da incombenze
ideologiche e da arrovellamenti puramente intellettuali.
109

Against the over-intellectualized artworks of the previous decade Bonito Oliva
posited the return to the intrinsic sensuality and lusciousness of the pictorial
materials, to colors, to the fantastic, and to the folkloric. These elements while not
uniquely constitutive of Serafini’s works are certainly present in the Codex,
particularly from a visual standpoint. The Codex is in fact a primarily “visual” book
drawn in a style that is a generic hybrid between graphic work and illustration, at
once reminiscent of comic books and of both seventeenth-century Austrian botanical
illustrators Franz and Ferdinand Bauer and Elizabeth Blackwell’s botanical drawings.
At the same time however, the Codex is engaging, in its very unique way, with
language, power, and ideology in ways that are not radically different from the ones
explored by conceptual artists. Hybridity is perhaps the term that generally best
describes Serafini himself and his work. Although this observation is far from
necessarily revealing a connection with the Transavanguardia and its project to
dismiss the dogmatic stances that Conceptual art had lived by in favor of a more
holistic approach to the idea of “making” art is also somewhat revealing of Serafini’s
assimilation of the conceptual experience and his carrying it over into at least some of
the fields opened up by the Transavanguardia.

109
Bonito Oliva, Achille. Transavanguardia, Firenze: Giunti Editore, 2002, p. 12
146

In the lights of the elements presented so far whether envisioned as an objet
d’art or as a distant relative of the “normative” book it is apparent that the artist book
has succeeded in maintaining a close relationship with the written word on the
material level and with the function of the book on the symbolic one. The dynamic
evolution of both these relationships has had as its outcome a rather vast pool of
radically experimental objects that have challenged their readers and “users” on
multiple levels.
The present chapter has engaged with two central features of the book: its
materiality and its symbolic function as a means to deliver knowledge. In looking at
the encyclopedia as genre I hope to have shown how artists’ books engage critically
in a multi-dimensional way with the book as a cultural and textual object. Specifically
the format of delivery, the spreading, and the dominant nature of the authority that
imparts and sanctions knowledge via the means of the encyclopedic project is—albeit
with different premises, modalities, and goals—prominently confronted in the works
of Isgrò and Serafini. The works selected for this chapter have, I hope, shown two
significant trends in the practice of artists’ books making, that is to say visual
manipulations of pre-existing text/book object and the creation ex novo of new
alphabets and languages.
Material manipulations and creative linguistic efforts that fall in the
experimental “genre” are not the sole domain of artists’ books. On the contrary these
manipulations have always walked the fine line between artistic and literary practice.
The significant presence of textual manipulations in artists’ book could definitely be
147

traced back to the lessons delivered by visual and concrete poetry in the 1960s and
1970s. The cross-pollination, and indeed “contagion” between genres, methodologies,
and visual perspectives that took place in this period of time at the hands of artists and
writers has made it possible for them to organically included the physical domain of
the book into their radical take on textual manipulation. This research does not
advocate for the necessity of establishing a tight genealogic node between conceptual
art and visual/concrete poetry to “explain” the origin of the artist book. As much as
establishing a proper genealogy and general guidelines for the understanding of what
an artist book is would be desirable it also is has also proven in time to be a futile
exercise. Ultimately it is not a central issue for the present research to further
elaborate on the perceived distance or proximity of the artist book, specifically of the
one that engages text, from and to the experimentation carried out by visual and
concrete poetry. While it is undeniable that a number of artists’ books, including
Serafini and Isgrò, have implemented the “operative modes” of visual and concrete
poetry without seeking to “make” poetry the continuity—if we wish to call it so —
between the artistic and literary practice is to be found in the
physical/typographic/illustrative aspect of artists’ books rather than in the textual one.
I am still not satisfied with the term continuity, perhaps it would be more appropriate
to speak of a parallel development, which still, however, problematizes the
relationship between the two and further blurs the line between the artistic and
literary practices I have examined here.
148

Above all however, my goal in this chapter has been to engage with the ideas
of taxonomies, order, and power because as the material and textual manipulations of
the works discussed here show none of those three are possible without language
manipulation. Language plays a paramount role within the avant-garde art book as a
tool that is used to both deny access to knowledge while paradoxically giving access
to it in a way that, borrowing from Owen F. Smith, is post-cognitive and thus
requiring the book to be approached with “[…] a greater degree of flexibility and
openness that exists beyond the limitations of older cognitive/linguistic structures.”
110

According to avant-garde poet Edoardo Sanguineti one of the main characteristics of
the literary avant-garde is its certitude that it is possible to verify in language, at once
and immediately, every ideological procedure. Thus, language is the ultimate
expression of an ideologically inflected and deliberate action.
111

It is precisely ideological procedure as such, and by ideological procedure I
suggest Sanguineti refers to the rhetoric of ideology, that is being challenged and
deconstructed in the playfulness of erasing language and in the manufacturing of a
new one by both artists’ books and visual and concrete poetry. Extreme
experimentation with typography and language has often reflected the radicalism
dominating the political and social trends of the time in which the artist book and

110
Smith, Owen F. “Fluxus, Experimentalism, and the End of Language” in: Jackson, K D, Eric Vos,
and Johanna Drucker. Experimental, Visual, Concrete: Avant-garde Poetry Since the 1960s.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. p. 192
111
“[…] ferma consapevolezza che non si dà operazione ideologica che non sia, contemporaneamente
ed immediatamente, verificabile nel linguaggio.” Barilli, Renato and Angelo Guglielmi, eds Gruppo
63: Critica e Teoria. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976. p. 272
149

visual poetry alike were produced, and this is particularly true of the late 1960s and
1970s.
Language and its relationship to power is thus what must ultimately be
addressed in the present analysis, particularly in the light of Sanguineti’s words. A
productive way of entering this relationship, albeit briefly, may be to consider it
following Antonio Gramsci’s reading of hegemony and power.
112
I do not wish here
to elaborate at length on Gramsci’s complex notion of hegemony, what is relevant for
my argument is that, as summarized Peter Ives, Gramsci “ […] redefined hegemony
to mean the formation of consent.” Indeed consent can be understood in multiple
ways, in the present research I have concerned myself with works, and specifically
for instance the work of Emilio Isgrò, that engage with the production of a cultural
consent, in other words with the creation of a historically oriented narrative by which
the world view of people of one nation is “informed.” Let’s for instance consider
Gramsci’s view of how hegemony exercises and dominates subaltern groups (defined
by gender, class, and race) that do not posses as Ives notes:
[…] a coherent philosophy of world view from which to understand
and interpret the world. […] Because these groups often do not have
effective intellectuals of their own, they are subordinated and adopt
conceptions which are not their own but borrowed from the hegemonic

112
See also Thomas R. Bates for Gramsci/Croce opposing notions of hegemony: Bates, Thomas R.
“Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony” in: Journal of the History of Ideas , Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr. -
Jun., 1975): University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 351-366
150

social group.[…] the members do not actively participate in creating or
critically assessing the philosophies that guide their lives.”
113

In the present research the relationship between shaping cultural forces embodied by
a dominant group has been read through the lens of the manipulation of language. For
Gramsci, language (and particularly the complex notions associated with it in the
context of the linguistically fragmented Italy of Gramsci’s time) is both used to
exercise power and, as pointed out by Ives, as “[…] a metaphor for how power
operates.”
114
The connection between power as viewed by Foucault and the shaping
force of language as conceptualized by Gramsci become manifest in the context of
the encyclopedic project, and specifically as I noted earlier in this chapter in the
context of the Italian encyclopedia which engaged at its very inception precisely with
the necessity of providing a world view for as well as becoming a commodity of the
nascent Italian bourgeoisie. I am not suggesting here that the intent of all
encyclopedias is a political one, yet as both Foucault and Gramsci highlight the
politics of power have a tentacular and pervasive quality. If we consider Isgrò’s work
in this light we see how the artist is effectively engaging in an act of “counter-
hegemony” by operating his erasure and manipulating the text as well as the physical
object in ways that reject the notion of a handed knowledge by reframing language
visually. What Isgrò works point to is, and this is true I propose of the artistic and
literary realm in which the artist operated, the consciousness of the workings of

113
Ives also acknowledges that such definition may sound reductive given that Gramsci’s notion is
indeed much more layered and complex than that and Gramsci’s own view of the specifically Italian
“questione della lingua” informs much of his understanding of the relationship between language and
power. Ives, Peter. Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. London: Pluto Press, 2004, p.2; p. 78-9
114
Ibid. p.101
151

power. It is in the acknowledgment of that consciousness that action is taken and a
“correction,” not necessarily a redaction of the grammar of power, as defined by
Gramsci, is made.
While my intent in this chapter was not to focus on fleshing out the
connections that can be drawn between the commodification of culture and the artistic
and literary reactions to it, it has been difficult to avoid them. Precisely because both
works by Isgrò and Serafini challenge and experiment with the encyclopedic format it
seemed appropriate to at the very least acknowledge throughout this chapter how
power and knowledge shape the encyclopedic project. I suggest here that questioning
the validity of taxonomies and formats, and by extension of the ideological stances
that taxonomic order reflects (specifically in terms of relevance) through visual and
linguistic manipulations is at the very core of the artists’ books as an artistic and
literary practice. This “hybridism,” (which results from a contagion rather than a
“grafting”) as a response and alternative to the taxonomic imperative, both within the
encyclopedic project and the very systematization of the artist book itself, is
ultimately one of the most compelling characteristics of artists’ books. In exposing
the material/bodily nature of communication and challenging the very concept of
meaning, many (but not all) artists’ books show how the book as a cultural object can
be a “place” of miscommunication which calls into question the relationship between
the writer/artist, the object, and the reader. In exploring artists’ books in which the
acts of writing, communicating, and meaning-making are either subverted or rejected
altogether I hope to have offered some answers to these questions. Furthermore, the
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works considered in this chapter do not subject the book-object to drastic formal
manipulations; in fact they maintain a rather traditional form. Thus, I propose that
these artists’ books use the “traditional” materiality of the book to disguise radically
subversive takes on language, exposing the fragility of communication and the
treacherous nature of the transmission of knowledge.
As I noted earlier in this chapter Foucault speaks of language as a non-place
where incongruities such as the ones of the Chinese Encyclopedia can take place. Yet
as much as language is a non-place that structures and defines a physical world, a
non-place where two terms can co-exist without sharing the same conceptual or
biological genus, we must not forget that language exists on the physical space of the
page. The page, and by extension the book, are the physical limits of the text. If we
consider, for instance, Isgrò’s work, the engagement with a certain kind of structure
and the reclaiming of agency upon the text is defined by the destruction of the text
and not of the book itself. I propose here that the rationale for that type of
intervention may be that retaining the book as a valid cultural symbol and indeed a
physical object reinforces the idea that it is not the book per se as a cultural, material
object that must be reevaluated and even challenged.
In Serafini’s work, on the other hand, the reader is asked to consider why a
civilization apparently so alien from our own would even conceive of “encoding”
itself (if indeed this is what is happening in the Codex) in a book—which
incidentally, as an object, is never represented in the illustrations of the Codex. While
language does appear, not simply by means of the entries but also as a physical (and
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often whimsical) object, the codex book appears to be excluded. Perhaps then, the
Codex in its physical manifestation—that is to say a codex book—is compiled not by
a member of the civilization it speaks of and for but by someone who once again has
been trying to “make sense” of acquired knowledge. The notion that in other worlds
or dimensions books could be altogether different from what we have come to know
them as, was also explored by Borges in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In his short
story Borges writes that for Tlönians:
In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It
is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does
not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one
author, who is atemporal and anonymous. […] Their books are also
different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable
permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both
the thesis ad the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A
book which does not contain its counterbook is considered
incomplete.
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Borges’ account describes with a rather uncanny degree of accuracy the works of
Isgrò, Serafini, and even Agnetti. Consider for instance the idea of an a-temporal
author one that exists every time he/she intervenes by interacting with the artist book
and, in the absence of a pre-conceived and enforced reading strategy is allowed to
establish and endlessly rephrase for him/herself the interaction with the text. Or the

