Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art.

Garrett Stewart is professor of English at the University of Iowa and in 2006 published The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text, which explored depictions of reading: 'all books are diptychs'. Stewart brings to this related area of enquiry a wide range of approaches, many from the literary theories of Gerard Genette and Regis Debray, but others from art theory, such as John Roberts's Marxist reading of deskilling, Michael Fried on absorption, and Thomas Crow's schema of the alternation between academicism and optical pleasure. There are the inevitable references to Jorge Luis Borges, but there are also less likely ones to, for example, Henri Bergson on repetition. These provide a richer grounding for the discussion of artists' books/book arts than is usually advanced.

The theme of the book is the recent upsurge in the exhibition of largely sculptural book or book-like structures/installations in the white spaces of galleries: 'There they rest, inert, impertinent, in gallery space--those book forms either imitated or mutilated, replicas of reading matter or its vestiges ... Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are cancelled as text when deposited as gallery objects, shut off from their normal reading when not, in some more drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.' Examples are Anselm Kiefer's large lead codices or Matej Kren's Passage, 2004, a corridor of real books and mirrors, whose title alludes to the section of a book as well as a physical walkway. Stewart calls such works 'bibliobjets'.

Stewart begins with a prologue, which describes a virtual exhibition with bookworks with imaginary titles, and the first chapter discusses examples of real bookworks that deploy three basic strategies--alteration, assemblage or simulation - in the work of Brian Dettmer, Wolfgang Nieblich, Doug Beube, Steve Wolfe and Adam Bateman. The 'Readybound' chapter translates the subtitle of the book--'medium to object to concept to art' - into a history of the artist's book/bookwork. Stewart argues that as other media challenged the monopoly of carrying information the book format once had, there evolved a three-stage trajectory: the livre d'artiste/edition de luxe, followed by conceptualist seriality, and lastly by 'the artisanal book of mostly "foreign" rather than print matter'--the 'bibliobjet' is the logical and, supposedly, last development of this stage. He sees a lineage of the bookwork from Marcel Duchamp's (now presumed destroyed) assisted Unhappy Readymade of 1919, a geometry book that Duchamp had requested his sister, Suzanne, strap to her balcony--an odd wedding present. Here, Stewart proposes that the defi ning characteristic of the bookwork is the 'demediation' that it does, once the text of the book is suppressed. The examples he uses, however, do not entirely support his argument. Buzz Spector's A Passage, 1994, was made by the artist altering every leaf of a hand-printed book in increasing tears from the left, but what is left is still legible as all the leaves contained the same text. Furthermore, the work is a publication received as art; it is in an edition of 48. The second example is Fiona Banner's dummy book project Life Drawing Drawings, for her 2007 show at the Power Plant Gallery, Toronto. But Banner is equally interested in text (eg The Nam) and her work straddles the book as container of information, conceptualism, installation and, in particular, performance.

Although entitled 'Demediated Means', the next chapter swerves into a discussion of painted or photographed images of books by Natfali Rakuzin ('pictures of things') and John Sparagana ('pictures as things'). The Chinese-American artist Xiaoze Xie, who photographs and paints library shelves with books lying lengthways on them (eg the Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, and more recently the Frick Art Reference Library), is mentioned later but not here. Likewise, there is no consideration of Patrick Hughes's perspectival libraries. 'Object lessons' (chapter four) discusses the relation of text-art to bookwork in a real exhibition, 'Learn to Read' at Tate Modern in 2007, before 'Anarchives' explores multiple bookworks and the real and imaginary archives of book culture. Although Kiefer has been flagged very early on as a sort of climax, thus creating a narrative expectation that seems to be endlessly deferred, when we eventually get to him he is treated rather perfunctorily compared with Rachel Whiteread, Christine Borland, Idris Khan and John Latham.

Despite the peculiar itinerary, this is an interesting read. Where I would diverge from Stewart is in his three-stage schema for the history of the artist's book: the stages overlap chronologically and are often contained in the work of an individual artist. The artist's book or 'conceptualist' book, to use Stewart's term, 'demediated' the book long before bookworks did: Jaroslaw Kozlowski's Reality, 1972, removed all but the punctuation from a chapter in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, while Mirtha Demirsache's asemic calligraphy defied 'reading'. Stewart's own examples suggest that it is not just sculptural bookwork that can perform demediation; Spector's 33 Art Histories, 2003, and Khan's every ... page of the Holy Quran, 2004, exist respectively as a Polaroid and a C-print. Yes, of course, in the last analysis we 'read' everything. But many bookworks can be illustrative, punningly banal and overly 'literal'.

Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art, Garrett Stewart, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 249pp, [pounds sterling] 42, 978 0 2267739 1 9.

STEPHEN BURY is Andrew W Mellon chief librarian, Frick Art Reference Library, New York.