This text is the first to appear in a series of curatorial texts written for historical exhibitions of artists' books in Israel. The publication stems from a desire to explore past exhibitions and collect knowledge and experience, accumulated in diverse art institutions over the decades. We hope the resonance of these texts in the virtual sphere will lead to new research and critical writing in the field of artists' books in Israel. We thank Eric Kilemnik, Irena Gordon, and Merav Hamburger for bringing the text to publication in 'Madaf' from the catalog Artists' Books (2011), which saw light during the 31st anniversary of the Jerusalem Print Workshop. In 2024, the workshop marks its 50th anniversary.
From the catalog.
Visual image, text, space, studio, exhibition—all are concealed in the artistic genre known as the “artist’s book.” Here, the visual and the literary meet within the object itself: the book. Visual images join with linguistic images on “walls”—walls that are pages, walls that can be leafed through, spread out, looked at, and read within this space of bound paper leaves. It is the fruit of collaboration between visual artists and poets and writers, along with printers, designers, binders, typographers, and publishers. One could say that the artist’s book is an interdisciplinary performance, one whose complexity presents a cross section of the artistic creation and thought of an era and a culture. It allows the realization of the ancient dialogue between painting and poetry while simultaneously raising questions about the philosophical and aesthetic status of visual and non-visual images from the beginning of the twentieth century to our day.
The artist’s book goes by many different names: livres des artistes, artist's books, book art, bookworks, or book objects. These names recount the history of the artist’s book in western culture, in particular its evolution from the nineteenth century to our day. Its starting point can be located in the Renaissance, with the rise of painting on the one hand, and Gutenberg’s invention of print in 1454 on the other, which turned the written word into public property. One of the first books to offer a dialogue of equals between the textual and the visual is Poliphili’s Dream (Hypnerotomachia Polipili) from 1499, a mythical-allegorical work attributed by some to the monk Francesco Colonna and by others to the artist and theoretician Leon Battista Alberti. The book tells the story of Poliphili, who is looking for his beloved Polia in what is at once dream and linguistic, poetic journey, accompanied by 174 woodcuts that constitute a visual-architectural and logical journey.
But the artist’s book begins to establish itself as a noteworthy artistic phenomenon only in the modern era. Some see its first buds in Caprichos by Francisco de Goya (1746–1824) and in works such as Jerusalem or The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the prophetic epics by English poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827). These two artists, Goya and Blake, worked at the turn of the eighteenth century, in the rupture between classicism and romanticism.
Both were virtuosos of etching and both simultaneously responded to complex social and political realities while offering an emotional and spiritual experience. Therefore it seems only natural that their choice of form should be a book uniting a visual practice with poetry (Blake); or a portfolio of etchings accompanied by philosophical-critical captions (Goya). The expressive potential of these forms, which were neither exclusively painting nor exclusively text, provided these artists with a powerful medium in relation to the commonly accepted artistic forms of their time, and they optimally served their artistic goals.
The official awakening of the artist’s book began in fin de siècle Paris, part of the modern artistic movements flooding the city and the vibrant interdisciplinary discourse there between visual artists, poets, writers, thinkers, and people of theater, music, and dance. Livres des artistes is the French name for the traditional artist's-book form and it dates primarily from France of the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The livres des artistes are characterized above all by a combination of visual works with poetry or prose, wherein the visuals do not merely illustrate the text but a dialogue takes place between the arts, the visual interprets the textual, and a new and unique artistic and cultural whole is created.
Artist's books of this type are printed in a limited edition and are made according to the highest, most traditional, and most meticulous standards, in terms of paper, printing, design, lay-out, and binding. In most cases, it appears in traditional book form with the visual images appearing alongside the text and the pages at times bound and at times loose, laid out side by side. They are made with woodcut, etching, and lithography techniques and are signed by the artist. Despite their conservative form, these books are marked by breathtaking and unique poetic compositions. Examples include Parallèlement (1900), with the erotic lithographs of Pierre Bonnard alongside the impressionist poems of Paul Verlaine, or Miserere et guerre (1922–8) by Georges Rouault, which is made up of a series of 58 etchings dealing with the suffering and horrors of World War I.