115
Borges, Labyrinths, p.13
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multiplicity of linguistically impossible sentences and plots in their illegible
permutations as explored by Agnetti in his anti-novel as well as Serafini’s Codex,
which appears to be a perfect materialization of the Tlönian encyclopedia. Lastly I
would like to suggest here that it is in Borges’ idea of a book that does not contain its
own counter-book as an incomplete one that artists’ books poignantly embody.
Perhaps more than anything else an artist book is precisely that: a counterbook—that
is to say a book that is not merely a negation but a reformulation, a rephrasing of sorts
of the normative book. The artist book is not always against—or counter to a text or
an idea—but it inserts itself in the negative space of the book and of text asking its
reader/user to mobilize an expanded set of cognitive and perceptual modes.

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CHAPTER III

3. The nature of the book: Materials, Materiality, Readers, and Users of Artists’
Books.

A pre-history and history of artists’ books has
three discernible leitmotivs-their dependence on
and independence of technology from
lithography to desk topping; how they relate to
sounds and the body; and their connection with
multiplicity, modulating their relationship with a
mass or elite audience. These themes are not
mutually exclusive, but overlap.
Bury, Stephen. Artists' Books: The Book As a Work of Art, 1963-1995.

In the previous two chapters I hope to have brought forth layered examples of works
that belong to the complex galaxy of artists’ books in their relation to the universe
that is the book itself, both as a symbol and as a physical object. In this chapter I am
setting out to instead consider the physical forms taken by the artist book as a literary
and artistic practice. What I am specifically interested in exploring in the present
chapter is the physical body of the book when its codex form is either transcended or
“infringed” upon by external, non germane, elements and what such
modifications/manipulation contribute to or take away from the experience of
reading. Although defining “reading” as a set of standardized practices does no
justice to the experience itself, it is not incorrect to say that indeed the “practice” of
reading mobilizes specific strategies and actions. In this chapter I hope to show book-
works, that is to say artists’ books that have a stronger “object” presence rather than a
codex one, in which “reading” is either parallel to or superseded by “interacting.”
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Understood in the perspective of interaction rather than reading the works I consider
here reconnect with the ideas of Maurice Merleau Ponty explored in chapter one. The
basic contention is once again that artists’ books demand from their users a new set of
skills and “reading” strategies precisely because of their physical dimension.
Although artists’ books that depart greatly from the standard codex-form do not
entirely dispense of all the strategies necessary for interacting with normative books
they make those strategies less relevant.
In the early stages of my research I was consistently struck by the extents to
which artists have gone in order to completely subvert any established notion of how
a book might look. More than once I have requested items from special collections
that were labeled as “books,” and yet their physical nature had nothing to do with the
codex book I expected. These non-codex-form books contribute largely in further
complicating the already very elusive definition of what an artist book actually is. A
gnawing question with which I dealt early on was precisely how to define these odd
objects for myself within the definition of artists’ books themselves. Simply put I
asked myself what is the difference between a book and a book-object? At first glance
it appeared that a book-object (a definition that I still find somewhat ambiguous)
implied a certain level of rejection of traditional readership and to a certain extent a
rejection of text as well. Thus, what is the “object” in the label “book-object”? I
cautiously suggest here that the book object is the opposite of a book “thing,” –the
book object has no add-ons, no play, no tricks; just paper, ink, glue, or yarn, cloth or
leather. The book “thing” is more than the book object, it is addition and excess, it is
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other than the book, an alterity defined by excess, as explained by Bill Brown in his
article on thing theory:
You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in
objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects
or their mere utilization as objects-their force as sensuous
presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which
objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.
Temporalized as the before and after the object, thingness
amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet
formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or
metaphysically irreducible to objects).
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Numerous artists’ books speak to the latency indicated by Brown in the relationship
text/format and format/user. Consider for instance artists’ books with a distinct
sculptural dimension where the physical object (the codex) is recognizable and
present but the text is inaccessible to the reader, thus making the presence of the text
a mere assumption. An appropriate example of this type of work is Wolfgang
Nieblich’s Still Life. Bookobject (1987), a stylized wooden human head upon whose
forehead is literally embedded a book. The latter is placed into and onto the head by a
metal string that holds into place the physical book. Here the book is at once willingly
and by force, literally and metaphorically, “shoved” into the mind. Access to the
content of the book is denied and yet its physical presence remains extremely

116
Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2001, p. 5
158

powerful. Indeed this is no book to be read, and the viewer is not called to read but to
merely look. The book is thus in a sense “locked.” In his insightful foray into
contemporary artists’ books Garrett Stewart notes how in the absence of text this type
of object is “ […] a null case of the printed codex, an encasement vacated of
reference, its material presence entirely self-designating.”
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Scholar and curator
Lucy Lippard hoped that artists’ books would move beyond and never fall into
precisely this self-designation. In 1985 Lippard contributed two chapters to one of the
first edited anthologies about artists’ books. In the first of the two the tone of her
writing revealed a great hope and enthusiasm for the new venues and possibilities of
accessing art and promoting activism that artists’ books seemed to be exploring. In
the second one however, her enthusiasm was no longer so vivid. Lippard opened her
contribution titled “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books” with the
following line: “The artist book is/was a great idea whose time has either not come, or
come and gone.”
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Her essay, while by no means painting a picture of doom for
artists’ books to come, pointed out the issues posed by the liminal and hybrid nature
and status of this practice. Lippard identified a sort of golden age of artists’ books that
begun in the early sixties with work such as Ed Ruscha’s Twenty Six Gasoline
Stations (1962), marking a serious departure from the works made by avant-garde
artists and writers in the earlier part of the century. For writer and curator Clive
Phillpot Ruscha’s work created de facto

117
Stewart, Garrett. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011, p.43
118
Lyons, Joan. Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Rochester, N.Y: Visual Studies
Workshop Press, 1985, p. 49
159

[…] the paradigm for artists’ books. […] Ruscha’s books
embody primarily visual content, multiplicity, cheapness,
ubiquitousness, portability, nonpreciousness—even
expendability—features inherent in his first book in 1962, and
thus predating most of the related book art activity of the late
sixties and early seventies.
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Yet Lippard also noted that fifteen years after the beginning of that positive and
consistent trend in the production of artists’ books (she herself championed their lo-fi,
low–budget, wide reaching nature) their potential remained somewhat unfulfilled.
And while Lippard conceded that artists’ books had certainly entered the discourse of
art practitioners and critics, by the mid eighties they had still failed to reach larger
audiences. More so, at the time when Lippard’s contribution appeared and despite the
fact that critical works were being written on the subject of book works, artists’ books
were still in search of a definition. More importantly, artists’ books still fought to
justify their existence as both an artistic and literary practice. In the present research,
among other things, I aim to show how and suggest that it is precisely the physical
nature of the artist book that is the greater obstacle to its definition. As I hope to have
shown in the two previous chapters artists’ books alternate between a very strong
physical presence, as evidenced in the work of Tatana Kellner with its incorporation
of a wooden crate and a cast arm, to a very unassuming appearance that gives into a
very subversive text as in the case of Emilio Isgrò’s erased encyclopedia. While one

119
Phillpot, Clive, “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books,” in Lyons, Joan. Artists' Books: A
Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Rochester, N.Y: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, pp. 97-99
160

work hinges upon a strong three-dimensionality the other co-opts a standardized and
preexistent form and undoes it from the inside. I believe that it is at this juncture that
it is necessary to ask, what is the body of the artist book telling us about what we
have come to understand as “the book”?
Consider for instance how Lucy Lippard noted that, at least between the 1960s
and the 1970s, “Accessibility and some sort of function were an assumed part of their
[the AB’s] raison d’être.” In Lippard’s view however, such easy accessibility and lo-
fi quality of numerous early book works often affected negatively the content of the
artist book.
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The books produced during this time stayed close enough to the codex
form precisely to be accessible but their “bodies” did little to enhance their contents.
As Johanna Drucker, one of the pioneer scholars in the field of artists’ books, points
out: “[…] not every book made by an artist is an artist’s book” and more so that “[…]
an artist’s book has to have some conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be
a book in order to succeed.”
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Drucker’s observation defines in its poignancy the
ethos of the artist book. In underlining that the “artist” portion in the artist book
equation is not a mere derivative or a given because of its maker Drucker reminds us
that a book is not merely an object but also a specific cultural signifier. What appears
problematic to me is that by saying that and artist book must be a book Drucker
leaves out many iterations of what a book could be. Still, both Drucker and Lippard
bring forth two key concepts: one being that the artist book should be accessible

