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The Book as Site (ENGL 333)
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Lecture 6: “The Book as Site”January 20th, 2023
Binding Space (2018) by Marian Macken
Macken seeks to explore the connections between architectural space and the artist’s book.
● Her book, Binding Space, “explores the potential role of artists’ books within the realm of
architectural representation and proposes the book itself as another three-dimensional,
complementary architectural representation with a generational and propositional role
within the design process”
● “artists’ books must, in some way, acknowledge the medium through which they are
communicated: the content and form of artists’ books are inextricably linked”
● Thesis: as soon as you acknowledge that a book has volume and depth, you can treat is as
an architectural space (not flatland) – when a book has depth, and you put into that book
flaps and foldouts, you move into an idea that the book has spherical space – orality.
○ The history of the book desperately tried to get out of flatland to a space of depth
that was left behind when writing began to impose flatness on sphericality.
○ Depth is a learned reaction to the world.
Bookness
“The page and its defined edge is the primary element of the codex form. Made from a set of
bound leaves or pages, the codex is a restrained form, depending on thin, pliable sheets of
something like paper in order to function. This definition extends to books which are loose
leaves.”
● “The page can be analyzed in terms of its use as a flat field, a literal space of paper; or
parallel to this, it may be seen as a window offering abstract or conceptual references
beyond the literal space of itself: Keith Smith refers to pages as ‘planes in space.’ Carrión
writes in his essay ‘The New Art of Making Books’ that the page may be seen as a site.
This idea of the page as a field of enquiry highlights its physicality and active
engagement with content, rather than seen as a neutral surface where ink is applied.”
The edges of the page provide a frame.
● The addition of a frame isolates an enclosed area from indeterminate space and scale and
determines its future perception through presenting an orientation and proportion.
● Artists’ books offer the opportunity for the page not merely to hold a reproduced image
on its surface, but rather the page may be seen as an image.
● “Paper pages, when bound, become dense: the accumulation of pages becomes a
collective form when housed within a book. Carrión refers to the collection of these
pages as ‘a sequence of spaces.’ With every book, a decision has to be made about how
to either ‘emphasize, ignore, or overcome’ the fact that the openings are discrete units,
separate spaces yet part of a continuous whole.”
The page, while whole, is relational and allows for different relationships within the book: two
images facing each other form a relationship between the recto and verso pages.
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