WRITER slash BOOK slash READER
THE BOOK, a reproducible, highly portable vehicle for ideas and information, is one of the profound innovations or even events of the millennium now (1992) slouching to a close. I realize how threatening theory is to most Americans, so maybe that's why I want to repeat the taboo word ... the way Lenny Bruce did with sexual language, to desensitize you/us to its terrors. In the spirit of my desire to synthesize lyrical and critical modes, to forge out of various dialects -- academia, poetry, journalism -- a flexible and inclusive language I take "theory" as the jumping off point for this essay. Caveat lector!
How can an invention or an idea be an event? In the sense that it can radically alter a civilization's concept of itself. In his foreword to Paul deMan's 1986 Resistance to Theory, Wlad Godzich traces the origins of "theory" as a word and a practice in ancient Greece. He equates theory with the idea of "a mediating instance between an 'event' and its entry into public discourse." Things only had meaning in the context of a theoretical framework, and everyone knew this. From 1950s to the 1990s video-television unfolded as the mass theory of the period, the thing that structured public discourse. People felt that "if it isn't on video, it didn't happen." Prior to that we had been, for about four centuries, a print culture. The book was the instrument that bound together communities of meaning.
A book is an interplay between the public and private spheres. Held in the hands of one person and scanned by one pair of eyes at a time, a book is consumed intimately, "privately". At the same time, it has a public facet -- its clones are out there in a multitude of other individual pairs of hands, and a work can sometimes serve needs and have meaning far beyond the intentions of its author or publisher.
Given the social fact that everyone "knows" what a book is, the response to an artwork in the form of a book can often be an oddly bittersweet reversal of that apocryphal philistine adage "I don't know much about art but I know what I like". To wit, "I know what a book is, but this one frustrates or confuses me." In other words, the heedless, impatient or doctrinaire reader may feel confused, cheated, even threatened by an artist-made book. But a book made by an artist warrants close scrutiny; often, its collaborative production processes make it more of a media project than a solitary artistic statement. This is the case with LessonsfromFrench. The attentive reader is likely to feel that something very familiar and ordinary has been charged with new meaning.
I use the word "reader" partly because we are dealing with a recognizable book and "to read" is the verb used to mean interacting with or absorbing what a "book" has to offer. But in a deeper sense, the term "reader" implies a deeper sense of Agency, the Subject's apprehension of world as text. "Reader" here refers to what in a discussion of an artwork or product is usually meant by "viewer" -- although "participant", "consumer" or even "victim" can be more appropriate in various contexts. The provenance of this usage is Structuralism, with its roots in early 20th century linguistics, out of which emerged mid-century cultural landmarks such as Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological analysis of tribal kinship systems via fundamentally linguistic categories, or Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic dictum "the unconscious is structured like a language". [See : Jean Piaget, Structuralism. NY: Basic Books, 1970.] These ways of interpreting art rest upon the assumption that "language" is a metaphor for any human cultural activity or, to put it the other way round, that any human construct or activity functions very much the way a language does and may be understood by applying to it some of the techniques of linguistics. All this is useful to bear in mind when looking at "artist's books" in general and more specifically in the case of LessonsfromFrench.
As Guy Debord has pointed out, books are one of the few artifacts still in general circulation that pre-date the Spectacle. "Spectacle" was his term for the global system of commodity culture and its political economy, under which we all live. [This is sometimes called the post-modern, but let's not tread into that terrain. See Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red Press, 1982, published in France in 1968; and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso Books, 1990.]
Crafted to be the repository of cultural values, the book became, in the course of western cultural history, an obvious target for the modifications of avantgarde experimentation. Artist's books as a genre grow out of the early 20th century European avantgarde -- dada, surrealism, lettreism -- art movements partly or wholly conceived or carried out in Paris, France.
A sense of interrogation, whimsy and exploration emerges as LessonsfromFrench engages with the multiple ambiguities and paradoxes of translation. The language(s) involved are French and English. LfF chronicles the experiences of an English speaker learning French, incorporating anecdotes revealing her relationship to French culture; all this develops in a dialogical game spun out by "teacher" and "student".