120
Phillpot, Clive, “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books,” in Lyons, Joan. Artists' Books: A
Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Rochester, N.Y: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985, p. 50
121
Drucker, Joanna “The artist’s book as idea and form” in Rothenberg, Jerome, and Steven Clay. A
Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing. New York: Granary Books,
2000. Print, pp. 383-4
161

while not cheap in content (and by accessible I mean economically accessible,
possibly portable, and physically manageable) and the other that the book would have
in its “bookness” its reason to be, that being and looking like a book would make its
text meaningful in that context. I propose here that the two concepts brought forth by
Lippard and Drucker should not be mutually exclusive. In other words it is not
problematic to call a book an “artist book” even if I one is unable to purchase it or
unable to carry it around. This would certainly be the case of Tatana Kellner’s work
which can be purchased for several thousand dollars and is not meant to be carried
around. Yet, in spite of these apparent limitations this book succeeds beautifully in its
intent to memorialize.
In this chapter I am not particularly interested in creating a divide between
books that fit more or less a paradigm in which form is geared towards the
enhancement of content/text and those in which form and content work are not
mutually enhancing with one another. I am instead interested in exploring artists’
books that have often gone to extremes in terms of book/object liminality and
textual/material hybridism. When Lucy Lippard expressed her concerns about the
contents and the formats used by artists’ books of her times and the audiences she
hoped they would reach she touched on an open nerve of the general discussion about
book arts. Today’s landscape of artists’ books is not entirely different from the one
Lippard had in front of her eyes over twenty years ago. Her concerns are still valid
and still poignant precisely because experimentations within this practice have
stretched the book form in many different and often unexpected directions. It is this
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shift from preconceived assumptions of what a book is and how it should look and the
opening up of new ways of interacting and engaging with the book that inform this
chapter.
I hope to have shown so far from the avant-garde art movements, through
conceptual art and to contemporary art the extents to which the book form has been
the object of tremendous amounts of manipulations and abstractions. Today
increasingly more popular tools and techniques made available by technological
advancements which allow artists to circulate, experiment with, and disrupt the book
form even more have further complicated the definition of artists’ books. This seems
to be especially true of works that retain only one specific aspect of what defines the
book as such, and that is either its shape or the text contained in it. In the present
chapter I set to address specifically the modifications of the physical dimension of
artists’ books. Of particular interest in this respect are works that fall into the category
of “movable” books as well as more proper book objects—that is to say artists’ books
that reject the traditional form of the codex while still keeping a relationship with
text. These works nod to the idea of traditional readerships, and specifically
readerships of narrative works, while at the same time presenting the reader with an
object that rejects the traditional codex form.
Within this framework I analyze iterations of movable books that evoke early
historical attempts of making the book an interactive object as well as books that
employ technology as an appendix whose function is to expand the “physical”
experience of reading. If, as Joanna Drucker has argued, the physical form of artists’
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books serves to enhance the nature of their text, then the physical form of the artist
book cannot be self- designating or an end to itself. Self-designation and often a sense
of disconnection between the act of reading and the form of the object is in my view
more manifest in those works that employ a high degree of interactivity, going
beyond the turning of pages or mere holding of the object in hand. These types of
work often ask the user/reader to engage with external or mechanical devices in the
effort to merge the physicality of the book object and its content. What I hope to
show here in contrast to the previous chapter is how these books modify the
normative phenomenology of reading. Thus, I suggest here, these works call for a
phenomenology of engaging with the text that goes primarily through a physical
experience defined by the fact that the object dimension of these works supersedes the
book dimension.

3.1. The body of the book: Materials and Materiality

In my preliminary observations on artists’ books I have noted how they can appear
along a spectrum ranging from high tech or low tech. This means that the book can
either be made employing modern technologies in terms of papermaking and paper
engineering, printing, binding, or using surfaces other than paper. These same
processes can be instead carried out by hand using techniques that do not involve the
use of industrial technology. The book itself whether made entirely by a human or
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with the aid of a machine speaks self-reflexively of its making—the technology
behind it. In this respect there is a quiet, albeit constant, dialogue between the book
and its physical nature. The ideal volume of this dialogue, which we seem to mostly
prefer on a low setting when it comes to mass produced narrative works is instead
turned up significantly by artists’ books. In recent times, artists’ books have come to
incorporate and not merely passively reference technology. In doing so these works
are experimenting with the dilatation of their readers’/users’ bodily experience
connected to the act of reading and interacting with the book object.
Central to the present chapter are the collisions between artists’ books and
technology and alternative “book materials” which, I suggest, show how book
making as an artistic practice seems to consistently position itself at the intersection
of the book’s purported obsolescence, the demands and innovations of modernity, and
the challenges (as well as threats) that new media and technologies pose to the book
form. This is not to say that artists’ books don’t fall into the trappings of their own
genre. Consider for instance the over-worked and over-designed limited editions
books of the 1990s made popular by large distribution which stand as an example of
the artistically inflected book for the book collector and lover—and not as hoped by
Lippard, for the masses.
A specific type of interaction is required by artists’ books that make use of
either a sophisticated engineered construction (whether through paper or the whole
object), or of an “external” technological support. These range from CDs to a
program able to remotely activate the reader’s personal computer’s camera, other
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books instead require an active participation of the reader/user in either “building” or
“going through” certain steps. All of these works demand a bodily experience. In
chapter one I discussed Fifty Years of Silence, a work by artist Tatana Kellner, whose
approach to book art involved placing her work in a wooden crate that once opened
revealed the cast of an arm embedded in a spiral bound booklet in which she recorded
the experience of her parents in concentration camps. Her work asked the viewer to
interact with the object in ways that would mirror her own discovery of her parents’
memories as well as experience what being confronted at all times with a mark
imprinted on a limb might mean. In Kellner’s work the bodily experiences that the
user/reader is called to serve the purpose of creating proximity of experience. In that
first chapter such bodily experience connected with both the visual and the tactile
were read in the light of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on perception and the
body. While in more than one way this chapter will also refer to the concepts fleshed
out earlier it will also try to come to terms with the limits of applying this theoretical
framework to objects that while bridging the symbolic dimension of the book and the
bodily rapport with it are not necessarily invested in dealing themselves with the
perceptual experience.

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3.1.1 From Static to Dynamic: the Body of the Book from Tool to Narrative
Object

In the light of the considerations made so far in terms of the bodily nature of reading
it is not too much of a stretch to see the book as a body itself. In other words to
imagine the book as “hiding” more than the eyes meet just like a human body shows
only its outer image and hides thousands of other details under the skin’s surface.
Taking that metaphor a little further we can say that the book can also be “living” in
the sense that within its inner folds there can be movement as well as other
dimensions. However, much like an automaton of sorts the book itself is an object
which mobility, and indeed “aliveness,” is very finite and predicated upon an
encounter with a human.
If we consider for instance the traditional codex form of the novel we can see
how the object itself allows only for a limited set of voluntary and involuntary
physical gestures: the holding of the codex, the turning of the pages, and the
movement of the eye triggered by the pupil’s interaction with the page. Even though
limited in its range of action the phenomenology of reading has shaped in more than
one way the cultural and social acts of reading. While reading culture per se has
changed over the centuries and ranged from being an activity practiced in group
settings to an intensely private act it remained largely dominated by an object that
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would focus the reader’s attention to the text more than its physical nature.
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Consequently illustrations and visuals conformed to the codex’s physical stipulations,
thus complementing its reading phenomenology. There are however some instances
in the early history of the book that reveal and urge to bend the “rules” of the codex
and add, what I call for lack of a better word, a fourth dimension. This dimension, I
suggest here, is one defined by the idea of dynamism and by interactions with the
object and the text that are not typically associated with the codex form. I would like
to briefly consider here some examples that I propose, have set a precedent for
modern and contemporary efforts to turn the static nature of the book into (and to an
extent that of text as well) into a dynamic one.
In an inspiring lecture delivered in 2010 at the Smithsonian Museum in
Washington DC in conjunction with an exhibit on engineered books Ellen G. Rubin
(known as the Pop-Up Lady, after her passion for collecting early pop-up and
movable parts books and ephemera) presented to her audiences a number of works
containing movable parts. Among the works presented by Rubin stood out for me
some very early examples of codex-form texts with movable parts. Rubin began her
lecture introducing Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk from St Albans, England who
in the first half of the 1200s is credited with having invented a device called the
volvelle, made of a series of super imposed disks attached to the page which moved

122
Bury, Stephen. Artists' Books: The Book As a Work of Art, 1963-1995. Aldershot, Hants, England:
Scholar Press, 1995, p.6
The one exception that must be mentioned is the production of pop-up books and movable parts books.
I am however, not including these here because they were primarily understood as toys and geared for
children. These book objects are works of art in their own right, examples of masterful engineering and
design that truly succeeded in bringing books to life.
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by a string functioned as a calendar. In the second half of that same century Ramon
Lull, a philosopher and logician from Spain included in his logics treatise Ars Magna
a similar device, a more complex and sophisticated version of Paris’ calendar that
allowed for a large number of combinatory instances of philosophical and theological
arguments that regardless of their combination would prove the validity of the
Christian faith. About four hundred years later, Rubin explained how due to the
paucity of corpses available for dissection Johann Remmelin became inspired to
create a flap book by the title Catoptrum microcosmicum (1619) that was conceived
by its author as an educational tool for students who after having learned the
fundamentals of anatomy would, literally, by opening one flap at the time “enter” a
human body in the book and with every flap discover a “human layer” (under the skin
layer would be the muscles layer, and then the veins and the organs).
123
With no
artistic flare intended to make them appealing the function of these three works was
primarily a didactic one. And while ingenious, the presence of these movable parts
was not a guarantee of either enhanced acquisition of a specific type of knowledge or
of a better understanding of the subject matter explored in the book on the part of the
readers. But the idea, developed in those early stages of book culture, that tactile
interaction through movable book parts would equate to discovering, uncovering, and
participating in an experience recurs in many contemporary artists books.
I have come across one specific work that struck me for both its participatory
nature and the resemblance to Remmelin’s work while at the same time being at the

123
Smithsonian Museum, access date July 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDJJOaZ1myM
169

opposite end of the textual spectrum. In 2002 artist Micheal Peven underwent heart
surgery and in 2006 he printed “Open…Heart Surgery” an artist book printed in
limited copies chronicling both his physical changes before and after the surgery as
well as showing the “inside” repair his heart went through. Peven’s book is a rather
small square work with a solid cardboard back panel and a front panel that opens as a
box’s top, in a sense thus the “cover” is also a flap. The photographic material that
“narrates” this experience is printed with an inkjet printer on 71⁄4” x 81⁄2” pages of
matte paper. While sophisticated in nature Peven’s work is very much adhering to the
lo-fi quality of which Lucy Lippard spoke in her essay.
Once opened the book reveals engineered paper flaps that allow the user to
“enter” both the physical object as well as, metaphorically, Peven’s chest.
Immediately upon opening the first flap, which shows a photographic reproduction of
Peven’s chest pre-surgery, the user enters the author’s body by prying apart the first
flap exactly where the surgery scar will be eventually placed. The second and third
flaps represent precisely the scar; again we see photographs of Peven’s chest, this
time divided in two by a long string of stitches. The edges of each flap are fringed to
match symbolically the edges of torn, stitched-together skin. The third flap opens
diagonally, and already the user can start to feel a certain resistance from the paper,
which makes it harder to keep the book open. Two perspectival layers appear here:
the position of the reader meshing with that of the surgeon who performed Peven’s
procedure and the artist’s own perception of how his body looked as it was operated
upon. Additionally a third layer might also be added and identified as the didactic
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one. In this respect Peven’s work is not too dissimilar from that of Remmelin, both
books show through what could be called here an “immersive” process the inner
workings of the human body.
The third flap opens into an x-ray image of Peven’s chest, which in turn opens
onto the most whimsical part of the book. The fifth flap is a photograph of an
anatomical model, one of those plastic educational tools often found in high school
biology classes. The two sides of the page on which we see the photograph of the
ribcage and the organs it protects are held together, right were the sternum is, by a
metal string that the user must untie in order to proceed to the next page. The sixth
flap thus reveals a photograph of rib-less gleaming organs in their cheap plastic
splendor. The following flap is the heart proper (still a plastic one) and a black string
holds the two flaps together. Here we are in the thick of Peven’s body and his
surgery. In the breaking down, flap by flap, of his chest we do not necessary “learn”
how to perform surgery but we are taught about what it means to get to the heart of a
man both literally and metaphorically. The heart of the book as well as Peven’s
physical heart are one and the same, and while the subject matter is certainly a loaded
one--the trauma of surgery, scars, learning that something is wrong with one’s body--
Peven’s whimsical twists allow for a meaningful involvement of the user. In pulling
apart the last flap which is held together by waxed linen thread, which likely
references the sutures used by Peven’s surgeon, the user gets to the last layer. Having
untangled the thread and pulled apart the flap the very last photograph of the book
appears revealing a young blond woman, reminiscent of an old fashioned pin-up girl,
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holding a large plastic heart that covers her entire body with the exception of her legs.
The lack of text in this work has the effect of allowing the user to experience what is,
in a sense, a word-less experience. While there is no textual narrative of surgery as
none of the photographs on the flap have words, the story that is told by visuals and
the interaction with the object itself create a narrative of their own. Peven’s way of
creating a progression of the flaps that suggests a journey towards something (in this
case his heart) successfully weaves a “narrative” of the surgery while also winking at
the educational aspect using a school model of a heart and ribcage. The participatory
nature and the lack of text in Peven’s book exist in a compensatory relationship that
underscores how artists’ books’ wordlessness does not imply a lack of narrative, and
the dynamic-interactive aspect contributes significantly to this alternative way of
storytelling.
I suggest here that while Peven’s work and that of Remmelin may be
understood as polar opposites they also both speak to the idea of the book as an
instrument. In the introduction to her recent book on Mallarmé’s interest in book arts
and the transformation of print culture titled precisely The Book as Instrument, art
historian Anna Sigridur Arnar argues that Stephane Mallarmé envisioned the book as
a “[…] specific site to engage a modern public,” indeed as an instrument and tool that
“[…] could occupy the center of daily civic life, providing sustenance and creative
freedom for a diversified public […].”
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The instrumental nature of the book can
thusly be understood both as that of a vehicle of knowledge and as a tool that