A central role in the appearance of the livres des artists was played by publishers like Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, who worked in Paris and across Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and whose initiatives included livres des artistes like those of Bonnard and Verlaine, Rouault, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, André Masson, and others.
The second major incarnation of the genre goes by the English name, Artist’s Book or Artist Book. Distinguished by being the initiative of the artist him or herself, it provides a wide range of possibilities for untiring investigation and experimentation. This manifestation began at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the artist books of the Dada movement, those of the German and French surrealists, and those of the avant-garde movements in Russia. The rise of pop art and, above all, the advent of conceptual art from the 1960s onward, brought American and German artists, primarily, to choose the artist’s book as a central form of expression. Artists such as Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha created conceptual and revolutionary books. Dieter Roth focused on the physical form of the book, investigating its structurality while challenging the two-dimensionality of the page using paper cuttings that create a labyrinthine inner space.
Ed Ruscha’s 26 Gas Stations became a landmark in the history of the artist’s book, being based on documentary photographs. The emphasis in the artist books of these two artists was the democratic distribution of reasonably-priced commercial copies. Thus, through the course of the twentieth century, the artist’s book is characterized by the implementation of ancient techniques alongside contemporary technologies. As a whole, it is experienced as an object or, alternatively, as a medium for the transmission of concepts and aesthetic and theoretical processes and for the examination of materiality, line, and form. Artists engaging in this form ranged from Henri Matisse and Picasso, Max Ernst, Alexander Rodchenko, and Kurt Schwitters, up to Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Kruger, Marcel Broodthaers, Anselm Kiefer, Lawrence Weiner, and Christian Boltanski. Nowadays, the French name is less commonly used, while the English “artist’s book” is widely employed to refer to all forms of the genre, whether conventional or avant-garde.
An artist’s book is always an original work of art. Sometimes it is a unique object; sometimes it is printed in a limited edition; and sometimes it is produced for commercial distribution as an ideological statement. Often the textual is assimilated into the visual and sometimes it doesn’t exist at all. Through the book’s three-dimensional form and underlying narrative principle, which allows the presentation of many images together in one composition, the artists examine the conceptual and material processes that are central to their art. It becomes a sort of mobile studio, accessible to every viewer and not site- or time-specific.
The thinking about the artist’s book, as a form and as an idea, carries with it an entire load of history, knowledge, and identity. The artist’s book invites a discussion on the nature of the textual, on the essence of the book, on the formal appearance of the letter and of writing, on the possibility of the page as an arena of action. At the same time it is a vehicle for examining the role of the image and the role of the book as tools for cultural and social change. The artist’s book offers the artists a working space whose presence lives and breathes in the lives of the individual and the lives of the collective, and therefore it is possible to see it, as artist Johanna Drucker defined it in The Century of Artists’ Book, as “the quintessential 20th-century art form.”1
The French Marxist philosopher Jacques Rancière identifies the page as the most distinctive form of western culture’s modern aesthetic, since it enables the insertion of the artistic into any way of life. In his book The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible1, Rancière claims that the flatness of the page restores to both writing and painting their shared canvas as mute signs. No longer does the painting have its illusion of depth; it is interwoven with writing into a new “interface.” “In the interface created between different ‘mediums,’” says Rancière, “in the forged between poems and their typography or their illustrations, between the theatre and its set designers or poster designers, between decorative objects and poems—that this ‘newness’ is formed that links the artist who abolishes figurative representation to the revolutionary who invents a new form of life. This interface is political.” 2
In Rancière’s view, therefore, the artist’s book, by virtue of its being a space shared by the visual and the textual, brings art to life. At the same time, one can add, the artist’s book is a unique, aura-endowed artistic work. Many artists, however, have chosen to reproduce and distribute it in inexpensive editions with regular publishers, as an ordinary reading-book, thus situating it between high art and mass culture. This duality allows the expression of artistic, social, and political perceptions while bringing to the fore personal motifs and local myths and creating a sensual act that takes place in both the aesthetic and the cultural-political realm and is born out of the encounter between the two.
