Week 43: 8th – 14th July
My studio work has increasingly begun to explore the spaces between art, artefact and interpretation as a way of layering meaning in order to aid audience interaction with the art object. The artist’s book as a medium therefore seems entirely fitting to this task, given how it interrogates its own form, whilst allowing space for expressing additional content relevant to its materiality.
This interest has led me to explore re-workings of original manuscripts, not only of early science and alchemical works (in week 18), but also early literary and religious texts. The understanding of how these subjects overlap in the pre-modern world view also sheds new light on our own modern obsession with the segregation and purification of genres. Recently, it seems that this exploration of original manuscripts is also of interest to other artists, allowing plenty of opportunities for the contextualisation of my work outside of an academic context.
Locating Boccaccio
Examples of these kinds of works are currently on show at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, who staged an exhibition and conference in response to the 700th anniversary of the birth of Boccaccio, writer of the Decameron and contemporary of Dante. In true allegorical fashion, the exhibition charts the changing attitudes to, and interpretations of Boccaccio’s works from the 14th Century to the present day, in order to understand the significance of his work in the 21st Century.
The exhibition catalogue is separated into sections detailing many different elements of Boccaccio’s works and interests including, his response to the role of women in 14th Century Italy; his work as a cultural mediator and humanist; innovations in print and aesthetics of the book; and the effects of censorship laws on the work. This exhibition of historic printed books and manuscripts showcases every one of his works, representing the breadth of the Rylands collection which includes the first illustrated edition of the Decameron. In addition to these literary works, Boccaccio’s achievements also include the development of ‘octave rhyme’ (ottava rima), and his prose writing becoming the basis for the standard Italian language used today.
Boccaccio and the Artist’s Book
Alongside these examples of printed texts and manuscripts, the curators also invited an international group of artists to respond to elements of Boccaccio’s ouvre. The brief for producing the work was left deliberately open and inspired a broad range of responses. The 13 artists included in the exhibition were Carolyn Thompson, Carolyn Trant, Glynnis Fawkes, Heather Hunter, Horst Weierstall, James Reid-Cunningham, Jeremy Dixon, John McDowall, Mike Clements, Paul Johnson, Shirley Greer, Steve Dales and Sue Doggett. The range of works on show gave a good overview to how artists might produce interpretations of historical works as new artworks in their own right. My particular favourites were by Heather Hunter, John McDowall and Steve Dales, as I felt that they explored the form of the book in interesting ways in addition to the content.
Heather Hunter’s work entitled ‘Famous Proba – found’ used the ‘designating duet’ method from ‘Woven and Interlocking Book Structures’ in order to create a patchwork of hand and digital prints incorporating a found poem (cento) and images. The term ‘cento’, from the Latin ‘cloak made of patches’, determined the format of the book. The format of the poem referenced the Ancient Greek tradition of poets creating new works entirely from lines or verses taken from Homer, and was taken from a word pool collected from ‘On Famous Woman’ by Giovanni Boccaccio.
John McDowall’s book ‘Giornata prima’, rebound pages from the Decameron in sequence by taking pages from each edition and selecting the corresponding page (the first page from the first book, the second from the next and so on) to produce a new version incorporating the different interpretations of the work through time. Steve Dale’s book ‘Untitled Alterpiece’ took inspiration from Boccaccio’s ‘De mulieribus claris’ and represents contemporary inspriational women as selected by friends of the artist. The main work is based on the St. Humilitas polyptych (see image) and is accompanied by a booklet which details the reasons for each selection and is embossed with an image of Eve on the cover. More examples and images from the artist book exhibition can be seen here.