124
Arnar, Anna S. The Book As Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist's Book, and the
Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp.1-2
172

promotes, as noted by Mallarmé’s, creative freedom. It is within the framework of
creative freedom that the book manifests itself in many different iterations and
becomes a tool that is used as a mean to explore specific experiences as shown, for
instance, by the work on trauma and memory by Tatana Kellner. Moreover, the tool
itself may be put under the magnifying lens and questioned in its function as a vehicle
of knowledge as done both by Emilio Isgrò and Luigi Serafini in their investigation of
the power dynamics involved in the encyclopedic projects. Lastly the book is an
instrument in the physical sense, it is an object that the reader/user is often called to
play with and experience beyond the narrative realm. In this chapter I will thus
engage with works that take to task the concepts of instrument and interactivity. I will
investigate here furthermore the narratives that are constructed through the
interactions that exceed those made available by the codex form and its treatment of
text.

3.1.2 Physical and Textual Hybridity: The Mutant Nature of the Artist Book.

One of the most wistful thoughts that the book lover is always contending with is that
the book’s beloved, comforting format will change— and for the worse. Much like
the encyclopedic compiler starting his endeavor from a place of anxiety, the anxiety
of the possible loss of knowledge, the book lover fears the loss of the familiar object.
Unlike the encyclopedic compiler however, the book lover does not fear loss of
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content as much as he/she fears a different interaction with the object that carries it.
This is very true of this specific moment in our times when technology such as the
computer has become increasingly available and portable. But in the early 1900s for
instance, the Italian Futurists saw the infiltration of technology in every aspect of
daily life as a welcome and necessary change. It was among the members of this
relatively geographically contained, yet quite influential literary and artistic
movement devoted to the idea of technological progress that daring experimentations
reflecting a very literal equation between modernity and the material form of the book
took place.
In disposing of all things passate, the Italian futurists, under the guide of
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, sought to infuse all aspects of culture with the idea of
modernity and science. Since Futurism as a movement was, it is safe to say,
conceived as pervasive of all the aspects of cultural and social life, its members
understood “modernization” as a process that would involve changes in clothing,
food, home décor, advertisement, plastic arts, visual arts, performing arts, and
literature. In particular the revitalization of Italian language and literature, especially
of poetry, necessitated according to the Futurists a typographic revolution, as
Marinetti himself wrote in L’Immaginazione Senza Fili e le Parole in Libertà (1913).
Such revolutionary attack on the form was to be:
[…] directed against the boorish and nauseating notion of the verse
as formulated by D’Annunzio, of paper […] inscribed with […] red
initials and doodles, mythological vegetables, prayer book ribbons,
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epigraphs and roman numbers. The book must be the Futurist
expression of Futurist thought. Not only that. My revolution is
directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page,
which is contrary to flux and reflux […] The typographic revolution
that I’ve proposed will enable me to imprint words (words already
free, dynamic, torpedoing forward (every velocity of the stars,
clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, drops of sea foam,
molecules, and atoms.
125

The futurist book not only had to disseminate the ideology of the movement but also
literally and physically embody it. Thus many of the publications made by futurists
are characterized by the rejection of conventional syntax, wild typographic
experimentation, as well as the use of different typefaces (and often even inks) to
convey specific moods, themes, and styles. More importantly the Futurists saw the
book as an object that could not only be modernized but also mechanized, thus
changing dramatically the experience of reading and interacting with it. In the
summer of 1922 architects and painters Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini wrote in
“Manifesto of Mechanical Art” summarizing the characteristic Futurist idolization of
modernity:
Now we are gripped by a compelling need to free ourselves from the
last ruins of old literature, symbolism, decadence, in order to reach

125
Rainey, Lawrence S, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 149-150
175

new starting points for revolt that are based on what makes up our life
today.
Based on MACHINES.
What Boccioni and other intuited (modernolatry) has enchanted us
with new forms imposed by modern mechanics.
Today is The MACHINE that distinguishes our era. Pulleys and
flywheels, bolts an smokestacks, all the polished steel and odor of
grease (the perfume of ozone from power plants). These are the
places that we are irresistibly attracted to. […] the painting of
locomotives, the screams of sirens, cogs, pinions, and all the
mechanical sensation KEEN RESOLUTE which makes up the
atmosphere of our sensibility.
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Such love for the “feel” of modernity was experimented with also outside the realm
of figurative arts. Several examples of “mechanized” book objects from this time
include a well-documented collaboration between graphic artist Tullio D’Albisola,
Marinetti, and artist/poet Bruno Munari. These collaborations resulted in the
production of litolatte books, or litotins; books such as Parole in Libertà Futuriste.
Olfattive, Tattili, Termiche (1932) and L’Anguria Lirica (1934) consisted of pages
made of printed metal sheets that included text, images, and illustrations. In the
“Mechanical Art Manifesto” Pannaggi and Paladini describe with force the “feeling”
of modernization:

126
Rainey, Lawrence S, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009, p.272
176

[…] We feel mechanically, and we sense that we also are made of
steel, we too are machines, we too have been mechanized by our
surroundings. The beauty of transport wagons and the typographic
pleasure of solid thick advertising signs, trucks shuddering and
trembling of a TRUCK, the fantastic architecture of a construction
crane, lucid and cold steels.
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Modernity in Pannaggi and Paladini’s words is very much connected with a specific
material, that is to say metal that, coupled with the “solid” look of advertisement,
spells and screams “MODERNO.” In 1986 Marco Sabatelli Edizioni, a publisher
from Savona, reproduced one of these very rare litotins.
128
This work collects some of
the poetry of Futurist poet Farfa (whose real name was Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini)
that was, albeit with slight changes, present in the original book from 1934. Il
Miliardario della Fantasia was originally “published” in 1933 in Milan and featured
a presentation of Farfa’s work by Marinetti himself as well as illustrations by Munari.
When it was first “published” the textual content of the book was a perfect example
of innovative poetry meeting an innovative format. Among the poems exemplifying
the Futurists’ take on poetry in Il Miliardario della Fantasia is “Magazzino di
distribuzione,” a playful catalogue of punctuation signs that begins by introducing the
letters of the alphabet and then describing punctuation as follows (I am reproducing
here the original formatting):

127
Ibid.
128
Numerous museums own reproductions of Futurists book works that are made available to the
public, as the originals were very limited editions.
177

PUNTI FERMI . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PUNTI INTERROGATIVI ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
PUNTI AMMIRATIVI ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
PUNTI SOSPENSIVI … … … … …
PUNTI DOPPI : : : : : : : : : : :
PUNTI E VIRGOLE ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
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The remainder of the poem is not visually formatted as if it was “in verse,” showing
instead sentences separated by dashes with each word capitalized. Farfa describes
punctuation in his poem as all the “happenstances of western writing—not pasted by
negligence—but by will—by forgetfulness—by ignorance—are gathered here—at
free disposal of those who read […]”
130
inviting the reader to use them as he/she
pleases, placing these punctuation signs wherever the reader perceives them to be
more pleasing.
These metal books with their hard pages covered in typographic experiments
and exquisite lithographic illustrations that reference the geometric, movable, ever
changing futurist impetus exemplify a clear, often very literal, connection between
modernization and materials. In holding this reproduction of the original what appears
most striking is the surprising lightness of the object set off by the stiffness of the
page. Its corners, while by no means dangerous, seem to want to point out

129
My translation: “Still Stops-Question Marks-Admiration Marks-Suspension Points-Double Points-
Stops and Commas. The poem plays slightly with the nomenclature of punctuation. “Punti
Ammirativi” is in fact “Punti Esclamativi” but in switching “admiration” for “exclamation” what Farfa
does here is showing the playfulness of language rather then the prescriptive nature of punctuation.
130
My translation, original “accidenti della scrittura di occidente—non appicciati per negligenza—per
volonta’—per dimenticanza—per ignoranza—sono qui riuniti—a gratuita disposizione di chi legge
[…]”
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(dangerously) how the new revolutionary syntax of the poems is as “cutting” as the
metal that constitutes the physical body of the book. There is a naiveté in the literality
of these works that is so much more powerful when read against many book works
that have forgone the relationship between form and function.
An earlier example of the literal nature of libri futuristi is Fortunato Depero’s
Depero Futurista or Libro Imbullonato from 1927. Created with the specific purpose
of disseminating Depero’s futurist graphic work and be a form of advertisement for
the publishing house that circulated it, this book stood as an embodied manifesto of
futurism. This specific work, in contrast to the litotins, is made of over two hundred
pages (pressed and tissue paper and cardboard) and held together by two metal bolts,
that once unscrewed would have allowed the reader to pull the book apart, giving him
the ultimate freedom to reconstruct it according to his own liking.
131
Depero
Futurista contains both examples of parole in libertà, experiments with typography
for advertising purposes, and slogans such as “W il futurismo W.” The artist/author
himself describes Libro Imbullonato as “dangerous” and possibly “a projectile
weapon” that should not be classified and does not belong in a bookstore or on