To this day, the Jerusalem Print Workshop has issued some forty artist books. They were created from start to finish at JPW, using a wide variety of print techniques and combining the more traditional approach with conceptual and innovative approaches. The first of these books was 13 Etchings to Poems of H.N. Bialik by Moshe Gershuni, published in 1987 and bringing together Bialik’s canonical poetry with the work of artist Moshe Gershuni, one of Israel’s leading artists. As Dan Miron explains in the introduction to the book, this artist’s book is not an artificial act but an essential encounter, one greatly needed by Israeli culture.
Despite the conservative form, in terms of the lay-out of the poems and etchings, the dialogue it contains constitutes an interpretational and experiential layer that exists solely within the artist’s book. Gershuni, whose virtuoso print work has become central to his oeuvre over the years, created the etchings in response to Bialik’s poems and he incorporated words from the poems into the etchings. The artist’s book allows for interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue between the modern national poetry of Bialik, which draws from Diaspora sources and the Jewish experience, and the expressive etchings of Gershuni, which contend with Jewish identity while criticizing the Israeli Zionist ethos through a combination of religious iconography and texts of poems and prayers.
Since that time, Gershuni has created two more artist books at JPW, one to the poems of Aharon Shabtai (1989) and the second to a verse from Ecclesiastes. The latter is called Under the Sun (2003). It is a completely conceptual work, whose structure is identical to the work process itself and to the format in which it was presented: 42 prints, of which the first and last nine are completely black, with no images, using only aquatint, while the middle 24 prints are the verse itself; every word appears, reversed, separately on each page. The artist’s book is displayed as a mobile exhibit dealing with absence—not only the absence of the private but the absence of the public, the collective, through the inability to represent, wherein the word appears as a visual image and the image appears as a black void.
Over the years at JPW, artist books have been created in collaboration with Israel’s leading artists. One of the major projects was “Etchings for Poems,” from 1989, which initiated collaborations between visual artists and poets, among them: Tamara Rikman and Dan Pagis, Michael Kovner, creating etchings for a poem of his father, Abba Kovner; Shaul Shatz and Admiel Kosman; David Ben Shaul and Arieh Zacks, Sidon Rothenberg and Dalia Rabikovitz; Zvi Tolkovsky and Harold Schimmel; Ra’anan Levy and Amir Gilboa, Larry Abramson and Zali Gurevitch; and others. All of the books in the project are set in wooden boxes, page after page of visual image and poetic image that fit into the palm of your hand and whose presence is complex: a personal notebook, a charm, a piece of jewelry, a prayer book.
From the catalog.
Some of the artist books created at JPW were individual initiatives of the artist or of JPW, for example, Moon (1998) by Larry Abramson and Zali Gurevitch, which was the result of an ongoing dialogue between the two artists: the poetic minimalism of Gurevitch, which deals with the prosaic and tries to touch the sublime, joins with Abramson’s precise images, which revolve around the moon. The poet’s black silhouette and the moon, which becomes a peek-hole to the other side of the page, are shapes that are only the traces of things themselves, while simultaneously, Zali Gurevitch’s “words” (as is written in the subtitle of the artist’s book) contend with the possibility itself of writing. Thus the artist’s book becomes an artistic search for the visual and linguistic image as a form and an event in the world.
Two others of Abramson’s artist’s books are Flora (1993) and Rose of Jericho (2007), both dealing with botanical images without text. Both are aesthetic investigations of the botanical image as a loaded cultural symbol and as a visual experience that is an event in the present. Both books create a visual lexicon that, when united in book form, can be situated as a narrative of place and time.
Artist Igael Tumarkin has a long relationship with and within the idea of the book, as part of his quests for the origins of ancient arts and cultures and their connection with the earth. Simultaneously in his works he engaged with cultural icons of western history—artists, playwrights, writers, and political leaders—through a combination of text and visual image that embodies the cultural dialogue underlying his work and to which he responds. In The Lamb Songs (1999), he assembles powerful prints from cut plates and dry etching whose anger and almost physical strength resonate with Yitzhak Laor’s poetry about sacrifice, sex, the passion for life, and the fatal dance of eros and death.
