An artist’s book in progress at a workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book.
Though they are often among our most treasured possessions, books usually have all the aesthetic zest of your average match box-and even less of an inventive design. Despite the fact that they provide us great comfort, hope, and inspiration-often forever altering the course of our lives- books are wedged onto shelves and into cardboard boxes like coffins stacked in an LA mortuary.
Meanwhile, paintings and sculptural objects look down on them disdainfully from their elevated perches. The unimaginative design of most books definitely makes it hard to get fired up about displaying them prominently, but can’t something be done? After all, doesn’t their art mean as much to us as that of the brush or knife?
San Francisco Center for the Book invites you to take those books off the shelf, hold them in your palms, close your eyes, and imagine their forms bending to more than just function. What if a text’s shape reflected the cognitive ripples and spikes it sends careening through our minds? Soaring emotions would be portrayed not just through lofty prose but also through pages arching toward the heavens; pained ruminations would literally tear away the very structure bearing them.
With this kind of psychic sculpting, wouldn’t books be all the better suited to transmit the myriad feelings contained within? Can’t the ideas behind the construction be as dynamic as the ideas inside the pages? Can’t the book be more than just a delivery vehicle?
With instructors from numerous countries teaching over 300 workshops per year, SFCB uses the universal form of the book as a welcome mat to bring together people from disparate backgrounds into the spirit of collaboration and idea-sharing.
“People come to it from every possible direction,” says Steve Woodall, Artistic Director of the Center. “The book is this kind of icon that draws people from a 360-degree radius. The book as an art form is even more that way because one of the things we promote is expression of all kinds. Besides literary expression, there are printmakers making books; there are sculptors making books. We’ve even had dancers talk about the choreography of movement of the book.”
The diversity of those who share and exhibit their skills at the airy, inviting light manufacturing building at the base of Potrero Hill is not measured just in their artistic approach. The corrugated, Superman-tights-blue metal über-shed serves as a supercollider for all manner of ideas and opinions.
The genius of the book as potential art object, it seems, is that it serves as both an inviting, familiar meeting point and a perfect place from which to travel out together. Here, any number of themes, from the silly to the most contentious, is explored through the form of the book.
What if a text’s shape refl ected the cognitive ripples and spikes it sends careening through our minds?
Without a doubt, the Iraq War has been one subject heavy on the minds of the bookmakers of SFCB. Drew Matott, an MFA candidate at Columbia College of Chicago and an Instructor at SFCB, is making paper out of the uniforms of soldiers who have returned to the US from Iraq.
Another artist has organized an event at SFCB to draw attention to the bombing of Mutanabi Street-Baghdad’s booksellers district. Here, as in numerous other examples, the universality of the book triumphs in creating a cross-cultural link.
This power of the book-to communicate no matter the languages held by the text or the beholders-engulfs SFCB and imbues it with the electricity of vanguard exploration. But the staff is eager to point out that this is not a hunting expedition for an elite few. When asked about the most amazing books that have been produced at the Center, Woodall mentions that over and over, the greatest sense of astonishment is in students discovering that they can make books.
“A lot of people think they need permission to make a book because there are so many taboos around the book that we grow up with,” he says. “When you can open that up, it really is liberating.” Often what follows, Woodall says, is a deeper bond. “The most intimate relationship you can have with a book-loving books-is to make one yourself.”
Evidence of Compression, a laser-cut book by Julie Chen.
A miniature book by Peter and Donna Thomas.
A pop-up book by Howard Munson.
San Francisco Center for the Book: www.sfcb.org
– Buck Austin