Sculptural books stand and deliver

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Jen Thomas

STAND AND DELIVER: ENGINEERING SCULPTURE INTO A BOOK FORMAT

CENTER FOR BOOK & PAPER ARTS

COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

SEPTEMBER 16-OCTOBER 28, 2005

In "Stand and Deliver: Engineering Sculpture into a Book Format," curator Ed Hutchins set out to showcase fifty artists' books that challenge the age-old perception of a book as simply front and back covers, end sheets, and a text block. Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book & Paper Arts was filled with these book objects--including an iron, a ukulele, baby shoes, a tiny bed, a cake, and a tent. Many of these books could easily have stood alone as sculptural objects, but all drew the viewer in with inventive engineering, alluring imagery, engaging text, or a combination of all three. The name of the show itself was a dead giveaway--these books stood, delivered, popped, rotated, folded, and did everything short of fixing a cup of coffee and fetching the morning paper.

Hutchins also enlisted several of the country's most innovative book artists to judge books for various awards. Susan E. King awarded Cynthia Marsh's The Book of Genesis Tent Show for Birds and Other Small Creatures (2003) with "Best use of typography" for her parchment tent Bible passages printed with wood type. Robert Sabuda awarded the title of "Best integration of message and engineering" to Friend or Faux (hypno politico) (2004) by Joe Freedman and Ilisha Helfman, an intricately cut, wooden Retroscope equipped with a crank handle for viewers to cycle through a series of hypnotic swirls emblazoned with disembodied George W. Bush heads and the message: "The whole world will be your friend--FAUX."

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The other books in the exhibition were no less impressive and showcased established and emerging book artists. Hutchins noted in the catalog that the books tend to fall into one of three distinct categories, according to their characteristics: intriguing shapes, revealing folds, or uplifting pages. Kerri Cushman's book Pumping Iron (2003) was certainly an intriguing shape--a welded lunchbox opening to reveal a fabricated iron filled with handmade, blue-jean paper, letterpress-printed with poems ruminating on the thread--combining topics of industry, consumerism, and family. Peter and Donna Thomas sawed and hinged a ukulele and housed within it a whimsical book detailing its history in handwritten text and brightly colored illustrations in Ukulele Series Book #23: A Brief History of the Ukulele (2003). There were shaped books in all forms, constructed with everything from paper to metal, including a Hazardous Materials placard.

Though many of these books employed complex feats of engineering skill and unexpected materials, others utilized simple and elegant accordion folds to pull their stories off the page. Tara O'Brien used a layered accordion to give depth to an octopus's aquarium escape in front of silhouettes of surprised patrons in At the Aquarium (2003). Other folded tomes revealed kaleidoscope wheels, and organic origami-esque shapes that seemed to grow out of themselves. Like the "intriguing shapes," these folded books were not all limited to paper and board. One accordion book, Procrastination (2002) by Deborah Phillips Chadoff and Lee Rogers, contained wire, clock parts, and minute timers in homage to the vice of procrastination.

The books with "uplifting pages" were just as varied, but all shared gorgeous, popping folios that rivaled those of pop-up king Sabuda. Stairs descended and shifted, bridges spanned pages, and fairies and birds flew away. Kelly Houle posits answers to Lewis Carroll's question in her book Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk? (2003), in which a long-necked Alice appears between the branches of a tree while the Mad Hatter perches atop it with his typewriter.

The ultimate irony of mounting a show of sculptural bookwork is that visitors want to reach through the Plexiglas and touch that tree like they had the Retroscope, to turn the bat-shaped pages of the Slinky-like Entries from the Bat Log (2003) by Peggy Johnston, or run their fingers over every intricate three-dimensional ecosystem of Welcome to the Neighborwood by Shawn W. Sheehy (2003)--but couldn't. Though they were made to be touched, the threat of theft, clumsy hands, and grubby fingers loom large.

This was the final viewing of this exhibition after a nearly two-year journey from the Brookfield Craft Center in Connecticut, through San Diego and the Movable Book Society Conference, onto the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection in Boca Raton, Florida, and the Denver Public Library. Along the way these pieces showed viewers that books can take many forms, even unique sculptural ones.

JEN THOMAS is an artist and writer living in Chicago, Illinois.