From the Artist's Diary

This text appears second in a series of curatorial texts accompanying exhibitions of artists' books in Israel. We publish these out of the desire to echo the historical and theoretical knowledge accumulated in various art and culture institutions, and among curators, researchers, and book professionals over the years. We hope that this resonance in the virtual space will lead to new research, writing, and more artist book exhibitions.

The essay "From the Artist's Diary" accompanied an exhibition of the same name, which was on display in November 2018 at the Hermann Struck Museum under the curatorship of Svetlana Reingold. The exhibition presented Struck's original artist's books from the beginning of the 20th century, alongside books by contemporary artists that correspond with the diary genre. We are very grateful to the curator and the Haifa Museums for bringing the text to Madaf, together with installation shots and reproductions of the original books from the catalog.

Hermann Struck's books are an important chapter in his artistic oeuvre. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the book was not only a means of communication but also a means of artistic expression, implementing graphic techniques essentially meant to be reproduced. On the one hand, the book's potential for wide distribution motivated many artists to publish books in large numbers of copies, thereby gaining broad public recognition. On the other hand, the inclusion of original printworks in books raised their value, making the book a unique and sought-after item among art collectors.1

Struck had a unique and uncompromising approach toward the independent status of the engraving or lithograph in a book. He did not seek to illustrate the literary texts with his works. He only painted what he saw, and for this reason, was never asked to illustrate a written text. Struck based this position on the approach of the German book artist Melchior Lechter, who asserted that "any illustration that suits the poet and the reader involves a flattening and loss of charm of the written word […]. It is not the illustrator's task to strengthen the written word. He is not supposed to interpret the text for the reader and the writer. There is no need to emphasize what the poet seeks to keep silent".2

The engravings in Struck's books were created as independent works based on the sketchbooks he carried with him on his journeys. The letters are large and clear, creating a textual mass balancing the engraving. This maintains the delicate equilibrium between text and illustration, so that the status of the engraving is not diminished and retains its independence. This aspect is prominent in the books Venice (1920),3 America (1922),4 and Italy (1923),5 printed in a particularly fine album format and diligently executed. The placing of the written text, the letter size, and the engravings themselves combine to create a whole work of art.6

Reflecting Struck's outlook, the present exhibition examines artists' diaries as visual lifelong travelogues – a tool of observation that combines a non-verbal diary with a written one. These artists continue to see books as powerful items, containing entire worlds that allow us to move through time and space, occupying many places simultaneously. Books rise above physical dimensions, allowing the reader to meet people of different periods and places, some of whom we've never met and some haven't even been born.

A book is a narrative and a life story, acting as a metaphor for the beginning and end of the human subject. It is also a multiplicity of potential and actual lives, as well as a workshop where thoughts and feelings are forged. Michael Sheringham, a scholar of autobiographies in French literature, explains the idea of the book as a multi-faceted metaphor for the human subject: "On the one hand, the book is solid, portable, voluminous, legible, authoritative, permanent: a monument, a mausoleum. […] the book is also voluminous in an earlier sense: 'full of turnings or windings, containing or consisting of many coils or convolutions.'”7

In this context, the present exhibition seeks to recognize the affinity between the book and the human subject – an affinity with a long historical lineage. In many autobiographies, the relation between the self and the book involves a deep sense of identification, an ambition to realize a life project through writing. When writing an autobiography, the connection between the subject and the book is particularly intimate: a whole life is written and compressed into one volume, which represents and embodies the writer. The subject writes him- or herself, until finally becoming a book.

The books in this exhibition afford the viewer a journey into the depths of the self, in light of the contemporary global reality. Each artist deals in his own way with questions of belonging and national, familial, and individual identity, in the contemporary world of art and media.

Thus, artist Andi Arnovitz employs books to interpret, in her own way, issues involving the landscape and the individual in the Middle Eastern space, addressing the relationship between herself and her surroundings. She uses her books as "travel journals" in which she collects her impressions.

Landscape and the individual are also an inseparable part of Noa Yekutieli's work. Her artist's book, While They Were Moving, They Were Moved (2015), continues her engagement with natural and manmade catastrophes. She uses the paper cutout technique to depict the human struggle in black and white, combining cutouts with transparent photographs. The photographs, collected from all over the world, are placed over the cutouts in a semi-transparent layer, creating a vortex of time and space that transforms a specific occurrence into a universal truth. Leafing through the book, the viewer is encouraged to dismantle and reassemble the visual impressions that the work presents.

Dismantling and reassembly are the leading tactic in the work of Peter Jacob Maltz, Journey Notes (2007) – a book in which the artist tests the tension between the narrative reading of "parable and moral" and the fragmented, postmodern reading mode. Every viewer can construct his own story, yet Maltz does create a linear narrative. The work tells of a man who sails to a foreign land, where he encounters natural and artificial threats and experiences war and political indifference. In his search for meaning and a sense of belonging he meets a wise man sitting beneath a tree, then finally returns home and relates his experiences to younger generations.

A similar approach of dismantling and reassembly characterizes the artist books created by Zvi Tolkovsky, which feature a collagist hybrid and do not obey any ostensible inner logic. According to him, "my art begins in the middle, from something that already exists […] it is difficult to indicate a point of departure, and the endpoint cannot be seen." Tolkovsky defines himself as a "broadcasting station" disseminating numerous and varied elements. He collects materials and ideas from different places that store leftover objects, which become, in his work, a colorful fabric portraying the Israeli place.