131
The idea of recombining a text in different ways seems to have also struck the fantasy of Marcel
Duchamp’s for his “Boite Verte” (1934) as pointed out by Anna Arnara: “ Moreover, Duchamp
consciously decided to place the notes in a box, rather than a bound book, in order to preserve a non
linear structure for the work. […] these unbound notes, like the mobile sheet paper in Le Livre, offer
the possibility of multiple permutations to be maneuvered by individual readers” And similarly n the
“shape” of books it appears that Duchamp had conceptualized also a “[…] a fluid, circular structure for
books appears consistently in Duchamp’s thinking. In an unpublished note for the Large Glass, for
example, he speculated regarding the creation of a “round book.” With no established beginning or
end, this book would either have its “pages unbound and ordered by having the last word of the page
repeated on the following page (no numbered pages)—or…the back made of rings around the which
the pages turn.” Ceaslessly mobile, the reader flips through the pages as if they were a Rolodex.” In
Arnar, Anna S. The Book As Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist's Book, and the
Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 286

179

furniture, which it could abrade. In order to avoid doing so, Depero instructs the
reader to put this “libro meccanico” on a colorful and “supple-yet-resistant Depero
pillow.” What the Futurist book project seems to point towards is the idea that the
book is a familiar but “foreign” object that carries within itself a potentially disruptive
yet innovative force. The freedom granted to the reader in recombining the book is
not too far from the one granted to the modern reader of the hypertext. It is certainly
this mobility, the infinite nature of the combinations possible—when a page is no
longer fixed—that is both so enticing and scary about the un-constructed (and indeed
de-constructed) carrier of text—be it in paper or on screen. What the combinatory
approach also highlights however, are the formulaic nature of the book itself and the
finite nature of reading. Regardless of all the possible combinations that the
reader/user may come up with Depero’s work is meant to return to an iteration of the
codex form. Even the textual rearranging which is contingent upon the physical
rearranging of the pages is finite and will only allow for a certain amount of the
reader/user input. While the reading order of the typographical items may change and
the shape of the book shift to a certain extent, the essence of reading will not.
For all its positive harnessing of the forward momentum brought by
technological advancements of the time and blending it with the “passé” technology
of the codex the Futurists’ “modernolatry” to borrow from Pannagi and Paladini, did
not call for the total annihilation of the book form. I suggest here that the Futurists’
mechanization of the book was an early attempt to create a “positive” technological
hybrid. Proving that resistance to technology is futile and counterproductive, that
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turning one’s back to the past is not necessarily a traumatic break but a necessary
state of liminality. It is in that liminal space that transitions from one state to another
can take place. In the case of artists’ books it is indeed a move from static to dynamic
and from homogenous/normative to hybrid. This hybridity can then separate in two
different strands: one that generates a “mutant” book with changes occurring at the
level of the physical object and the other happening instead at the semantic level.

3.1.3 Readers and Users: Multi-media Artists’ Books, Readership, and Pleasure.

The impetus to technologically enhance the book did not vanish with Futurism. But
we also must remember that machines and mechanical progress at the cultural
junction in Europe in which Futurism found itself were also vehicles of specific
ideologies and aesthetics, which, is a significant difference between technologically
inflected works of that time and contemporary ones. Today technology, and
especially computer technology, is depicted as constantly threatening to end the life
the codex book form as we know it, much more aggressively than the rather dramatic
shift from paper to tin of the Futurist’s litotins. It is perhaps possible to identify in the
relatively long life span of the codex form vis-à-vis the development of human
culture part of the anxiety connected to its “loss.” The codex book is a familiar object
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and a cultural marker that has transcended like few other objects time and space. And
it is perhaps for the same reason that the codex is increasingly feared as obsolete.
In 1994 at a scholarly symposium held in San Marino, Umberto Eco delivered
a presentation in which, with his usual mix of humor and concern, he took to task the
Cassandras prophesizing the demise of the book at the hands of computer technology.
Among the many relevant contributions made in his speech, some stand out with
greater relevance with respect to the subject matter of this dissertation. Eco notes, for
instance, how technologic advancements will indeed make certain “kinds” of books,
such as encyclopedias and manuals, indeed obsolete. Obsolescence in this case is not
to be identified either in the transmission of knowledge or in the act of reading but
instead in the material support employed to perform those two actions. The physical
nature of cumbersome formats such as encyclopedias and manuals is, in fact, an
obstacle to the accessing of the knowledge they “carry.” Yet the same cannot be said
of a novel, for instance, whose “portable” nature does not infringe on the possibility
of the reader to access, at the very least the physical object if not its contents
comfortably. According to Eco: “ Books will remain indispensable not only for
literature, but for any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to
receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it.” What seems crucial
in Eco’s statement is how he correlates the physical object (the codex) with an
enhanced experience of reception/speculation/reflection. What Eco is suggesting in
his speech is that these three functions are either diminished or impacted negatively
by the electronic format—and perhaps by any other format. If the format indeed
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affects our ability to receive knowledge, speculate about it, and reflect upon it what
do we make of those artists’ books that via their codex-defying formats ask us to
altogether read by different means? And does reading by different means always
mean appropriating the title of “user” of books? In this chapter I am interested in
showing how the confluence of book-construction techniques and current
technologies in the artist book re-mediates the book object and in doing so demands
that the reader practice reading by other means and does indeed become a user.
Enmeshed with the pleasure of reading mentioned by Umberto Eco is also
Roland Barthes’ pleasure of the text. Before moving into the specific works
considered in this section it might be productive to briefly address the concepts put
forth by Barthes as they, I believe, are helpful in illuminating some of the most
engaging aspects of artists’ books. In his seminal work The Pleasure of the Text from
1973, Barthes points out an extremely important aspect connected with his theory of
pleasure—that is to say, the redistribution of language. According to Barthes the
redistribution of language is defined by the simultaneous presence of breaks and
collisions, opposing codes, new linguistic stances, and a combination of varying
degrees of high and low registers. Such redistribution is achieved according to
Barthes “by cutting.”
132
This concept is paramount for the readership of artists’ books
because, as I have suggested before these works inhabit a space that is defined by two
edges, edges that stem from the cutting above and that are defined as follows:

132
Barthes, Roland, Richard Miller, and Richard Howard. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1975, p.6
183

Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the
language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it has been
established by schooling, good usage, literature, culture), and another
edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never
anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of
language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring
out, are necessary. Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the
seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so. […]
Whence, perhaps, a means of evaluating the works of our modernity:
their value would proceed from their duplicity. By which it must be
understood that they always have two edges.
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I suggest here that these two edges and the identification of the erotics of textual
pleasure in “the seam” between culture and its destruction are the space in which the
pleasure of the artist’ book itself is to be found. Artists’ books may be engaging in the
practice of text (as suggested by Garrett Stewart) and in that of reading by other
means, but in them one always finds a somewhat “obedient, conformist, plagiarizing
edge,” be it the copying of language or the signifiers of language as defined by
culture. The other edge, the “mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours)” one is the
physical body of the artist book, in which indeed we see the death of language.
Between the two is sheer pleasure, to be found in the contrast to the materiality and
text, and perhaps in the subtle battling of form working against content.

133
Barthes, Roland, Richard Miller, and Richard Howard. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1975, p.6-7
184

What to make of text then? Barthes isolates (cuts?) two kinds of texts:
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text
that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a
comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a
state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain
boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological
assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to
a crisis his relation with language.
134

In addition to the reading and textual pleasures outlined so far I propose there also
exist what I call here “the pleasure of return.” Because of its hyper-present physical
and open nature the artist book is also an object to which the reader/user (hopefully)
desires to return to in order to either renew the experience of interacting with it or
engender a new one. In other words, the staying power of the artists’ books is not
merely defined by its content, its design, and a successful combination of the two. It
also resides in the ability of the book to draw in the reader multiple times. I would
also like to suggest that is in the multiplicity of returns allowed by the ability to
manipulate the book via its technical component and thus produce (or reproduce) a
novel experience that a major difference can be drawn between artists’ and normative
books. In this respect artists’ books seem to have a great deal more in common with

134
Barthes, R. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975, p.14
185

internet and electronic arts, where participation and input from audiences contributes
to or affects the performative aspect of the art work.
135

While I am hesitant to identify the intrinsic limitations of certain artists’ books
as failures, I do agree with the view expressed by Janet Zweig in her article by the
telling title “All dressed up with nowhere to go: The failure of artists’ books” in the
Journal of Artist Books from 1995. In the article, Zweig aside from taking issue with
many of the received wisdoms about artists’ books also notes how many of these
works don’t hold any staying power after they have been interacted with briefly.
Zweig, much like Drucker and Lippard, forcefully asserts the need for the artist book
to have a reason to be in that specific format and not limit itself to be a fanciful prop
for a poor idea. My personal experience with artists’ books is that the desire to
endlessly return to them is not different from the desire to re-read a beloved novel or
essay and that indeed that wish to return, to “look for” a new nuance in the work is
essential for both narrative and artists’ books alike. In this respect I think of Luigi
Serafini’s work for instance. The Codex Seraphinianus, a work in which text has been
completely evacuated in favor of a new visual language and even more of an entirely
new linguistic system, invites its reader to multiple returns precisely because of its
open/close nature. In Agnetti’s work, Obsoleto, where the erasure of syntax and
physical language challenges the comforts of reading the familiar textual practice of
the novel, the pleasure of the text is that of a text of bliss. Via what is almost a
negative connotative process the reader is called to cope with loss of syntax and

135
See: Popper, Frank. Art--action and Participation. New York: New York University Press, 1975.
186

narrative schemes; Agnetti’s work asks us first and foremost to “see” text in its
simplicity and beauty as it graces the pages of the codex form and only then to read it
(only, of course, to frustrate all our expectations about it).
Both Serafini’s and Agnetti’s work are artists’ books that hinge upon the
traditional codex form. Their phenomenology of reading is precisely the one I
outlined earlier in this chapter. It is a phenomenology not different from the one we
would experience when reading a novel. What differs here are the cognitive processes
that we are called to activate in order to generate meaning.
There are however, artists’ books which physical form requires a type of
interactivity on the part of the user/reader that is not germane to the codex form.
These works stand as a counterpoint to avant-garde artists’ books and their idea of
mechanization. The product of a careful design and of technological means, these
works have a very dynamic presence. I am referring here to artists’ books that require
a high level of interactivity. As I mentioned earlier, interactivity is perhaps one of the
most interesting features of the artist book. Often it is also however its own greatest
limitation. I will not belabor here on this point, preferring to focus instead on the
pleasure of interaction with these book objects and trying to point out how these
artists’ book stretch both the idea of “book” and that of reading.

