Breaking Books Open

In a new show at the Bellevue Arts Museum, texts are taken apart, reassembled and turned into art objects.

"Books aren’t sacred to me,” says Casey Curran, a twenty-seven-year-old artist who lives in Belltown. When he makes art out of them, he says, “I don’t feel like I’m burning books. In fact, I feel like I might be glorifying them to some extent.” This from a Cornish grad who gets nervous going into used book shops because he’s afraid they’ll recognize him as a book-destroyer and kick him out.

Casey Curran, Pretence, photo by Chad Wasser

Curran’s work will be on display with twelve other local, national, and international artists at the Bellevue Arts Museum in an exhibition, The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book, running through June 14. Perhaps “destroy” is too strong a word when it comes to these artists and their book-altering ways. Recycling is a more appropriate word. “Books are a commodity just like everything else,” Curran says. He talks about what he is doing as a form of “reusing” them as objects.

In Dystopia, Curran reuses George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, positioning the famed novels amongst chopped-up maps, a crank contraption and large bugs with bulbous eyes. The books Fun with Dick and Jane, Essentials of Effective Speaking and The Philosophy of Nietzsche are also fields of play for his rearrangements. Curran, originally from Maple Valley, says, “I find the structure behind written words, how a person tells a story through symbols, fascinating.” It’s difficult to describe his pieces: odd and beautiful, antiquated and entirely new.

Sandra Kroupa is the Book Arts and Rare Book Curator at the University of Washington. She knows about books as canvases. During her library hours Kroupa is literally surrounded by book artworks, and she has been for the past forty-plus years. Browsing through the catalog of fifteen thousand pieces, she hints at the depth and breadth of the collection (one which she continues to build on).

Some titles she offers up: Selected Proverbs of Hell. Games Oligopolists Play. The Flip Book of the French Revolution. Katie and the Sunflowers. Artists and Aesthetics in Spain. Nymphets and Fairies. Suburbia. Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes. Hair Loss. Caliban’s Books. House of Cods. The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin: An Opera. Moo Moo Buckaroo. Gugu’s House. Hydrogen Bums. Sedona Scapes. The Goodwill Girls Datebook. 200, 731: Rider Hairstyles on the Bus Today.

Jacqueline Rush Lee, Unfurled: Devotion Series, 2008, 6 x 5.5 x 4.5 inches, used book and painted ink, collection of Dean Geleynse, photo by Paul Kodama

What is a “book” anyway? It can be a lot of things. “Books are a source of knowledge,” Curran says, “and they’re also artifacts, and they’re also just a bunch of pieces of paper with little markings on them.” To local book artist Ellen Ziegler — whose work ranges from a sixteen-foot-long book made of plexiglass and a piece called Unbearable Lightness of Bean that’s made of wonton wrappers, a skewer and a fava bean — a book is “a sequence of images or parts of a visual story divided by visual ‘incidents’ — pages, folds or other ways of candencing a story.

At the Bellevue Arts Museum show thirty works will be on view. Washingtonians James Allen, Gary Berg, Curran, Alan Corkery Hahn and Jane Lackey will all be showing. New Yorkers Noriko Ambe, Long-Bin Chen and Yuken Teruya will also have works present, as well as Brian Dettmer of Georgia, Guy Laramee of Canada, Jacqueline Rush Lee of Hawaii, Georgia Russell of the United Kingdom and Jenn Khoshbin of San Antonio, Texas.

“I am tunneling into vintage hardbound texts,” Khoshbin declares, “to explore the dubious future of the book itself, trying to imagine what it might be like for books to undergo a kind of adaptation for survival.”

This adaptation is in clear view at the Bellevue Arts Museum’s exhibition, not only with the transformative power of an artist to take a text and turn it into a sculpture, but in the way in which each artist produces something stunningly unique.

Fewer and fewer people are reading these days — so lamented the National Endowment for the Arts in a recent study, in which it was discovered that the percentage of American adults who report reading any book not required for work or school is at 54.3 percent. And those who are reading are doing so on computer screens. In contrast to the dominance of the screen, the exhibit at BAM focuses on the physicality of the printed form, the tactile sense of a book — the papers, the covers, the glue.

James Allen, Age of Enlightenment (detail), 2008, excavated book, courtesy of the artist, photo by Nora Atkinson

“Art is an appropriation of what’s around them,” notes Curran. What was around him were his father’s seven-thousand-plus science fiction books when he was younger.

“He built a library onto the house for all his books. It filtered into my work.” It seems to have happened at a young age for most book artists, this filtering. “My father’s best friend was a collector of rare books in Los Angeles,” Ziegler says. “I spent a good part of my childhood looking at his books — illustrated by famous artists, set by noted typographers, bound as one-of-a-kind volumes.” Khoshbin saw books as “the source of answers for all possible questions. Later I developed doubts as to what a book can and cannot offer. But the book remains for me a symbol of searching.”

Librarian Kroupa doesn’t even hazard a guess. “I don’t define the word ‘book.’ Artists are continually redefining what a book is.” And, as if to prove her point, she continues to guide me through the maze of titles:

Zakuski, a Taste of Russian Artists’ Books. Volcano Blue. Have a Gas on Your Birthday. Canal Game. Recent Artist’s Books and Art Like Books and Fine Trash. Apple. Dr. Spleen’s 3-D House of Horror. Fresno Fruit Grove Scroll. Radio Silence. Teach Your Child to Tell Time. Paragraphs on Pajamas. World Without End. •