Unbound 31 July – 7 September 2013 Macquarie University Art Gallery Bound Macquarie University Library Exhibition Space above Stephen Birch (1961–2007) Untitled (bookcase) detail 1989 plaster, acrylic, timber dimensions variable Macquarie University Collection Donated under the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Andrew Birch Photography Effy Alexakis cover image © Courtesy the artist’s estate Jayne Dyer A Reading: 3 2008 From The Reading Room series digital image 198 x 120 cm No. 3 in edition of 5 Courtesy the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne and King Street Gallery, Sydney © Jane Dyer/Licensed by Viscopy, 2013 Unbound Curators: Rhonda Davis and John Potts 31 July – 7 September 2013 Macquarie University Art Gallery Robert Adamson, Effy Alexakis, Jonathan Jones, Michael Karris and Suzanne Archer, Mireille Astore, Julie Peter Lyssiotis, Yvonne Kendall, Bruno Leti, Barratt, Vanessa Berry, Stephen Birch, Ruark Lewis, Richard Long, Euan Macleod Chris Bond, Anne Brennan, Meredith with Lloyd Jones and Ron McBurnie, Brice, Christian Capurro, Caitlin Casey, Bea Maddock, Chris Mansell, Rocket Angela Cavalieri, Angela Cavalieri and Mattler, James McGrath, Allan Mitelman, Peter Lyssiotis, Stephen Copland, Fiona Nell, Monica Oppen, Ken Orchard, Davies, Urszula Dawkins and Peter Mike Parr, Ed Ruscha, Sangeeta Lyssiotis, Jayne Dyer, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sandrasegar, Alex Selenitsch, Sandra Selig, Joachim Froese, Nathalie Hartog-Gautier, Kylie Stillman, Richard Tipping, Angela Nathalie Hartog-Gautier and Iain Brew, Welyczko and Anne Zahalka. Helen Geier, Juno Gemes, Robert Jacks, Foreword / Although the ‘death of the book’ is Experimental novelists like B. S. Johnson This exhibition (and the satellite exhibition now a familiar concept and changes tried to disrupt the reader − text relationship in the Macquarie Library) explores the to consumption of printed material are with such works as Albert Angelo where ‘bookliness’ of books and the bookishness having catastrophic effects on traditional holes cut in the pages force the reader of book lovers. The form and nature of the publishing models many people still like to see events which lie in the narrative book is considered in a variety of works books. It isn’t so much what is in them future, or the Unfortunates where the which extend and challenge our ideas (we can often access that much more book comes in a box of loose chapters to of what books are and what they are for. efficiently) − it is their ‘bookliness’ that really be read as the reader pleases. The artist This exhibition is not so much about the matters. Books are cultural products which Tom Phillips approached the question retention of the book in ‘treated’ form have value far beyond their function or of the book as art work from a different as an exploration of ideas which have content. They are signifiers of education, direction with his Humument, a ‘treated’ the book as a starting point. of culture, of civilisation itself. Reading version of a Victorian pot-boiler or his Seen together with its satellite, this a book marks you as a particular kind of illustrated version of Dante’s Inferno exhibition offers a balance between the person. Owning a library marks you as a which became − as A TV Dante − a prize antiquarian impulse which fetishizes particular kind of person. Walking around winning and ground breaking video. the book as a cultural token fast losing with a book under your arm marks you However, these remain relatively isolated its power as we move into a post-literate as a particular kind of person. You are a examples of aesthetic assaults on the world and the opportunities that this bookish person. The death of the book is form of the book which retain the object world offers to revalue the book and undoubtedly well in train but alongside as something portable and legible. find new ways to explore and celebrate this economic process is a process of a remarkably durable artifact. cultural resilience in which the book retains a value far in excess of its practical worth. Professor John Simons Executive Dean Faculty of Arts Macquarie University 2 Unbound / 31 July – 7 September 2013 The Persistence of the Book / John Potts We live at a time when all that is solid is Mass literacy – and with it enormous It is the materiality of books that melting into data, when knowledge is shifts in political, scientific and religious has often inspired the attention of immaterial and lives in the cloud, when thought – rose as printed books became artists, who in recent years have the book is said to be disappearing. widely available in the centuries after rendered the book-form in wood, The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has Gutenberg. The printed book distributed stone, metals and other substances. declared that ‘the physical book and knowledge to masses in an entirely Perhaps this is a response