From the catalog.
In Florentine Meals (2000), the text—Tumarkin’s own—and the etchings describe imagined encounters with three figures from fifteenth-century Florence: the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who developed the concept of perspective; Pope Leo X of the Medici family, patron of the arts; and the Dominican priest, Girolamo Savonarola, who preached against Renaissance culture, tried to bring about religious reform, and was ultimately burnt at the stake. The book’s accordion form follows the artist’s ongoing artistic and personal conversation—one that has no beginning or end—with the history and culture in which he is rooted.
The Thought-Fox, ten etchings by Sharon Poliakine to the poem of Ted Hughes (1999), makes an analogy between the artistic process as an etched-in consciousness on the one hand, and the etching of the printing plate on the other. The visual image and the linguistic image are engraved and etched in the thinking of the artist and capturing them in the metal platform is as absolute as it is evasive. In the etchings, Poliakine displays a pendulum swing between the concrete and the abstract within the material as an embodiment of the mental process.
Hila Lulu Lin Farrah Kufer Birim.
Hila Lulu Lin is a multimedia artist who works with images and words, in painting and sculpture, in photography, and video. For her, the artist’s book is an arena of action and the page is a space in which words and visual images are forms that move alongside one another and interweave to create compositions that express the private self, which is always also political. At JPW, she created Scream into a Paper Bag (1996), composed of visual hieroglyphic-like images printed in screenprinting on flick paper, while her own concrete poetry is printed on parchment-like paper; the papers, placed in a metal box, create a labyrinth of voices and forms whether they are spread out or placed one on top of another; layers upon layers of transparency and opaqueness with the word and the pictorial hieroglyph seeming to intertwine. Another work, consisting of eight salt boxes, was also created at JPW.
At the center of each is a glass divider on which is screen printed one of the phrases: “I got” – “I lied” – “I stole” – “I failed” – “I came” – “I loved” – “I escaped” –“Help.” In the artist’s book, the box is the page, the salt is a red paper divider, while the words embody an existential experience on the one hand, and on the other hand they become a barcode, meaningless merchandise. The feeling in the gallery space that the boxes were fluttering between life and death is transformed in the artist’s book into a feeling of pursuit and urgency whose pace is dictated by the very act of turning the pages.
In 2007, inspired by a joint initiative of Carmel Publishing House and poet Michal Govrin, who published collaborations between Jerusalemite visual artists and poets, JPW initiated a project of its own, supported by Mifal HaPais. It commissioned ten artists to create ten artist books.
From the catalog.
Two years of intensive work brought about the creation of some one hundred new works in etching and screenprinting, the fruit of both longstanding dialogues and new connections between creators: Phosphoric Beets by Michal Bachi with texts of Hanoch Levin; A Spider’s Cradle by Uriel Miron to poems of Dan Pagis: And So Said Jerusalem by Orna Millo and Michal Govrin; Seeds by Nurit Gur Lavy and Maya Bejerano; Things as They Are by Sidon Rothenberg to the poems of Israel Hadany; Qasida by Zvi Tolkovsky and Harold Schimmel; Twilight by Noam Rabinovich to a poem by Israel Hadany; Fear by Avraham Eilat to a poem by Rami Dizani; Hugging by Dov Heller to his own text; and Hinom Valley by Alex Kremer to his own poems.
The artist’s books in the project express creative processes that deal with the poetics and politics of the Israeli landscape, with local identity as an outcome of journeys, and with the relationship between the self and the other through fictional autobiographical narratives.
Footnotes
Dr. Irena Gordon, art historian, and chief curator of the Petah Tikva Museum of Art. In the past, she curated the Jerusalem Print Workshop and served as its chief curator for a decade. One of her main focuses of interest is narratives of rupture and transition, and metamorphoses between different artistic mediums.