A separate chapter in this exhibition addresses artist books by female artists. These works engage in a gender-oriented discussion regarding the complex relations between women and the literary world. In these books, the artists use the act of drawing, which connects the practice of painting and the act of writing a personal diary – a diary that is, at the same time, an artist's book. These works express the intimate authority that each artist acquires when producing such books, at a time when the power balance between men and women is shifting.

The days when reading and writing were privileges reserved for men are addressed in Maya Attoun's 2018. This artist's book, in a format of a weekly planner, marks 200 years since the publication of the novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), by Victorian author Mary Shelley, considered the first book in the science fiction genre.8 In her work Attoun creates a collection of images which she published on Instagram, anatomical illustrations, climatic models, graphs, and more. The novel Frankenstein describes a living-dead figure invented by "the new science." Attoun explores Shelley's book, published anonymously so as not to be classified as "women's literature." According to Attoun, "Frankenstein touches on many aspects: anxiety, life and death. It also engages with the issue of gender – since a woman author wrote it, but in the voice of a man."

Subversive ways of reading and writing biographical women's literature are investigated by Hagar Cygler, who uses a pool of photographs from albums of strangers as the basis for her work. In the project presented in the exhibition, There's a Story I Think I Know (Folded) (2016), the artist focuses on the sense of loss and unresolved questions following the passing of a loved one. In her words: "I compensate for the doubts created by the loss by looking for clues in other places: I read used books and find sentences underlined by others, and scavenge through endless piles of photos in thrift stores. I find it easier to be an outsider to the leftovers of others. I build the story behind them, and imagine the full life through a couple of signs. I think about others like me who are also looking for missing parts. Maybe I am holding their missing pieces of the story, holding them in my context of imagination."

Some of the artists participating in the exhibition investigate the book as an object, addressing our times as the end of the era of the book, in a period dominated by a digital means of production in capitalist consumer culture. This issue is apparent in the artistic approach of Addam Yekutieli )Know Hope(, who carves into the covers of his treated books texts that juxtapose political and emotional situations. The treatment of the cover illuminates the place of the book in an age when advertisements and billboards seek to control our minds. In this context art historian Gideon Ofrat notes: "Regarding the book as an object in and of itself, its weapon of survival (in today's world) is its cover […] the cover is the shiny, revealing dress, it is the seductive make-up, the intoxicating fragrance […] the cover is the scene of the chase and the battlefield in the conquest of the reader's eye-heart-mind."9

Etamar Beglikter, in his work Brainless (2008), finds inspiration in the massive volumes of the Encylopaedia Hebraica. The near-sanctity once attributed to the encyclopedia serves as a catalyst for his art. Beglikter cuts a hollow brain out of the encyclopedia, seeking to raise questions regarding the status of knowledge and culture in our time.

In this context, we may again cite the words of Gideon Ofrat: "The capitalist Affluent Society engenders over-consumption that is far beyond the real cultural needs. It weakens the reader's power of judgment and his principled choice, creating a consumer of literary works who can be easily manipulated by marketing mechanisms."10

Does the contemporary era symbolize the negation of the book? The negation of the reader? Ofrat emphasizes, with regard to books as a commodity, that "in an age of the end of the dialectics between culture and industry, books, just like everything else, are merchandise, and their objective is their self-negation as a shelf-object in favor of providing paid-for pleasure. Will books survive the all-out war of goods in the society of abundance?"11

The artists participating in this exhibition seem to argue that the book continues to survive in the contemporary world by serving as a metaphor for the subject. What is it that lends the book this quality? The answer apparently lies in the book's duality: the fact that it is an inanimate object like all others, yet one endowed with a symbolic life by means of its written contents (words, ideas, thoughts), whose value and existence are beyond the letters' ink traces. The book stands for the individual, who also exists simultaneously in a physical body and in symbolic worlds.

Footnotes

1. Ruthi Ofek, "The Books of Hermann Struck," in: Ruthi Ofek and Chana Schütz (eds.), Hermann Struck, 1876-1944 (The Open Museum, Tefen, and Centrum Judicum, Berlin, 2007). ↑
2. Hermann Struck, Die Radierung im Schönen Buche (Berlin: Euphorion Verlag, 1921), p. 13. ↑
3. Venedig, Verse von Robert Hamerling, Dreiundzwanzig Radierungen von Hermann Struck (Berlin: Euphorion Verlag, 1920). ↑
4. Amerika, Zwanzig Radierungen von Hermann Struck mit Worten von Arthur Holitscher (Berlin: Hans Heinrich Tillgner Verlag, 1922). ↑
5. Italien, Verse von Hermann Hesse, 22 Radierungen von Hermann Struck (Berlin: Euphorion Verlag, 1923). ↑
6. Ofek, "The Books of Hermann Struck," p. 174. ↑
7. Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 7-8. ↑
8. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus, Hebrew translation by Iris Bar'am (Petah Tikvah: Astrolog, 1995). ↑
9. Gideon Ofrat, "The Design of the Book in the Capitalist Affluent Society," Gideon Ofrat's Warehouse, https://gideonofrat.wordpress.com. ↑
10. Ibid. ↑
11. Ibid. ↑

Svetlana Rheingold is an independent curator and researcher of Israeli art.