to the rapid bookstores are dead’, replaced by the new way; the book carries the weight digitisation of knowledge in the Kindle, iPad and other new vessels for of this intellectual history in its form. contemporary world; perhaps it attests digital text.1 The e-reader and online Anne Zahalka’s Gesture series, built to the sheer attractiveness of the book publishing are upheld as the vehicles on digitally scanned details from oil as object. Indeed artists have long been of progress, displacing the old-fashioned paintings, suggests the connections captivated by the form of the book, printed book already referred to, a little between books, knowledge and social often hand-crafting specialist artist books disdainfully, as the ‘p-book’, or, more power. The social elite once portrayed in or transforming the basic codex format in aggressively, as the ‘dead tree book’. oil paintings attempted to concentrate creative ways. The art book has functioned There are many digital prophets and political power through a concentration as part-documentation of art works and ‘futurologists’ predicting that the of knowledge, represented by expensive part-art work in itself. old-fashioned writing format known books owned by the aristocracy. But the Even the conceptual ‘post-object’ art as the book will soon be vapourised – printing press made pamphlets and emerging from the 1960s found a central unloved and unGoogled – replaced by books increasingly available for a wider place for art books. For a ‘land artist’ like its immaterial successors. readership. The free circulation of books Richard Long, the work was the process of symbolised the movement of ideas, Yet it’s hard to dismiss the printed book, walking through a landscape, interacting knowledge, and freedom to think: which, like the wheel, has sheer longevity with natural features as he found when a totalitarian regime sought to on its side. The codex form of the book them. This process, however, was then restrict thought and beliefs, it staged – sheets bound between covers – has documented in the form of limited edition book burnings. Books – durable capsules existed since the first century, when it was artist’s books, such as the small book of thought and creativity – have helped invented by the Romans as an alternative documenting his 1973 walk From Around inspire the great social movements of to the papyrus scroll. Previous vessels for a Lake. This book, initially printed in an the last two hundred years. writing including dried clay tablets, wax, edition of 300, depicted leaves found by ivory, metal and glass. But the bound Long on this walk; the artist book endured paper book proved the most effective long after the walk-as-art was completed, vehicle for the printed word, particularly becoming an art object in itself. in the wake of the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. 1 Quoted in Ken Auletta, ‘Publish or Perish: can the iPad topple the Kindle and save the book business?’, The New Yorker, 26 April 2010, p. 26. 3 Macquarie University Art Gallery 4 Unbound / 31 July – 7 September 2013 left Anne Zahalka The German Woman (Ulriche Grossarth/artist) From Resemblance 1987 cibachrome photograph edition of 10 103 x 94 cm Courtesy the artist © Anne Zahalka/Licensed by Viscopy, 2013 right Anne Zahalka Gesture V (from Johann Baptist the Elder Lampis d A.A ‘Portrait of Prince Bezborodko’, 1794) From Gesture 1993 Ilfochrome photograph 96 x 73 cm Collection of Julie Robb and Michael Furlong © Anne Zahalka/Licensed by Viscopy, 2013 right Anne Zahalka Gesture VI (from Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres ‘Madame Marie Marcotte de Sainte Marie’, 1826) 1993 Ilfochrome photograph 96 x 73 cm Collection of Julie Robb and Michael Furlong © Anne Zahalka/Licensed by Viscopy, 2013 5 Macquarie University Art Gallery A person’s book collection is, like Richard These memories are triggered by Despite the claims made for the book’s Long’s artist books, a display, a reflection the material presence of the books; imminent demise – its book doomsday of the self. It is a record, in material Benjamin lovingly describes the smell, – in the age of digital text and online form, of the works that have helped the dust, the feel of the volumes as he delivery, the printed book remains shape that self: the ideas, arguments, unpacks them. Books engage more remarkable healthy. The material knowledge, narratives, characters and than just the visual sense in the act form of the book has survived since poetry drawn from those books over of reading; they jostle all the senses the Roman Empire; it has been loved many years. The books carry pieces of (with the possible exception of taste). as object as well as container of the person’s self with them, slices of We touch and hold the paper and cover; knowledge. Two thousand years is personal history. The books age along we smell the book’s interior, especially a solid record of persistence.