One of the trains of thought that LfF set in motion for me was the interplay of theory with my own practices of art-making and the teaching of art-criticism and writing. A couple of years ago I taught an art criticism course at UCSD. The seminar was structured around a simple triadic schema of the relations between:
AUTHOR TEXT READER
ARTIST ARTWORK VIEWER
Production Object/Product Audience/Reception
As we look at terms which could usefully fit into this triad, it becomes clear that various societies and historical periods privilege one or the other of the categories as being definitive of the function and meaning of art. Classicism and neoclassicism emphasized formal purity and the transcendent quality of an ARTWORK. The Romantic emphasis was on the heroic primacy of the ARTIST. The modernist preoccupation with ambiguity helped form the notion that a work's meaning is largely constructed in the mind of its AUDIENCE. [This is a generalization and various critics would disagree with me. Plus there's the whole problem of the relation between Modern and Post-Modern. But again, we ain't going there. See: Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Port Townsend WA: Bay Press, 1985 and The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post-Modern Culture. Bay Press, 1983.]
The claim of any book to represent the world by reducing its complexity to two dimensions and a rectangular format can always be challenged. Just as questionable is the claim of any translation to have taken a thought or utterance that arose in one culture and given it an equivalent form in the idiom of a different culture. Every language has powerful characteristics of its own that inevitably shape the thoughts expressed in it. In a strangely satisfying way LessonsfromFrench takes this notion to its logical (that is, absurd) conclusion, transporting us in the process beyond the territory of the binary. LfF doesn't simply acknowledge the distortions each individual subjectivity can work upon the raw data of experience, it celebrates them! It opens with the words, one per page, "Say See Bone", which is either non-sense or a phonetic approximation of how the French expression "C'est si bon" might be "heard" by an anglophone, bringing to mind the work of Raymond Roussel, which was based on free association upon words and their sounds, along with some of the work of Anna Homler, Joyce Lightbody, Betsy Davids & Jim Petrillo's Rebus Press, and the samizdat of Rimma and Valery Gerlovin.
Structured around a dialogue in the form of French lessons, LfF has a refined sensuality. Transparent tissue-paper pages bearing the teacher's corrections in pale green ink, alternate with the dense physicality of handmade paper. Each lesson takes off from the prosaic ground of everyday reality and then verges swiftly and inexorably but oh so lightly into the airier realm of free association. The structure itself also "takes off" from its call and response format to a less easily-categorized mode.
In "The Grain of the Voice" Roland Barthes proposed a theory of art reception by saying that he wanted to pay attention to his relation with the body of the person singing, and that this relation is erotic but not subjective because the orgasmic-like pleasure of the experience does not reinforce our individual identity but helps to relieve us of it. [see Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero Beacon Press, 1970.]
My favorite passage here begins in a Paris hotel with an Arizona couple complaining about the cafe au lait; then it verges into what in any other context would be called a digression about "cafe ole'" in Los Angeles (L.A. or elle-aye), verging finally into an invitation to coffee, napoleons and "tiny kiwi tartes" at a rococo cafe in Japan town.
It is odd how easy it seems to write about Los Angeles (as a state of mind as well as a physical place one has endured or braved) from a safe distance of just a few hundred miles to the north. For years I, like King (Susan but also Rodney) negotiated the labyrinthine freeway systems, cycling through the astounding multiculturalism of that vast metropolis. Maybe King's wildly disjunctive associations (and my own associations that I am superimposing onto her opus) are too fragile, too complicated. Milanese writer Carlo Antonio Gadda, accused by his critics of being too "baroque", answered that it was not his writing but the world itself that was baroque and he was merely its transcriber. Just so: the world is fragile and complex; our texts merely mirror and mimic this.
As Gertrude Stein wrote in Paris France, "... everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they really live. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there." LessonsfromFrench creates a tangible aesthetic link between the two states. Ultimately, it lingers in the mind as poetry. And that's highest compliment I know how to pay to a work of art.
Marina deBellagente LaPalma
This discussion was written in conjunction with an exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library; published in The Ampersand: Journal of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts (Vol. 12, #3-4) in Spring 1992. This piece was reprinted in my PROSE 1990s, The Present Press, Menlo Park, CA, 1997.
It is based on LessonsfromFrench by Susan E. King. Text by King and Jean Gabriel Adloff, paper by David Carruthers at La Papterie St. Armand in Quebec, type by McKenzie-Harris Corp. of San Francisco, binding by Shelley Hoyt, printed at Paradise Press, Los Angeles, 1988.