The Intelligible Book: Timothy Ely’s and Luigi Serafini’s Book Arts
The Intelligible Book: Timothy Ely’s and Luigi Serafini’s Book Arts
2019, Italica (96.2)
Italian artist Luigi Serafini and American bookbinder Timothy Ely share the same aesthetics of communication in book art. Both authors conceive their works as a book format, producing a clash between the unreadable content of the books – otherworldly images combined with invented indecipherable codes – and their intelligible material and visual characteristics, that imitate existing artefacts. This study draws a comparison between these two artists’ book production. It is my conviction that the books by Ely and Serafini convey the idea of a universal readability and can be interpreted as tools for accepting otherness.
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Recent research projects and conferences devoted to the book arts have responded to Johanna Drucker’s 2005 call for urgent work to be done on establishing a more rigorous theoretical underpinning of the field of book art production. Yet these projects and conferences, due to the participation of artists and other practitioners in the field, not surprisingly, point any discussion on the book arts towards practice and away from theory. In acknowledging that a need still exists for a more rigorous examination of the theoretical underpinnings of the book arts, this paper explores selected examples of artist’s books by Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Broodthaers, Buzz Spector, Ulises Carrión and the South African artist Ilka van Schalkwyk through a lens provided by Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on dialogism and heteroglossia. These critical terms, which demonstrate the multivocal and heteroglot voices between these works in history and within themselves, are shown to be appropriate frames for the analysis of particular qualities which enunciate artists’ books: selfconsciousness, discursive perceptivity and reflexivity. I apply Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and heteroglossia to the task of proposing a theoretical foundation for the artist’s book as a dynamic and relational visual language.
Rivista di Storia dell‘Educazione, [S.l.], v. 6, n. 1, mag. 2019. ISSN 2384-8294. <https://www.rivistadistoriadelleducazione.it/index.php/RSE/article/view/194>
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