Part 5 Project 2 - Artists books

I didn't really understand what an artists book was so I looked at the description from the Victoria and Albert Museum which has a large collection.
The Smithsonian Institution also has a large collection of books including the lovely Gifts from our Elders by Kerry McAleer-Keeler which is like a miniature room of objects and ideas. They also have Negative Space by Mungo Thomson, a beautiful book made by inverting photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (Thompson is interested in time, relative to this module in other ways?)
The Book Arts Web has a selection of works made on the flag book format which was developed by Hedi Kyle is something of a guru in bookmaking, I found this set of detailed instructions to make covers and protects for books. Also, via Book Arts, The University of Brighton, this timeline of the development of books.
The Caseroom Press are a publisher working with artists to make innovative designs such as these train ticket books

This Guardian article gives a good background on the history of the modern artists book. Edward Ruscha is credited with setting things in motion when he published Twenty Six Gasoline Stations in which is listed everywhere as being published in 1963 including the Tate which goes on to offer an online version which very clearly has 1962 on the first page. It is an interesting document, the stations are very different, not at all like modern identikit petrol stations.
Hans Peter Feldman takes found images and lays them out in a book allowing the viewer to make their own interpretation. His exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in 2012 Handbag as Museum is a beguiling collection of objects laid out and photographed together. They remind me of paintings of collections of objects by Lisa Milroy.
Wolfgang Tillmans is a photographer who has used books as one means of exhibiting his work. His images range across all subjects and are used as art photographs and for political expression. There is an exhibition at the Tate which starts next month and I think that I need to see the exhibition to find my way around his art but in the meantime I found a review in the Guardian of his Serpentine exhibition in 2010, and this discussion of his more recent images.
Sol de Witt was co founder of Printed Matter which was set up to promote and support the medium of artists books. Their website has this explanation the medium. The Smithsonian has some of De Witt's own books which appear to be focused on the ordinary and everyday. This seems to be a recurrent theme for the artists in this list.
Eileen Hogan is a more traditional painter who had produced a number of books either to showcase her own work or in collaboration with authors or poets. I like the way that many of them feel like sketchbooks, there is something very special about being granted access to someone else's sketchbook, a real privilege.
Arnaud Desjardins is a bit tricky to research because he shares his name with a noted French spiritual teacher I found a a link to an altered book which is a beautiful object and this abstract from his  PhD thesis. There is also a video of a lecture he gave to the Emily Carr University Library where he had a residency. He discusses the philosophy of artists books and some of the challenges associated with them.

Sandro Botticelli made a series of drawings to illustrate Dante's The Divine Comedy. The title is familiar but frustratingly I know nothing about the story. I found this summary of Inferno aimed at students and read through the Wikipedia entry and this essay in the Khan Academy website. Sadly I'm too late for this exhibition at the Courtald. From what I've managed to find I think that I could spend a whole degree studying the Divine Comedy and it's various illustrations, I have a better understanding of the pictures I saw at the Rauschenberg exhibition (the Rauschenberg Foundation shows them here). The World of Dante has all the illustrations here (although irritatingly they need adjustment to display on my computer) and I am indebted to Books and Boots who went to the Courtald  exhibition and writes eloquently about seeing them first hand. With this guidance I can see the way that the drawings change as the story progresses, the busyness of hell and the simpler drawings of purgatorio and paradiso. Books and Boots finds the drawings a bit clumsy and simplistic which may be more obvious in real life, I think that the figures are quite well executed considering the number that there are and the restrictions of the media available to Botticelli. They express the feelings of the characters so that I feel that I can understand the gist of the story without a written explanation, something that Rauschenberg failed to convey to me. Botticelli tells the story in a coherent way whilst managing to have Virgil and Dante appear more than once in the same illustration, and the two men are clearly recognisable and distinguishable from the other characters. 
Botticellis project was a massive undertaking and I do wonder whether he would have done better to finish a few pictures rather than sketch out all of them, but without all the illustrations we would not have had the opportunity to view his whole imagining of the story which is so significant because it was produced so long ago. His images, although they were done more than 100 years after Dante completed the poem, are from a world that is much closer to the mindset that told the original story.

Armed with all this information I set out to make my own book. First I was interested in non traditional book designs. I made these by sticking flaps of cardboard to a base layer. For some reason I can't get the videos that I took to work on my blog so I've uploaded them to Vimeo. This was my first attempt which is just a simple line of pages. I liked the idea of them not being linear so I put the second set on a curve like a rainbow here.

I made a fan which switches from grey 

to blue(skies) 

Its very difficult to video on a phone one handed whilst moving the pages so I apologise for the quality of the video here.

The major failure with this design is trying to add decoration and colour after it has been made. Using watercolour paper I made one side blue sky and the other dark clouds. I cut six wedges at a 30 degree angle, then drew a rainbow onto the card that I was using for the base before I glued the pages on.

Closed

The pages aren't glued on quite evenly to line up the major details of the pattern which have become separated by the the overlap and folding to attach the pages to the base card.

and open

There is a video here of the book in action. The blue skies side doesn't work as well because there are areas of white card visible through the pages. I have chosen not to trim the pages so that I have a reasonably big area of colour.

Reflection

This needs more time, thought and work. There are lots of challenges in working in three dimensions with a moving object. I think, in trying to keep my options open, that I've over complicated it. I need to make lots and lots more prototypes and close down the options as I go along to take this forward. It has shown me the challenges of recording this sort of work for my blog, this is the first time ever that I have posted a video on Vimeo, which was a lot easier than I had expected it to be.