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3.1.4 The Voice of the Book: The Palaver by Gad Hollander and Andrew Bick

There are a staggering variety of iterations of what are considered “interactive”
artists’ books. By interaction I understand here works that involve the reader/user by
literally “asking” to perform a specific task or physical movement that is not
contemplated the phenomenology of codex reading.
136

In order to restrict the field to a manageable size I have decided to concentrate
on works that make use of very specific types of supports and methods of
construction. In researching works that rely on either mechanical parts or
technological supports I came across The Palaver by Gad Hollander and Andrew
Bick (1999), an artist book that is accompanied by a CD. When I began working on
this artist book I was struck and enticed by the idea that the CD with which a limited
number of the book’s edition come with would offer and element that is rarely
associated with book, and that is sound. The Palaver is a rather small booklet printed
with a soft cover, containing text and photographs which, as noted in the description
found on the website of the “art commissioning organization,” Bookworks, through
which The Palaver was published, this artist book was:
Originally produced as a ‘photo roman’ book, in 1998, The Palaver
was created as a story-board for an imaginary film consisting of

136
These tasks range from either following specific steps in the “operating” of the book designed by
the artist to having to pull, push, unfold, draw, and turn on a device in conjunction with the experience
of reading.
188

photographs that have an elusive but familiar quality, sourced in
various European locations with corresponding text. Each image
presents a sense of deja-vu typical of the emotions felt whilst
travelling. This feeling is compounded by the addition of blue line
drawings super-imposed on each image that operate as a form of
‘punctuation’ and accentuate potential meanings within the work.
[…]The title ‘Palaver’ implies or refers to the idea of ‘around idle
speech’, the text is layered with meanings and its presentation is both
erotic and voyeuristic whilst alluding to the tensions between text, or
in the case of the CD, ‘dialogue’ and image.
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It is conceivable that none of the information made available by the website is
absolutely self-evident to the reader/user of the book as he she holds it in their hands.
Still, it does not take necessarily too sophisticated of a reader to infer a connection
between The Palaver and the cinematic medium. Specifically I propose here, The
Palaver’s slick use of photographic images makes it an interesting book parallel to
the film La jetée by Chris Marker. While the narrative developed within The Palaver
is by no means similar to that of Marker’s short film there are some interesting points
of connection. The Palaver, for instance, employs a montage-like technique of black
and white photographs organized sequentially on the page. The staccato rhythm
offered by the codex form reinforces the feeling of a story unfolding. The
photography in The Palaver is purposefully grainy and somewhat haphazard in its

137
Bookworks, access date May 2012, http://www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1480
189

composition. Its quasi-familiar and demure nature further drives the point that we
might have already seen the photographic image elsewhere or perhaps even lived it.
The relationship between text/word and image in The Palaver is not necessarily
manifest and does not provide a narrative arch, as does the narration in Marker’s film,
although it is possible to infer the presence of at least two well-defined “characters.”
Early on in the book, for instance, appears a photograph of a woman crossing the
street (the top portion of her body circled by a mysterious yet ubiquitous circle traced
with a blue marker). The angle of the photograph suggests that the picture has been
taken from a higher vantage point than that of the subject, thus creating a sense for
the reader that the woman is being spied on. The text found immediately below the
image appears to be a stream of consciousness of sorts, the possible “output” of the
second character manifest in The Palaver. Lacking punctuation and systematization,
this text is quite literally a stream of words that is up to the reader to connect with the
images. Here the correlation between the image and the text is loose, but palpable in
its very basic terms: “[…] way the woman whose position makes it difficult yes
impossible for a sudden movement a signal of desire of lust to be transmitted so you
repress the impulse you wonder if that said corse [sic.] is what we call love that
persistent yearning to touch her breast [..]” I am resistant to say here that there is any
challenge for the reader other then the glaring lack of punctuation (but Farfa the
futurist had already said we could place it wherever we wanted, did he not?).
Incidentally Agnetti had already experimented with truly disrupting syntax in ways
that absolutely barred any possibility on the part of the reader to elicit meaning.
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Without its technological component The Palaver would perhaps be one of those
artists’ books disparaged by Zweig and Lippard for their lack of depth. It is only
when the material on the CD that comes with The Palaver is played in conjunction
with the booklet itself that the book quite literally comes to life.
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The recordings present in the disc are readings of the text part of the artist
book performed by two humans and a computer generated voice. The overlapping of
the female, male, and computer generated voice contribute to creating the feeling that
one is listening, as the title of the book suggests, to “idle talk.” While exploring the
purportedly “cinematic” nature of The Palaver one is however reminded that the book
is merely referencing the visual space of the cinematic screen. In fact The Palaver is
not cinematic at all, unless we buy into the clever description on Bookworks’ website,
what it is instead is audio-visual as understood by French composer and filmmaker
Michel Chion. In that aspect The Palaver is also not necessarily successful as—or
because it is—a book. A few months ago however, The Palaver became substantially
more interesting to me when I discovered that Gad Hollander, one of the authors of
the published version of the book had posted on VIMEO (a social network focused on
video sharing) a “visual transcription” of the original Palaver. Hollander’s video-
posting has added a whole new dimension to his artist book. In the video not only do
we physically see page by page the original booklet and hear the CD track as we
watch the pages being turned as they are being read. In this video rendering the

138
My assumption is that the tracks are either meant to played in conjunction with one’s reading of the
physical book or they may be listened to independently from it, since these tracks do not provide any
further information on the text or the pictures.
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photograph on the page is often replaced by a video fragment within the video itself
while the text below it remains unchanged. These video fragments, ranging from
excerpts of old films, to scenes shot by Hollander himself. In one of them for
instance, we see the booklet of The Palaver disassembled and its pages flying about.
It is in its video iteration that this book stands as an incredibly poignant example of
the dimensionality that the combination of images and sounds generates, as explored
by Michel Chion in his seminal text Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen (1990). Chion’s
work focused predominantly on the relationship between moving images (film, both
narrative and experimental) and sounds, whether the sound of the human voice, the
soundtrack-that is the more or less coherent set of sounds present in a movie—or a
proper musical score. Among the numerous points of interest of Chion’s work are his
concepts of the added value and temporalization of the image by sound and the
presence of the so-called acousmêtre which I see at work in the The Palaver.
According to Chion an added value is
[…] the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches
a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate
or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or
expression ”naturally” comes from what is seen, and is already
contained in the image itself.
139

Temporalization for Chion is a phenomenon that manifests in three distinct ways: in
the first one sound is the flow of time in the image between two polar opposites one

139
Chion, Michel, and Claudia Gorbman. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994, p.5
192

tangible the other ephemeral. In the second case sound endows images that may be
chronologically incongruous with cohesion when it is cohesive itself. In the third case
it provides a direction for the image, a tension towards something.
140
But how is the
concept of time different in an artist book than in a linear book or a set of moving
images? Dan Graham has suggested, for instance, that already in Mallarmé’s book
works “time exists in a moment-to-moment specificity; its duration and structure
being formally identified with the constituent group of “readers” whose presence
literally in-forms it.”
141
It ought to be kept in mind that artist books re-orient both
time and space for their readers in general, but more specifically and manifestly, I
suggest here, when they ask the reader to participate with physical actions other then
those of turning the pages and holding the book itself. In the light of these
considerations it is safe to say that the mechanical component of the book establishes
a relationship by which “life” given to a book is to be understood as dynamism, and
that this dynamic existence is predicated upon an active engagement of the reader.
Chion was primarily thinking of film, and thus of sound, as a parallel
phenomenon to that of the appearance of the image on screen. Still, I propose here
that in the The Palaver the intention of the CD voice track is precisely to allow for
sound to temporalize a set of images and function as a replacement for the lack of
punctuation and temporal connotation in the text. The Palaver’s use of three different
voices, a female, a male, and a computer generated voice that is reminiscent of those

140
Idem. pp.13-14
141
Arnar, Anna S. The Book As Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist's Book, and the
Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011, p.289
193

used by computer software designed to “transcribe” into sounds text written by those
unable to use their voices, is in my opinion not unlike Chion’s concept of the
acousmêtre. The latter is an “acousmatic” character […] whose relationship to the
screen involves a specific kind of ambiguity and oscillation […] We may define it as
neither outside or inside the image.”
142
Its function in the cinematic realm is that of
working as a conducting body of tension, its liminal nature—not quite inside or
outside the image, omniscient but not always fully understanding of the images it
speaks of or for—invested with a great dramatic power. I suggest here that in The
Palaver the liminality and power of the acousmêtre find an awkward resolution in the
book form and a more meaningful one in the video transcription. Even though The
Palaver shows how the dimension of sounds plays with the textual and visual one, via
the introduction of sound as a bodily experience, I question the limitations of the
perception that is structured in the book form. It appears to me that in the book
version of the work this principle is somewhat lost. Such loss is determined by the
physical “distance” between the CD and the book itself and between the static nature
of both the photographs and the text. The opposite is true in its video iteration, where
the moving images and the sounds complement and inform each other in a truly
cinematic way. Effectively however, The Palaver succeeds in one major aspect in
both its formats, and that is to say for the user/reader to enter and experience the
book—an otherwise “mute” object—by way of sound.

