At CAW, The Art Is The Word

The book is rough-hewn, with bark for a cover, sticks for a spine. The pages are made of leaves. The title that artist Karen Cipolla gave the piece — Loose Leaf Notebook — is an enjoyable pun. But it’s not just entertaining. The piece itself reminds you of where books, or at least physical books, come from. If there’s thread binding the book’s pages together, it used to be plants. The paper used to be trees. In time, as physical books fall by the wayside, many existing books may become plants again.

That is, if we really think they’re falling by the wayside.

“Freed Formats: The Book Reconsidered” — running now at the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street through July 28 — begins with an intriguing essay by Sara Kirk Hanley that neatly frames some of what was on the minds of curators Chris Perry and Alice Walsh when they put the show together. ​“At this juncture in our history, the digital revolution has become so fundamental as to prompt the question: what is the purpose of the codex in our time? The artists in Freed Formats argue passionately for its continued relevance: their work maintains an important connection of mind/body/soul in the act of engaging with a book. We are invited to turn, flip, finger, read, peer, wear, crane, smell, delight, ponder, and empathize…. They help us remember: a book is a universe unto itself.”

Hanley’s most earthy observations held true for this reporter, who can’t remember the last time he wanted to touch the pieces in an art exhibit so much. The exhibit itself is wonderfully overstuffed in the manner of a great used bookstore, and the individual pieces so full of texture that it’s hard to resist (though, for the record, I did).

Many of the pieces in the exhibit can be said to be not only freeing the form of the book, but exploding it. Pages are reworked and made into shoes, twisted into abstract shapes. In Sheila Hale’s Tower, they are allowed to fly from their spines.

A few artists very nearly pulp their pages, or cover them with sand. In Julienne 4, Anti Gangi Balkun tells you straight out what she did to create the effect she got.

Is it OK to shred a book? For book lovers, there can be a sense of desecration, even if it’s to make art from it. For the politically minded, destroying books has echoes of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. Burning books has sometimes been a step toward far more horrific things. The artists are surely aware of this. In transforming them into art objects, in one way they’re pointing out that changing tastes are also very slowly casting books — or at least some books — aside. We read things on tablets and phones now. Are we OK with that?

A few pieces hone in on the way that books as physical objects in our houses are slowly going the same way as other household objects that two generations ago seemed like staples to a home. But is it really so bad that no one uses a telephone book anymore, or that landlines are becoming a thing of the past? All readers would mourn the losses of their favorite novels, and even their favorite cookbooks, but how many people really miss combing through the yellow pages for a plumber? Isn’t it maybe a little better that instruction manuals for electronic devices are online?

Besides, in their book transformations, the artists make their pieces do what art does. With Tests for Colour Blindness, Jean Tock takes an old book that really is just tests of color blindness — various shades of various colors, plus those dot illustrations in which numbers are embedded in the array that would be invisible to the colorblind. The addition of just one more element, a sign for a segregation-era water fountain, suddenly throws the entire piece into a different light. What else might be in that book?

And in Hole in My Heart, Kumi Korf can bring the viewer up short with a single small poem, presented in just the right way on a page, with plenty of white space around it.

Seeing my daughter’s name alone,
Not buried with her
Not decayed under moss,
Brings me so much pain.

Taking the long view, the exhibit ultimately is a reminder that the era of mass-market paperbacks isn’t all that long a chapter in the history of books. Before the printing press was invented, books were art objects, created painstakingly by hand and often illuminated in great detail with brilliant illustrations. The decline of mass-market paperbacks, or even hardcover books, doesn’t mean the end of reading, as the popularity of e‑books amply demonstrates. And ​“Freed Formats” suggests that there’s liberation in this. Maybe the book’s day as a ubiquitous object full of typeset pages is waning. Maybe its resurgence as an art object is just beginning.

“Freed Formats: The Book Reconsidered” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through July 28. Admission is free. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.