As the books' demise is mourned and discussed, it seems that more and more people want to
make books by hand.
Artist books are their own art form, just like photography, or sculpture, or painting.
My name is Amy Galpin, and I'm the Chief Curator at the Frost Art Museum.
I was thinking about books in terms of literature and how books can function as a portal, as
a pathway to new experience, new travels.
And I was thinking about this relationship that could be applied to an artist book.
I think an artist book can be a sculpture, it can have text, it can look completely different
than we might think a book should look.
Or it can have strong connections, like the work of Margarita Cano with illuminated manuscripts,
medieval manuscripts.
I used to go a lot to New York to the Morgan Library.
So I was very familiar with books done with parchment, and gold, and gild, and all that.
I started painting in 1993 just after I retired.
The first thing I did was an Adam and Eve being told that they had to leave Paradise.
And the Paradise was Cuba, and the tree, instead of an apple tree, it was mangoes.
I thought it made a statement for people to think about the sufferings of people who have
to leave their country.
That accordion books, you know, that you open up, and then I have these little pieces inside,
sort of like the mirrors.
So when a person grabs one of my books and starts opening and looking at it, all these
things start falling to the floor and it's very irritating, but that's part of what I
wanted to cause.
I wanted that to be an effect, because the Cuban situation is so irritating.
As some artists are very much dedicated to the form, I don't think that either Carol
Todaro or, for example, other artists in the show like Donna Ruff or Rosemarie Chiarlone
consider themselves to be only artist book makers.
But they definitely make many artist books.
I really enjoy experimenting with media and pushing the kind of media I can use with artist
books.
I think a lot about display when I make a book, I think about where it will be shown
and how it will be seen.
So this is a group of six artist books that work together as an ensemble.
And it's called Villanelle.
The pages are made of a translucent material and the images and words are hand-printed
on in a very simple method of transferring text from an actual laser print.
And a villanelle is a type of poetic form.
It came from a French song form.
Therefore, these books, which are a kind of analogy to the poetic form, are mounted on
music stands.
The music stands do two things: they provide a way for the books to be displayed as sculpture,
and they also cue us that music is a part of the content of the piece.
So the words are all fragments of poems.
This one begins with the words "as if".
So, when you go down to the side, it says "forming a galaxy", and on the other side,
"becoming a graveyard".
So I'm going from the cosmos to below the earth in this one segment of the poem.
It's not really a story but more images and texts that the viewer is invited to put together
and make their own meaning from.
I think for, you know, most people think of Diego as a painter.
He's someone who really interrogates, "What does a painting mean?"
But I was really taken with his elaborate sketchbooks, these deconstructions of other
magazines joined with various drawings.
And I thought he brought a really fresh perspective to the exhibition.
For me, the artists books came just as a way of necessity, of just making.
And luckily, I work in a lot of art institutions and what I decided to do was just incorporate
a lot of the materials that was around me.
They had a lot of catalogs that they were always throwing away.
I didn't really think about it as like, any different than painting.
I just needed to make.
So during my break time I would be making it, and even during the time when I was working
I would be walking around and if there was like, an interesting page because of the material
I thought it would be interesting, I would just grab it and put it into these, like,
artist books.
And yeah, I learned a lot from that.
And after I made the book, I felt like I couldn't make the same type of art again, what I was
making in grad school.
It just didn't make sense for me.
I'm always thinking about that sense of awe that a viewer might have, but then simultaneously,
what is the resonance?
You know, what does the work mean to them after they leave the museum?