142
Chion, Michel, and Claudia Gorbman. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994, p.129
194

3.1.5 Dynamic Book Disruptions: Julie Chens’ Full Circle and Karen Bleitz’s
Mechanical Words.

As I hope to have shown the fascination with the merging of books and technology
certainly did not die with the end of the futurist movement. One could argue that the
increased ease in the production and reproduction of photographic material and the
development of low cost printing have only increased the number of artists who are
willing and able to merge the two in their book production. Clearly today technology
means to us something very different than what it meant for the Futurists, but a
similar impetus behind the integration of books with technology and in general
materials otherwise not associated with the book form seems very much present.
It seems to me that the idea of “adding” to the book form reflects the
perception that addition is equated with enhancement and that, as I hope to have
shown so far, is not necessarily always the case, depending as much on the context as
it does on the object itself. As noted earlier this chapter explores artists’ books that
involve a certain amount of designed mechanization or have a technologic
component. So far I have shown works that while maintaining a close proximity to
the traditional book form incorporate both text, image, and sound using some form of
technology or material associated with mechanics/technology.
In stark contrast to these artists’ books explored so far stands the work of Julie
Chen, which dramatically abstracts the book form by turning it in to a “device.” This
strategy is coherent with the idea of making language concrete, dynamic, and
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“interactive,” but I suggest here that it its lack with proximity to the physical form of
the book relegates it to a liminal space in the realm of artists’ books, pushing it in fact
into the realm of book-object—but here too I should say that I am tentative in terms
of this definition because I see an extremely tenuous connection with the book form.
Julie Chen has said of her work in a television interview broadcasted by PBS
that: “In my mind, I’m trying to give the viewer/reader an experience that has to do
with reading—that has to do with a one-on-one physical experience with the object.
Even though I’m getting more and more away from physical book structures, it’s still
solidly in my mind, a book.” In her book-object Full Circle (2005) the traditional
book form is indeed completely subverted while allowing the user/reader an
experience that is only tangentially connected to language and reading. Chen’s work
is, I propose, an outstanding example of Lippard’s description of a self-designating
artist book. Musing on the poetics of faith understood as a cycle, Chen’s work
explores its various stages understood as a set of intersecting circles. As I mentioned
earlier, this specific artist book dispenses altogether with the book form. Full Circle is
in fact a box that must be opened in order to physically engage with it. Unlike
Kellner’s crate, which contained the physical book containing the testimony, Chen’s
work once opened reveals nothing but a cube. The outside of the cube is covered by
luscious aqua colored shantung fabric; the top cover of the box has one carved circle
with two smaller circles inscribed with the author’s name, the title, the publication
date and the publishing house—this perhaps being the only formal element still close
to a traditional book. In removing the top part of the box it is immediately apparent
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that relating to this object is an experience diametrically opposite to the engagement
with the codex form. Overlapping pink, green, and yellow circles “map,” as if in a
combinatory game, the author’s contentious relationship with the very idea of belief.
Each circle is inscribed with sentences such as the following: “Things I remember
believing in/things I was taught to believe in/ things I will always believe in/ Things I
forgot to believe in /Things I need to believe in//Things I was told to believe
in/Things I profess to believe in/Things I remember believing in/ Things I made an
effort to believe in.” The center of the square holds the fulcrum of the mechanism that
constitutes the book and thus situates the interactive locus. While combinations
resulting from the movement of the circles do not come to prove any specific idea
about faith they are very much reminiscent of Ramon Lull’s Ars Magna rotating book
devices. They both seem to suggest that the key to subscribing to any belief resides in
the way in which we “spin” its narrative.
The “body” of Chen’s book object hides a rotating wheel that the user can
spin thanks to a small slot on the right hand side of the cube. In moving the wheel,
five slots/windows that intersperse the circles of faith reveal each a number, a word, a
sentence, an object, and a letterpress illustration of a body part for a total of twelve
wheel movements. A small slot on the side of the cube invites the user to pull a red
tab that appears only in conjunction to a certain movement of the wheel and
corresponds to only three of the numbers that appear in the windows. When the tab is
pulled it reveals a small drawer covered with fabric, hosting a folded pocket that
opens into a pop up. Each one of the pop ups represents a crucial junctions in the
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cycle of love/faith (1-Infatuation, 2-Estrangement, 3-Reunion). The twelve
“movements” of the wheel compose a poetic narrative that combines not only text,
but also images and objects. The sum of all these parts is meant to create a multi-
sensorial experience of reading. The sentences that are revealed every time the wheel
is moved appear to compose a poem of sorts. Which, if printed on paper sequentially
would read as follows:
I speak to you but you cannot hear me
I reach for you but you are not there
In your absence I secretly envision you
I lose myself in the idea of you
I wait for the response that never comes
I beseech you in silence, needing to ask
But not wanting to hear the answer
I turn my face away in sorrow and shame
I search for an alternate explanation
I choose to accept the slightest of evidence
In my never ending need to believe
I dream that you are the answer that I seek

The literary nature of this composition is unspoiled by being transposed “on paper”
and yet the experience of interacting physically with the “book,” that of discovering
connections between objects and words, and ultimately connecting each sentence
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with the concomitant objects, images, and words that appear in the four windows
adds a whole new dimension to it. It is in its “radical materiality” and through its own
unique interactivity that the pleasure or reading, the pleasure of text found between
two very sharp edges, and lastly the pleasure of returning to the object, take place in
Chen’s work. In the artist’s view, through this kind of interaction, each reader is
allowed to generate his own meaning following a very personal and intimate pattern
of association between words, images, and objects. Thus, I propose here that the sheer
movement involved in the moving of the wheel and the opening of the drawers
creates a connection between the abstract and the physical that highlights both the
ephemerality and materiality of the word while resonating with a radical and yet
playful idea of book disruption. Chen’s work in its rejection of the book format and
deliberate object design is consistent with a trend (applicable to book arts and other
artistic practices as well) identified both by Garrett Stewart and Joanna Drucker.
Stewart specifically, in retracing Drucker’s steps of her chronological assessment of
art after modernism, maintains with poignancy that in what:
[…] one may call a maximalizing [sic.] of material options, current
trends in aesthetic imaging, no longer medium preoccupied—but not
strategically mediated either (as was often the case under
conceptualism)—now consort with the products of commercial media
and commodity culture in a less elitist colloquy with spectators. In
material terms, the result is often a medial hodgepodge of sheer stuff,
whether fabricated or assembled. Sculptural elements, for instance, are
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clutched together from the flux of a world whose materiality they
don’t pretend, let alone begin, to transcend.
143

What Stewart’s observations highlight is the notion that current artistic practices,
including artists’ books, have shifted quite radically their approach to materiality. In
doing so they have in a sense reclaimed the right of the artist to engage with a
physicality that may at times feel and look indeed like a mash up of different media—
but that in doing so is in fact an image of the present time. This seems particularly
true of artists’ books, and specifically even more so of book objects like Chen’s Full
Circle. Wishing to provide the user with a reading experience, an experience that
takes place by means of a device and not a book, Chen’s book object exposes the
limits of the device vis-à-vis the codex form. While the maximalizing, to borrow from
Stewart, of material options has effectively allowed for a more expansive creative and
expressive freedom, it has at the same time I propose here, restricted the interstitial
space between text and page where much of reading and textual pleasure takes place.
Along the premises outlined up until now is the work of another contemporary
artist, Karen Bleitz collaborating with poet Richard Price, whose engagement with
machines and mechanics showcases yet another iteration of codex disruption and user
interactivity. Speaking at the Codex Symposium at UC Berkeley in 2009 about her 5
“volume” artist book Bleitz stated that she had created a “mechanical language”
resulting from the mechanical parts incorporated in her 5 volume-artist’s book. At the
inception of her project Bleitz was drawn to the very idea of language and the

143
Stewart, G., Bookworks, pp. 84-5
200

possibilities opened up by the creation of a new one by means other than the
alphabetical one. Bleitz’s contention was shaped primarily by what she considered as
manipulative forces being mobilized through language by media exercising power on
words. Bleitz saw the smallest common denominator, the word itself, as getting
invariably lost and abused in the public arena. Connecting (at least ideally) with a
long tradition that interrogates the status of nouns in language Bleitz wondered:
“Could there be another kind of writing system that would allow you to peel back the
complex histories embedded in proper nouns,” a system that could indeed be stripped
to the point of being able to convey unequivocally a specific meaning. In order to
achieve this effect Bleitz looked into a strategy used by a specific teaching
methodology, the Montessori method. Here grammatical instances such as subject
and verb are associated to specific geometric shapes. Ultimately however, Bleitz
found herself dissatisfied with the minimalism of this approach, which seemed to
both leave out a substantial chunk of information that words in and of themsleves
instead, are able to convey, disposing with what she saw as the most important
element of language: its descriptive/dynamic nature. To replace words with shapes
means to erase the larger cognitive and semantic map that comes with words, which
are ultimately something that in the book form is—no matter how disruptive the
intervention—impossible to dispose of. In the works considered in the present
dissertation, words even though erased, eroded, manipulated, and even fabricated
remain still the smallest common denominator; their presence and their relevance
often reinforced by the pointing to a significant absence. But as I have noted
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throughout this research words and therefore text as well as the act of reading must be
understood in a broad perspective in the context of artists’ books. Thus, works such as
Isgrò’s, Serafini’s, and even Peven’s, disrupting language and text seem to turn
towards ways of, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter, generating text and
interacting with it by other means. Still, I would say, that all the works addressed in
this dissertation show that there exists a well defined textual-semantic dimension that,
as Bleitz’s experiment with shapes replacing words shows, allows for language to
exist in a meaningful way while its dynamic nature is brought out in and by the
physical dimension of the artist book.
Bleitz’ work opens up several lines of inquiry, what however is more relevant
for the purpose of the present research, is that her intent in The Mechanical Word was
to “use machines to look at the dynamic relationships - people and power
relationships - that grammatical rules quietly and sometimes noisily suggest." In a
process of “peeling” layers of language structure, Bleitz came to focus on four
specific verbs, to be, to have, to go, and to do, which in her perspective were both
basic and dynamic. In her first experiment with the substitution of grammatical parts
with shapes Bleitz dealt with static shapes. In The Mechanical Word, Bleitz took a
step forward associating shapes with motions. Thus, in the sentence “You are happy”
visually the subject “You” is substituted with a circle and an arrow indicating rotation
is attached to. Rotation will stand for the verb “Are,” if the rotation is indicated as
clock-wise the arrow will stand for “Are Happy” if it is counter clock-wise it will
signify “Are Unhappy.” No rotation indicated will instead signify merely “Are,” or a
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state of neutrality with respect to feeling. In the association of motion and words
Bleitz’s work seems to connect with Julie Chen’s approach to connecting the
movement of certain mechanisms to words as ones generating specific and new
narratives. Bleitz’s work however, is not concerned with the combinatory nature of
open narratives as much as it is with the consequences that movement has
“physically” on words and the “responsibility” that the reader must take in
deliberately modifying text. There is no coherent narrative to be modified however, as
Bleitz herself notes in her lecture at the Codex Symposium, when language interacts
with a machine, or perhaps better said when language is generated by a mechanical
device, linearity, space, and time are dramatically reconfigured precisely because
machines operate across those categories of thought.
From a material standpoint her “books” mimic traditional texts exclusively in
that their shape replicates that of a bound book—spine, front/back cover, and
sequential “pages.” Each volume of The Mechanical Word is made of three single
aluminum and silkscreened polypropylene “pages” hosted in a silkscreened
polypropylene slipcase, which has the appearance of a CD case. The physical body of
Bleitz’s work is in sense reminiscent, at least conceptually, of the Futurists’ Litolatte
in that both works rely on materials (tin and plastic) that, I propose here, generate a
“material meta-narrative” geared to dialogue with the textual component of the artist
book. In each volume a poem and the layout of the “page” are modified when the
levers and gears that the reader/user is asked to interact with are moved. The text
included in The Mechanical Word is by Richard Price, a representative of the British
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Informationist poetic movement active during the 1990s, who has defined the
movement’s poetic stances in the following way:
They are, firstly, bearers of news: the information they make
available in their poetry includes rather than necessarily opposes
media news because part of their raison d'etre [sic] is to digest and
transmit as many different types of data as they can. Little-known
information, social history and all kinds of "underprivileged" facts,
possibilities and ideas are recontextualised [sic] in their poetry;
hierarchies are exposed. Secondly, in presenting information these
poets also scrutinize that very process, sometimes they parody, often
they extend it: they meddle with "enlightenment" itself. This typically
involves substitution of fantastic but also unfamiliar elements into
patterns of accepted knowledge […] the concerns of the
Informationists range from the apparently frivolous to the
fundamental problems of existence; from antics to the ontic. Indeed,
the word "Informationism" is such a preposterous - yet serviceable! -
phrase, it seems to undermine itself in the short time the reader takes
to get from "In" to "ism". Though the garment is robust, the label is
not only not washable, it's soluble.”
144

144
Price, Richard and W. N. Herbert (eds.), Contraflow on the Super Highway, 1994. Web.
http://www.hydrohotel.net/approach.htm
204

The inclusion of Price’s poetry in Bleitz’s work mirrors her own concerns with the
treatment of language by media as well as the role that artists and authors play in the
transmission and observation of re-mediated language.
In terms of the interplay between text and object it appears that Price had very
well in mind the tradition of the artist book when in writing about his collaboration
with Bleitz he pointed out that his poems, never more than few sentences referencing
Bleitz’s “kinetic-verbs” experimentation in volume 1, are arranged on the “page” to
interact with the mechanical component and not to mirror an image as the traditional
“livre d’artiste” would do.
145
Price’s observation seems to suggest a view of the “le
livre d’artiste” as a static form rather than a dynamic one. The emphasis here is again
on the key concepts of interaction and dynamism, which Price seems to hint to are
elements not to be found in the “traditional” artist book.
As I mentioned earlier in her talk at the Codex Symposium Bleitz noted that
the impetus behind her interest in the interaction between machines and words was
the possibility that a mechanical device would allow text to truly become dynamic.
Such dynamism is possible only in the presence of a human, of a “doer” to use
Bleitz’s own words, and in his/her interaction with the object that lead to changes
which effect is experienced visually (and immediately) but the user/reader. I suggest
here, as I did earlier in this chapter, that the notion of dynamism achieved with the aid
of mechanically interactive components addresses both the idea of making “material”
the kinetic force of language and expose the dynamics of language itself.

145
Price, R. “Words In Process: Arc Editions” in Artist’s Book Yearbook 2008-2009, Impact Press,
The Center for Fine Print Research, Bristol, September 2007, p. 13
205

Bleitz’s work thus, asks to mobilize reading and interacting strategies not
entirely dissimilar from those mobilized by Julie Chen’s work. Precisely the act of
reading, readership, and most relevantly of the “kind” of reader “summoned” by the
works considered here are the elements that are necessary to address now as a way of
drawing some final considerations on the nature of the book-object and the book as
object.
In formulating his theory of the open text semiotician Umberto Eco notes
how:
Those texts that obsessively aim at arousing a precise response on the
part of more or less precise empirical readers […] are in fact open to
any possible ‘aberrant’ decoding. A text so immoderately ‘open’ to
interpretation will be called a closed one.
146

The text that has a predetermined set of reactions as a hoped-for outcome are, in
Eco’s perspective is structured “[…] according to an inflexible project.” What is not
planned in the careful path laid out to elicit emotions at specific narrative
intersections is who is going to go down that very path. What Eco proposes is that
while some authors do not envision a specific reader others do so, and those who do
guide that reader—the expected and “social context” dependent one—in ways that
close the text rather then opening it. In the context of artists’ books the same issues
arise and are even more pressing. Are artists’ books open or closed texts? Are artists’
books reader-specific? Are their authors and makers envisioning a specific

146
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington [Ind.:
Indiana University Press, 1979, p. 8
206

reader/user? And lastly, is it possible to speak of an “ideal” reader of artists’ books? I
will perhaps try to begin answering these questions starting with the last one. If we
consider for instance the work of Emilio Isgrò made of several cumbersome volumes
of an encyclopedia, standing in stark contrast with the portable/manageable artist
book envisioned by Lucy Lippard, we must assume first and foremost a reader/user
who interacts with it in a public space such as a museum or a gallery. In this respect
the reader of Isgrò’s work is obviously a specific kind of reader. However, this very
museum going-gallery browsing reader must not necessarily posses any knowledge of
the cultural value specific to the Treccani encyclopedia and its connections with
Fascists intellectuals. That kind of knowledge is not essential to the understanding of
the redactions and erasures operated by Isgrò. In other words while reading for
comprehension may not necessarily take place (unless we are also assuming that the
reader is language-specific) a different kind of reading takes place, in Isgrò’s work
case is the reading of the act of erasing. The reader of Tatana Kellner’s
memorialization of her parents’ experiences in the concentration camps is not
required to be knowledgeable about the history of the Holocaust to begin connecting
with and implicating himself in the testimonial process. I suggest here that this is
possible precisely because the level of interactivity as well as the combination
mediums (text, photography, three dimensional objects) that allow access to the work
itself. It is indeed hard to tell if the authors/artists making artists books are indeed
envisioning a specific type of reader. What I think it is safe to suggest here is that the
artists and authors may be hoping for a reader that is as interested in the meaning
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present in the material dimension of the book and in the physical interaction with it as
much as he/she is in the textual part. In this respect I would argue that artists’ books
are always asking the reader to be open to become a user as well, and be prepared to
be surprised at the forms that “reading” can take. To go now back to the first question
I posed at the end of this section “Are artists’ books a closed or an open text?” I
believe it is safe to say that there is not one standard that can be applied to all artists’
books in those terms. It appears that much of the perceived openness or closures of
the artist book as text itself is dependent upon its user. In this respect the individual’s
perceptual realm, as defined by Merleau Ponty, could perhaps be seen as the point of
departure for any interpretation of artists’ books, and in particular of those works that
have a very string “object” dimension. It is my hope that in this chapter as much as in
the previous two I have been able shed light on how the hybrid nature of this artistic
and literary practice eschews more often then not these kind of definitions.

208

CONCLUSIONS

In the aftermath of the first wave of enthusiasm that shaped the 1960s production of
artists’ books Lucy Lippard, grappling with the form’s shortcomings, closed her essay
“Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books” with a humorous observation on
the possibility that artists’ book may be nothing but “[…] a state of mind.”
147
Years
later, Johanna Drucker wrote in her The Century of Artists' Books that the “[…] artist’
book is the quintessential 20
th
-century art form. Artists’ books appear in every major
movement in art and literature […]” allowing the shaping movements of twentieth
century art to produce artistic work via “[…] unique means.”
148
In the present
dissertation I have tried to reconcile as much as possible both perspectives. Although
not necessarily in chronological order my goal has been to provide a historical
connotation when possible, while focusing on the specificities brought forth by the
artists’ books selected here. Still, each chapter in this research holds on to the notion
that when exploring the complex universe of artists’ book’s, even if the aim is to
illuminate them through a more literary approach, it is necessary to draw precise
connections between both the literary and the artistic contexts of their production.
Moreover the artists’ books that have been included in each chapter of this
dissertation try to show how whether reviled, parodied, dismissed, disrupted,

147
Lippard, Lucy. “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books” in Lyons, Joan. Artists' Books: A
Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Rochester, N.Y: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985.

148
Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books, p. I
209

glorified, or touted narrative and language are still very much at the core of the artist
book.
The materials as well as the concepts explored by artists’ books can certainly
not be summarized in one single research. Still, I hope to have offered in the present
one a glimpse of a number of relevant iterations of this literary/artistic practice. In
considering the relationship that the “literary” book has with memory, power, and its
own physical formats and genres I have tried to show how even the most disruptive
intervention on the form of the book is inevitably relying on the literary dimension to
structure meaning. Consider for instance how Julie Chen’s Full Circle works against
the form of the book while still operating within the poetic realm, and in fact weaving
an interactivity alien to the book with the familiarity of the experience of reading a
poem. And how vice versa, the tamest physical disruption can work for and with the
most radical linguistic disruption as evidenced for instance in Luigi Serafini’s Codex
Seraphinianus. I have suggested here that the Codex negates and at the same time
makes available the possibility of knowledge in a system that speaks of inclusion and
exclusion, revealing itself as a utopian “universal book,” that materializes itself in the
“narrowest” of literary discourses, that is, the encyclopedic one.
In considering the work of Tatana Kellner and Robin Ami Silverberg, aside
from the larger implications of the discourse that surrounds the Holocaust, my aim
was to show how the defining elements found in the testimonial literature of the event
are still very much present in the works of these two artists.

210

One of my goals in this dissertation has been to highlight concepts such as
interactivity, dynamism, multi-mediality, hybridism, and experimentation as a way of
teasing out what I believe are the defining concepts that will shape the book (and not
merely the artist book) of the future. While I have merely gestured toward some of
these notions here I believe that these are relevant lines of inquiry that I hope to
explore in the future.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artists’ Books

Agnetti, Vincenzo. Obsoleto. Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1967.
Bleitz, Karen, and Richard Price. The Mechanical Word. London: Circle Press, 2005.
Chen, Julie. Full Circle. Berkley: Flying Fish Press, 2005.
Davidson, Deborah. Voce. Massachusetts: D. Davidson, 1995.
De Pero, Fortunato. Depero Futurista/Libro Imbullonato. Dinamo Anzari,1927.
FARFA, Il Miliardario della Fantasia. (orig. 1936) rep. Marco Sabatelli
Edizioni:1986

Hollander, Gad, and Andrew Bick. The Palaver. London: Book Works, 1998.
Isgrò, Emilio. Enciclopedia Italiana; fondata da Giovanni Treccani, cancellata da
Isgró. Milano: In proprio, 1970.

Kellner, Tatana, and Eva Kellner. 71125, Fifty Years of Silence: Eva Kellner's Story.
Rosendale. N.Y: Women's Studio Workshop, 1992.

Kellner, Tatana, and Eugene Kellner. B 11226, Fifty Years of Silence: Eugene
Kellner's Story. Rosendale, N.Y: Women's Studio Workshop, 1992.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation is an analysis of artists’ books not only as works of art, but also as works of literature. Artists’ books have long been at the center of a debate about both their nature and their future. One of the goals of this dissertation is to explore how throughout their history artists’ books have expressed the interactions between narrative, language, and materiality. ❧ This dissertation is an exploration of the evolving and hybrid nature of the book as a cultural object in its engagement with the concepts of memory, power, and multi- mediality in the iteration of artists’ books. This research offers a reading of, among others, Deborah Davidson’s Voce (1995), Carol Rosen’s The Holocaust Series. Book X, To Ashes (2000), and Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence-Eva and Eugene Kellner (1992) to address the representation of memory and witnessing. Luigi Serafini’s visionary Codex Seraphinianus (1981) and Isgrò Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani e cancellata da Isgrò (1970) engage instead with the concepts of power and hegemony and are read against the works of Michel Foucault and Jorge Luis Borges. The Palaver (1999) by Gad Hollander and Andrew Bick is instead both an example of interactivity and multimediality showcasing an iteration of the artist book as an object that is defined by a hybrid nature. ❧ One of the aims of this dissertation is to shed light on how artists’ books engender a disruption of the “habits” of reading and engaging physically with the book form, and how this disruption calls for a set of new interpretative instruments.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Crisci, Caterina (author)

Core Title A place in the total library: artists' books between art and literature

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 11/16/2014

Defense Date 10/08/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag artists' books,literary theory,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Pinkus, Karen (committee chair)

Creator Email caterinacrisci@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-112034

Unique identifier UC11290285

Identifier usctheses-c3-112034 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CrisciCate-1295.pdf

Dmrecord 112034

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Crisci, Caterina

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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